And it’s not just money, it’s time and talent. In fact I would argue those two are more important. Kaiba is a good exmaple…

But whatever, he’s obviously an elitist tool too self-indulgent to listen to anyone elses arguments. He’s like those Final Fantasy nutjobs who swear the series should have stayed 2D because it was more charming.

Furthermore, people don’t listen to MightyOtaking’s personal rants. He really doesn’t deserve all that attention. He proved himself to be blind and onesided to his own arguments. He just made fun enough of himself with that hilarious youtube megarant on fansubs history. Not only he proves not to know and undestand modern animation, but he also tends to prove his desplicable thesys with wrong examples.

I’ll reply about Kurenai as soon as i’ll finish watching the 9th episode.
But I still will warn you this particular eoisode is indeed the calm before the storm. It was clear from the outcome of the former episode.
A final confrontation was too early and Shinkuro was easily defeated. Now it’s the time of regret, so we have plain solw and boring episode, but next episode will still begin Shinkuro’s awakening, leading to fireworks in the last episode. Many anime follow that route, and they end up awesome! Just wait and see ;)
Don’t drop the serie now that’s the best part is finally at hand!

Yeah, but I got a lot of anime to catch up on and only a lifetime to do it in. Which only gets shorter and shorter day by day.

To paraphrase someone whose name escapes me at the moment, “Life is too short to watch mediocre anime.”

He kind of reminds me of Answerman from ANN. Both of them know their stuff and make very good points. At the same time they also torpedo their own arguments by making sweeping generalizations, providing contradictory evidence to support said arguments and being opinionated to the point of myopia.

I’m wondering if this guy will ever blog? He could win next years ABA Peoples Choice Best Dorama Awards easily.

Oh yeah…this post was also about Kurenai wasn’t it?

I have stopped watching this show as of episode 8 and I am not really sure I want to continue.

After reading this post I am almost tempted to just delete all of the episodes on my hard drive and move on to something else.

It was one of the few shows this season that seemed to have some potential. Now it seems like it is going to finish with one big meh of an ending. Kind of like last season’s Spice and Wolf.

Here’s to hoping I am wrong.

Was that the effect where the characters’ clothes looked like windows onto a flat texture? I though that was beautiful. :)

I do feel that Kurenai has almost run out of steam. It was great at first, but now everything does indeed feel like an extremely contrived device for some drama, and it’s just dissapointing.
I still have faith for a good ending which can be both a mixture of character interaction and some decent action, but as has been said it could easily go the other way, and really let the show down.

But considering Baccano built up to an action-packed last episode, didn’t, but still managed to make a good episode and ending - I think I can imagine Brains Base pulling off a good ending.

The problem with experiments in shading in animation is that it increases the complexity of actually animating things drastically as shades change with motion.

In fact, I think Otaking makes the mistake repeatedly. For example, OAVs actually don’t always have big budgets (especially back in the 80s). What makes them shine over TV series is scheduling–OAVs like Giant Robo had all the time in the world to produce, yet Macross Frontier has a brutal, weekly schedule. Time is more of a limitation than money when it comes to TV broadcasting.

When you want to animate in color, shading will reflect change in lighting. Having 3 shades versus two means your coloring now takes 50% longer. Ever wonder why Kaiba is so pale color-wise? Because it’s “very” animated. With computer inking, we can do tricks like ones in Gankutsuou where you just slap some transparent layer and let loose some CG rendering. CG cell shading is another common form of experiment with shading, because it’s not as labor intensive.

And truthfully, I don’t entirely blame Otaking as his ignorance regarding the animation process is quite common place among fans.

Quite simply, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Not to mention that an audience’s preferences change will over time - it’s called creativity. Ironically, if animators and artists stuck to the shading techniques of the ’80s, as Otaking insists, anime would look very stale today.

Funny you should hijack a Kurenai blog post for such opinions though. While the animation in Kurenai has been choppy and uneven, the background art, on the other hand, has been stupendously gorgeous. Especially the painted wall screens in the Inner Sanctuary and the Hozuki household.

When you have such eye candy to hold your attention, who needs gratuitous cell shading? ;)

Shame that you found this episode boring though. Shinkuro received further development, as did poor Yayoi. It’s also nice to see Shinkuro’s “sisters” give him much needed encouragement. The pieces are falling into place and we’ll soon see how Benika’s masterplan turns out.

As for quality… I will admit that I was never into anime in a big way until a couple of years ago, so I can’t say I noticed. I have to say the shading thing would be lost on me, though; I’m not big on colours. Quality anime to me suggests quality animation. Fluid, convincing and detailed.

overall i can’t say i like old anime more than the new one just as i cannot say the quality of the new series is a lot better and i like that ones more,i love anime in general and i think each anime period has its good things and bad things and the current anime generation has given us a lot of gorgeous animation and has a lot of talented artists