Anime & Donghua

Alas, because we're in the part of the year where Turtle Island has switched to DST and Europe is still on standard time, I've had to put The Owl House on hold for a bit. Or I guess "had to" and had to, since I could just start my shows at 10 PM my time, but I do prefer to start at 11 PM when I can.

People said they liked Trigger Happy Horses, but the chat was pretty dead for most of the movie.

Regarding My Little Pony: A New Generation, come Saturday I'll probably agree with my past self and say that it's a serviceable — if not outright Fun — movie, but still far below MLP G4.

Fireman Sam continues to be a very cute little stop motion slice of life. Once I finish showing series 5 I guess I'll move on to Joshua Jones. But imagine if something like Cardcaptor Sakura were in the Sam-Jones stop motion style, that would rock, right?

SHINE was very technically competent and I think the use of narration was a good choice for the limits of the medium, but unfortunately it never got a second episode.

By contrast, Magic Heart and the Magical Warriors is probably the longest fanime of all time; I'll be showing episode 2 this Wednesday alongside some Soviet movies. What's notable about Magic Heart aside from its length, age (starting in 2007), and weird-ass geometric art style, is the voice acting — it's all Microsoft Sam! The characters have literal ROFLcopter Bonzi Buddy ass voices, presumably because the creator didn't speak English as a first language and didn't have access to any other voice actors (or maybe just didn't want to deal with doing voice direction over the Internet).

My own fanime I'm slowly but surely working on, Blazoner Narazen, also uses machine-synthesized voices — albeit using Retrieval-based Voice Conversion rather than text-to-speech, to give me full control over the intonation and meter of the acting. But ultimately I have to acknowledge that Magic Heart's use of Microsoft Sam is for similar reasons as BlaNara's use of RVC: the only meaningful difference is 20 years of technological advancement.

Camden once said something like, "In the future people will use GenAI to make fanime and it will be indistinguishable from the original thing" — which I thought was honestly pretty disrespectful to the medium. Fanime is to me something defined by its "spirit" first and foremost: the spirit of making things for the sake of making things, even if the end result is poorly drawn, poorly acted, and poorly written, or otherwise "cringeworthy". Offloading that to generative AI just defeats the purpose! The point is not that fanime is an anime-inspired animation created (or in the case of GenAI "created") by an anime fan: the point of fanime is in the creative process, in the drawings that through their flaws show how they were made, you know? So the uses of machine learning technologies that are acceptable in fanime in my view are those that adhere to this Fanime Spirit™.

But that's enough of that tangent.

It was good to return NEW GAME!!. We'll presumably finish it on Sunday, after which we'll have to choose something else to watch together. It was also fun to show ol' Aeroo Chitanda various songs I liked, and she also showed me a song she liked in turn, Bao The Whale's "Final Bow", a Vtuber song that vaguely reminded me of Eir Aoi's "Sirius" from Kill la Kill. I think she might've also shown me another song in the intermissions but I didn't make note of it, alas.

Cardcaptor Sakura remains a favorite of mine, but Garg's wapas were my first time seeing the movies. A good time was had by all.

Magic Knight Rayearth is another CLAMP anime. I've tuned in for the first eight episodes but frankly they haven't impressed me nearly as much as Cardcaptor. Part of that is probably just because it's hard for me to follow along on the chat and the subtitles at the same time, especially when I'm tired and distracted by [gestures broadly at the absolute state of things]. Following along on the subtitles is a much smaller issue when the thing being shown is an anime I've already seen before.

Apropos anime I've already seen before, Gurren Lagann: It fucked way harder than when I watched it for the first time yeeeaaars ago, but the movie was disappointing.

Courage the Cowardly Dog is another old cartoon I'd wanted to get a taste of just to familiarize myself with others' nostalgia. I was surprised that the dog talked, I kinda thought the dog only whimpered. Frankly, I think it would've been better if the dog only whimpered.

Archer and Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt are interesting because they're both kinda gross and vulgar for the sake of it, but I didn't care for the former but look forward to the latter every week. I first tried Panty & Stocking yeeeaaars ago and basically rejected it because of the grossness and vulgarity, but this time around I've responded to it much better. Is the social aspect part of my enjoyment? Probably, but that raises the question of why I didn't care for Archer.