i mean, that may be but i don’t know about a bunch of pple in the anime industry holding those views. if i hear something shitty about a creator then i’m usually done. with things like movies, tv, and books. with music i have extremely problematic and terrible faves that i give leeway to because i’ll still listen to them but with anime and shit i’m just like ’ cya '.
i haven’t really examined why i’m like this only with that kind of media before but i think it’s just that i don’t wanna be associated with their fanbase. like if yoshi-p came out saying some racist shit or was a war denier, i would be absolutely crushed but i would probably still cancel my sub.
maybe it’s a double standard or i’m more strict with anime, manga, and books because the ideas of the authors usually comes through in their work?
i feel like when i found out Amano did that painting of Shinzo Abe as a samurai protecting Japan it created like some kind of stack overflow error in my mind where now i am just like, smooth brain, unable to cancel any more
My partner and I have been watching Urusei Yatsura lately. I was first exposed to it through random episodes in the SB anime club and it really won me over. Now we’re watching it through in order. It’s funny, she and I both found that show a little offputting at first, but once we got on its wavelength we fell in love with it. When you first encounter the dynamic between Ataru and Lum, thanks to decades of shitty harem anime, it’s easy to assume the worst… But it’s really not that kind of show at all.
Everything about Ataru is actually so funny. He’s such an exaggerated caricature of the insincere niceguy womanizer archetype, and it’s hilarious to see him placed into all these fantastical situations that you’d never see a character like that in. The show looks down on him so hard, just this most pitiful asshole constantly getting put down.
The way he’s animated is so great too. There’s one episode where he gets so mad he starts chomping on a desk, and you think it’s just exaggerated abstract emoting, but then some random background character is like, “Why are you chewing on that desk?” And then later someone’s like “fuck off, desk chewer!” Now that’s comedy!
I’m so curious what this 2022 Urusei Yatsura anime is gonna be like. How the heck would they even approach this kind of material these days? And why? The original is so good!
i’ve only ever seen the Mamoru Oshii movie Urusei Yatsura 2: Beautiful Dreamer, which i gather is not exactly emblematic of the show’s style, but i can still get a sense of what you mean from it and yeah, super charming
That movie is so good! It actually does reflect the style of the show in that the show has a level of artistry FAR out of proportion to its frivolity. Just constantly throwing weird original ideas and visual inventiveness at you in the context of a goofy sitcom about the world’s most pathetic dirtbag.
Assault Girls was basically a comedy, albeit one that’s more like a parody of his own pretentiousness and cinematic style. He also made that series of shorts a few years ago called “Sand Whale and Me” which was just a bunch of video game gags.
I haven’t seen Legend of the Fast Food Grifters but it looks mostly comedic to me.
Oshii has some of the best comedic timing, so its a shame that he made so many dour, humorless projects, GITS onward. His sense of humor balances out his navel-gazing tendencies, and I loved his early work for this reason.
I like Oshii’s dour, humourless stuff, although I think a lot of what made them good was probably Kazunori Ito’s scripts. Most of what he’s made since their partnership ended has been a notch or two below
UY works because it has one joke and that joke is that Ataru is an asshole and gets what’s coming to him and simply centers every story around this fact and let’s the dominos fall (seemingly a thing a lot of other harem or harem-adjacent shows don’t get, it’s one thing to have the world orbiting around the protag’s dick, it’s another to have the world functioning around it)
and yet, for all he does, he’s a million times better than any of the other male characters because for him, Lum is there whereas everyone is trying to white knight or take her as their own property, effectively treating her as a person instead of a prize
anyway I’m sure the new show will be good and I’ll watch it once the memory of Yashahime is fully bleached out of my mind