Trivia for you: Ritsuko uses NeXTSTEP.
It's often hard for me to believe or comprehend just how important details like that are to my enjoyment of a series -- I don't mean the fact of her using a particular operating system, but the simple fact that it is possible to tell. Detail like this used to require incredible amounts of money, and as a consequence it was seen only rarely. Now we have computers, and the cost of detail has come down. It's still expensive, but not unreasonably so.
It took us a while to get this far. In the old days, it seemed like 3DCG would overwhelm traditionally-styled animation. Even more traditional productions of the mid-2000s sometimes seemed infatuated with the prospect of moving things around cheaply with computers. In the process, they often lost sight of the little touches that animation requires in order to seem natural. (I don't want to single out anything in particular -- it was endemic. Even the
Read or Die OVA, a great production overall, suffered from this a little. Watch it and you'll see.)
But we're past that now, to a great extent. We'll always have cheap bad animation, but the better productions have learned to use their computers effectively to cram scenes with the sort of detail that used to require an Otomo or Oshii. (Not to mention several million dollars.) The new Evangelion movies are examples of the state of the art, and I think they're very much better for it.
More detail on that tomorrow. Time for me to go to sleep.
words from chris, 2009-06-22 03:33:22, los angeles
