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best-underrated-anime · 3 months
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Best Underrated Anime Group C Round 2: #C6 vs #C4
#C6: Sports anime for people who prefer bildungsromans to sports
#C4: Lesbians with swords
Details and poll under the cut!
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#C6: Ping Pong the Animation
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Summary:
Despite being polar opposites, Makoto "Smile" Tsukimoto and Yutaka "Peco" Hoshino have been best friends since childhood. Although the overly confident Peco strives to be the best ping-pong player in the world, he often skips practice, earning the ire of his fellow teammates on the Katase High School ping-pong team. Meanwhile, Smile—in spite of his innate talent for the sport—cannot help but hold back his full strength when playing against others. Through their mutual love for ping-pong, the two have developed a bond that is seemingly unbreakable.
When Peco hears that an ex-national team player from China is coming to Japan, he drags Smile over to rival Tsujido High School to observe them. The subsequent trip leads to a clash between Peco and Kong Wenge, who overwhelmingly defeats the former in one game. Stunned by such a comprehensive loss, Peco finds himself questioning why he plays to begin with. Seeing his potential as a player, Katase's coach begins to train Smile to overcome his hesitation, but he is reluctant to play if it is not for enjoyment.
As the two struggle to find meaning in the sport, a plethora of stronger players—each with their own internal strifes—await them at the inter-high tournament, where only the very best can persevere. But when these young athletes let their unbridled ambition go unchecked, the hardships they face paint a somber reality as they pursue glory.
Propaganda:
An experimental director (Masaaki Yuasa) adapting a work from a very stylized and emotionally-focused shonen mangaka (Taiyo Matsumoto). This is an anime that feels more like watching an indie arthouse movie than a shonen anime. Featuring characters and arcs that subvert standard anime tropes, it gives an incisive picture into youths on the verge of growing up and learning responsibility. If you want to watch a short anime (one 11-episode season!) which will include cool sports action (and that’s coming from someone who is not generally into sports animes) the matches given weight by the primary use of them in narrative being as checkpoint in the characters’ growths.
I tend to prefer shojo over shonen for being more introspective, with the emotional arcs developed slower and more subtly, but for me this shonen hits a sweet middle ground of having that more internal feel, while getting to do the shonen things of having cooler, action-focused animation and character relationships which are about friendship rather than romance, and character arcs that are about trying to strive hard to achieve a dream. The show is quite well critically regarded, but a lot of anime fans get turned off by the unusual art style, and there isn’t really a fandom for it, so I think it counts as underrated anyways! Anyways, I think it delivers a really impactful and complete story-arc in a short time, and it leaves you feeling like you’ve grown alongside the characters, no matter how old you are (no seriously, my 50-year-old mother walked away saying she didn’t know anime was such a profound genre when I made her watch this).
Trigger Warnings: None.
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#C4: Katana Maidens: Toji no Miko
Summary:
Throughout history, an elite group of shrine maidens known as "Toji" have saved the world from "Aratama," strange and malevolent beings bent on destroying humanity. In modern times, these warriors have been assigned to a special police squad to exterminate Aratama. The government has also set up five elite schools across the country to provide young girls the necessary sword fighting skills to eradicate these monsters and eventually join their fellow Toji in protecting the world.
A student of one of those five schools, Kanami Etou is chosen to represent Minoseki Academy in a sword fighting tournament, where she meets the mysterious Hiyori Juujou. Although Kanami and Hiyori rise to the top of the tournament, their battle takes an unexpected turn, throwing the world of the Toji into chaos. Likely that the Toji are facing betrayal from within, the two are forced to flee the tournament, clashing with former comrades on the way.
Propaganda:
The depth of this show was seriously mindblowing to me. For much of the series it was just a fun romp, with some pretty interesting twists and turns along the way. But as these characters develop, as the plot gets moving, it all comes together in the end. I have not seen a more concentrated concoction of doomed tragic yuri in my life.
Trigger Warnings: Child Abuse, Emotional Abuse, Self-Harm
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When reblogging and adding your own propaganda, please tag me @best-underrated-anime so that I’ll be sure to see it.
If you want to criticize one of the shows above to give the one you’re rooting for an advantage, then do so constructively. I do not tolerate groundless hate or slander on this blog. If I catch you doing such a thing in the notes, be it in the tags or reblogs, I will block you.
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Know one of the shows above and not satisfied with how they’re presented in this tournament? Just fill up this form, where you can submit revisions for taglines, propaganda, trigger warnings, and/or video.
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lemonlemonfry · 6 days
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aymrc · 1 year
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Ping Pong Fanart.
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alspezz · 7 months
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WHEN I'M IN A PINCH, A HERO IS SURE TO APPEAR
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squirrelstothenuts · 6 months
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magentasnail · 12 days
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PLEASE WATCH MY SHORT ANIMATION OF SILLY ALIENS PLAYING PING PONG!!!
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peevishpants · 1 year
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ping pong gamers Smile and Peco on the bus... gonna miss their stop
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jammysammys · 10 months
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Ping Pong capsule figures from Takara Tomy
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roseillith · 11 months
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areyouokaypanda · 1 year
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Impending zoomies...
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loremaster · 3 months
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draw your comfort characters as steven meme etc…
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sorenblr · 9 months
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since we're on the subject what are your honest thoughts on eva. me personally i think its really great in a lot of ways but also completely full of shit and really falls apart when analyzed non-emotionally (in more ways than just it's *extremely* loose Christian theming)
I think it's fantastic, at least the original series and EoE. Many of the criticisms commonly levied against it are justified- this is a series that castigates its otaku audience for leering at its grossly sexualized portrayal of adolescents while at the same time constructing one of the most vociferous merchandising apparati ever conceived around exactly that purpose- but it's greater than the sum of its defects.
In the matter of broad aesthetics, direction, and composition, I would place Evangelion near the apex of the medium. The industry mechanism necessary to create something that looks like this simply no longer exists. The philistine reaction against the long takes, which would elsewhere be recognized as part of the basic grammar of any serious film, is a credit to Anno's sensibilities as director. There aren't any characters that I particularly dislike, and I think Shinji and Asuka are near to brilliant. And the first thirteen episodes are simply exceptional, even fairly undemanding genre fare. The fucking Israfel one is just an outstanding episode of television. The dramatic idiosyncracies that the series is known for don't manifest in greater quantity until the latter part, which is I imagine where less receptive audiences will start to check out, but I think they're both necessary complements to the whole.
I think about Eva-02 catching that missile to the face on a semi-regular basis. The entire MPE scene is one of the most compelling pieces of animation ever put to film. This and the Gouf battle from 08th MS Team around the same time are the acme of the thought that emphasized plausible heft and momentum in mechanical animation.
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The extent to which the original series is celebrated as 'deconstructive', or as a radical departure from previous, less 'cerebral' works, is grossly exaggerated and I think dependent on a historical ignorance of the genre. That isn't to say that it's complete equivocation, but Amuro's first character arc in 0079 is going catatonic after being compelled to fight in the ambulatory war crimes machine, and Pen Pen is not some sort of embedded reflexive criticism- he is a fun penguin who basically loves to hang out. Much of the thematic material is indebted to Ideon-era Tomino, who was at least as catastrophically depressive as Anno during the period of his most prolific cultural output.
The greater innovation in Eva is its radical orientation towards psychodrama, which I think does finally reach a deconstructive apogee in EoE. Still, the basic theme of the series, the communicative impediments to human intimacy, is also the overriding concern of the first several incarnations of Gundam- but only Evangelion will have a character literally describe the hedgehog's dilemma aloud. So a lot of the perceived deconstruction is a maximal treatment of what was marginally less explicit in earlier works, and I think Anno's direction does produce striking and beautifully affective turns on that material. But the old joke that this mecha anime is about the characters is still descriptive of the entire genre. This isn't meant to be a criticism- I think it's infinitely more engaging to consider Eva as the ultimate Lost Decade continuation of earlier forms than some sort of iconoclastic rupture from tradition.
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The Judeo-Christian imagery is another point of radical continuity with hyper-influential genre fare, in this case Ultraman. Anno's recent directorial output is enough to evince the tremendous debt owed to the series, but whereas the religious iconography was a genuine article of faith for Tsuburaya, in Eva the material is valued more for its aestheticizing effect. It was only when transplanted to a Western audience that the desacralized treatment of religion assumed a transgressive quality that happened to be a perfect 'in' for adolescents nationwide. Shinji is a Midwest emo icon and I can make an AMV of the series set to Chop Suey by System of a Down? This phenomenon is, to me, more interesting than the actual thematic connections the series draws from myth, which is certainly not what the thing is 'about' in any case.
Also, I am an episode 25-26 truther. EoE is great but the television finale is its obvious complement. If you're out here telling people to watch EoE immediately after episode 24... grow the fuck up! bitch!!!*
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*parody parody
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canmom · 2 days
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Ping-Pong The Animation: eps 1-3
So Masaaki Yuasa [AN12, AN28, AN150] can do no wrong, right? OK, well, I'll admit Ride Your Wave was kinda mid, and Devilman Crybaby goes hard as hell at the beginning and end but sorta treads water in the middle, but... generally speaking! No-one does it like Yuasa.
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For reasons I don't really remember, I didn't get very far watching Ping-Pong The Animation some years ago. It should be entirely my shit: Yuasa pulling in a gang of wildly creative animators to put their unique spin on something. However, the first episode didn't entirely hook me, and I never got round to trying the second before something else punted 'watching Ping Pong' out of my brain. ADHD, y'know.
This is a shame because even the very next episode seriously goes, as does the one after that. But also this anime isn't entirely what I was expecting (crazy sakugafest full of Yuasa weirdness). Not to say it doesn't do a lot of really unique stuff with its cinematography and animation, but these first episodes at least are more about like... dissociation! ennui!
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But more on that in a mo. First I wanna continue the thread of 'how do you animate sports'.
So, ping-pong, or table tennis. Not a sport I know much about, I'll be honest. (To be fair I don't know a lot about sports in general outside of some very specific niches. The sports I've pursued so far are rather eclectic: swimming, fencing, tai chi chuan, and roller derby; I never got particularly far in any and it's been years since I've done them.)
I'll inevitably be drawing a lot of comparisons to The First Slam Dunk, the other sports anime I've watched recently. I do think it's a productive comparison though! Both of them bring something of the visual language of manga into their presentation in unique ways. I have not yet read the Ping Pong manga, but it's by Taiyō Matsumoto, otherwise known for scifi manga like Tekkonkinkreet (god tier movie, still need to read the manga) and Number Five. So that's a pretty impressive track record!
If you go take a look at some scans of Ping Pong, what will immediately jump out is the shaky, rough line style and unusual camera angles and compositions.
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The stylisation is also very different from a lot of manga. Noses are fully drawn, eyes are realistically small, and in contrast, lips and mouths tend to get the emphasis - as well as hands.
Knowing this makes a lot of the creative choices in the anime make sense! It also adopts a shaky lineart style, and makes use of heavy line weights and spotting blacks to add definition. It also has a lot of crazy closeups and layouts, and it loves a visual metaphor. But most of all, the most striking element of this anime is how often it loves to split the picture up into little panels...
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...which [eli]'s subs do a really good job of typesetting, incidentally, moving the dialogue to fit naturally into the split composition. And while this shot with 7 smaller shots is perhaps on the extreme end, splits of three or more are pretty frequent. It's a really interesting way to evoke the effect of seeing a whole page of manga
So, as you proooobably know, ping-pong is a game of bouncing balls off a little table and directing them into places the opponent will find it hard to hit them back. From watching this anime I picked up that there are a number of styles of holding the racket (e.g. 'penhold grip' and 'shakehand') and approaches to hitting the ball (e.g. 'chopping'). A lot of this pretty much went over my head, but honestly it didn't matter, since the narrative significance was pretty much always evident.
Compared to basketball, though, ping-pong is a pretty tricky sport to make visually interesting! Sure, you have the players running to and fro, and that can lead to some interesting poses, but how do you get the drama and tension into this?
Ping-pong additionally is all 2D, it doesn't have the sort of resources that Toei could throw at making the best looking 3DCG basketball game ever. It is limited to a TV-feasible drawing count. So it has to make use of clever limited-animation tricks to get the most impact out of fewest drawings.
Let's take an example sequence from episode 3. A minor character is about to get his ass kicked by Tsukimoto. Tsukimoto is something of a pingpong prodigy, and yet he is very emotionally closed-off and even standoffish; he doesn't particularly seem to like the game very much, and doesn't particularly feel inclined to flex on other players and get into the status games. But other players, like Wenge, have heard about him and want to see what he's got.
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First we have the setup. Other characters are observing and discussing the game. Since ping-pong tends to involve very rapid exchanges, it can follow the classic shōnen model where there's a lot of talking, flashy fight sequence, more talking...
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The cut happens in two steps, maintaining the vertical dividing line. This approach to cutting is used a lot in Ping-Pong, and it's quite a creative way to keep visual interest when it's using a lot of largely static shots. The panel on the right is more animated than the panel on the left, a naturalistic depiction of bouncing the ball off the table.
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Things start moving faster here. A rapid pan on the image on the left disguises the fact that this anticipation pose is actually not moving at all. This then goes into a rapid, explosive moment as this guy serves.
The final pose is held for a couple of seconds while the voiceover line discussing his intended move finishes. This sort of elasticity of time is a very Osamu Dezaki type of move - it's something that Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata actually really disliked.
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A sound effect hits as Tsukimoto appears on the right in silhouette, anticipating his reaction, and setting up the next shot which leaves the split picture and hides the background for just a moment, as if to put us in Tsukimoto's shoes: he only sees the ball.
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Tsukimoto follows through and holds this pose - the ball is the only thing moving here. The ball moves mainly on 2s while Tsukimoto moves on 3s and 2s, and he and the ball move on alternating frames. He holds the pose as the ball zips off to the right (bouncing off the corner of the table), with a speed lines-like effect. At the end of the shot, the ball freezes in the air for the moment while the sound echoes.
The actual table-tennis round lasts just seconds, and the drawing count involved is pretty minimal, but it does a lot with those drawings.
We go back to voiceovers and reactions in the next few shots, returning to the split video as Tsukimoto's opponent thinks about how he'd really rather be at the beach...
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Often, these comic-like compositions will change one panel at a time, and while one panel is animated another panel will be still, naturally moving your eyes across the screen. It is an approach similar to some experiments I've seen in 'animated comics' viewed in a web browser, where the panels do not appear all at once, but enter with some animation.
So this is the sort of animation technique that Ping Pong uses. It's effective! Elsewhere the cuts are used in a less direct, continuity-editing way and more in a juxtaposition/montage way. For example, Wenge's desire to return to China is symbolised by match cutting/fading to shots of an aeroplane.
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And there is a recurring image, which I'm sure will be expanded on, of Tsukimoto hiding in a cupboard and wishing for a tokusatsu hero to come save him from his isolation. As Tsukimoto's feelings about himself change, the toku hero is replaced by a robot. At this points it starts to feel like an outright Ikuhara anime.
There is occasionally a little bit of CG, mainly when Tsukimoto uses a different type of racket surface, and the way the ball and racket make contact is the crucial thing that the shot is trying to convey...
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It gets the job done, but I'm glad they stuck with 2D for most of it.
So I went in the first time expecting like, crazy elaborate sakuga - and to be fair, the OP, animated by none other than Shinya Ohira, delivers on that front - but if anything what I've seen so far in Ping-Pong is actually a triumph of storyboarding and limited animation techniques. I think back then I didn't have the eyes to appreciate it in the same way.
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OK, that's the film nerd stuff, but what about the story? Ping Pong follows two school friends, Makoto Tsukimoto aka "Smile" (right), and Yutaka Hoshino aka "Peco" (left). Smile is defined by a flat affect and a standoffish persona. He's just going through the motions. He's very good at ping-pong, but to him it's just a way to pass time, and he's scornful about the idea of caring all that much about it. Much like Shinji with his casette player, Tsukimoto is pretty much always staring at a handheld games console rather than make eye contact with anyone.
Peco on the other hand is the more childish one - playful, kinda arrogant, very much an 'emotions on his sleeve' kinda guy. He sulks when he loses and gloats when he wins, and is constantly seen with bubblegum or other kinds of candy. He provides a lot of our commentary when he chats with the other players.
日本語上手 readers probably noticed the tsuki (moon) vs hoshi (star) symbolism thing they've got going on here!
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High-school table tennis in this story seems to be a rather 'tough love' kinda world. Most of these players tend to look down on those who can't meet their level. Going easy on someone is seen as weakness, or cultivating bad habits, by almost everyone. Tsukimoto doesn't play at his full potential because he isn't as invested in winning as all these weirdos, but it seems that might be starting to change...
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The coach is interesting. He's an old man and fairly disdainful of the club at large, and prone to speaking English randomly with a heavy accent. But he gets excited at the prospect of getting Tsukimoto to unleash his full potential, in terms that are repeatedly metaphorically compared to romance/marriage.
And when Tsukimoto gets sick of it, he challenges him to a game, with the stakes as...
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Cue Makima/Beatrice images here I guess.
Tsukimoto de facto wins when the coach collapses, but this episode marks a change of heart. He starts to think of himself as a robot - the affect of a robot replacing the affect of the toku hero in his fantasy. And in this way he does what people seem to want and plays ping pong with mechanical precision, expressed once again in visual metaphor (shot here from a cool transformation sequence)...
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What if I just dissociate harder? This is gonna end well.
So it really is one of those kind of like 'ennui of being a teenager' kind of stories - c.f. say FLCL. 'Boy with complicated emotional landscape' is Yuasa bread and butter, but the particular variant here seems a little unusual for him - they tend to be a little more earnest. I'm curious to see how Tsukimoto develops.
I am definitely enjoying the arrogant Chinese player Kong Wenge. Dude's got a lot of screen presence, and while I'm sure he'll get shown up sooner or later, he makes for a very fun antagonist of sorts.
In comparison to Slam Dunk... one thing that's significantly different about table tennis is that it's an individual rather than a team sport, which means it's harder to have an ensemble cast all contributing to the protagonists' eventual victory - instead it's about a lot of individual arcs interweaving with each other, individual duels. Besides that, it does seem like it will be following a similar arc of a character in an emotional hole (grief for Ryota, depression for Tsukimoto) finding new meaning and purpose through sports - though I can't be sure how things are gonna go for Tsukimoto here!
The tone however is quite different. Even when it's silly, I feel like Slam Dunk is a very sincere story. There's little detachment or irony, or false consciousness - with perhaps the major exception of Ryota's mother, who lets her own grief and trauma get in the way of understanding her son. But ultimately 'why would you care this much about basketball' is not a question that anyone would ask in Slam Dunk. Even the judo guy in the manga who's trying to recruit Sakuragi is just as hot-blooded about his own sport of choice.
There's a difference in like, general affect about the players as well, which has something to do with the sport itself. Yeah, Sakuragi's superpower is his 'genius' ability to predict rebounds, and there is plenty of strategising in Slam Dunk - but basketball is still a sport that very much emphasises physical power, and as much as Slam Dunk will work hard to sell you on a clever trick pass, the visuals are also emphasising the speed that players are dashing, the height they're jumping, their physique. Table tennis by contrast seems to be a sport that's more about prediction and mind games.
That said it is equally just like Matsumoto's style being different from Inoue's. Now I know it's by the guy who wrote Tekkonkinkreet, a lot about this series falls into place! There's a sense of tension here, of being fundamentally at odds with the world. The autismfeels. This is reflected also in the drawings - the characters don't entirely seem comfortable in their embodiment.
So if that's what I'm getting from just three eps, I'm very excited to see what the remaining 8 have to offer. This series is probably too long to cram into Animation Night format, but we'll see...
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alspezz · 1 year
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ping pong from some time ago 🏓💥
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squirrelstothenuts · 4 months
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