2nd Anime Oscars?
More mock awards on the anime blogosphere (as if there haven’t been enough), this one being a sequel of the one I did last year. Just like the last effort, this set of awards will be structured to (somewhat) resemble the real Academy Awards, cheekily timed to coincide with yesterday’s ceremony. Again, these [...]
Random Comedy is Not Clever Comedy
This post is largely inspired by a Twitter debate largely between Sea Slugs! Anime Blog’s Jesus159159159 and The Cart Driver’s Scamp, over the respective merits and flaws of Excel Saga and Seto no Hanayome. For the record, I sided with Jesus159159159, but it’s quite a stretch to say either is an exceptionally funny, let [...]
The Structure of Yuri: the Shift from Female to Male Audiences
Yuri, shoujo-ai, girl’s love, cute anime girls getting it on with each other – no matter what you want to call it, these names refer to entertainment that contains romantic and/or sexual relationships between women. Yuri first developed as a genre mainly targeted towards women, much in the same way that lesbian literature in other societies began growing as homosexuality became an issue in developed nations. However, it seems that a large volume of yuri being produced is now marketed towards male audiences rather than ones composed of females. Why is this?
At first, the answer may seem quite simple. Perhaps men simply enjoy entertainment involving lesbian themes; after all, plenty of guys have been interested in lesbian pornography. But there’s an interesting fact about the consumers of lesbian-themed anime, manga, or novels that one should note: namely, that while pornography is purely sexual, non-erotic yuri still seems to draw customers, particularly male ones.
Themes of Distance and Separation in Ponyo
There are two ways to look at Ponyo, Miyazaki Hayao’s latest movie, one as a film and the other a story. In my opinion, as a film it’s great, as the overwhelming majority of his films are, but as a story, it’s good-OK. It’s a very simple story, possibly the simplest from Miyazaki [...]
Facial Expressions in Anime – The Extreme, The Effective…
…And the extremely effective.
Recently I’ve taken to watching video reviews from The Angry Video Game Nerd. I find his work hilarious… he has that college internet style of humour that online satirists like Maddox from The Best Page In The Universe have, except the “satire” itself has been replaced with extreme crassness delivered with [...]
