TEXHNOLYZE

Just a few weeks ago i was alone at the house and i just set up ani-cli on my newly setted up debian computer. Yes i am trying to make the switch to linux and FOSS slowly and i started with a debian. So far it goes pretty well. It would not be an exxagaration if i said i actually love using my debian. Anyway this is not what you are here for. You want to read about TEXHNOLYZE so let's go actually. I found some weird and interetsing character designs that resembled the ones my friend used to draw. Those weird and interesting character designs were the SETTEI of the TEXHNOLYZE anime. The character designs were semi-realistic which i like. So i opened up my ani-cli on terminal and trying to come up with an anime to watch i just put texhnolyze in there and started watching it.

I think the best and most interesting episode of the TEXHNOLYZE was the first episode. There was hardly any speech, characters did not talk much and tried to tell and justify their thoughts in a manner of a WALL OF TEXT narrative. So i liked it. Most people actually said that the first episode suffers from the pacing because that it is so slow but, to be honest it felt just right, i did not get bored at all. I hate characters talking all the time and things happening too fast so this first episode was perfect for my taste actually.

SPOILERS!!!!

Basically what happens in the first episode is that our protagonist is a fighter and he waits for the payment from his boss which is a woman. Boss declines wanting to have sex with him in order to pay him. Protagonist supere uninterested but has sex anyway. In this world for the technology of the TEXHNOLYZE to be working they put some additional modification to a human's eye and making them have HUD's in their vision which also makes it so that the eye is no longer as soft as it was I GUESS. So this texhnolyzed boss being curious in this untexhnolyzed fighter kid she tries to put her finger thru the eye of the protagonist which hurts him which in turn makes him punch her. Which in turn makes the boss that is actually associated with a mafia to torture the kid. Whatever. As you can see the story is actually quite easy to follow if you actually watch. This is not why we are here. If you are curious about the story i highly recommend you to watch it to be honest. We are here for the SAKUGA.

I really liked how characters had this "semi-realistic" design going on. I like it because no singular element on a character dominates their look. They have eyes, nose a mouth everything a human should have :D. I think this is important because this makes it possible to make characters look distinctive. After SAO (Sword Art Online) took of with A1 all the characters started looking the same. I know there were templates for old anime too, it is just that the characters are way way more similar these days. So for that reason i really liked characters having their own unique looks to themselves.

What about animation?

Animation in the first episode is actually quite good. Especially the opening scene, i am talking about the fight scene. With all the dynamic angles and vague sillhouettes of the characters i think it is quite hard to make the audience understand what is going on and it actually succeeded at that. (opening fight scene)

Another cool scene was probably the fight between HAL vs SHINJI. It showed that in order to win you don't need a whole cyborg implant, only one robotic finger is enough as long as you have the brains and experience. Shinji was just way too superior compared to Hal. He just did not stood a chance.

One interesting thing that i notice not only in this anime but in anime generally is how they handle walks.

In this particular scene they basically made it so that every frame is eased in and also eased out towards all keyframes. Which makes the character to havea a "stop & Go" feeling going for it. Now both in real life and in most animation people do not walk this way. We mostly keep a certain speed as we walk that stays mostly the same. However in this scene and also in many animes they make it so that the character kind of gets slower in every step. They also make this in running animations too. Which i think is a very cool technique. This actually reminds me something from H. Wöfflin's principles of art history. I will not be directly quoting what is inside the book is that the difference between baroque paintings and rennaisance paintings are that rennaisance paintings are mostly linear and baroque paintings are mostly painterly. Linearly art is trying to make every detail pop which makess the painting crowded. However linearly art really tries to give you every detail there is about the subject while painterly art tries to convey the feeling of the subject rather then having all the details. I think this weird walk-run technique in animes is done for the same reason. For conveying a feeling even though it is not actually shows the real thing.

However we can also find the opposite of this in some animes for example if we look at toshiyuki inoue's walk cycles they look quite realistic. He rather tries to convey the feeling of the motion by giving characters side by side motion rather than forward motion. Which is also not the actual real thing but a different way to depict reality. I think stop & go style of walk and run cycles are more suited for lower budget animation and also maybe more stylised animation and toshiyuki inoue style side to side walking is for higher budget animation. This is completely a speculation btw.

I did not like the animations that much in texhnolyze other than a few bits here and there. Even tho i liked how the characters moved so slowly and so weightfully, there were not many moments of intriguing techniques of sakuga or excitement. Most scenes were very plain. What is done in the scene is pretty much has set up in the storyboars already. So i think the beauty of the most scenes just goes to the director even tho the animators were good. They just did not bring that much to talk about.

After the first episode a lot of drawing errors become visible to audience. That was what i noticed when i was watching. Character were just not consistent.This was most noticable on faces. Especially on face turns. Characters just did not look like themselves on certain angles. I did not like that part but it was not so bad that it hurt to watch. It was fine.

Conclusion

I mostly watched the anime because they did not talk as much and they did not talk as clearly like other animes. I think japanese people being so educated actually kind of hurts their creative writing especially on anime. For some reason writers are always seem like they need to tell what they exactly think by the character's mouths and then we just sit and watch some roughly animated lipsync doing loops while we hear some weirdly detailed plot in a single scene. No i hate that. In TEXHNOLYZE there is almost no talking in the first episode. We can see what happens instead and if you just watch it you will understand what is happening too. Which is better than someone just telling you. I actually do not like the rest of the episodes that much compared to the first episode because characters start to talk more. At least they are still talking kind of humanly. That is a good thing to experience, it is hard to find. Basically i liked to find a show that was finally more about show not tell even though it was not that much of an awesome thing. Another cool thing is that things kind of just happens. I felt an emptiness after finishing the anime, not in a usual sense but rather the anime felt empty. There was nothing in the first city, there was nothing in the second cty. Actually there was so much nothing in the second city we actually came back to the first city's nothingness to just end in nothingness. It was that empty. Which is a good feeling i guesss? The anime makes you feel stuff. I will give it that. Sorry if this was not such an in depth analysis of the anime, i watched and experienced this anime for and with very basic reasons but i still wanted to tell it. Thanks for reading it!.