Apologies for the delayed final few Strike Witches posts. It’s the end of the spring break now, which means it’s time for me to stop doing mostly nothing and start finish the schoolwork I’ve been putting off. Which, in turn, means I don’t really have time to sit down and hammer out the rest of the transcriptions right now — but I can, at least, present to you this curious example of contemporary anime art at work.

By “Madaramean Principle” I mean that argument made by Harunobu Madarame in the fourth chapter of Genshiken in defense of 2D porn: the human mind can make quite a lot out of very little.

Perhaps the rather simplistic character designs of Strike Witches demonstrate this in themselves. The selectively-censored disrobed Witches, with their overlarge heads and implausible builds, aren’t strictly, technically what we’d probably think of as human-looking — but they’re evocative enough of human beings that we can “read” them as such without much trouble, especially if we’re trained to do so by years of anime consumption. And, to be fair, better they look like caricatures than fall into the uncanny valley.

But there’s a particular example of how significant an impression very minor details might make on us in Strike Witches’ first episode. I’m talking about that character I’ve been calling the “moe grandma” not because she arouses those moe feelings in me, necessarily, but simply because of her character design.

It occurred to me, during this scene, that, aside from coloring and clothing (relatively ambiguous factors, in my opinion, particularly when we’re new to a show and the fictitious or fictionalized people and cultures it presents), there really wasn’t much about these characters that suggested age. Four lines, in fact. So I removed them just to see what would happen.

Not much has changed with Miyafuji’s mom, who is more “comprehensively” aged, I suppose. But I seem to have done the grandma quite a favor.

Is this an example of artistic laziness at work in contemporary moe anime? Maybe, but what does it matter, as long as those four lines work? And they do work, I’d say; perhaps surprisingly so. Rather than bemoan such art for its laziness, perhaps we should praise it for a simplicity that allows a large degree of viewer agency — if indeed it does, but it would seem to me that four well-placed lines can be as authoritative as four hundred.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 14th, 2010 at 6:00 pm and is filed under Fandom, Genshiken (Manga), Strike Witches. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.