Will Serious Western animation ever rival Serious Eastern animation?

And reading people's minds isn't cheating.?

Someone could have tried it, it makes more sense then trying to beat him in a kids card game even though that didn't work last 800 times it was tried?

If they wanted his puzzle so bad, they could have filled his house with nerve gas and take it, its not like he secret ID or something.

That show makes no sense, how are card games more important then Super Bowl and the world cup in that universe?

Regardless I find the suggestion that show is better then JLU, in terms of story, highly amusing.
 
Of course since kids don't read comics, there is nothing wrong with Marvel having series aimed at kids, in order to introduce kids to the characters.

Considering fan boys are the only ones who read their comics now, I think it makes sense Marvel spends more time targeting kids with animation then fan boys.

Besides there is good mature and bad mature, if mature just means gore and sex and that's it, that's not a good thing. Again dark content in of itself doesn't make something good.
 
I don't know, After long decades of it's reputation, I don't think Western Animation can ever be taken seriously. This is why we have Live Action.

And I wish Chinese and Korean animation were more notice. I kind of hate it when people think all Eastern animation is Japanese and all Western animation is American.
 
Will anime ever be more than endless series of big muscly guys fighting each other in tournaments?

Japan has plenty of kids' comedy shows (Doraemon, Chibi Maruko-chan, Sazae-san, etc.). In fact, kids' comedy shows blow most other anime out of the water in Japan, popularity-wise. Both the East and the West have the same types of cartoons.

People just have the misconception that all anime is violent fighting shonen or mature dramas, simply because that's the only stuff that would have a market abroad. Same thing goes for "quality". Only the best 1% is translated and released out West. There is about 99% of average or sub-par anime out there that hardly anyone will see.
 
I'm not really talking about dark and edgy so much as just treating it like a viable medium to tell a story. Networks are really only interested in using animation for comedy shows, or comic book superhero shows. Most shows don't have a plot, or any real story to them. Action shows will mostly be about the episodic adventures of a character with no real goal, and the endings are usually nonexistent due to cancellation or extremely open ended so it could be picked up for more season. Even terrible shows like Queens Blade have a story to tell (a bad one, but a story nevertheless, which sort of proves a horribly morbid point about animation being taken more seriously; even that kind) I can only think of maybe three United States shows that do that and would really like to see more.
 
The power of a milenium item passes the power. Items can be used a\gainst items fairly.

No one said the story was better than anything else, I was sayng it has made more money from the first series alone.
 
Which also has its unfortunate drawbacks. A TV budget can only go so far, which why the majority of TV shows are set in modern day with any and all fantastical elements presented in as limited a fashion as can be allowed. And while there's the option of making a movie, it's limited by running time and traditional three-act pacing.

I'd hate to imagine how Gundam 00 would suffer if it was limited by live action special effects.
 
Except there have many animated shows that have a had continuing storyline since 92, JLU, 2k3 TMNT, Wolverine and the X-Men, Gargoyles, Iron Man: armored adventures, Specutalar spider-Man, Avatar and that's just off the top of my head. There are examples of this, people just choose to ignore them. Heck most action cartoons creeated today have a continuing storyline, rather then an episodic one, so that whole epsodic storyline argument is just dated.

Besides BTAS had an epsidoic storyline, is a BTAS a bad cartoon now?

As for a point mentioned earlier, about western aniamtion having weaker characterization, I will mention that Mr. Freeze was a deeper villain in BTAS then he was in the comcis, despite the comics being more "mature".
 
Plenty of people already take Western animation seriously. Persepolis has 96% at Rotten Tomatoes, for a start, that's got to count for something?

(I get the feeling that when people complain that animation isn't taken seriously in the west, what a lot of them really mean is that action-adventure animation isn't taken seriously...)



And... he's supposed to be better than the otaku he's responding to? If he likes cartoons so much, surely he should have learnt never to sink to the level of the bad guy :p
 
That basically sums up part of the reason why animation has always interested me. Honestly, live-action sci-fi or superhero shows/movies always look a little cheezy to me on some level, no matter how well done it is.
 
To use some TVTropes-isms, Yu-Gi-Oh!, no matter which part of the series you're watching/reading, relies a great degree on Rule of Cool and What Do You Mean, It's Not Awesome?

Also, as I understand it, beating Atem in a game is pretty much the only way to defeat him. Think about it, he's a reality warper that can bring cards to life and completely mind rape people. The only way to fight him is on his terms.
 
Respectfully, I have to disagree. Western animation is taken plenty seriously. Also, I wasn't aware that Western animation had a "bad rep". I've honestly never heard that before.

Animation is universal. It's not just USAnimation and anime. There is no 1 definitive look or style that defines Western animation, thus, every animated project should be judged individually.
 
I don't really think that. There are plenty of anime that are mature dramas like Monster for example that's what I mean. I realize they have children's cartoons like pokemon or shin chan but I mean will we see a american cartoon that's like bleach or fullmetal alchemist.
 
Wow, these threads move fast... that's gonna be a pain to try and keep up with


Do not confuse "bad" with "not as good"... just because it's a good show does not mean we can not consider a lot of other shows better

I mean, one thing that i did not like about the series was the fact that i hardly ever really got intrigued by the main characters... 90% of the time all they did was show up, solve the case, catch the bad guy, and went to bed... rise, wash, repeat... the main characters barely ever really developed accept for a scant few episodes... and again, a scant few episodes does not make up for the rest of the series... frankly, i had more interest in the villains for that very reason, because they seemed like they got more development (ofcourse they appeared a lot less which makes it easier to focus on just those few episodes)...

not to mention i can't help but feel like arkham asylum looks a little silly... no matter how many times the villains get caught they always manage to break out... you'd seriously would think that the city would give the place a bigger budget and would have figured out how to keep them breaking out after a while


Yes and that's what made them the best FEW episodes of the entire series...
but that's just it, it was a few episodes and it does not make it up for the rest of the series... frankly i thought it was the high point of the series as the legion of doom made the show into cookie cutter, black and white villainy... you could say their was a continious story, but it wasn't a very good one... i mean, aside from the beging, when luthor takes control of the group, and the ending episodes, the episodes are pretty interchangable and as such episodic... sure you could try to say their would be continuity error as some villains got their brains zapped when the JLU caught them; but those villains play such minor roles they are easy to forget... not to mention with the way they always breakout of jail its so easy to assume "they recovered"


wow, now that's a broken argument... instead of comparing JLU to great anime series, let's compare it to a kids show whose purpose was to sell trading cards... seriously, unless someone is making the argument that ALL anime is better than ALL western, you should comparing the best western animation to the best animes...





One of my points is that format is not as good as long on going storylines through out the entire series... I mean, sure each episode has "beginning, middle and end", but how much character development occurs? how much does that development matter in the following episodes? Character development is what can really attach you to a character, and you don't get as much of it when you are dealing with an episodic series... afterall, the people who air the show are relying on the fact that they will be able to rerun the show in random order, and as such the status quo from episode to episode must go largely unchanged... the show is really just "another day, another villain"... frankly, you miss an episode and you won't feel like you really missed much as that's the nature of the show

And that's why "fifty episodes to tell one story a better method than having fifty stories about one cast of characters"... when you work episodic, the status quo for the characters changes very little as the episodes are interchangeable with one another... when you work with a linear storyline, you can have the characters undergo a long, drawn out, development; interchange the episodes and you not only mess up the story, but you mess up the characters themsevles
 
The underlying problem with this thread is that there is an assumption that crap like Bleach and Fullmetal Alchemist is all serious and mature. It's not, it's kid's stuff. It seems a little different because it conforms to different social mores but it's still kid's stuff. All Shonen is by definition kid's stuff, hell that's inherent in the name.

The seinen that we do get over here, with all the boobs and gory violence, is roughly comparable to Western efforts like Heavy Metal.
 
Though, I do see a ton of anime that have very predictable ending as well.
If you want a serious american animated series doesn't really falls into the predictable side, watch The Maxx and or Spider-man (MTV version).
 
Seriously? What about all of Bruce Timm's shows, or W.I.T.C.H, or Transformers, or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, or He-Man, or Spawn, or... you get my point?

Japan may have more action cartoons than America, but to say that one Gargoyles episode is the only piece of western TV animation with drama...
 
We've had animation like that for decades. Mature Western animation is much more mature in tone and intent than horror or adventure anime that throws in a lot of sex and violence. Only things like Grave of the fireflies and Ghibli and Miyazaki anime are as truly mature as, say, American Pop or A Scanner Darkly.

I think Western adults just don't like action cartoons as much as they like humor cartoons, so anything with mature content is either going to tend to be a serious dramatic piece or a silly, Adult Swim type thing. That recent Hulk Vs. DTV was pretty damn violent, though. And then there was Spawn on HBO, so there are exceptions.

I think what you're really asking is will action cartoons for kids in America ever be as violent and sexy as action cartoons for kids in Japan. The answer is no, not unless cultural norms change. The closest thing of I can think of was the excellent Exo Squad from the 1990s.
 
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