Forum - View topicIs anime considered mainstream?
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TarsTarkas
 Posts: 5823 Location: Virginia, United States |
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That's not quite true. I would like higher quality writing, animation, and music to be more standard. But that is not what we are talking about, is it. As said before, I have no problem with Japan putting out more anime targeted or pandered to western audiences. But nor do I want to see Japan submit to western demands for anime to be edited for content to meet western PC or morale standards. With so much anime being put out nowadays, there usually is something for everyone out there. |
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CCTakato
Posts: 514 |
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Again those are issues with pandering which can also happen just as easily with otaku bait shows. What matters again is how organic it is in it's creation and not whether it's "Western" or "Japanese" as though there is somehow only one type of anime that is definitely representative of Japanese culture and fandom.
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TarsTarkas
Posts: 5823 Location: Virginia, United States |
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Most of the time, anime is going to be targeted to the Japanese consumer. Most of American TV is targeted to the American consumer. They don't say, lets sterilize our show so that it can appeal to a global audience. |
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BodaciousSpacePirate
 Subscriber Posts: 3017 |
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Maybe not TV shows, but nowadays Hollywood absolutely focus groups their blockbusters with global audiences in mind. They'd be stupid not to, what with how crazy China currently is about movies. |
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CCTakato
Posts: 514 |
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TarsTarkas
Posts: 5823 Location: Virginia, United States |
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I have lived several years in Japan and I spent practically 6 months there last year. But that is besides the point.
I am not dictating anything. I rather like how things are now, there usually is something for everyone. Listening to some of the ANN reviewers though, and many of the comments supporting them, there is a significant number of anime fans that wish Japan would get rid of many of the things that a lot us us got into anime for. I don't think we are really disagreeing, unless you really think anime should be politically correct. Right now I think we have the best of worlds for all anime fans. And seeing the sea change in stores like Animate, bodes well for the future. |
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Jose Cruz
 Posts: 1773 Location: South America |
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China is crazy about Japanese 2D stuff too: https://www.wsj.com/articles/japan-feeds-chinas-anime-addiction-1482060688 I think that in a few years the Chinese demand for anime will surpass the local market. When that happens they will begin sterilizing Anime in the same way they sterilized Hollywood movies. That will not be good, well, they will still have the domestic market so let's see how it goes. |
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yuna49
 Posts: 3804 |
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The "elephant in the room" is the declining number of young people in Japan. Anime producers will have to consider how to expand their audience outside of the 12-24 age group that has traditionally been their target. They could try to expand their reach into older demographics and may be doing so with the release of shows like Rakugo or some noitaminA offerings like Fune wo Amu. But these efforts are still pretty limited because many Japanese adults view anime as something for kids. I can easily see producers seeing markets like China as a better bet if they want to survive.
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Jose Cruz
Posts: 1773 Location: South America |
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Well, I think that late night shows like Kobayashi Dragon Maid and Tanya the Evil are more focused on the 25-40 year old demographic rather than the 12-24 one. Shows like Naruto and Hunter X Hunter are the traditional teenager anime stuff. Although in Hunter X Hunter they were doing Heineken commercials and in Japan drinking is only legal after the age of 20.
Also if you look at the age of the people who attend the Comiket and form the hardcore otaku demographic in Japan most are between 25 and 40. Japan's children and teenagers population already declined by 45% over the past 30 years: in 2016 only 13% of the population was between 5-19, in 1985 that population was 24% of the whole. Hence, the decreasing demand for children's anime and why anime studios shifted from children's stuff to adult stuff over the past 35 years. In Shirobako this is clear since musashino animation was depicted making children's anime 20 years before and now shifted to otaku shows (Shirobako is clearly referring to shows like Madoka and Strike Witches). While the bulk of the adult population is not hardcore about anime the few who are represent a very powerful group who can spend much more than children and teenagers. |
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Sky Captain
 Posts: 26 |
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I wish that anime would and could be widely popular, so that it could inspire studios here in North America to try to do more adult works (including anything with sex in it) instead of what's usually done here (and I don't mean shit like Sausage Party.) Said mainstreaming would light a fire under the asses of Disney-Pixar/Dreamworks/Blue Sky/Illumination etc. and make them see that there's a market for quality animation that's also adult (what I see the Japanese are doing a lot of) rather than all of the talking animal (and talking object) stuff infesting our theaters. Anime seems to be able to do a ton of wider stuff-why can't we? |
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TarsTarkas
Posts: 5823 Location: Virginia, United States |
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Mis-using a quote from a favorite cereal commercial, Cartoons are for kids! There is nothing stopping us from doing more mature animation in the West, other than perception of who the audience for animation is for in the West and if there is a market in the West. Don't believe the animated Heavy Metal movies did any good over here. Can anyone name a really successful mainstream animated movie from the West that is in the vein of anime? |
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Jose Cruz
Posts: 1773 Location: South America |
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Wreck it Ralph is a bit more similar to Japanese animation in the complexity of its writing and it's use of J-pop and in being self consciously kawaii.
The problem is that there is not a large subculture of comics and animation in the west to support a whole cultural movement. In Japan the whole thing began around 1950s when thousands of different people started writing manga of many forms and styles and a couple of decades later there was a massive comics industry already. Tezuka might be crucial in that development because his manga work is massive (150,000 pages long) and he developed a unique sense of time that became characteristic of manga: the fact that manga stretches and contracts time and space in radical fashion in order to represent emotions. Anime emerged a bit later as a by product of manga carrying onto it the same aesthetic ideals and principles. Western mentality is just incompatible with comics and animation because Western art looks at physical reality as it's aesthetic ideal (which has been so since the time of Plato 25 centuries ago) and so already cuts down at the core essense of comics and animation which is stylized representation. In other words. Western culture is a photographic culture and so does not accept stilization as a substitute for photographic realism. Hence the main reason why comics and animation have been relegated as 2nd rate mediums while film and literature remain the only acceptable mediums for serious fiction. Since live action film is essentially theater but packaged to be consumed anywhere we can note that the mediums of theater and literature were already well developed in Ancient Greece. So, considering that the West's obssession with photographic realism is 2500 years old, I don't think we will see the emergence of a large Western 2d culture soon. Its more likely that China and even India will develop manga/anime like cultures before the west. Japan is the first large country outside of the Western world to become industrialized and at the same time it became industrialized it developed this unique culture of manga/anime. While Taiwan and Korea already have well developed comic cultures as well but they lack the market size to support animation. |
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Blood-
 Bargain Hunter Posts: 23762 |
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Eh, I think your sociology and history are both a bit shaky, Jose Cruz. I know that there are those who maintain that manga is some kind of long standing Japanese tradition that predates World War II, but I think that's kind of bullshit. I'm in the camp that believes the manga industry we are aware of is mostly a post-World War II phenomenon that was strongly influenced by American comics. Similarly with anime ... it really didn't become a "thing" until the 1960s and the main impetus for its creation since was that animation was a lot cheaper to produce than live action. I believe economic factors have played a far larger role in the advent of manga and anime in Japan as opposed to some sort of cultural "non-photo-realistic" bent on the part of Japanese people.
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Alan45
Village Elder Posts: 9836 Location: Virginia |
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@Blood-
Be careful now, he is quite obviously a scholar of both eastern and western culture and the difference between them. (probably has multiple degrees) He has frequently pointed out to the rest of us how little we know of our hobbies. Now, personally, I don't think I've ever seen a western cartoon that could be called "photo realistic" dating back to the movie shorts they used to show on TV in the 1950s. They have all been, well, mostly "cartoony". Lines of funny animals with pipe stem legs lining up and singing "Ain't we got fun" really doesn't strike me as any more realistic than the Simpsons. My own take is like yours, many different factors went into the Japanese emphasis on manga and anime, some cultural and some simply historic accidents, like, you know, the aftermath of a losing war. But what do I know? |
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Jose Cruz
Posts: 1773 Location: South America |
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@Blood-, a lot of what I said has been based on this book: https://www.amazon.com/Beautiful-Fighting-Girl-Saito-Tamaki/dp/0816654514
His argument makes sense that Western culture emphasizes realism and places realism at the top of the artistic scale: Westerners regard live action as a superior art form than animation. Same with comics, it's regarded as inherently inferior. That's I think is pretty obvious. @Alan45, While Western cartoons are not realistic they are not complex either: they don't try to do the stylization that you get in manga/anime, its either very simple cartoons like this: 
Or realistic cartoons like: .png)
You will not easily see western stylized stuff that combines complexity with it. Although recent Western animation and comics heavily influenced by manga have done that (like the stuff on deviant art). Stuff like this is very Japanese: 
In manga/anime you get a combination of stylization with complexity. And also things like sexualization of stylized images (obvious in the poster above). In the west stylization is regarded as inherently inferior so you are not supposed to be aroused by it, hence why there is no Western pornographic animation. While in Japan stylized porn is abundant. Economic factors play a role as Japan became a large industrialized economy only in the decades after WW2 with a large middle class population that could afford manga. Manga though started to develop earlier, during WW2 they even had a manga department for propaganda purposes. I don't think WW2 in itself played any role at all in the development of manga. Individuals live their daily lives and they are not really affected if their local government has "won" or "lost" a war. I mean, not to the degree of affecting their mentality. So I think this manga/anime culture it's a combination of 2 factors: Eastern cultural environment and economic development that lead to manga/anime. Now, China is already developing a huge 2D culture as well, they already make a huge number of animated films. Western countries did not develop animation/comics to remotely the same degree because Western culture favors photographic realism over stylized images. That has been the way since 500 BC: 
I wonder what will happen in India when they develop. Also my profession is economics which is a social science but more focused on other things than culture and stuff. I like understanding things so I read about the stuff I am interested in besides just consuming it: I like knowing (or theorizing) why things are the way they are. Such as why there is no Western equivalent to manga/anime. |
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