Crom Unhinged

Tuesday, April 1st, 2008

Nice review….

Have you read an Anime review online lately? Here’s a sample :

When it comes to clarity and making sense, this volume is kind of a mess, but what a dramatic and beautiful mess it is.

….What?

Let’s talk about something here for a minute. It’s going to seem like a tangent, but I assure you, it is part of this whole mess. We all like shitty movies. Not as a group, but each of us probably has a list of movies, that we KNOW people think are shitty, that we love. We don’t care that they’re shitty, in fact we almost wear it as a badge of honor. This is the movie that’s OURS. In all it’s Shitglory. Whatever, it’s no big deal. Here’s the thing…

Almost all the reviews I’ve seen for anime film and television, have a sentence, similar to, if not almost exactly the same as the one quoted above. Which leads us to conclude something…There’s a lot of shitty anime being made.

Now the people in the peanut gallery are going to be shouting at me “there’s a lot of shitty movies in hollywood made each year fucker!”. And, they would be correct. In 2007, conservative estimates say that about 200 movies received major release from the land of make believe. Of the one’s I saw, maybe two of them weren’t disappointing. (Juno and Hot Rod; Juno was so clever it cut the roof of my mouth like Cap’n Crunch, and Hot Rod was one of those “so retarded it’s funny” kinda deals)

However, the average that Hollywood is running seems to be much better than the Anime crowd is pumping out. The number of seminal Anime films, with I take to mean that anybody who likes Anime agrees they’re awesome, can be counted on one hand. let’s do it kids!

Akira (duh), Ghost in the Shell, Princess Mononoke….my example goes to pieces here, the votes splinter. But they don’t splinter that far.

Is Anime generally shittier? Or, perhaps, do anime fans have lower expectations?

These reviews beg some questions. If something is a mess, it’s a mess. And being “ok” with the fact that it is a mess, strikes me as a lazy approach to pushing for improvement in the art form. Especially if they plan to let us Western Dogs into their playground. We’ll burn it down man…we don’t know any better.