Tuesday, June 23, 2009

Uncool ninjas

There is a lot of effort required to make mysterious assasins, trained in the most lethal of martial arts look boring but anime the wildly popular Japanese style of animation manages to do just that. I wouldn't have had so much of a beef with anime and we would have stayed away from each other in mutual agreement had it not invaded my personal space for nearly an entire year. I had borrowed my friend Subbu's PC for almost the whole length of my final year of engineering and had had to patiently put up with the incredible stupidity and blind devotion of Naruto lovers.

I have always loved comics and animation and still do but somehow the Japanese style of doing things always manages to get my goat. The weirdly coloured hair, the boringly repetitive facial expressions and the unnecessary iterations of the camera panning away to reveal two opponents squaring off in yet another yawn inducing ninja battle were asking for too much if they were asking for my attention. Japanese voices sometimes too coarse and others too squeaky talking gibberish like the "chidori" (Thousand bird power), the triple seal curse or yelling "Sasuke Kan" had started to appear in my dreams. My room was always packed with Naruto fans who seemed to love even his retarded "ramen" weakness & giggled like teenage girls and the series ran in 24 hour cycles within the closed confines of my room. The show was astoundingly popular and I was frequently given incredulous looks by anime devotees for not having liked even the tiniest portion of it. Being in the same room as this shabby work of art was a pain but it was still my room so I had to manfully withstand this assault on my good taste. My stand was crystal clear: ninjas cool, anime totally uncool.

No comments: