Karakuri Babble is a daily column by the editors of i360.com, usually on topics tangentially related to anime and cosplay.

In the past we have endorsed many things; in the future we shall support many others.

You guys have probably heard the term "superflat." If not, there's a brief Wikipedia article on the subject, naming some pivotal figures and examples of the work. Go check it out, there's some good stuff referenced there.

Personally, I can't figure it out. Sure, as the article says, it's marketing. But I think there might be something there, some genuine trend that we can only see now, at a comfortable distance from the last few years.

We have seen this sort of thing before. Cyberpunk's a good example. Gibson and Sterling came out with a few books. Reviewers decided that they had a whole new genre, a host of people published books of techno-noir, and it turned out that, no, Gibson just writes really well, and Sterling has just the right sort of quirky ideas.

In retrospect, the entire cyberpunk canon is most likely under a half-million words. They're good words, but not a genre. Yet their influence was so wide-ranging that post-cyberpunk is entirely real.

Superflat's like that, to me. You can say that it's a movement that parodies the tendency toward idealization common in otaku culture -- but that's a pretty big target. I find it really hard to put Hitoshi Tomizawa and Koji Morimoto in the same genre, and I would regard any claims to do so with extreme suspicion. But it's a fact that things look different than they used to, and it's not all the whims of fashion.

(More on anime's peculiar self-referential genre stylings another day, when I feel up to it. "And of course, more fan service.")

words from chris, 2009-01-15 00:26:16, northern california