Anime – Page 27 – Wis[s]e Words

Battle of the MMOs! Bofuri v Dendogram!

Published on January 30, 2020Leave a comment

The third episode of Infinite Dendogram opens with the protagonist being told about how much stronger players than he had solved the problem of the player killers he himself fell victim them to last episode.

The third episode of Bofuri opens with the protagonist complaining to her best friend about the new rules introduced by the game that nerf her powers after she came third in the first big event it had launched.

Nothing shows the contrast between what should be very similar series better than this. In Infinite Dendogram the protagonist has things happen to him. He starts playing the game his brother has already been playing for years and lets him guide him through his first adventure. He get things just for being there, most notably his “Embryo”, the unique gimmick of the game, which predictably turns out to be a young girl. He gets attacked by player killers and by coincidence meets a super high level player shortly after who promises to do something about it. He hears about what other people are doing but does nothing of note himself in this episode. In Bofuri the protagonist is active. After she let herself be convinced to start playing the game her best friend wanted to play with her, she spent the first episode on her own, deciding how she wanted to play the game. Once she had decided, she then set out to create exactly the type of character she wanted to play: somebody so strong in defence and vitality she could never be hurt. Through this she came third in the game’s first tournament, at the cost of having her powers debuffed because they turned out horribly game destabilising. And in this episode she sets out to find new ways of using her skills to compensate for this nerfing.

What also becomes very clear in these third episodes is the difference in how each series treats their setup. In the first, the world it takes place in is very much a fantasy world with some gaming elements laid on top of it, with little thought on how it would work as a game. In the second, it feels much more of a game. Events happen, rules get modified when abilities turn out to be game breaking and we see the protagonist and her friend talking in real life about the game. Infinite Dendogram wants us to forget it’s a game; Bofuri revels in it.

Both series are about having relaxing adventures in a MMORPG virtual reality game. Both games are set in the sort of medievaloid fantasy world we already know from dozens of similar anime and manga series, only this time nobody is trapped inside them. Their protagonists are sort of similar too. Both are gaming newbies who have just started playing this VR MMO, who have more experienced friends to give them advice. But Infinite Dendogram puts me to sleep while Bofuri, (full title: Itai no wa Iya nano de Bougyoryoku ni Kyokufuri Shitai to Omoimasu or I Don’t Want to Get Hurt, so I’ll Max Out My Defense keeps on charming me with each episode.

Just casual slavery — Infinite Dendogram & Nekopara First Impressions

Published on January 19, 2020Leave a comment

This raises so many questions.

Infinite Dendogram: for admin reasons, tians have human-grade cognitive capabilities and personalities

“Tians” are Infinite Dendogram‘s “generic” (sic) term for NPCs, which for some reason are given human intelligence and personalities, which is, erm. If you kill a tian in the game, isn’t that murder? Do the tians know they are in a game? What happens once the game’s no longer profitable and the servers are turned off, wouldn’t that be genocide? It all seems ethically dodgy on a level that even your average amoral tech company would balk at.

All of this is ignored by the show of course in favour of a very low stakes not actually trapped in a videogame story, with yet another clueless newbie player gets to hang around in a fantasy world having adventures. The first two episodes have been alright, but I’ve read dozens of these sort of isekai or videogame stories and there’s nothing interesting going on. Only if you really like this sort of thing.

Meanwhile, in porny visual novel turned cutesy anime Nekopara it turns out cat girls are literal second class citizens:

Nekopara: Cats are not allowed to leave their houses unless their masters are with them.

So in the world of Nekopara cat girls (so far only girls) are real and look just like actual human women, just with tails and cute cat ears, but sometimes they act like real cats? And that’s enough to treat them as second class citizens? It’s all a bit squicky and unnecessary for a show that’s purely a pseudo-harem series about cute cat girls working in a bakery and having issues with bladder control. Japan eh?

Nekopara: Cat fight

As said, this is based on a porny visual novel, where you can buy the actual game on Steam but have to buy a separate plugin to get all the sexy bits. Which explains shots like this, slighty too on the nose, crotch shot of the most fan servicey cat girl. Though for the most part there isn’t all that much fan service and what there is is more implied than shown, no censor beams or other BD sales enhancing techniques used here. This is almost a cute cat girls doing cute things show, if not for the presence of their master. Not a very good show, but a fun one and one that’s much less creepy than its origins would suspect.

Not furry enough — Murenase Seton Gakuen First Impressions

Published on January 13, 2020Leave a comment

No, I’m sorry, it’s only properly furry if your female characters are just as monstrous and animal looking as your male characters:

Murenase Seton Gakuen: a crowd of animal people with the boys all proper animals and the girls just have animal ears and a tail

Forget about being the only boy at magical school, protagonist-kun is the only boy at animal school — and he hates animals! The only light in his darkness is that there’s also one human girl in the school, who he’d very much wants to befriend but too bad! He’s already adopted by a wolf girl, who has taken him into her pack!

Murenase Seton Gakuen: the cooking club at table together

Having read the original manga of this a while ago, it was an enjoyable pseudo harem series, nothing special and the anime seems the same way. The nastiness of this first episode was also part of the original’s first chapter(s) but calmed down considerably once the initial setup had been established. It remains hilarious how bestial most of the male animals are when all the girls are conventionally pretty, just with added cute ears or tail.

On anime translation

Published on January 12, 2020Leave a comment

When a certain Crunchyroll employee showed off the company’s new offices on Twitter (since deleted) a small controversy popped up about the company’s translation rates:

just a reminder that the contractors who actually translate shows for crunchyroll get paid $80 per episode without benefits, while a lot of other people at the company make close to six-figure salaries

In a way it’s fitting that translators/subtitlers get paid just as crappily by the US streaming companies as animators are by the Japanese studios. In both cases it’s the people doing the actual work who get the least rewarded for it. You can’t make anime without animators and you can’t stream anime abroad without translators and when you underpay both you get crappy anime paired with equally crappy subtitles. Especially when both are created under extreme time pressure. The relentless death march of seasonal anime has been well documented (and even fictionalised in Shirobako), but no less so are the demands of an international market wanting subbed anime to be available within an hour of the Japanese broadcast. Granted, scripts, rough anime cuts and the finalised version will be available earlier than that to the translator and subtitler, but an at best weekly turnaround still puts a lot of pressure on the people doing this, especially if they’re working on multiple shows.

The subtitled dialogue says Miyako Kono, while the translated caption says Kono Miyako

Which they have to, if they’re paid that badly. If you’re only making eighty bucks per episode, better line up more episodes. No wonder you get things like this from 22/7, where the dialogue reverse the Japanese name order but the translated caption keeps it. Or slightly later in the episode, where the manager introduces himself and the dialogue has his name as Goda but the translated business card says Gouda. No time for proper quality control and the people doing it are paid too little to care for consistency. And those are just the things I noticed with my limited knowledge of Japanese; Shitty Simulcasts noticed a hell of a lot more, including just not translating text messages at all.

Understandable. If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys. If you don’t even credit the monkeys that work for you, like both Funimation and Crunchyroll (but not Sentai, which has full credits for both Japanese and their own staff after each episode), there’s even less incentive of doing anything above a passable job. Professional pride can only take you so far.

Translating nee-nee as Big Sister also loses something

Personally I can’t blame the translators and subtitlers for this. It’s the unwillingness of the streaming companies to pay for proper translations and the time pressures of the simulcast markets that are to blame, a structural problem that goes beyond individual translators. The first problem is easily solved if a company like Crunchyroll took its responsibilty and paid translators a living wage. The second is less so. As long as we have this relentless pressure of seasonal anime, time for a proper translation will remain limited.

I do wonder how much we anime fans actually want or need these simulcasts. Personally, more often than not I end up watching an episode only a day or even several days after its first release, or some series only once they’re completed. But as long as the anime streaming companies are competing with each other (and Netflix, Amazon) on both how many series they simulcast as how quickly they simulcast, we can’t solve this problem. Still, paying your staff properly should not be complicated. Nor should it be difficult to actually credit them for the work they’re doing.

Anime is beautiful — Eizouken First Impressions

Published on January 11, 2020Leave a comment

If Shirobako was about keeping your love for anime while working in the industry, Eizouken is all about the pure love for anime and why anime is worth loving.

Eizouken_anime: do you want to make anime or not?!

Yuasa Masaaki. This is the second or third series of his I went in blind only to be knocked out by the sheer majesty of his imagination. Devilman Crybaby, two years ago, was the last time that happened. I went in only having seen the cute pictures of monster girls and their girl friends on anitwitter and was completely unprepared for the maelstrom of feels that happened when I binged it one Sunday. For Eizouken ni wa Te wo Dasu na! I only had the MAL description to guide me, which made me think it would be a more fluffy Shirobako. A slice of moe version if you will, cute girls in a high school club making cute anime together. And while there are school girls, an anime club and a desire to live your life to the fullest doing what you love, it’s all a bit more hard edged.

What it shares with Shirobako is its love for anime. The scene shown above was basically my experience watching this. There’s so much to like in this scene. First, there’s the simple pleasure of watching the protagonist Midori settle down for a night casual anime watching, only to get drawn in slowly to the point she almost crawls into her screen to see everything better. Second, the fact that it’s Mirai Shounen Conan/Future Boy Conan, a 1978 anime series directed by Miyazaki Hayao. Finally, that it takes the time to actually show scenes from the anime, lovingly recreated and still recognisably in the style of the original. You see Midori fall in love with anime and you see why she falls in love with it, why a 42 year old anime could stir her this way. I don’t know why exactly Mirai Shounen Conan was chosen as the series that made her fall in love in anime, but it fits so well. The town or city that Midori lives in could as easily be part of the world of Conan, it has the same sort of aesthetic, though it also reminded me a little bit of some of Moebius works.

The true story only starts with a time jump to Midori just starting high school, badgering her friend Kanamori to go to the Conan showing in their school’s anime club, not wanting to go by herself. Kanamori agrees, but only if she treats her to no less than four bottles of milk from the local bath house. Kanamori is a bit mercenary, hard headed, not that interested in Midori’s obsession with anime, but a good friend who goes along to support her. When she asks what Midori actually enjoys about all this, the result is the rant above, where she painstakingly and in great detail explain just what makes Mirai Shounen Conan so good until her friend stops her.

What’s so great about this is that Midori’s rant is one you could’ve read on Sakbugabooru. It’s all about the art of animation, not the cool plot or cute characters, let alone the usual otaku consumerism. Midori is all about how the animators create a whole world by taking reality and “exaggerate it in a way that makes sense”. As we watch the same scene with the antigravity vehicle they’re watching, we have Midori explaining that by picking it up as if you would try and push a car to get it to run, you lend it an air of realism. She elaborates further, as we watch a typical Miyazaki impossibly big airplane take to the sky and Conan running around on its hull, how the way the plane moves and debris circles around it again makes it believable, with the sheer physicality of how Conan moves atop of that ship makes you accept it when it’s clearly impossible.

And the best part is that having explained and set out all these rules, the show immediately goes and demonstrates how to use them. Everything Midori said about Conan goes for her own series as well, up to and including the idea of “seeing a character wandering around a mysterious world filling you with a sense of adventure”. Most obviously in the chase scene right after Midori’s rant, as she and Kanamori run into Tsubame Mizusaki, child actress & model. Mizusaki’s parents have forbidden her to join the anime club and now her bodyguards are chasing her to stop her doing her so. As she’s confronted by the head bodyguard in some sort of theatre stage, the other two rescue her, being chased by the guard, fleeing to the top of the stage. As the guard approaches, Midori pulls a rope and opens a trap door, which he avoids. She pulls another which does nothing useful, he smirks but as she pulls the third rope, the steps collapse, forming a slide and he slides down them into the trap door. It embraces all the principles Midori set out just before and adheres to the rule of three of comedy. It’s a neat, physical scene in an episode that has a lot of talking heads otherwise.

Once the three escape Mizusaki’s minders they take her to a laundrette to clean her strawberry milk stained school shirt. It’s there that she and Midori bond about anime, showing each other their sketch books. Whereas Midori is all about concept art, Mizusaki is more about character sketches and the like. As Kanamori looks on, she asks whether they would like to make an anime together. Midori demurs, but Kanamori asks if not now, when and she has a point. As high school amateurs they have nothing to lose, nobody expecting anything from them, so if they fail, so what?

Her little motivation speech leads to a bout of inspiration for the other two, bouncing of each other’s ideas to create an entire world from a small doodle in Mizusaki’s sketch book. I’ve included the start above, but the full sequence runs over five minutes. As they creating, Mizusaki asks about Midori’s interest in concept art and she answers by asking if she ever created layouts for a secret base as a child. For Midori, concept art is her creating a whole new world as best as she can. Even before she got into anime we saw her sketching and mapping her new city. Having somebody to do this with must be heaven for her.

When the scene switches from them creating a new world to them having an adventure in that new world, we once again see everything that Midori ranted about earlier, everything that we saw in those Mirai Shounen Conan excerpts, being done here as well. The vehicle they created should not, could not fly as it does here, but it works because the way it behaves is consistent with the visual cues we are given about it. When one of the wings is damaged and no longer works, Mizusaki and Kanamori jump out and use their body weight to shift the vehicle, so they can fit through a narrow crevice in the landscape. You can feel them do it as you’re watching. It feels right.

Honestly, something very good has to be released this year for Eizouken ni wa Te wo Dasu na! to not be my anime of the year at the end of it. This is not just a good anime, it’s something that completely rekindled my love for anime, made me excited about anime after a year in which I watched much less anime than I used to. I was a bit burned out on it all, but this was just what I needed. Having characters fall in love with anime to the point of wanting to create it themselves, without all the usual otaku nonsense surrounding it, is so refreshing.