It's just you, the link works fine for me.

I already knew, of course. I'm reserving judgment though; best not to get my hopes up, which is hard because...it's really him, back in command after so many years of silence...

Last edited by Aelanie (02-21-2011 03:39:03 PM)

Oh wow, I'm thrilled! I thought he had become a hermit or something.

satyreyes wrote:

I wonder if his "I-san" is as good as Enokido.

We'll see. Enokido was one in a million. Of course, I'm a little biased because he's my idol.

Awesome!

I'm hoping for epic mindf**k, but I'll accept surreal hi-jinks.  The only way this series could disappoint me is if there's no yuri in it.

liberrrty wrote:

This is also kinda weird but I miss transformation sequences that repeat each episode. All the recent anime I watch now don't have them, so it's kinda nostalgic for me I guess.

I love transformation scenes. Meaningless actions, pretty swirling, trinkly sounds and pretty music, they're the definition of eye candy. Not enough shows have them.

tuomastahti wrote:

Let's not get our hopes too high. The individual members of Be-PaPas haven't been able to reach the level that they had as a team (IMHO). Sometimes the collective spirit is greater than the sum of its addends.

Hasegawa Shinya has.  But otherwise, I can't help agreeing with you.  I'm halfway through Enokido's "Ouran High School Host Club," which many of us will be familiar with.  And it's good, yannow?  Funny and clever.  But it's not Utena, it's not near Utena, it's not within three degrees of Utena's symbolic, narrative, or artistic brilliance.  If it were a novel you wouldn't read it in college.  And heaven knows Ikuhara's other anime credits have been no great prizes.  (Okay: the opening sequence of Aoi Hana is adorable.)  Still, I keep the light of hope burning, in hopes that Ikuhara did not exhaust all his genius on one show. 

As sad as it is (after I've come down from my fanrush) I think all of you might be right in not getting our hopes too high.

As wonderful as Utena was (though I'm not saying it isn't unique in it's own right) it was definately part of a creative movement at the time where a lot more depth in storytelling, narrative and symbolism were more of the norm instead of the sole exception. Don't get me wrong, Be-Papas did an excellent job by their own right, but without all the creative influences coming from people and artwork that indulged in more intellectual depth around them would they have explored the ideas and themes as much as they did? Not to say they copied anything but you don't create art in a vacumn.

Another block would be the (percieved) audience, the producers and the artists self censorshipping new ideas. I mean when Ouran High School Host Club came out it must've seemed like it would be better recieved than an anime like Utena by the average anime fan seeing as all the other popular anime being produced at the time were doing well despite lack of artistic depth, so why take a risk trying something so drastically new when something fun and cutesy will do? I'm just using anime as an example here but I think you can see it across the cultural spectrum, both Western and Eastern, and nowadays things are just a lot more 'dumbed-down' than they were in the 90s/very early 00s.

However the world is changing drastically at the moment everyday so hopefully it might encourage people to to take more risks and explore new ideas again. ( I hope that makes sense I'm quite tired)

OnlyInThisLight wrote:

To throw Enokido a bone here, Ouran was based off a manga by Bisco Hatori (sic?), so it wasn't his story he was translating into animation.  Considering the manga it came from, which was decidedly more shoujo and slower paced than the anime, the tone, pacing, emotion and grandeur he was able to pull off through animation was surprisingly subtle and varied.  Plus, I did get a bit of a nerd boner whenever I saw a shot that reminded me of Utena -I recognized a lot of his style when I first watched it, and then confirmed it to be so. 

Ouran is art, good sir.  Just.  You know.  The lowest form of it.  Comedy.

That's fair.  We look for different things in comedies than we do in dramas.  I can't think of a comedy film that's clearly high art rather than low.  (Maybe Amélie?  Dr. Strangelove?)  So Utena isn't a good benchmark to compare Ouran to.  And I'm not surprised to learn that Enokido elevated Ouran a lot from its manga origin.  Ouran as an anime is pretty much the artistic equal of any other comedic anime I've watched; I think I'd put it slightly above Haruhi Suzumiya and slightly below GTO.  So yeah, okay, I retract the dig against Enokido.  Maybe he's still got it, and is limited only by his chosen source material and genre.

liberrrty wrote:

As wonderful as Utena was (though I'm not saying it isn't unique in it's own right) it was definately part of a creative movement at the time where a lot more depth in storytelling, narrative and symbolism were more of the norm instead of the sole exception. Don't get me wrong, Be-Papas did an excellent job by their own right, but without all the creative influences coming from people and artwork that indulged in more intellectual depth around them would they have explored the ideas and themes as much as they did? Not to say they copied anything but you don't create art in a vacumn.

Another block would be the (percieved) audience, the producers and the artists self censorshipping new ideas. I mean when Ouran High School Host Club came out it must've seemed like it would be better recieved than an anime like Utena by the average anime fan seeing as all the other popular anime being produced at the time were doing well despite lack of artistic depth, so why take a risk trying something so drastically new when something fun and cutesy will do? I'm just using anime as an example here but I think you can see it across the cultural spectrum, both Western and Eastern, and nowadays things are just a lot more 'dumbed-down' than they were in the 90s/very early 00s.

These are interesting points.  I wonder if it's true that anime these days are shallower and/or dumber than they were a decade ago.  Certainly we're moving further from the direct influence of Hayao Miyazaki, whose movies almost always invited reflection, and Satoshi Kon has sadly left us.  It must be said, though, that there were plenty of overrated anime in the 90s and early 00s -- and that smart anime persevere today.  2008's Time of Eve was beautiful, haunting, and very smart.  A year earlier, we had Piano no Mori.  I haven't seen Hetalia: Axis Powers or Spice and Wolf, but I've had people I trust tell me that both shows are excellent.  On the other side of the Pacific, Avatar: The Last Airbender, which ran through 2008, seems to me to have been one of the best animated series of the last two decades.  I think there still is, and always will be, a market for smart shows.  If that niche feels underrepresented right now, all the more reason for Ikuni to try to fill it! 

In general, I'd say that the direction of anime is either - gritty, serious, violent and slightly psycological [death note, eva, that Madoka magical anime that came out recently ect.] or overy the top, gaudy, sparkly, full of epic yet unrealistic plot points in the way of Gurren Lagann, Sengoku Basara. It's all fun and enjoyable to watch, but for how long? There's not as much to analyse or think about. There are all types of anime, but I gotta say most of them lean towards these trends.

BTW satyreyes, you awoke my Hetalia fangirl spirit and I will say the anime isn't that good in comparison to the manga. The direction, I think, has done things to annoy me, or lessen my love for Hetalia and that is; reusing material [and in a 5 min show, you don't have much excuse for that], hyping up expectation for the next episode, and then not doing the story altogether [you'll see that in the first season, but they stop], and censorship. It's not necessarily important things they edit, but they do have an effect on character development, plot... like for instance, the Italy bros don't sleep with any clothes , but they make them wear clothes all the time, and that bothers me because you won't see anything anyway, it's like, "what's the point of having done that?", you ruined a character quirk! And also, often show only part of a plotline, but cut it off before anything too questionable happens - or just cause they couldn't be bothered to finish it.
I'm sure you'd all understand watching Utena how little things make up a story, and just seeing these mistakes in the anime ticks me off. But I watch it happily anyway, cause I love watching the scenes come to life. And the voice actors are awesome.

Oh, I wrote another rant...

I dare say that the 90s in anime began and ended in drastically different places (just like the 70s and 80s, actually, but that's a topic for another day).

The early 90s saw Japan's economic bubble burst. The OVA market began to feel the squeeze after years of high quality, expensive productions, which were still quite prevalent up to the mid-90s and then all but disappear. The Real Robot boom gave way to the Shonen-Fighting boom, in no small part because of the smaller budget required by a show with no robots to animate (Gundam kept going, but it was Goddamn Gundam).

In the mid-90s, if you look carefully, animation quality actually DECREASES as the industry kinda shrank. This is when Evangelion is the big system shock, the much needed shot in the arm. Whatever you think about Evangelion's plot, love it or hate it, it changed anime. It said 'you can still make anime relevant to people', it said 'you can still tell engaging stories with giant robots', and 'you can have OAV quality animation in a TV series' (though, notably, not for most of it, but some sequences in Evangelion stand up incredibly well). All of a sudden, people start going 'crap! it's OK to experiment? What?' and you have a huge trend, by the closing of the decade with shows like Lain and Utena, with experimental narratives, subversions of traditional genres and, yes, even revivals of once-forgotten genres (space adventure? Bounty hunters and thieves? That's all 70s stuff nobody wants to see, right?* a Jidai Geki shounen manga? Who cares about Jidai Geki right?**). Not even Gundam escaped this fever, churning out its most original and least commercial product ever (Turn A Gundam).

However, like any other trend to be 'groundbreaking', there were failures. Many 'experimental' anime were weird for the sake of it. This was done, often, at the expense of characterisation or an engaging plot, simply adding just an air of mystery with symbolism mixed in, to make it look clever. They were just following the fad created by Evangelion (just like how in the 80s you have many passable, but very average real robot shows that imitated Gundam).

I think that any trend where 'weirdness' and 'creativity' are the buzzwords is likely to produce fascinating results. But it's still a trend and has its downsides. I wouldn't say the anime industry is any less creative or interesting now, because with the huge amount of shows around each year, there's a LOT of stuff to choose from. The last decade has given us masterpieces like Death Note, Planetes, Welcome to the NHK, Azumanga Daioh, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, Gankutsuoh... all very different and very original creations. But what is true is that the anime industry has become VERY VERY good at figuring out 'sweet spots', niche markets that are reliable and ripe for exploitation, hence why the 2000s could be called the 'decade of the harem anime', hence why so many anime these days seem laser-targetted towards a certain demographic. But I feel there's still terrific work being done in the industry.

Overlord Morgus wrote:

Examples? Besides Love Hina? I hated Love Hina. It's like, you watch it, and you know exactly why it was made and who it was made for, it's so insultingly transparent.

I agree! And in fact Love Hina is where it becomes such a huge anime trend it even infiltrates other genres. Sadly I don't have other examples, because as soon as I see a harem anime I run in the other direction (unless it's subversions like Fruits Basket or Chobits which I love).

J-Syxx wrote:

Ikuhara was the intellectual force behind Utena.  In fact, it can be argued that the whole experimental style that was mentioned in this thread was because of him due to his influence on Anno's Evangelion.  I don't think Utena was just like the right people coming together at the right time, he drove the whole thing.  Just listen to the commentaries with Saito and Ikuhara on them together.  Saito pretty much gives the impression she was completley bewildered by what was going on in the TV show.

I'm not going to argue with you about Ms. Saito.  The SKU manga, which she was primarily responsible for, was okay, but only okay; it felt like she couldn't bring herself to explore the darker themes of the situation to the extent that the anime does.  When she talks about the anime, it sounds like either she left it mostly to the other members of the team or her input mostly got ignored.  Whatever the case, I doubt she was a prime mover of what we saw on screen.  But to be fair, her manga came first; the team got to review the manga and see what worked and what didn't as they were readying SKU for TV.

But I don't agree, based on what I've seen, that Ikuni drove the whole thing.  That's what I assumed when I first got into Utena too, especially after I read the manga; SKU is a work of genius, but the manga is not ingenious, therefore Ikuni must be a genius, Q.E.D.  But let's examine Ikuni's other work.  Yeah, he used to work for little children's shows like Goldfish Warning, and it would be unfair to hold that against him, but he came to Sailor Moon with an undistinguished record.  His work on Sailor Moon is usually considered very strong, exploring tricky themes with considerable nuance, but it's hard to disentangle his contributions from those of Naoko Takeuchi and Jun'ichi Sato -- both geniuses in their own rights.  Then he directed Utena.  After Utena, he did... what else, exactly?  He's co-written a manga and a novel, neither of which I've read or heard anything about even from Ikuni's fans on this forum.  If they're overlooked masterpieces then I stand corrected.  But it really seems to me that if Ikuni is a lone-wolf genius able to singlehandedly carry the whole creative team kicking and screaming to anime Bethlehem, he's done a good job hiding it in his previous work.  A genius, certainly, but not a singlehanded one.

Fortunately, Be-Papas wasn't just Saito and Ikuhara.  I think it's likely that there really was some important alchemy between the members of the team, particularly between Ikuni and series writer Youji Enokido, whose original script for the movie gives us a glimpse both of his native talent and of the interactions that must have gone on among Be-Papas to transform it into its final incarnation.  Enokido is, frankly, much better credentialed outside of Utena than Ikuni is, though like Ikuni he seems to have risen to greater heights with Be-Papas than without it.  And neither gentleman can possibly have been hurt by the art and character design of Shinya Hasegawa, whose work on Evangelion speaks for itself.  Utena was created by a team of talented people -- including Saito, in the final analysis -- who created something together that none of them could have created alone.