Well, I decided to go ahead and try to watch through a couple more 2010 shows before I post about my favorite title of the year. And so the first title I watched was House of Five Leaves.
I gotta say, Five Leaves was severely disappointing. It was one of the few titles from this past year that I really looked forward to, and expected a lot from. However, watching it was boring and uninteresting. Sure, the backgrounds were fantastic, and the character designs were "different" (which, I'm not so sure is an automatic plus). It wasn't a series about high school girls and panties, it was a period samurai piece, which was interesting. But there was just nothing there.
I think the biggest problem with Five Leaves, is that it's 100% character development. There's nothing else. It's entirely substanceless beyond the background and friendship of characters. It's like slice-of-life, only overly dramatic and "atmospheric" (dragging). The entire thing is all a build up to the co-main dude's back-story, which is all super obvious from the first episode. The entire point of this show is just to develop these characters back-stories as the two main guys become best friends, and that's all that happens. There's this glimpse of some action in the first episode, to trick all those dudes who like samurai into watching it, but after that anything beyond the main characters sitting in a bar and talking is pretty minimal.
Now I mean, I'm not complaining that this wasn't like Sword of the Stranger. I'm not saying it needed to have bodies sliced up every other minute, and the only talking should've been the duelists yelling profanities at each other. No way. In fact, I'd probably find that more boring than I found this. But at the same time, there's gotta be something more to the characters and the series than just people talking about their back-stories. It introduces them all as gangsters and then it just starts right into "but they're only criminals because this and this and this happened to them!" without portraying them as criminals or anything. They come across as just regular joes most of the time. And, I'm not saying character development is bad. I realize it's a completely necessary part to any good story. But at the same time, Cowboy Bebop had character development and was character driven, but it still had the dudes doing stuff. It gave me a reason to think Spike was cool. There was substance there. There just isn't anything else really going on in Five Leaves.
But I think this show just simply wasn't for me. I know Noitamina makes shows specifically targeted towards women, but before Five Leaves I didn't really see that come through. However, Five Leaves is totally the superficial character drama I could see tons of young adult chicks getting real into. I think it would be great for the people it was made for. So I guess it's just not my thing.
Overall, I'm not sure what to think. I loved the artwork, the directing and atmosphere was generally appealing, the bgm was great. But there just wasn't anything there besides developing characters for the sake of developing characters. I don't consider it fully a waste of my time, but still, I don't think I'd re-watch it, and I definitely wouldn't recommend it to anyone. I think this also goes to show how absence of fanservice or "moe" doesn't make something good, which is an important thing the anti-moe fans should keep in mind.
Next, I thought I'd post about something else that's been on my mind today. Whenever I see people talking about animation quality in anime, it's always basically "the animation was fluid, backgrounds were good, and character designs/costumes were good." That's basically what the average fan's animation assessment entails. Now, I remember Onion posting about how super-fluid animation is a turn off for him, so clearly this isn't everyone. But I just see this basic stuff come up all the time in like MAL reviews, or when people praise a shows animation.
I just think this concept of fluid=good is funny, because Disney's animation is incredibly more "fluid" than pretty much any anime. Yet, most anime fans write off disney as crappy animation, and praise anime as good animation.. Then they go and defend it's "good animation" by praising how fluid it is. The western (so, Disney) standard is like, 12 drawings a second. In Japan, the show is super fluid if it uses 9 drawings a second. Western animation is 1/3rd more fluid than Japanese, yet western animation isn't praised because of it's excessive fluidity. Which is why this notion of fluid=good is ridiculous. I mean, go to any anime review, on AniDB, MAL, ANN, etc. The people, if talking positively about the animation, will most likely claim it's fluidity as one of it's pros. It's really kinda silly.
