You think these anecdotes are boring?
I would gladly trade anecdotes all day. I just worry that I’m boring other people.
They are different. Specially after the second movie. The third one is surprising.
There is less brooding and instrospection, it has more action, and I guess more palatable to a wider audience. Again, it has new references too.
I’ll need to see it. If nothing else, I can compare and contrast it to the original. And it’ll have epic mecha vs. alien battles, so that’s worth something.
There are series that don’t have a previous manga, and these suffer from short lenght, strange endings, etc.
Sometimes. Most anime are adaptations, but Princess Tutu for example had pretty perfect pacing and a wonderful ending. But yeah, adaptations seem to fair better overall because the story and characters have already been successful, so we know they work, and then they have source material to keep from going off-track.
I think there is a perception of better quality because the big number of series they produce every season, compared to other countries. Is easier to find something good from plenty of series to choose.
But that’s my exact point. There’s more total quality and total creativity in anime than there is in, say, American animation, because there’s more anime to choose from. The fact that there’s so much anime means that not every series needs to succeed for the companies to make a profit, which means they can gamble on weirder, riskier series. That’s where the creativity comes in. Because there’s so much of it, and so much
less quality control, creators are free to breathe and make new things in a way that isn’t true of other industries.
That’s why I say books will probably always be the most creative medium, because they take less total effort and total money to produce, and there are tons of them, so people can make as many weird, new books as they want. Certain kinds of comics could overtake them in terms of creativity if books get a reputation as being too “respectable” or something, (comics also only take a single creator, so it wouldn’t be that hard), but mediums like that will always be more innovative than mediums like movies, which take hundreds of people and can’t afford to fail nearly as often these days.
My stance is that the average anime is going to be much worse than the average movie- but the best animes will be far superior (in terms of creativity and storytelling) than the best movies, because of the nature of each medium. The more total stories released in a medium, the better the best is and the worse the average is.
Granted, I haven’t seen AoT, but I haven’t heard that description from anyone who has watched it.
Anime news network lists it under no less than six genres- action, drama, fantasy, horror, psychological, and thriller. I’d probably say it has horror elements just because people keep dying in gory ways, but the presentation is more action/psychological than horror, since the characters aren’t just getting picked off and surviving by running, they’re actively fighting a threat. Even when people die (and it happens often), it’s not purely for shock or scare value; the heroes remember them and have difficulty dealing with the loss, and we explore their reasons for doing what they’re doing. It’s kind of an aged-up equivalent of Naruto with more character exploration, better action and animation, more graphic violence, and humanity always fighting a seemingly-impossible battle.
So no, I wouldn’t say “horror” is an adequate description. The atmosphere is completely different from, say, Higurashi.
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The world is far, far bigger.