Well that was nice. Unfortunately, it also reminded me of the almost non-existant quality of animation in most animé. Sad. It looks good, those few moments they decided they could afford to actually animate parts of their characters.
Now this is interesting! You're probably already familiar with the background of anime, but just for the purposes of this thread I'll try and offer a quick summary.
I believe that anime has been part of Japanese culture for an extraordinary length of time; given that anime has only recently been exposed to western culture you might be fooled into thinking (as I was in my illustrious 'Dragonball Z' years
) that anime is a relatively new concept - but the reality is that the anime style of animation stretches back centuries into Japanese culture. I remember reading, but I'm not too clear on this, that the first evidence of anime-influenced art was on stone tablets, wall decoration and pottery etc. from as far back as the medieval ages even. The most interesting thing is that, even though in future years the artists were free of the constrictions of their canvas (stone, I'd imagine, is very hard to draw on), they never 'evolved' their style much at all. Even the first anime drawings on 'paper' were still extremely crude, no more than barely legible stick drawings.
For a time, anime really refused to adapt and change to reflect the improvements in artist tools and canvas but one event catalysed the evolution of the anime culture - World War 2. After the first atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Japanese people were in desperate need of inspiration and some form of identification with the country which brought them nothing more than strife and war. Anime provided an excellent medium with which to acheive this goal - it was simple, charming and very cheap to produce (this is where your point starts to come to light, DocBot.). In no time at all, anime produced the figureheads, superheroes and world-dominating characters that the Japanese used to inspire their reconstruction. The inspirational storylines telling of ordinary, poor folk discovering hidden talents and rising above their station proved a hit with the Japanese population.
The first majorly publicised manga work (I'm not entirely sure of this, but I think manga relates to Japanese pop-culture comic strips, whilst anime refers to the 'movie' animation side of things, usually adopted from manga comics in the first place) was Astro Boy - the story of a young boy with supernatural powers who did, well, heroic things I guess. From there, anime took off. The combination of the simplistic drawing style and cheap production values (in line with the fact that the Japanese economy was shot after WWII) meant that a wide variety of anime material was soon available to the market.
Now, despite the surge in popularity for their art form, the Japanese still refused to develop the, shall we say, quality of their art. Even when manga made the transition to fully animated 'animé' movies, there was always evidence of budgetary and time constraints. Very often, anime artists managed to create enitre scenes just using a single, repeating background cell - like the moving background behind a car for instance. Even the cells for characters were reused time and time again in different situations - all helping to alleviate the financial concerns of the artists.
Therein lies the reason for your quip, DocBot
- cheap, mass-produced animation has not quality as an attribute. Personally, I hardly even notice the cheap production values and the dodgy quality - in fact, it might even endear me, in much the same way that 'smileys' are simple but effective, so too is cell-based animé.
Of course, nowadays anime directors have started to incorporate more Western styles of art into their masterpieces - most notably computer animation; mostly because the culture-barrier between the West and the East has been broken down somewhat - probably by the early-nineties surge in popularity for animé in the West. The Western publication of Akira (oh yes, that ol' gem!) is probably recognized as the first step that anime took to gain a foothold in the West.
Now, obviously if you think the animation is cheap, you think the animation is cheap - why settle for less when you can have more? (Lion King, anyone? -amazing animation) However, maybe some of the misconceptions about 'effort' or just 'skill' can be cleared up by my tome! (not saying you share these misconceptions, but oh there are people with that view of anime)
Hey, I just wrote all
that? Cool
