@04:19 I probably didn’t help my case by posting crappy youtube clips. Especially …

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Comment on Top 20 Anime You Wept Over by Anonymous:

@04:19
I probably didn’t help my case by posting crappy youtube clips. Especially the first one suffered extremely hard from detail loss and lack of brightness. The actual film material is much better.

The argument that the visual quality of the movie is “bad” to the point of being distracting for young viewers used to today’s animation is invalid. Visual quality is not a matter of opinion. It can be quantified by looking at the details, relative occurrence of drops in art quality, and average frame rate. This movie (and in fact a good number of later 80s and early 90s features and shows) score higher than most of todays shows in all these points. You could also evaluate the conformance to modern aesthetic expectations if you want to bring in a subjective component, but this movie is pretty good even in that department. Mikimoto’s character designs for Macross were arguably the first to feature particularly modern design traits, namely in terms of hairstyles and colors, and the shape of the eyes. I wish I had a way to post screens of certain shots of some of the female characters in the movie to illustrate this (quite a few would easily be considered “moe” by todays standards). Same in the mecha department. Gun turrets on space ships are depicted today just like those on the Macross, the 360° HUD projection in the Valkyrie fighters is now in every real/giant robot, and the flashy launch clearance indicators on the ARMD carriers in Macross have become a major coolness factor in every self-respecting mecha anime.
It should also be mentioned that the mecha combat choreography pioneered here (the “Itano-Circus”, named after the animation director who invented it for the Macross franchise) revolutionized the depiction of animated battles, and is still being employed in the exact same way today, most recent examples would be Gundam Unicorn and Eureka 7 AO.

I could go on endlessly, but the point here is, epoch-making gems like this are so good visually, that rejecting them on those grounds simply doesn’t make sense. Especially if the stylistic traits of those works are used in today’s anime in exactly the same way as they were used back then. Don’t let the youtube clips fool you here.

By extension, ~25 years into the past isn’t a subjective choice made by a particularly notorious group of aged western otaku. It’s simply the the point in time where anime design aesthetics matured and became similar enough to what they are today, and high-budget productions visually intricate enough to become timeless.

By the way, I’m 24 and I started watching anime 9 years ago. CGI was already commonplace then. It didn’t prevent me from recognizing the great art and animation of some old titles, not least because many do feature enough visually appealing bishoujo characters to satisfy even the modern weaboo. There really is no excuse for staying ignorant of them. Except maybe being an ignorant Narutard. But then design/animation quality clearly isn’t the issue.

Anonymous made other comments on this post:

• Top 20 Anime You Wept Over:
  

  I was more pissed with AIr than sad. I’m not gonna spoil the ending, but the way everything turned out is what mad me mad.

• Top 20 Anime You Wept Over:
  

  @gutsyfrog anon 21:56 28/05/2012 here. “and I don’t think level of detail and amount of frames equals ‘measurable quality’. the dance/concert scene in Symphogear episode 1 is animated on 1s and quite detailed, but it looks like shit because the art is trash and the movement is amateurish-looking.” You’re quite right about that. Realistic, or depending on the art direction simply “accomplished” movements should be part of the measure, but I’m unsure how to quantify that, although intuitively I’d …

• Top 20 Anime You Wept Over:
  

  agree with you, i almost cried when Yuuko …….

• Top 20 Anime You Wept Over:
  

  Read the manga. The anime cuts out an awful lot.

• Top 20 Anime You Wept Over:
  

  Witch Blade actually got to me… But that’s just me…

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