ANIME VS AMERICAN ANIMATION Essay Research Paper — страница 6

such as personal tastes, experience, maturity, background and mental state of being. However, if you can break down “quality” into specific commonly accepted standards and point out the details concerning them, you can make a legitimate comparison. The other areas, besides the visual quality of animation, which need to be discussed are the quality of the voice acting, plot, storyline, and scripting. These of course are going to be a lot more subjective, but my goal here is to cover popular beliefs on the subject and also raise certain provoking questions which may challenge a reader to come to his own conclusion. Why is it that people can watch as little as five minutes of American animation and still find it entertaining, but it is not so for Japanese anime? Now there is a

question of simple logic for all those obsessed anime fans to try to answer. Whenever someone says that they saw some anime but didn’t like it because they couldn’t understand what was going on, an anime fan will answer by explaining that the person must watch more of it in order to begin to like it. The more time you spend watching it, the more you’ll like it. Of course, this is true of almost anything! You can learn to like anything, if you expose yourself to it for a long period of time. Many anime fans have watched hundreds of hours of animes. However, the question still remains. Why is it that I can watch a five minute Looney Tunes short and still see as much action in it as there is to see in an entire episode of an anime series, and yet still perfectly understand

what’s going on? I mean, that’s what I call time well spent! Just take a look at some of the works of Tex Avery, and you’ll see what I mean. But if you were to randomly watch five minutes of any anime, you’d have a 95% chance of seeing a bunch of nothing. Maybe that example is a little extreme, considering that most animes run as continuing series. Still, we cannot ignore the run-of-the-mill plots found in most individual anime episodes. Most anime series contain a pattern format that is used to construct the plot for each episode. In America, formats are used to some extent also (mostly in old sitcoms) but nowhere to the same level of restriction as in anime. It seems to me, that most animes are missing the plot twists, variety, and suspense that make American series fun

to watch. It’s all too linear and predictable. After you’ve seen several episodes, you can already guess the layout for the next episode. How many plot ideas have you seen used over and over again in the same anime series? A typical plot might follow like this: good guys learn some bad news, good guys find bad guys, good guys talk with bad guys, good guys go fight bad guys, something bad happens to good guys, good guys fight harder, good guys win, but bad guys get last laugh. Boy, that sounds boring, doesn’t it? While you may be thinking that you’ve seen this sort of stuff in American animation as well, the difference is that American storywriters usually add more to spice it up. For instance, there might be a few scenes of comic relief mixed in here and there. Also, an

American cartoon might be bound to a simple rule that the good guys must always win in the end, but how they win is a different story. In different episodes, the good guys will win through different means, not just fighting. That’s called ingenuity! So what accounts for these slow-moving empty plots found in Japanese anime episodes? Well, compare it to American animation. In an American production you have many happy-go-lucky writers who work on different individual episodes and are constantly developing fresh and new ideas on a regular basis. The American writers are given the freedom to experiment and try new things. Some episodes will turn out rotten, but others will be really good. The plot of the series evolves dynamically as new ideas are thought up. In Japan, the

concepts of most animes are developed by one person. Often times, the plot is sketched out long before the anime even exist. Often times, the plot is based entirely off a manga. Anime fans will argue that this gives Japanese series stronger continuity than American series, but I partially disagree. Anime series often leave a lot of plot holes in individual episodes. These gaps exist because the plot is forced to move in a certain direction, but there aren’t any plausible explanations for why it does. The director knows he must get from point “A” to “C”, but there is no “B” connecting them. Even worse, a lot of the time new characters are brought in for the sole purpose of being a “plot device” and then disappear, never to be seen again. Sometimes, regular