Ok – let me make one thing perfectly clear – I fucking HATE anime’.
I despise it.
With the heat of a million suns.
Why? It’s not really animation.
I’m an advocate of the Golden Age of Warner Brothers cartoons – and not even all of them.
As the budgets shrunk, and the good directors left (or were fired), they were no longer turning out the 24-frames-per-second cartoons with the extremes and in-betweens that made them wonders. (and no, this isn’t a “cartoons were better back in my day” rant, as the WB Golden age was over before I had learned to read)
Hell, even if a WB cartoon comes on and I see that Milt Franklin (or worse, William Lava) did the music (which eventually became cheapo 8-piece “orchestras” instead of the 50+ piece resident orchestra of the Golden Age) , I change the channel. Because I know what’s coming. Stilted, stiff characters with no movement, too much dialog with nothing moving except the mouths, and chase backgrounds that repeat the same10 frames over and over, and over.
In the 80s, a friend came over ranting about this new “anime’ thing, and put a VHS tape of it on.
I watched the whole thing with him, and when he asked me what I thought, I replied :
“It’s Speed Racer with spaceships.”
Nothing moving except mouths, and eyes the size of tennis balls. No gags (unless you regard Spritle and Chim-Chim as comic icons).
Don’t think gags are important in cartoons?
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I rest my case.
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For a good part of the WB story, please give the following documentary a look :
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