Site Index | Blog What's New? Review List Stuff Review Outline Why Hate Anime? Wheat RoD: The TV Haibane Renmei Teen Titans Chaff Akira Legend of the Overfiend Black Heaven Okay, I'll bite. Just where do I get off making a page about something I don't even like? Am I a masochist? Or just a jerk? Or both? There are lots of reasons to dislike anime. Some of them are even good. In order to get a decent number of ham-hams from me, an anime has to bypass most or all of these obstacles. Observe. (Note: I'm going to get through this page without naming any names, if at all possible. Gotta save somthing for later on after all.) First off, there are crippling availability issues. It's not like I can just run down to Blockbuster and rent some Cowboy Bebop for the weekend, even if I didn't have $400 worth of late fees. Anime is hard to get at. Beyond the tiny bit shown on TV, if I want to check out an anime I have go out and buy it. Seeing as how I'm almost guaranteed to hate virtually everything on the shelf, it isn't even much of a crapshoot; I might as well feed my money to the dog. Alternatively, you can leech the stuff and watch it on the computer. This isn't always an attractive solution because even with a spiffy cable modem it can take upwards of four hours to download a thirty minute cartoon. Second, the filesizes tend to be enormous; in the neighborhood of 150-200 megs per episode. Not a problem if you have a monster hard drive or a CD burner (and you don't mind pirating stuff), insufferable if you don't. Lastly, not all the downloadable stuff is exactly what you'd call good quality, neither in the crispness of the rip nor the coherency of the translation. Then you have to deal with all the nudity. Now don't get me wrong. I like a good booby. The only thing better than a good booby is a pair of the suckers. And yes, I realize it's technically inaccurate to call boobies suckers when more often than not they are the suckees. But too much anime make the boobies the stars of the show, and the actual characters (you know, the ones with names and faces and dialogue) take a backseat. There's a lot of this in American entertainment too, I realize. Sex sells, and I can live with that. But in American media there's generally stuff to go along with the boobies. Unless you watch MTV. In any case, I've seen far too many otherwise likable and respectable anime characters take off all their clothes for no clearly defined reason right in the middle of the plot. Tell you what, if your anime is a sixty-minute setup for a four-second money shot, just give me a sixty-minute money shot and be done with it. And nevermind that a lot of anime producers pull their punch at the last second. Every time someone puts a nipple-less breast or a blank crotch in their anime, a baby kitten dies of SARS. The three M's... Mecha, magical girl, and monster collecting. These are three genres I can do without. Mecha are stupid, magical girls are obnoxious, and monster collecting is only fun in video games. Scratch that; it's usually not fun then. Unfortunately, the combined population of those three types of anime comprise a full 83% of the genre's makeup. Not only that, but now that anime is becoming more and more mainstream, more and more American cartoons are taking notes. This means more American cartoons about mecha, magical girls, and monster collecting. American cartoons are abyssmal enough as it is without this trash leaking into it. OMG so kawaii!!! This is a general catch-all for eyes that spout waterfalls instead of tears, mouths that somehow manage to slide off someone's face, and heads that bloat up three times to large. Wild takes are for Bugs Bunny; the more realistic characters who star in most anime don't need this nonsense. If you're going to do a series in which the laws of physics (more or less) apply, remember those laws apply the the biological makeup of your characters' faces too. Sheesh, even South Park manages to avoid wild takes. Sometimes, it isn't even animated very well. Don't get me wrong, I love the anime art style. Big flowing pink hair and tantalizing green eyes and cute slender girls giving me the peace sign are some of the greatest things about anime. But those only work in still shots. In an actual, you know, anime the characters ought to move. Sometimes they don't even grant us that much. I've seen too many fight scenes which were little more than a series of panning still shots. I've seen too many long conversations where the only things that move are the characters' mouths. Come on! These are cartoons! Hit each other! Throw your arms up in the air! Jump around like a fruit! Instead of two still shots of the doting samurai hero, the first showing him holding his sword all mean, and the second showing him landing the blow... why not show him swinging the sword? This is another thing more and more American toons are picking up on. Le sigh. DBZ. Okay, I said I wasn't going to name any names, but come on. The fact that DBZ exists is enough to turn anyone off anime forever. Like butter spread over too much bread. Much of what I've seen moves to slowly to keep me interested. American cartoons (well, except for Justice League) often manage to tell an entire story in one twenty-two minute episode. An anime would need three episodes to tell the same story. It would need one episode alone just to hold all the flashback sequences to last episode, which in turn was mostly flashback sequences to the first. Why is it that these anime folks don't think I can keep an idea in my head from one week to the next? To be fair, there are only a few I can think of which are crippled to the point of unwatchability by the creepy-crawly pacing. Plus one if you count Xenogears. The Grunting tm Why is it that anime characters grunt, sigh, squeal, growl, moan, or forcefully exhale so often? I'm not like an Olympic champion talker or anything, but I can usually manage a conversation without farting out of my mouth. Sickening over-pretentious plots. Just because your series is thirty episodes long doesn't necessarily mean you have to have a crucial plot twist in every one. Most all of my favorite anime have simple, easy-to-follow plots. Over-complicating matters just for the sake of over-complicating matters only works in the sense that they trick people into thinking the story is brilliant since they don't want to admit they didn't pick up on it. And while I'm at it, even if you do understand a plot, that doesn't make it good. A forced plot twist is going to backfire every time, without fail. And if more than one character switches sides more than three times, you have to ask yourself if the writers honestly couldn't think of anything better than rampant treason. Another pet peeve that falls cleanly into this category is when an anime takes itself way too seriously. Not that they shouldn't do so, to an extent. But come on, give me an air hole once a whlie to relieve the tension. An anime with no sense of humor is a rickety house of cards; one wrong touch and the whole thing comes crashing down. Any story that takes itself to be all-important immediately fails if there's even one tiny plot hole or illogical twist. That covers it... for now at least. As you can see, any given anime has a very narrow path to walk if it wants to entertain me. That's the whole goal of this page; to find the ones that make the sprint.

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