Forum - View topicHow Creative Original Anime Get Made with Takayuki Nagatani
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your fly is down
Posts: 27 |
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Hmm
As far as catering to an international audience goes, that really does not mean anything except making an anime available and accessible to anyone. I can see how some people might see the globalisation of anime as something that affects quality but it actually imp4oves quality like how lupin and cowboybepop have a European and western theme in them rather than a japanese one But those shows are better because of it. I think the real issue that produces have to come to terms with is market over saturation, black fox and serius the jyager may be great shows but in a market where the best show is the only one given spotlight whose to say these original shows will just be forgot only a month after the final episode airing. A good example is flip flapper or space dandy which were both original and both very enjoyable shows but did not break the threshold for fame. The question is that is there even any incentive to create original shows given the possibility of success is so low. I'm not saying that original anime is pointless, it's the best kind of anime in my view( excluding certain novel adaptations like what Ghibli does) but maybe working with 3 different studios on 3 different original anime is more deleterious to the industry than working hard on a single two or three part OVA/movie series made with absolutely full effort, like it was in the 70s and 80s. That would result in great quality anime and for funding just keep making adaptations that make some profit. I site devilman crybaby as an example of if a team is given free reign they can make something superb but if done to often saturates the market and loses value. Just saying that the anime industry should slow down because the market can't keep up such a high demand that it leave room for risk taking. |
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Mohawk52
 Posts: 8202 Location: England, UK |
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configspace
Posts: 3717 |
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Then for whom? You can't just say overseas or international because everyone's tastes are different. China's tastes are not the same and mainstream US audiences. And mainstream US audiences tastes are not the same as core anime viewing audiences. And each core audience subgroups tastes also differ. I bet overseas in this case just means Western which just means Anglo countries. Evidence for this is the citation of Bones studio somehow being preferred by overseas And yet, every show gets licensed internationally, so you can't say they tweak every show or every source manga or VN before it's even known they'll get adaptations or licensed abroad, in order to somehow appeal to every differing taste on the globe. There are so very many shows and their source novel/manga with elements and concepts that can easily disprove the notion that anime in general is created for international appeal (which again, is an oxymoron because of non-uniform tastes) Select shows? Yes, absolutely, but I'm gong to have to disagree with the assertion that the entire industry or most of it is. Heck, I remember reading a Pixar animator's blog of how he loves Gurren Lagann yet some elements wouldn't fly here -- Yoko specifically. This was also in the context of the Gainax / pre-Trigger crew visiting Pixar. I mean I am absolutely sure the mangaka for Initial D was not told, hold on, people elsewhere won't understand tofu delivery, drifting, touge racing, AE86's and so on (all based on real life btw) so he better change it since those are completely foreign concepts elsewhere at the time. |
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Stuart Smith
 Posts: 1298 |
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The real question is if it actually works, and in my experience very few of those shows ever actually see success. I completely forgot B the Beginning existed, because I have not seen anything about it in the Japanese fandom or the western fandom. Same thing with Space Dandy. I imagine Yokai Watch's push for America themed Yokai with the 3rd game was an attempt to popularize it overseas, but it backfired horribly. It helped kill interest in Japan, and America was never going to get into Yokai Watch to begin with. It was a completely misstep. They seem to be trying to rectify it with Shadowside, but it had horrible timing of coming out the same time as Gegege no Kitaro's new series. Will Sirius the Jaeger be as popular as the regular breakouts of the season? I have my doubts. International appealing shows have their own audience, but It doesn't seem to be what the majority of anime fans want. -Stuart Smith |
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SHD
Posts: 1752 |
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I don't think Sirius will be popular, and I think it's fairly easy to see why. One - there's just zero hype about it. Nothing whatsoever. I follow the official Twitter account and it has like 7500 followers with each tweet getting likes that average below 100. (Just for comparison, the Grand Blue Dreaming anime account has 34.6k followers.) There's barely anyone talking about it, in English or Japanese. It's just like with other shows that Netflix snatched up (remember Piano Forest? or The Great Passage? ...yeah), or Netflix's own anime originals that came and went without making any waves in Japan or the western fandom, with the sole exception of Devilman Crybaby... and even that was mostly on the English speaking side, and was only a fraction of the attention the show would have gotten in both markets if it aired weekly on TV/was getting a simulcast. I mean sure, Sirius will get released in December(????!!!!) and then ANN and a couple other web places will publish a few reviews of it, some people will go and watch it, or come across it randomly while browsing Netflix content, and... yeah. We can argue about the merits or lack thereof of binge watching vs watching something weekly, but I think it's getting painfully obvious that Netflix's business model is actively hurting the visibility and popularity of their anime content. And two - really, the show is nothing special or particularly interesting. Like B: The Beginning or AICO it's like it was created by a team following a checklist of tired old clichés and tropes, with a corporate delegate "anime fan" standing over them and going "add this trope, Americans will love it!" and "a show like this should have Trope X!" - only, they're the kind of person for whom anime is whatever was shown on TV when they were a kid, and they haven't watched any anime since 2005. I guess Sirius is not as offensively terrible about this as B: The Beginning and it's not as offensively boring as AICO, but it's a show we've seen about a thousand times before. I enjoy it in a sort of "turn off your brain for 20 minutes, then make fun of what you've seen" way, and even non-ironically it's kind of cute, and likeable in its earnestness. But it's so full of tropes and clichés that you could watch it in Japanese without speaking the language and be able to follow it nevertheless. And this is why I also strongly disagree with the claim that most anime are made with a foreign audience in mind. Maybe the production committees for regular shows spare a thought or two about potential overseas viewers but that usually doesn't seem to trickle down to actual production. Most of the time it's very easy to tell when a show is actively trying to make western audiences like it, because they all seem to apply pretty consistent tropes and clichés, following some pretty consistent ideas about what American (let's face it, it's mostly American) audiences like. And yeah, these shows tend to flop. In the US casual viewers may enjoy shows like Sirius (if they ever watched it, but they don't because there's zero hype around them) but for the anime fans who make up the vocal part of the fanbase and also the ones who buy the merch, buy the releases (if any), go to cons and events, look up reviews, seek out the shows - most of them are enjoying different sort of shows. These are like the shows that you watched in the '90s or '00s when you were just getting into anime and it was all new and shiny, and I guess for some people they have that nostalgia factor, but not much else. And for the Japanese audiences these shows are just hilariously retro/old-fashioned. (Well, there's at least the seiyuu. About 90% of the reason why I finished B: The Beginning was the seiyuu, the remaining 10% was some genuinely beautiful visuals. I wouldn't be watching Sirius if it didn't star Sakurai Takahiro as the white-haired pretty boy villain - seriously, my rant just writes itself at this point, but regardless, Sakurai is nice to listen to and I'm easily entertained.) |
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