I'm not busting your balls. My original post was not directed at you. You were the one who dug into me. If you thought it was directed at you specifically, it wasn't. If you thought it was an insult, it wasn't. It was serious advice. Harshly said, sure, but not insulting.

Moreover, I disagree and argue like this even with my closest friends when we talk about shit. I don't do this to specifically target you, I do this because I happen to disagree with what you say a lot.

Now to be clear, I wasn't trying to prove Disney was better when you accused me of the fallacy... I was trying to point out a critical point of comparison for the two studios that had not been discussed, I wasn't using the popularity as a premise for anything beyond "They've made more money". You, on the other hand, were trying to add as another premise to your argument that no one you know understands my point... that is a direct application of that fallacy, even if it's "only a personal touch".


Now for fact checking, and definitions of words here's one for you.

"Incomparable - Unable to be compared; totally different in nature or extent"

All my babbling about levels of analysis (extent) and how things are at times completely different and share nothing in common (nature) isn't just babbling. I hate pulling definitions in an argument because it shows an inherent lack of understanding that people view things differently, and because doing so is extremely dismissive. Clearly you're of the onion that everything is comparable because you can check for similarities and differences, yet the word incomparable exists. How does that fit into your world view? It doesn't really... So, instead of just quoting a definition and blowing you off, I tried to argue on the level you wished to argue, and show you WHY the word incomparable exists, rather than just pointing at it as if it is a perfect counter-argument.

Now you seem convinced that I'm wrong, and you're right about all this despite all your talk about challenging your own onions. Arguments are where I challenge my onions the most... I stop and say "What's this person trying to say... am I wrong? Are they wrong? Are they misunderstanding what I'm saying?" Perhaps, you should do the same rather than being as dismissive as you are. I don't dismiss your points, as I'm sure you've noticed that I have ceded on some issues, yet you continually dismiss mine without really trying to understand what I'm saying, and seeing if it can jive with what you think.

Was I wrong in saying "completely incomparable"? Fuck yeah I was. I was speaking in hyperbole but that's no excuse to be wrong. Am I wrong in saying they are incomparable on the levels that most people were looking at in that thread as I have since said? No, not really. Example? You saying you think Ghibli animates faces better. Do you think that's just because they're better, or is it because the majority of faces that Disney are anthropromorphic, and need to be easy to read because of this? Do you think Ghibli does that moment of hair standing up and other such facial expressions better because they just are better, or is it because Disney doesn't actually often choose to animate that large of a range of emotions because they are using simple emotions for children in their stories? Comparing them on a raw level of just "how they animate" misses the bigger picture. It's too narrow of a level of analysis.

Hell, I could even be wrong in that Ghibli and Disney are too different to be compared, I'm not entirely sure. Frankly I don't see it, but I'm open to being proven wrong. That said, it doesn't stop the fact that things are sometimes incomparable, which is a premise you've been disagreeing with heavily.

Anecdotal experience and appealing to popularity are actually two different fallacies, you also forgot this in a pretty short time;

"Also, to shoot the shit, the thing about informal fallacies is that they are not by definition incorrect. They certainly can be, and the whole point is that they don't work as the foundation for an argument."

Your appeal to popularity was at the time your only argument in favor of Disney. My anecdotal evidence was just my closing statement, kind of a personal touch where I also called you a fool (maybe that's why it's insulting) but here's a better one;

I don't think you read the definitions I posted on comparison. So I'm gonna copypaste one a bunch of times.

"to examine the character or qualities of especially in order to discover resemblances or differences"

"to examine the character or qualities of especially in order to discover resemblances or differences" "to examine the character or qualities of especially in order to discover resemblances or differences" "to examine the character or qualities of especially in order to discover resemblances or differences" "to examine the character or qualities of especially in order to discover resemblances or differences"


"to examine the character or qualities of especially in order to discover resemblances or differences"

"to examine the character or qualities of especially in order to discover resemblances or differences"

"resemblances or differences"

"or differences"

Why yes! Things that are not exactly alike, which I hope I can say about most art, do have things that aren't in common. How fuckin astute! So it turns out you were right, this is semantics! I mean you were that right that it was semantics, you were sure as shit as wrong about the semantics, but all this time you just had a bug up your ass because "we can't compare things that have differences" which you were just plain wrong about. Dictionary says so. ALL THE DICTIONARIES SAY SO. ALL OF THEM. IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII CHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEECKED (the first time I posted the definitions in fact, I checked all of them I could find just in case, all of them, try it sometimes, try fact checking before you embark on these stupid fucking crusades, I do it with EVERY POST believe it or not).

You at some level compare things, call it whatever the fuck you want, call it inwardly, outwardly, call it a civil fucking union, but the more attention you pay to it instead of just naysaying like a bitch the more you can make the kind of detailed analysis that even impressed DrRobotnik as opposed to the "this is objectively better end of post" that you just can't abide by on the internet.

Take a few days to think on it, or don't, but seriously fuck off. You're right about one thing, you're the only one consistently busting my balls anymore (RIP Morm, at least you had a ruthless conviction going for you) but as of this argument it's not cute anymore, it's pathetic. If I didn't "chose not to believe that I could ever say something intelligent" before, I sure as shit do now. So next time you feel like it, just don't. And the next time you make an open insult post like "If anyone is having difficulty recognizing that Disney and Ghibli animation is so vastly different that they're completely incomparable then that person needs to refine the way they look at films." (completely incomparable, your words) then I'll try not to either. And the whole forum will probably be better off for it.

First: It's funny that you actually just used the logical fallacy you accused me of using earlier "but no one I've asked about it on IRC knows what you mean". Like are you fucking serious right now? You're the one accusing me of not understanding basic logical concepts and blah blah blah, I'm uninformed, blah blah, and you're pulling this? This is insulting.

Second: I'm sorry if it wasn't clear to you from the start that I was talking about comparisons in the sense of a qualitative perspective, when that had been going on in the thread, and was what I was responding to. I can understand now how that may have not been clear to you if you chose not to believe that I could ever say something intelligent. And yes, it does irk me when they say it's objectively better because as I was trying to point that very thing out with "Better at what?" Then you go on to talk about how Ghibli is better at a certain thing, WONDERFUL, YOU'VE FIGURED IT OUT.

If I was good at articulating my thoughts (Due to poor thought organization skills, not actually because of your idea that I don't compare things), I would've said 5 posts earlier about how there are intrinsic levels of analysis to any medium. When the point is compare Studio Ghibli and Disney you won't learn a lot about the studios, because how different they are forces you to abstract outwards, or inwards, but never at the raw side by side level. An analogy for these levels would be that there are different responses to how a business would handle a worker's strike (an internal issue) and how they would handle competition in the market (an external one). Or how a state would handle a drug problem (Domestic), or how the world handles a drug problem (Systemic). This same concept applies to how you think critically of medium. When you compare two things they need to be on the same level of analysis otherwise you will get inconsistent results, or you will get things that don't make sense. This is what I meant way earlier in the thread where I said something along the lines of "They're comparing things on a scale that's too specific and misses the larger point".

An example of abstracting inwards would be how Princess Mononoke and Wall-E handle a specific subplot (The environment). So you CAN compare them at a specific level, but you can't compare every moment of the movie and get relevant information when the two movies have some scenes that share NOTHING in common.

An example of abstracting outwards would be how we can compare Sly Cooper and Battlefield 3 to learn about the genre, and the medium as a whole. As before though, you can't compare the games (unless you went inwards) since there are elements to both games that have NOTHING in common. This is not to say "One you have a cane and one you don't" but is more of "One has levels that are designed to be fun to climb things, and the other focuses on making levels that have various strategic points to fire from".

Another way of what I mean when I say you can't qualitatively compare them is that you can't qualitatively compare things that aren't trying to do the same thing. That's why I repeat "better at what?" Is asking who is faster the sprinter or weight-lifter a valid comparison that gets all the information you need? No. Does it get you a part of it, sure, but on its own it is vastly misleading.

Once again, I have compared Sly Cooper to Battlefield 3. It's honest to god why I went out of my way to play both games; so that I could compare them to my current vast palate of game experience and integrate any positive or negative game design into my personal artistic philosophies. It was also neat that the Cooper series was amazingly fun but I bought it because it might make me a better artist with a more informed opinion. By comparing Sly Cooper and B3, one a narrative game and the other generally seen for its multiplayer, we get a small part of the bigger picture as to what makes these different sub-mediums work. I have been in the last year compiling several rules of sub-medium and I couldn't do that without comparing my experiences with games exactly like you said.

Of course there's a bigger picture to comparing PM and Wall-E, yet you don't want me to compare them so I don't know how you are ever going to see it. Here's an OP ed piece I found that compares Wall-E and PM in an attempt to discover why these movies succeeded where other environmental movies fail. I haven't read it thoroughly and can't attest to its opinions, but it's a legitimate question. By comparing and contrasting Wall-E and to PM to Fern Gully, asking why the first were good while the later was poor, we can form artistic philosophies that will better prepare us to make our own environmental movie in the future, or help us get a better sense of why we enjoy certain movies and dislike others.

So why would someone writing an academic paper on the matter (which can't be stressed enough) benefit from comparing Disney and Ghibli? Maybe he's an art or film student, and he's busy (with the teacher's instruction) forming his own artistic philosophies. If he wants to be an animator, is he going to take cues from Disney's thick bubbly colorful direction, or Ghibli's sharper detailed yet still whimsical direction, or is he gonna try to forge his own path using all the experience he's gained by examining both? Hell, noting those thick lines is more useful than anything you did in the thread, not to mention that its another comparison that you say is so futile.

To illustrate why comparison is so integral, it seems to irk you that people in the thread called Ghibli objectively better without explaining why. Without proper comparison they might not be able to fully articulate it, but I can. The #1 rule of animation as a medium is that things should be in motion more often than that. Animation is after all, "The act, process, or result of imparting life, interest, spirit, motion, or activity". You'll find few animators who disagree with this point. As a big budget movie studio Disney certainly always did this above average, especially in terms of musical numbers. But what truly separates Disney and Ghibli (who can also do thick bubbly lines) is in the more mundane moments. Ghibli animates faces better. Ghibli is the only studio where I can get a sense of a character's hair standing up in the back of their neck, it's such a minute and subtle motion when they do it but it's so powerful that it makes my own hair stand up every time. The layers in establishing shots don't pop out as much. The action is smoother, more intricate, and often has more layers on screen. That's an opinion, but it's one that comes from careful examination of over a dozen movies. My current game has no animation, but hopefully the day will come when I can instruct employees to follow these principles.

In short, comparison of vastly different art forms helps us get the most out of each. It helps to establish rules of medium, it helps us develop artistic philosophies. You subconsciously compare these things which causes you to develop opinions, but only by doing it consciously will your opinions be more informed and more articulate. You should always be the first and second person to question your own opinions, and that's not an opinion; that's advice. Why don't you man-up and try it the next time you see a movie, instead of complaining that I keep missing your point; your point keeps changing. If it truly ever had to do with how you don't want people to say one is better than the other, which I keep calling you out on, you sure as shit didn't say that in the first place when going off on a tangent about how two unrelated subgenre movies couldn't be compared.

I've tried to "understand you" because you are coming across as incredibly foolish, but no one I've asked about it on IRC knows what you mean when you say you can't compare Ocean's Eleven and Reservoir Dogs, or Disney and Ghibli for that matter, as apparently no one in the thread has given that they keep trying. Also again, for a thread to help an academic paper to compare the two, I'd wager the teacher doesn't understand you either. The smartest thing you did was take this to PM, cause the OP explicitly wants what you would deny him (and for absolutely no reason, you've shown that you could have added new insight to the paper instead of trying to stop the thread).

Once again, you've proven that you missed everything I've said before this if you think I haven't attempted to re-explain the same thought over and over and over and over again.

Now for hopefully the last time, the point of my original post was that comparing Studio Ghibli to Disney in the way that had been going on in the thread up to the point is an exercise in complete futility. There is not a single useful thing to be learned by rote comparing the art quality, story-telling techniques, characterization, etc between the two studios entirely because they make so vastly different films. One would not compare a singular comedy film, to a dramatic film unless they specifically wanted to highlight the differences between the genre. In this case, that is not at all what they were attempting to do. In the thread, they were comparing the two studios as if they make the same kinds of film in the way one would compare say... Call of Duty: Modern Warfare to Battlefield 3... when in reality it's more like comparing Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus to Battlefield 3.

I actually do think you CAN compare Ghibli to Disney in some respects, but not in the way that had been going on. The way that people were looking at it was WAY too limited of a view to glean anything useful. That's why I mentioned that Disney has made more money, because they are both businesses, it's why I mentioned that Disney and Ghibli have different target audiences, because that heavily impacts the way they make decisions.

And again, another part of my point is that whilst you can systematically list differences and similarities between any two things, that doesn't mean you should, or that any conclusion you make from it will be necessarily valid. The problem here is that there will always be elements as a part of every film that can be compared to something else, as you pointed out with Wall-E and Princess Mononoke, which I knew you would, and I really hated that there's nothing I could do to stop you from doing it because it meant you're once again not looking at the bigger picture. The point was that when you're watching a picturesque forest scene, you won't think of Wall-E talking to the spaceship's steering wheel.

In other words there are things that you can compare, and things you can't. You can compare certain aspects of Ghibli and Disney, you cannot rote compare all of them. And the majority, not necessarily all, but the majority of what was being compared in that thread was things that were incomparable on the level at which they were comparing. Seriously, Ghibli has "objectively better" animation? Certainly if you refuse to think that the very way you animate has an impact, and that Disney went with more vibrant and poppy colors with thick lines in order to be more appealing to children.


And also, you can't have it both ways. You can't say that no one ever turns off pattern recognition, and that I form my onions poorly because I do exactly that. I compare things that are comparable, and I don't compare things that are incomparable. Apples to Oranges and whatnot. Just because you think these barriers are artificial doesn't actually mean they are... that's just your own personal onion.

On the contrary, I don't feel that outside of this visitor message you've tried to explain yourself at all. You started off by saying that we shouldn't compare two animation studios, no more than that, two heist movies, which falls pretty neatly within "other things that are similar" by your own admission. However yes Transformers can be compared to the Notebook for the same reason that PM can be compared to live action by its creator, in the same way that we can compare movies to tv shows which helps us establish rules of medium. In examining my thoughts on movies as a medium, I've found myself comparing Princess Mononoke and Silver Linings Playbook. You could probably have facetiously thrown out those two movies just as much as any other comparison, but in putting these two movies back to back I actually came to some radical conclusions as to how I feel about the medium as a whole.

And that's me going out of my way to explain myself way more than you ever do, and frankly it's for your own damn good this time. I may not like all of your opinions, but now I can see how you form them all so poorly. You are limiting yourself by creating artificial barriers when evaluating art, which hurts you as an art consumer (let alone if you are an artist yourself, I forget). By all means watch Transformers and The Notebook back to back and compare and contrast what each does well and differently.

Also Wall-E and PM are both pro-environmental message movies, which I have seen compared in academia.

We may never shut off pattern recognition, but our brain does this cool thing where it automatically categorizes things so that they will only be associated with other things that are similar because it's not useful to see a tree and think of a car (Which was my point with that 'comparison').

Sometimes the heuristic first impression categorization is flawed and organizes things that aren't really all that similar except for a single characteristic (Animation, "Heist Movie" genre, etc.). Actively comparing things that have almost nothing in common doesn't give you any useful information/insight, and that's what my point is. That you should be able to recognize when your brain is categorizing poorly, and when you need to conscientiously reorganize your mental association game. Again, while you may be doing pattern recognition and 'comparing' movies, on the whole, you're not going to think of Titanic once while watching Evil Dead. Just like you shouldn't think of Wall-E while watching Princess Mononoke.

Also, I'm not saying don't compare things, I'm saying compare things intelligently and efficiently. Is it better to compare Transformers to Gundam, or Transformers to The Notebook? Are you getting that much from the latter as compared to the former?

And lastly, I'm not saying comparisons only determine which is better, I'm saying comparisons that do so are rather bad, and especially useless when comparing two things that are vastly different like had been going on in that thread.


Quite honestly, you're the hardest person to argue with on this entire forum entirely because you never understand a single thing I say. You skew my words out of their intended context and try to frame my meaning as something very different than what I'm saying. Sometimes I wonder if it's just my poor wording, but there are other times where I'm feeling it's just you personally. I don't get what it is, but it just happens. And holy fuck is it draining to try and re-explain the same thing over and over again, because I read your posts and counter-arguments and know that you missed the point.

Bluewind was trolling too. Hey here's a secret, I know the difference between masterful and jeb. The question still bears asking; why are people treating them differently when in the end they both shit all over the thread with useless posts? "Oh, he's just a troll, it's cute". Last time I checked, that sort of 4chan shit was pretty heavily reviled here. So if he wants to act like masterful I'll treat him like that.

Also iirc, Masterful wasn't a troll, he was just actually legitimately that stupid.

Unless of course your plural use of troll is referring to someone else? I'm not sure.

But you were playing directly into the troll rather than counter-trolling.