Email: japanese art style

what i liked about anime during the 80’s and 90’s was that it provided movies and cartoons that could not be done on film.  fist of the north star is something that could not be done on film.  even if the technology is available, like today with computer effects, it would not work. 

 

we all know ridley scott’s alien and how bad ass the alien looks like.

here is what most of us would imagine of when we think about the alien,

http://archangelgabriel.deviantart.com/art/Alien-106531306?q=boost:popular+in:digitalart+alien&qo=43

 

however, if you were to japanize it, it would look something like this,

http://www.epilogue.net/cgi/database/art/view.pl?id=56014

 

we also know the arnold schwarzeneggers predator movie and what we imagine it to be, which likely resembles something like this,

http://images.darkhorse.com/darkhorse/downloads/desktops/predator1/predator1_lg.jpg

 

however, when we japanize it, it becomes cute

http://gamebanana.com/css/sprays/36973

 

if you were an imaginary male character and had to be drawn, you better pray that it isn’t done in japan because you’ll end up fagitize.You make a great point. There was anime that was contracted out to the Japanese or to other areas but had Western writers. The purpose of anime was to do things that couldn’t be done in other mediums. I have books where writers suggest that in anime writing, not only does the writer have to become the director, he must do things with anime that cannot be done anywhere else. The Earth exploding cannot be done anywhere else (or very expensive to be done with special effects). With the rise of computer special effects, anime has lost its reason for existence. No one wants to watch an anime sitcom where live human actors are so much more interesting. And spaceships and mechs can be ‘animated’ with computers today.

I recall the Star Trek writers saying that they had a rule where every story had to be something only done in science fiction. Just having character drama on a spaceship wouldn’t cut it. There had to a story that only science fiction made possible such as Picard living another lifetime within half an hour in The Inner Light.

Above: Can’t find episodes like that in non-science fiction shows.

I find this interesting because the fashion of science fiction shows is to run away from science fiction and to be less ‘weird’. But it is like a hamburger joint running away from beef. Science fiction is the reason why we are here. It is not surprising that the most successful science fiction show became so by embracing science fiction.

The concept seems simple enough to everyone not in the Game Industry. The path for prosperity for video games is for them to embrace being video games and doing things video games can only do. A video game doesn’t have much value to me if it is like a movie or a board game or a novel or a deck of cards. The most exciting video games were those that explored what possibilities a video game could do. The best recent example I can think of a game that did this would be Minecraft.

Have you noticed how comfortable gamers are with games showing their electronic roots? According to Industry thinking, a game like Berserk should have us hide underneath our chairs with how primitive and basic it is. Instead, we stand up and applaud it. And the same goes with Robotron. Why?

It feels like a video game. All the electronic sounds and electronic graphics just seem right. Why is it that I prefer some of the 8-bit and 16-bit musical themes over the full blown orchestras we have on DVD and Blu-Ray disc games? They certainly feel like they belong in video games.

There does appear to be a correlation that anime lost its popularity in the United States right when computer special effects really boomed in the 90s. Correlation doesn’t mean causation. Maybe the reason why people watched anime then was because it differentiated itself by doing things other mediums couldn’t. In 1985, Robotech couldn’t have been portrayed in any other way but in anime.