Sunday, September 23, 2007

Autumn of Arts


Photo by Saya-Mikan

In Japan, it is said that autumn is the season for cuisine, reading books, and arts. I went to a arts exhibition yesterday and am going to go to listen to a orchestra from now on, I'd like to talk about these.

Yesterday, I went to arts exhibision by Kazuo Oga. Kazuo Oga was a member of studio Ghibli(now he is working as a indivisual illustrator) and he is a specialist of drawing background pictures. He engaged in Tonari-no-Totoro(My Neighbor Totoro) and Mononoke-hime(Princess Mononoke) as an arts director, and also in Majo-no-Takkyuubin(Kiki's Delivery Service), Sen-to-Chihiro-no-Kamikakushi(Sprited Away), Hauru-no-Ugoku-Shiro(Howl's Moving Castle), and many other animes by Ghibli as background picture staff.

This exhibition is to show these background pictures drawn by Oga, thus it was like a exhibition of Ghibli arts.

Each pictures were drawn finely and in detail, I thought it would be too good to be used as merely a background of anime... (it seems pictures of today's anime is far less better in quality than even 80's Ghibli!) Together, it would be impossible to reproduce these fine images on TV... New Generation DVD must be needed!

In this exhibition, popularity of Ghibli is well proven. It took 170min to just enter the exhibition at 11AM! When I stood in a line at 5PM, it still took 130min to reach the entrance!
However long I stayed in line, it was worth visiting.

Today, I'm going to go to a concert performed by Autumn Leaf Orchestra. They are orchestra specialized in music in Hentai Games. Today's program includes music from AIR, CLANNAD, Tsuyokiss, Otome wa Boku ni Koishiteru, and other games.

As I know, there's half dozens of orchestra specialized in playing game music and also some "normal" orchestra play game music. However, usually their program is from Dragon Quest or Final Fantasy. Very limited groups play music from Hentai games. (As for band consist of Vo, G, B, Dr, It seeems many are playing Hentai game music, but there're few orchestra)

There're many good musics in Hentai games. Such as from Key, NekoNeko Soft,,, I hope these musics get popularity among the people.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

It seems that an orchestra that only played music from hentai games would have a small audience, because of the nature of hentai games. I don't know how popular they are, not living in Japan...

Silphy & Misuzu said...

Yesterday's concert seemed to have 200-300 audiences. Large enough, isn't it?

The sales of the hentai game sold the most (Fate/Stay night) is more than 150,000 packages. Also in other dozens of famous hentai games, 50,000-100,000 packages were sold. You could figure there're at least 100,000 players of hentai games.

In Akihabara, it seems to me that the market of hentai games is comparable to that of anime... Plenty of advertisements of hentai games are filling the avenue.

But it doesn't mean hentai games are accepted nationwide, the influence is just limited to otaku(On the other hand, many anime otaku are familiar with hentai games)

By the way, the word "hentai" is insulting in meaning in Japanese. I'd like to use the word such as "visual novel," but it seems to be less known...

Anonymous said...

200-300, That is a very promising figure! Music is very important, and I wish people would stop making the source such a big deal. Last year, we had a concert of video game music in Edmonton - it was our first one. The game otaku were very excited, as were many casual players. However, it was just a one time thing. Maybe one day we too will have orchestras devoted to only game music.

Anyway, you know the solution to this, right? Make more people otaku. :D

Silphy & Misuzu said...

Hello, how are you?

Yesterday I went to the concert of game music, mainly of FF and DQ. As much as 1500 people came and the performance was quite exciting. By seeing many old people, I realized the popularity of game music.

However, the situation of major game like FF and so-called hentai game is very different, as I mentioned. Still, otaku-contents is expanding in the mass-media now, more people would interest in being otaku (?)

By the way, I heard of a very big video game music live. http://www.videogameslive.com/
I wonder how is their performance.

Anonymous said...

I'm great! I hope you're doing well! I will send you pictures soon of Lauren and I dressed in our costumes, with Kurisu and Nozomi-chan!

Actually, that was the concert that came to Edmonton. The performance wasn't bad, being the first one I guess. They had a lot of interesting games there as well so it was fun to watch. It sold out - a good sign. :D