For this week's Anime Friday I was going to cover Dragon Half. The intention was to do a compare and contrast with last week's entry, Slayers. They're both inspired by Dungeons & Dragons, they both employ Chibi art and they're both at the same level of not-too-serious adventure fare. Ultimately, I decided against it. There's nothing much more I can say on that topic.
When I started this project nearly six months ago, I had every intention of carrying it for an entire year. That amount of time would give me an opportunity to explore as many facets of the genre as possible, spending equal time with the big names as with the obscure fan favorites. It's been an interesting run and I'm glad I did it, but I think it's time to move on.
I began Anime Friday as an attempt to explore why it is the genre never really clicked for me, or for a lot of people for that matter. I dug into anime from the perspective of general criticism as well as from a point of view that was more sympathetic to its idiosyncrasies. In the end, I've come away with the following.
I feel remiss for not having an anime adviser who grew up in Japanese culture. At best, I've had advisers who lived in Japan for a brief but decent period of time. This led to some unfortunate self-selection. Americans who take the leap of living in another country tend to do so out of a fascination with that country's culture, however skewed their initial understanding of it happens to be. This project would have benefited from direct information about how different people from Japan view anime, not just how Americans who are predisposed to either liking it or dismissing it feel about the genre.
Despite any insistence that it's somehow exempt from the same rules, anime is a cartoon medium. This brings with it a lot of baggage that I simply refuse to believe is culture-specific. I don't think there's anything about Japanese culture that makes Japanese people any more willing to take cartoons seriously than Westerners. In fact, I think it's something of a misconception that they do take this stuff seriously. Do Americans take their favorite programs seriously? Did anyone but a small fraction of avid comic book enthusiasts go to see X-Men Origins: Wolverine for anything more than action scenes, special effects and a shirtless Hugh Jackman? In short, all true Otaku may be Japanese, but all Japanese people are not Otaku.
Don't mistake me for being summarily dismissive of the cartoon medium. I do believe there is nuance beyond falling anvils, it's just limited. Ink is never going to capture the subtlety of a fine actor, but that's not really the point of ink. Cartoons are meant to be exaggerations and anime is nothing if not a series of exaggerations. A character will have practically no nose, chin or cheek bones, but that's just because the artist would rather focus on giant, jewel-colored eyes and, ahem, "expressive" hair. The set pieces are rarely ever going to have narrative qualities because many of them are designed simply to be destroyed by an over-the-top fight scene.
This is ultimately why I've come to prefer the silly anime over the dramatic stuff. Regardless of a creator's intentions, drama requires more than moody lighting and grim line delivery. Anime is better off sticking to monsters, robots and popcorn plots because those are all things that cartoons can do better than live action productions. Expecting ink and voice actors to provide high drama is like expecting a tricycle to win the Tour de France.
It's been a worthwhile ride and I've learned a lot, but I do believe it's time to move on. There's a whole world of unique music, cinema and television to explore. While I'm certain that I'll return to Japanese culture frequently for this blog and I have no intention of swearing off anime, Fridays will now be devoted to a more expansive range of pop culture. In the end, I suppose I just wanted anime to be deeper than it turned out to be.