Quote:
Originally Posted by SeijiSensei
Isn't a lot of the difference between Japanese and Western television programming due to the fact that the Japanese expect their audiences will follow a long-form, multi-episode program? American television programs are almost always episodic with little in the way of a longer plot. At best even in the highest-quality US shows like Homicide: Life on the Street or Picket Fences, episodes might refer back to earlier parts of the story or have some underlying themes, but most episodes still can be watched on a stand-alone basis.
Many anime productions don't conform at all to this model of programming. First, you have many programs with well-defined conclusions. No recent American series I can think of does this, in large part because you need a lot of episodes to support syndication, which is where the real profits are found. (Just as anime producers use network broadcasts as advertisements for DVD sales, US network television producers use the network run to build audiences that will watch repeats in syndication on cable or local stations.) I'm not sure I'd disagree with Matrim about how intrinsically complicated anime shows are, since very complicated shows probably won't succeed as mass entertainment in any culture. Still the long-form nature of many anime shows gives the writers and producers the space to develop more complex stories that don't need to be told entirely in one episode.
As for examples of "complicated" shows, I might list Evangelion, Noein, or Ergo Proxy, but in each of these cases I'd say the more complex material is really a gloss over fairly simple stories. You don't really need to understand the pseudo-science of Noein to appreciate it as an adventure, and the philosophical glitter of the other two is really just that, glitter. I don't think either of those shows are as deep as they pretend to be.
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Yes, very true. Evangelion doesn't actually have a complex story, it just has a shitload of meaningless 'christian symbolism' and weird imagery. Naming things after things in the Bible does not make a good story alone.
Anyway, Higurashi as an anime suffered a little bit, because the story is so insanely complicated; the anime could not POSSIBLY show all the backstory from the games, and therefore it lost a bit of luster.