Roving Thoughts archives

Kemono Friends shows that CG versus drawn animation is ultimately unimportant

Kemono Friends is made almost entirely in CG, and they're famously pretty janky and limited, with a stilted and awkward look (even when it tried). The show was made with so few resources that it took them until episode 7 to make the bus's wheels spin in the opening. Kemono Friends is also really good. Not 'good for its limited budget'; genuinely good, to the extent that it's likely to make any number of people's end of year lists (mine included). Kemono Friends has a depth to it that anime rarely manages, and the show does it without ever losing its lighthearted charm.

Would Kemono Friends have been better if it was made with adequate resources using traditional 2D drawn animation instead of scrappy shoestring CG? Probably; I'm willing to believe that all of the charm could have been maintained with better art and animation. How about a version of the show made in great 2D drawn animation but without the excellent writing and direction that Kemono Friends had? There are some people who would say that such a show would be better than the Kemono Friends we got because it would look much better, but I'm not among them. The greatness in Kemono Friends doesn't come from how it looks, it comes from what's in the show, and if you take that away it doesn't really matter how pretty what's left looks. A pedestrian but beautiful show is still a pedestrian show. As we've seen more than once, not even KyoAni's many talents can save a show from its own writing.

What Kemono Friends illustrates, once again, is that whether a work is made in CG or with drawn animation is far less important than what's in the work. While we've had illustrations of this before, Kemono Friends is extremely handy because it has such a gulf between its visual appearance and its quality of writing and execution. You almost never get amazing things that were made on a shoestring and show it.

This is what I mean by calling CG versus 2D animation ultimately unimportant. The difference between the two is not nothing, but moving from one to the other moves the overall quality and impact of a show far less than other things do.

(Well, for most people. There are people who care a lot about sakuga; for at least some of these people, CG is pretty much a deal killer in the same way that a mandatory English dub mostly removes my interest.)

As a corollary, that a particular show will be made in CG instead of hand-drawn animation is well down the list of things to worry about. You should be worrying much more about things like who is making it, under what conditions, what they feel about it, and what their goals are, because all of those are far more likely to change whether the end result is good or bad.

(This is part of the 12 Days of Anime for 2017.)

Knight's & Magic and the power of honesty

Knight's & Magic doesn't exactly have a promising premise and plot; in fact, it basically sounds like a wince inducing piece of wish-fulfillment fanfiction. A mecha otaku dies and is reincarnated as a kid genius in a world with mecha where he can use his other-worldly ideas to make the best mecha ever and be fawned over by all and sundry? Many people would give such a show a wide berth. But despite this unpromising premise, the actual series was surprisingly good, with an infectiously earnest enthusiasm and a a heart-on-sleeve appeal.

Originally I was going to write about the power of this earnestness and embracing your genre, as Thunderbolt Fantasy did last year. But earnestness by itself doesn't make a show good in the way that Knight's & Magic is; there are plenty of quite earnest works that are actually kind of terrible, and Knight's & Magic could very easily have gone off the rails itself, falling into complete absurdity and losing much of its appeal. Instead, I've come to feel that the crucial ingredient that made the show work is honesty.

Knight's & Magic is a show that is honest with itself, and as part of that it's honest about what it is; it's wish fulfillment and it never pretends otherwise. Knight's & Magic takes things seriously (it's not a satire or a farce), but it's not a serious, realistic work and it doesn't try to be one. As part of this it quite deliberately dials everything up to at least ten, not for comedy but because it's more fun that way. While earnest fun is the heart of Knight's & Magic, I don't think it would have been possible if the people behind it had not understood and appreciated what it was, warts and all.

As part of dialing everything up to at least ten and going straight for fun, K&M is completely transparent about how the plot is on Ernesti's side. This is in a way another side of the show's honesty; the show is always clear about its fundamental nature, including its ultimate niceness (at least as far as the good guys are concerned, and this is a show with very clear good guys).

Another part of this is a surprising honesty about giant robots, because the final showdown is framed as the romanticism of giant robots versus the practicality of other options. Ernesti explicitly admits this and declares that he doesn't care; he's going to defeat Gojass's creation in order to preserve the world for giant robots because that's what he loves. He wins, of course, and it doesn't feel out of place because the thumb of the plot has been on his side all along and has never made any pretense about it. Knight's & Magic is as honest about loving giant robots, with their contradictions and all, as it is about the rest of its nature.

(You can read the ending of the show as partly a nod to this conflict being a never-ending one.)

(This is part of @appropriant's 12 Days of Anime for 2017.)

Sidebar: Ignoring the long shadow of Gundam

Like many giant robot shows, Knight's & Magic winds up wanting to have its cake and eat it too. On the one hand, the most interesting giant robot fights are generally against other giant robots, and in situations where there is real tension. On the other hand this means war, literally; people are fighting each other in those giant robots and dying in those pretty explosions. The contradiction between war as a cool thing with awesome giant robots and the brutal, bloody consequences of war is deeply embedded in the genre since at least Gundam.

Knight's & Magic basically ignores this. It's not that it pretends that there aren't people dying in the pretty explosions (it's pretty explicit that there are, actually). Instead, it pretends that this is no different than when the characters were fighting giant monsters earlier in the series. The opponents are different and more challenging and the fights are cooler because they are giant robot versus giant robot (or giant robot versus giant flying robo-dragon), but that's it.

(To be fair to Knight's & Magic, the show also ignored how there were plenty of people dying 'heroically' against the giant monsters. It did have one little plot section about how scary fighting is, but promptly brushed it off.)

Within the show this pretense works, but that's by authorial fiat. Outside of the show, well, there's at least a long history of doing this and the audience is probably used to it. Knight's & Magic is not a show you think deeply about, anyway. I twitch here because I'm quietly scarred by Mobile Suit Gundam 0080: War in the Pocket.