Personal metrics 2 the good and bad of ninja scroll

It has been some time but I have felt that it has been to long since I posted a personal metrics post. It is partially because I think these posts make my usual reviews more worthwhile and partially because it gives me something else to post about other than reviews and the seasonal preview.

A long time ago there was a time called the nineties and everything was extreme to the max. Anime was new and one of the few anime movies we could get from a mystical place called a video rental store (it was like a redbox you could walk into) was a movie called Ninja scroll. It was a movie with a bunch of sex and violence and a bare-bones plot. It was the beloved classic of everyone's inner teenage boy. Then years later there was a thirteen episode television show done about ninja scroll and that tv show wasn't so well beloved. The question is why.

My belief is that ninja scroll was never really anything significant in terms of plot or character and was never intended to be. The difference in a movie is only about an hour and a half long and it only needs enough plot to string fights together. The pacing of a television show simply can't work with the simple diet of adrenaline the way a movie can as television has the natural cool down point that an end of an episode is. However as fun as a movie that is mostly only battles with a little plot for glue might be I tend to only give out bronze awards to them. 

Personal metrics part 1 The Akarin problem

 

The real menace

One day while looking over my blog I realized that the majority of the articles that I write for Jeckyllcast and Blog are reviews of various anime shows and movies. One thing that is important to realize about reviews are invariably subjective as any review requires an opinion. Even a review that says Princess Monoke is good or Akikan is bad is actually just a subjective opinion. Thus for another topic that I can blog about I have decided to write about what I consider to be good in terms of anime which will hopefully make reading my reviews more worthwhile.

 

One of the most enduring debates in the field of visual media (anime and beyond) is the importance of characters versus plot in a given work. There are even arguments about how some people who prefer one thing over the other determines one's quality as a fan (see more here). In truth both of them are important as all stories are what happens to the characters and if you don't care about either the characters or what happens to them the story will fall apart for the viewer.

 

One thing that I think it is important is that all of the main characters are important to the story. If there isn't a character who has a significant impact on the story then they shouldn't have a significant presence in the show. I find this problem is particularly common in slice of life shows as they are often about the lives of four school girls and for the most part the show might as well be about the lives of three girls, a manzai comedy pair and a viewpoint character. It has gotten so bad that this phenomenon has been lampshaded in Yuru Yuri in how Akari is the odd girl out who has no real place in the show.

 

So how does this affect my reviews? I look for how tightly the show is constructed regardless of genre. Unless it is a biography the details of a show are entirely up to a writer and dangling elements should be cut out whenever possible. This does not mean that I dislike the slice of life show. In fact I have seen slice of life shows that can adhere to this principle and they are among my favorites of the genre. It just means that slice of life shows have to deal with the same standards as other genre's of anime when it comes to my reviews.