Well I’m done with this particular convention.

I was pretty much done with it before the convention, but the actual con didn’t really deter me from my decision to cut it out of my future convention attending schedules.

The reason why I’m done? Their handling of attendee submitted events/panels prior to the con.

I had no problem running my MADstravaganza event at the con, but getting to that point before the con was like pulling teeth.

For starters, the form to submit them didn’t go up until the end of May. Which is bad, but I think it was still better than previous years. However, it’s then a bit much to not give anyone a human response until four weeks before the convention.

Amecon may not realise it, but attendee submitted events/panels are the last remaining unique selling point of UK residential anime events. Everything else they do you can get elsewhere:

• Anime Industry Guests – you can get the US voice actors at Expo and Japanese industry folk at Expo and film festival events.
• Parties – You’ve regular J-pop events running in London, plus events like the Grand Cosplay Ball and the Cosplay Cruise. And I’m sure similar events elsewhere in the country. Also if you just want to party and don’t require a Japanese or Fancy Dress element, well you do live in “Binge Drinking Britain”.
• Cosplay – Again, Expo has this covered, as do the cosplay based parties I mentioned above. There’s plenty of places to get your cosplay fix that aren’t residential conventions.
• Dealers Room – Expo, of course.
• Anime – Once upon a time we had a sneak preview of Perfect Blue at Minamicon. Nowadays if you want to see the latest anime films before general release, you need to go to film festivals instead.

Rather than treating the attendee run events as an afterthought, conventions should be encouraging them. The final straw was the fact that cosplay events got their own special e-mail sent out to attendees detailing them before the convention and the other events got nothing.

There was a warning sign as to their misplaced priorities early on as they didn’t actually mention anime or manga on their front page for 4-5 months of restarting the site. Combine that with a video programme that you had to hunt down, rather than have given to you in your con bag, and you’re left with the impression of an anime convention that has lost all interest in the reason it existed in the first place. Unless that reason was to import dubbing irritant Monica Rial to the UK every couple of years, in which case JOB WELL DONE!

There is one big downside to fan run events at UK cons, and it was particularly in evidence at this convention. Some people have got it into their heads to treat conventions as some sort of open mic night. So in addition to the open mic abomination that is the “Omake” we also ended up with rip-offs of the BBC radio shows “I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue” and “Fighting Talk” (luckily missed the first and what I saw of the second made me glad I didn’t see all of it, as at least one person on the panel had seemingly missed the point of the format entirely). I don’t know if it’s an extension of the show-off attitude of cosplayers, or that people see the few talented people who can do this stuff well and think it’s easy.

What we need instead is more panels with the passion and obsession of the folks running things like this year’s Takarzuka panel or Ayacon’s Rocket Scientist’s Guide to Space Anime. I shall be putting my money where my mouth is on this front next year, as Ayacon are accepting submissions for events already. I suggest anime/manga bloggers reading this who are planning on attending Ayacon, Kitacon or any of the other UK cons next year do the same. While the people running conventions might have seemingly lost interest in anime/manga, there will be people attending who haven’t, so you’ll find an audience.

Now, had the Amecon gone swimmingly they might have changed my mind about not attending again, but the lack of signs/internal maps, a Student Union that was grim bordering on squalid (you should not be able to smell urine where food is being served) and buildings that were too far apart did a good job of killing any sort of good vibes the convention might have generated.

So I’m out.

I can’t imagine why people nowadays don’t find anime to be the coolest thing.

I mean, who wouldn’t want to be interested in something where everyone is sounding the death knell and blaming the fans?

Doesn’t that sound like the fun party you would want to be seen at?

—

One thing that struck me in the wake of Satoshi Kon’s death was the fact that a number of  pro- and amateur-industry commentators have crafted a narrative of The Doom That Came To The Anime Industry that they must add to at all times.

For those people, Kon’s death can’t just be the premature death of a talented individual, it has to be tied into the ongoing narrative of how Japanese cartoons are going to Hell in a handbasket.

I’ll cut them some slack, along the people whose first concern seems to be “is his last film going to be released?”, as they are common responses to death, particularly the deaths of creative people who you only really know through their work.

I’m more curious as to how commentators form their ongoing narratives in their writing, and more importantly, identifying what my own are. Pretty sure I’ve been guilty of selling the anime doomsday scenario into the past, especially in the Hate Fun posts (which are mainly hyperbole and exaggeration, plus incredibly easy to write), though I’ve tried to move away from that somewhat this past year towards getting a better, broader perspective.

Going to try and resurrect some old post themes this week, to see if I can get some “appointment internet” going while I work on some long form posts in the background.

This particular Animator AMV for Toshiyuki Inoue’s work got a strong reaction from the audience when I played it during my MADstravaganza panel at Amecon this past weekend. The panel in its original form started life as an animator focussed panel 3 years ago, but gradually broadened to include everything I like that doesn’t get covered in other panels at UK conventions. Which at this point also includes anime and manga…

This year I decided to drop a couple of Animator AMVs back into the panel to gauge the response. I’ve already built a decent sized audience now, so I can see what else I can throw at them. I was pleased with the responses they got, and this one in particular got a strong response. I was left with the impression that it’s not so much that people don’t have animators whose work they like, it’s more that they don’t know they do.

One of the big inspirations for that first panel in 2007, was Tony Robinson’s Stay Tooned show for the BBC. It took what was a standard cartoon compilation programme that the BBC would run after Grandstand, and added a layer of education to it. In half an hour you could learn who made the different cartoons and what the different elements were that they brought to it. Without that, I don’t think Tex Avery and Bob Clampett would have clicked with me in the same way, and I think that little bit of information needed to join the dots is what the majority of anime viewers lack.

“Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it”. – EB White.

Like that is going to stop me.

The Seitokai Yakuindomo anime started recently as part of the summer season of anime. It’s based on Tozen Ujiie’s 4-panel gag manga that currently runs in Weekly Shonen Magazine. The gags are hung on the premise of an all-girls high school having to open its doors to male students due to a falling birth rate (Gakuen Utopia Manabi Straight! also uses falling birth rate for a springboard). The main characters are three girls on the school council and the boy they press gang onto the council to represent the new gender in the school. So far, so cliched. School councils and press ganging people onto committees seem to be some of the most popular “me-too” ideas in manga and light novels at present.

The manga of Seitokai Yakuindomo stands out from its peers and influences on two main points. First off, it’s very low on fan service. In fact in terms of art it’s less salacious than Azumanga Daioh. Compare these bikini pin ups, Tozen Ujiie uses far less suggestive angles than Kiyohiko Azuma, who seemed to love that “looking up at boobs” angle more and more as Azumanga Daioh progressed.

The second point is in direct contrast to the first, indeed without the first it would not be as effective. Namely, “dirty jokes”. Obviously this is hardly unique, we’ve already had B Type H System adapted this year, another series whose female lead is sex-obsessed. The differences are that Seitokai Yakuindomo isn’t visually explicit, there’s no romantic underpinnings and while the lead does/says stupid things, she isn’t a complete idiot. Just a partial one when the gag demands it.

Most of all though, the series is highly focussed on gags over characterisation. The four main characters are basically there to be shuffled about into various combinations to set up and deliver gags. In fact they are barely characters. You’ve got Takatoshi (male, defacto straight man), Shino (President of the Council, sex-obsessed), Aria (busty, tells dirty jokes) and Suzu (super-intelligent, comically short). They’re basically hooks to hang jokes on.

A typical gag set up will be as follows:

* Character A says something ostensibly serious.
* Character A then says something stupid/incongruous to the setup.
* Character B reacts to it.

Normally it will have the same character deliver the setup as the punchline, rather than break it down to a standard feed/comic distribution of roles. The straight man often only comes into play in the last panel, commenting on the idiocy that happened in panel 3.

This is why I don’t feel it’s setting out to shock by using “dirty jokes”, but rather just using sex as the incongruity. Sure, the toilet talk adds a frisson to the joke, particularly as the comic doesn’t try to be sexy, but the funny is in how it gets from something perfectly clean to something dirty. It’s cleverer than just drawing a cock on a blackboard (which is still admittedly funny). There’s other joke formula they use (and over use) like Suzu being too short to do something and something innocent looking like something rude from a certain angle, but the one above is probably the most common so far. It’s all very music hall, rather than out and out shock humour.

The anime on the other hand is different beast to the manga, and that’s what I really want to talk about here. If you weren’t aware of the manga, then from a distance the anime might just strike you as your typical slightly smutty otaku bait shows. One thing that really adds to that is the colour palette chosen. Seriously fuck this colour palette. Particularly when it saturates the incredibly dull opening sequence of episode one, playing like the opening to some dumb erotic video game being adapted into animated homeopathic porn. You know what palette I’m talking about.

Yeah, that fucking palette. There’s some blue-green in there too, but the backgrounds in that opening are awash with oversaturated pastel blues and pinks. The blues should be complementary to the browns of the school uniform (at least in the RGB spectrum), but they are so oversaturated that they overpower the characters. The pink just makes it so much worse. This sort of thing is what annoys me the most about modern anime, moreso than poor hat animation!

After a couple of minutes of this opening that seems to go on forever, we get an opening animation full of brazen dick jokes and one of those tedious peppy J-pop songs (not to mention some ludicrously ambitious panning animation).

Then we get an even more ludicrous 3D shot to set up the first gag. Which isn’t that great so let’s skip to the second gag, based on the second 4 panel strip. Prepare to have any humour present killed by over analysis.

Panel 1 / Shot 1

The anime flips the characters around, and pulls the focus from them by filling the screen with a busy, garish background that overpowers the layout. Apart from that it’s pretty much adhering to the strip.

Panel 2 / Shot 2

Here we get a complete change in camera position, as the middle two panels are pretty much the same shot it in the original. By changing the shot, the anime can recreate the beat made by the movement from one panel to another.

Panel 3 / Shot 3

Here the shot is much closer to the original layout, however we now get a budget saving move come into play, where the anime hides the mouth of the character talking off screen. Hooray, one less thing to animate!

Panel 4 / Shot 4

And finally, the punchline is delivered with a shot that’s pretty much straight out of the manga. However, the anime has second response shot that it adds…

This is the sort of shot that doesn’t really happen in the comic, if only due to the restraint of the 4 panel half page format. It’s one place where the anime can take advantage of it’s medium.

Now while that’s not the funniest or the most typical gag on the show, it does demonstrate what the show does best – nail the rhythm of a 4 panel gag strip.

Here’s a few other notes on how it takes advantage of the medium:

• Movement. Gags that rely on movement (e.g. the kick with the shoe flying off the foot) are framed to take advantage of actual movement.
• Asides. Not super-keen on this technique, if only because it’s been done to death by Family Guy, but it will throw in extra shots to illustrate something said, rather than keep to the proscenium leaning step ups preferred by the manga.
• Visual gags. Similarly it will sometimes add visual gags to the background that weren’t present originally. The best example is the strip where Aria’s suggesting boys might join the school to start a harem and in the anime we see someone in the background clearly hoping for just that. That strip’s anime version is also a good illustration of the asides the anime uses, as we get asides to both an 80′s style sex comedy and a Maria-sama ga Miteru style show to match what Aria’s suggesting.

However, as good as the anime is adapting individual strips from the manga, there’s a couple of flaws.

Firstly there’s the issue of repetition, both in terms of the structure and the punchlines. The structure of the jokes can be so similar, that over half an hour it can get wearisome. Add in the fact that so many punchlines seem really similar in the first episode and I wouldn’t blame you for tapping out. Personally I found enough to admire in the mechanics of it to push on, particularly as most of these sort of adaptations let the air out of the gags, and this gets the rhythm right. You, on the other hand, might find the amount of times Shino turns the conversation towards periods somewhat sapping.

The big flaw though reveals itself in episode 3. Or rather in the preview to episode 3. It just gets confirmed in episode 3.

One of the anime’s gags is that in the preview the characters mention what pages from the manga they are adapting next week. Episode 1 covers the first 32 pages, episode 2 covers pages 33 to 56, episode 3 on the other hand only covers page 57 to 60.

Four pages. In a half hour anime. Even Naruto manages more pages than that.

What this meant was we were going to get lots of anime “original” material. And by original I mean they turned the show into exactly what you might have thought it was going in. We get a load of fanservice, gags that outstay their welcome and finally, accidental bestiality.

There’s a fine line that the manga walks with its dirty jokes and in episode three the anime takes a running jump over that line. There’s clues that the screenwriter’s sense of humour might not be on the same page as the comic’s in the first two episodes, but by episode three it becomes crystal clear. The big problem with it is they don’t have the character Takatoshi around to act as straight man to Shino and so her digressions into stupidity go unanswered. Without someone to annoy them in the show, idiots are just annoying you the viewer. Plus she seems more idiotic when the anime screenwriters write her without the original manga’s scripts to base the gags on.

In short, it’s a really awful episode.

Episode four promises more manga adaptations so hopefully that will get back on form, though given how bad episode 3 was that’s the only chance I’m giving it.

If you do have an interest in the mechanics of gag anime I’d definitely recommend the first episode at the very least, as to me it felt much closer to the sort of shows we got during the dawn of late night anime than we get nowadays.

Oh, and the ending animation is really well made, to the point where you’ll wish you’d seen whatever show from an alternate reality it really belongs to.

COME!

Spending too much time researching and not enough writing of late. In order to write that promised piece on the early 90s TV anime malaise, I’m now gathering information on anime from 1970. May have over shot my target a little there.

The following thoughts might find themselves in the even longer promised “Science Fiction is the Arthritis Crippling the Anime Industry” post, but then again I may never finish that, so might as well use them here while they’re fresh in my mind.

Going back through titles both pre- and post-1977 it struck me there’s threads of discussion that are perennially under-discussed in Anglophone online fandom outside of a few places like Mike Toole’s new column on Anime News Network or Ben Ettinger’s site.

When you do see discussion of older shows it has a tendency towards the sci-fi end of things. It’s not surprising given that anime otaku-dom as we know it likely has its birthplace in Yamato, both in Japan and the US. Your version of history is coloured by what you were exposed to. In the UK you’d be probably be breaking some kind of law if you failed to mention Dogtanian or Mysterious Cities of Gold in an anime history article. Because of that colouring of formative experience, some historical articles end up feeling like they are writing about the fandom, while ostensibly discussing the product, but that’s hardly unique to anime and manga fandom.

However, there’s a couple of big areas that struck me as being under discussed and they are…

Baseball

Forget giant robots or magical girls, there is one genre that weathers all storms in the audience’s taste. Baseball. There are so many big baseball series, both classic and modern, that I’m certain you could easily run a blog just about baseball anime/manga. In fact I’m surprised there aren’t any already. I tried searching for them, but while I found shows like Major discussed on baseball forums, I couldn’t find any dedicated baseball anime/manga blogs.

Possibly the reason for this is that baseball itself attracts an audience with a certain degree of nerdish obsession, given that it lends itself to the accrual and processing of statistics, and those people are already expending their blogging energies on REAL baseball.

Gags

Now I do write about this occasionally myself. I’ve discussed some recent gag manga adaptations and various shows from Wonderful among others. Not to mention the vast amount of coverage I’ve given to Urusei Yatsura. However I feel there’s some pretty severe gaps in my knowledge, for instance I’d love to see more of the second Tensai Bakabon series. I tend to find myself judging all long form gag anime against prime Oshii/Ito period Urusei Yatsura and all 4 panel gag manga adaptations against Akitaro Daichi’s adaptations, and as good as they are, I’m not sure they’re the real benchmarks.

There’s a vast amount of gag manga and anime that just falls under the radar, even incredibly popular series. And while there’s plenty being written about modern gag strips and anime like Hetalia or K-On, is often without a sense of the genre’s history. It often feels like Azumanga Daioh is year dot for some of the audience. As we’re seeing more and more of a move towards this genre again, particularly as web-anime and web-manga expand, a discussion of the genre in a historical context would be helpful.

Am I right? Are these under-discussed? Or are there people out there writing about these areas and I’m just sleeping on them?

I wrote about the first three episodes and the gist of the show over here.

The first 12 episodes are really great, totally living up to the promise of those opening episodes. Had it stopped there, I’d probably love it as much as I did the same team’s Bacanno!. The problem is they then went straight into another 12 episode story arc.

That second arc unfortunately pales next to the first. It’s more to do with the strengths of the first arc than any specific flaws the second has. Particularly how those strengths aren’t able to be duplicated in the second arc due to the nature of the adaptation.

The big problem is that the first arc does a really great job of introducing characters, and there’s a lot of characters it has to introduce. The second arc has a lot less characters to fill us in on, and some of the new characters don’t get their backgrounds fleshed out.

Where the first arc felt like a series of interlocking origin stories, the second arc has to deal with a fairly linear gang war story. We do get a couple of new origin stories and a couple of fun character introductions in there, but it doesn’t compare with the weirdness of the first arc. Related to this is the second arc’s use of different narrators to relay different points of view of the narrative and characters isn’t as strong as the first arc’s episodes.

The second problem is that the lead of the first arc, Celty, is pushed into a supporting character role in the second arc, with Mikado, Masaomi and particularly Anri taking the lead roles.

Frankly, they aren’t as interesting as the adult characters, plus the plans of Izaya which set them up as the main characters, are revealed as delusions of grandeur by the end. Which is kind of the point, and you can appreciate that when the point is forcibly made by Simon in the final episode, but while you’re getting there you’re expecting a little more than what you get.

That plan of Izaya’s is probably the one weakness that is the arc’s own. The plan relies on that screen-writing cliche of not having characters talk to one another in order to keep the running time up and the story going. If the three had just talked honestly to one another the whole story would have lasted on episode. They give enough reasons to keep the characters emotionally isolated from each other, and that isolation is somewhat the theme of the arc, but I felt there was about one too many episodes of drawing that out. It passed from tension to frustration.

Had they put a gap between arcs, I think I’d have been a bit more accepting of the changes, but in contrast with the opening arc it was a little dissatisfying.

That being said, there’s still plenty to like in the second arc, particularly the various fight scenes with Shizuo and the inventive lengthy chase sequence where Anri is pursued by the Yellow Scarves. And there’s a pay-off between Izaya and Anri (and then Izaya & Simon) at the end that puts Izaya’s self-proclaimed “love” of humanity in a clearer light. Makes me wonder if there’s some subtle word play around that in the original Japanese dialogue that the Crunchyroll subtitles miss?

Certainly there’s nothing in the second half that would put me off wanting more Durarara!!, there’s still mysteries to be explored and it’s full of engaging characters. I just hope that further story arcs don’t rely on three teenagers not talking too one another to power twelve episodes worth of plot.

I was going through some nineties Newtype freebies I still have lying around while trying to find the copies of V-Max I hope I still have somewhere and found the following bit of nonsense from a Utena ‘zine that came with a 1997 issue.

This was, of course, a show I had thoroughly PSHAW’D when it first appeared. Anthropomorphised countries? WWII? It sounded like a dreadful idea.

However, while writing the piece on Wonderful, I decided I ought to check out the big modern gag anime that I hadn’t already seen. Namely, Lucky Star, K-On and Hetalia. While Lucky Star and K-On don’t really work for me in the form they are in, I was pleasantly surprised to find myself enjoying Hetalia.

Despite what the loudest, most obnoxious parts of its fandom might suggest to you, it works on a variety of levels, not just that of pretty boys in uniforms. In fact, the pandering innuendo is probably the weakest aspect of its humour, which unfortunately becomes more of a crutch for the series than is in evidence during this first batch of episodes.

What the show is strongest on is the historical humour, often delivering jokes that are arguably too clever for their own good, due to their reliance on very specific historical and cultural events (what other anime is making Busby Stoop Chair gags?). I’m a big fan of overly specific humour and parody, but I can see how the need to research the history to get some of the jokes would be off putting. And to it’s credit it doesn’t overuse them, often using them a starting point, spinning the humour off the historical reference by using it’s main comedic weapon.

Namely, national stereotypes.

Now there certainly is the potential to be truly offensive here, and it’s easy to assume it would be by the description. Or indeed the name. However, from my point of view, it’s no more offensive than ‘Allo, ‘Allo and it’s probably about the geopolitics of WW2 to the same extent as that erstwhile British sitcom. Of course people complained about ‘Allo ‘Allo, so it’s not surprising that Hetalia has its critics too.

Where the series mainly confines its use of anthropomorphic geopolitics is in the non-WW2 sections, particularly the Chibitalia segments set during the Holy Roman Empire. The WW2 era is wisely left more for the broadest gags based on national stereotypes. Because some of those gags are very broad, it’s worth avoiding watching too many episodes in a row. There’s only so many jokes about Italy being obsessed with food and surrendering you can watch in one sitting, even if they are interspersed with sketches about historical border changes in Central Europe.

The writing is so all over the place and the animation functional but consistent, that it won’t rank up there with all time classic gag anime, but it’s not as dumb as it looks on the surface. Well, OK, it is that dumb sometimes, but it’s also too clever for its own good at other times. And the timing and editing is very good, light years ahead of the likes of Lucky Star and K-On.

This is the third of three reviews of films I caught at the BFI’s Anime Weekend. They run the weekend every couple of years and it’s well worth paying attention to as you’ll get a chance to see films you won’t at UK anime conventions (i.e. Mind Game in 2006, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time in 2008).

Luke and Professor Layton find themselves in a puzzle contest promising eternal life.

This film is not going to disappoint fans of the Professor Layton games, and there’s likely enough of those fans that it won’t need any other audience.

That being said, there’s only a couple of instances where familiarity with the games is intended, and frankly if you’ve only played the English language releases, they’ll likely leave you similarly non-plussed as the non-fans. You see, this film takes place after the fourth game in the series, part of a prequel continuity set before the games we’ve had translated so far.

That means there are a handful of characters it assumes you are familiar with, such as Layton’s other assistant, Remi Altava and Inspector Grosky, the ridiculously manly Scotland Yard detective, whose chest hair is always trying to escape his shirt. You won’t have met them yet unless you’ve played Professor Layton and the Spectre’s Flute, but with one exception you can easily grasp their characters within seconds of their introduction.

Otherwise, it’s easy to grasp what’s going on in the story, no matter how preposterous it gets. And it does. It is Professor Layton after all. However, like the writing on the games, it does such a good job of drawing you into Layton’s world, that it is still completely possible for you to guess the final reveal, even though it is completely outside of our reality. It makes complete sense given what you’ll have seen up to that point and it plays fair in giving you clues to that reveal. The Sherlock Holmes influences in the characters and the Lupin III influences in the game’s OTT set pieces, means it all transfers very well to the screen. Even the puzzle sections work well, and they even find a way to fit the games typography organically into the film.

Visually it continues the look of the OLM produced cut scenes and Level 5′s character design. This means you get a cast full of big headed grotesques and weirdos, who move in a very pleasing manner with some strong camera movements. I really, really like some of the running sequences in both the film and the game cutscenes. They are just so full of character.

Layton himself is probably the weak point, the would-be iconic nature of his design and particularly his dot eyes, leaves him rather plain in terms of expression when placed next to plucky Luke, the boisterous Grosky or the ass-kicking Remi. Though that might be just because he’s a British Gentleman as the script continually reminds you to comic effect. Though apparently being a British Gentleman means chatting during an opera performance and blocking the view of the people behind with your big top hat. He does get an action scene of his own near the climax that is quite fun despite the limitations in his character design.

Definitely a must see for fans of the games, but certainly worth a rental or visit to a screening when it becomes available whoever you are.