Thomas The Tank Engine is 'classist, sexist and racist'

Wibbs wrote: »

I do love the Japanese myself. Completely bonkers and nice people with it IME. Though I would have some agreement with AA Gill when he wrote; After 10 minutes in the land of the rising sun, you realise the Japs are off the map, out of the game, on another planet. It’s not that they’re aliens, but they are the people that aliens might be if they’d learnt Human by correspondence course and wanted to slip in unnoticed. Might be why I dig them and much of their culture though.

Honestly? The above is not at all how I'd describe Japanese people. They're normal, or at least as normal as anyone else. They are really, really far from the crazy, alien and unrelatable culture a lot of people think of. Western countries really have an overly exoticized view of Japan that just isn't the reality by a long shot.

I'd say the biggest culture shock you'd get if you landed in Japan, is the fact that public transport is awesome!

Tony EH wrote: »

That's the greatest thing I've seen all week.

Sometimes I just have to admire the sheer level of "not giving a fuck" that the Japanese have.

:pac:

It's not really a case of "not giving a ****" it's more like, because of the medium of animation, if you can imagine it; you can create it. Anime is cheaper to produce than live action, and in Japan there isn't the idea that animation = childrens TV or comedy shows. So you can sometimes have situations where they wouldn't have the budget to produce something in live action, so they'd turn around and just animate it instead. Perfect Blue and Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade being two examples of anime movies that were originally conceived as live-action.

It's also relatively cheaper to produce anime in Japan, than in America for example. I've read that a single episode of Futurama cost as much as the entire series of Neon Genesis Evangelion, and director Makoto Shinkai made the entire movie Voices of a Distant Star by himself! So because of that, it's easier to make shows for niche audiences. It's also easier to make shows that are completely out there and so you get absolute head****s like Evangelion and Paranoia Agent and the like...

So that brings you a show like Girls Und Panzer, where someone had the idea of a bunch of schoolgirls who compete with other schools in competition tank battles, and they didn't have to water that idea down or make it palatable to a wide audience in order for it to get made. The niche audience it was aimed at (domestically, and overseas) lapped it up. It's also astonishingly good, had great characters who actually had decent character arcs, and the battle scenes were downright amazing.

By comparison, regular Japanese TV is pretty damn boring, you have your usual soap operas and other boring fluff that the majority of people would watch. You wouldn't get that over here, because who's interested in the Japanese equivalent of Fair City? What travels most often is the niche stuff. So we get the awesome stuff, but not the dross.