More "Haruhi" to Worship

A new season for The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya is in production as we speak! Very exciting. It includes the story from the third light novel Bamboo Rhapsody where Kyon time travels to Haruhi's junior high years and helps her put the symbols on the quad. Other than that I don't know what it includes. The anime will air in August in Japan.

Very exciting!

Purity of Art

You might look at the post title and go: "Buh? The hell?", and I wouldn't blame you. It took me almost a year to understand this concept and I can't even remember the proper term for it. In fact, I had a 1/3 of a class on it and for the first time in my life I received less than a 'B' on something English/Humanities-related. But because this can apply to animation, I wanted to discuss it here.

I'll start by asking you the same question I asked myself after re-watching Wall-E for the fiftieth time: Which is superior: 3-D animation or 2-D animation?

Seriously now, don't blurt out an answer. Sit and think about it for a good solid minute, come up with reasons and arguments, and then keep reading this blog. Whatever you do, keep reading!

First, let me start off by saying this: Wall-E is a brilliant and heart-warming masterpiece. I utterly adore it to itsy-bitsy pieces. The fact that about 85% of the movie relies on pantomime to convey story is utterly fantastic and a concept that I adore and can babble endlessly on. It's my personal pick for Best Picture of 2008, maybe a tie with The Dark Knight.

That being said, it is (in my opinion) inferior to most 2-D animated features. Just as most 3-D features are. There are exceptions to this rule, and I'll go into detail later.

Two dimensional animation is superior because it is made directly from the artist/animator. Each cell of animation was hand-drawn from the animator. There was one person and one person only involved with that character on the page, and made them come to life by their own hand. Every expression, every movement, everything done with no interference from a machine, other animators, etc. All was created specifically by the animator themselves, and everything about the character on the page is inherent to the artist/animator's hand.

In computerized animation programs and just about any animator can manipulate a 3-dimensional model stored on the computer into doing whatever they want. Sure, only the best programmers and can get specific expressions, but with enough practice anyone can duplicate it. And therein lies what will always make 3-D animation inferior: the duplication. The mediums. A program made the art--not the human. A bunch of 1s and 0s created what the human hand didn't.

Think about the difference between a photograph and a painting. A painting is a purer form of art because it cannot be reproduced in exact detail, even with the same materials. Even the best copy-cat with the same type of materials, brushes, oils/paints, etc. cannot produce an exact copy because of the little things like paint clumping (for oil paints) or brush strokes, or even a hair of a paint brush being left behind on the canvas in the paint. A picture can be recreated in the same lighting and position easily, or at the very least you can take the original negative and create as many copies as you want. The machine created the art--not the photographer. In reproduction it loses its' purity.

The same with hand-drawn animation and computer animation. With the machine acting as the medium, the purity becomes lost and reproducible. Sure, it takes time and skill, but in the end you can create an exact copy of what was already made. With hand-drawn animation it take innate talent to be able to create recognizable characters on a page, much less copy the exact ones over and over ad infinitum. Could you copy Disney's Pocahontas cell by cell over and over again? Or Production I.G.'s Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade? I think not.

Look back on Toy Story now. At the time, it was a brilliant feat of animation. Now the textures look kinda silly and out-dated compared to what can be accomplished these days. Yet something like Beauty and the Beast is still incredibly impressive in terms of fluidity, motion, and character design, etc. Seriously.

If things like this interest you, I suggest taking a Humanities course or a Philosophy one. They think about this kind of stuff all the time. ^_^

Coraline

Saw Coraline this last Sunday. It was utterly fantastic.

For those not in the know, Coraline is a stop-motion film by the director of The Nightmare Before Christmas based on Neil Gaimen's story of the same title. It's a tale full of "careful what you wish for because you might just get it!" that is beautifully told with lively characters in colorful settings. The titular character of Coraline is a treat in herself because she is a normal child with a growing imagination who is bored senseless after her parents move her to the middle-of-nowhere away from her friends. She explores their new home and finds a small, secret door that leads to an alternate dimension where people have buttons for eyes and everything seems built to make her happy. However something sinister lurks below the surface...

It's slightly creepy but full of amazing visuals and great characters. Perfect film to scare the crap out of your kids with. ^_^

Ouran 2nd Half

So, the second half of Ouran High School Host Club is out but good luck finding it in stores. I continually checked Best Buy for a week and a half after the release date and it still never showed up. Not even on their website. The first half is still there.

What did I do? I pouted and whined. Tony pointed out that the Internet is a viable source of legally purchasing anime, and I whined some more about how my complex won't allow me to accept packages anymore. Solution? Mail anime to his place. Yay! I got the second half on Amazon.com. Hallelujah! For cheap(er) too!

Still fun menus and extras. And of course the anime itself. Heeeeeeee. Must loan it out to people who want to see (I'm a one-woman lending-library).

In video game news, absolutely nothing to look forward to is on the horizon. That was quick!

No movies, no video games, and no (really) new anime to look forward to right now. Bleak. Oh, almost forgot to mention that Bones' Darker Than Black is starting to come out on DVD, so keep a lookout for it. Box set won't appear for a while, though.

Animation

I'm totally stunned: American animation isn't dead. I just spent the last week watching Avatar: The Last Airbender (seasons 1-3) and absolutely loved it. I can't stop quoting it or searching for art on deviant art about it. The fact that this show aired on Nickelodeon still astounds me. Best characters are of course Sokka and Toph, and I'm a Zutarian (because heaven forbid I should choose the cannonical couple...) all the way. This show was just way too awesome. It combined all the best parts of anime and American cartoons while having some of the best characters I've ever seen on a screen. A friend lent me season one and I rushed out to buy the rest (in my defense I was going to buy Ouran High School Host Club part 2 but it was no where in sight). Kudos to American animation!

Also started watching an anime called Toradora! on Tony's reccommendation. It carries on the tsundere character-type created by The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya's titular character in the form of Taiga, a tiny delinquent. It's a romantic comedy that's hilarious, told from Ryuuji's POV (a boy with a gentle nature but with "evil eyes") about the two percieved delinquents trying to help each other hook up with their respective best friends. Beautiful and punchy animation combined with hilarious voice acting creates a cracktacular series. Not as great as Suzumiya, but still promising.

Happy Holidays!

Happy Holidays here! 2008 is coming to a rapid close and there's still so much of it left to enjoy. It gave us a pretty decent year in gaming, less so in anime. In terms of gifts, it gave us a lot to ponder.

Every one of my friends but myself has an Xbox360 now. I'll probably get it sooner rather than later now. With my latest friend getting an Xbox (Seth) we also got to experience Rockband 2 and create characters! It's incredibly addictive, though as the singer of the group I didn't know as many of the songs on this playlist as I did on the first one. There is an option to port over Rockband 1's playlist over to 2, so hopefully we'll get around to that. I'm pretty much going to try and hang out at Seth's as much as possible now because this game is just that fun. Also now that we're not playing on the Wii the controls work much better and character creation is too fun. Seth and I were fighting over who got to spend money on whose character while Tony and Larry rolled their eyes at us.

Prince of Persia came to a close a while ago (it's almost criminally short) with a controversial but (in my mind) brilliant ending. Also, it sets up for a sequel. I feel less good about that given Ubisoft's track record.

Tony was a doll and got me Blood + season 1 box set (with a great T-shirt in the box, though the full series would have been acceptable) so I've been watching the DVDs. I keep forgetting that Adult Swim used to edit a lot of the blood out so it's more of a gore fest than I remember, but that only adds rather than detracting from the experience. "Saya!" Never gets old.

Ouran High School Host Club 2 will be out in two or three weeks. Cannot wait. Love this series.

Death Note boxset 1 is out for a reasonable price (first half of the series for $50.00--that's around 30 episodes). One of the few Madhouse series to not have gallons of blood to spurt at high pressure in every episode (the other series is Monster if you were curious) and has lots of crazy "intellectual" twists. It's hella fun to see Light and L go at outsmarting each other and all the moral issues involved with Light's actions. Definitely worth the cash.

Can't really think of anything else noteworthy to squawk about right now. Maybe later. Happy Holidays once again!

50th Post! Also, PoP...

Yeah, so I haven't updated in forever. Sorry. Real life/work/family/Thanksgiving all got in the way.

So, on to the good stuff:

Prince of Persia landed on shelves a week ago. It is awesome. Seriously, I had been doubting how amazing it would be (so it looks pretty, big deal) but it has some incredible level design and strong characterization, which I'm a whore for.

You play as the mysterious "Prince", though he's actually a grave-robbing orphan with a rakish demeanor and a "roll-with-it" attitude. He's incredibly fond of chasing pretty faces with little thought beyond that. This is how he teams up with the equally enigmatic Elika, a pretty face with something more beneath the surface. Like magic.

The story is a bit flimsy (stop evil Ahriman and his followers by changing the corrupt fertile lands back into fertile lands) and the fighting, as always in the PoP series, can get repetative. The combat system itself, though, is much improved and fun to use. You have your sword button, your gauntlet button, your Elika button (where you throw her at the enemy) and your acrobat button (helps you roll to/from/around enemies). You can chain combos pretty endlessly until a gimmick the enemy pulls (where you can only approach with a specific attack) and the ever-annoying-quick-time-events should you fail to read your opponent correctly. Enemies do not randomly spawn and you only fight one at a time. If you're fast enough you can cut them off before they spawn! Bosses, on the other hand, you can never avoid and you will fight them numerous times with little difference between battles. Sure, sometimes you're forced to do a different gimmick (use environment, can't use magic, etc.) with the same boss in different battles, but most moves never change and you'll find the fight repetitive and sometimes irritating.

Also, you can't die. Which is sweet. In the series of old, if you died you were forced to re-do from whatever arbitrary checkpoint the game came up with, or worse, your last save point. I can't tell you how many times I was forced to re-do that stupid puzzle before the elevator in Azhad in Prince of Persia: Sands of Time because of that stupid elevator fight in which large groups on enemies re spawned three times and Farah kept dying. (I had to do that fight like 32 times or something. I had a tally at one point.) Not so in the next-gen game. With Elika you get the "Save Me" move where she pulls you from death and lands you on the last stable platform you were on in about three seconds, sometimes followed by witty (read: fun but cheesy) dialogue. No reload screen, no game over screen, no waiting. Sure, the "save me" is unstoppable, but it lasts two seconds. So while you never die, you still know that you screwed up. Quite frankly that's actually preferable. Doesn't make the game less challenging (hell, you goofed in the first place) either. In battles the penalty is more if Elika saves you, such as if you don't hit the quick-time buttons fast enough then the enemy's health is regenerated.

Elika's AI is incredible. One major plus is she won't die on you and the game doesn't end if she's knocked out (which she can be). She also never hurts you in battle or ever gets lost platforming, and can be used in battle to chain combos and deal actual damage. As much as I adored Farah (and I truly did) it got annoying that she couldn't actually keep lasting damage on enemies (except for those sand raven/bird/things). Elika helps to finish off enemies. Also, she keeps up with you on platforming and helps with the Power Plates (silly magic gimmicks) and long distances as well as providing a compass. Plus, she's a real character that reacts like an actual human being instead of your typical vapid JRPG princess or supercilious bad-ass-cold-hearted-action girl that populate a lot of action games.

Elika and the Prince (who is heavily modeled off of Harrison Ford-variety action heroes) have great chemistry, unlike most ridiculously shoe-horned love interests. While I'm sure a lot of people appreciate that the dialogue in this game is optional (except during cut scenes), I long for more of it. I swear, if I were playing the characters would spend too much time talking to each other rather than platforming. They even play "I Spy"! I love the optional dialogue as both Kari Wahlgren and Nolan North are incredibly strong actors. Their voices are just nice to listen to.

For all that praise and excitement I just heaped on Prince of Persia, I will say there are some annoyances. The game is definitely padded. After healing a ground, you have to re-explore to gather Light Seeds, which you then trade in for a Power Plate power (there are four plate powers). It's annoying. Sure, the platforming is fun, but being forced to collect these things is irritating. You don't have to collect all of them (forty-five in each area), but there are achievements for doing so. Big whoop. Also, combat is repetitive (no surprise considering Ubisoft made the game, but still) and the story itself is rather thin. Also, your boss characters are incredibly irritating as they don't really vary attack-wise and will often spout the same nonsense over and over. The level design is gorgeous, but they definitely dumbed down how to solve your path so that the platforming flows for anyone with two working hands. Not like that's awful, but most of the challenge is gone. As much as I lamented my almost-constant splatter-death in Sands of Time, I still felt awesome for achieving it when I did on the first try. Also, the puzzles are lacking in this one. They're still there, just more annoying and less charming.

Still though, it's a great game with strong characters and beautiful cell-shaded graphics to resemble a moving storybook. I'm completely enthralled and beg you to join the experience.