Year In Review: N-Squared List
Just like last year, I guess some things have not changed. This could be a reference.
Gadget Geek Supports Toradora!
I don’t really give a damn about cheeky romance, “one more time” [cue Daft Punk], or the usual inner struggles as manifested through intercharacter drama that wrapped up like a satisfying trashy romance novel. Toradora is based on light novels, right?
I do care about the display of current-gen kids and their interactive behaviors as brought about through improved access to each other, and to technology that improves their Quality of Life. I know, in America, major carriers, armed with big bucks, push their version of a tomorrow where MMS (multimedia messaging) can transform your relationship with the people you care. Does it? Maybe. Perhaps it did for Taiga because, you know.
But would some other method work just as well? Maybe not for a naive little girl who isn’t too great at verbal communication. It’s probably some kind of cathartic moment for me to see it portrayed in pop media, mixed in there with an emotionally satisfying ending to a love story. However at the same time it makes me question the authenticity of the message…
…that is until I realized big brothas aren’t agile enough to create something like this. That car cases, literal product placements and other simple name droppings are still going to be the primary means of in-show advertising. Even CC’s craving for larger-than-life pie is as clear cut as a box of Rocky. Or Packo. Or Pochy. Something like Taiga’s silliness can only be the creation of someone who’s equally silly. It’s not srsbzns.
What is serious is something like Platonic Chain. I guess that’s the catch, right? When you want to show off a new reality built on some next-gen perspective on how to live, it’ll come off like a science fiction. This is not the case with Toradora, so it caught me off-guard.
But this really makes a huge case for phones with high-megapixel cameras with good sensors. I mean, seriously, this is not possible in America given far, far majority of the phones people have (99.9%, probably more) will never be able to capture an image that shows anything but a sheet of darkness, if there’s some lonesome star upon an urban sky. Let alone seeing it on another phone (QVGA screen? LULZ). Tokyo is one of the brightest places on earth as viewed from space, after all. And it might be because it’s aglow with awesome cell phones I wish I could have.
Needless to say, I’m really glad that I can find one final, positive note, to end this fun but ultimately pedestrian journey through adolescence. Yeaaaaa go Toradora! :woot:
While Growing Up
Do little kids dream of being or doing something when they grow up? Do we put that aside and ride that rail road to better education, career, and income?
Japan is a place where people ride the rail. And I’m not just joking, I’m both joking and being serious!
They even have train pushers to pack their massively jammed rush hour sardine cans on rails. But I’m not going to talk about that. Well, maybe the literary symbolism a little.
As a small challenge to myself I’m going to try to write something positive about Toradora! Its popularity to me is a testament of how lame 2008 was in terms of having something exciting among all the new anime that came out that year. And it isn’t to say there weren’t great shows, just none that floored me. And probably none that floored you. Sans the ones you haven’t watched. It isn’t really about how good Toradora is. To me it’s an above average show that didn’t do anything special. If “did nothing seriously wrong” was not a special quality. Remember, that’s just me.
So let’s take the one character that did grow up in Toradora, at least in a literary and figurative sense: Sumire. Now it’s one thing to question which national or private effort will rally behind her with a space program, even if it’s quite interesting, it’s another to evaluate her role within the show’s themes.
I am currently reading the novelization of RahXephon. Comments on the English translation aside, in volume 3, there was a little scene between Sayoko (Itsuki’sQuon’s brother’s aide and stalker) and Haruka Shitow, which played out in terms of “who’s really the ‘mature’ one.” It’s curious because the assumptions we make and operate within are sometimes delusions made to make us feel better about ourselves, and the passage did well to convey that in a succinct manner without telling it to you.
And while there is a fair bit of self-delusion going on in Toradora, some of it can be attributed to a lag. Like, say, Ryuuji and realizing/understanding his feelings for Taiga. Or Taiga for him. They’re just slow. As they say in the modern American Baptist(?) tradition, the distance between the brain and the heart is quite long.
But that’s really the magic about Toradora–it’s about that idealist self-delusion. Sumire is the rocket girl that pierced that illusory ceiling and went on to pursuit her dream. Do the rest follow? Do they see the limits as imposed? Or are they real? It’s fitting that the anime series reached a turning point on that outburst around episodes 15 and 16. As they say in Honey & Clover (and, well, literature of times ancient and everything since) it’s about finding yourself.
Back to RahXephon. That scene I described above came in two parts. The first part, told from Sayoko’s perspective, described an angry woman. She’s a hurting and hurtful individual, and they’ve gotten across that rather bluntly. It also didn’t help that she likes Itsuki, and yet here stood the woman who is Itsuki’s ex because Haruka dumped him and the idea that Itsuki will never be hers eats away at her. Sayoko and Haruka’s friendship (at this point in the story) is cordial but mostly because Haruka kept it that way. Sayoko and Haruka made some talk, in the first part, but it ends up with Sayoko asking Haruka something “work related.”
The second part of that scene in RahXephon, told from Haruka’s perspective, dealt with that piece of information. It detailed mostly Haruka’s inner thoughts as she conversed with Sayoko. Realizing that by asking her those questions, it marked the move of a third party manipulating her feelings. Haruka didn’t really notice or find Sayoko’s passive-aggressiveness bothersome, but she plays along her image as projected. Something about being an adult?
In a similar way, we can think about Ami and Minorin on similar terms. It’s not a perfect fit, but you get what I’m saying, I hope.
More seriously, however, Sumire was like, the rock that toppled the status quo. Much like Quon was the deus ex lolitamachina whose “la la” ate away at the sanity of all around her. It’s a very typical screenwriting strategy for TV anime, now that I’ve thought about it from this angle.
- You introduce your main cast, your core concept, your hook
- You create a stable, attractive and comfortable reoccurring theme
- Set up the final plot arc while doing so.
- Break open the egg and tune your world. BAD END. Except in RahXephon’s case, which they made enough money to give it a real ending via the movie. And it was lovely.
And your viewers will translate into delicious omelets made of DVD revenues? LOL.
I know I am trying to say something positive about Toradora, but I’m sorry, when I try to read things like this, I just can’t. I laugh at it. It’s like the crazy people who think they’re actually doing serious business on TV Tropes. But I did manage to compare it with RahXephon. I mean comparing Toradora to H&C really is an apples-to-oranges comparison, but comparing it with RahXephon, hey, at least they ARE trying to do the same things with the human relationships detailed within. Granted, they are also so different that the comparison only makes sense within a very narrow set of frameworks.
That was a joke, by the way. Really forcefully shoved in. Can’t you tell? I would tell you, but I am trying to say something positive about Toradora…
I guess that means I can’t tell you what I predict what I think how the ending will be either.
A Designer’s Dilemma
In Japanese-animated adaptation of comics, an anime’s animation character designer’s role is to extrapolate the original character designs into formats fit for animation. At least, that is it in a nutshell.
For instance, a popular manga simply is that, a manga. To then take the characters from the manga, draw out all the details (think: a typical character design sheet you can find in artbooks for shows or as Newtype features, etc) so animators can see how the character’s hands are, how the back of the character looks like, how the character’s feet are like, etc. The animation character designer provides those specs as one uniform source for the production team to work off of.
Consequently, the extrapolation process often times includes making the original designs workable in the context of making an anime. The original design may have some inconsistencies, or are often way too complex for the purposes of animation. And due to budget and time limits, detailed animation are often not possible anyways so the animation character designer has to simplify the designs in a capture-the-essence kind of way.
And of course, this isn’t limited to manga adaptations. Some light novel adaptations come with character illustrations, and sometimes an animation character designer work off that.
So what happens when the manga was generic enough to begin with, design-wise? The animation character designer should have an easier time right? Not necessarily.
The easily identifiable differences between different design elements within the same set of characters is one of the keys to make a good set of character designs for the original character designer. However, beyond that, the designs generally reduce down to “same” or “barely differentiable” for the sake of faster processing, checking, and better consistency in a hurried anime production.
By nature, character designs bear trademarks of the designer. Style, some would say. There is also a matter of form and convention. Anime characters have big eyes and small mouths, for example. But your generic character designs are already generically pleasing in some sense; people use pleasing templates.
So how do you differentiate a generic-in-reality character versus an above-average-pleasing character in terms of the design aspects that pleases the average viewer’s eyes? A focus on T&A and shapely body lines? Muscle tones? Height and length of limbs? What if those things were already drawn, as a genre convention, at their ideal specs by default?
How do you make someone like Ami-chan extra-sexy? Maybe there are a few ways. But it isn’t by design.
