An Evolution in Franchise Milking

Ah, children, the new year is upon us at last. As many of you may know, Charles Darwin celebrates some anniversaries this year, including the publication of The Origin of Species. I had planned to do a little article on Charlie, as I'm quite taken with him. However, I realized just in time that this is a visual media blog, not a general blog. It is with this in mind that I bring you a feature on another one of 2009's evolutionary offerings: a god-fucking Dragonball live action film.

I won't lie (nor will you other brothers) and say that I didn't like Dragonball a lot when I was a kid. In a nostalgic sense, I still do like it. I still get in pretend ki fights with people from time to time. There are thousands like me, most of them in the 18-35 age bracket. This does not mean that thousands of people want to see it made into a live action feature with James fucking Marsters as Piccolo.

Back in the day, there were rumors of a movie with an actual budget coming out making the rounds in just about every discussion forum and mailing list. We became numb to it eventually, dismissing the possibility as remote and even laughable. Why the Hell would an American motion picture company want to produce a film based on a foreign series enjoyed primarily by ten year olds and nerds? I mean, especially when several Japanese-produced animated films already existed, why bother?

Of course, with the recent success of other nostalgia films like Transformers, it seems it would only make sense in this market to continue the trend of milking existing franchises for all they're worth. Things are on the rocks, so why not go with what appears to be a sure thing instead of trying something new? It might not make as much money as a totally original film would if it was a big hit, but why risk a total flop?

I know that sounds cynical, so I want to make one thing clear: I want to see this fucking film. I don't care if I have to take the bus and walk all the way to the theatre from the bus station; I will see it! My need for Spikolo knows no bounds. I don't even want to see it in a so-bad-it's-good trainwreck syndrome way; I just want to see what the fuck they're doing. As of late, I am way too fascinated by re-imaginings of existing series, and seeing Dragonball converted into an American action film would do me just fine. Just looking at the trailer fills me with a burning need to go see it, just for the sake of knowing more.

Something I find amusing is the sentiment in the online community, both within and without the YouTube comments on the video, that the question of whether or not the film will be awful can be debated. This is hilarious to me for several reasons, chief among them being the tendency toward frothing rage on either side of the argument. You're either an idiot for believing it will be good, or a depressive pessimist for assuming that it will be bad.

Here's my take on things: There is a slim but present chance that this movie will be good as a movie. The odds of it being a faithful and pleasing adaptation of the original are absolutely abysmal, and I think the internet as a whole will be a lot happier once it realizes this. In fact, let's not stop there. Let's get more general and offensive and say: No live action film adaptation of a non-film franchise will ever, ever be a totally acceptable adaptation. Never. There are several reasons for this, and I am prepared to list some of them:

1. If the original medium was not film, odds are it will not translate well to film.
I believe this to be where most critical failures of film adaptations begin. Let's take the example of video games, since they're a popular target for certain over-eager film makers more often than not. Now, many video games have interesting and engaging plotlines; this much is true. One would think, for instance, that Silent Hill would make for a fantastic film, and I did indeed make that mistake. However, you and I both forget that much of the entertainment that we derive from video games comes from slowly being fed bits of the overarching plot. This is, of course, why we get so fantastically angry when our insensitive friends spoil that Dumbledore kills Aeris. When you can't draw out the plot-feeding by having the movie's protagonist jump through the hoops of dungeon exploring, the plot will either be so condensed that it feels forced and rushed, or be adequately spread out and neglect several minor details. Either way, people will be displeased.

2. There is very little outside encouragement to make these movies good
Let's face it: If you slap the name of an existing franchise onto a movie, you automatically ensure that it will make some money. Even if it's just from kids, parents, and nerds hoping to see a trainwreck, you're more or less guaranteed at least some profit. The movie's worth is sort of artificially inflated this way. There's just as good a chance that you'll make tons of cash releasing an acceptable movie with a recognizable name, and not so good odds that you'll make decent cash with an exceptional movie from a previously unknown property. When you want some fast cash (and who the Hell doesn't?), there's less effort and more assured cash in just making a franchise film that won't cause viewers to kill themselves out of shame.

3. Uwe Boll exists
And he has ruined it for us all.

I Review Princess Tutu: The Shamening

I think it's been sufficiently long since my last anime review that I may comfortably subject my three readers to a second one. This will be somewhat unlike my last review, mainly because I intend to put some thought into it and pretend like I have some kind of standard of quality. Hint: I do not.

It's only fair that, since I've already reviewed a series that I can unabashedly enjoy, I should now review one that fills me with deep, painful nerd shame. Allow me to explain, first, how I came to watch and enjoy this girly, fluffy, sparkly, poofy horror of a series.

Our story begins in a cramped, poorly stocked and laid out dealer's room at Vermont's only anime convention, Bakuretsucon, whose Cheeto-scented halls we shall never darken again. Our anime club had traveled over two hours to reach the cramped event that amounted to a hallway, a staircase, and a few personal rooms transformed into viewing rooms. Following our arrival in this dismal place, we spent a total of five hours within those inoffensively beige walls. I was bored after the first hour, hungry by the third, and homicidal toward the end when we lost two of the younger club members and had to send out two separate search parties.

When I was far past fed up with the activities (or lack thereof) outside the dealer's room, I sequestered myself there for a time, and came upon a nice booth with blind boxes for sale. On top of this, the booth also held the only article of Japanese-language printed material in the entire dealer's room. Was it manga? No, it was something even more lovely - it was doujinshi. Unfortunately for my desperate ass, it was for a series I had never watched, featuring characters whose relationship I had no prior knowledge of. As I mentioned, I was somewhat desperate for something of interest to show from this awful trip. So, negotiations began immediately. I asked how much it was, and was both amused and bewildered when he insisted on checking the UPC on the back for the yen price. Not only did he have the only doujin in the house, but he was under the impression that it was official merch. To my delight (and equal horror) I was dealing with someone who knew absolutely nothing about the most interesting item he was selling. Thus, the haggling commenced. I eventually acquired it for the princely sum of seven dollars, fifty cents, and a sizable chunk of my dignity.

To help me understand the book (and to have the boxset in her mitts) the club's vice president/treasurer/puppetmaster (who is also my good buddy) purchased the Princess Tutu boxset for the club library. I tactfully avoided watching it for some time after its arrival, then proceeded to watch the entire fucking thing in the span of one week. The shame was palpable, but god damn it, it was a good series.

I am as serious as a stab in the kidneys. The title is humiliatingly bad, the premise is sappy, and the classical music and fairy tale motif is utterly beyond my ken. But I devoured it like Roger De Bris devoured Springtime for Hitler. However, unlike Mr. De Bris, I feel shame for having enjoyed it. I wanted it to be terrible. I wanted to hate it so badly, but I just couldn't. I want to believe that I've reached the stage of geekiness where I don't have to pass judgment against myself for enjoying things outside my usual realm of interest. I'd like to have that kind of nerdy zen, but I don't yet. As such, I am still incredibly ashamed. Maybe I should be. But, enough about me. Let me try to explain what the series is, and why I *HURP* like it. I will most likely be antagonistic and accidentally spoil some parts of the series.

Like I said, the premise is soul-suckingly lame upon first glance. Anime News Network's summary made me want to kill myself when I read it in an attempt to learn something about the series I was about to watch.

13-year-old ballet student Ahiru is clumsy, good-hearted and sweet... and has a big secret. The mysterious Drosselmayer morphed a young duck into a girl to give her a mission: help a Prince to get the parts of his heart back. With that in mind, she morphs into Princess Tutu, whose magical dances ease the pain and purifies the bad feelings.

That is the single most embarrassing summary I have ever read. More so than the summary for Onani Master Kurosawa, which is about being caught jerking it. It manages to give a greater sense of vicarious humiliation than reading about a character being caught waxing his wizard's staff. However, the people of 4chan put it in a far more appealing light in the now defunct thread on the series:

It drops that formula and becomes a tale of fighting fate from a guy who cuts his hands off and writes all the main character's fates down with blood from his stumps.

Another Anonymous accused the poster of lying. He was not, and that is why the series succeeds in my eyes. It doesn't go so far as to become a deconstruction of magical girl shows, but rather it rides a comfortable mid-line between playing it straight and tearing it down. It falls into fewer pits than it majestically vaults over, but it did manage to frustrate me at times. Now that you know the story (kind of) I'll tell you about the characters. I can actually sum up everything that delights and infuriates me about the series through doing this, as it's largely character driven.

This is Ahiru. She is, arguably, the most important character in the show. She's either the youngest or shortest of the central players; it's never explicitly stated. She has a magical googaw which allows her to turn into a magical girl who must collect other magical googaws to restore the soul of her red herring love interest. Yes, I just spoiled that. No, I don't care. It was spoiled for me, and I didn't care then. Anyway. Like every other goddamned magical girl who has ever existed, she's a bumbling klutz with a reputation for being late for school and having the deductive skills of a wet hat. Unlike every other magical girl ever to exist, she doesn't inspire the urge to snap her little head off like a bored and spiteful child snaps the heads off of his mother's daisies. Yes, she is occasionally exasperating because she will do things during situation in which all signs point to 'no.' Still, she manages to be one of the few female anime characters that I like beyond grudging acceptance.

Here's the prince we mentioned earlier. Yes, he's naked. Yes, you should get used to that. Yes, you will become more or less numb to it as the series wears on. His name is Mytho, and he has no emotions. Shame is an emotion, so... this happens. I don't know if it's symbolic or not. As much as I like the little bugger, there isn't a lot to be said about him. He's a designated victim, more or less. He exists to be kidnapped andto jump half-dressed out of windows. So, really, he fills a valuable role that the token female character would fill in a shounen series. Badump tish.

This angry young man is Fakir, whose name I initially thought was the kind of gibberish name that anime often gives to foreign characters. Chibodee? Not a name. Anyway. Fakir plays the role of the knight, and plays it as well as he can when the villains mock him for it and the tragedy-bent universe he's been written into dumps liquid crap on him most of the time. He's such a serial failure that it's become a running joke among club members who have seen the series. As the knight, his sole purpose is to protect the little nudist prince until the bad guy inevitably kills him for his efforts. He is so dedicated to his charge that I spent much of the series waiting for the love dodecahedron to go rogue and collapse in on itself following a love confession from him. The subtext actually transcended the level of fanservice and became vaguely uncomfortable at times, because it was never played for laughs.

The lovely young lady to the left is Rue, who was my absolute favorite female anime character for approximately 14 episodes. In a 26 episode series, this means that she lasted for over half the entire series in a much coveted position. What knocked her off the pedestal? She stopped being nasty. Yes, I spoiled that too. However, you would have expected it anyway if you're jaded and didn't expect the series to be a direct deconstruction. Unfortunately, I allowed myself to enjoy her stint as the show's antagonist, and was sorely disappointed when she got a heartbreaking (I guess?) backstory and was turned from a grey character to a pearly white one with a dirty sheet draped over her head. I love female antagonists, and I think you can blame Batman for that. How can you not love this exchange (paraphrased) between her and Fakir:

"Get the Hell out of here, you crazy evil bitch!"
"Crazy? Evil? Damn right, I am. Now you get out, pissant."

It was glorious. But, alas, girls can't be nasty unless they have absolutely no reason to be so. There are countless male characters who have been allowed to remain the hateful, manipulative, slaughtering bastards they are under far worse conditions. Whole family slaughtered, forcing you to live alone on filthy streets crawling with human predators from an age when most kids are being weened? Suck it up. Driven to cannibalism and banditry by the ravages of war? No problem! Manipulative adoptive dad who's molded you into a minion? Live with it, yo- What, you're a girl? Get Out of Dark Side Free card! Yes, I spoiled that too. It's for your own damned good.

So, in sum, it's a fine series that needs a better title and to gain a reputation as a deconstruction so I can admit that I like it.

Musings on Subbing, Dubbing, and the Future of America's Anime Habit

Keeping up with your favorite series in a legally-sound fashion is damned expensive, and damn frustrating if you don't want to wait about a year before you get your first taste of something that looks genuinely interesting. A single DVD containing less than five episodes will bust your wallet to the tune of at least twenty dollars. These purchases are often made 'sight unseen' in the case of series not aired of the SciFi Channel or Cartoon Network. To people without parents to chunk money at them to finance their hobbies, this is kind of a kick to the face. The argument could be (and has been) made that American viewers really have no right to complain, since Japanese consumers pay about 150% of that price for their DVDs, and in much greater numbers than our pirating asses. Are we ungrateful? Is Japan so driven by consumerism that this difference in buying habits is cultural? Well, maybe it's all that and a lot more.

Let's go back to the 'sight unseen' concept. A great amount of anime released in Japan is aired on television before the DVDs are released, and many that aren't are OVA spinoffs of television series or PC games. Much of the DVD sales are from collectors or fans who were unable to catch up with the TV airings. It's more or less impossible for an American fan to get this sort of preview legally without dropping $25 on the first DVD, or $10 on a magazine that includes a preview and review of the first episode. Of course, the dubbed versions of some series are aired on channels like Cartoon Network and the SciFi channel, but this really doesn't make up for the number of $25 impulse buys people make. This also used to be the case with VHS. You'd plunk down $20 for about five episodes or a single film worth of content, either dubbed, or subtitled and uncut. Perplexingly, the subtitled versions were often sold at a slightly inflated price, despite costing less to produce.

I think anyone would agree with me when I say that the popularization of digital media changed everything in respect to how the market for anime works. The advent of faster internet connections and person-to-person sharing networks revolutionized how we, the consumer, consume things without having to pay. DVDs and digital editing streamlined the fansubbing process to the point where a team of a few people (all working for NOTHING) can adapt an episode that aired in Japan on Sunday to a fully subtitled, annotated version that viewers in English-speaking countries can watch on Friday. That is fucking progress, my friend.

Of course, this means that fansubs are no longer so inconvenient as they once were. They're accurate, they're lovingly crafted, and they're free. To someone who doesn't want to pay for the extra audio track, the choice is kind of obvious: we want the fansubs.

So, who's the villain in all this? Is it the fansubbers for doing all the work for nothing and giving it up for free, or is it the fault of the distributors for sticking to a business model that's been rendered obsolete? In my opinion, neither party is entirely in the wrong. However, I also believe that the companies are going about addressing the issue of tanking sales poorly in that their recent methods may only alienate fans. Rather than demonizing fansubbers, they may find better success through updating their mode of distribution.

First of all, stop dubbing shit that hasn't been on American TV. If you're selling it because it went over well in Japan and you know otaku will buy it, don't bother. Dubbing is a labor intensive and expensive process that drags down release dates and inflates price. On top of that, most fans just bitch about the dub anyway. Dubbing really doesn't have a great reputation among otaku, a fact that becomes all too obvious on message boards and mailing lists full of moaning and bitching whenever something is licensed.

Secondly, consider delving into the deep, strange world of pay downloads similar to iTunes. A couple bucks for an episode that took a week to subtitle seems much more tempting than $25 for four episodes of something you may not even like. Of course, the downloads would have to be of a slightly less than perfect video quality so that people with the collecting fetish will go out and buy the shiny boxsets when the season/series is through.

As American consumers, we often feel just a little cheated in the way our fix comes to us. We get little on TV, we get next to no cool merch besides the occasional wall scroll or action figures (NARUTO YAY OTL), and we have a history of having to nance around legalities in order to watch anime that isn't massacred. And we can't even make doujinshi for all our trouble!

On the Subject of Otaku

I've ruminated on this subject for several years now, always coming close to takataka-ing down something resembling an entry, but never quite getting there. Still, this is a blog called OtaKulture, so I feel obligated to include such an entry.

When I consider this, I realize that the main factor keeping me from writing an entry on otaku is that I keep trying to define the phenomenon in concrete terms, a feat that anyone with more than passing knowledge of nerd culture finds oddly difficult. Just like the term 'nerd', the word's meaning can and does vary wildly from person to person. You could say it's someone who watches anime/reads manga. To that, many would say, "Weeeell, it's not quite so simple."

To many people, otaku is kind of a catch-all term for the obsessed. Most any obsession is applicable, particularly obsessions with visual media and technology. Anime, manga, video games, horror films, computers, etc. The real qualifying factor is obsession, usually to the point that the interest (whatever it may be) influences one's everyday actions and/or way of thinking. It really can be defined as what can happen when your hobbies take you a little too far over the deep end.

With that somewhat nebulous definition out of the way, I'd like to admit my bias here by confessing that I do consider myself to be an otaku. I am an officer of a club on my college campus called, fittingly enough, GMC Otaku. I recently had an interesting conversation with an acquaintance who couldn't wrap his head around the club's name. He tried to kindly inform me that the word has a terrible connotation to it, and if I knew one lick of Japanese blah blah blah on and on. He was understandably gobsmacked when I told him that, yes, I do know what it means, and that I've been learning Japanese for nearly two years. Thus, he swapped tactics. Why, why would you want to associate your club and yourself with something that means something so bad? Why, oh why? Well, the primary reason is that I don't want to be dishonest. Looking around my room at the bookshelf full of manga, the stacks of DVDs either bought legally or awaiting a future in fansub-archiving, and the numerous posters, I find it difficult to think that the term doesn't apply to me. In fact, most of the club's members (pre-freshman membership drive) really could be classified as otaku in most every sense of the word. Of course, some of us have more dork street cred than others, and that can lead to pissing contests the likes of which I'll get into shortly.

As a student of anthropology, I find otaku to be fucking fascinating. As a phenomenon and as a subculture, the idea of obsessive dorks considered to be totally anti-social convening to be obsessive together. It becomes even more fascinating when they start forming cliques, using terms and language not common or present in mainstream language, and defining their own standards of decency. Many things are just different in the context of otakudom.

One facet of this cultural analogy I'm trying so desperately to conjure up is the aforementioned pissing contests. In a subculture brought together by obsession, it's only natural that social standing within the group is in a way relate to just how obsessive or knowledgeable one is in regards to the subject at hand. The issue of whether it's a negative or positive reflection on you largely depends on what sort of toll the obsession has taken on your life. If you came across the knowledge by being creepy and pissing in PET bottles, it is certainly a negative reflection.

I must reflect again on people's strong opposition to the word's use as anything other than an insult. The acquaintance I mentioned earlier in this entry is a fan himself, and quite obsessive, but recoils at the idea of the wok otaku being used to describe anthing but socially withdrawn madness. Yes, the word carries a negative sting in mainstream use, but is it so wrong to use it humorously, frankly, in a way that says, "Yes, I know exactly what you're thinking?" Why yes, I'm fully aware that when I tell you I read manga and can disassemble a PC in a minute or two, you're thinking to yourself that I'm some sort of potentially dangerous, withdrawn loonie.

So, to put it in words that your average college freshman hasbeen groomed to pretend to understand : It's ironic! Quit hatin'!