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HeeroTX wrote:

Who did they influence? How are you measuring the impact? You can easily point to Kishimoto and other SJ creators as evidence of Toriyama's influence, but how long did it take to really see THAT impact? 15 years? 20? Most people that are going to make a difference based on CURRENT creators won't be proven for at LEAST a decade. So you can't say "Girls Und Panzer" was influential until "Random Director X" notes the impact it had on him when he was just starting out.

Maybe not that many years, but at least it took at least 3 years after Dragon Ball ended, when in 1992 JoJo Diamond is Unbreakable came out and had a character who was basically Gohan Super Saiyan 2 and whose stand was literally Cell, but even the Cell arc was long over before Dragon Ball ended. And in the case of Hunter x Hunter's Chimera Ant arc villain, Meruem, with a very similar Cell-like appearence, he appeared in 2005, we can take some years off considering the hiatus and probably he was planned at least two years prior to his debut, but still.

I think the "instantaneous" influence is very scarce, and it doesn't usually happen. The only one I remember now is Eiichiro Oda and Hiro Mashima having similar artstyles at the beginning of their career because they studied together. And a kind of similar one, keeping up with Togashi's influence, is Masashi Kishimoto, who started Naruto in 1999 (in 1996 it was an one-shot I think), one year just after Hunter x Hunter started. But even so, Ishida Sui started to mimic a lot of Togashi's style almost twenty years later in Tokyo Ghoul, and Kubo was inspired by Yuu Yuu Hakusho, which started in 1990, but Bleach started in 2001.

Sometimes the person who is supposed to be influenced by someone else will get to work much later (especially WSJ titles, given the demographic), hell, sometimes even the demographic reaches people who aren't in the anime or manga industry or are already too old, but maybe the manga they liked will reach their sons and be influenced way before and start to get into the industry with that kind of influence.

Valhern wrote:

Maybe not that many years, but at least it took at least 3 years after Dragon Ball ended, when in 1992 JoJo Diamond is Unbreakable came out and had a character who was basically Gohan Super Saiyan 2 and whose stand was literally Cell

That's more "homage" than influence. You can find PLENTY of anime right now that contain similar homages to other very recent anime. I LOVE Accel World but I don't fool myself into thinking its widely influential. But I know a character in Nogizaka Haruka no Himitsu cosplayed an Accel World character.

And then you have things like Evangelion where other anime of the time aped their mecha style to catch the "fad", but that isn't an enduring influence.

@HeeroTX: I guess to clarify, I feel as though Japanese artists seem to be more inclined artistically to create works stylistically/spiritually that are popular to the age, and maybe aren't as predisposed to take inspiration from older works if that inspiration might buck modern trends. Toriyama and Takahashi I think for their time inspired a lot of light-hearted action adventure sorts of works, and a certain serious but comedic visual styles that were more prevalent back in the day. While you can certainly point to specific artists like Eiichiro Oda and Masashi Kishimoto having later on taken admitted inspiration from Toriyama, my point was leaning more towards how the popularity of certain works helps to drive the creation of other similar sorts of works contemporary to the time period. For example, I think the popularity of Lucky Star and K-On fairly quickly drove the industry direction to create works with a similar visual style/aesthetic/themes.

Kikaioh wrote:

One thing that seems different between Western and Japanese cultures is how much nostalgia is embraced. Here in the West, 80's entertainment culture is still beloved in the mainstream, and seems to be heavily influential on modern entertainment (Mad Max, Star Wars, Ninja Turtles, Back to the Future, Terminator, Smurfs, etc.) In Japan though, that sort of love for retro culture seems a bit ways non-existent --- it generally feels like entertainment there burns bright and fades fast, and even long-running shows are kind of integrated into the "here and now", as opposed to bringing back the actual atmosphere of a bygone age. I wonder also if the adult mentality of "grown ups shouldn't spend time on childish things" feeds into that any.

The thing with the American nostalgia it's not exactly nostalgia if there's constantly remakes and reboots of the franchise. You might have a specific Transformers series you particularly enjoy, but there's always going to be a Transformers series airing that deals with Optimus Prime vs. Megatron, so it's never going to leave the public conscience. There's always going to be a cartoon airing about DC and Marvel heroes, and it looks like movies will go that way since we're on our 3rd Spider-Man coninuity reboot in 14 years.

It's easier for anime to leave the public eye when they don't do remakes nearly as much, and when they do it's usually cases like FMA, SM, and HxH which are designed to cover the manga story instead of the anime-original path the first series went. Sailor Moon is never going to always have a series on TV like Ninja Turtles or Transformers do, so newer, origina! stuff like Precure will move in and take over.

-Stuart Smith

Stuart Smith wrote:

Kikaioh wrote:

One thing that seems different between Western and Japanese cultures is how much nostalgia is embraced. Here in the West, 80's entertainment culture is still beloved in the mainstream, and seems to be heavily influential on modern entertainment (Mad Max, Star Wars, Ninja Turtles, Back to the Future, Terminator, Smurfs, etc.) In Japan though, that sort of love for retro culture seems a bit ways non-existent --- it generally feels like entertainment there burns bright and fades fast, and even long-running shows are kind of integrated into the "here and now", as opposed to bringing back the actual atmosphere of a bygone age. I wonder also if the adult mentality of "grown ups shouldn't spend time on childish things" feeds into that any.

The thing with the American nostalgia it's not exactly nostalgia if there's constantly remakes and reboots of the franchise.

This. As I said way back on the first page of this discussion - marketing über alles. The demand for 80's entertainment culture isn't so much "nostalgia" as it is "more of the same pap regularly pumped out for the past thirty years". You can't have nostalgia for something that never went away in the first place.

The 80's changed everything when it came to pop culture. Most relevant in this thread is the wide availability of physical media and the easy retrieval of "childhood memories". The entertainment industry discovered that people would happily shell out for endless repetitions of those childhood memories - and the franchise was born and the sequel (and remakes, and reboots, and re-imaginings) came to dominate the media landscape.

I think its not an issue of too much being made, but what it does to otaku identity with so many shows and so many factions.

"Everyone" watched Yamato.
"Everyone" watched Evangelion.
"Many" watched TTGL.
"A good fraction" watched Madoka.
"A few watched Ping Pong."

Every show listed is absolutely great. But we're getting to a point where massive success doesn't require the entire community. Often you go to a convention because its a place of like-minded people waiting to be your friend. Now you can watch dozens and maybe hundreds of shows and only have a brief overlap with a room of hundreds of Otaku.

I like that the industry does well, because we get more variety and content. But if it continues to do too well and put out too much we -will- see the community continually divide itself. I've wanted to submit this in question format for this column for some time.

Also Stuart's posts here are often a highlight of the comment sections. I'll add to his ideas, to point out that in the West we like solid stone monuments. We like monuments that last, preferably forever. Compare this to the temple in Izu. Every 20 years regardless of its condition they destroy and rebuilt it from very temporary materials. Every new Gundam plays with the franchise's ideas, but is otherwise built again from the ground up. Western franchises have every superhero and cape crossover with one another, and they're usually tightly knit variants. Keeping the Izu temple in mind you can step back and look at anime as a whole and see this willingness to take everything down and rebuild - knowing it is temporary.

I find it interesting that at least 80 anime series are airing in Japan this season. That's obviously a lot of anime series! Meanwhile in the US, the amount of animated TV series airing this season is nowhere near 80.

angelmcazares wrote:

The person asking the question cites at least 80 shows airing this season. But aren't like half of those shorts and shows aimed at children, which are financed by tv channels, toy makers and other companies?

You're correct.

Stuart Smith wrote:

The thing with the American nostalgia it's not exactly nostalgia if there's constantly remakes and reboots of the franchise. You might have a specific Transformers series you particularly enjoy, but there's always going to be a Transformers series airing that deals with Optimus Prime vs. Megatron, so it's never going to leave the public conscience. There's always going to be a cartoon airing about DC and Marvel heroes, and it looks like movies will go that way since we're on our 3rd Spider-Man coninuity reboot in 14 years.

It's easier for anime to leave the public eye when they don't do remakes nearly as much, and when they do it's usually cases like FMA, SM, and HxH which are designed to cover the manga story instead of the anime-original path the first series went. Sailor Moon is never going to always have a series on TV like Ninja Turtles or Transformers do, so newer, origina! stuff like Precure will move in and take over.

I'm not sure. Jurassic World, for example, released just last year, and the previous Jurassic Park movie was way back in 2001. The 2016 Ghostbusters reboot released almost 30 years after Ghostbusters II. They still sell merchandise for Back to the Future and Gremlins in stores, and a lot of TV shows and movies make references to works like The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, The Golden Girls, etc., despite all of those not having followups for some decades now. Even Indie gaming in the West looks back at the 8 and 16-bit styles and emulates them, some to critical acclaim (like Undertale). It seems to me like the kids of yesteryear grew up, but still seem to embrace the culture from back in the day.

My broader thought, though, is that there's a spirit to 80's and 90's anime that seems to be getting lost. The 80's had some gritty and campy sci-fi that really defined the era, and 90's shows like Slayers, Irresponsible Captain Tylor, Ghost Sweeper Mikami, Samurai Pizza Cats, etc., that had a sort of breezy, light-hearted and charming sensibility about them, also don't seem to be reflected in modern anime. It's as if the industry and culture for the most part have moved on from that aesthetic and spirit of the age, and I can't help but think it's mostly becoming forgotten.

It's sort of like saying there's too many books being published.

It's not so much that there's too much anime being made, it's that there's too much for one person to watch it all. As such fans can't relate to each other because they haven't watched the same shows. The same thing goes on with NA dramas.

There's five broadcast networks, each with their own share of shows. At two to three hours a station for six nights that's 10 to 15 hours a night and you could be looking at 80 shows a week. And then you throw in the cable shows, not to mention the DIY, food/cooking and reality shows, and you're probably well over 100 shows.

Similarly, back in the good old days of the 70s, you had shows such as MASH and All In The Family that everyone watched because there were relatively few channels. Nowadays it's hard to share shows. Those who watch Vampire Diaries may not be watching NCIS. Some may like one sitcom and not another, or not care for any sitcoms at all. And even though CW has four superhero shows, not everyone who watches at least one watches all four of them.

I think we're getting to a point where it's impossible for a fan to have watched everything. Twenty years ago English speaking fans were limited in what they could watch because only so much was available. Now it's almost all available and it seems overwhelming. It may make some fans feel isolated, but if you can catch the one or two big shows of the season like Attack on Titan, One Punch or even Sword Art Online (it was a slow season) you won't feel too left out.

H. Guderian wrote:

Also Stuart's posts here are often a highlight of the comment sections. I'll add to his ideas, to point out that in the West we like solid stone monuments. We like monuments that last, preferably forever. Compare this to the temple in Izu. Every 20 years regardless of its condition they destroy and rebuilt it from very temporary materials. Every new Gundam plays with the franchise's ideas, but is otherwise built again from the ground up. Western franchises have every superhero and cape crossover with one another, and they're usually tightly knit variants. Keeping the Izu temple in mind you can step back and look at anime as a whole and see this willingness to take everything down and rebuild - knowing it is temporary.

Your example makes me think of why Pokemon continues to be a success (not the only reason) while something like Digimon failed. It's got a hardcore fanbase but the community is very fragmented among the various seasons, games, and manga

Paiprince wrote:

Almost everything by Makoto Shinkai, with Kimi no na Wa topping the charts in every anime ranking site. It came out just this year.

Shinkai's stuff is pretty popular, but not really groundbreaking. Voices of a Distant Star kind of is, but only because he personally animated the whole thing; story-wise it's competent but very by-the-numbers, visually pretty good but not head and shoulders above everything else of its time. Remarkably close to the top, given it's a one-man show, though. Most of his other stuff? Visually brilliant, but still very by-the-numbers story-wise.

Your Name, though, that is great all round. The story is arguably still not that original, spoiler[being a mix of a bodyswap plot, a star-crossed lovers plot, and a time travel plot], all very standard things, but it does put the elements together in an imaginative enough way that it does feel pretty fresh. But still: not groundbreaking.

The theory that marketing explains everything strikes me as incomplete at best. Certainly some things may not be big or as big as they are without marketing, but you need more than that. Does anyone seriously believe that you could make the most forgettable LN adaptation (or ones of those series that only sold 200 units mentioned earlier to make it less specific) a classic merely by marketing it continuously for years? spoiler[They would run out of money from unsold discs before long] You need marketing but you also need quality or at least, yes, genuine nostalgia. The theory gets the causation backwards. People don't buy stuff just because they are marketed. Companies market them because (they think) people will buy them.

chaccide wrote:

In the good old days when we only had three television channels we remembered what shows were on by gum and we talked about 'em! Blah blah. Who remembers the great TV from the 50s and 60s now? But I bet people can remember crap shows like Gilligan's Island.

Senior citizens? To have watched a show in the 50s you'd have to be well up their in years. Although many shows from the 50s and 60s are remembered for their afternoon reruns in the 70s before cartoons and later talk shows took over.

And who could forget Gilligan's Island even if they tried?

H. Guderian wrote:

Also Stuart's posts here are often a highlight of the comment sections. I'll add to his ideas, to point out that in the West we like solid stone monuments. We like monuments that last, preferably forever. Compare this to the temple in Izu. Every 20 years regardless of its condition they destroy and rebuilt it from very temporary materials. Every new Gundam plays with the franchise's ideas, but is otherwise built again from the ground up. Western franchises have every superhero and cape crossover with one another, and they're usually tightly knit variants. Keeping the Izu temple in mind you can step back and look at anime as a whole and see this willingness to take everything down and rebuild - knowing it is temporary.

That's a good way to look at it. For a multi-installment franchises like Gundam, Precure, Yu-Gi-Oh, Kamen Rider, and Super Sentai, while it's all the same franchise each installment is something new and different with a new cast of characters, even if you have common archetypes most series follow like Gundam's masked Char-clone character. It would also explain why franchises like Power Rangers, Yu-Gi-Oh!, and even Pokemon have dropped off in popularity in America and most people only care about the first installments of those series. To those people, Power Rangers is Jason and Tommy, Pokemon is Ash, Misty, and Brock, and Yu-Gi-Oh is Yugi and Kaiba. Someone at those companies must realize this which is why they commissioned the Japanese to make more of that stuff exclusively for the American audience like the "Zyu2" footage for Power Rangers and that capsule monsters spin-off for YGO. They were probably aware that popularity would drop off once the cast changed.

Mcfox123 wrote:

Your example makes me think of why Pokemon continues to be a success (not the only reason) while something like Digimon failed. It's got a hardcore fanbase but the community is very fragmented among the various seasons, games, and manga

Digimon it's one of those rare cases where even Japan mostly cares about the first installment. Adventure and 02 were popular, but once Tamers arrived the ship started sinking until the franchise was canceled after Frontier. Ever since then we've only gotten a few series here and there with long breaks inbetween them. To me this says not everything is destined to be a franchise, and some things are better off as one-offs or two-offs

I also have to wonder if Digimon is reliance on the ever-changing technology landscape plays a part in its failure. Digital pets are extremely obsolete these days, which is what the series has made it's most notable feature on. The current Appmon series seems to be riding off cell phones which is probably the best route for it to take if it wants to be successful.

Also, while Pokemon may always be about Satoshi, Pikachu, and Team Rocket, all the other characters are replaced every series and do different things. I would say it's a middle ground between the two mindsets. Whenever Pokemon tries to play up nostalgia, the west is usually more receptive of it. Origin wasn't really popular in Japan, which explains why Generations is not airing in Japan. Japan focuses on current Pokemon more.

Kikaioh wrote:

I'm not sure. Jurassic World, for example, released just last year, and the previous Jurassic Park movie was way back in 2001. The 2016 Ghostbusters reboot released almost 30 years after Ghostbusters II. They still sell merchandise for Back to the Future and Gremlins in stores, and a lot of TV shows and movies make references to works like The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, The Golden Girls, etc., despite all of those not having followups for some decades now. Even Indie gaming in the West looks back at the 8 and 16-bit styles and emulates them, some to critical acclaim (like Undertale). It seems to me like the kids of yesteryear grew up, but still seem to embrace the culture from back in the day.

Movies might be in a different territory considering the format of how they are released compared to weekly television. You generally have to wait years between movie releases. Personally I've never been a big movie fan in general and always gravitated more towards television so I can't really speak for movies very much.

Quote:

My broader thought, though, is that there's a spirit to 80's and 90's anime that seems to be getting lost. The 80's had some gritty and campy sci-fi that really defined the era, and 90's shows like Slayers, Irresponsible Captain Tylor, Ghost Sweeper Mikami, Samurai Pizza Cats, etc., that had a sort of breezy, light-hearted and charming sensibility about them, also don't seem to be reflected in modern anime. It's as if the industry and culture for the most part have moved on from that aesthetic and spirit of the age, and I can't help but think it's mostly becoming forgotten.

80s grunge is one thing, but there's a lot of light-hearted shows that air. I'm not sure what the difference between Samurai Pizza Cats and other comedic kids anime like Yokai Watch or Heybot is, or Slayers differing from other shounen like Fairy Tail. Sci-fi in general has definately changed though. Some genres, like mecha, just arent as profitable anymore since kids have moved onto other genres like monster battling.

-Stuart Smith

@writerpatrick

The 50s had very little in the way of great shows, game shows, sitcoms and cowboy shows mostly. Cartoons shown on TV were recycled theatrical shorts from a decade or more earlier. The earliest, made for TV cartoon I can remember was Crusader Rabbit. There were reportedly a few night time dramas that were supposed to be good but they were for adults who are mostly no longer with us. The early 60s had some fairly good stuff, mostly from Warner Brothers (77 Sunset Strip and co.) I can't speak to later stuff because I mostly quit watching TV in 1963. I can, however, tell you what killed the early reruns. They were in Black & White. When color sets became the standard no one wanted to watch them.

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