Sorry there, but a lot of toku is pure cheese. Yeah it's cheesy fun, but if you deny the cheese factor, then you are just as bad as the people that try and say how Super sentai is deep and dark because they saw some swear words used in a fansub.
Toku wasn't invented in Japan and the Japanese can't claim it as their own.
If you don't think the SFX to some old and new toku is cheesy, then IMO you are deluding yourself. A giant mecha gorrila throwing bananas as a weapon is very cheesy.
You seem to think cheesy is a bad thing. It's not.
Story aside, it really is just a branching off point where one country's special effects territory went into a different direction. It's entirely possible to use miniatures and creative camera work to make things look good - and you can punctuate this idea by looking at poorly done miniature work, there's a marked difference in what you would be looking at when comparing the two.
I think that for people who want to make a distinction between when it should and shouldn’t be used, they are not quite used to this type of communication and so it throws them off.
Limiting a term to a certain grade of media from a certain country only isolates its use and who can use it, which I feel is the complete opposite of the entertainment media as a whole.
The fact that people want to classify a term that brought us all together to just one country makes absolutely no sense to me.
It’s like saying that Enter the Dragon is not a martial arts film because Warner Bros. was involved in the production.
Why does this have to be some sort of, for a lack of a better word, “holy†term that only certain people can use?
That's a bit patronizing, don't you think? You're literally saying your opponents in this debate must be less cultured than you are, and that is the only reason why they disagree. I don't think you really mean that, given that the rest of your post is about the importance of being open-minded.
In writing, and to an extent in English communication in general, I subscribe to George Orwell's admonition that gratuitous use of foreign terms in English where perfectly good English terms exist already is pretentious, obnoxious, and needlessly obfuscates meaning. That is, don't use a foreign word for something where an English word will do.
Tokusatsu has the problem of its broad definition meaning exactly "special effects," which is going to be more familiar a term to 99% of the people you will ever communicate with in English. Unless you want to emphasize that you're speaking mainly about Japanese special effects stuff, then why bother to import the term into English at all? We've already got a way to say the same thing that's easier to pronounce and abbreviate.
The point of most entertainment media is to turn a profit from direct sales and licensing. If the point was "spreading ideas and concepts across regions" there'd be no such thing as region locking. Yet for basically every major modern form of entertainment, the people who own it carefully region lock all releases in an attempt to control who can and can't see it. As fans of primarily Japanese media, we break that rule all the time when we download fansubs and other bootleg releases. But chances are the people who own it would stop us, if they understood how to do so efficiently, and we forget that too easily.
Earlier I made the argument that there was no logical reason to argue for a broad definition of tokusatsu, that mainly a broader definition made non-Japanese fans feel better about themselves. And honestly, you've just proven that point. How does where we're from matter at all? We're all watching the same stuff. And I mean, we're posting in a forum where basically every non-Japanese show gets ignored, unless it involves Saban (i.e., is American, like most of our userbase).
We can talk about how great it is that every nation makes tokusatsu all we want, but very few people who show up here actually wans to talk very much about Korean, Chinese, Filipino, and other shows. I'm sure Bima Satria Garuda will get ignored, too, even though Ishimori Pro is working on it. It's rather reminiscent of how everyone talked about how Americans could make manga, too, back during the manga bubble? And then TokyoPop's entire OEL manga line bombed so hard it brought down the publisher. The exact same people who argued anyone could make manga made it clear in their spending that, regardless, they only wanted to buy Japanese manga.
It's more like saying that (in English) Enter the Dragon is a good martial arts film, but isn't a wuxia film because it's just too American. And this is something people actually do, despite there being broad acceptance that Enter the Dragon is definitely a Hong Kong martial arts film. That's how genre definitions work. Some works fit and some don't, and the classification is meant to tell you something useful about what the work is like. It doesn't diminish Enter the Dragon's greatness at all to say it's not a wuxia film.
Whether you use a limited or broad definition, I think it needs to be emphasized that to be tokusatsu is not necessarily to be good. There is no inherently desirable positive quality to being tokusatsu. In fact, even if you used the most limited possible definition of tokusatsu, you must admit that a lot of shitty, dumb tokusatsu exists.
I think everyone in the thread could probably agree that toksuatsu is simply a type of production, regardless of their other stances. So I don't think there's anything necessarily good or bad about saying something is or isn't covered by the term when it's used in English. It's a grouping of similar objects, not a cool kids' club that some people aren't good enough to join.
And I note we're having this conversation in a part of the site where, generally, threads about non-Asian media are reported, so they can be moved to the Power Chamber.
And those philosophical differences like using rubber suits instead of CGI won't hold true forever. Or did you not see Superior Ultraman 8 Brothers, Movie War Core, and so on?It's not just about the country of origin and it's not just about the style and art direction either. It's both of those things, but most importantly it's about the underlining aesthetic philosophy at work behind the entire enterprise. The Japanese have cultivated and continue to employ a certain style SFX because their is a unique artistic ideology at work behind it. What Donald Ritchie refers to as "Representational" and "Presentational" aesthetics. American filmmakers have largely been preoccupied with the "Representational" trying to recreate reality on the silver screen. The Japanese on the other hand are more interested in the "Presentational" is which a stylized idea of a particular version of reality is shown. It's for this reason that Hollywood SFX have continued to change drastically over the decades with regards to the techniques they use because they are always looking for something more "real." But the Japanese have been content with men in monster costumes ever since Harou Nakajima slipped into the very first Godzilla suit because "realism" isn't a prerogative of Japanese art. So a man in a dinosaur suit is just fine because everyone watching the screen understands that is this version of reality this is what a 50-meter-tall radioactive behemoth looks like.
Are you suggesting Japanese shows don't have the issue of being "fake looking or tacky"? I'm in the middle episodes of Dekaranger now, and the miniature sets are terribly plain. They're pretty much just dull buildings packed closely together. I decided to compare those a later episode of Ultraman Nexus, a show which came out not too long after Dekaranger. Nexus had miniature plants, electric towers, lamp posts, fences, lots of little vehicles, and even highway guard railings. All of which combine to form a more convincing city scape than Dekaranger provides. (yeah, Dekaranger had tiny vehicles too, but as far as I've seen, they were really scarce, even in the cities, except during those shots with the Deka Machines driving over them)But I suppose it would help if we defined terms here. When someone says something is "cheesy" I take it to mean "fake looking or tacky as a result of being cheap," as in "The SFX could have been better but they went with these tacky ones because they were cheaper, as a result the film is rather cheesy."
But because the majority of Tokusatsu movies and shows tend to be incredibly expensive productions (by Japanese standards) I don't think you can fairly throw the allegation of "cheesiness" at them.
If we can say "bad", why not "cheesy", then?You can certainly say that some of the SFX in the older shows and films are bad however.
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