JOJO ~ SONO CHI NO SADAME 8 Bit Remix (2.0) - JoJo's Bizarre Adventure Opening 1
11i gave dio pink hair because i think that dio looks cool with pink hair - same goes for jojo and his green hair.
now that the obvious question has been answered, let's talk about part 1, how 'bout that?
actually, maybe we can start with those cool colors, 'cause that's actually one of the only things that the 2012 anime did really fucking well (along with the ost, lol). the shots of the wild colors (often just contrasting tones lol) are fucking fantastic, and the way that jojo's death does the whole "osamu dezaki/anj2 end card"-thing is a nice nod to the scene's framing being a reference to joe's death. [i'm tellin' you: read anj and you'll see it fucking everywhere in every other manga. it's crazy. i almost feel bad for bringing it up as often as i do, but that shit has become the gold standard that i hold all other chinese comic books to (in regard to everything bar technical execution of the artwork).]
anyways, yeah - the colors used in those shots of the anime are fantastic, and, generally, the shots are well-composed. notice how i'm not saying that the artstyle is great, lol? other than the colors, i think that the anime fucking butchered the shit out of the original look of part 1. araki didn't start using hard-angled lines until part 3, and was really big on heavy-inked shadows - kinda reminescent of contemporaneous american comics - and curved lines during parts 1 and 2. the anime just fucking threw that in the trash, which is a damn shame, because part 1 had fucking fantastic art. i totally get it, too - 'cause they did it for the same reason that they changed the designs of literally every character: it would just be way too fucking annoying to animate, and that's more than fair and fine. but, i dunno. when i think of jojo and dio, i think of them as they appear in the manga - dio, especially, always had that one instantly-identifiable tuft of hair that would hang at the side of his face down to his eye [SO FUCKING COOL, part 1 dio is FUCKING awesome], which they just totally removed from his anime incarnations seen in parts 1 and 3. the manga designs are just plain ol' appealing, and they tell you everything you need to know about both of them at a glance. jojo looks like an upright guy who had to adapt to his shitty situation in order to pull himself out from it without much time to prepare, and dio looks like a vaguely-homosexual law student who lost his fucking mind; they both look like what they are. the part 1 anime just makes jojo look like some guy who just got done with his workout (they FUCKING gave him fucking grey sweatpants are you KIDDING me) and dio kinda just looks lame due to of the slight design changes altering his sillouette to make him a little smaller. the latter is fine, i guess, but part 1 hadn't hit araki's twink era yet, so dio being a little less buff than he should be just feels wrong (inb4 "lol eggo is really going to sit here and complain about men not being buff enough").
i believe i'd talked before about how much i appreciate the thematic elements and implications of dio taking jojo's body at the end, so as to not be redundant, i'll just say that i still think that such a concept is just fuckin' killer. the body of the only man who ever gave dio grace time-after-time being stolen to further enable the crazy motherfucker to live on is really cool.
people say that part 1 is just a fist of the north star clone, but - as someone who has read every hokuto clone under the sun - i really don't see that.
hokuto is less about the relationship between any two characters as much as it is about the destiny of an individual (and love, which is kind of the bigger theme, but i don't care). it was ken's fate to be alone at the end; it was raoh's fate to literally punch heaven; it was toki's fate to die to his brother; souther's to die to the successor to hokuto shinken (and shu's to sacrifice himself to give such an opportunity to said successor); so on and so on. every single character learns to accept something (their own mortality, mostly - which is the ultimate destiny).
jjba is just about jonathan and dio; two men who hate each and other to such a degree that it kinda loops back around to becoming obsession and respect. simple as. i think that part 3 is the perfect ending to the series, and everything else from 4-6 serve as postscripts that dissect the effects that the lives of dio and jojo had on - well - what would come to be literally every human being ever by the end of part 6. that bond between jojo and dio is just so fucking cool.
that's the show for today. no big schizo rant, kinda just a little conversation about the black sheep of one of the biggest anime series in the fucking world (if you told me that this would be the case when i was a bumbling lad reading scanlations of jjba online however-the-fuck-many years ago, i would have been really fucking confused - still crazy how big this shit got)
see ya here next week :)
have a wonderful day, gentlemen. god bless.