i cant watch anything anymore without being irrationally annoyed at how theatrical 99% of anime is. the dialogue, the action, etc makes me start imagining whatever nerd wrote it without experiencing anything even remotely similar.
gimme something real!!
Paranoia agent has some pretty grounded dialouge for the most part.
Also visual novels are an option: anime adjacent yet you mentally supply the voices.
I think genuine grounded realism doesn't really work in most animation, even supposed "down-to-earth" cartoons like King of the Hill are very caricatured. But in terms of stuff that feels less nerdy, idk, Great Pretender was still exaggerated but in a way that felt more like a Bond movie than a D&D table
Ofc you’d feel that way OP, since most anime and manga are written by shut-ins stuck in their homes due to how intensive the life of a mangaka is, so I doubt you’ll ever see any “grounded” anime or manga that isn’t a one-shot, standalone movie, or manga series. I mean, just look at Eiichiro Oda’s schedule.
The end result is that most characters feel like archetypes as opposed to actual people, which is what Miyazaki was saying contrary to that “anime was a mistake” false quote: Most media will only as far as the creator knows.
An example would be how ass female characters in Naruto are, and that has to do with how the author himself isn’t good at writing female characters (as he admits) probably because, well, he is a man.
As for the theatrics, there was a similar complain by gay westerners over the anime Yuri on Ice!’s subsided displays of romance between the gay leads. But that had less to do with homophobia on the Japs’ part than with how Japanese culture in general is more introverted and touch-averse compared to, say, Spanish culture. The end result is heavy displays of emotions, but subsided public displays of romantic affection with loads of crying and shyster behavior. That is partly a reason why you see more trans characters than explicitly gay or bisexual ones in the industry.
The theatrics can easily be explained by how early mangakas (like, during Tezuka’s times) took a lot of their artistic cues from movies and theatre conventions, so that’s why it feels theatrical as you say.
I’m probably restating common knowledge, but those seem to the facts based on what weebs told me back when I was in MAL.
>>30205Closest example I can think would be Spirited Away and Miyazaki’s biographical movie on the founder of Mitsubishi, where the conversations between the characters does feel like how people in real life talk, and the MC in Spirited Away does look like the average Japanese girl as opposed to an idealised portrayal.
But even then, the animation and character design are still too stylised to be deemed “grounded”. Rotoscope movies might be the exception given how much of the technique is reliant on live-action motion.
Watch monster, paranoia agent, inuyashiki last hero
Planetes mb
I think Oshii films are the most 'mature' stuff tbh, also GitS stand alone complex
i started watching the patlabor early days OVA and the dialogue seems fine to me
>>30203Isao Takahata (Grave of the Fireflies, Only Yesterday)
Mamoru Oshii when he's not trying to be funny (Ghost in the Shell 1 & 2, Patlabor 2, Jin-Roh, The Sky Crawlers, Angel's Egg)
Satoshi Kon (Perfect Blue, Millennium Actress, Tokyo Godfathers, Paranoia Agent, Paprika)
Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
Whisper of the Heart
Cowboy Bebop
Liz and the Blue Bird
Planetes
At some point you have to accept that anime is expressionistic. It wants to convey what it FEELS LIKE for that thing to happen, not what it LOOKS LIKE. That's why you have guys who are on fire when they're angry and cry major river systems when they're upset. It's about creating an external visual depiction of an internal emotional state.
>>30205This. It’s not exclusively an anime problem.
In fact I would say western animation is worse with the theatrical overreaction
>>30203Read manga instead. Or watch BL and GL
>>30205Realism in 99% of art is inherently relative. The whole “well realism can’t ACTUALLY do X” argument is dumb because it treats realism as an absolute.
Take superheroes for example. Could Batman actually exist? No, obviously not. Is ‘The Dark Knight’ still a valid “realist” take on the premise given how it has internal consistency under a believable set of constraints relative to the premise in a way that carries suspension of disbelief? Sure. The point of realism in art is maintaining the illusion to whatever purpose the artist has decided.
Nerds constantly miss this because they have terminal YouTube brain and treat realism as an absolute, when it almost never is.
>>30283This.
It’s a consequence of a society where it’s socially permitted for adults to make hour-long video essays about some singular nuance of a cartoon show
>>30283>Realism in 99% of art is inherently relative.it's also an odd complaint because thinking about it, naturalistic dialogue in film and tv is a relatively modern innovation and is still somewhat niche outside of "mumblecore" indie movies. most commercial movies and shows are actually fairly theatrical in their delivery. like bitch you want godard? go watch godard. why are you watching anime?
>>30285This. The Dark Knight movie directed by Christopher Nolan was heralded as the vanguard of more gritty realistic superhero movies.
Heath Ledger turned down Nolan once because he thought Nolan’s Batman movie series was gonna be the same old campy stuff.
>>30292i guess you could arguably say it's leftist but in a way that most people probably won't get, you can easily read it as uncritically supporting fascism
>>30294>>30291Honestly? The Nolan movies are campier than they’re often given credit for despite their realism, and I think Nolan knew exactly what he was doing.
Realism and camp depending on the context aren’t necessarily irreconcilable. Stuff like the Nolan Batman movies are realist in setting rules and aesthetic, but still very heightened and theatrical in their acting, dialogue and plot.
Again, realism is relative
>>30297I agree with this as well.
I especially am mind-boggled over how people often like to roast fictional characters for their motives not being “realistic” enough
It’s especially dumb when done for superhero media.
It’s like people forget that this shit is meant for amusement. Trying to find “deeper meaning” to the plot is just dumb.
The same people who take time to logistically analyze this shit are the same ones who cannot be bothered to research any science or geopolitical affairs
>>30285Look up method acting
>>30304method acting does not really deliver natural-sounding performances, and depending on the director, the whole performance may be actually worse. because of brechtian alienation or whatever.
>>30293That's fair, no characters really have anything to do with leftist politics. It's more anti-colonial/pro-revolutionary I guess. It don't see how it would be facist to me unless you think the slave-holding, sadistic, child-killing, authoritarian humans are the good guys for some reason.
>>30307They do that in kabuki shows as well, and I don't think that's marketed towards children (or the prevalence of tsukkomis with manzai stand up comedy, which I personnaly find extremely unfunny)
i dunno if theyre mature but anime i wanna watch
sonny boy
hyouka(references failure of japanese leftist movements)
that smoking cat girl anime who is depressed lowkey
delicious in dungeon
witch hat atelier
genocidal organ
gundam
planetes
>>30309Gundam’s kinda like Star Wars or Marvel in that the age demographic varies wildly due to being a legacy IP. Some of it can be enjoyed by an older audience, others are shameless in being toy commercials full of goofy bullshit. Sometimes you get a Hathaway or Thunderbolt, other times you get ZZ or Build Fighters
the true chad mecha are Big O and Patlabor >>30310I know this is heresy but I don't really see why people love Patlabor so much (outside of Patlabor 2 which is very good).
>>30307I don't know how much for kids it is, simply because most anime depends on Bluray sales to be profitable, and the thing about kids is they don't actually have all that much disposable income?
>>30310Despite not being very good a lot of the time, ZZ is unfortunately the most class conscious Gundam series. I say unfortunately because I would have liked it if the class conscious one was also the good one.
Amuro and Camille are both ultimately rich kids. They live in the fanciest parts of the colonies, their parents are high level Space Raytheon people, ultimately the war can be a war of ideals for them.
Judah in ZZ is somewhere between working class and lumpenprole. He understands that the rich, either Earthnoid or Spacenoid, care nothing for him. He helps a miner's strike, for god's sake!
New GiTS is so good
>>30309forgot some. gonna use this as personal dump
new gits
galaxy express 999
land of the lustrous
Princess Utena
i think already watched patlabor movies and jin roh wolf brigade
Something something Hayao Miyazaki
>>30283"Realism" in the context of this thread is not referring to how believable something is, it's referring to a specific aesthetic called "realism", one that tries to deprive the subject matter of stylistic flourishes like melodramatic dialogue and theatrical action. The Dark Knight might be "more realistic" but it's not "realist". Animation inherently simplifies reality (you couldn't animate a Da Vinci painting) which is why it's always stylized in some direction or another and cannot be strictly realist in the sense that a Tolstoy novel is.
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