Yup, Asian!

Whenever racism comes up there's obviously a lot of tension and emotion.  As an American of Chinese heritage I luckily haven't had to deal with many overt acts of racism to my person.  I grew up in the country-side where myself and a handful of others were the only Asians in my high school graduating class of around 400.  Although I have a deep appreciation and respect for my heritage, it's important to note that a more authentic Chinese American wouldn't be completely off base in calling me a twinky or banana.  Both are derogatory slang for someone who is "yellow on the outside; white on the inside".

With that disclaimer out of the way, I'd like to tackle the whole controversy surrounding the movie The Last Airbender.  This is where people's emotions get involved.  The movie is based on a beloved television series named Avatar: The Last Airbender.  Even being a show targeted at young American children watching Nickelodeon, it borrowed heavily from several Asian cultures.  The amazing thing, is that it did so with a healthy amount of respect.  Caricatures are funny, but it becomes racist when it's the predominant form of entertainment featuring a particular people.

When the casting of the main characters for the movie was released, there was a fairly large backlash in the Asian American community.  It was big enough that I took notice and looked in to it.  Right away the obvious point of tension was that the studio had cast 4 white actors as the main characters.  Out of these characters: 2 are dark skinned people who live on the ice (arguably Inuit), 1 looks East Asian, and 1 is fairly ambiguous.  These characters respectively are Katara/Sokka, Zuko, and Aang.  The opposing argument here is that these are imaginary characters from imaginary peoples.  Katara even has blue eyes.  That's fine.  I also tend not to care too much what the ethnicity of an actor is in a role.

The public outcry might have had an affect.  Jesse McCartney, the actor cast as Zuko was replace with Dev Patel.  This was reportedly due to schedule conflicts between concert tour dates and martial arts boot camp.

So now they have an Asian as one of the main characters!  This is when we get to the crux of the problem.  It's not who you end up casting but how you go about doing it.  If you cut through the noise and look at how they did the search:

Lead Roles: Caucasian or any other ethnicity

Background/Extras: Near Eastern, Middle Eastern, Far Eastern, Asian, Mediterranean and Latino ethnic groups

So here we have a modern day case of purposefully casting Caucasian leads with their Minority support.  There's the problem plain and simple: a clear cut case of racial discrimination.  Now people who have never been the victim of racism often downplay it.  I've even had friends talk about the whole "racebending" controversy as whining.  There's definitely some truth to those sentiments.  The world isn't fair.  Then again, that's no reason to strive to make it so.  Nobody here is looking for handouts or (horrible idea) law regulated diversity in casting laws.  When there are so few roles that are open to actors of Asian descent, it's depressing when ones that so obviously should be open to Asians end up being closed off.

The only reason I could imagine this being so is money, since that's the goal in any business.  Movies need to get people in the seats.  And the film industry is saying that the movie going audiences wouldn't go see The Last Airbender if there were ethnic actors in the lead roles.

If you want to learn about the whole controversy, I learned a lot just from searching the web, as well as from racebending.com

Pumpkin Scissors?

Pumpkin Scissors is a supernatural, alternate history, action, mystery, military show.

It starts off a little slow with encapsulated episodes.  Slowly the information begins to connect between episodes to give the viewer an idea for what the big picture is.  As the over-arching story unfolds the show's pace really picks up.

Unfortunately this apparently is one of those anime shows that isn't finished.  I'm not spoiling much by saying the show ends on a fairly big, if not somewhat obvious reveal.  Then there's a poorly tacked on ending.

Overall, Pumpkin Scissors is a lot of fun.  Besides the ending, there are a few other quirks.  The dub supervised by ADV has some odd accents.  There's a mix of British, German, French, and American all rolled in.  There are three main nations in play, but the accents aren't consistent between them.  There are some recognizable voices but I definitely enjoyed the dub more than the original Japanese.  In order to enjoy the show, you'll need to tolerate some magic mixed in with your German style soldiers that have been robbed of their Nazi symbols.  It almost feels like they just wanted an excuse to use the word "jäger" a lot.

There's a theme of class struggle with commoners versus nobility.  It's not a subtext or anything but obvious and part of the story.  The main story is one of an illuminati style group pulling the strings of corruption from behind the scenes.  Sadly this plot just gets running when the series ends at the 24th episode.

I definitely recommend the show if you like fun with a side of awesome.

I AM BETTER COLORED MAN

I've been watching anime and reading comics for less than half my life.  Because of that I have no real attachment or sentimental memories of my childhood favorites.  I can say that one of my favorite movies is The Last Starfighter; knowing it's a corny movie I can still say that I love it.  As I play catch up with anime and comics, I'm finding that a lot of material that's recommended to me suffers from the same nostalgic memory lens.  People remember things as being awesome, but under the light of fresh eyes, the ink starts to fade.

Take for example Gundam.  More precisely the earlier Universal Century stuff. I'm probably going to get a lot of flak for criticizing it, but a lot of the art is pretty poor.  It's quite possible that I'll never experience the adventures of Amuro Ray because I can't stand to watch it.  Until I saw Cyborg 009, I thought I had issue with character designs.  That was the first show that made me realize that wasn't the case.  So what's the matter?  I love mecha.  I enjoy mecha so much that I'm willing to put up with awful plot lines and whiny characters (see Gundam Wing) to get my fix.  It boiled down for me to a very shallow feature of the art.

I group anime and comics together here for a purely aesthetic reason: color.  The two art mediums share a common production process:

1. The original art is drawn by a penciler
2. An inker goes over the pencil drawings with pen or marker
3. Finally color is added

It's that last step that kills much of old animation and comics for me.  I didn't realize it until I looked at comic books and anime together.  In general, the art that is created after computers were used to color is awesome.  A lot of stuff created before then in these mediums just don't do it for me.  I can certainly appreciate it for what it is, but I just don't like it very much.  There are going to be exceptions, but especially with comic books a lot of the material was mass produced.  It was pumped out as quickly as possible to sell as many copies they could and make the most profit.

I'm also willing to give stuff a try.  For example I just read the thick volume 1 of the Age of Apocalypse saga.  Most of the trade is colored old school.  Lot's of white backgrounds with single color fills.  I was getting along fine until the end of the book.  There they have a run of Blink.  These books are colored in a modern style that makes the rest of the book look like the Sunday funnies page from the newspaper.  Wary, I checked out the second volume at my local comic shop (Charging Star Comics).  Sadly enough the book reverts to it's old coloring ways.  I probably won't continue reading the story arc because of the alternate universe aspect of it combines with the dated coloring to create in me the perfect storm of meh.

What do you think?  Am I too shallow here?

A recent discussion amongst a few of my followed on Twitter brought this question to mind: how did the piracy of copyrighted works evolve to how it is today?  Thanks to digital reproductions of digital products, there is rarely any difference between an original licensed work and a pirated copy.  When copyright law was envisioned these circumstances can't have been imagined.

It's important to keep in mind why copyright law exists.  Wikipedia starts to define copyright as "... the set of exclusive rights granted to the author or creator of an original work, including the right to copy, distribute and adapt the work."  Why does an author need exclusive rights in the first place?  The same Wikipedia article quotes the World Intellectual Property Organization, saying that copyright law is there "To encourage a dynamic creative culture, while returning value to creators so that they can lead a dignified economic existence, and to provide widespread, affordable access to content for the public."  Artists need to get paid!  If anyone could just copy their stuff and have it for themselves without paying for a license then the original artist in this case would not get paid.

When it comes to physical art, reproductions are usually obvious.  There's also less intrinsic value: an original painting is vastly superior to a print or reproduction.  Original works of this nature stay naturally expensive because of their limited supply.  Creating unlicensed copies of paintings, sculptures, books, etc. are not free and this limits the market.  Things change drastically when it comes to the digital medium.  Computer software, music, and film are all distributed in digital formats.  Being digital, they can be reproduced with zero loss of data which makes them perfect copies of the original.  Now where's the motivation for purchasing a license for the material from the creator?  A consumer can have a perfect copy at virtually no cost to themselves.  That's certainly hard to turn down.

Here's the crux of the issue.  A common justification for piracy is that the pirate is not stealing anything.  Nothing is being taken from the creator in to the possession of the pirate.  Based on the justification and origin of copyright law, we can take this argument as a Straw man.  It's not the act of the pirating or downloading.  That's an outdated comparison to traditional theft.  The problem here is the lack of action.  As a pirate, an unlicensed user of copyrighted material, a person has not compensated the creator.  An answer to that argument is that the pirate would not have purchased it anyway.  That just seems disingenuous.  Why are you consuming it at all?  If it's good enough to watch, read, listen to, or play, it's good enough for you to compensate the author.

It seems like piracy should be self defeating.  If an author does not receive payment for their work, they would cease making it.  However the world is not black and white.  There will always be people conscientious enough to pay for their entertainment instead of obtaining it unlicensed.  In essence these pirates leach off the efforts of both authors and paying customers.

Copyright law exists to enforce common human decency.  This becomes more important with the anonymity of the Internet.  I imagine most people who pirate software would not walk in to the office of a software developer, copy a product on to a portable hard drive and walk out.  Being able to do so anonymously and with little effort makes it a different story.

Sometimes material isn't available as a licensed property.  This happens often in the international film industry.  Surely it can't be a problem to obtain a copy of a film that isn't available for licensing in your home country.  I'd say as long as you properly license that material if it becomes available then any possible wrongs there have been righted.

Chime in down below with your thoughts on copyright and piracy!

NIS America

With the recent losses of some anime publishers in America, it's welcome news that another company will be stepping up.  NIS America, a subsidiary of Nippon Ichi Software, is known for bringing quirky niche video game titles like Disgaea to the United States.

In a press release dated February 12, the company has announced their intention to meet the growing demand for Japanese culture in America by releasing anime series on DVD.  The "first 4 anime titles" are: "Toradora", "PERSONA -trinity soul-", "PandoraHearts", and "Our Home's Fox Deity".

These four shows seem to span the thematic spectrum.  It ranges from the darks of Persona to the high school love of Toradora.  I look forward to seeing how well NIS America's efforts do.  Their experience in the niche market of RPG and Strategy RPG video games should prepare them well for a similar experience in anime.

I'm Lovin It!

There's more to an art form than the medium itself. Some subject matter lends itself better to a particular style. I'm sure you could do a landscape of a spring meadow with a sculpture, but surely an impressionist watercolor is better suited. That's a bit of a stretch, as different painting styles really can't be segregated that way, and there's an exception to every rule. In the plastic arts (wikipedia) this may not be so clear cut. Even in literature, it becomes difficult to make divisions along the lines of content being paired with style.

Serialized illustrated work seems to have taken an interesting evolutionary path.  Compare the American comic book and  Japanese Manga industries.  While there are standouts, the American comic book is often about a costumed super hero.  Sometimes there are secret identities, but more recently they have taken a back seat to the main course: heroes vs. villains.  Crazy fights in worldy and other places with amazing powers.  All of this done in beautifully drawn and colored artwork.  These are amazing to behold.

Looking at Japanese manga, there's a change in both content and presentation.  There are books for many different market segments, with named categories: shounen, shoujo, etc.  Not only are they aimed at different people, but these aren't super heroes aimed at girls for example.  They are just stories that appeal to different people that happen to be drawn in a serial art format.  The format is also usually a small paperback size, and in black and white.

The differences here are pretty drastic.  Part of it is definitely cultural.  In our beautiful USA, cartoons and comic books are for kids.  In order for adults to be entertained by it, it has to be filmed with actors.  Just look at how successful the DC and Marvel movies have been lately.  I'll omit the bad ones, but the newer Batman movies, Spiderman, X-Men, and my favorite Iron-Man have all done very well.  They're the same stories told in the comic books which themselves have definitely matured over the years.  Meanwhile anime and manga have no problems with containing material that isn't targeted at children and reaching a market.  According to manga critic Haruyuki Nakano, the baby boomers continued reading their favorite manga in to adult-hood.

All this leads up to Americans reading Japanese manga.  I never thought I'd see the day when mainstream booksellers like Barnes & Noble have entire sections in their stores dedicated to manga and Best Buy having an anime section.  Like it or not, anime and manga have grown popular amongst America's youth.  The first anime I saw was a passed around bootleg VHS since there was no way to purchase anything, let alone with any sort of English.

Batman: Death Mask

It only makes sense that the comic book industry, which is a shadow of its former glory, would try to cash in to this growing market.  What piqued my interest in this comparison was picking up Batman: Death Mask from Charging Star Comics.  It's a manga in the comic book size format from DC's CMX imprint.  After reading it, I was surprised that the story was wrote Batman.  There's a mystery involving an unknown killer, internal Bruce Wayne/Batman strife, and a curious woman.  The black and white art works relatively well with the overall style of Batman, being dark and gothic in setting.  It is written and drawn by Yoshinori Natsume.  Not very prolific, his series Togari was well received and features a villain who slowly becomes good.  There definitely is a sharing of themes with the Dark Knight.

Although a fun read, I immediately wanted to compare it to the last Batman I had read: Hush.  The next two nights I reread parts one and two.  Gone are the understated tones and sharp lines of Death Mask.  Here we have Jim Lee's huge men and huge women (I'll let you figure out which parts are huge).  The plot is more epic, but they have more time to tell the story, being more issues in length.  Death Mask is a good effort but Hush is just more impressive.

Batman however is a good example of a cultural crossover.  He fights crime to avenge the death of his parents.  Instead of a caped crusader swinging over the night sky of Gotham, he could definitely be a masked ronin samurai ridding the country side of bandits.  It's a relatively straight forward story that transfers over well.  Batman is an honorable warrior who fights for justice with his mind and body.

Really?

Then there's a different approach to transferring properties over.  They turned X-Men in to a shoujo manga.  That means it's "for girls".  The men look all flowery and pretty.  That's all I'm going to say about that since I'm definitely not in their desired market segment.  But it's interesting that they tried to take an American comic book property and place it in one of the Japanese manga segments that X-Men definitely doesn't fit in to.  It's definitely a risk and experiment, as it would have been easy to just take X-Men and place them in a shounen manga that's all about the fight of the week.

Similar things are happening in the world of animation as well.  Saturday morning cartoons here in America have been populated with re-edited Japanese anime for many years now.  I grew up watching Robotech (rehashed Macross), Transformres, GoBots, and Voltron (mashed up GoLion).  The trend is still going strong, only now accompanied by American animators mimicking the anime style.

We're also starting to get American based properties, animated in Japan, not aimed at children. The Animatrix kicked it all off with their compilation of shorts done by notable Japanese anime studios.  More recently Batman: Gotham Knight was produced in a similar fashion to help promote the 2nd new Batman movie: Dark Knight.  And arguably targetted at a slightly younger audience is the yet to be released: Halo Legends.  All three of these titles feature prominent Japanese studios creating anime shorts utilizing American properties for an adult American audience.  Unlike the earlier mentioned Batman manga, these feature anime sensibilities in their story telling, the American producers having given their contracted studios some freedom to tell their stories.  These three works do well since they are well conceived and preserve their source material.

There are two upcoming Marvel releases that don't hold as much promise.  Both Iron Man and Wolverine have "anime" releases coming.  These are more like anime re imaginings of their source material, with Iron Man looking more like kaiju giant robots with over the top villains and Wolverine  a girly, angsty samurai.  I hope they're good and do well, but it's not looking very promising.

I hope that these industries continue to innovate and experiment with properties, although I'm not sure I like the trend of Hollywood deciding to make live action movies of anime.  We've yet to see one make it to release and I'm eagerly waiting to either cheer or rip them to shreds!

What do you think of this phenomena? Leave a comment and chime in!

Crunchyroll

Wow.  Thankfully I was checking out Anime 3000 while listening to my friends over at Reverse Thieves.  A3K happens to be hosting their new podcast.  Go give it a listen!

Anyway, this is an amazing development and I can't believe I hadn't heard about it till now.  For those who don't know, Crunchyroll is a a legal streaming site for anime and live action drama from Asia(Japan and I think Korea).  Before Netflix had their streaming, I used Crunchyroll a lot.

Now they've made it even easier to watch!  Crunchyroll is free for a good number of shows.  If you want exclusive content access as well as more current,  as they release in Japan, shows you can pay a fee.  If you pay a fee you also don't have to watch commercials.

The app itself is nothing too crazy.  You can sign in to your Crunchyroll profile to view your account and guestbook.  As for viewing content, you can tilt the phone sideways to see featured titles as well as using buttons along the bottom to Browse and Search.

I tested on wifi and 3G.  The wifi works great and it appears to use the built-in Quicktime viewer which allows you to scrub around to view the part you want as well as zoom in a little so the picture takes up the whole screen.

Unfortunately, probably because of Apple and ATT, the app will not let you stream anime over the 3G network.

For a free app this is great and it may actually turn me in to a paying customer of Crunchyroll!

Crunchyroll for iPhone rates Super Awesome!

The Sky Crawlers

Directed by Mamoru Oshii, this movie is definitely more cerebral than the typical anime that becomes popular here in the US.  I find it hard to review movies after just one watching but I'm going to to my best.

As you can see on the cover art there to the left, Oshii is credited with bringing us Ghost in the Shell. In his works, the viewer is transported to another world like our own but different in a few key ways.  At first glance The Sky Crawlers could be taking place in one of the theaters of World War II.  The opening features a beautifully rendered dogfight between a wing and a solo planes of a nondescript make and model.  As the story progresses, the viewer is treated to unfolding layers of secrecy that both the audience and some of the characters are unaware of.

With the exception of the motherly mechanic, most of the characters are flat and undeveloped.  They have the bare necessities required to get their role in the story across.  If you want a movie with interactions between complex characters you will probably be disappointed.  That's not to say that there isn't character interaction; the relationships between the key figures in the fighter squadron is integral to the story.  The blank expressions on the box art inform us of the mood that Oshii strives to display on the screen.

Thankfully, those expressions take a back seat to the 3D renderings created for the movie.  I don't know what else to say beyond that they are wonderful.  I remember being amazed at the affordability of computer generated graphics and that they could be used on weekly television shows.

Amazing!

A direct comparison can be drawn from the Histroy Channel show Dogfights.  The planes and fights they created were well done.  Here however, in this movie, they are amazing!  A great action sequence is not complete without audio however.  Amazingly the studio went to Skywalker Studios for the sound design.  Part of the special features is a trip to Skywalker Studios where you can watch the meeting of the minds as they describe the sounds they need as they show off their silent version of the film.

At first glance, I was a little confused about the mechanical designs in the film.  It seemed that the designers were in love with push props.  Most piston and radial engine aircraft utilize a propeller that is designed to pull the plane through the air.  In those designs, the engine and propeller are placed in the front of an aircraft.  Towards the end of World War II, several designers started to experiment with different designs.  The Dornier Do 335A-07 was a German design that featured both a push and pull prop.

After some thought, it appears that the push props are all piloted by the "good guys" with the pull prop being piloted by the obvious "villain".  The Sky Crawlers is not a simple good vs. evil story but I'll leave it at that for you to think about yourselves.

If this viewing experience is indicative of anime on bluray then consider me stoked.  The picture and sound were awesome and there are a lot of enjoyable extra features.  I rate The Sky Crawlers on Bluray Super Awesome!

The Sky Crawlers [Blu-ray] at Amazon

I've just started with my HG Guncannon kit.  I saw it in the store and at around $20 fell within my impulse purchase range.  It's pretty rare to see a Gundam kit this far north in New York State.  Take a look at his assembly, it's quite well done!  Eventually I'll post about my experiences with my HG kit.  I quickly finished a Strike Gundam 1/144 scale kit and promptly murdered it with heavy acrylic paint.

For just about any sort of media you can get on a DVD these days, Netflix's service is great.  Anime however is a slight exception.  Much of western television and serialized visual entertainment is fairly encapsulated.  Each episode can stand on it's own merit.  Just about anything you catch in syndication can be watched without too much issue.  A character may come and go or a relationship may be different for example.  A few shows have overarching storylines, like Lost and Fringe.  These shows rely heavily on having a plot that continues from one show to the next.  And then there are shows that are a mix.  Shows like Babylon 5 have a beginning, middle, and end but fill the time between with stories that stand on their own.

I've found that anime is definitely in the storytelling mode of continuing plot lines.  Stories that stand out as being unrelated to the plot are clearly pointed at as filler episodes.  Seeing an anime show out of order can be pretty annoying, especially if the story is full of reveals and twists and turns like anime often is.

What this all comes down to is a feature of Netflix that can get very annoying.  When the next DVD on your Netflix queue is not available, they send you the next disk.  Each DVD of a television show is considered to be it's own movie on your queue.  So when disk 4 of Solty Rei wasn't available for me to watch, they sent me disk 5.  I, not realizing this is what happened, dutifully watched disk 5.  There had been so much time in between my viewings of disk 3 and 5 that I had assumed that my memory of the events in 3 was just especially bad.

I didn't realize what had happened until disk 4 arrived in my mailbox.  So please Netflix, treat serialized episodic content as a single entity on the queues.  Continuity thanks you.