MoFo Lists

The list is compiled by animators, not critics.

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Cobpyth's Movie Log ~ 2019

At a quick glance I've seen 23... out of them WALL-E and Akira would be the only two that'd make my animated list if I made one.

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Which ones (out of curiosity)? UP and Ratatouille wouldn't make our list?

Oh yeah, my mistake however it shows that western animators do not watch any anime beyond the titles that are the most famous in the west. It explains why Hideaki Anno's work, while extremely influential overall has not influenced anything released in the west.

Western animators certainly have all shared tastes and aesthetic sensibilities more adapted to the production of children's movies. That's what happened when people who wish to work as animators in the west choose to do so because they are obsessed with Disney's stuff.

Most people only watch the famous movies of their regions, or of the major markets, that's why those movies are famous. As soon as everybody watches something considered obscure, it's no longer obscure.

But I watched the most famous anime movies very quickly and moved to the least known stuff in a matter of months. It is interesting that western animators work for decades in the field but have watched like 60 hours of anime over a period of 20-30 years while I watched 1,500 hours over a period of 18 months and I work in a completely unrelated field. References to anime in Family Guy and Futurama are extremely stereotypical and shows how ignorant the authors of those series are of the medium. When anime titles make references to western animation it is precise:



I think that this is a consequence of the fact that "the West" (US and Western Europe) is extremely culturally self contained and that people who do not have specific interest in animation produced in Asia, even if they work in the field, remain ignorant of most of the stuff produced. So in the west only anime fans and people who do research specific to anime/manga have substantial knowledge of the anime medium. People who write general top 100 lists such as this one or books such as "history of animation" have watched like 50 hours of anime:

http://books.google.com/books?id=1Yi...ed=0CC4Q6AEwAA

I guess it's like how many Indian movies the typical western film critic have watched, a figure like 10, while India has produced more movies than the USA.

It was to much expect somebody who works professionally in the field such as animation to actually know most of the most popular stuff produced in the country that produces several times more animation than Europe and North America combined. However if you ask someone working in a western animation studio (either the movie or the TV studios that make the nickelondeon shows) which of these titles they watched: http://guriguriblog.wordpress.com/20...of-the-decade/, they wouldn't have watched a single one (or perhaps one of two).

The west still behaves as if it is in the complete control of the world like it was in the 19th century. It is self contained culturally and impervious to external influence, considering itself to be so enormously superior to the rest that they do not easily assimilate artistic developments made elsewhere. Technological and scientific developments are completely different though but I guess when the stuff "really matters" nobody cares where it comes from since it is a must that it most be assimilated.

I find it incredible how enormously behind western animators are and incredible that they do not even more in the direction of convergence. It's like western animation studios look like medieval forges forging crude iron implements to till the fields while Japanese studios make automated machine tools but the western studios do not even look at the work done elsewhere. Well, as long as their enormous captive audience continues to buy their crude iron implements they continue to produce it.

You're constantly stating utter assumptions as facts, Guap. You should unlearn that.

Oh, I didn't know we were all ignorant. That explains why we don't like some of this junk.

Look, there is good anime but there is crap as well.

Winter Sleep http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2758880/ still needs to be added to the Cannes list.

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"Don't be so gloomy. After all it's not that awful. Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."

I disagree, I arrived at these conclusions after doing some research. It is easy to see that given that the American/English animators only voted for the most famous anime titles in the English speaking world shows that their knowledge of the field is extremely limited. If they had voted for some slightly more obscure titles such as Urusei Yatsura 2 I would have a different impression of their knowledge.

It is also a fact that Japan produces several times more animation than the West and it is obvious to me, who has watched very large volumes of Western and Japanese animation that the latter achieves much greater artistic peaks. In the west animation is not taken as a serious field for art, instead they are regarded as cartoons for children. In Japan the perception of animation as a general field for storytelling and experimental visual art is well established. Talent in the west that goes to writing novels and directing live action films and TV goes in Japan to the writing of manga and the directing of animation. The reason? I don't know, I think that the West is a more photographic culture and as a result animation and comic books become underdeveloped while Japan has a more abstract visual culture which lead to the full development of animation and graphic novels as artistic mediums.

As a result, today Japan produces about 200 animated series per year and 100 animated films, while the US produces 30 animated series per year and 15 animated films. However, Japan's animation mostly targets teenagers and adults while American animation targets mostly children under the age of 12. The number of animations made for people over the age of 12 in Japan is around 250 titles (movies + TV) per year, in the US is less than 10. As a result, the number of masterpieces in animation in Japan is simply much greater as a function of it being a much larger field. The fact that animators in Japan take their work much more seriously is also a factor.

American animators such as Lasseter, even said that to be an animator one has to be like a child. Oshii and Anno would laugh at that. Anno said that animation is defined as field of cinema where dreams become reality. Animation is a medium, it is the use of drawings to produce cinema instead photography. There is not ex-ante restriction on what animation can do. In the west, animators have their minds locked and they are not audacious, they do not take their art seriously and still associate animation with simplistic children's cinema. They are unable to take advantage of the possibilities of the medium. As a result, no Western animation achieves the beauty of Haibane Renmei, the elegance of My Neighbor Totoro, the epic scale of Legend of Galactic Heroes, the emotional power of Grave of the Fireflies, the sadistic cruelty of PMMM or the artistic sophistication of Lain.

And also, western animators, being ignorant of most stuff produced in their field, are also locked into making the stuff they always made.

That's because you do not understand the language it speaks. So it sounds as gibberish to you. Usually people who claim anime to be mostly garbage are the ones that know the least about it. People who are knowledgeable and open minded about comics and animation can appreciate hundreds of different titles in many genres of animation produced in Japan.

Indeed. However, the same applies to western animation. In the US, out of the 7-8 adult animations made per year, 1-2 are good, in Japan, out of the 250 adult animations made per year, about 70-80 are good. There is much more trash but also much more good stuff: for each hour of good adult animation made in the US there are 50 hours made in Japan.

I personally have no identification with Japanese culture versus American or European culture. I do not have any specific attraction to it (though I do not feel rejected by it as well, I think they are inside the spectrum of normality, together with the west in general). However I like cartoons and 95% of all good cartoons made in the world are made in Japan.

I actually would love to see a well developed culture of animation in the US and Europe. However, fact is that there isn't much stuff made in the west and the little that is made is substandard if compared to the top of the line in terms of anime. The existence of this large number of masterpieces was made possible by the fact that each great anime sits atop hundreds of mediocre titles. Quantity is required for quality: to have a great novel, movie or anything you need hundreds of mediocre ones. And to have a great novel, writers must not be afraid of producing personal work, of taking it seriously and not make it as a babysitter movie for 5 year olds (like it happens almost always in the west, even Norstein's work is tainted by family friendly preoccupation).

If you compare animation with videogames you will notice that US and Europe have developed videogames as much as Japan. Like animation, videogames started as a children's entertainment. Differently from animation, all over the world videogames quickly evolved into a general entertainment and artistic medium. As result today we have western videogames in all genres and many masterpieces. Animation in Japan evolved like videogames did in the west, animation in the west stayed locked into the child's play box with a few entries into gross sarcastic comedy (such as South Park and The Simpsons).

Some people in anime forums commented that the lack of development in American animation is due to the laws that restricted the development of comics books after WW2. These laws made impossible for comic books to develop into a wide variety of genres and to feature more adult content. As a result comic books became a tiny niche in the US, corresponding to 4% of the size of the market for novels. In Japan, comic books are a fully developed medium for fiction, they sell more than novels there and in fact the size of the Japanese comic book market is comparable to the entire market for novels in the US! As a result, there are thousands of masterpieces of literature in comic book form in Japan. In the US, nearly all serious writing is done in novels without pictures, comic books are not a serious medium in the US.

Animation developed in Japan from adaptations out of these comic books and since these comic books cover all genres and demographics, animation also covers all genres and demographics. Since the US comic book market never developed into a mature market and a general medium for fiction in all genres, the adaptations of comic books became a genre into themselves in the US. In Japan since 2/3 of the highest grossing films are adapted from comic books (a statistic which I derived from 2009-2013 box office data), to say that a movie is a "comic book movie" in Japan is as absurd as saying that this Hollywood movie is a "novel movie".

Miyazaki even said that comic books became ingrained into the visual mentality of the Japanese people, as a result even live action film direction in contemporary Japan is heavily based on comic book visual techniques. As I read in a blog, Japan is a "manga crazed culture". Their animation and visual novels* are just a derivation of that.

*visual novels are computer games that play like a manga with multiple options and have graphics like this:


The west lacks a culture for animation and in fact, the fact that you Americans use the words cartoons and comic books as derogatory terms (this is a poorly written character like a "cartoon character", this is a poorly written film with the depth of a "comic book") shows how lowly your culture thinks of these artistic fields. Since our society does not value these artistic fields, few people wish to work there and as a result the ones who work there have their minds like Lasseter who spouts nonsense like "one must be like a child to be an animator".

It is a very sad thing for me who likes animation to be restricted to the output of a single culture, Japan's. But I have no other option (besides not watching much animation, like you guys do (I notice from the movie tab and tv tab threads that you guys usually watch 95% live action and few animation here and there): people who watch 500 hours of animation per year are only the anime fans. I do not think there exists many people over the age of 15 which manage to watch 500 hours per year of American cartoons by tuning on nickelodeon and cartoon network. I personally stopped watching American cartoons regularly when I was in the 5th grade since I grew out of it. Still watch the few adult titles though such as Family Guy. But they are not diverse enough and good enough to fill my "animation buffering". In fact, I wouldn't say I am an animation fan without the existence of enough material to supply the hobby and Japan produces this material.

I hope that in the future this changes. Pixar and Dreamworks have already moved to produce some movies that transcended the traditional limits of western animation such as UP and I hope that with the further development of videogames that some crossfertilization happens between this field and animation to further push western animation forward.

Also, China is becoming an economic superpower. Given that they also share their comic book culture with Japan it is only a matter of time before they develop a large animation culture like Japan. So that's another possibility for the supply of my animation needs.

I don't like anime.

Thanks; done.

Any chance we might see a new list soon, like the foreign list or something?

Yeah, probably. I've always got a lot to do, but adding another list or two is towards the top, priority-wise.

I have an idea for a list.


"The MoFo Most Iconic Movie Cars Of All Time"


I ain't doing it though. Not after I did the Comics List.

Indeed, I now feel embarrassed by my overreaction from a stupid list.

As Harry Lime said, I have to stop taking things so seriously.

It is one of your worst ideas.

Or write fewer walls of text and get out and get some sun or something. Sheesh!

I guess nobody read that.

And I don't like sunlight. I prefer the stable light provided by artificial lamps.

Probably not.

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I know that you are not a big fan of reading Miss Vicky since I remember you complained about the length of my posts and also since you complained about having to read tons of text to watch a movie with subtitles.