Dharma & Greg Get Animated... About Animation
 

CARTOONS, BITCH!!! i

https://media.giphy.com/media/iJSpqpVU7L2Ks/giphy.gif


Fin to go rewatch the first episode of Record of Lodoss War and then talk about that ****. Stay (car)tuned.

If you asked me for an anime that was pure Tolkien worship then I'd have a very short number of recommendations for you. I could give you Slayers but while it's very Western fantasy it's also Japanese anime comedy to the hilt so won't satisfy your cravings. I could give you Vision of Escaflowne or Berserk but while they are more serious they go their own way, the former taking influence from giant robot anime and the latter being more alternate medieval history with a heavy Lovecraftian influence. Really the only anime I can think of that would satisfy everything and nothing else that you would want from an anime that was Lord of the Rings embodied would be Record of Lodoss war. It is the best Dungeons & Dragons campaign you ever played with your lameass friends writ large with every trope you'd expect accounted for.

The entire 13-episode series is well worth your time but while I could try to encapsulate everything involved into a blurb that would simply make it sound like every old school fantasy book you could read (cause it kinda is) I will instead tell you of the very first episode and why it is the perfect introduction to such a series and why it is also one of the most perfect small forms of Western fantasy you could ever give 25-minutes of your life to regardless of how you wanted to imbibe your fantasy.

This episode begins with a fellowship entering a cave to do... something. They are exactly what you would expect from a fantasy fellowship: you have your young human swordsman with more gumption than experience, your mystical elf in conflict with your gruff dwarf, your Swiss Army knife wizard, your snarky thief, and even a cleric who just wants everyone to be friends.

Throughout the episode you'll see hints of the forces of both good and evil preparing for conflict that is focused upon the outcome of our heroes' journey, but while we will see how this plays out in time, for this episode we are solely focused upon our fellowship making our way through this cave, an ancient dwarven stronghold that has fallen into darkness.

We will see evil creatures assault our heroes, we will see those heroes explore the ruins of what once was, and we will see a final confrontation with what must of course be at the heart of a corrupted, ancient place of civilization. No, not a balrog, **** you. A mother****ing dragon.

So yeah guy with a sword, elf, dwarf, wizard, and then they fight a dragon. And there's lore interspersed. That's the entirety of this episode and concentrated into less than a half-an-hour it is one of the most pure personifications of everything that is Western fantasy on this planet. It's not even the first chronological story in the series. It's somewhere in the middle but it's shoved into the beginning because it's a trailer, not only for the show itself, but for fantasy in general.

What? That doesn't sell itself? Maybe because you don't know how perfect and atmospheric the animation is? Because you don't know how the rest of the series will build on this most basic concept so masterfully into a sweeping epic? Because it doesn't give an indication that the characters will develop in interesting ways? Well that makes sense because episode 1 isn't about that. It's simply about being the perfect archetypal Western fantasy scene and everything else starts with episode 2 and mesmerizes you from there with more longform storytelling.

Record of Lodoss knows what it is and knows that to begin it needs to set the tone and knows that to do that you need to feel like you've been dropped in the middle of a D&D campaign with your drunk friends and does so with flourish and fun. For years one of my favorite things to do on a day off was order a pizza and watch this episode. There's just something about it I can't quantify that makes it perfect for a lazy day while eating pizza and I'm getting the urge right the **** now.

Watch Record of Lodoss War because if you're a fantasy fan and you don't then you're harming yourself.

Full Metal Panic? Fumoffu

Full Metal Panic has three seasons. Season 1, Fumoffu, and Season 2. Seasons 1 and 2 are a mix of anime high school romcom and mecha action series. They're goofy and fun but also switch on a dime with action and a plot revolving around... something or other. I've only seen part of season 1 and nothing of season 2 and that was a while ago so I don't really remember. But that doesn't matter cause we're talking about the intermediate season Fumoffu. Fumoffu is Full Metal Panic with the action (almost) completely taken out to leave us with a fully silly anime high school rom com. Except it's a unique high school rom com that can actually be watched independently of the series proper and let's see why, and let's also see why it's by far the funniest anime I've ever seen and easily a top 5 funniest show of any kind I've ever seen...

Episode 1 (separated into two separate parts of which we will explore only the first) begins with a high school teacher confronting a principal concerning destruction of school property buy one Sousuke Sagara. The principal makes it clear that this will be ignored due to a "sizable donation". You see, Sousuke is a child soldier, a member of a benevolent mercenary unit, and his current assignment is to protect one Kaname Chidori, a fully normal high school girl, for reasons that are made clear in the first season but never in Fumoffu because they don't matter and have nothing to do with this season. So just go with it.

After this we see Kaname walking to school with a friend discussing a Sylvester Stallone movie she had watched the previous night cause that's just her thing, and they are interrupted at the school entrance by an explosion. You see, Sousuke had discovered that his shoe locker (Japanese school children turn in their shoes at the entrance) had been tampered with and decided that the only reasonable solution was to use C4 to detonate it. Sousuke has only known war and does not know how to be a student, so the fact that his locker had been "tampered" with by a female admirer leaving a love letter would never and could never cross his mind. Hence the high yield explosive. You never know when it could be the work of a terrorist.

So after Kaname discovers the source of the explosion she performs her main duty throughout the series: she physically assaults Sousuke in energetic exasperation.




After a discussion with the school council president who is also a nutbar who sides with Sousuke, Kaname and her male lead love interest discuss the nature of the letter that he exploded. Kaname perceives it to be a love letter cause of course it was and I just said it was, but Sousuke thinks it is a clever feint challenging him to a duel after school while also impersonating the handwriting of a high school girl because he is stupid.

Sousuke leaves to do... what the **** ever, and so Kaname, thoroughly jealous, and her previously mentioned friend decide to wait in the bushes at the spot where the "terrorist" had told Sousuke to wait after school and proceed to sit for several hours while the "terrorist" girl, a beauty pageant runner-up cause of course, waits in plain site. Eventually it gets dark and even Kaname begins to feel sorry for the hapless love letter sender but then the stock Japanese toughs intent on rape show up.

They try to assault the other girl, Kaname stops them, also almost gets raped, and then Sousuke, having waited motionless in a prone firing position for many hours in a gillie suit shoots the toughs with rubber bullets.

Like, the hapless girl is highly confused by this, is devastated on revelation that her letter was blown up, and then we never see her again. Then Kaname physically assaults Sousuke for being a clueless weirdo who can only deal with normal situations via ludicrous military solutions.




Then the next day she leaves him a lunch in his shoe locker in thanks for saving her and assaults him when he tries to detonate his locker yet again.

And this is the entire gist of Full Metal Panic? Fumoffu. It's just Sousuke misinterpreting normal high school situations, trying to blow things up, and Kaname beating him up while being in love with him. And it never gets old. My god it never gets old. You have no idea just how much feet this concept has. The writing is razor sharp and the animation is beautifully modern yet still warm and inviting. And most importantly none of it makes the least bit of sense ever at all. I just watched this first episode and had to tear myself away from the series because **** off.

This will absolutely not be my last Full Metal Panic entry. This wasn't even a particularly notable episode. It's just a good setup. There's so much brilliance that I absolutely must tell you more.

Just rewatched some episodes of FMP Fumoffu? and holy **** is it still one of the best shows of all-time so I'm definitely gonna have to make more entries. "The Hamburger Hill of Art", "A Goddess Comes to Japan Part 2", and absolutely most of all "The War Cry of Excessiveness" need their own entries.

Got a link to anywhere I can check out the Lodoss War?

I'll partake in any discussion that focuses on the following shows because they mean the world to me...

Adventure Time
Ren & Stimpy
Futurama
Rocko's Modern Life
Cow & Chicken
The Simpsons

My man!

Japanese: https://kissanime.ru/Anime/Record-of-Lodoss-War-Sub
English: https://kissanime.ru/Anime/Record-of-Lodoss-War-Dub

****in' plebe. I figure there will come a time when I'll have to talk about Futurama though.

You can make arguments about the rest being normie shows but if you don't like Adventure Time, you have no idea what you're talking about. It's a fantastic show.

I've actually never seen it through sheer laziness but I know I need to.

I watched the first episode of Adventure Time and noped out.

It's nice but hella overrated.

Lol, Fumoffu sounds hilarious.

Banned for adblock.. i'll try back in a couple days or on my ipad, cause that website is sketchy as ****.

That's just the first episode, which is merely a taste of its heights. I haven't covered the episode where Sousuke shouts profanity at a bunched of gay coded rugby players to turn them into remorseless soldiers, or the hot springs episode where Sousuke's male classmates try to peep on the girls and have to run through Sousuke's literal field of mines.

Yeah Kiss Anime was great for a long time but it's gone hard with ads and **** recently and is kind of annoying now. Gogo Anime might be the better site at this point even if Kiss Anime still has the most comprehensive selection on the internet. You might just have to turn off Adblock though. I mean that is a thing.

Sub: https://gogoanime.io/category/record-of-lodoss-war
Dub: https://gogoanime.io/category/record-of-lodoss-war-dub

Nope, not turning it off. Ipad it is :D

So you have to avoid like half of the internet?

Yeah, it's fantastic. Also, I only really go on YouTube, Twitch, and informative websites that aren't trying to sell you ****. I can't think of a single quality website that has issues with adblocker. It's only sketchy **** you like to visit. There's a reason I don't have virus protection and have 0 viruses.

Oh so you're just boring.

Do you stop reading a book because the first three pages didn't grip you?

I really think you'd love the series if you watched the whole thing. There's so many episodes that make zero sense unless you know the story well and once you do, you realize it's a very special show.

Try to watch the episode "Hall of Egress".

You already know this. Now get back on topic.

I've seen a lot of episodes and never ran into a nonsensical one. What does watching the whole series open up apart from nostalgia?

Kind of has that "Arrested Development" thing where callbacks happen without giving a lot of exposition to what they mean, except they're not "inside jokes", they're important pieces of story context that make what's happening in the episode mean much more than it leads on.

For example there are lots of flashbacks and set pieces where Finn has a robotic right arm. You learn later in the season what that means and the context of where you saw him without an arm in previous episodes makes that reveal mean much more than just "Oh, Finn has a robot arm now".

There's also subtle clues that dive into the relationships of certain characters multiple seasons before you learn the answers to them.

Next entry will probably be about Dino-Riders so way ahead of you.

I'd be really curious to hear your thoughts on The Thief and the Cobbler, Richard Williams' 30-year long passion project.

I've been rewatching Vision of Escaflowne cause it's fantastic and I'd love to do an entry about it but in the first few episodes I came across an old thing I'd forgotten about that interests me on a language level. English and Japanese have different pronunciation norms. Duh. For instance the Japanese have that thing I'm not qualified to comment on where they add "u"s to the end of a lot of their consonants at the end of words and I don't really know why, but that's not what this is about. This is about a quirk in English pronunciation I just realized that I find cool.

Many names in the show are Western influenced (such as "Van" and "Allen") and "Merle" is pretty clearly so when you consider just how difficult it is for Japanese voice actors to pronounce her name without sounding like they're trying to swallow a particularly uncooperative squid. "Merulu" obviously is not what they're trying to say, but I think the transition from the "r" to the "l", at least at the end of a word, might be a bitch for anyone who isn't fluent in a language that does this.

Try it. Go "rrrrrrrrrrrrr" and then quickly go to "L". See if you notice that in-between you involuntarily exhale because the tip of your tongue moving to your top teeth naturally flexes your throat muscles just a bit. Now imagine if you were a native speaker of a language that didn't do this and see if "rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrulu" doesn't make a bit more sense. Kind of a next level pronunciation technique tbh.

There's no real reason to this post. I just thought of that and it was fun to me.

All of those weird Japanese pronunciations of non-Japanese words and names make sense when you know how their alphabet works. If I recall correctly, the only stand alone consonant they've got is an "n" sound. Hence the need to cram in vowels where they don't belong into foreign words.

Yeah people talk about Spanish and rolling "r"s, but when I listen to Japanese I realize that Westerners roll all of their consonants to transition into vowels in a way that's kind of neato. Like if you do it slowly and imagine how your mouth looks while you're doing it you feel smarmy and kind of like a super villain and I swear to god this is why the West conquered the world.

In Danish, the "r" is clearly still there, but it's always a very short, clipped sound compared to something like Spanish, French. But I've got no difficulties rolling r's like a Spaniard.

It's funny how easy it is to learn to pronounce Japanese, considering how hard it is for them to do the same for other languages. Their words are very simple in structure and there's not a lot of vowel and consonant variety. Oppositely, I believe I read somewhere that Danish is the language in the world with the largest variety of vowel sounds, so a Japanese person would probably need 50 years to learn to sound like a native.

lol I don't know why I said "roll". I think I was visualizing a consonant casually "rolling" into a vowel and was too party time to worry about saying smart things. I mean everyone knows what rolling an R is and I was not talking about that.

Ok I get what you were saying better now. Definitely not all western languages have actual rolling r's to a noteworthy degree.

I do like the languages that do. Also Russian. Sounds badass in songs.

Perhaps that's why Japanese and Korean pop is so big. The languages are so consonant and single syllable based that it goes perfectly with pop beats.

I've thought about this entry for a while but rewatching the movie now I really think I need to make an entry for The Death of Superman comic vs the animated movie, cause the comic is a piece of comic history but the movie is actually comic history worth talking about as far as I'm concerned. So let this be encouragement to actually do this piece.

Oh and also *spoiler alert* Batman V Superman does the thing where Doomsday just kind of kills Superman and we're meant to be amazed by this, but the Death of Superman animated movie introduces us to the very idea of Superman, sells him as a hero that Metropolis loves and is emotionally attached to, and then kills him in a way that is dramatically satisfying. Like, the animated Death of Superman movie is one of the core things that has made me care about Superman and it did it in a way that made introducing him in a movie also be the 1 hour and 30 minutes thing that made me really sad that he died. I ****ing cared about Superman after this animated movie.

They actually weren't. I mean they had a nice fight going on, but the idea of setting up Doomsday as a major threat by having him crush a Justice League of nobody's who nobody cared about being beaten up would have POSSIBLY been meaningful for anybody who cared about the current Justice League at the time but does womping on Booster Gold, Blue Beetle, and mother****ing Bloodwynd mean a damn thing as far as making it meaningful to then show that Superman also couldn't beat the same threat?

And the main thing that made the Death of Superman comic uneventful was simply that they basically didn't try to make it eventful. Like they were trying to keep all the emotional moments for after the Death of Superman series when everyone finally realized that Superman was dead and it was time to feel sad.

Seriously though, the comics weren't that great. The animated Death of Superman movie though was emotional, eventful, and just badass in a way that the comics weren't. I've watched the movie and I've read the comics, and the movie was infinitly more emotionally impactful. Even just the final moment works when the original is weak.