Thursday, October 19, 2006

Why I Do Not, as a General Rule, Watch Anime

I've never really found anime as fascinating as some do. I have occasionally watched more than a minute of Inuyasha on the Cartoon NetWork, and two years ago I found Lupin III mildly amusing, but in general I don't find it that interesting.

Two things, though, that I have noticed about anime:

(1) As Udolpho has pointed out, there seems to be a creepy pedophilic element in a lot of the Japanese cartoons, where obviously sexualized characters look like they are still in elementary school. (More precisely, everyone looks like they are in elementary school, so any sexual behavior by default involves people who look underage).

(2) In graduate school, I once watched an episode of Knights of the Zodiac wih a friend who insisted that it was the best cartoon ever. I couldn't help but noticing how they translated onto screen the comic book conceit that one can recite an entire paragraph of dialogue in the time it takes to do a jump-kick. This becomes not only bizarre, but in my opinion extremely boring, as you can watch a whole minute of a fight scene during which time one of the contenders is still suspended in the air waiting for his attack to hit home.

In any case, I much prefer American cartoons (including the American versions of cartoons that also had different Japanese versions, i.e. classic Transformers).

That is all.

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