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Good animated movies / cartoons can be more deep and existential than live-action, much like how a Picasso painting can more deeply reveal the secrets of shapes

Good animated movies / cartoons can be more deep and existential than live-action, much like how a Picasso painting can more deeply reveal the secrets of shapes than many photographs. I don't think Kung Fu Panda is particularly deep, but probably is deeper than a lot of other Hollywood films. I'd say the deeper animated films I've seen are Secret of Kells (largely an adventure story, but very in depth with regards to dark-age Irish history/legends/mythology). There are a lot of in-depth Anime movies, hard to pick anything in particular that stands out. Tokyo Godfathers, and Wolf Children, probably affected me emotionally the most (despite being mostly mundane situations). I think a lot of the more sci-fi / dream / supernatural stuff loses points due to technobabble (Ghost in a Shell, Evangelion, Paprika), but these are also deeper movies than typical. Tokyo Godfathers / Wolf children manage to be deep about a relatively mundane subject. Homeless people for Tokyo Godfathers, and Wolf Children is basically a simple "raising a young girl / young boy" story, with the wolf-myth just largely representing the uncertainty that all mothers face when raising kids for the first time. Despite being about mundane subjects with only the barest of myth/sci-fi/fantasy in it, these movies seem to discuss the human condition better than many other films (even contrasted to other anime films, like Evangeleon)

Zababa 5y ago
> I think a lot of the more sci-fi / dream / supernatural stuff loses points due to technobabble I think you can mostly ignore the technobabble without issues, most of the time it's here for the setting but not necessary. For example, Akagi and Ten (mangas by Nobuyuki Fukumoto) feature a lot of mahjong, but mahjong is secondary to what's really happening, which is a clash of multiple personalities/ways of life. You can usually see this because the important moments don't usually feature the technoblabble part. The gambling house arc in Akagi doesn't feature any mahjong, yet is the point that defines Akagi as a character. The last three volumes of Ten also don't feature any mahjong, and are in my opinion the most beautiful manga chapters ever written. Evangelion is so loved because the characters are flawed humans trying to go through life, the setting is almost secondary. Patlabor 2 features large robots in a sci-fi world but the politics are the same as ever. All of these stories are stories about humans before everything else, which is why they are so good.
- dragontamer 5y ago
  > I think you can mostly ignore the technobabble without issues, most of the time it's here for the setting but not necessary I agree that its largely ignorable. Actually, the "technobabble" adds a lot of flavor and "coolness" to a lot of situations, so its fine for my reptilian brain. The issue is that every minute of technobabble on the screen is another wasted minute from a storytelling perspective. When you watch a denser film (like Secret of Kells), that's lacking any of that techno-babble... or even something like Fate/Stay (which largely cuts out the techno-magic babble aside from a few key phrases), the storyline is heavier and denser. More things "happen" because there's less "filler technobabble" going on. So when we talk about pleasing my "higher-order" brain (as opposed to my reptile brain which is pleased with the technobabble + explosions), my high-order brain enjoys the character interactions and the deeper analogies to the human condition. ------- So from the "higher-order" perspective, something like Tokyo Godfathers can tell a fuller story in a shorter amount of time, because there's less technobabble eating up the screentime.
  - Zababa 5y ago
    I wouldn't call that time wasted, I think it's usually very important to create an atmosphere, and to better understand the world that the people we're watching are living in. I've never watched Secret of Kells so I can't comment on that. But it's funny that you pick something like Fate, in both the original Stay Night (the visual novel) and Zero (the light novel), there is a lot of technobabble. It gets cut in the anime adaptations, along with most of the interesting parts of the characters and the story. The original Stay Night by DEEN was a weird mix of all three routes, not great by any means but at least brought something new, UBW was butchered, and I'm trying to keep things civil so I won't talk about Heaven's Feel. Zero had the same treatment, most of the internal dialogue of characters was cut, leaving a story with half-baked characters and trying to compensate with the visuals. > So from the "higher-order" perspective, something like Tokyo Godfathers can tell a fuller story in a shorter amount of time, because there's less technobabble eating up the screentime. That's true. However, I think time is not always a hard limit. Sometimes the movie being slow is part of the experience. It is something I like a lot, so I probably have a bias here.

Zababa 5y ago

> I think a lot of the more sci-fi / dream / supernatural stuff loses points due to technobabble I think you can mostly ignore the technobabble without issues, most of the time it's here for the setting but not necessary. For example, Akagi and Ten (mangas by Nobuyuki Fukumoto) feature a lot of mahjong, but mahjong is secondary to what's really happening, which is a clash of multiple personalities/ways of life. You can usually see this because the important moments don't usually feature the technoblabble part. The gambling house arc in Akagi doesn't feature any mahjong, yet is the point that defines Akagi as a character. The last three volumes of Ten also don't feature any mahjong, and are in my opinion the most beautiful manga chapters ever written. Evangelion is so loved because the characters are flawed humans trying to go through life, the setting is almost secondary. Patlabor 2 features large robots in a sci-fi world but the politics are the same as ever. All of these stories are stories about humans before everything else, which is why they are so good.

dragontamer 5y ago
> I think you can mostly ignore the technobabble without issues, most of the time it's here for the setting but not necessary I agree that its largely ignorable. Actually, the "technobabble" adds a lot of flavor and "coolness" to a lot of situations, so its fine for my reptilian brain. The issue is that every minute of technobabble on the screen is another wasted minute from a storytelling perspective. When you watch a denser film (like Secret of Kells), that's lacking any of that techno-babble... or even something like Fate/Stay (which largely cuts out the techno-magic babble aside from a few key phrases), the storyline is heavier and denser. More things "happen" because there's less "filler technobabble" going on. So when we talk about pleasing my "higher-order" brain (as opposed to my reptile brain which is pleased with the technobabble + explosions), my high-order brain enjoys the character interactions and the deeper analogies to the human condition. ------- So from the "higher-order" perspective, something like Tokyo Godfathers can tell a fuller story in a shorter amount of time, because there's less technobabble eating up the screentime.
- Zababa 5y ago
  I wouldn't call that time wasted, I think it's usually very important to create an atmosphere, and to better understand the world that the people we're watching are living in. I've never watched Secret of Kells so I can't comment on that. But it's funny that you pick something like Fate, in both the original Stay Night (the visual novel) and Zero (the light novel), there is a lot of technobabble. It gets cut in the anime adaptations, along with most of the interesting parts of the characters and the story. The original Stay Night by DEEN was a weird mix of all three routes, not great by any means but at least brought something new, UBW was butchered, and I'm trying to keep things civil so I won't talk about Heaven's Feel. Zero had the same treatment, most of the internal dialogue of characters was cut, leaving a story with half-baked characters and trying to compensate with the visuals. > So from the "higher-order" perspective, something like Tokyo Godfathers can tell a fuller story in a shorter amount of time, because there's less technobabble eating up the screentime. That's true. However, I think time is not always a hard limit. Sometimes the movie being slow is part of the experience. It is something I like a lot, so I probably have a bias here.