Wednesday, August 9, 2006

   All hail Phillip Brophy, the otaku’s leader to a new even more sex craved stereotype!
I was pretty stoked when I heard that Phillip Brophy was coming to Australia to promote his new book 100 Anime. I hadn’t heard a lot about his book but from my previous experiences of books written about anime I thought it would be great, damn was I wrong. This guy has officially set the social evolution of the otaku and anime back, to the original thought that they were just perverted sex starved geeks, I mean the violent geeks had a much better ring to it don’t you think?
But why this entire experience was so annoying for me was the way in which his speech was totally un-researched, he got dates of anime’s wrong, he got the political and social statements being made by some directors entirely wrong. I mean come on the directors themselves have stated in interviews what certain aspects of their anime’s meant. If you’re going to write a book and then talk about it in front of hardcore fans than at least get you’re info right.
The main misinterpreted point expressed was when he insisted that Japan as a whole has never lost a single aspect of its traditional culture. Damn, it was Miyazaki himself that created the character ‘No Face’ as a representation of the current Japan having lost its identity, HELLO (and he isn’t the only Japanese artist that has stated this).

And than he further insisted on the statement by clumping all anime as a whole. He stated that there are absolutely no differences between (just an example of two) hentei, and Studio Ghibli films except for their content being aimed at different audiences, they both contain the same philosophical and social statements. Ok so they may make similar social statements at certain times but generally that isn’t the case all time. But wait it gets worse this same guy who is saying that we need to look past the pornography to get to the social statement was also saying that its impossible for society as a whole to get past this. HELLO, CONTRADICTION OF THE CENTURY! And the example he used for this was that big-breasted female reporters are not allowed to be filmed on TV because they are provoking sexuality rather than conveying the serious news at hand. I mean what News Programs does this guy watch? The news programs I watch don’t give a damn what their reporters look like. But what really made his argument against societies over sexed imaginations fall apart was the fact that he must have said ‘tits’ at least ten times in two minutes and each time he said this he would have a slight chuckle to himself, NOW THAT IS PATHETIC!
But back to the point of saying that anime is just anime, there are no boundaries created. Ok again please listen to the directors interviews before you make a statement as false as that. There are many directors these days that have stated that due to the mass turn out of anime resulting from its popularity anime series are deteriorating in way of art. Anime is becoming more about profit than actually creating a piece of art that is conveying messages about our negatively changing world.
There are countless statements about the social childishness of the Japanese society due to the mass production of anime and manga.

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