icarus-daedelus said:
You could just as easily be describing K-On here if it weren't for the fact that it has more of a connecting thread to bind the scenes together than Nichijou, but the former is vastly less exciting and energetic than the latter on its best days.
Its not some minor difference, its a completely different style of comedy. A joke in
Excel Saga is fundamentally different to a joke in
Legend of the Galactic Heroes to a joke in
The Wire to a joke in
Urusei Yatsura (well, it depends).
A show that I can describe as: a robot walks into a dude and explodes and stuff falls on this silly girl who eats food dramatically and then a girl shoots a frisbee and then theres a guy on a goat and then theres a dude giving a speech and then someone gets shot and then
its a very particular style. It's not an uncommon form in anime comedies, but it's still very distinct from other variations on the comedy show.
icarus-daedelus said:
I find K-On enjoyable, but to call it funny is kind of being really generous; I think I laughed out loud once or twice per season. What little humor they attempt couldn't be flatter most of the time.
If I was watching it as some kind of comedy, Id probably turn it off for failing to keep me entertained. But I dont approach it in that manner.
I disagree about the humour too. I think the show attempts some overt jokes (Yui is singing in a silly way! Haha) which I dont enjoy, but it also does more natural humour, like when the girls are all lying in one room and trying to get to sleep. One person says something, and then another replies, and someone else finds it funny while trying to shut the first girl up because everyones really trying to get to sleep. Theres no one punchline to that scene, its amusing because Ive had that exact same situation when sleeping in a room with my friends.
icarus-daedelus said:
Filling it with "slice of life" stuff in this case just feels like vastly extending the length for no real reason. This just kind of adds to the general dullness of that show. There's not enough added characterisation to justify it being twice the length, buuuuuuuuut the sentimental tear-jerking at the end does kind of work okay for what they're trying to do. So I can kinda see how someone would respond to that.
So, youre admitting its like
Aria?
icarus-daedelus said:
Direction is so nebulous a term for me, though. Production values are comparatively easy to pin down. I'm not really sure if I can come up with an adequate definition, other than a director being the ultimate arbiter of decisions, but even that has its exceptions. It feels like a lot of the time that when people are talking about direction they're really speaking to the editing and cinematography of a film or tv series, which are admittedly strongly influenced by the director. Maybe that's my real problem here. I'm so bad at arguing, I overthink things to the point of forgetting what the hell point I was originally trying to make, lol.
This has been brought up before, but often I use direction as shorthand for everything. For instance: mise-en-scene, sound, photography, storyboarding, camera movement (cinematography), editing, pace, flow, lighting and so on (I do talk about animation and writing separately). How much control the actual director has varies from show to show as in -
duckroll said:
Well that's not always the case. Ideally, and in most of the best examples, the director does indeed storyboard what he is directing as well. But that's not always the case. Often the episode director, the series director, and the episode storyboarder, are totally different people. Let's not forget the director of photography as well, who would be the chief compositor.
In many cases Ill single out a particular thing to discuss like the use of sound in
Ghost Hound or the use of editing in
Bakemonogatari. If all those above things happen to be good, Ill just write direction rather than knock off that full list. In the case of
K-On! (and
K-On!!) all those things are through the roof, hence I dont bother splitting them up.
