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Originally Posted by TinyRedLeaf
Similarly, when fans complain that "moe is ruining anime", they are implicitly saying that there's too much emphasis on cutesy imagery to sell the story. The unspoken message is that such anime is beneath the intellectual dignity of supposedly more sophisticated viewers.
Again, these fans are completely missing the point of animation. If not animation to present a cutesy story of cute girls doing cute things, then which medium? Sure, we could specifically create a drama as a vehicle for promoting carefully groomed celebrity idols — but in that case, viewers would more likely focus on the actual idols than the characters they are supposed to portray.
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Well it's the whole package, which includes sound and script.. You can have a cutsey looking girl doing cutesy things. Then you can have a cutesy girl with a cutesy BGM and a cutesy voice (That often times sounds rather child-like). Then you can have a whole show's script revolve around cutesy dialogue and cutesy plot.
You could also have cutesy images and the script doesn't have to revolve around cutesy things. Take Madoka for example. What can be more cute than a mahou shojo
? But the story is anything but cute.
I think it's for the above reason that people put so much emphasis on the "writing," and I have to disagree with you that writing serves the visuals. I think the relation tends to be just the opposite and that visuals serve the writing. Anime is suppose to bring to life our very ideas and thoughts with its visuals. Does our story inherently have to make use of the fact that it's animation rather than live-action or even just a book? Well of course! This is an anime, and when a production staff animates something, they are making us of all the techniques and expertise they are gifted with to make an idea come alive in the best way possible in the medium.
Maybe the disagreement is merely semantics here; what exactly do we call the inception of the ideas we wish to make come to life in a story? Do we call that writing? Or nothing at all? Yes, we use a visual medium to tell our story, but if the idea is bad... It's just bad. I really do think an anime can survive with mediocre visuals, but a great story. I do not think the same is true of the opposite, from my perspective. That's why the writing is always going to be talked about first, even though as 4Tran pointed out, we could stand to talk a little more about the visual aspect of anime and its importance to the shows we are watching.
Quote:
Originally Posted by TinyRedLeaf
As it were, I already feel that there is too much obsession over which voice-actors are involved in any given anime production, too much focus over celebrity rather than on the specific acting qualities that any voice-actor brings to an anime project.
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People are obsessed with actors just the same in Hollywood. That's not unique to anime, film critics do exactly the same. I do not think there would any obsession unless the individual merits of said voice actor did shine through. Sure, perhaps people don't sit there and break down each and every time why said VA is fit for a role or not (Though you'll see it happen here and there). Then there's this idea of overexposure that's been prevalent in the industry lately. For example Kana Hanazawa is a phenomenal voice actress, and she does a great job in almost every anime she does, but the characters she does start to blur together because she's in like 3-4 shows in a given season (This season alone we got Psycho-Pass, Zetsuen no Tempest, Kotoura-San, Shinsekai Yori where she is featured prominently). It's not like these performances aren't distinct in their own way, but when you hear your voice it's like "Oh that's Kana," and that sort of breaks your immersion sometimes.