Quote:
Originally Posted by hyl
You are again only looking at the most famous studios and not at the general ones.
I am not saying that both England or France don't have good ones, but from my experience the majority of the animated shows that they show on television or paid TV are not that good. Most of them suffer from low budget, choppy or simple animation and other problems.
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If we're still on the topic of animation and not style for our side discussion here, majority of anime itself are low budget choppy and simple animations.
The main thing that makes anime fans think that anime has good animation is the pretty style and detail. I'm sure you have seen many times on AS where people can't even differentiate between animation and graphics. Anime has a really bad habit of saving manpower and budget, which is still frames, they are notorious in the animation industry for that.
I'm an Evangelion and Gainax fan, but I'll use it as an example, its probably one of the least animated works of Gainax. Remember how many episodes where there were scenes of two minutes of doing absolutely nothing? Shinji staring at the ceiling, sitting in the train, the animators saved hundreds, thousands of frames while the only thing that kept those scenes alive were BGM and voice actors. Remember the number of elevator and escalator scenes? Those are basically hundreds of still frames with just a panning or zooming background.
Anime is literally animated by sound, the music and voice acting creates illusionary movement for the scenes. Even so despite the amount of effort and investment in voice acting, animators do not animate conversations. When characters talk to each other, the only thing that moves is the mouth and lately there's even a trend where they don't even show the face of the talking character, a complete still frame of conversation. This would have been completely unacceptable in cartoons, conversations always come with gestures and facial animation, both requires knowledge and skill of acting and staging.
Such 'cheats' to cut of corners and save budge in anime persist till now and yet they are demanding so much money for their DVDs and Blurays. If you're saying the fight scenes are worth it, then you're really only paying for less than a tenth of the animation. And even fight scenes are packed full of sliding still poses and repeating frames. Anime is the only type of film where the audience is happy even with the lack of motion. Probably one of factors the niche audience of anime has is the acceptance of such lack of motion.
The only thing that anime has over western animation besides pretty aesthetics are the stories, not the writing, but the range of themes and genres.