Why Is Anime Obsessed With Power Lines?
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Why Is Anime Obsessed With Power Lines?
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Re: Why Is Anime Obsessed With Power Lines?
#2I thought it's just that in Asia, they don't usually hide lines or make effort to decrease number of individual wires.
That's what you have on street - that's what you get in anime.
Re: Why Is Anime Obsessed With Power Lines?
#3I thought it's just that in Asia, they don't usually hide lines or make effort to decrease number of individual wires. That's what you have on street - that's what you get in anime.
https://www.citylab.com/solutions/2016/07/bangkoks-tangled-p...
"That Time Bill Gates Accidentally Shamed Bangkok Into Burying Its Power Lines"
Re: Why Is Anime Obsessed With Power Lines?
#4Lol... I was going to say this exactly. Evangelion and Lain were pretty popular even in the US around the year 2000, so I imagine they were near ubiquitous in Japan. Both were well-animated and the power lines a symbol that was returned to again and again.
Anime/manga also loves to meme/trope things like this because animation studios are cheap and love 30s tracking shots across 2 hand-drawn panel with nothing more to animate than a bit of lens flare. IMO it started as a style thing but quickly became a “this is a cheap way to pad our runtime” thing.
Re: Why Is Anime Obsessed With Power Lines?
#5In addition to the reasons given here, I'd say that as far as bang-for-buck in terms of visual realism goes, power lines are pretty effective. They look complex but are quite fast to draw with line tools or model in a 3d package and usually can be represented with minimal shading. Creating the impression of modern urban landscapes is largely a question of creating very detail-dense images, and power lines are a pretty cheap way to add a lot of small detail.
Re: Why Is Anime Obsessed With Power Lines?
#6I thought it's just that in Asia, they don't usually hide lines or make effort to decrease number of individual wires. That's what you have on street - that's what you get in anime.
I was told that at least in Japan, this is done because it's easier to rebuild after an earthquake than digging up and reburying broken power and communication lines.
Re: Why Is Anime Obsessed With Power Lines?
#7In that great documentary "Crumb" cartoonist Robert Crumb shows his notebooks in which he keeps pictures of all sorts of mundane infrastructure that he incorporates into his drawings.
It's really effective in this sequence "A Short History of America":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IFVUHg_tUc
That one always gets me...
Re: Why Is Anime Obsessed With Power Lines?
#8In that great documentary "Crumb" cartoonist Robert Crumb shows his notebooks in which he keeps pictures of all sorts of mundane infrastructure that he incorporates into his drawings. It's really effective in this sequence "A Short History of America": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IFVUHg_tUc That one always gets me...
That's a great expression of how expansion and exploration drive technological progress. Much of the technology in the later video didn't exist when the video started, and was created on the newly-explored continent.
Re: Why Is Anime Obsessed With Power Lines?
#9I thought it's just that in Asia, they don't usually hide lines or make effort to decrease number of individual wires. That's what you have on street - that's what you get in anime.
That was my understanding as well.
Re: Why Is Anime Obsessed With Power Lines?
#10This makes me wonder about how complex is the world we are living today. The large amount of niches humanity created, unceasingly. On our complex societies, even a micro blog about "power lines in anime" have an audience, and got a journalist's attention to create an interesting article.