Mediocranime
Hunting season
Japanese animated television series, the subject of many a Funny Little Men blog, are seasonal beasts. Twice a year, at the start of both spring and autumn, the cages get opened, out come countless new titles and another hunting seasons starts. Hard drives get readied for torrents, blogs get cleared out for a new batch of reviews. Fans worldwide know this and eagerly await each new season.
They prepare by reading up all the pre-release literature, get excited simply by looking at a single pre-release image.
Hoping that the spoils will be rich, the titles memorable, they sit impatiently in front of their computers, ready to start downloading. Every seasons will spawn close to fifty new titles, all premiered in the span of a few weeks (that's close to a hundred new titles a year for the mathematically challenged amongst you). It's easy to see how being an anime fan can become the full time hobby it is for so many. (little update: we have since found out that in 2006 alone, more than 300 titles were released in Japan)
A lot of these series will only last for one season. Since the Japanese audience's brand loyalty will keep a franchise and its associated merchandise going for years, there's often no need to keep the series alive with a second season. Yes, anime titles are as fleeting as that famous icon of Japan, the cherry blossom. Often not lasting more than thirteen or twenty-six episodes.
So as an anime fan, you constantly have to be on the lookout for that one new good series. It's like being a goalkeeper on a field where all the players have a ball, all kicking at the same time. Blink, and you will have missed that unmissable series.
Of course, all this really amounts to is an appreciation of the sheer quantity of Japanese television series. But how about that other Q word that always gets mentioned in conjunction with "quantity"? You know the one...
The two Q's
Elusive as a floating dandelion seed, impossible to define but glaringly obvious when it's lacking. As creators of popular cultural artefacts ourselves, we often feel that we shouldn't have to bother with it. We would love to be able to shrug and say: "Good enough". But sadly, there's no escaping it. It easily doubles, if not quadruples, our workload. Most importantly, it is the eternal enemy of quantity. We are of course talking about that pesky parameter: quality.
You can see what we're getting at: Twice yearly, this enormous quantity of anime is unleashed like sand from a tip truck. But how about the quality?
Well, here is the rub. It's rare to come across a true gem. But it's equally rare to come across a truly awful series. The Japanese have a knack for lifting what should be rubbish to a level of "not bad", a bit like their pot noodles. Actually, at Funny Little Men, we like our contrived analogies, so how about sticking with that anime/pot noodle analogy for a bit longer? It would be fair to say that Japanese television series are the animated equivalent of fast food. It's very well made fast food. Presented in a perfectly cute bit of packaging, handed over with a smile as if it is the most precious thing in the world. The lid will come off without ripping, the individual items are beautifully wrapped. But it's still just fast food. And there's something deliciously wrong about eating fast food. Like sticking up a middle finger to all things good and proper. A little act of pedestrian rebellion.
Quality wise, most series hover around a respectable 6 out of 10. But even if a series isn't that good, there's often still something interesting about it. Maybe the backgrounds are interesting, or the opening sequence is interesting. "Interesting" is the most overused word here at the Funny Little Men compound when reviewing anime series. Well made mediocrity, with bits of "interesting" sprinkled over it, is the order of the day. Is it the speed at which these series get spawned? Is there never enough time to really flesh out the ideas for a series? We can only guess. In the end, mediocranime rules the airwaves in the land of the rising sun.
The other thing of course is the cookie cutter mentality. Genres, storylines, jokes, design concepts, archetypes... they all get repeated ad infinitum. We could start summing up all the clichés to prove our point, but we already did something like that in the side bar of our little Geass appreciation post. Go check it out if you've got time to waste.
Why oh why
Whenever we've been talking about good anime in this blog, we were really talking about the odd oasis in a desert. Many painful hours have we spend watching mediocrity. Only after months of stubbornly digging around in the low-res, high compression world of YouTube did we come across our first gem: The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya.
Which of course begs the question: why? Why do you go through such great lengths, oh Funny Little Men? Just watch Pixar movies, they're pretty safe when it comes to quality. Our answer is of course: That's exactly the problem, they're too safe. We already know them. We already know what a Pixar movie will be like before we've seen it.
When we started checking out anime, we wanted to seek out the unknown, look beyond the horizon. We wanted to see a novel approach to animated film-making altogether. The fact that we came across a few gems on our journey was just a pleasant bonus. There's nothing as intellectually satisfying as getting to know and appreciate something we were, frankly, a bit prejudiced against.
And we're not just talking about watching one or two series and saying: "That's cute."
No, really getting in there, learning the vocabulary, getting to know the cultural background, the underlying logic. Really immersing ourselves. That's what the whole anime thing was really about for us. The fact that a lot of the series were not wholly satisfying in the quality department was less off an issue. We were learning a new language.
Without all the mediocre animes, without that vast amount of so-so's, the gems would be completely meaningless. By the time we reached the gems, we were ready to fully appreciate them. We knew exactly where we were coming from, the gems now had a context. There was a framework of references in place.
Autumn 2008
All this brings us to the new season: autumn 2008. At the time of writing, we're over a month into the season. Most bloggers have already moved on from the "first impressions" posts. But at Funny Little Men, we're never the first ones to talk about anything, we just do it very thoroughly.
So what's this season's crop like? Well, it looks like there's no classics to be had. But as always, those clever Japanese humanoids refuse to make it truly awful, denying us the joy of letting rip and spitting out some delightful venom. Instead we're reduced to observing that there are some "interesting" bits and bobs.
A case in point is Kannagi, pictured in the main image for this post. Kannagi is not bad. It's also not very good. It has an interesting opening sequence with an above average quality animation, very probably based on a rotoscope of a real person. There are some surprisingly nicely observed animations of the main character, Nagi. They definitely went beyond the call of duty when keying her poses, avoiding to make her simply cute. Instead, she is a bit of a handful, a uniquely colourful character. Nice character, shame about the series which is really just another harem comedy.
There's not even a series like Geass which we managed to get addicted to in an ironic way. Autumn 2008 just looks flat and lifeless. Gainax's latest offering, Shikabane Hime, is merely okay, not even close to brilliant. Nothing has really managed to grip us. The landscape is barren and dry. The formulas have been re-heated for the umpteenth time with very little surprises.
Funny Little Anime Watchers
So where does this leave us, your favourite "Funny Little Anime Watchers"®? Sadly, the excitement of discovering something new is waning. We sort of have seen it all. We're now wearing the "been there, done that" T-shirt and are ready to move on. Maybe we were never true fans. We never participated in Anime Battledome forums, much less created an anime forum on the Funny Little Men website. And we all know the world needs more of those.
Neither did we put quote's from our favourite anime's in our signatures or ever participated in cosplay. Although, we would have made one heck of a "Mighty Morphing Power Rangers" cosplay team. Just imagine us in Spandex. Oooh, Spandex.
So is this the end for our adventures in anime? Are we all anime'd out? Well, we will still keep an eye out, but our participation levels, and related blogging efforts, will go on hold for the foreseeable future.
Maybe we're doing this at the right time too. It looks like some sort of crack-down has started on the whole torrents thing (what took 'em so long?). Shikabane Hime, Gainax's latest offering we mentioned earlier, is not available anymore from Tokyo Toshokan, our favourite torrent tracker. When you click on one of the links to download the torrent file these days, you'll end up staring at the photo of a both facially and sartorially challenged young man with some message about the license being in the hands of some American distributor and could we please stop downloading this stuff.
In the end, the free lunch was never going to last. But it was fun while it lasted. The weird thing is that we ended up with quite a few anime DVD's here at the Funny Little Men compound which we never would have bought had it not been for the (illegal) distribution channel that introduced us to the titles. No that we're trying to defend torrents. Not at all. They're wrong. Morally reprehensive. It's just that we like them.