So, I thought it would be fun to talk about three opinions I have related to anime that run counter to what I think is the popular view in the anime community. I'm not trying to call anyone out on this or anything, and if you think I'm wrong, feel free to let me know. I'm not arrogant enough to think I know everything about what's best for anime. Just most of it.
Opinion #1: Darling in the Franxx never sucked!
Darling in the Franxx is an ambitious title from the minds of Gainax veterans working for Studio Trigger, A-1 Pictures, and the newly formed Cloverworks Studio. It was a post apocalyptic mecha series that combined homages to classic Gainax shows like Evangelion and Gurren Lagann and heavy-handed metaphors for puberty and sexual awakening to make a point about adolescence being the death of individuality and adult culture being the equivalent of actual sterilization. And the mechs were controlled by male pilots grabbing handles that came out of the butt cheeks of female pilots who had to bend over in front of them.
Yeah, subtlety was never on the agenda here. And yet, the show took the anime community by storm, with the fun characters, beautiful art, and mysterious backstory keeping the conversation going and giving Darling the status as one of the most popular series of the first half of 2018.
So what happened? Well, when the second half of the series rolled around and the mysteries started being explained, the community didn't take to the revelations very well. Apparently, the sudden involvement of aliens (which were foreshadowed earlier on, but whatever) and the main female character turning into a giant mech wearing a metallic wedding dress was too weird for them. Tons of Youtube videos and Reddit posts ranted about how the show just got super dumb all of a sudden and the ending has become a target of ridicule among the community.
And I find that really sad. Yes, it was silly that the entire story turned out to suddenly be turning into a giant space war, but is that really any sillier than the Franxx robots being piloted through simulating sexual intercourse? Is it really that thematically dissonant for a show that argued that adulthood was killing the individuality of teenagers to present an alien force capitalizing on their greed and forcing homogenization for its own evil purposes? I don't think so. I honestly think that Darling's fall from grace is the result of too much hype as it was going on, only for the shock at an episode not meeting the super high expectations that the community built up for it causing a disproportionate reaction of anger and betrayal. It was never a masterpiece, but it was never bad either.
Opinion #2: Netflix and Amazon are good
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| Not this. This was stupid. |
Once upon a time, there were no legal streaming services for anime. Then in 2006, Toonami launched an experimental platform called Toonami Jetstream to stream their shows and release smaller exclusive releases that wouldn't do well with a mainstream television audience. It flopped pretty quickly, but the void was soon taken over by another rising star that started at around the same time: Crunchyroll.
Crunchyroll has become, without a doubt, the premier platform for watching anime in the modern era. With their expansion being timed at around the same time as the launch of popular modern shows like Sword Art Online and Attack on Titan, they have done a lot of good for the medium and pushed anime to being the closest to mainstream success that it has ever been, to the point where Goku was even featured in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade this year!
And honestly, Crunchyroll is a pretty cool platform. A huge library of anime titles, ad-free, released on the same day as their release in Japan, all for a pretty reasonable subscription fee? How could I say no to that? But, as what happens with any given success, imitators have come, and now we have a slew of platforms, each with their exclusive shows stuck on the platform. Netflix, Amazon, HiDive, and now even Hulu are getting exclusive shows that will not legally air anywhere else, and if you want to watch everything, you need to have a subscription for each. And naturally, anime fans were not happy about that. Five different subscription fees are pretty expensive altogether, and Amazon especially tried to push it with a 16 dollar monthly fee for their AnimeStrike platform, which I can happily say was dropped and now their anime is sitting nicely in the Prime library. And I get the feeling of frustration from missing out on something you were excited for because it became exclusive to a platform you don't have access to. I only recently got access to HiDive myself, and I have a lot to catch up on (Bloom Into You is pretty good, by the way).
But! I see all these platforms competing to license as many anime as possible, and I'm only excited. The rise of online streaming has made anime a hot commodity, and with five different platforms building their own exclusive library, it's now rarer and rarer for any series worth a damn to be left without an official western release (Captain Tsubasa and Layton's Mystery Detective Agency notwithstanding). No longer is anime in the US limited to shonen action, kiddie shows, and direct to video obscurity. If it weren't for Netflix, I never would have seen Seven Deadly Sins, Violet Evergarden, or Aggressive Retsuko. If it weren't for Amazon, I never would have seen Re:Creators, Killing Bites, or Grand Blue. And if it weren't for HiDive...well, Bloom Into You is pretty cool.
I understand that none of these platforms are perfect. Netflix is apparently allergic to simulcasts, Amazon is ridiculously greedy, HiDive's library is pretty small compared to the others, and Crunchyroll has some weird subtitle issues occasionally. But the competition between these different platforms is good for us as anime fan's, as it leads to a greater variety of shows to watch and keeps any one platform from getting too greedy and trying to establish itself as the only place to watch anime.
Opinion #3: Cute Girls are a Crutch
This is Anima Yell. It's a show about cheerleading that I was planning to include in the weekly roundup, but it had a slightly later release than the other shows in the roundup, and I didn't want to add a new show only to cut it in the same week because the first episode is terrible. The animation is stiff, the jokes are unfunny, and none of the characters or story hooks are interesting in the slightest. And while I'm happy to report that it's not a popular show in the community, the fact that it still has 15,000 members on MAL (which is 10,000 more than Space Battleship Tiramisu Zwei, which I mean, I know it's a sequel and a niche title, but it's better than this!) and a score of 6.75 is baffling to me. But then I went to a random episode discussion on Reddit and saw literally every post talking about how cute this or that girl is, and I understood everything.
I have nothing against cute anime girls. It's normal for animators to make good looking character designs, and cuteness can inspire positive emotions in me. There are some shows that are built on cute anime girls such as Hinamatsuri and Skilled Teaser Takagi-san that I absolutely loved this year, but none of them rely solely on the appeal of their cute characters. Hinamatsuri is an uproariously funny comedy that explores what family actually means, and Takagi-san is a sweet romantic comedy that portrays middle school relationships more accurately than anything else I've ever seen. But these shows seem to be a rarity. Shows like Comic Girls, Anima Yell, and, to a lesser extent, Harukana Receive coast on the visual appeal of their female characters and not much else. And that's pretty boring. I have no idea if I would have even come close to finishing Harukana Receive if it wasn't a sports anime, which as we have established, is something that I am a fan of, and I LIKED the girls in that show.
In general, I'm not going to say that having a show's appeal based on cute anime girls is an inherently bad thing. You can make a good show out of anything after all. But as far as I'm concerned, it isn't enough, just like how I would say that cool action scenes aren't enough to make a truly good action series. Without a strong story and interesting characters, I just can't bring myself to care otherwise. And seeing overly cute girls stick out like a sore thumb in shows like My Hero Academia and Goblin Slayer, where they don't quite fit in with the aesthetic of the rest of the show (ESPECIALLY Goblin Slayer), really makes me worry that studios think that shows just don't sell without cute girls and makes me want to cheer when a show like Angolmois or Hinomaru Sumo drops with an almost entirely male cast just because it means I can see something a little different for once.
And you know who I blame for all this? Kyoto Animation.
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| Not this, though. This is great. |
Kyoto Animation has risen to be one of the anime community's most beloved studios in the past decade, thanks to their 1-2-3 punch of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, K-ON!, and Lucky Star. All of these shows are shows that I haven't had the chance to watch yet, but are infamous for building a huge audience through a combination of high quality animation, cute character designs, and strong character-based humor, at a time when that was still new and fresh, and the majority of their shows after that, such as Nichijou, Love Chunibyo and Other Delusions, Sound Euphonium, and Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid, seem to follow that same formula. All of these shows are very popular in the anime community, but as someone who has mostly only seen opening themes and a handful of clips at most, all I can say is that the animation quality is definitely very high.
But as for me, I have seen four shows from Kyoto Animation. I spoke about Sound Euphonium before, and I stand by it being just a meh show with pretty visuals, which is also how I feel about Free Iwatobi Swim Club. Tsurune Kazemai Kyudo Club (another show I considered for the weekly roundup before it's delayed release caused me to abandon that idea) is a waste of potential with some of the prettiest animation I've seen in a sports anime wasted on a fat load of nothing. And Violet Evergarden...is amazing, but I think that that is just because of how good the source material was, though the amazing art from KyoAni is definitely worth watching the show instead of reading the novel.
But anyway, KyoAni's huge success with a library of shows that are almost all about cute high school girls has inspired what some have called a "Moe Revolution", where cute girls have taken over anime to the point of over-saturation (in my opinion). But there's no way that so many imitators can live up to the pedigree of one of the highest quality animation studios in Japan, which is how we get shows like Anima Yell. And is it even worth it in the end? As far as I'm concerned, KyoAni's animation quality isn't that much better than Studio Madhouse, Bones, or Trigger at their best, and the narrative quality of their content typically stands head and shoulders over everything that I watched from KyoAni (aside from Violet Evergarden), so I really don't get the hype.
But that's just me. I hope you enjoyed reading the opinions that I think run counter to the common wisdom of the anime community, and if you did, maybe I'll come back with a few other unpopular opinions I have. But until then, I will leave you with the undeniable wisdom of Hayao Miyazaki:
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