This week, we discuss the Fall Anime 2016 season and how the anime community reacted to the release of Flip Flappers and Yuri!!! on Ice.
Let us know your opinions and thoughts! If you enjoy our content, give us a like, subscribe to our channel, or submit a comment here, on our video, or on Twitter!
This podcast was recorded on December 29th, 2016.
Here’s a question: What music comes to mind when I say “telekinesis”? It’s a bit of an odd question but say, for instance, that a composer had to make music all based off the idea of one vague idea: individuals with psychic powers. What would he or she do? What musical instrument or theme would fit that fantastic element? The concept may seem a little abstract, but sometimes, that’s all a composer initially gets to base a soundtrack on. Composers aren’t usually given a complete version of the material to work with (although composition is traditionally done much later in the creation process so they might have some visuals), so a lot of composition may come down to just a feeling or an idea that they get.
Yoko Kanno, for instance, is famous for taking something so vague as “being human” and making an entire body of work based off of it. On the western side, when Christopher Nolan was creating Interstellar, he initially gave the film’s composer, Hans Zimmer, the concept of “a father and son” (later changed to a daughter), without telling Zimmer anything else about the film. This was specifically to get to the heart of what Nolan felt the film should be about. Vagueness, in this way, allowed for a lot of creative freedom, but at the same time, as many artists can tell you, too much freedom can be oppressive, leaving them to not even know where to begin. However, because the initial idea may be so vague, the same concept done by different composers can lead to amazingly diverse music, which brings me back to the music of psychic powers.
This week, we talk about how Barakamon’s usage of a unique setting brought out Handa’s true potential and helped his skills develop.
We also talk about random references we made in the lost footage of this episode, which you’ll never get to hear. Sorry.
Let us know your opinions and thoughts! If you enjoy our content, give us a like, subscribe to our channel, or submit a comment here, on our video, or on Twitter!
This podcast was recorded on December 8th, 2016.
Lately I’ve been binge-watching anime films as I still haven’t seen several influential films that I probably should have by now, especially with 200+ anime series now under my belt. Specifically, I’ve started catching up on Ghibli movies, as they’re the ones I’m lacking from my anime background the most. I’m already a huge fan of Makoto Shinkai and seeing how popular Your Name. is in sales, even surpassing some classic Ghibli films, I wanted to find out why Ghibli has always been popular among Western fans while directors like Shinkai are only finally breaking into the market. While Your Name. is most likely an excellent film (please no spoilers), it’s very tonally Shinkai in both art style and narrative, yet it’s gotten so much more hype than his other works. If it is so stylistically Shinkai, then why is it that very few works of his, minus arguably Five Centimeters Per Second, are not even mentioned by most well-versed anime fans, yet almost every Ghibli film is known even to those who just dabble in Japanese animated films?
This week, we discuss the ethic systems in place within Shinsekai Yori and how perceptions of those ethics shape our view of humanity.
Unrelated, we also talk about Japan’s obsession with blood types for a bit.
Let us know your opinions and thoughts! If you enjoy our content, give us a like, subscribe to our channel, or submit a comment here, on our video, or on Twitter!
This podcast was recorded on November 19th, 2016.
Every time a new season of anime rolls around, I take some time to look through the season’s offerings and decide what shows I’m hyped about, what I might give a look, and what I will more than likely pass altogether. Generally speaking, I check out most shows’ available PVs and do some digging into the creative teams that have been working on the show. These factors are most often what inform my choices of what I decide to check out, and what to perhaps get excited about. What acts as a preliminary informant to me before I even get to that stage of digging, however, is the simple survey of show genres–in contrast to the great deal of digging I do for shows that I follow, I often don’t pay much mind to shows that don’t seem even remotely interesting to me as far as their purported genres indicate.
Usually, I tend to breeze past shows that are tagged as ecchi, for example. If a show is branded as “action, comedy, ecchi, romance,” more often than not, you can bet that I am not going to be following that show in the slightest. That being said, I don’t have anything against the ecchi genre–I know many people that are fans of shows within the genre as a whole, and I know that, in some senses, it can be fairly diverse in how it appeals to different audiences within the genre fanbase through various modes of sexual fanservice. There’s all sorts of arguments that people can make about the genre with regards to, for example, how it might appeal to a male gaze, which, if you really want to get into that, seems to ignore the existence of any alternative gazes (lesbian gaze, bisexual gaze, etc.). But that’s not a discussion I’m going to get into here. Everyone has their own opinions as far as genre goes, and they’re entitled to those opinions. Some people don’t like mecha anime; some people don’t like slice of life; I myself generally don’t like ecchi.
Before we get into the post, I have to give a big shout-out to my ISP (who shall remain unnamed) for all their amazing work making sure my internet connection stays up and stable when I really need it to. Thanks, guys. You didn’t screw this one up at all.
Seriously, though, I hadn’t initially planned on writing a post about my shows I’m excited to watch this season—initially, I was simply going to share my thoughts during the Log Time General Podcast #2, which if you haven’t given a listen, you absolutely should. It’s filled to the brim with some fantastic discussion about some of the earlier episodes of this season’s shows, all nicely wrapped up in sweet, sweet banter between Mythos and Owningmatt (and myself, for all of about twenty minutes).
With that in mind, I should go ahead and mention that this is in no way meant to be an exhaustive preview of this season—due to the technical difficulties during the recording of the podcast, I still had some things I wanted to mention about the few shows that I definitely plan on watching this season; thus, here we are. So let’s get started.
This week, we discuss the Fall 2016 season and how portrayal of narrative elements can make or break perception of a show.
Let us know your opinions and thoughts! If you enjoy our content, give us a like, subscribe to our channel, or submit a comment here, on our video, or on Twitter!
This podcast was recorded on October 27th, 2016.
You know who the biggest assholes in myth are? Fairies. I mean, sure, the Greek pantheons were pretty bad, but what they typically did was monumental in scale, making them seem more malevolent or dispassionate towards humans rather than just plain trolling. Let’s say here I am, walking through the cliff sides, when I suddenly see a beautiful woman blocking my path and dancing to a haunting tune. She asks me to dance. If I don’t, I get thrown into the nearby thistles to hurt for the rest of the week. If I do, she may let me pass or I’ll just end up in the bushes anyways. Not to mention that given my skills in the art of dance, I’ll probably be in the thistles either way.
This example is actually from French folklore of the Dames blanches or “White Ladies”, a
particularly nice fae compared to a lot of others. See, even when fairies are nice to humans, they’ll still find some way to dick you over, or, in the case of this fae, have you pulling thistles out of yourself for weeks. In fact, throughout most European mythology, fairies are notorious for messing with humans because 1.) they can, 2.) it’s fun killing humans for sport, torturing humans for decades and what not, and 3.) because it’s all some power play to keep us down, like we’re a group of beatniks oppressed by the Bourgeoisie. The worst part is that sometimes they may help a human out on a whim, making it confusing as hell to figure out what they’re up to. It’s like meeting the Joker on a good day. I think the Fae took Cyndi Lauper to heart because, particularly at our expense, fairies “just wanna have fun.”
Pictured above: Cyndi Lauper being accosted in the woods about her peculiar dance moves.
This week, we talk about the stand-out romance story of Nodame Cantabile and how classical music creates a character driven narrative.
We also touch on how drama is portrayed in anime, along with some other differences between this show and modern anime.
Let us know your opinions and thoughts! If you enjoy our content, give us a like, subscribe to our channel, or submit a comment here, on our video, or on Twitter!
This podcast was recorded on October 6th, 2016.
The Backloggers 