Hey, I'm posting this because I feel like I don't post enough :|. So I went camping this past weekend, and it was pretty fun. I dunno when the last time I had gone camping was.
I made a pup tent-style shelter out of two tarps (I was only gonna do a lean-to with just 1 tarp, but it looked, and started to, rain a bit. So I put a tarp on the other side). I also saw a wild bear while I was out there. Though, it wasn't really as awesome as it sounds. We were just driving down the road and noticed a car stopped and was taking pictures of the mountain, so we tried to see what they were looking at, and we saw the head of a little black bear moving around up on the mountain. I also hiked the Appalachian Trail. Of course not the whole thing, just a mile in and a mile back. It was cool.
Alright, enough about camping. Time to talk about cartoons.
So the other day I had the privilege of watching Scooby Doo on Zombie Island, which I remember coming out when I was a kid. They would advertise it with "This time.. The Monsters are real!" and it was like, Scooby Doo with zombies! it rocked. It was also a lot darker and seemingly more serious than the older Scooby Doo series, which made it more appealing.
But anyways, the reason I mention this is because during the credits I noticed the mass amount of animators with Japanese names. Call me a weeaboo, but I love seeing things that I watched as a kid and finding out they were animated in Japan. The series also had two co-directors that were Japanese, and one of them, Hiroshi Aoyama, directed Rocket Girls.So this dude who directed this Scooby Doo movie I watched as a kid, directed Rocket Girls. That just blows my mind. I also checked out some random key animators, and of them was Hiroki Abe, who animated for 11Eyes, White Album and Umineko, so clearly the dude is still actively animating in the industry.
I'd like to talk more about animators in general, because I think it's cool. Seeing which key animators worked on which shows. Too often will anime fans look at a bad shot in say, K-ON, and proclaim "Kyoani doesn't know how to animate" without giving any thought to the matter. Or take Naruto episode 167 for example, people will say "Narutos animators suck", or just "Naruto has bad animation". Considering the massive amount of animators of that show, and the extreme variance between any given episode, using umbrella statements like that is pretty misleading. Take Gorou Sessha for example. He(?) has done animation work on Kannagi, Toradora, Shakugan no Shana, and Naruto. That's right, one of the people who animated Toradora animated parts of Naruto. I said this somewhere, and someone responded "no, Naruto is Studio Peirrot, Toradora is JC Staff", but clearly just because they are produced by different studios, that doesn't mean the same animators can't work on both.
And one last thing. I watched Snow White recently, and knowing it was made in 1937 it blew my mind. I cannot believe something of that caliber was created 3/4ths of a century ago. I mean, Hakujaden was 1958! Something else I thought was really cool about Snow White, is how it features a complete(?) list of animators in the opening credits. I just think that's awesome and really respectful. You don't see that these days. Like, I was trying to see the credits of Adventure Time, to see the animators names (probably all Korean), but it's so squished to the side on the TV that you can't read anything in the credits.. All you get to see is the episode director and the episodes animation director and storyboarder and junk at the beginning of the episode :\
anyways, I guess that's all I've got to say.