Anim(e)-tion Station

In 1963, Astro Boy - under it's original Japanese title of Tetsuwan Atomu - hit television screens all across Japan and embodied the elements that would come to be known as "Anime." It enjoyed mild success in America, but anime would really come into it's own in the states thanks more to shows such as Speed Racer, Battle of the Planets, Sailor Moon, and especially Dragon Ball Z.

Whatever qualities these shows may have had, and I'm sure they are (not) many, they all contained one vast problem: They were cheap productions.

This isn't really surprising. A look through much of the anime that has come out over the decades shows a vast number of animes that wouldn't constitute much more than "B" productions. Though occasionally one of these shows might have a relatively good story, they all consisted of the problems hardly reticent throughout all of anime.

The main problem of low-budget animation projects is the art. In order to save effort, anime studios created - or borrowed - simple cheats to bypass the budget problem. This included things like drawing the nose as a single line connected to the chin, so the mouth could flap about on the side of the face without anything else on the body needing to be animated. Or drawing characters in specific poses so that a single cell of them could be dragged across the screen to give the appearance of action. Or giving characters incredibly ridiculous, very over-the-top facial expressions.

The last of these leads us into another inherent problem with these productions. The studios did not feel that they could convincingly pull off subtlety on a tight budget. The over-the-top facial expressions helped solve part of this dilemma. Anime explanations came about intended to solve the rest.

Anime is notorious for these explanations. If you've watched anime in your life time, you know what I'm talking about. Watch any episode of Dragon Ball Z - or any number of its spiritual successors such as Inuyasha, Naruto, or Bleach - and more likely than not a character will do something, and then everything will stop for the next 5-10 minutes so that a character can explain in excruciating detail exactly what it is that's occurring.

For some reason, this dull writing cheat is adored by anime fans. But to those who aren't, particularly to people who are fully grown adults, these explanations just make even the most serious moments of a show seem downright silly and child-oriented.

This is an important factor when it comes to story telling: Don't. Baby. Your audience.

This is a problem through a great many different genre of narratives. It's constant in anime, it's prevalent throughout comic books, and it's the most cherished cheat of fantasy novelists. But it's quite simply silly and incredibly pointless. You don't need to explain absolutely every little detail to your audience. You can assume that they might be smart enough to figure things out for themselves. A truly great story - and this is particularly important in visual arts such as comics, movies, and animations - is one that shows you something and doesn't tell you it's there.

In the movie Citizen Kane, they didn't just constantly tell you that Kane was the richest man alive. They could show you that by depicting an incredibly lavish house containing fireplaces 6 feet tall and 12 feet wide. You get the idea just by seeing the results of his wealth.

Anime has an annoying love for convention, so it's rare to see something that regularly occurs throughout anime suddenly stop being used. To my surprise, a great majority of animes have stopped using the mouth flap cheat, and many of the expressions will now be less over-the-top, but these anime explanations just don't seem to be going away.

There are anime shows and movies out there that actually have good stories, but often they're bogged down under persistant anime conventions and a complete lack of desire to be truly creative, inventive, or artistic. This creates an interesting dilemma between being able to enjoy a good story and a good story being ruined by lazy animation. Often times even when I want to enjoy an anime, it's difficult to find something good under the layers of crap that are these conventions.

Story telling is an art. It's always important to remember that. And if you're not willing to dedicate yourself to telling a good story, no amount of art, or action explanations, or hackneyed conventions are going to save the final product. So many potentially good animes over the past 45 years have fallen by the wayside because the creative team behind them have chosen convention over story.

Maybe, Japan, it's time for a change.

Time for Some Squidbilly Soup

There is a saying in my country. It was quite popular when I was a child, and even earned a Simpsons episode about it. It goes something along the lines of: "If you looked up (stupid) in the dictionary, it will have a picture of your face by the definition." "Stupid" could be easily interchanged for a bunch of different "insulting" words, such as fat, ugly, moron, idiot, etc.

When it comes to Squidbillies, I can't help but be reminded of this familiar bromide, but it ends up a little different. I think of something more along the lines of: "If you looked up the word 'bad' in the dictionary, the definition could simply say: 'Squidbillies'."

This isn't "bad" like that word meant in the 80s, when it suddenly meant "cool." Don't think you're clever if you responded to that sentence with a thought along those lines.

Squidbillies is an attempt to take the absolute worst about already popular Adult Swim shows - Space Ghost: Coast to Coast, Sealab 2021, and Aqua Teen Hunger Force - and make a show consisting only of that.

Sealab and Aqua Teen, and even Space Ghost had some pretty lousy animation. Almost like a bare bones attempt at the South Park style. This could be enjoyable in a quirky kind of way, but only worked because episodes of those show actually managed to have legitimately funny dialogue from time to time. The animation was pretty much the worst part of those shows.

But I guess Williamstreet decided that it was the animation style that brought people to watch those shows. But it wasn't. Despite the reality, Squidbillies is a show that exists to have an extreme version of the lousy animation from those shows. It's even worse, which I guess is one hell of an achievement by itself, but nothing to be proud of.

And apparently this show is supposed to be funny because the animation is just that fucking bad. It's so bad that it somehow makes the show "good." Which is such an utterly idiotic concept that it boggles the mind. This is what they must think however, because the incredibly bad animation is the only thing the show has. That's it. Nothing else. The writing might as well not be existent. I have never in my life seen a more pure example of a completely lack to even just try to write something. It almost seems like the "writers," (it pains me to even call them that) simply sat around a tape recorder and spoke into it while growing progressively drunker throughout the night. Then they took some dice and rolled them, and whatever number it landed on they would go that many sentences through the recording and pick whatever was said and write it down as the next line of the script.

To say it makes no sense would be a compliment to this show. It doesn't even bother to try and make sense. It doesn't bother to tell jokes, it doesn't bother to have character humor, it doesn't bother to make absolutely any aspect of the show whatsoever into anything that is even worth the time it takes to create it.

There are probably plenty of 5-year-olds out there who can make an overall more entertaining and better done television show than Squidbillies. This show is literally bottom of the barrel. There is absolutely nothing here worthwhile, and yet somehow it's on its third season (of 20 episode seasons!?).

My only assumption is that they were literally trying to make the absolutely worst show they possibly could. That is the only logical conclusion I can draw. And they would have succeeded, too, if it wasn't for Tim and Eric.