Newgrounds is an on-line, amateur Flash animation community website. It's somewhat obscure and often quite. . . amateurish, but has given a few animators a launch pad for their careers, including the animator for "Weird" Al Yankovic's music video, "Virus Alert" (the Newgrounds logo is actually inserted for a split second at 2:05).
"There She Is!" seemingly started out as a silly, psychotic love story by Korean animator SamBakZa that somehow morphed into a poignant tale on interracial relationships. On the other hand, the signs (literally, they're signs) of bigotry were always there, from the beginning. And why not? The Koreans would know about senseless racial tensions; their country was ripped in two. Fifty years later, families are still separated. Among animators, South Korea and Japan routinely work together, but the countries overall still can't get along. The "otaku" (Asian anime/video game) community, for all its reputation for being disgusting perverts, are actually a laid-back bunch and quite vocal in their works about their disdain for bigotry.
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The popular, entertaining, high quality "There She Is!" series quickly became among the highest-rated works on the website. Almost four years after the first clip (when the characters didn't even have names), the work is completed and ready to be shared. So here they are:
Step 1: There She Is!
This sets the groundwork for the relationship between Doki & Nabi. At this point it looks like a funny skit about a psychotic rabbit. The signs are in plain view but easy to ignore, like they always are.
Step 2: Cake Dance
Most of the side characters are introduced here. The best of the five, in my opinion. :)
Step 3: Doki & Nabi
The least important of the series, but at this point you should be hooked!
Step 4: Paradise
Suddenly the series gets serious, pushing racial tensions to the surface and setting the stage for the climax.
Final Step: Imagine
Two very important messages in this clip, that I can see. What do you think?
The long-anticipated finale was posted December 18, 2008. It quickly won two awards, became a front-page feature, and was rated 4.66/5.00 (mind you, that's WITH troll down-ratings) among 24,787 voters, with almost 200k views in ten days -- for a single clip.
Why post this now? Well, first of all, SamBakZa just finished the series. Second. . . well, Prop 8, of course. We've come a long way since the Japanese-American and black-white pairings of my parents, aunts and uncles were strongly opposed by my pre-Civil Rights, post-WW2 grandparents, but the LGBT community is fighting the same battle. The struggles I hear from non-straight people (especially in "red" states) tell me we're still too far away from a world where any two people don't have to feel ashamed for being attracted to each other.
These are five-minute music videos, so watching the entire series takes less than half an hour. IMHO they make a great family-friendly, educational video on hate. Just make sure your browser has a Flash plug-in!
I don't understand Korean, but that didn't stop anyone in the community from enjoying them. (Frankly, the videos have gotten me curious about Korean rock. Them's some good tunes in there!) There's just enough English scattered in the scenes to understand what's going on.
Enjoy!
P.S. I'm not affiliated with NewGrounds in any way. Heck, I don't even have an account. Good stuff just has a way of being found, neh?