Forum - View topicIs anime considered mainstream?
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Alan45
 Village Elder Posts: 9845 Location: Virginia |
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@Jose Cruz
First, from the reference you gave, you are basing your comments on one person's theory about the cultural differences between Eastern and Western culture. You have been stating this a settled fact, which it is not. As soon as anyone starts making sweeping comments about cultural differences I expect to see an acknowledgement that it is theory, opinion or simply one person's perception. A single persons book does not establish reveled truth no matter how much it seems "right" to you. Try adding "according to what I have read" or "in my opinion" to such theories and we will get along better. Second: I would argue that despite the background, the people in the Japanese illustration you provided are closer to realistic human than the Flintstones ever were. Western animation, cartoons and comics have not been consistently "photo realistic" since the Victorian age. Some comic books, notably a lot of super hero comics in the US are either realistic or hyper realistic (muscled like a character from Fist of the North Star). However, if you see all of the styles put out each month there is a lot that owes nothing to realism. The picture of Batman is from a comic book not animation. No one eastern or western is going to put that much detail into animation. I recognize it as I have the comic book. The artist is Jim Lee. He is first generation Korean American born in South Korea. Like a lot of people in the US his background is mixed. He is also the editor who was responsible for DC Comics attempt to start a line of translated manga in the US. (CMX comics). It is not a good example of "Western Style" artwork. |
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Errinundra
Moderator
 Posts: 6528 Location: Melbourne, Oz |
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^
I would also recommend Tamaki Saito's book Beautiful Fighting Girl, which, among other sources, is heavily informing my own thread on the subject. It's a fascinating read. There seems to be a disjunct between what Jose Cruz is trying to say and how you are reading him. When Saito and Jose Cruz use the term "realism" they are using it in a particular way. I'm at work - my break is almost over - so I can't go into more detail. |
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Redbeard 101
Oscar the Grouch
Forums Superstar  Posts: 16935 |
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This is hardly the first time this particular point has been made. I would not hold my breath. |
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Alan45
Village Elder Posts: 9845 Location: Virginia |
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@Errinundra
Any sort of discussion is impossible when one person is using words outside their usually accepted meaning. I look forward to some clarification. I still maintain that the generalizations are way too sweeping. Not all artwork in either area is alike. I quit even attempting to watch US animation a couple of decades ago as the characters are ugly and look nothing like human beans. I think I came to this conclusion about the time of Rug Rats. The Simpsons didn't change my attitude. That is nothing like any definition of "realistic" I can recognize. Regardless, the book cited is simply one person's opinion or theory. It should be quoted as such and not presented as unassailable truth. |
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Errinundra
Moderator
Posts: 6528 Location: Melbourne, Oz |
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(Another break at work).
TBH, I'm not comfortable enough with my understanding of Saito's arguments on how time as it is used in anime is different from how it is used in other forms of animation to pontificate about it right now (despite having read the book twice). I'm working on the basis that, as I do my reviews and think about his book, it will become clearer. I even intend to review his book eventually. Sorry if that comes across as a cop out, but, then, I wasn't the one making the argument. (BTW, I assume all posts are opinions. I expect everyone to consider my posts as opinions.) |
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Blood-
Bargain Hunter Posts: 23781 |
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Jose Cruz - I would agree that in Western culture there is a snobbery with respect to live action versus animated films and non-illustrated textual works versus comic books/graphic novels. I just don't attribute this to a Western culture bias toward photo-realism. That might have been true up until the mid-19th century, but it certainly wasn't true after Modernism arrived. Ever hear of a guy called Pablo Picasso? Hint: He wasn't Japanese.
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Jose Cruz
 Posts: 1773 Location: South America |
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I think that Modern art is not actually mainstream: its an underground rebellion against Western Aesthetic principles. Pretty much nobody that I know goes out to appreciate modern art as a form of leisure on a daily basis. When they claim that they like Picasso they actually spend their free time watching Girlmore Girls, a live action (that is, photographic) TV show. I feel like modern art is essentially trying to be radical and extreme, more a rebellious movement rather than a representative of mainstream perceptions. What the Western people that I know usually do in terms of visual culture is to consume stuff like live action TV shows, live action movies and some plain comedic animation like Simpsons. They mostly watch stuff like House of Cards and Orange is the New Black. When I said to a friend that I watched My Neighbor Totoro several times he said "why? That's a cartoon.", the notion that stylized representation is inherently inferior to photo realistic representation is deeply embedded in the psyche of the Western people. I don't think I need to say that out loud because I think it's pretty obvious: for example, the notion that it's wrong to masturbate to cartoons is essentially derived from that: you are supposed to masturbate to photorealistic (live action) film. Painting became an underground alternative art in the 20th century which is appreciated by a fandom that is today smaller than the Western anime fandom. Mainstream Western visual culture strives for realism, for instance, Western videogames try to look as realistic as possible even though it's a medium naturally suited for stylization. I think that perception is the main factor for the relative underdevelopment of comics and animation in the Western world: Only when it becomes common for young people in the west to masturbate to cartoons that we will see the true flourishing of mainstream Western stylized visual culture. |
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Blood-
Bargain Hunter Posts: 23781 |
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Uh, modern art isn't mainstream? Dude, modern art completely destroyed "realism" in painting. Can you name a single major painter of the 20th century who continued in the pre-Modern style?
Frankly, the subordinate status of animation/comic books in the West could simply be a historical fluke. What if instead of Walt Disney an animator who was a genius in the non-family film world had arisen and had a hit? Part of the ghetto-ization of animation in the West is because Disney was the first and most successful animation studio on the scene and they did family fare. So from that time on, animation was seen as something for kids. It's kind of the same for comic books. Super hero and comedy happened to be the formats that initially drove sales, thus cementing in the public mind that that medium was only for kids and teens. |
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Alan45
Village Elder Posts: 9845 Location: Virginia |
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Jose Cruz wrote:
I would argue that Fine Art in general is not mainstream and seldom has been outside the ruling and religious classes. You are the one trying to use art history back to the Greeks to support your argument. Honestly, I don't see any connection between Greek theater or Greek statuary and either western animation or comic books. With regard to comics, they were demonized in the early 1950 just when TV was coming along to take their place. This historical accident resulted in comics being pushed into a niche much like anime is in Japan. In addition they were hurt badly by the demise of news stands and other traditional outlets for comics. The rise of dedicated comic shops resulted in the vast majority of comics being made for a progressively older market. Children's comics make a very small portion of the total. Since younger people are not reading comic books they are becoming more and more niche. In Japan the opposite happened. Their initial post war economy through most of the 1950s resulted in manga being the cheapest and easiest form of entertainment to make and enjoy. Further, unlike the US the population did not disperse to the suburbs and continued to live in neighborhoods where manga was readily available. People who read manga while growing up continued to do so into adulthood and the industry adapted to this. Long train commutes gave otherwise harried individuals time to pursue this portable entertainment. In both cases, the decline of comics in the US and the rise of manga in Japan are mostly post WWII accidents. My opinion is that it has nothing to do with either any history of fine art in either case. With regard to animation, I should point out that reports here at ANN indicate that the attitude that "animation is for kids" is every bit as prevalent in the general Japanese population as it is here. Animation intended for adults is apparently every bit as niche in Japan as comic books are here. Animation for adults has been tried here (Fritz the Cat and arguably Roger Rabbit). Unfortunately it never caught on. I would argue that this had more to do with the immense output of live action scripted shows both for TV and the movies already in place. The film industry was if anything invigorated by WWII as was most of US industry not destroyed as happened in Japan. Again, this has much more to do with the history of the last 70 or 80 years and very little to do with ancient Greek theater or art. |
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#867902
Posts: 3 |
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It's a mainstream in Japan. Outside Japan, we're not quite there yet.
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Jose Cruz
Posts: 1773 Location: South America |
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Painting itself died as a mainstream medium in the 20th century. Back in the 19th century painting was way more popular as leisure than it is now. The fact is that photography made painting obsolete since Westerns do not value stylization in general.
There is more than one country in the West, in fact, there are about 80 countries in the Jewish Christian world. Animation and comics are marginalized everywhere in the West not just in the US. The historical argument could make sense for 1 country, but 80 countries in the West simultaneously failed to develop comics and animation while the only large industrialized country outside of the West developed comics and animation. Clearly, fundamental cultural factors must be at work. Animation and comics has not developed into a large world in any western country. And I don't think US cultural influence is that big since the other major Western countries each with very distinct cultures (France, Germany, Italy, Brazil, Russia, Spain, etc) also did not develop an anime/manga culture either. While right now comics are expanding in popularity across East Asia: in Taiwan, Korea and China manhua and manwa are getting more and more popular in a way comics have never been popular in the West (example: in Taiwan,  http://www.nickstember.com/manga-from-formosa-the-wild-world-of-taiwanese-comics/, note the obvious Japanese influence). I believe that's because these countries share the fact that like Japan they are not part of the Jewish-Christian civilization and so lack the fundamental bias in their psyche against heavily stylized images.
@Alan45, not all classical painting was fine art. It was consumed in general, it is modern art that became an elitist thing that nobody outside of a tiny group consumes. Stuff like this, in contrast, was a decoration on pottery made to store food, clearly mainstream stuff: 
In regards to anime, out of the top 10 highest grossing Japanese films in Japan in 2016, 6 are anime films. Several of the highest grossing anime films are obviously not children's movies: Your Name and Wind Rises are obviously not and even supposedly family movies like Howls and Spirited Away are very different from what we conceive children's movies to be. Graphic novels/comics, in contrast, do not make even 2% of the total book sales in the US. It's not even close: Anime is infinitely more popular in Japan than comics are in the US. While still it's not as popular as manga (although that is also changing: college age Japanese are more often anime otaku than manga otaku: http://en.rocketnews24.com/2014/02/01/are-you-otaku-roughly-40-percent-of-japanese-college-students-say-yes/, although I might guess the 60% who are non-otaku college age people more often read manga). You might argue that there is a social stigma tied with anime/manga but that's a very different thing from saying it's not popular. I think that Western anime fans perception of anime as being niche is mainly derived from projection of the fact that is niche locally to Japan plus the stigma against manga present in Japan. But it's not true at all. Otakus are themselves a large fraction of Japan's young population (as the article I posted above details). In Japan manga sales are 10 times larger than film ticket sales (which includes foreign and anime films, live action Japanese films are only a small fraction of Japan's film market: live action Japanese films sell about 40 million tickets per year compared to manga sales of 1.5 billion manga magazines and books, plus massive digital downloads) while the anime industry is several times larger than the live action film industry (anime is about 250 billion yen business, while film gross from live action Japanese features is around 50 billion yen, many of which are manga adaptations, manga sales themselves are at about 500 billion yen, 400 billion yen physical manga and 100 billion yen digital). It's plain incorrect to claim that anime in Japan is a niche like comics in the US: anime in a huge industry that employs tens of thousands of artists and produces 300 new movies and TV shows every year (compare that to 119 new TV shows airing in the US in 2016 and 150 new movies made by the major studios). Also, I don't think one should separate anime and manga since most anime are manga adaptations (the stuff I have been watching recently are 4/5 manga adaptations and 1/light novel adaptation) and are heavily influenced by manga, anime is essentially the way westerners consume manga: its manga adapted into a TV series format. Manga's popularity is, in a sense, anime's popularity since anime is a by-product of manga: anime is TV show that adapts manga panels into scenes and adds animation and voice acting to the narrative. And regarding the stigma towards manga in Japan: I think that the social stigma tied to manga (and it's derivative, anime) is essentially due to Western cultural imperialism: In the past centuries, Western civilization and culture completely dominated the world and sets what you are supposed to "like" and "dislike". Since manga is a fundamentally Japanese medium (something that some Japanese intellectuals actually promoted as a Japanese medium vis film and literature) it has been driven "underground" by the dominance of Western culture (which believes in the inherent superiority of photographic realism as opposed to stylization in manga/anime). That argument was also made by a Japanese anthropologist in one of the interviews of The Moe Manifesto book. Still, despite it's "underground" status, anime/manga in Japan today is a tremendously large entertainment industry (it's a much larger industry in Japan than live action film as I said before) while those Comiket conventions in Japan gather over half a million people every 6 months. So, if you compare on aggregate the size "mainstream Western mediums" of novel and live action film industries they are: novel sales are about 1/3 of book sales which is 250 billion yen plus 50 billion yen of live action movie ticket sales which total 300 billion yen by comparison the "underground subculture" manga+anime industry sales are about 750 billion yen. |
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Blood-
Bargain Hunter Posts: 23781 |
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Sorry, Jose Cruz, I simply don't accept that there is a Judeo-Christian bias against "highly stylized images." Logically, such a bias makes no sense. Up until the invention of the still life and motion camera (which came almost 5,000 years after the beginning of Judiasm and almost 1900 years after the beginning of Christianity), "highly stylized images" as you would call them is all that existed. It makes zero sense to presume there was some long dormant bias in favour of photo-realism in the Western world that suddenly flowered when the technology arrived to exploit it.
The difference in the popularity of manga/anime in Japan and some other Asian countries versus the greater ghetto-ization of animated works/comic books/graphic novels in the Western world is an interesting one, but I just don't buy the J-C bias against "highly stylized images" thesis. |
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Alan45
Village Elder Posts: 9845 Location: Virginia |
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@Jose Cruz
It is a nice theory, but I don't buy it. I don't know how you can look at US animation comics and cartoons and not see stylized figures in many if not most instances and I don't see how you can look at Japanese anime and not see realistic imagery on occasion. Obviously we are both looking at the same thing and seeing different things. As I have said, in my opinion, the relative popularity of manga in Japan compared to comics in the US is due primarily to historic accidents and not to perceived cultural differences dating back thousands of years. Basically mass market entertainment dated only to the onset of mass market publication and near universal literacy which made it possible to provide such entertainment outside the moneyed classes. About 200 years give or take. Since there seems to be no common ground between us, I see no point in carrying this further. |
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Jose Cruz
Posts: 1773 Location: South America |
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Well, its pretty obvious that Western Art tends to be highly realistic and tends to favor realism. During the 17th century the Netherlands for instance had a population of 2 million people and was a prosperous country where paiting was consumed by the masses, hence, it's estimated that about 1.3 million paitings were made just during a couple of decades, more than enought to decorate most houses in the Netherlands (hence, painting was mainstream mass culture back in the 17th century Netherlands). So, how the art consumed by the Dutch people looked like? Like this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_Golden_Age_painting Super photorealistic. I said that the arrival of photography made western paiting obsolete, hence the reason for the collapse of popularity of painting and why paiting became elitist and disconnected from mainstream society, in the form of modern art. The mainstream form of visual art/culture in the West now and has been over a century is live action film and photography (in magazines for instance). Which is photorealistic by definition. About stylization you should note that stylized images are not taken seriously in the West: cartoony comics and animation are comedic: The Simpsons and Family Guy are crude blunt comedies that make even live action comedies like Seinfeld appear rather serious. It's impossible to find a Western TV animation that takes itself seriously like a run of the mill anime show such as Re-Life, for instance. When comics get more serious they try to look more realistic. While the apparent stylization of medieval art was mainly due to the lack of technical expertise of the artists, by the 17th century Western art was fully photorealistic and continues to be so now as photographic images dominate our culture now: the covers of magazines are almost all photographies now. The reason goes back to Ancient Greece. Plato, for instance, said that art was inferior to reality and reality was inferior to the ideal. Hence, for art to be great it had to aspire to look close to reality. Hence the reason why Western comics and animation does not take itself seriously and is not taken seriously: since it's stylized it's inherently seem as inferior. It's not true that comics and animation are in a guetto in the west as westerners consume stuff such as webcomics very often. However, they don't take comics seriously: when saying a comics inspired movie is good a movie critic points out how "little comic like" the movie is, when they say a movie has bad writing the movie has the "depth of a comic book". The people who work in the comics and animation fields don't take their work seriously as well: a cartoonist makes comics to cause cheap laughs and characterized by very pedestrian low quality art, for example. While the people at Disney make their children entertainment products in a very factory like way, with like 3-4 writers for each movie and 3 directors, producing bland simplistic stuff that just can't be taken seriously since they are just "children's movies". In Japan things are very different. As Tamaki Saito noted: art is not regarded as inherently inferior to physical reality by the Japanese. A cartoonist in Japan is called "manga artist" and they often say that "they put their souls into the manga they drew" (that was a line from 20th Century Boys). Miyazaki's approach to animation for instance, is actually very serious: Spirited Away was his personal criticism of Japan's society that became a hotbed of spoiled brats by the early 21st century. Pornographic manga is common since their culture is not automatically averse to the appreciation of sexually attractive stylization, something that's almost impossible to find in the west. I mean, to me the difference is obvious: Western culture in general just does not take seriously visual culture that is not photographic. And the roots of that go way back, since the time of Plato. Of course, there are exceptions such as us, anime fans (or the couple thousand people into modern art). |
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Blood-
Bargain Hunter Posts: 23781 |
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Jose Cruz - your assumptions continue not to track. You claim painting became "obsolete" due to photography and this so-called Western bias for photorealism. First, it is true that today, that painting does not occupy the same station in popular culture it once did, but that is a pretty recent development. I've already mentioned Picasso who was a superstar, but there were lots of other painters like Dali and Warhol who became quite famous, too. Even as late as the 1980s, artists like Basquiat and Julian Schnabel were able to become relatively famous, albeit not on the level of a Dali or a Warhol.
Wanna know another artistic art form that has basically gone the way of the Do-do? Poetry. Unless you count song-writing as poetry, poetry has pretty much disappeared as any kind of mass audience art form. Opera and ballet, which used to attract more widespread interest are now just elite past-times supported by a small niche. I mention all this as an example that artforms can decline in popularity and it has nothing to do with a so-called Western bias for photo-realism. |
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