Post
by Geirr » Mon Oct 13, 2003 7:31 pm
Just two more cents on this topic:
One impediment might be that most Japanese, and the animators who serve them their entertainment, don't 'get' Christianity. The culture takes more of a shotgun apporach to religion and religious symbols; we lived there and saw some of the oddest storefront displays for Christmas - I think the strangest one I saw had a bunch of reindeer & a sleigh parked on a snow-white church roof, and next to it they had lashed a Santa to a cross in the snowy churchyard. (!) Umm, merry, yeah. You too.
So in anime, you will see kaballahs and you'll see combined, more-the-merrier conglomerations of symbols, like the cross with a star of David on it (Phantom Quest Corps, was it?) But, in general the animators don't really have a clue about what happens at the altar of a Christian church (to be fair, most Christians of one denomination probably couldn't explain another denomination's rites & rubrics with exactitude - ask a AoG church-goer to explain what the priest does during a Byzantine rite, or ask a Maronite Catholic to explain a Four Square church ...)
What that means is that it will be difficult or darn challenging to find anime scenes or special effects which would be useful for presenting well-known Christian themes visually: what series and scene, for example, could you use to make a reference to (a) the Sermon on the Mount (b) Jesus calming the storm before Peter, (c) Paul's conversion on the road to Damascus (d) the suffering in the garden of Gethsamane, (e) Salvation or Judgement Day, etc.
Unless you're VERY good with a program like AfterEffects or Animation Master, video editors might have a hard time finding scenes which unmistakably point to Christian mysticism, and if you can't do that, it probably won't 'feel' like a Cristian AMV. (In counterpoint, if you OVER-do it, it would be TACKY.)
- G