mysticjuicer[he/him] I'm a muscle wizardand I cast P U N C HRegistered Userregular
The romance in S!E is absolutely in-the-text, as far as I can tell. Like, I think one would have to go pretty hard into “just gals bein’ pals” denial to read it as queer-bait. But I’d love for Kana to weigh in on it.
The romance in S!E is absolutely in-the-text, as far as I can tell. Like, I think one would have to go pretty hard into “just gals bein’ pals” denial to read it as queer-bait. But I’d love for Kana to weigh in on it.
More that these girls are clearly into each other, but we can't actually show them doing anything, think of the children!
everyone who hasn’t should immediately give ‘Sound! Euphonium’ a shot.
It's an excessively pretty show, but nothing seemed to be happening.
Interesting! I feel like the show was paced extremely well. It is definitely not a show about Action. I feel like character work and the writing are some of the best I’ve ever seen. It’s the most interior sports anime (about a high school band) I’ve ever watched.
I also read it's extremely guilty of yuri baiting, something I'm sure @Kana can elaborate on and would probably result in involuntary twitching.
So there's definitely people who feel otherwise, but personally I still don't think Hibike Euphonium was yuri baiting... Sort of. Not in season 1.
Like Kumiko comes across as really gay even when Reina's not around. She isn't planning on re-joining band, but she gets recruited by a pretty girl and Kumiko can't say no. When her friends are talking about cute boys, or about how their band instructor is pretty cute, Kumiko is just kind of sitting there and smiling and looking slightly confused. When Perfectly Nice Heterosexual Boy Shuuichi is obviously asking her out Kumiko's not being tsundere, she's pretty obviously just 100% not interested. And literally all of the obviously romantic things Shuuichi asks her out to do - go practice music alone together, go to the festival, go see the fireworks... Kumiko turns around and does them all with Reina instead. Also Kumiko and Reina keep checking each other out, like Euphonium isn't a fanservicey show whatsoever, the only time it notices a girl's body is when Kumiko is doing so. And Kumiko most definitely does so.
There's a Kyoto Animation interview between a bunch of the studio directors that talks about "is it yuri?" Yamada is Naoko Yamada, the female director of the first season.
Oguro: Reina’s finger touching Kumiko’s lips had a lot of impact too. Whose idea was that?
Ishihara: (silently points towards Yamada-san)
Yamada: Sorry for bringing out that seductive atmosphere between Kumiko and Reina. (laughs)
Oguro: Ha ha ha ha ha! (laughs)
Yamada: That kind of late night sensation came during work on the storyboards. I very much enjoyed that “writing a love letter” feeling it had. Kumiko gradually appeared to look like a young boy during the mountain scenes. I thought “giving the feeling of a young boy falling in love one summer” would be nice. It’d be a “first” for Kumiko."
...
Oguro: When I saw episode 8, I thought “So this is what a yuri work would be.” It’s a different yuri than what men fantasize.
Ishihara: Yes, yes, that’s right.
Oguro: I’m not that familiar with yuri manga as well, but this wasn’t the soft fluff that they feel like; this was a work staged in the real world much like a manga for older women. That temperature also felt realistic.
Ishihara: That’s right. But it’s an example of how Yamada can go overboard occasionally.
Yamada: What?! (laughs)
Ishihara: I thought so in Tamako Market. It was awfully realistic.
Oguro: What, is that true?
Ishihara: She’s awfully serious when it comes to depicting yuri.
Oguro: But you don’t think of it as yuri, Yamada-san?
Yamada: That’s right.
Oguro: I thought there was also some yuri in Tamako Market.
Yamada: Ah, that’s right. Surely you mean about Midori.
Oguro: That’s right.
Ishihara: I agree. That’s somewhat serious too. (laughs)
Yamada: Is it?
Ishihara: Well, that doesn’t go to where men want yuri to be.
Oguro: (interrupting Ishihara) No, no, if Yamada-san doesn’t think it’s yuri, then it’s not!
Ishihara: (continuing on) What men want is a bit more giggly chuckly…..
Yamada: (interrupting both Ishihara/Oguro) Calm yourselves down! (laughs)
Oguro: Sorry. I got a bit excited.
All: (laughs)
Yamada: Okay. So I’ll say it clearly: I don’t think that’s depicted as yuri. I wanted to depict adolescence.
Oguro: For which case?
Yamada: Probably for all of them. For Tamako, for Reina, for all of it. I wanted to depict adolescence!"
Regarding Tamako Market, it's another Yamada directed series, the main girl has a het love story, but there's a side story that is her best friend realizing she had a crush on her, and that she's never gonna get with her straight best friend, and dealing with her feelings about that.
The other directors are throwing a little bit of shade at Yamada, because rather than being "yuri" in the sense of soft, safe fluff, her characters are treated too realistically. This isn't yuri, this is just (gasp) gay!
When Yamada started working on A silent voice, it was Ishihara who took over season 2, and unsurprisingly The Gay Stuff mostly disappeared from then on. It's really noticeable. But I don't think that invalidates season 1.
At any rate I think season 1 is really good. Unlike most Japanese shows, which are all about smoothing over group differences until the team reaches success, Hibike is actually mostly about accepting internal conflict. Kumiko gradually becomes willing to overthrow seniority and try to take solos and higher seats away from her upperclassmen. To be willing to stick out to get what she wants. Her personal life echoes that too - it's one thing to be into a girl at an all girls school, yuri style, but Kumiko has a dude asking her out and that's not what she's interested in, she wants to go hang out with Reina.
A trap is for fish: when you've got the fish, you can forget the trap. A snare is for rabbits: when you've got the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words are for meaning: when you've got the meaning, you can forget the words.
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mysticjuicer[he/him] I'm a muscle wizardand I cast P U N C HRegistered Userregular
Damn, that sucks to hear about Season 2. I’m glad I know it going in though, so I’m not having the rug pulled out from under me. But that really sucks... S1 was so beautifully, unexpectedly gay...
An entire movie worth of music and not ONE single Amen break?
Not a "banger".
Oh, it's a banger, all right. It's an old-school banger. From before they recorded the Amen break. It's how your grandpaw used to rock out. To a full piece orchestra.
Damn, that sucks to hear about Season 2. I’m glad I know it going in though, so I’m not having the rug pulled out from under me. But that really sucks... S1 was so beautifully, unexpectedly gay...
There's also Liz and the Blue Bird, which yamada directed. It's similar to her other stuff, it never tells you its characters are gay, but it all just kind of feels assumed into its worldview. ... I have a longer post about it in the movie thread but I'm on phone and can't find it.
A trap is for fish: when you've got the fish, you can forget the trap. A snare is for rabbits: when you've got the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words are for meaning: when you've got the meaning, you can forget the words.
Damn, that sucks to hear about Season 2. I’m glad I know it going in though, so I’m not having the rug pulled out from under me. But that really sucks... S1 was so beautifully, unexpectedly gay...
That's one of the things that's kind of a bummer about homosexual relationships being depicted in anime (or Japanese media in particular). I know someone who was learning Japanese and she was profoundly disappointed when she learned that Yaoi/Yuri are the name of *fetishes* and not social constructs. Yuri/Yaoi is primarily made for the opposite sex. (Meaning, Boy's love manga (Yaoi) is targeted for straight women, and Yuri is targeted for straight men.)
That being said, Here's something that amuses me to no end. Out of all the anime I've ever watched that featured a relationship. Only one one I ever found that wasn't dysfunctional was Haruka and Michiru's.
I also can't really stand Food Wars' cringey orgasm scenes. if you want some non-embarrassing food anime where the term food porn is more non-literal, I've seen a few good ones on crunchyroll. Today's Menu For The Emiya Family and Gourmet Girl Graffiti come to mind.
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silence1186Character shields down!As a wingmanRegistered Userregular
Demon Slayer was so good this week. I can't wait for next week. Just like after last week.
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CorporateLogoThe toilet knowshow I feelRegistered Userregular
Damn, that sucks to hear about Season 2. I’m glad I know it going in though, so I’m not having the rug pulled out from under me. But that really sucks... S1 was so beautifully, unexpectedly gay...
That's one of the things that's kind of a bummer about homosexual relationships being depicted in anime (or Japanese media in particular). I know someone who was learning Japanese and she was profoundly disappointed when she learned that Yaoi/Yuri are the name of *fetishes* and not social constructs. Yuri/Yaoi is primarily made for the opposite sex. (Meaning, Boy's love manga (Yaoi) is targeted for straight women, and Yuri is targeted for straight men.)
That being said, Here's something that amuses me to no end. Out of all the anime I've ever watched that featured a relationship. Only one one I ever found that wasn't dysfunctional was Haruka and Michiru's.
I'm not sure that is actually true anymore when it comes to yuri. There's a very significant market of woman-aimed yuri works going on right now. As well as a lot of nonsexual but romantic yuri stuff (which seems to be about 80% of my lesbian friends media consumption, actually. The Danish one in particular seems to feel that the more... I dunno, understated way the Japanese gay stuff approaches things is a lot more relatable to her than how American queer media approaches things).
M/M stuff does seem to tend a lot more fetishized for some reason, though.
Watched the first episode of the Dr. Stone dub! It seems good! My one complaint is that Senku sounds a bit too... cool? But then again him sounding like a dorkus wouldn’t fit either. Taiju is spot on though.
There is a one shot of the Dr. Stone artist drawing the issue of One Piece where Zoro first fights Dracule Mihawk floating around and...
Ah, if folks will forgive the sin of quoting myself, here's my movie thread post about Liz and the Blue Bird:
So I'd been wanting to see Liz and the Blue Bird for a while, and Amazon's finally got it streaming so I watched it this week. I don't really think it was a good movie as a whole, the movie feels too short at the end and yet way too long in the middle, the main relationship is never fully developed enough, and it's never really able to bring much depth to the main protagonist. On the other hand it's a movie that isn't super concerned about plot and narrative in the first place, and whatever its flaws I did think it was pretty interesting and worth a bit of examination, at the very least it fails in interesting ways.
So, yeah, Liz is an animated movie, a sort of side-story to the anime series Hibike! Euphonium. Up-and-coming female director Naoko Yamada directed season 1 of the series before leaving for some other movie projects, but came back to direct this pretty much stand-alone movie. If you've seen the series you'll appreciate a few cameos and a few more characters will make sense (why is that trumpet girl so grouchy?), but it really works just fine as a stand-alone story about two female friends and fellow band nerds, nearing graduation and trying to figure out the future of their lives and their friendship. As a partial aside, Liz is about as Bechdel test pleasing as can be - female director and a female screenwriter, our two protagonists are performing a musical piece written by a female composer, based on a storybook written by a woman about a friendship between two women. There's guys around, but pretty much only like two male speaking parts at all.
I really love the opening of the movie, an almost dialogue-free 5 minute sequence which introduces the two girls Mizore and Nozomi. There's a fan theory that Mizore is meant to be somewhat on the autistic spectrum, and while I'm not sure I agree I can definitely see where the idea is coming from. She's verbally awkward, but the world from her viewpoint is hyper-aural. Everything from the clomp clomp of shoes to a key turning in its lock seems a little extra pronounced, it's not even quite clear if the soundtrack is meant to be non-diagetic, or if it's simply how she experiences the world.
Yamada first had talks with composer Kensuke Ushio to decide on the rhythm of every scene and draw the storyboards based on [a] particular tempo. Those would then be animated and used as the basis to create the audio, which once again blurs the lines between SFX and soundtrack as many of his compositions were based on environmental sounds they recorded while visiting real schools; “We drummed on the chairs, rubbed the windows, hit the lockers, and scraped a beaker with a [violin] bow. Then we used these sounds to create the music.“, Ushio reminisces. The result to this unique way to create anime is made immediately obvious: the movie starts with a 5 minute-long scene that features virtually no dialogue, where the protagonists’ walking takes the spotlight. The lack of harmony at first – Mizore’s 60 beats per minute footsteps versus Nozomi’s 110 – sets the tone for their asymmetrical relationship
So Mizore is awkward, withdrawn, a brilliantly talented young musician who holds back during performances to not stand out too much. Nozomi is open and friendly, the 1st chair of the flutes, good at music but with other interests and hobbies as well. When Mizore asks one of the club advisers about going to a musical college, the adviser is thrilled, giving her pamphlets and info about her old alma mater, an elite school. The girls have talked about maybe going to the same college so they can stay close friends, or maybe even room together, but Nozomi's not sure she's talented enough - or even interested enough - to go to a music school, and when she goes to ask the same adviser, all Nozomi gets is a kind of disinterested "good luck!" In their next practice - the farewell movement between the titular Liz and the Blue Bird - Mizore finally cuts loose, playing brilliantly. All of the implications on their future hit Nozomi as they play - How much better Mizore is than Nozomi, how they'll be splitting up when they go to different colleges, perhaps the end of their friendship.
The problem with this movie really is that while it's brilliant when nobody's talking, it's just kind of OK the rest of the time. Some aspects of the movie are ambitious and creative as hell, but the script itself is kinda middling, and the final resolution between the two of them - if you can even call it a resolution - is mostly just them coming to terms with their approaching separation and understanding how each of them feels. Which, I mean, coming of age story and all that, it should be fine, but in the end it feels a little too safe, because, well, this is also a gay movie. Or at least, it's a hella gay subtext movie. Which is an ongoing theme in pretty much all of Naoko Yamada's stuff. None of her stuff ever explicitly mentions sexuality, and actually none of the mainstream reviews I read of Liz seem to pick up on its queer themes at all (although one of the reviews mentions the girls' "platonic longing" for each other). As a rule Yamada doesn't do male gaze, fanservicey shots, but she is quite conscious in using viewpoint shots to communicate the female gaze, and there's several shots where Mizore is pretty obviously checking out Nozomi. There's a moment where Nozomi casually puts an arm around Mizore's waist as they're talking to a friend, and then both girls sort of freeze awkwardly as the realize the intimacy of it, or another moment where a classmate is trying to figure out what's going on between the two of them, and as she's looking back and forth between them she overhears a bandmate talking about her boyfriend. That mention of romance gives her an "ah ha!" moment, it's not like there's a rainbow colored lightbulb that turns on over her head, but it's pretty obvious what she clues in to between the two of them. Mizore's definitely gay and in love with her best friend, but she's pretty sure Nozomi's not. The movie never quite resolves whether Nozomi is or not, but she's definitely picking up on the weird uncertainty of their more-than-just-friendship relationship.
And that does actually create kind of an interesting conversation in the movie about, well, gay subtext itself. The piece they're performing, Liz and the Blue Bird, is about a couple of girls who immediately hit it off, and decide they're going to live in the same house together, forever. When the conductor or adults talk about the themes of the story, to them it's obvious that this is all a story about close friendship. Mizore, who very much relates to the story, has to awkwardly talk around how Hello, isn't this really obviously a love story, because the adults just don't really seem to get it. And when Nozomi says how the two of them are like the girls in the story, again, Mizore's like... Wait, do you mean in the gay way? Or in the Just Gals Being Pals way?? Am I just imagining all this romantic subtext to the story, why does no one else recognize such an obvious motivation in the story???
Unfortunately the script is never really quite brave enough to really take those ideas apart as much as they deserve, and it leaves the movie feeling like it hasn't truly resolved its biggest and most interesting idea. Still, not a bad watch, and it's only like 4 bucks to stream on amazon.
A trap is for fish: when you've got the fish, you can forget the trap. A snare is for rabbits: when you've got the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words are for meaning: when you've got the meaning, you can forget the words.
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silence1186Character shields down!As a wingmanRegistered Userregular
Im still watching Demon Slayer. It's still pretty good! Tanjiro is a great protagonist!
Sadly, Zenitsu is a living, walking personification of a concept from this video.
httyoutu.be/4ikGvLUbOuU
Im sorry show, I am really not going to ever give a fuck about him if just this week you show me three different scenes of him being pathetic.
Zenitsu is a pita, but no more than say Usopp? Usopp had many great moments, and Zenitsu has already had one himself. Zenitsu's was much much better animated than it originally appeared, too.
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BroloBroseidonLord of the BroceanRegistered Userregular
looks less weird and bad than I'd expect that kind of technique to look!
in fact I think the only part that felt wrong was the 60 FPS smoothness when my brain was expecting 12 or 24 FPS from animation
BahamutZERO on
+4
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BroloBroseidonLord of the BroceanRegistered Userregular
it's weird, because there seems to be a pretty genuine split of people who think it looks great, and people who think it looks like trash
and I suppose it's subjective, there's no *correct* way to feel about the motion
and the final resolution between the two of them - if you can even call it a resolution - is mostly just them coming to terms with their approaching separation and understanding how each of them feels.
That's not what I got from it. What I took from the ending was them realizing that just because they are taking different paths in life doesn't mean they can't be together. A rejection of the Liz and the Blue Bird storybook ending that had been hanging its shadow over them the entire movie. The movie ends with the symbolism of the two birds flying in the sky, bobbing and weaving, not quite in sync but not flying separately either. And Disjoint becomes Dis Joint. It felt like things are stronger between them because they understand each other and what they want out of life.
Munkus BeaverYou don't have to attend every argument you are invited to.Philosophy: Stoicism. Politics: Democratic SocialistRegistered User, ClubPAregular
with the weird pixelation it looks like someone turned on smoothing for a live sports broadcast of the broly fight
Humor can be dissected as a frog can, but dies in the process.
One, thanks for the link to the Youtube version and two, now that I can watch it without artifacts I can judge it properly: it looks bad. My eye keeps catching the interpolated frames and it makes it feel real jumpy.
+1
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BroloBroseidonLord of the BroceanRegistered Userregular
Using an algorithm to make 24 FPS into 60 FPS is going to look bad no matter what.
If you want something at 60 FPS make it natively at 60 FPS.
yeah they picked a pretty brute-force method of doing this that doesn't work well with hand animation
but at some point i wonder if ai will get good enough to do this
like with enough source footage you could probably train a deep learning intelligence to recognize a goku face/body and re-draw it from any angle
and given two clean key frames of animation you could probably do a decent job of guessing what an intermediate frame would look like instead of just blurring them together
as well as having bits of the ai to know when/where *not* to blend frames together by analyzing artifacts
you'd need to tune it a lot to pick up on artistic intent but it seems within the realm of reason
Posts
More that these girls are clearly into each other, but we can't actually show them doing anything, think of the children!
So there's definitely people who feel otherwise, but personally I still don't think Hibike Euphonium was yuri baiting... Sort of. Not in season 1.
Like Kumiko comes across as really gay even when Reina's not around. She isn't planning on re-joining band, but she gets recruited by a pretty girl and Kumiko can't say no. When her friends are talking about cute boys, or about how their band instructor is pretty cute, Kumiko is just kind of sitting there and smiling and looking slightly confused. When Perfectly Nice Heterosexual Boy Shuuichi is obviously asking her out Kumiko's not being tsundere, she's pretty obviously just 100% not interested. And literally all of the obviously romantic things Shuuichi asks her out to do - go practice music alone together, go to the festival, go see the fireworks... Kumiko turns around and does them all with Reina instead. Also Kumiko and Reina keep checking each other out, like Euphonium isn't a fanservicey show whatsoever, the only time it notices a girl's body is when Kumiko is doing so. And Kumiko most definitely does so.
There's a Kyoto Animation interview between a bunch of the studio directors that talks about "is it yuri?" Yamada is Naoko Yamada, the female director of the first season.
Regarding Tamako Market, it's another Yamada directed series, the main girl has a het love story, but there's a side story that is her best friend realizing she had a crush on her, and that she's never gonna get with her straight best friend, and dealing with her feelings about that.
The other directors are throwing a little bit of shade at Yamada, because rather than being "yuri" in the sense of soft, safe fluff, her characters are treated too realistically. This isn't yuri, this is just (gasp) gay!
When Yamada started working on A silent voice, it was Ishihara who took over season 2, and unsurprisingly The Gay Stuff mostly disappeared from then on. It's really noticeable. But I don't think that invalidates season 1.
At any rate I think season 1 is really good. Unlike most Japanese shows, which are all about smoothing over group differences until the team reaches success, Hibike is actually mostly about accepting internal conflict. Kumiko gradually becomes willing to overthrow seniority and try to take solos and higher seats away from her upperclassmen. To be willing to stick out to get what she wants. Her personal life echoes that too - it's one thing to be into a girl at an all girls school, yuri style, but Kumiko has a dude asking her out and that's not what she's interested in, she wants to go hang out with Reina.
I've been rewatching Hyouka again too and fuck this show is just so incredibly beautiful, in every way. I love it so much.
Oh, it's a banger, all right. It's an old-school banger. From before they recorded the Amen break. It's how your grandpaw used to rock out. To a full piece orchestra.
There's also Liz and the Blue Bird, which yamada directed. It's similar to her other stuff, it never tells you its characters are gay, but it all just kind of feels assumed into its worldview. ... I have a longer post about it in the movie thread but I'm on phone and can't find it.
That's one of the things that's kind of a bummer about homosexual relationships being depicted in anime (or Japanese media in particular). I know someone who was learning Japanese and she was profoundly disappointed when she learned that Yaoi/Yuri are the name of *fetishes* and not social constructs. Yuri/Yaoi is primarily made for the opposite sex. (Meaning, Boy's love manga (Yaoi) is targeted for straight women, and Yuri is targeted for straight men.)
That being said, Here's something that amuses me to no end. Out of all the anime I've ever watched that featured a relationship. Only one one I ever found that wasn't dysfunctional was Haruka and Michiru's.
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
Who died and made you King of original club bangers then?
I do think food wars is really fucking funny in a very juvenile way, but it won't be for everyone
I'm not sure that is actually true anymore when it comes to yuri. There's a very significant market of woman-aimed yuri works going on right now. As well as a lot of nonsexual but romantic yuri stuff (which seems to be about 80% of my lesbian friends media consumption, actually. The Danish one in particular seems to feel that the more... I dunno, understated way the Japanese gay stuff approaches things is a lot more relatable to her than how American queer media approaches things).
M/M stuff does seem to tend a lot more fetishized for some reason, though.
Sadly, Zenitsu is a living, walking personification of a concept from this video.
Im sorry show, I am really not going to ever give a fuck about him if just this week you show me three different scenes of him being pathetic.
Official release is out: https://mangaplus.shueisha.co.jp/viewer/1003133
Everyone check it out!
So I'd been wanting to see Liz and the Blue Bird for a while, and Amazon's finally got it streaming so I watched it this week. I don't really think it was a good movie as a whole, the movie feels too short at the end and yet way too long in the middle, the main relationship is never fully developed enough, and it's never really able to bring much depth to the main protagonist. On the other hand it's a movie that isn't super concerned about plot and narrative in the first place, and whatever its flaws I did think it was pretty interesting and worth a bit of examination, at the very least it fails in interesting ways.
So, yeah, Liz is an animated movie, a sort of side-story to the anime series Hibike! Euphonium. Up-and-coming female director Naoko Yamada directed season 1 of the series before leaving for some other movie projects, but came back to direct this pretty much stand-alone movie. If you've seen the series you'll appreciate a few cameos and a few more characters will make sense (why is that trumpet girl so grouchy?), but it really works just fine as a stand-alone story about two female friends and fellow band nerds, nearing graduation and trying to figure out the future of their lives and their friendship. As a partial aside, Liz is about as Bechdel test pleasing as can be - female director and a female screenwriter, our two protagonists are performing a musical piece written by a female composer, based on a storybook written by a woman about a friendship between two women. There's guys around, but pretty much only like two male speaking parts at all.
I really love the opening of the movie, an almost dialogue-free 5 minute sequence which introduces the two girls Mizore and Nozomi. There's a fan theory that Mizore is meant to be somewhat on the autistic spectrum, and while I'm not sure I agree I can definitely see where the idea is coming from. She's verbally awkward, but the world from her viewpoint is hyper-aural. Everything from the clomp clomp of shoes to a key turning in its lock seems a little extra pronounced, it's not even quite clear if the soundtrack is meant to be non-diagetic, or if it's simply how she experiences the world.
So Mizore is awkward, withdrawn, a brilliantly talented young musician who holds back during performances to not stand out too much. Nozomi is open and friendly, the 1st chair of the flutes, good at music but with other interests and hobbies as well. When Mizore asks one of the club advisers about going to a musical college, the adviser is thrilled, giving her pamphlets and info about her old alma mater, an elite school. The girls have talked about maybe going to the same college so they can stay close friends, or maybe even room together, but Nozomi's not sure she's talented enough - or even interested enough - to go to a music school, and when she goes to ask the same adviser, all Nozomi gets is a kind of disinterested "good luck!" In their next practice - the farewell movement between the titular Liz and the Blue Bird - Mizore finally cuts loose, playing brilliantly. All of the implications on their future hit Nozomi as they play - How much better Mizore is than Nozomi, how they'll be splitting up when they go to different colleges, perhaps the end of their friendship.
I really love this scene too, again without a bit of dialogue
The problem with this movie really is that while it's brilliant when nobody's talking, it's just kind of OK the rest of the time. Some aspects of the movie are ambitious and creative as hell, but the script itself is kinda middling, and the final resolution between the two of them - if you can even call it a resolution - is mostly just them coming to terms with their approaching separation and understanding how each of them feels. Which, I mean, coming of age story and all that, it should be fine, but in the end it feels a little too safe, because, well, this is also a gay movie. Or at least, it's a hella gay subtext movie. Which is an ongoing theme in pretty much all of Naoko Yamada's stuff. None of her stuff ever explicitly mentions sexuality, and actually none of the mainstream reviews I read of Liz seem to pick up on its queer themes at all (although one of the reviews mentions the girls' "platonic longing" for each other). As a rule Yamada doesn't do male gaze, fanservicey shots, but she is quite conscious in using viewpoint shots to communicate the female gaze, and there's several shots where Mizore is pretty obviously checking out Nozomi. There's a moment where Nozomi casually puts an arm around Mizore's waist as they're talking to a friend, and then both girls sort of freeze awkwardly as the realize the intimacy of it, or another moment where a classmate is trying to figure out what's going on between the two of them, and as she's looking back and forth between them she overhears a bandmate talking about her boyfriend. That mention of romance gives her an "ah ha!" moment, it's not like there's a rainbow colored lightbulb that turns on over her head, but it's pretty obvious what she clues in to between the two of them. Mizore's definitely gay and in love with her best friend, but she's pretty sure Nozomi's not. The movie never quite resolves whether Nozomi is or not, but she's definitely picking up on the weird uncertainty of their more-than-just-friendship relationship.
And that does actually create kind of an interesting conversation in the movie about, well, gay subtext itself. The piece they're performing, Liz and the Blue Bird, is about a couple of girls who immediately hit it off, and decide they're going to live in the same house together, forever. When the conductor or adults talk about the themes of the story, to them it's obvious that this is all a story about close friendship. Mizore, who very much relates to the story, has to awkwardly talk around how Hello, isn't this really obviously a love story, because the adults just don't really seem to get it. And when Nozomi says how the two of them are like the girls in the story, again, Mizore's like... Wait, do you mean in the gay way? Or in the Just Gals Being Pals way?? Am I just imagining all this romantic subtext to the story, why does no one else recognize such an obvious motivation in the story???
Unfortunately the script is never really quite brave enough to really take those ideas apart as much as they deserve, and it leaves the movie feeling like it hasn't truly resolved its biggest and most interesting idea. Still, not a bad watch, and it's only like 4 bucks to stream on amazon.
Zenitsu is a pita, but no more than say Usopp? Usopp had many great moments, and Zenitsu has already had one himself. Zenitsu's was much much better animated than it originally appeared, too.
i didn't ask for this
yeah, frame blending in after effects
in fact I think the only part that felt wrong was the 60 FPS smoothness when my brain was expecting 12 or 24 FPS from animation
and I suppose it's subjective, there's no *correct* way to feel about the motion
but oh man it looks 1000% like trash
That's not what I got from it. What I took from the ending was them realizing that just because they are taking different paths in life doesn't mean they can't be together. A rejection of the Liz and the Blue Bird storybook ending that had been hanging its shadow over them the entire movie. The movie ends with the symbolism of the two birds flying in the sky, bobbing and weaving, not quite in sync but not flying separately either. And Disjoint becomes Dis Joint. It felt like things are stronger between them because they understand each other and what they want out of life.
This is goddamn weird to watch and I stopped about thirty seconds in. I don't dislike it, but I don't want to see it.
it's on youtube as well
you can really see the bad interpolated frames if you freeze-frame through it
If you want something at 60 FPS make it natively at 60 FPS.
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
yeah they picked a pretty brute-force method of doing this that doesn't work well with hand animation
but at some point i wonder if ai will get good enough to do this
like with enough source footage you could probably train a deep learning intelligence to recognize a goku face/body and re-draw it from any angle
and given two clean key frames of animation you could probably do a decent job of guessing what an intermediate frame would look like instead of just blurring them together
as well as having bits of the ai to know when/where *not* to blend frames together by analyzing artifacts
you'd need to tune it a lot to pick up on artistic intent but it seems within the realm of reason