My First Anime (OUAN402)

DISCLAIMER: This is an extra long bumper blog post, as I have not done one in yonks.

I thought I'd step outside my comfort zone and make an effort to be a little more worldly in my viewing habits. I watched the first two episodes of "Black Lagoon", a 2006 anime series based on a manga novel.

The black lagoon boom crew

Some people (some CRAZY people) will say that you need to watch a few series of a show before it gets really good to convince you to watch it. They're like "watch series three, that's when it gets good" or something. But I'm a busy boy! I'm not going to watch something terrible for three series just on the assumption that it'll get good at some point, based on the testimony of just anybody. What am I, an idiot or something? A show needs to grab me from the offset to retain my attention!

That's what I WOULD say to someone who was having this discussion with me.

The point of that paragraph was to establish that I am making all my judgements about this show, that I probably won't return to, based on only two episodes. That may annoy some. I don't know if that's unfair or not. Either way, I did enjoy this show! I enjoyed it far more than I was expecting it to, considering I've always had a lot of preconceived notions about anime that put me off the genre, like the fact that every character in an anime looks stupid and acts stupid and is stupid. But that was BEFORE I actually watched an anime.

"Black Lagoon" LOOKS awesome. I especially like the colour scheme, the clever use of blacks to accentuate the other colours and the shading. It is nice and bright. The shading is the most detailed I've ever seen in an animated TV show and it's awesome and, erm, depth-ly*? Also, the detail on the clothes and the bold, black lines remind me a lot of The Red Turtle, another kind of Japanese film I watched and raved over for the art style. Anime (in general) has this weird thing where the backgrounds look exquisite but the studio execs must've run out of board meeting tea and biscuits before allocating any budget to the animators in charge of lip syncing, because the mouths are shockingly terribly animated. This annoyed me because the viewer's eye is drawn to the characters before the background, and I am more engrossed by a character if they are animated smoothly.

That background is awesome!

I always assumed that anime characters had really dumb hair, but the hair in this show was pretty on the level.

Especially this bloke's hair. Shows that he doesn't mess about. Good for swimming fast.

The plot was really entertaining. As previously established, I love a good rip roaring adventure with balls to the wall action and a slew of interesting characters. The characters bounce off each other very well and the premise is really fun and it keeps quite a brisk pace. The only thing that took me out of it was the fact that I don't speak Japanese so relied on subtitles and if there's one thing I hate, it's when a show lures you in with the promise of moving pictures and then shows you some words instead.

But that is my own personal battle, and unrelated to the show.

I really really hate the way eyes are drawn in anime. They're so weird and angsty looking and they make every character look like they're about to burst into tears all the time. A lot of the characters are drawn very well but the lead character looks very generic, I think because of the way his eyes are drawn.

Ugh too sad

This is much more cheerful

The main lesson I learned from watching this was to always give new things a try, and to shade better I guess. RIGHT! Now I can go back to watching my REAL favourite thing with "lagoon" in the title, "The Creature From The Black Lagoon".

"I know that you are from a rich family and that I am a lagoon man, but I love you. Even if society doesn't want us to be together, we have each other" - Creature from the Black Lagoon

*depthly - having depth