Hey, Answerman!

Phony Baloney

Hah. "Gang." Now I'm picturing my readers as roving packs of marauders, snapping their fingers in West Side Story-style syncopated rhythms, dancing to Stephen Sondheim songs. That is an image I want to never leave my brain.

And the "fuzziness" is also suspect. The colors in Avatar: The Last Airbender are certainly a bit more muted and soft than I think people are used to in their cartoon shows, but I dunno about you, I think it looks just as vibrant and sharp as anything else that's animated on TV. And it has nothing to do with "paint and supplies." Every last anime on TV, with the exception of Sazae-san, is animated and colored digitally. Same with every single animated show in the west.

Having said that, I do think there's something to be said, quality-wise, about the fundamental differences between animation done here in the west versus Japan. Which, I mean, I know that sounds obvious, BUT - to put it very simply, there's so many weird ways that animation production itself differs between the two that it's sort of a miracle that something like The Last Airbender can even kinda pull off the "anime" look.

And those differences in the sheer discipline of animation are what really screams to the trained anime-watching eye that something like The Last Airbender is not anime. I doubt that kids or people less trained on anime were able to really discern the difference, but it doesn't take somebody like an Anipages Daily reader to tell that something like Avatar doesn't hold on key poses as long as anime tends to, or that the camera angles tend to be less dramatic and more static. American and (generally) Western animation is created through such a factory-like system of automation that it's always a miraculous thing, to me, when the animation takes even a small little risk. Western animated shows are "timed" extremely closely - meaning, every movement, action, and piece of dialog is coded onto the "layouts" which provide the blueprint that the animators have to follow. And if they don't, that basically screws up the entire scene - dialog doesn't go where it needs to be, characters overlap each other, that sort of thing. Once the episodes are timed and drawn as layouts, the animators' job is to basically plug in the necessary jigsaw pieces (or "drawings" I guess) into the puzzle, and the whole thing flows. (Of course, I'm speaking in generalizations here - not every cartoon show follows the same formula for production.)

Because the budgets are (typically) much smaller for anime, and the teams are much smaller, there *is* a certain amount of "freedom" on behalf of their animators. That's because, honestly, they're not beholden to strict timing - after all, they don't start recording the dialog until after the animation is in production. That gives the animation crew a ton more freedom to play with the timing and the action as the director deems fit. There's a certain "looseness" to the timing in Japanese animation, I think, that gives it its distinct flavor - moreso than the "jerky movements" and "flapping mouths" that people always point to. Western shows simply don't have that luxury, since they have to strictly adhere to the "click tracks" (temporary dialog/music tracks) in order to speed up production.

But that's just one part of it, and the part that jumps immediately to me when I see something like The Last Airbender. It's sort of an "uncanny valley" thing, in a sense; the closer it gets to looking just like an anime, the more the little things stand out to the trained eye. Of course, the big difference is that the method of production, the training, and the execution of anime v. Western animation was developed by two methods that were created within the two countries over 60 years ago, independently of one another - while certain portions are similar, that's merely by coincidence. The godfathers of Japanese animation, going back to Toei Douga in the 50's and Mushi Pro in the 60's, were essentially self-trained and self-taught animators who had to reverse-engineer the Disney animated films they were seeing after the war. They ended up with a very specific discipline of timing, directing, and executing animation in an efficient manner, and it's basically unchanged today - except of course with bigger and better tools and technology.

But, what's good for the goose isn't always good for the gander. In the business world, especially the entertainment business, the cost of convenience be rather high. Nobody seems to flinch at Crunchyroll's current Premium subscriber rate at $6.95 a month - you get an awful lot of content for that price, and their HD video streams are pretty good. But what if that was doubled? Because without any competition narrowing the field, suddenly overhead becomes a prohibitive factor - companies need to tack on extra server costs, extra licensing costs to cover the suddenly huge array of content they need, and so forth.

There's also the problem of the "tyranny of the majority." Right now, Crunchyroll is subsidized mostly by their simulcasts of big tentpole shows like Naruto Shippuden and Bleach - cool stuff like Folktales From Japan probably isn't doing much for them monetarily, if it makes any monetary sense at all. If there truly was a one-stop shop, one way to keep costs down would be to eschew niche titles like that, freeing up their servers and networks for the shows that consistently bring in the viewers. And that would just be a damn shame.

Part of the appeal of something like Crunchyroll and NicoNico and Hulu and the rest, is the sheer breadth of content that you can get between the three of them. Sure, there's definitely a lot of overlap between them, and largely they seem to be targeting the same audiences, but the healthy thing about competition is that it allows for that tiny bit of variance, to the point where I can watch new episodes of Polar Bear Cafe on Crunchyroll, old episodes of Bubblegum Crisis on Hulu, and everything else in-between on Funimation's site, and of course numerous other options - Netflix, Amazon, Playstation Network, iTunes, everything!

It's a vast, connected network, and I personally think that *if* the price of a little bit of inconvenience means that we get more diverse content, then so be it! There's more than enough eyeballs and more than enough peculiar tastes out there to supply enough users to make even the niche-iest of the niche titles a worthwhile streaming acquisition. And I think that's pretty damn cool. We live in a golden age here, people!

Unless you live in another, non-North-American region. Or, stuff happens to one of those streaming websites. Which leads me to my last question:

Now, I wasn't able to contact Funimation about this, since this news came in just under the wire from when this column is due, but I felt like I should touch on it. If only to make one point that I see every time a show is pulled:

Just chill out, guys. Let's just wait and see what happens here.

Are the shows coming back? I have no idea. For the time being at least, if you were hooked on Future Diary on NicoNico, that's still online via Funimation.

Is FUNico a bust? If this is truly the end of it all, then yes. But if it comes back, then no. Very simple math, there.

And, look, I get it - the silence is a bit frustrating, but that's leading to an awful lot of weird theories and misinformation getting spread via Twitter and internet forums. When things like this happen, I understand that it's fun to curl up into the nest of conspiracy theories inside of your head and come up with weird reasoning and ideas about what you "think" happened. But you don't know, and the people who do are working behind-the-scenes and they simply aren't ready to comment yet. So, let's not start spreading weird "rumors" that this is somehow linked to the One Piece leaks of yesteryear, that one half of the partnership is "holding out" on the other, or some grand "Crunchyroll/Sentai Initiative" or anything like that. Misinformation spreads just as quickly as actual information these days. If not quicker.

And really, it's best not to make up stuff like that if for no other reason than the high likelihood that you will be dead wrong about it. Because we're all nice and civilized people, we probably won't make you eat crow about anything you've made up when it turns out to be wrong. But can you imagine how much it would suck if we did? Yuck! And you'll have to eat it while listening to Humble Pie. Their terrible early-80's stuff, too. Ew.