Will Serious Western animation ever rival Serious Eastern animation?

True, although the same thing could be said for the DCAU and Avatar, and thus they shouldn't be discussed either. They were written with kids in mind.
 
How does comparing a Miyazaki film to acknowledged trash like Titanic, the Animated Musical (which wasn't even made in this country) really prove anything?

I could take one of Disney's best features and compare it to the multitude of crap that comes out of Japan on a yearly basis in order to prove the exact opposite.

In short, your comparison isn't very fair.
 
Star Wars: The Clone Wars
Wolverine and the X-Men
Justice League Unlimited
Samurai Jack
Spectacular Spider-Man
Avatar
Spawn

Just to name a few from the last ten years.
 
I don't think they shouldn't be discussed. I just don't think they should be used as examples of how "Japan has more serious action animation for adults" and somehow placed on a pedestal above things like JLU that are aimed at the exact same demographic.

Compare apples to apples. Compare seinen and josei to stuff like Bakshi and Heavy Metal and the Spawn animated series. It's roughly comparable, in fact I'd say that good seinen anime that exist to do more than just titilate with violence and sex are pretty thin on the ground.
 
Shin-Chan is certainly no children's cartoon. Yes, it's mostly about children, but so is South Park, which it could be more reasonably compared to. Decidedly not-for-kids material.

Will western cartoons ever get beyond comedies with talking animals or extreme caricatures, with realistically proportioned humans reserved for super-hero tales? There have been many attempts. They don't seem to stick. I have some hope for the future that this may change, but not a lot of hope.
 
not a good comparison at all. Ponyo is a major movie, while Titanic Animated is lucky to be sold in a convienence store. Quality shows it. Any way, we were mostly talking about in shows, not movies.
 
Bleach and Fullmetal Alchemist are technically children's shows too, you know. So is Shin-chan, albeit one that horrified parents when it aired in Japan.
 
I agree.

Although, I have to confess that I accidentally put Hajime no Ippo in the adult category even though it's a shonen series.
 
Oh brother, is this ever a pointless discussion. You can find good and bad examples of animation on either side, so we might as well stop before this turns into a useless duel of youtube videos. It's a waste to spend so much time debating the opinion of some obnoxious moron with a youtube account. And no, I won't "look past" the trolling part and force myself to watch beyond the few irritating seconds that I did. My time is worth something. I'll spend it here taking real arguments seriously.
 
Without reading that thread, I think I was using them as an example of old shows for the nostalgia argument (I did like them as a kid). But like I said, taste change over time. I used to like the 80s Ninja Turtles show too. Now I most certainly do not. Though I should clarify I don't hate those shows, and may even find some of them enjoyable, they're not something I have any interest in either (I'll touch on that in the below Simpsons comment)

It's kind of the opposite for me. If I can skip an episode and miss nothing, then it doesn't interest me that much and comes off as filler.

Usually that's when the show based on a comic catches up to it and has to wait for the comic to get ahead again. Otherwise, shows that wait to make an adaption tend to have little to no filler (like Death Note). Though I think proportionately JLU has more filler than plot (if we're saying the Cadmus stuff was the 'main storyline', where even drawn-out shows like Naruto and it's filler saga have more plot than JLU did.

I believe they did give a reason that the Millennium Puzzle had to be won in a game and couldn't be taken by force (as far as why Pegasus didn't do that). Then again, you could also ask why the cops/Batman never kill the Joker, or why they don't build a boat on Gilligan's Island when they can make radios and other more advanced stuff.

Maybe not 'bad', but not something I would go out of my way to watch. I mean, I can watch Spongebob and other similar shows, and laugh and enjoy them, but I would do that only if it's just something to watch while I'm eating or working. I'd never break a gaming session or something to go catch the latest Chowder, since there's no story or plot to persuade me to do so. I only watch TV for about 30 minutes a week right now.

Usually it's more fleshed out, and more can happen. In a single episode, things tend to resolve within 30 minutes or less. But in a story spanning an entire series a lot of things can happen: important characters can be killed off, where as killing of a one-episode character doesn't have as much impact as a character who's been there from the beginning. I like seeing how the plot changes and escalates up to a climax, and the outcome of that struggle. If I'm just watching Superman beating up different thugs week after week, it's just not as interesting as a hero struggling against a goal for the whole series with plenty of twists and turns in the storyline along the way. But, say, Mega Man Star Force, which shows Geo and Omega-Xis' struggle against the FMians invading Earth, there's a lot more to it than that. Each episode contributes to that overall plot, and things start getting really focused when the threat becomes more serious over time and more revelations about the characters and plot are revealed. The US has a few shows like that, but not as many as they do in the vein of Superman and the like

I've heard that before in the Spectacular Spider-Man thread about a show being about a character's life, and while I suppose it technically counts as a thematic for the show, I don't really consider it to be in the same vein of an actual storyline, like Monster or Iron Man. I think thematic and story, while they can be connected, are fundamentally separate entities. For example, Iron Man has a coming-of-age thematic as well, but it also has the whole plotline of Tony finding the five Mandarin rings to follow in his father's legacy and stop Stane from destroying Stark International.
 
I think he's trying to underline the fact that the comparisons used by the guy in Cohenmarioman's videos aren't very fair either. The only clips he uses in the first one are from Dragonball Z and Beauty and the Beast.
 
I know it's an unfair comparison. He's using unfair comparisons as well. Just trying to even it out to show that both sides have good and bad animation.
 
The shonen shows like FMA, Bleach, etc. are children/teen shows in Japan, but in America I'm pretty sure parents wouldn't want their children to watch that. :shrug: Well, the really conservative parents. :sweat:
 
The problem I have with threads like this is that they tend to spring from the mindset of anime snobs who instantly prefer anything Japanese and just as instantly turn their noses up and poo-poo anything that doesn't come from the Land of the Rising Sun. (I'm not referring to anyone here specifically, but it's an attitude that I've encountered all too often on message boards.)

The title of this thread alone suggests or at least implies that serious Eastern animation can't be beat and animation from any other nation is innately inferior and has to struggle to keep up with Japan. That opinion is flawed for 2 reasons:

1. Not everything anime is gold. There are plenty of sub-par and even crappy anime; we Westerners just don't get to see it because 85% of anime never gets imported over here. It's easy to think that Japan can do no wrong when all we ever see are the exceptionally well-done shows. There are entire vaults full of crappy anime that we'll never see.

2. Quality is in the eye of the beholder. Someone here said that a single episode of Gargoyles was the only serious and dramatic example of Western animation that he'd ever seen. Nothing could be further from the truth. Western animation has produced tons of quality dramatic animated programs, if Eastern animations snobs would only stop putting down all things not Japanese and give them a look.
 
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