What non-Japanese animation are you watching?

Non-anime/manga-related TV, movies, books, and comics, especially but not limited to pre-2000 titles
Heero
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Re: What non-Japanese animation are you watching?

Post by Heero »

"Monster in Paris" is a really good movie, especially if you like Phantom of the Opera
http://www.amazon.com/Monster-In-Paris- ... r+in+Paris

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Z-NbQvhzKM
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llj
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Re: What non-Japanese animation are you watching?

Post by llj »

Just watched Fantastic Planet, from 1973. Quite flawed, and some sequences seemed to be cut out of the film or they didn't have time to finish them (apparently this was outsourced to several animation houses across Europe and Asia for development, during great political turmoil in some of the countries), but I still loved it. I miss the days when cartoons were expected to be trippy. Great soundtrack too. I've never used mind altering drugs in my life, but I can imagine how the experience might be enhanced by watching this while stoned. But I watched this at 1:00am in the morning, which is close enough to hitting that sweet spot between being awake and starting to fall asleep.
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llj
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Re: What non-Japanese animation are you watching?

Post by llj »

I'm watching the Tom and Jerry blu ray and I have to say, I actually really like these older shorts better in some ways compared to their prime years. Some of the artwork in the first few years is absolutely beautiful, and I quite like the more "furry" look Tom had, over the more streamlined look in later years.

I find it funny that the "Mammy Two Shoes" character has caused so much fuss over the years. I quite like her, and while she is a stereotype, I don't find it to be necessarily a completely *negative* black stereotype (racially insensitive, but not "racist") and I find it almost refreshing to see that it often seems she actually owns Tom and the house (or houses, as they seem to take place in multiple ones) rather than being just a maid, which would mean she is a single independent black woman in the 1940s-50s, and I think the positive implications of that would negate any negativity surrounding her actual portrayal.

It's weird that in some TV airings they edit her out or reanimate her scenes with a white woman instead, which in a certain way is an action that seems even more racist than the character itself. Kind of reminds me of when the Sailor Moon dub rewrote Neptune and Uranus as "cousins". The final result in which the changes seem actually worse than the original one.

The funny thing is that in my childhood recollections of watching this during the 80s, I do recall seeing shorts with her in it, instead of the white-washed woman. Maybe rarely, but watching these again years later she seems quite familiar to me.
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Re: What non-Japanese animation are you watching?

Post by davemerrill »

last week on Bob's Burgers they went to a pony convention, as in a 'My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic' convention full of grown men wearing colorful pony outfits and buying and selling plastic toys of magic ponies. It was about fifty kinds of hilarious.
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Re: What non-Japanese animation are you watching?

Post by _D_ »

Ben 10 Ultimate Alien, Clone Wars season 6 (Netflix). Didn't get to watch the premiere of Robot Chicken yet. Have checked out TMNT but find it way too cute. Beware the Batman went off the air due to high costs and poor ratings. Nothing much else on now...
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Re: What non-Japanese animation are you watching?

Post by greg »

llj wrote:I find it funny that the "Mammy Two Shoes" character has caused so much fuss over the years.
Tom & Jerry is big in Japan, moreso than Looney Tunes (that upsets me, since LT has better humor than T&J, but oh well). I've noticed that this character has had her voice re-dubbed to sound more subdued instead of the "hysterical Southern black woman" voice. I haven't seen it reanimated to make her Caucasian, and I think that would be terrible. I never thought her character was racist, but in situations when Tom would get his face blasted and they make him look like a black baby (or "pickininny" or whatever was the word back then), that was more potentially offensive than just a black woman who runs the house. IIRC, T&J had more "blackface" gags than LT. Then again, T&J appealed more to the lower common denominator than LT. It's more slapstick violence than anything really intelligent. Roadrunner and Coyote are somewhat comparable, but the brilliance in that is all the bizarre Acme inventions that Coyote uses to try to catch Roadrunner. T&J is spoofed well with Itchy & Scratchy on The Simpsons. Just mindless violence.

However, the slapstick violence with little dialogue is what makes T&J sell well in Japan. There isn't a ton of cultural references and celebrity spoofs as there is with LT, which would go right over Japanese kids' heads.
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ParaParaJMo
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Re: What non-Japanese animation are you watching?

Post by ParaParaJMo »

Watching the Silverhawks DVDs I ripped from my brother. I used to have the toys as a boy.
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Re: What non-Japanese animation are you watching?

Post by _D_ »

New Adventure Time started on Monday.
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llj
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Re: What non-Japanese animation are you watching?

Post by llj »

Mr Magoo theatrical films collection. This just dropped on DVD and I'm plowing through them. I'm a big fan of these non-TV animation UPA productions. But I do see why UPA eventually got frustrated with Magoo...he's essentially a one-joke character no matter how you slice it. Yet audiences kept lapping it up and it became their most successful property. If you ever needed an argument that audiences prefer formula over innovation, this is just one more you can use. It's too bad Gerald McBoing Boing didn't catch on better for UPA--I think you could do a lot more with his gimmick than with Magoo's. You can only mistake something for something else for so many times before the joke gets stale. The real star of these Magoo cartoons is the design work, though...these abstract graphic line worlds they construct around Magoo for him to bumble around in. This is genuinely stylish stuff. If you treat these Magoo cartoons as graphic adventures rather than comedies, he is a lot more watchable. The later Magoo TV series was a very bad idea when you think about it...an entire TV series devoted to a guy whose lone joke is being nearly blind! These 53 theatrical shorts (and 1 full length animated feature) are more than enough Magoo anyone should get. And they look a heckuva lot better than the crappy art design and slow pace of the TV series.

Prime UPA was a lot like early Gainax. They were ambitious, motivated, progressive, and had a lot of promise early on as a rebel animation studio, but eventually they had to make a living and sold out to the almighty dollar.
greg wrote:
llj wrote:I find it funny that the "Mammy Two Shoes" character has caused so much fuss over the years.
Tom & Jerry is big in Japan, moreso than Looney Tunes (that upsets me, since LT has better humor than T&J, but oh well). I've noticed that this character has had her voice re-dubbed to sound more subdued instead of the "hysterical Southern black woman" voice. I haven't seen it reanimated to make her Caucasian, and I think that would be terrible. I never thought her character was racist, but in situations when Tom would get his face blasted and they make him look like a black baby (or "pickininny" or whatever was the word back then), that was more potentially offensive than just a black woman who runs the house. IIRC, T&J had more "blackface" gags than LT. Then again, T&J appealed more to the lower common denominator than LT. It's more slapstick violence than anything really intelligent. Roadrunner and Coyote are somewhat comparable, but the brilliance in that is all the bizarre Acme inventions that Coyote uses to try to catch Roadrunner. T&J is spoofed well with Itchy & Scratchy on The Simpsons. Just mindless violence.

However, the slapstick violence with little dialogue is what makes T&J sell well in Japan. There isn't a ton of cultural references and celebrity spoofs as there is with LT, which would go right over Japanese kids' heads.
Yes, T&J did use blackface gags long after they went out of style in most cartoons. Probably the real black mark on them.

I think early-to-mid T&J is pretty brilliant in the way it's crafted, and in its universality. It may be just "dumb violent fun" but it's about the only cartoon series I can think of where anyone around the world can understand it, no matter what language you speak. It's like Mr. Bean. By the 40s, most movies and cartoons played more to dialogue than pantomime--T&J is pure body language, and visual storytelling. There haven't been many cartoons since that done it quite with the same excellence of execution as T&J did. You can screen it on an airplane today and it will still play well. I don't think that's necessarily true of Looney Tunes, which was always usually more dialogue driven (for the record, I really didn't like the LT mainstays--Bugs, Sylvester and Tweety, Road Runner and Wile E Coyote....not a big fan of those characters. I liked their earliest and oldest characters the best: Daffy of course...and Porky was very versatile in the stories you could put him in...but I actually preferred the more experimental LT one shot shorts over their main characters) I also think much of the humour in prime LT is kind of dated today. Bugs' wisecracks don't play quite as well now as they used to. The quirky speech impediments of Sylvester, Tweety and (hate to say it) Porky and Daffy can also get annoying pretty fast these days. But I think a frying pan to the face followed by the patented Bill Hanna Tom scream still holds up as being pretty funny on a purely primal level. Sophistication inevitably dates; dumb comedy doesn't. :lol:

In terms of execution of sight gags and slapstick timing, I think T&J was leagues above almost all the other cartoons of its time. It may not have been rocket science entertainment, but the precise execution of those "dumb" gags was pure science. Alas, like Magoo it's a one or two joke cartoon...and by around the 50th short I'm pretty sure Hanna and Barbera had wrung out every conceivable variation of the "cat chases mouse" formula. I absolutely hated the later T&Js where they were more consistently friendly to each other, and when the artwork got more streamlined.
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Ben
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Re: What non-Japanese animation are you watching?

Post by Ben »

Just thought I'd mention that I recently purchased (and re-watched) Home Movies, which was a cancelled UPN show (and spiritual Dr. Katz successor) that got new life on Adult Swim. This was a really underrated show, specifically the last two seasons, looking back I feel like it was probably the best thing to air on Adult Swim. If you were a fan of Dr. Katz, or of stand up comedy/sketch comedy in general, it's definitely worth giving a shot. The DVD boxset of all 4 seasons is down to $60 now, so it's a steal at that price: http://www.shoutfactory.com/product/hom ... lithograph Coach McGuirk is one of my favorite all time animated characters, in a weird way I almost feel like I enjoy this show more than Dr. Katz going back and watching them again (I also got the Dr. Katz boxset awhile back).

*Also, this is a bit off topic, but I'm a fan of a lot of classic animation like llj. Him bringing up Mr. Magoo reminded me of something, though, Billy West (of Ren and Stimpy, Futurama, etc.) used to be a regular on The Howard Sten Show, and did a hilarious, politically incorrect Magoo impression. Obviously NSFW - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppFYo470ALU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tc1GAIIeiRg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHGa-DEbdOE
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