Forum - View topicIs anime considered mainstream?
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Squall-Leonhart17
Posts: 6 |
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I didn't expect the conversation to leeway into this.
What do you guys think about famous celebrities liking certain anime? I mean aside from Robin Williams like Evangelion(which I don't really consider mainstream to be honest), most of these anime they show interest in are incredibly mainstream and known to even those not aware of the medium such as DBZ, Naruto, Pokemon, etc. |
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Alan45
 Village Elder Posts: 9861 Location: Virginia |
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@Squall-Leonhart17
Sorry, not my area of interest. I know nothing about celebrities as I don't watch live action. Also I know only that DBZ, Naruto, Pokemon, etc exist, I've never seen any of them. @Jose Cruz Feel free to continue beating on this dead horse. It is obvious that neither of us understands the others arguments or sees the same thing from examples. I disagree with you but see no reason to continue arguing the point anymore. |
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ChibiKangaroo
 Posts: 2941 |
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I just wanted to comment that I personally do not see anime or manga as the height of artistic stylization. They are a convenient medium through which to express fantastical narratives and imagery, just as Western animation is. Very little of current western animation is "photorealistic," and those that are tend to be CGI works that are produced that way primarily for cost reasons, not due to preference. Fully rendered/shaded traditional 2d animation has become more and more expensive as artists have shifted to computer assisted work (also for reasons of cost efficiency and marketability) and true, traditional animation takes a lot more time than CGI animation. Why do you think so many Japanese studious are outsourcing a lot of their traditional animation work to Korea? (Soon China most likely.) It's also why a lot of anime cut corners part way through a season and only make the first and last episodes high quality animation.
What I will buy to some degree is that American studios are more focused on maximizing profits no matter what. To that end, if CGI lets them pump out more content at lower cost, they will do it. |
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Squall-Leonhart17
Posts: 6 |
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I think it really is just stuff like Naruto and all that which is what you a lot of those 'celebrities who like anime' watch. I don't think any celebrity is as much of an anime fan as one of us.
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Jose Cruz
 Posts: 1778 Location: South America |
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I think that a good example illustrating the Western rejection of stylization is Roger Ebert's review of Grave of the Fireflies:
http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-grave-of-the-fireflies-1988 He has to explain in detail how he struggled with the fact that's it's animated and how he understands it by trying to see animation as more abstract. He clearly lacks the capacity to just watch it like he watches a live action movie: "Because it is animated and from Japan, “Grave of the Fireflies” has been little seen. When anime fans say how good the film is, nobody takes them seriously. Now that it’s available on DVD with a choice of subtitles or English dubbing, maybe it will find the attention it deserves. Yes, it’s a cartoon, and the kids have eyes like saucers, but it belongs on any list of the greatest war films ever made." He clearly reveals the resistance that Westerners have regarding stylized visual depictions of serious things. |
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ChibiKangaroo
Posts: 2941 |
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I'm pretty sure Mr. Ebert was talking down to his readers a bit there when reassuring them that it was a great movie despite the animated stylings. Read though dozens of Mr. Ebert's reviews of animated features as I have and you will see that on several occasions he comments that he believed animation to be a superior form of storytelling for many subjects and concepts. Don't just take one statement out of context. Ebert loved animation and often praised Japanese animation in particular.
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Jose Cruz
Posts: 1778 Location: South America |
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But that's what I mean: the fact that he had to talk down to his readers. When I watched Grave of the Fireflies I knew it was a big deal and I was familiar with the fact anime is a big deal, the fact is that Westerners are in general unaware that animation is an artform shows that the Western mentality is incompatible with aesthetic stylization.
Squall-Leonhart17- In Japan there are celebrities too. And the average Japanese has consumed way more narrative that's adapted into anime than the average Western Anime fan: a typical Western anime fan has watched about what? I guess around 300 series, that works out as 6,000 episodes or the equivalent of about 1,500 manga volumes. The average 25 year old Japanese has read more manga than that: per capita in the 1990s the reading of manga was about 80 volumes per head per year, so an average 25 year old would have read about 2,000 manga volumes in his/her lifetime. The average Japanese has a superior understanding of manga/anime than the average Western anime fan as well who tends to have a very stereotypical perception of this world. |
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Blood-
Bargain Hunter Posts: 23839 |
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Just had a thought, but it is not based in hard evidence. I'll present it here, anyway. There has been a marked increase in the number of anime TV titles compared with earlier eras like the 80s and 90s. Most of this increase seems to be concentrated in the "late night" anime category which forms the majority of titles fans like us watch. My understanding is that many of these titles do not sell very well. As a lot of us know, late night anime doesn't really make its money from broadcast fees. From what I understand, the bulk of revenue that comes from late night anime is from disc sales ... and international licensing fees. From what I understand, the late night anime demographic hasn't increased much over the years. We keep on hearing how there's no point in lowering the price of anime in Japan because the demand is fairly inelastic. So, given that sales for a lot of titles are pretty low and given the the audience does not appear to have grown appreciably over the years, why are there so many more titles in the current era compared with the past?
My theory is that license fees and royalties from international markets (i.e the West) make some of the poorer selling titles more viable. In other words, one of the reasons there are as many late night anime TV shows as there might be because of us "anti-stylized artistic representation" Westerners. |
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Jose Cruz
Posts: 1778 Location: South America |
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No, the Western market is getting relatively smaller while the Korean and Chinese market are increasing. But overall it's not important: In 2005 about 15% of the entire industry revenues were of licenses from abroad, or about 30 billion yen. Now international revenues increased mainly thanks to China and Korea but are still small. They are nothing compared to the domestic revenues of manga, anime and merchandising: 500 bililon yen, 250 billion yen and 1,000 billion respectively.
And I think the audience had increased a lot since the 80's. Today 40% of Japanese college students identify as otaku, that is probably way more than in the 80's. And now access to late night stuff is much easier with streaming, cable and programmable recording. Still notice that many late night stuff is adapted from mainstream franchises: Kancolle, Love Live, Assassination Classroom, 7 Deadly Sins, Attack on Titan are mainstream franchises with late night shows. And lots of people watched some of these late night shows: sales of Attack on Titan increased by 12 million units between 2012 and 2013 thanks to a late Night Anime Show. That's in a country of 125 million. Clearly, a large number of people were watching that show. In fact, most major mainstream media franchises have a late night anime show: animenewsnetwork.com/news/2016-12-29/top-selling-media-franchises-in-japan-2016/.110442 Out of the top 10, all ten have a late night anime show. Late night anime's profits come from advertising the franchise to sell manga, books, merchandise besides disks (which are becoming obsolete). The Western market is not significant and will become even less significant as the Chinese and Indian markets develop further. Western anime fans are not significant in their market size for Japan's pop culture industry and will never be unless manga becomes REALLY mainstream in the West. Also the growth of anime since 1995 was simultaneously happening as manga declined: in 1995 the manga sales were 600 billion yen, by 2010 they were 460 billion yen, while the anime industry grew from 150 billion yen in 1995 to 250 billion yen in 2005. Since only 30 billion yen of these 250 billion are licensing rights therefore its obvious that most growth was domestic. I think that with the internet more people in Japan are consuming anime because it's now easier to find while physical print manga is getting relatively less popular. Also about the size of the Western fandom: For instance, Crunchyroll's revenues are only about 7 million dollars per month or 84 million dollars a year the average yen dollar exchange rate over the past 10 years corrected for inflation was 90 to 1, so that means that total Crunchyroll revenues are valued at about 7.5 billion yen at long run average exchange rates, if half of these revenues are licenses to Japanese firms they mean an income stream of only 3.75 billion yen while domestic sales of manga, anime and merchandising are 1,750 billion yen, or 500 times larger. So it's just not very significant. Just because there a few fans of Japanese pop culture in the west doesn't mean that they are an important element for overall Japanese pop cultural production. I mean, manga/anime is a huge thing while Western fandom of Japanese pop culture is a small group so it's pretty intuitive that they are not relevant for the industry. I don't know why people should get personally offended just because their group is not economically significant. Or because the local culture is incompatible with the development of certain artforms. Last edited by Jose Cruz on Fri Mar 10, 2017 5:47 pm; edited 3 times in total |
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ChibiKangaroo
Posts: 2941 |
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I'm pretty sure Ebert felt the need to talk down to his readers because he assumed that they were older people who don't watch much animated content period, not because they have certain tastes about how animation should be styled. If he had been Japanese his audience would have been similarly mostly older people and he probably would have given similar reassurances.
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Blood-
Bargain Hunter Posts: 23839 |
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@ Jose Cruz - Maybe I wasn't clear enough, but my theory about the importance of international licensing and royalties was in reference shows that don't sell well in Japan, of which there are many. Anime may be a 250 billion yen a year business in Japan, but the bulk of that money goes to a relatively small number of wildly successful titles. Hell, some titles only sell hundreds of singles volumes. So in cases where a title doesn't rack up big domestic sales in Japan, licensing and royalties fees would make an outsized difference to its bottom line. My theory is that the reason there are so many titles made is that anime producers know they will get a chunk of dough from international sources which mitigates the risk.
Revenues from S. Korea and China are a relatively new phenomenon and do not account for the profusion of anime titles in the 2000s compared to the 1990s. The percentage of Japanese college students who identify as otaku is kind of a meaningless statistic. The only stats that matter are viewership and sales. Viewership of late night anime titles is tiny, which is why the fees from broadcasters are so low. Many, many late night anime titles do not sell well in Japan. Those are the only stats that matter. |
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12skippy21
 Posts: 785 Location: York, England |
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You lot do know that we are all viewing this from a privilaged position. You can now watch stuff that would have been incredibly localised even 10 years ago which, thanks to the internet, we can buy and consume because the cost has been driven down. If you think about shows on TV, from a British perspective we have a lot of junk (mostly soaps and cooking shows) which will never earn revenue and only something like a period drama will sell (I only knew Americans who watched Downton Abbey for example).
Anime fits in a weird catergory like the rest of these shows, only people who really like it will buy it, the rest dont care. So not just anime, but World Cinema, (wherever you are) will always sell poorly but if you maintain a fanbase in the medium there will be some money made. Hence why we are all here, fighting on the behalf of something we happened to get into. |
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Jose Cruz
Posts: 1778 Location: South America |
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I don't think so. Japanese film critics who are like 75 years old, all know and respect Miyazaki's work very well. While 95% of Japan's population has watched Ghibli's films, it's not just a youth thing: manga is sold to ALL age groups in Japan and manga sales are 10 times larger than movie ticket sales. Everybody in Japan is well aware of manga (and hence it's derivatives). While Miyazaki and his studio is extremely well known in Japan. Same thing with films like Your Name, the Japanese public lacks the prejudice against animation the western public has so that films like Princess Mononoke and Your Name, which are obviously not like Western children's movies, but are the biggest Japanese box office records of their respective decades 90s and 2010's. So I disagree completely. There is a fundamental cultural difference in perception of comics and animation at work here. Which explains why animation and comics are so diverse and popular in Japan while being so extremely restricted to a mostly crude comedic role in all the 80 countries of the western world. Considering that you, Blood- and Alan45 simply do not believe that such difference in cultural perception exists (even though it's natural considering we are talking about different civilizations: Japanese and Western), then we are left with no explanation for the enormous difference in popularity of comics/animation among these two civilizations.
Manga sales and merchandising revenues are way larger than disk sales. Disk sales are around 100 billion yen while manga sales and merchandising revenue are combined around 1,500 billion yen and international licensing fees are 30 billion yen. For instance, Madoka generated over 40 billion yen in merchandising revenue while only 4 billion yen of disk sales, a similar claim can be made for Love Live (I heard 43 billion yen in merchandising revenue from someone in the forum). Videogames are also huge in Japan and tied to anime series. Overall it appears the dominant sources that make anime production function are sales of light novels, manga, games and merchandising, not disk sales and not international licensing revenue (up to 2005). In the next years disk sales will decrease further. Studios make a large set of shows: if out of a dozen shows they have 1-2 hits the studio can function (like KyoAni basically survives on Haruhi, K-On! and Free). And I wouldn't think that international revenues are less dispersed among different titles but perhaps its true that Western anime fans support certain franchises that the Japanese public does not (Sword of Stranger and Cowboy Bebop for instance) so it might have some risk smoothing effects but given that the magnitude of the Western market is so small compared to the domestic market (less than 30 billion yen versus 1,750 billion yen) I wouldn't think that would significantly influence production decisions of shows. |
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Blood-
Bargain Hunter Posts: 23839 |
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@ Jose Cruz - but once again, if you look at merchandising, the vast bulk of it is related to a core group of huge titles. Many late night anime shows don't have much of a merchandising push. What is true is that the industry's hits help pay for the numerically greater number of misses. But keep in mind that not every studio has ownership of huge hits. That's why sometimes a studio, like Manglobe, goes bankrupt. The margins on anime are not enormous. It is easy to underestimate the impact of the international money on anime. 15% may not sound like a lot, but it is. If you are trying to finance a project and you have a gap of 15% in the budget, then the title simply doesn't get made. If all revenue from Western markets dried up, it would have a sizeable impact on the amount of anime production in Japan. Yes, the monster titles would continue to get made, but there would be a lot more conservatism over titles that have riskier prospects. That's just reality.
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Alan45
Village Elder Posts: 9861 Location: Virginia |
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Jose Cruz wrote:
Not true, that is not what I said. Don't go putting words in my mouth. |
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