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