Writing on anime should be firmly kept to formal criticism...

Writing on anime should be firmly kept to formal criticism. What makes the medium worthwhile is its manipulation of drawings in motion to deliver a unique experience that no other medium is capable of. Japanese animation in particular is distinct with its frame modulation in comparison to Western animation. Any medium can have rich character development and deliver discreet social commentary in which case those mediums tend to excel in more so than anime but none of them exhibit the unique joys in which one can attain from witnessing an Ohira Shinya cut. There is no comparison you can make to film or literature.

Many anime fans also seem to naively divide anime into 4 categories of "story, characters, visuals and sound" which is just absurd. The majority of narrative criticism is just glorified plot summaries with the author inserting a personal philosophy he/she's been interested in at the time. Worse of all are those who can only talk about plot holes as they have absolutely nothing insightful to say about the work in question.

Arguing that animation or film is inherently a narrative medium is insanely reductive and needs to die. Dismissing the production aspect of the work as "pretty colours", claiming to watch anime for the "story/writing", people like this should just not be taken seriously as they are 99% of the time completely ignorant on not just anime but art as a whole.

>Worse of all are those who can only talk about plot holes as they have absolutely nothing insightful to say about the work in question.
r/movies and r/anime is a nutshell. Well written post.

Nails the point on the head. If an anime has garbage visuals or visual directing, it is not a good anime.

But you're expecting some level of comprehension and critical thinking out of the anime community which just isn't going to happen.

I'm impressed that this apparently isn't pasta, but I still didn't read all of it.

Writing on anime should be firmly kept in the trash.

so does that mean naruto is the greatest anime ever since it has the best visuals in anime?

No, but that first arc of Naruto was actually really good. Or rather, it showed a lot of potential which could have turned into something completely different, and better.

Yes obviously, watching anime with the expectation of good writing is just arrogance.

it only got better though

>t. sakugafag

>not made by kyoani/dogakobo
>best visuals
nice joke bud

tl;dr

that's correct, naruto has much better and meaningful visuals than any kyoani/dogakobo show

Is this pasta or an actual discussion?

i bet you haven't even seen this my dude
makes naruto look like gutter trash

what's wrong with being a sakugafag

visuals are the most important thing in anime, writing doesn't matter at all

Why do you keep posting Naruto all the time? Nobody takes you seriously at all.

he's trolling, please do not respond seriously

i've seen it but i wasn't terrible impressed by anything. the visuals were generic and newt's character in particular felt very contrived

Too long,Didnt read lmao
>muh visuals
get out

Speak for yourself

isn't this a thread about visuals?

how can you not mention naruto when you're talking about visual excellence in anime?

i think cory was just too deep for you

stick with children's shit like naruto, kiddo

The true question is which girl is best waifu?

Rei

I said best, not worst.

>Movies can't compete in character development, narrative or thematic depth with novels, so why should we care about their writing?
>Writing on movies should only focus on their editing and cinematography.
This is exactly as retarded as you sound right now.

I said Rei, not Asuka

kaworu is best everything

Animators themselves generally have the most insightful commentary on animation as they understand the process behind animation better than your layman.

Visual illiteracy among so call animation fans is painfully prevalent. Narration goes beyond word and anything experimental gets blasted as QUALITY. Shit like Watership Down is considered a classic when basic fundamentals of film and art are wholly ignored. All the while, good improvements to Pokémon anime are lambasted.

The focus on sakuga has done some to remedy that, but it focuses more on this cut looks cool or w/e than its purpose and heralds the same animators with little interest towards or discovering new talent.

>a disposable clone
>even qualifying as a waifu

>>Writing on movies should only focus on their editing and cinematography.
This is true though, along with the inherent political discussion that should come with every film.

Neither of you are funny.

...

Spooky, I was just thinking about this at length yesterday. Thanks for expressing it intelligently.

>This is true though
Decades of writing about cinema utterly wasted.
>along with the inherent political discussion that should come with every film.
Which is strictly correlated to the writing said films.

...

Who else dropped karekano when MC confessed in episode 1

who cares? leave the writing to the novels.

anime is a visual medium.

Don't ever reply to me again unless you're contribuiting to the thread.

> Arguing that animation or film is inherently a narrative medium is insanely reductive and needs to die
No medium is inherently narrative. What the fuck is your point? The vast majority of anime are still narrative works, and arbitrarily not counting the narrative of those things when judging them is dumb as fuck.

and most anime has generally been crap.

the ones that focus on the visuals are the ones to be respected.

Naruto is a narrative work.

it's also a visual masterpiece though

the tooth girl

If you're in anime for the narrative, you're in the wrong place. If anything, good anime excels visually so it's inherently the most interesting thing to comment on.

no caps is lame

what are you my english teacher?

If you're in anime for the visuals, you're also in the wrong place.

Yeah, also stop avatarfagging.

I love how 99% of these Naruto shots don't even look good.

I don't think you understand what formal criticism is

i'm not avatarfagging, i'm dumping images that support op's argument

you're not looking in the right place

>He fell for the "visual medium" meme

OP here, I've haven't responded to anything posted in this thread so far so don't think I'm the Naruto guy samefagging. I wrote this all drunk and I'm going to sleep.

maybe you shouldn't comment on things you don't understand

I meant besides Naruto, that should be inherent in every post.

Drunk and nothing better to think about than criticism about chinese cartoons? Sad!

thanks digibro

that's not even an opinion digibro would hold

Fuck off back to Sup Forums retard.

It's obviously good ol' tammy back from the dead.

I would disagree but I'm not really interested in arguing about what opinions digibro holds

What? Digibro first and foremostly goes on about literally everything OTHER than visuals

Do you think Digibro uses his fame to sleep with cosplay con girls? I sure as fuck would.

cosplay con girls don't give a shred of a shit about analysis

user that's just not true

Cancer.

Politics is tied to the form of a work.
>Soviet constructivism was a direct attack on capitalist economies and the style was employed in cartoons

>Politics is tied to the form of a work.
Just as much as it's connected to its content.
Though I must commend you for your cherrypicking.

This.

Even if those that write about anime were to broach formalism in their criticism, it'd still be bad because those people are still going to be idiots.

It unironically does have the best animation of any TV series though.

6/10 I replied

he's right

>The majority of narrative criticism is just glorified plot summaries with the author inserting a personal philosophy he/she's been interested in at the time. Worse of all are those who can only talk about plot holes as they have absolutely nothing insightful to say about the work in question.
This is true.

>Arguing that animation or film is inherently a narrative medium is insanely reductive and needs to die. Dismissing the production aspect of the work as "pretty colours", claiming to watch anime for the "story/writing", people like this should just not be taken seriously as they are 99% of the time completely ignorant on not just anime but art as a whole.

This is not true. Anime is a visual medium and should be treated as one, but how good it looks is completely separate from how it uses its visuals. You tell story THROUGH visuals, you can have an amazing story without a single line of dialogue, and frankly every story in a visual medium should be understood even if you muted it. If by narrative you meant dialogue and exposition and the likes, then you'd be right in saying animation or film is not an inherently narrative medium. But narrative is not dialogue, it is synonymous to story, which is not specific to dialogue and CAN be told entirely through visuals. Also things like script, writing, etc. are not dialogue specific either. You still have to write and script the visuals, just like a book author would describe the setting of a scene.

But yeah overall most anime critique is fucking terrible and doesn't take genre or intention into account. Most anime critics couldn't even tell you the different between plot and story.

I judge anime by whether I enjoyed the package in some level t b h.

Have you seen like 5 anime naruto is a slideshow compared to a lot of tv anime

no it isn't

naruto has the best fights in anime

Naruto a shit

So you have seen like 5 anime

Oh yeah, seeing that flashback for the 120th time certainly didn't get old.

what flashback? all those events happened for the first time in that episode

sorry but until you post an anime with better fights than naruto then you're still wrong

>Dismissing the production aspect of the work as "pretty colours", claiming to watch anime for the "story/writing"

There's a hell of a lot of space between these two things.

If the visuals are outright garbage, I'm not going to enjoy the show even -when- I'm watching for story/writing.

If the visuals are decent, though, and the story's great? I'm happy. I'm not an art critic, and Sup Forums isn't a formal art gallery or university classroom. I'll talk about a show being good or bad, or one being better or worse at something than another, but I'm not typing journal articles here.

Hell, the original Macross was great and had some lazy animation at times.

Toradora had a better fight than anything in naruto and it didn't have to be 40 min of flashbacks and 10 min of actually fighting

Gon vs hisoka has no flashbacks and isn't a slideshow

You're right, I obviously watched Higurashi for the art and animation.

I can watch anime that has shitty visuals and animation, but a somewhat good story/writing/storytelling.
In fact, that's how everyone in Japan has done it for decades.

gon vs hisoka is like one of the only well-animated fights in HxH the rest are just back and forth punch spam between characters

one fight doesn't negate the amount of shit fights that HxH has

also naruto's flashbacks that break up the flow of fights are better than HxH's way of doing it which is just to do 10-minute monologues such as "he disappeared, where did he go ? hmm did he teleport ? no there is blood ! that means i touched him, i see he's invisible ! but why didn't he use it sooner ? one of his allies must have the ability to make himself and others invisible !"

naruto's flashbacks actually help a lot of the fights by adding emotional weight instead of making people tune out

But the best animation/visuals are good because they further the narrative. Anime is a visual story telling medium. Flashy sakuga is pretty to look at, but meaningless without a narrative. Good animation uses visuals to tell a story, which is why I've always felt that animation without dialogue is the highest form of the medium.

angel's egg is garbage though

>naruto's flashbacks actually help a lot of the fights by adding emotional weight instead of making people tune out
Are you really this delusional

>naruto's flashbacks that break up the flow of fights are better than HxH's way of doing it
This, but only flashbacks to things the viewers haven't seen yet.

Have considered that maybe you have shit taste?

The real queation is ' why anime is even made?'
We don't have to draw 24 frames x 60 xseconds x 21 minutes. In the same way that we can ask why does this movie based on a novel gets made, the story is already there. And it sold well enough to that it was worth animating/filming.
Anime is all that makes its parts. The story, characters, music and visuals all are part of what makes an amine great. It's stupid to dismiss any part of what defines this artform.

I think it varies a bit depending on what I expect from the show, and whether it's consistently "bad" or just bad in spots.

Original Utawarerumono had some nasty spots, but they didn't ruin the show for me because I was in love with the story and characters.

He watches anime just like you. That means that you and him have shit taste, and you aren't different from each another.

Incorrect.
The forte of the medium is that it allows to tell any kind of story easily.
If the story is irrelevant and to be removed, may as well be watching disjointed fragments of various animations, only the most exquisitly created, instead of watching entire shows.
Also, animation quality in most anime is also rather poor. Not to say the stories are any good either.

Anime is not art. It's a product, and it has well-defined purpose - to serve as a masturbatory aid. Whether it gives you a proper boner, or a heart boner or a male fantasy boner, or a self-pity boner matters not, the pornographic aspect is always present. Now of course there is an occasional artsy work now and then, but even that is usually inherently pornographic. Exceptions to this are few and far between, and all the writing on them have already been done many times over.

Writing on anime therefore should be firmly kept to gauging the doujin potential of a given work.

>naively caricaturizing an entire medium

t. Sigmund

>Arguing that animation or film is inherently a narrative medium is insanely reductive and needs to die. Dismissing the production aspect of the work as "pretty colours", claiming to watch anime for the "story/writing", people like this should just not be taken seriously as they are 99% of the time completely ignorant on not just anime but art as a whole.
So are you arguing that artstyle and animation are more important than storywriting?