Why Did I Think Sayaka Ohara Retired?
Because Sayaka Ohara didn’t. She did announce that she is getting married/is married, late last year.
The equally-fab-but-less-historied, yet-also-35-year-old Erino Hazuki plays Yamamoto-sensei in Hanamaru Youchien. As you may notice, Hazuki is not a frequently-heard voice in the sort of anime we watch. Her voice is somewhat distinctive, and it is not hard to pick her out if she has any notable roles. I mention this because it makes the handful of main/secondary character roles she plays notable.
The thing is, in Hanamaru Youchien, Hazuki plays an ara-ara onee-san/okaa-san type, Hanako Yamamoto. Yamamoto-sensei is also the type of character you typically find Sayaka Ohara doing.
So if you’ve watched Aria, you might recall the ending of season 3. Now read j1m0ne’s splendid spoiler.
I am sure what I am pointing out is a coincidence. But it makes the mind wonder, doesn’t it?!
Archetecture x Character Design: Sora no Woto, Qwaser
I wish I can show you pictures, because then I wouldn’t have to try to explain it with only words. Then again it might be easier to just be vague and simple. It’s the strongest!
It occurred to me when Ben over at Anipages mentioned SoraOto, and how the character animation and art “get in the way” of the background animation, that he might have meant it in a literal sense–like subtitles getting in the way of the OP or something. Further on he iterates the same complain you’ve probably heard several times by now about Sora no Woto.
While my position on the complain and the show is “wait and see, I think they’re setting us up,” that sort of first impression shared by Ben has run rampant. It’s gotten to a point where I think the anime is giving off those vibes as designed, and not because they are trying to force some moe down something or another. Why else could so many people agree on this? They are doing it on purpose; the show is setting up some kind of expectation.
It just doesn’t make any sense to think that a high profile Production A-1 production would get “how to do moe” wrong. Consider their prior works. I mean, if you want to do a moe show, you pick the source material that fits. You might also want to use a director who fits the job. Consider both the source material and the director. If we just look at the circumstantial evidence and also the story elements so far, it is almost obvious that Sora no Woto is going to pivot somewhere and “get serious.”
But it goes back to Ben’s point about something getting in the way. I feel that the generic-feeling characters and the character designs, while evoking probably the sort of feeling they were designed to do, makes difficult for people to enjoy the other aspects of the show. Part of it, perhaps, is out of the biases of those who would use the word moe or moeblob as a negative signifier. But at the same time it is a clashing aesthetics, against SoraOto’s beautiful, if lonely background art and setting.
This is where my experience with Seikon no Qwaser kind of make me take a second look. Qwaser is a visually modern and gothic affair. The opening may look generic shounen but the ending took a page out of Don’t Be Lazy with its senseless, music video inspired choreography (not to mention the seiyuu ensemble). The source material itself is dark, brooding, and (non)sensibly Japanese all the while. The character art is arguably moe-inspired, especially in Tomo’s case and the super-deformed segments. Ironically, the fact that it can afford that visual contrast between “normal” and “SD” suggests that there’s some kind of gap between serious and the not-quite-so.
I think the K-ON complaint goes to that point, perhaps unfairly: K-ON has SD mode and normal mode too, but it’s fairly hard to tell between the two. Sora no Woto, however, doesn’t go SD, yet it has all those SD signifier from Shuko the Owl to Kureha’s moments of tsun and dere. The end result, rather than something easy to understand viscerally, we get something that is off our expectation. In contrast, something like Qwaser is totally what we expect, and more.
This is really why I have a tough time faulting SoraOto, simply because as much of the baggage comes from us as it is from the show going against the grain on some of these expected visual cues. On top of the harsh contrast behind its luscious, highly-detailed background and the simple, if overly cute foreground character animation, the end result is probably too jarring for the casual Judge Judys out there.
And lastly, I used the word architecture although I didn’t really talk about it, but I think that is probably a better term than “background design.”
The Nutbladder Ranking: 2010-01
I always wanted to do some kind of ranking thing, because it’s fun to express what you feel about the stuff you like (ie., anime) in new ways, and ranking provides an overt framework to express yourself. It’s like a game where you roleplay some nutty critic. Unfortunately I also despise the trapping that any ranking system comes with. I always thought to myself (usually after feeling the want-of-rank) that I could just personify the anime or whatever in Pani Poni Dash (or for the newfags among us, Bakatest) with a short list of arbitrary stats. Kanokon could be something like “Breasts: 4, Trope subversion: 3, Licensed dub possibility: 2″ or something. For another example, Tsukihime anime could be “Existence: 0, Faithfulness to source: 2, Moon Princess: 4.”
Isn’t this fun? (Possibly NSFW pic after the jump.)
The Retailer Focus, BD and New Media
While my heart goes out to the panning of the rant of a retailer, speaking as a buying customer (though I never shopped at RACS) I have to say there is a very agreeable point to what Robert (Bob?) is saying.
Let me see if I can pin it in fewer words and less “quit ruining my business!” bias:
- DVD sales declined partly due to Blu-Ray Disc adaptation, across the whole industry (let alone Japan, who is really taking the lead in anime BD sales).
- BD sales is the next cycle in the home video industry, or at least a part of it. So without BD uptake, the home video sales will suffer.
- BD uptake in anime licensing in America is currently throttled by licensing trepidation, lack of a better word, from Japan. Reverse importation may be the primary source of fear but who really knows? There is no data to support it, one way or the other.
- R1 companies should focus their efforts and resources in securing BD licenses and produce better products, because that’s where the money is in the near future. (I’d also add on my own that before BD prices drop across the board, now is the time to cash in on high margin SKUs.)
Also just for footnote, remember that the US anime industry (if one could be said that there is one, as commonly known) has its roots in the home video business. Pretty much everybody’s core business model is to sell actual, physical products (with one notable exception). It just happens what they sold had to be licensed from Japan. This business came from a tradition of pushing hardware, not software. So things like home video sales trend is key to their survival, including their downstream affiliates.
A proper rebuttal of Rob’s fears (perhaps better put as soothing and reassuring his worries, for the less confrontational) goes like this. In short:
- We don’t know for sure how the BD market is going to turn out in this space. Yet.
- Blu-Ray Disc market has yet to stabilize especially in America, considering the nature of the format still waffles between budding home-theater owners, trend-conscious consumers, and hardcore collectors.
- We don’t know how BD-buying anime fans fit between those categories.
- And there are a lot of other things that we don’t know (most importantly: pricing trends in specifics).
- And once we do know for sure, Japan will much more likely cooperate.
- (Old argument:) The internet piracy market doesn’t overlap with the BD-buying market anyways! All that online stuff is to add revenue stream through the people who won’t buy the physical media in the first place, and the data is good on cannibalization (as in, not enough to worry about).
- Most hardcore collectors either don’t give a flying damn about Funimation’s crap BDs, or lament about it (By the way, this is hawt.). [By the way #2, we also don’t care about some torrent of some 720p material upscaled (by manufacturer) to 1080 then downscaled (by encoder) to 720. WTH guys.]
The way I see it, when Viz, Funimation and others branch into online media stuff, they’re trying to secure as many revenue streams as their budget can allow. I mean, that’s what every media licensing company in America (and elsewhere!) is doing. Even if they don’t make money through it, it’s a great way to advertise. Take Viz for example, I think they suck when it comes to the internet in general, even compared to Funimation (maybe that is because they are now a Japanese company and invariably that sort of lack-of-business-savvy comes like a D&D racial penalty), but even then, they know they have to go there because the is money there, because the next generation of buyers are there. You have to be visible in that space.
If anything, Crunchyroll has shown Japan that there is money in the cloud. It’s a separate question as to if CR can stay afloat, but that’s a different inquiry. Ultimately there’s very little people like Robert can do, so his frustration with the whole shebang of ills throughout the system/process is sympathetic, if a tad misdirected.
I also have one more note from the blog comments–
Who has a BD strategy? I know Funimation does, as their 5-man dedicated in-house mastering folks…exist. They also have dedicated marketing folks that post blog posts and screw around on Twitter. I already mentioned before that these sorts of people are almost luxuries–how many anime licensing companies in the US can afford that? Viz comes to mind, and Crunchyroll? It isn’t like BD mastering is a simple and inexpensive process either. And even today, the only good anime on BD, in the US, come from Honneamise and Sony. That’s it folks! In reality Bandai Visual and Funimation are obviously two players with a BD strategy; one just gets hated on for no good reason (BDs being too expensive is no reason to hate IMO) and jumped ship, the other is in the process of making less-crappy BD releases and wrangling over licensing problems.
In short, BD is still too expensive for small fries, too corporate-paranoid for the big guys (except Bandai), and behind the curve for everyone else (see Funi’s backlog).
Personally, I would love to be able to buy BD of all the anime I want to buy. But a honest look at the landscape of the market would tell me that even if I have a lot of spending money and live in Japan, not all the title I want is even available in BD. Where is my Simoun? Where’s my Futakoi Alternative? Where’s my Kara no Kyoukai? If anything that is the “moral” of the True Tears box story. So, I think it is a little unreasonable to ask a foreign licensee that sort of thing, at this junction.
One thing I do agree with him: Funimation should quit pussy-footing around and make a strong statement in their BD releases; even if it is at the expense of spending more money there and spending less money elsewhere, BD ought to be/will be a core business product. Being the default anime industry leader in the US, they need to be able to put out a quality BD product. Absolutely have to. Why? If anything, so it quells my fear that they can’t even if they wanted to. As I see it, they’re really just trying to scrape by as cheaply as they can, and that just makes the HD-whore in me sad. Worse, it gives me an incentive to wait for something better, like a Japanese release.
And lastly, two more notes:
Japan is paranoid about reverse importation of BDs and they make people jump hoops about their Region A releases. Still, I think there is good sense to change your release methods to avoid making the “ultimate” SKU that will end up siphoning all the richest/most desperate buyers. It is the opposite approach of the Honneamise/BV strategy. For example, we have Disney’s Ponyo, which is tailored to the American audience for their US release, and tailored to the Asian audience in their Japanese release. I think it’s quite clever that the Japanese release carries just a 2.0 English track where as the US release carries a 5.1 Japanese (but lower bitrate than the Japanese one) track. I think that’s really tailoring it to the right audience. Of course, this strategy doesn’t apply so well on titles where volume of sales that don’t tier, or are just really low. And yeah, it rubs those perfectionist collectors the wrong way, but they could always just buy both copies :3
(Oh wait, that makes THREE studios with concerted BD strategy. Let’s remember the margin Disney makes on these babies in their Japanese release. Ahem.)
The other note being–do people care? I mean it sort of goes under my bullet up there about “overlapping.” Poor suckers like me probably would double- and triple-dip on BD/DVD/VHS/LD or whatever as long as you give us a compelling reason we will buy SKU from our favorite shows. I think that’s the basic operational mentality from the consumer side of things in the anime industry. In that sense, when Funimation releases Samurai Champloo BD, I bought it, mainly because it would be my only archival copy–that is the same as buying the DVDs of the thing, since the quality is about on par (if not worse). Still, I bought the damned thing. I can see why people might not buy it as an upgrade to their library, but it’s one example where the BD SKU can fit a role that a budget re-release DVD does for a title that already has a first or second pressing. I think Funimation understands this and knows that’s possibly where the money is!
TL;DR: It is a game of incentives. Funimation (and everyone) stands to gain from playing ball in the various markets, both because there is something to gain and because it is relatively cheap. Before we cry about bulking up core businesses we have to rationally examine the potential gain versus the cost, even if it contradicts with what I said up there…
Marble
No puns this time! (I think.)
I’ve grown to like Marble’s music, the pop duo Micco and Tatsuya Kikuchi that have re-launched their brand of music since 2007. To be more concise than Wikipedia, the two signed up with Lantis in 2007, and since then they’ve released a line of music that really gets to me.
Before then, the two also have worked for and with different artists, writing music, touring, and releasing stuff. Both can compose, play and write; and in stereotypical musical-duo-form, Kikuchi gets to do the bulk of programming and play. Some names they’ve written for include Nana Kitade, Mai Nakahara, and Ryoko Hirosue, among others. Recently, they’ve written one of the character songs (at least?) for Hatsukoi Limited and provided the OP song and the Christmas episode image song. Their first single from Lantis launched with Hidamari Sketch (2007), as the ED song, and you can hear their latest single in Hidasketch Hoshimitsu (X***?). More (outdated) info can be found at the marblepedia.
Actually, I want to talk about that ED. See here. With lyrics. It’s a bit of a divergence no? I thought the way they sounded since 2007 had a particular method to their madness. It is like dressing up street pop with a lot of glitz, but in a fluffy, diet-soda kind of way. Compared to the songs on their two re-release albums, which was a lot more mainline indie/folk/jazz influenced, the new stuff is just outrageous. And I don’t mean outrageous like Lady Gaga. It’s like Akiba/Dempa with a much smaller dose of the electricity.
Oh right, their new song, “Sakura Sakura Saku ~Ano Hi Kimi wo Matsu Sora to Onaji de~,” is a freaking mouthful. And catchy in that cheapass teenage powered rock music way. Sigh. Perhaps it’s a progression from Hatsukoi Limited? Wait, there is a PV to Hatsukoi Limited? LOL?
It’s like seeing Micco in that outfit for Kuusou Jet reminds me of Elizabeth from Persona 3. Farm their old blog for pics–the two of them post quite a bit, and you can follow their new posts on their ameblo.
In fact it’s probably more amusing than a blog post full of links you can google up in a few minutes. In a nutshell that’s partly how I feel about Marble–they are nothing really extraordinary, but somehow they’re just really enjoyable. It is as if they are in a niche that takes advantage of their competent if humble skill set. It’s like, moe?
It’s so much like moe, that all this poking and researching don’t add much to my appreciation of their works. So weird. I guess it beats writing a post about the lone nipple pointing at the moon…
