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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Well, “good lighting” and “good color palette” are pretty subjective (as is many things related to art).

    To me, Perfect Blue by Satoshi Kon is a masterpiece work and has both a color palette and lighting perfectly fitting the theme and mood of the film. But I will guess that this type of film is not exactly what you mean.

    I bias towards older anime around the OVA boom, because I personally prefer the older art style over much of the newer anime. Especially for cyberpunk or medieval-fantasy style anime. So for me, I think of anime like:

    • Princess Mononoke (Mononoke Hime) and from Studio Ghibli
    • Record of Lodoss War (Lodoss tou Senki), the original 1991 OVA, the 90s TV serial was decent too
    • Berserk (Kenpuu Dinky Berserk), the 1997 series
    • El-Hazard (Shinpi no Sekai El-Hazard), the 1995 OVA
    • Slayers (Slayers), the 1995 TV series
    • Bastard!! (Bastard!! Ankoku no Hakaishin), the 1992 OVA
    • Angel’s Egg (Tenshi no Tamago), the 1985 OVA (only one episode)

    Obviously, these all have varying levels of quality due to various factors, usually directly related to Japan’s bubble economy and subsequent market crash in 1992. However, these are I think among the best and make a good use of color and lighting in all of them to create an enjoyable experience.

    If you have more details on what specifically you are looking for, I might know of somethines else maybe you haven’t considered.


  • I recently watched Last Samurai Standing from Netflix I think, which I actually thought was pretty good, but I noticed the English dub seemed to use some kind of AI to make the character mouth movements match the English dub words.

    At first it wasnt too noticeable, and I thought they had maybe filmed in English. But there was a lot of things that seemed like maybe they had some native Japanese people on the team because English speakers would have either not known about it or would feel culturally compelled to change it. Then at some point I noticed it, the mouths moving unnaturally. I think it was a close up of someone talking, but once I noticed it, it was pretty distracting.

    I honestly like the idea though. It might actually be a legitimate use case for “AI,” as some people are distracted when character mouth movements don’t match the words they say, but in this case I think it is still too early for deployment. It was done well enough to pass on people that can’t see very well, but it was pretty distracting for me once I noticed it. It would be too much work to try and film all the actors saying languages they likely don’t understand to try and composite. Is it mandatory? No, but it would be nice for people that get distracted by mismatched audio.


  • This does tend to happen with changing markets. As a market rapidly expands, studios crumble away and new ones swoop in to replace them.

    Anime boomed in the 90s, and then it lulled for a while. When the Covid-19 Pandemic shut down the world, anime interest spiked, but due to literal health reasons studios had to delay or cancel content. This has negative effects for years later, with some studios never being able to recover. Some lost very important people, and that can lower the quality of the studio’s works, which can lead to complaints, less viewership, lower employee morale, and ultimately studio closure.

    As an interesting note: Cost of Living in most of Japan isn’t all that bad, actually. According to (source), the United States is ranked 9 and Japan is 76. The cost of living in Japan is about half the cost of living in the USA, meaning the minimum amount of pay a person should expect to live is less in Japan. Now, this is of course an average. So someplace like Tokyo is going to be more expensive than Fukuoka, just as literally any city in California will be highway robbery compared to any city in a state like Oklahoma. But for the purposes of this conversation, the low pay isn’t really the big problem. Japanese culture makes up the difference for low pay and generally Japanese workers will stay with low paying jobs, as much as I might wish that aspect of their culture was different.

    The biggest problem is the physical health toll due to overly long work hours, leading to sleeping under their desks in their office most days of a month to be considered normal and expected.






  • There is also the Macross Plus designations YF-19 and VF-11.

    I don’t know if you can use pattern XXX-##, but if you can then that opens up EVA-00, EVA-01, or EVA-02 from Neon Genesis Evangelion. This also opens up ARX-08 as the Arbalest from Full Metal Panic! and ATM-09 from Armored Trooper VOTOMS.

    There is also the MS-12 Mobile Weapon Gigan from Gundam Unicorn. RX-78 is most likely to be taken, nbut you can check it as the eponymous Gundam featured on the cover art of the original Mobile Suit Gundam (well, specifically RX-78-2, but lopping off the 2 isnt a huge issue). Chars Gundam at one point is the RX-93.

    You could get a little cheeky for Re:Zero and go with RE-00.

    AV-98 is the designation of the Ingram mech from Patlabor.

    Outside of mecha designations, its going to be pretty hard to get a reference with such little character and number count.






  • I discovered Goblin Slayer got a second season, so I have watched 5 episodes of it.

    I like it so far, though I am not fond of it showing more of his face this time. If the show always showed his face I wouldn’t really have a problem with it, but by this point if they do it now, its weird. Hopefully they keep the helmet on.

    Also glad the show doesn’t get so detailed as its first episode. It isn’t a bad thing, and it has its place, but I think having that first episode set up the show enough that it doesn’t need to do it again, and so far it hasn’t.