Ham, Sliced

*ahem*

Titles don't come easy for me; everything is instead an overanalysed introspective into what things really mean. Like the anime sequence from Horton Hears a Who!

The film is actually great for CGI; nicely weighted characters, natural expressions and even some genuine cartooning. However, the one thing that stands out from the rest of it is the anime-styled sequence. This is an obvious dig at children's cartoons today, which seem to either be derived from, or aiming to be series that are essentially geared toward selling 9,001 (Oh, surely you can see what I did there) different versions of the same thing to children (Pokémon? Yu-Gi-Oh? Whatever?) with a cheaply-made, episodic, formulaic (Keep adding derisory verbs, they all make sense) fodder which is offensive to look at and hear with it's high-pitched screaming child-labour "actors" and palette choices straight from a three-year old's sugar-fuelled nightmares.

Whilst watching this in the cinema, I was laughing my head off, completely. And I was the only one. After a quick look at reviews of the film on the Internet, I see it wasn't a very popular sequence; apparently it either "didn't fit" or would "date quicker than the rest of the movie" (Which in itself, is very rich for a CGI movie; in itself ostensibly based around the current level of the rendering technology but hey). I'm inclined to think they didn't get it, and nor did the people in the cinema. Tell you what, give it five years or so, and the same children who lap this sort of stuff up will since have gotten tired of it, and find this sequence as hilarious as I did.

Or, perhaps I'm biased? After all, Horton blatantly throws a Street Fighter Hadouken in this sequence, how could I not love it?

So, occasionally I'll be in a mood for some Japanese dance music, and there's a good reason why. Allow me to explain:

This is Nami Tamaki's Heroine, and it is full of exactly what appeals to me about the genre. It's not just dance music, but dance music done in the way the Japanese do it. It's different, somehow packed with a lot more energy and more variety in the dynamics than the stuff we get here. And, I think the gap between our cultures has a lot to do with it.

We, as decadent westerners, live in a culture where the very idea of lifestyle, of individuality is sold to us; and what better way to wind down after a week of your boring eight-till-five factory job, then to get ridiculously inebriated and dance the troubles away, surrounded by the opposite sex in a darkened room? Indeed, many people I know base their entire week around their Friday nights, and our advertisements, even our music reflect this.

In opposition, we have the Japanese culture, more focused on honour and success than trifling pursuits in one's spare time. Indeed, there is not a lot of personal expression in the east, and as human creatures (No matter the nationality), we need to express ourselves in whichever manner we can. But not in public, not in the working week, not around others. It's a very insular culture, so is there any wonder we'd get things like the wacky gameshows, freaky "cartoons" and music like this, packed with more energy than an average club-goer here would rather hear, in favour of generic, homogenous, easily-mixable six-minute dronefests.

Nami Tamaki is far from homogenous. I've been listening to a lot of her stuff recently, and it's a whole balanced diet of dance, techno, rock, RnB and even ballads. Okay, she hasn't got the angelic voice of, say, Ayumi Hamasaki - but that's for a post when I'm not in such a Nami Tamaki mood.

Sort of.

My love of old videoganes showing through here, this clip is absolutely charming -- sure, it contains a lot of jokes that are funnier if you've played Mega Man 2, but this captures the spirit of many things so very well; videogames, the wacky japanese, and the "fandom" factor so prevalent all over the Internet (It really is, you just have to look).

These days, I think it's very important to look at this sort of fandom as a potential demographic; I have wondered personally whether there is a potential business model in posting animated shows on the Internet completely free and accessible, but making money from merchandising -- most teenagers/students/manchildren can't get enough of "cool stuff" to wear, or stick on shelves and impress/bore guests with (myself included), there appears to be a big enough demographic for this. I know some online animators do this, for example I could buy a T-shirt of Egoraptor / Arin Hanson's Metal Gear Awesome videogame parody series if I did so desire.

Of course, if this were the primary concern of an animation studio, I could see them being very far off the mark with this approach unless the marketing or R&D staff were comprised mainly of their target demographic, which would unfortunately not be the case. And in the corner, the lowly animators all want to get their "cool stuff" made, so they can wear shirts with their silly little doodles on. Hahahahah.

Start my new blog off with a boom, I thought.

A friend drew attention to this. Now, I sort of like the style of the animated series; it's quite sleek (Possibly too far so, though) but not very emotive. Occasionally the writing or acting shone through and made it enter the realms of pure awesome to watch. Well, this clip contains one such moment.

This, the uncut version, is definitely from the "cartoons are not just for kids" school of thought; and to be very honest, the way Robin's laugh mutates into a tortured cry after he fires the gun at The Joker made me very uncomfortable indeed, way surpassing what I would have thought the simplistically rendered, almost graphic-design characters to be capable of. Terrific acting there.