Souvenirs from the Great CLAMP Expo
No, I did not (alas) get to go to some mythical convention that's all CLAMP, all the time, filled with interviews, videos, and such. The "Great CLAMP Expo" is a project of my own. I have decided I want to try showing my anime club Tsubasa and xxxHoLic -- this time in parallel, with the episodes shuffled together to make one crossover extraordinaire! Some of them have previously seen and liked xxxHoLic, but Tsubasa didn't work so well last time we tried to show it because people had no idea what was going on with all these characters they were supposed to already be familiar with. My solution? Show them everything. From the beginning. In order (according to manga publication dates). That's the Great CLAMP Expo (which is presently in the middle of what I fondly call "The CLAMP School Clusterf***"), and it'll probably take all year.
So far, they've been willing to put up with my insanity, which is one reason why my anime club is awesome.
Obviously, this gets a little tricky in the area of things that haven't been animated (such as Legend of Chun Hyang or Legal Drug), things that were animated as a set (if anyone's interested, I could write up an episode/materials list for the whole project -- for example, which extracts I used from the CLAMP School series to illustrate each of Nijuu Mensou ni Onegai, CLAMP School Detectives, and Duklyon), and things where the anime was... shall we say not entirely representative of the work? I'm looking at you, Tokyo Babylon.
Don't get me wrong. I thoroughly enjoy the Tokyo Babylon OVAs, and as filler episodes go I think they're fairly well written. (My objections to the English reversioning are an entirely different matter, which you shouldn't ask me about unless you want a long rant.) Their decency as filler episodes, however, does not change the fact that it leaves out huge swaths of both story and characterization. And that's fine for an OVA's intended audience -- existing fans who're picking it up as a collector's item. But I've always been of the opinion that just seeing the OVAs without knowing the rest of the story (as will happen much more easily in America where the manga is out of print and not widely available to begin with) would leave the viewer at best uninterested and at worst asking, "Wait... what the hell?!" when such things as the fight on Rainbow Bridge go down.
I did buy the club a store copy of the manga to read, but there's always that chance that someone won't quite get to it before we pick up with X, or won't see any reason to bother at all -- despite the fact that, of all the stories they've ever written, Tokyo Babylon is probably the one where the plot matters the most to subsequent works. I'm not an experienced vidder who can make pieces of art equivalent to what some people I know can do, or what fans may be used to, but I wanted to make some kind of presentation to highlight the differences in characterization between the OVAs and the manga, hopefully to spark a greater interest in reading the story but at least so that when certain things happen in X and Tsubasa, the club members understand where it's coming from.
Okay. What I wanted to do was animate the entirety of the manga, with voice acting and everything, and I still want to do that, but the best course of action according to restraints on my current abilities and resources was to create a short series of character pieces. Which has left me with a conundrum. Now I'd made these things, and I wanted to show them to people -- not that it's likely people are clicking on my Tokyo Babylon stuff without having any familiarity with it, but because I made them and I want to show them to people. I'm like that. And who knows, there's always the chance that someone who'd never heard of TB before would see them and want to give it a shot.
Which left me wondering if these videos were fair use, since I didn't want to upload them to YouTube and start linking and/or embedding if my account was going to get hit with take-down notices (especially with everything that's been going on).
See, I was confident that it wouldn't be legal to distribute my own TB anime, if I were ever to make one, whereas I would be confident that a video focusing on some subjective aspect of the series would be fair use. But what about these? Is characterization subjective? After analyzing what work I did, the effect, and my own intentions, I came to the following conclusion:
Yes.
I handpicked a very, very limited number of images (approximately 50-52 partial clips of a 7-volume manga or selections from an artbook), often cross-cutting lines from different books, to create a coherent representation of what I believe to be this character's personality, circumstance, and driving motivation. It's very possible to pull an alternative reading from the manga, as evidenced by the debates over characterization I've been having with
sumeria, and I cannot definitively say that I am presenting the original author's intent. It's my opinion as a (pardon my momentary lack of humility -- pretty damn well informed, bordering on expert) reader. As such, I put that down as subjective commentary on the work. I'm definitely not presenting something that I would consider "equivalent" to reading the manga, I'm definitely not making any money from it, and I hope that people who haven't read Tokyo Babylon come away with enough interest in the characters to read it rather than feeling like it's been spoiled.
The song translations are my own work, though the original lyrics are (of course) not. So, here they are, for better or for worse. Some text may not be legible unless you watch it full-screen on a higher resolution.
I'll be doing this little educational series all year, though I don't know how many additional videos I'll be making. Right now the only ones I have definitively planned are a character intro to show before the X movie and an overview piece for Legal Drug. We'll see. My time is stretched so thin right now that I'm just glad so much is animated by real studios. Yes, I even got a legal DVD of the Miyuki-chan OVA. Oh man, did I never think I would own that. (Although it was surprisingly watchable.)
This entry was originally posted at http://psiten.dreamwidth.org/78143.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
So far, they've been willing to put up with my insanity, which is one reason why my anime club is awesome.
Obviously, this gets a little tricky in the area of things that haven't been animated (such as Legend of Chun Hyang or Legal Drug), things that were animated as a set (if anyone's interested, I could write up an episode/materials list for the whole project -- for example, which extracts I used from the CLAMP School series to illustrate each of Nijuu Mensou ni Onegai, CLAMP School Detectives, and Duklyon), and things where the anime was... shall we say not entirely representative of the work? I'm looking at you, Tokyo Babylon.
Don't get me wrong. I thoroughly enjoy the Tokyo Babylon OVAs, and as filler episodes go I think they're fairly well written. (My objections to the English reversioning are an entirely different matter, which you shouldn't ask me about unless you want a long rant.) Their decency as filler episodes, however, does not change the fact that it leaves out huge swaths of both story and characterization. And that's fine for an OVA's intended audience -- existing fans who're picking it up as a collector's item. But I've always been of the opinion that just seeing the OVAs without knowing the rest of the story (as will happen much more easily in America where the manga is out of print and not widely available to begin with) would leave the viewer at best uninterested and at worst asking, "Wait... what the hell?!" when such things as the fight on Rainbow Bridge go down.
I did buy the club a store copy of the manga to read, but there's always that chance that someone won't quite get to it before we pick up with X, or won't see any reason to bother at all -- despite the fact that, of all the stories they've ever written, Tokyo Babylon is probably the one where the plot matters the most to subsequent works. I'm not an experienced vidder who can make pieces of art equivalent to what some people I know can do, or what fans may be used to, but I wanted to make some kind of presentation to highlight the differences in characterization between the OVAs and the manga, hopefully to spark a greater interest in reading the story but at least so that when certain things happen in X and Tsubasa, the club members understand where it's coming from.
Okay. What I wanted to do was animate the entirety of the manga, with voice acting and everything, and I still want to do that, but the best course of action according to restraints on my current abilities and resources was to create a short series of character pieces. Which has left me with a conundrum. Now I'd made these things, and I wanted to show them to people -- not that it's likely people are clicking on my Tokyo Babylon stuff without having any familiarity with it, but because I made them and I want to show them to people. I'm like that. And who knows, there's always the chance that someone who'd never heard of TB before would see them and want to give it a shot.
Which left me wondering if these videos were fair use, since I didn't want to upload them to YouTube and start linking and/or embedding if my account was going to get hit with take-down notices (especially with everything that's been going on).
See, I was confident that it wouldn't be legal to distribute my own TB anime, if I were ever to make one, whereas I would be confident that a video focusing on some subjective aspect of the series would be fair use. But what about these? Is characterization subjective? After analyzing what work I did, the effect, and my own intentions, I came to the following conclusion:
Yes.
I handpicked a very, very limited number of images (approximately 50-52 partial clips of a 7-volume manga or selections from an artbook), often cross-cutting lines from different books, to create a coherent representation of what I believe to be this character's personality, circumstance, and driving motivation. It's very possible to pull an alternative reading from the manga, as evidenced by the debates over characterization I've been having with
sumeria, and I cannot definitively say that I am presenting the original author's intent. It's my opinion as a (pardon my momentary lack of humility -- pretty damn well informed, bordering on expert) reader. As such, I put that down as subjective commentary on the work. I'm definitely not presenting something that I would consider "equivalent" to reading the manga, I'm definitely not making any money from it, and I hope that people who haven't read Tokyo Babylon come away with enough interest in the characters to read it rather than feeling like it's been spoiled.
The song translations are my own work, though the original lyrics are (of course) not. So, here they are, for better or for worse. Some text may not be legible unless you watch it full-screen on a higher resolution.
Click to viewI'll be doing this little educational series all year, though I don't know how many additional videos I'll be making. Right now the only ones I have definitively planned are a character intro to show before the X movie and an overview piece for Legal Drug. We'll see. My time is stretched so thin right now that I'm just glad so much is animated by real studios. Yes, I even got a legal DVD of the Miyuki-chan OVA. Oh man, did I never think I would own that. (Although it was surprisingly watchable.)
This entry was originally posted at http://psiten.dreamwidth.org/78143.html. Please comment there using OpenID.