When I first started watching anime as anime rather than as cartoons that just happened to come from Japan, one of the things I most looked forward to was the new releases from ADV every month. For a simple reason: The ADV tapes (and this was back in the middle ages, so all we had was tapes) had trailers on them.

Trailers that did not suck.

This was an art that had escaped most of the anime distributors of the time, though watching even a handful of ADV's trailers made the techniques involved obvious. All they did was take the opening theme (or in some cases, the closing theme if it was catchier or if there was no opening theme) and a selection of clips from the show. Even without a real-time NLE (which were in short supply in the 12th century) you could put something like that together in an hour or two. Add titles with your handy-dandy character generator (anyone remember the outrage when ADV changed their subtitle font?) and you're done. A 90 second promotional spot that your customers will actually want to watch made for practically nothing.

(The secret part that most of their competitors didn't get was what they didn't do. No voice-over. They let the anime speak for itself.)

Well, that's what I want to talk to you all about; endings.

I love the opening and closing sequences of anime shows because this is exactly what they are designed to do. They have to sell the show, and they have just 90 seconds to do it.

The job is very different to the opening credits of most western TV shows. Look at something like, say, Buffy or Stargate. Yes, you have theme music (or in the case of Buffy, a crappy pointless noisy riff), and you have some action shots, but the big point is to show and name the cast. Because... Well, I don't actually know exactly why. But that's what they do. With a live-action show, the cast is important; not many TV series can get away with replacing their stars (Dr Who being the notable exception).

Live action TV shows live or die to a large degree by their casts. The stories are secondary - which is why so much of what we get on our screens is crap.

Animation doesn't. I might be interested if a series has a character voiced by Megumi Hayashibara, still a favourite of mine, or if it has music composed by Yoko Kanno. A film from Hayao Miyazaki is a must see. But for the most part, the names of the seiyuu (voice actors), composers, directors, and writers don't register all that strongly. It's not about the stars.

Now, endings normally happen at the end.

It's about the story. Most anime is developed from existing manga*, comic books, and manga are usually the work of just one or two people. They're almost always black-and-white, so there's not even the need for the type of teams of artists that produce many Western comics. (Does Rumiko Takahashi have an inker and a letterer? I have no idea.)

And when a show is story-driven, what you have to do is tell the story. If you have 12 episodes worth of story, you can't run the series for seven years.** So next year, next season in fact, you have to come up with another story to tell.

And you have to persuade people to watch it.

And you have ninety seconds to do so.

You have ninety seconds to say, these are my characters. This is my artistic style, this is my animation, this is my music. This is my story. Please watch it so that the advertisers will keep funding me and I can afford something more than instant ramen now and then.

But as we all know, endings are just beginnings.

Given that requirement, it's not surprising that a lot of thought and effort goes into the opening and closing credits in anime. I have a couple of laser discs (uh, somewhere) of the credits for all the seasons of Urusei Yatsura and Ranma ½. That such a thing could be produced and sold means that I'm not the only person to notice this.***

Hence this, and this:

My friend (a 2nd generation Japanese) who has seen far more anime than all other people I know (and myself) combined, has come up with an heuristic for judging whether something is worth getting an actual viewing. There are far too many series around competing for attention, even more so for him since he can watch region 2 releases (no need for English). Time and resources are finite, so some sort of prioritization must be used. Basically it is this:

Watch the opening and the closing.
- If both are good, then the series is, more likely than not, also good and worth watching.
- If one is good but the other so-so, then the final opinion could go either way. (Openings are worth more points.)
- If both are bad, don't watch.

But it works - for me - far more often than not.

And that's why I'm archiving them here. A reviewer can tell you that the animation is fluid (or stilted, as it may be); the music joyous or inspired or achingly beautiful or, well, none of the above. But in ninety seconds, you can determine that for yourself.

* Most anime series that aren't adaptations of manga are adaptations of computer games. But they almost invariably suck, so I'll ignore them.

** Ranma ½ notwithstanding.

*** And if you thought that the closing themes for Popotan or Happy Lesson were ear worms, just writing the name of Urusei Yatsura has got Lum no Love Song stuck in my head.

Hoshitachi ga kagayaku yofuke
Yumemiru no anata no subete.
Aishite mo anata wa shiramburi de.
Imagoro wa dare ka ni muchuu.

Oh yes, here, in case you were wondering.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:07 PM | Comments (20) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)