Pretty much. Even some of the cute shit is incredibly terrible because of what happens afterwords. Griffith's shit wouldn't mean so much if we didn't see things like that he's a goof who likes to have naked bath fights with his bff. But we do and then what happens later has so much fucking weight behind it that when you go back to the earlier stuff and look at that same scene again there's just this...feeling of knowing mourning that you get. It's lovely. So it's not just the shock of the initial time you see the betrayal, but also the lasting effect it leaves on each subsequent reread or rewatch. And that's impressive. Also just finished episode five of HxH. This was the first one that had a thing in it that really, truly impressed me. Until this point I've been fond of it. It's very nicely animated and directed. The music is lovely and I like the characters so far. But the fight between Gon and Hisoka was amazing. The way the fight itself was edited really conveyed a feel of "This is just how outmatched we are." It was kind of disorientating, but because we haven't seen edits like that in the other parts of the show and because of how we used them here it really helps convey Gon's feeling of "Oh god where the fuck what the fuck I am fucked". And then there's the aftermath. See a lot of shounen anime due the "I was almost killed!" horror scene. Like in Naruto after Zabuza schools us we get like dramatic music and everyone's talking and we have closeups on Naruto's face and shit. To convey the gravity of "This shit is real and we are not prepared for this mission". And while I think this is effective at what it's doing, namely upping our stakes and making us root for our little guys that much more it doesn't pull the emotional weight that this one did. In this one we don't get music. We don't get a lot of talking. There's some yes, but it's sparse and also the sound levels are low. Much lower than that of Gon's breathing, which predominates the sound design at this point. And we do get a look at his face, but then we eventually cut to just...a look at the sky that he's looking at. It's cloudy and misty still. Giving this vibe of dreamlike haze. A sort of unreality to the situation and we let this linger for a bit in silence save for Gon's shuddering breaths. Then the fog clears and shortly after Gon's breathing becomes less pronounced sound design wise. All serving to hammer in just how Gon is feeling at the moment, and it works really, really fucking well. Gon almost died. We almost died. And that is dizzying to the extent that it's almost unbelievable. Jesus christ Madhouse. That was masterful for a 148 episode long anime.
...man, sounds like I'd really like Hunter x Hunter *sighs loudly, chucks it onto the gigantic and ever-expanding pile*
Chronos Ruler is not a good anime. It is mediocre verging on bad. It's got an awesome premise with some great possibilities theme-wise. It attempts to be a supernatural action drama with really awesome monster battles and moments of character-driven comic relief, in the vein of Kekkai Sensen. Unfortunately, the CG action sequences are just not quite up to par, and the dialogue is overburdened with exposition, which really kills the sense of dramatic stakes. Some of the comedy bits *are* quite funny, though.
MangaStream just started translating Akagami no Shirayuki-hime, which is great, but in typical MangaStream fashion, they're starting with chapter 92, which is also great because Spoiler Mitsuhide just turned down Kiki's proposal to him, and there are just a bunch of people in the comments for whom this is the first chapter of AnS they've ever read and yet they're already super annoyed at Mitsuhide and it's hilarious.
I have finished one punch man and am now filled with a seething lonliness that can be filled only by reading the entire manga, then the entire webcomic, then as much quality fanfiction as I can find. This is a sad day for my working productivity.
Neural Network invents anime faces: Make your own here Demo video. Warning: The transitions are kinda creepy.
oh that's very cursed wild how homogenized the "anime" style has gotten in the past couple years though :/
I think there’s still outliers, but stylistic trends have been a long running feature of anime/manga in my experience. It just usually tended to be locked to a genre, so it was considered a convention of those rather than typical of a time period.
Yeah true I think it has to do with the profusion of moe slice-of-life stuff, which is what the generator is based off anyway. That kind of stuff is all particularly samey, but I think you can see the influence of the moe archetype on other stuff - character design in "mainstream" shows has gotten steadily more stylized and neotenic, to my eyes I think it's a bigger thing in anime than in manga though - designs for hand-drawn animation are always gonna be simplified owing to the constraints of the medium. I think this is where the "Calarts style" the western animation fandom complains about originated too.
Has anyone else here read Pumpkin Scissors? It's pretty good, I'd recommend both the anime and the manga although the anime afaik only has one season. It's about a small corps of soldiers carrying out "war relief" duties in an unnamed Empire three years after a ceasefire was called in a devastating war, which for Plot Reasons means they keep going up against military outfits Doing Things They Shouldn't, international conspiracies, and a lot of tanks. The main characters are an idealistic young noble a couple of years out of officer training school and a giant ex-soldier who turned out to be a veteran of a cryptid unit filled with human experiments who regularly takes on tanks on foot with a handgun and wins, who's HEAVILY traumatised because of said experimentation and who has basically two modes, Murderous Ghoul and Giant Cinnamon Roll. I just finished the armored train arc and I'm crying over Randel and his hallucinations. I just want this man to be happy, ohmygod. And also I really hope that the mangaka is going for a sort of queerplatonic relationship with him and Alice; the emphasis on the military roles is interesting but I can't see it making for a healthy romantic relationship and as I said before, I want this man to be happy ajhdgkkashgdg
i'm amazed by how accurate those anime faces look like, i could easily believe a human drew any one of them how did it get so good at it?
Generative Adversarial Networks have actually gotten really super good at mimicking artistic styles. You want a picture of Barack Obama as painted by Van Gogh? You want Picasso's version of Three Wolf Moon? A GAN can make it for you.
Hi, reviving this thread because (the first season of) the anime Houseki no Kuni ended yesterday, which means that I picked up the manga Houseki no Kuni today, which means that I absolutely have to gush about the entirety of Houseki no Kuni somewhere right now immediately. So, Houseki no Kuni is a story about genderless nonhumans named after and made out of gemstones. As such, you might have seen it referred to before as "the Japanese Steven Universe". It is really not that. It is, however, really, really good, y'all. It's about identity, purpose, loss, and how much it sucks to be immortal, and it's also the most visually breathtaking anime I've seen all year, and it's the most visually well-composed manga I've read all year, and...above all, it has such a good atmosphere. Houseki no Kuni has this melancholy, contemplative nature to it, in the manga especially, but it's not slow the way other "contemplative anime" can be; the action scenes are thrilling, the cliffhangers are steep and meaningful, and the deep underlying mysteries of the setting are always very visible to keep you going. And, like, all the characters are very good and very sad and I have to keep watching/reading in the sheer hope that they'll all find peace eventually. Also, again, the "visually breathtaking" thing. That includes the backgrounds, the character design, the fight scenes - one of the fight scenes in a later episode is genuinely my favorite fight scene I can remember ever having watched. Did I mention, by the way, that it's almost entirely 3DCG? Good 3DCG? Not just "good-for-a-CG-anime" good, but, again - "the most visually breathtaking anime I've seen all year" good? Here's the OP and ED, which are the most spoiler-free way I can think of to introduce y'all to the art direction I'm talking about here: And here's a blog post discussing the art direction and production notes of the first half of the anime, where all of the art stuff I mentioned above is gushed about much more eloquently than I managed to here. (There are some mild spoilers, though you could also just skim through to look at the pretty images if you want.) Please watch Houseki no Kuni. The anime, first, and then pick up the manga from where the anime leaves off. (That's how I'm doing it, anyway, and it's working well for me.) The only thing that's stopped me from reviving this thread to rec the anime earlier was the fear that it might flub the ending somehow and then I'd look silly calling this The Perfect Anime Fave Of The Century Can Do Literally No Wrong, but y'know what? I've watched the ending, they didn't flub it, and it literally just IS that good. Every episode. Please watch Houseki no Kuni. (By the way, there is some very literal kintsugi in this series. There's symbolism, there's imagery, there's a whole thing. Can't say much else without spoilers, but you'll know it when you see it.)
...It is not on Crunchyroll. Which is kind of an unfortunate thing, yeah...maybe the kind of unfortunate thing I should've mentioned up front.. I think it's an Amazon exclusive through Anime Strike, is the problem. You can find it under its Westernized title "Land of the Lustrous" there. It looks like there's a 7-day free trial option, maybe...?...but you have to have an Amazon Prime account first, I think...?...but there's an Amazon Prime free trial also, possibly......??? ...I, uh, went down a path of less resistance on this one...so I can't offer any advice in this particular area. (I feel like I should mention for the sake of my conscience that manga is also licensed, and can be purchased without having to sign up for unnecessary niche new streaming services, at least?)
I'm reading the manga and my only complaint is that I have a hard time parsing what's going on. The style is very unclear
For what it's worth, I think starting with the anime helps with that in a few ways: It's easier to tell the characters apart in the anime, where they're all conveniently color-coded, and once you get to know them there it becomes easier to recognize them in the manga too. In the manga you basically have to rely on hairstyle and eye shape to tell gems apart, which is hard when you don't know them, but which is easier once you've assigned a color to them and can just go "oh...those are Yellow Diamond's eyes, so that must be Yellow Diamond". The art style generally improves/becomes clearer over time, I think? I actually started the manga on two separate occasions: once from the very beginning and once from Chapter 26 (which is approximately where the anime ends; really it ends more around Chapter 29, but I wanted to stay on the safe side). On that first time around, I wasn't quite seeing that "breathtaking composition, every-page-is-like-an-illustration" thing everyone was talking about, but once I tried again starting at Chapter 26 it was a lot more apparent. The manga in general has a kind of "ambiguous" atmosphere that the anime by its nature has to resolve a little, so...to watch the anime is to see an interpretation of the source material...and seeing one interpretation of the source material makes it easier to interpret it yourself...is I think how that works. I'm not sure how to put it into words, but I think a lot of my enjoyment of the manga is not in what is drawn but in the places where what isn't drawn leaves me free to do that interpretation. It's just generally easier to understand fight scenes when they're in motion. You get to see all the frames that take the character from one position to another, rather than just the ones that get drawn in the manga. I still have a little trouble parsing the fight scenes that happen in the manga after the anime's end, but that's to be expected for me. I'm no good at reading fight scenes in any manga, even the ones that get highly praised for their clear fight choreography. ...Anyway, though, now that you've mentioned it I am kind of curious about where that "shift" between the early art-style and the later art-style takes place; I've seen some manga-only fans say that it becomes clearer after some chapters, but I don't know exactly how many chapters that is, just that it's less than 26. (Maybe it's not even that the art style gets clearer, but that it just gets prettier, and the "getting clearer" aspect is just because it becomes easier to read once you've had some practice in reading it?) So I think I'm going to start reading it from the beginning again and see where it starts getting clearer...(although it'll be hard for me to be objective about that, since I already know what happens in the first chapters from the anime...so I don't need as many visual cues to understand what's happening...but I want to try it, still).
Just started watching JoJo's Bizarre Adventure- Diamond is Unbreakable- the first JoJo that I'm watching PROPERLY rather than absorbing the plot via osmosis and memes and the occasional clip or stray episode or analysis video here and there and two episodes in I am Pleased owob
