Forum - View topicAnswerman - Why Were Anime Budgets So Big In The 80s?
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Nyren
Posts: 702 |
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I recently watched Five Star Stories, an hour long mecha film from the 80's, and it is one of the gorgeous films I've ever watched. The fact that sequels were never made annoys me.
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Sakagami Tomoyo
 Posts: 940 Location: Melbourne, VIC, Australia |
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I expect that TV productions largely had existing funding arrangements that new investors didn't really have any way to barge into, and existing investors largely chose to find additional projects to put their extra money into, rather than just pumping more into existing investments (though some possibly did up the funding on those a modest amount). But possibly more importantly, adding money doesn't give them any more time to work on things than they'd otherwise have. The insanely tight scheduling on TV anime production is well documented, and the industry in the 80s had far fewer tricks to do things quickly without apparent drops in quality. |
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AkumaChef
Posts: 821 |
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Five Star Stories is indeed fantastic. But it's easy to see how it got such a huge budget. FSS is not very well known in the west, but it was a hugely successful manga with a massive cast of characters. It certainly would have been an attractive target for investors. One thing that I find curious is that there were many excellent (IMHO, anyway) adaptations of popular manga made during the late 80's and early 90's which had a little animation made but they only covered a tiny bit of the manga source material. I can't help but wonder why they were not continued. Examples include Battle Angel, 3x3 Eyes, etc. I'd even throw the original Ah My Goddess in that list. (Yes, I know there were various sequels made to AMG but that was not until many years later) Some shows were continued, perhaps even as TV series (e.g. You're Under Arrest!), but so many were not. I had heard that 3x3 Eyes was offered a TV series multiple times but the creator declined because the violence had to be toned town for a TV broadcast. I can't help but wonder what, exactly, stopped the various others? |
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Nom De Plume De Fanboy
 SubscriberExempt from Grammar Rules Posts: 613 Location: inland US west, pretty rural |
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The AWO podcast folks went into how this was financed for a couple of minutes in their review. Evidently it was a vanity project of a wealthy gentleman, and when he ran into complications, that was the end of that. That is as best as I can remember, it's been a while since I listened to that show. |
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EricJ2
 Posts: 4016 |
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Oh, a TAD: 
Japan's China-like economic boom in the 80's--before the bust--had created a lot of overconfident xenophobia, at the same time as Shintaro Ishihara's book "The Japan That Can Say No" tried to spin the future Abe-era wave of neo-militaristic nationalism and paranoia at being the "slave" of Western powers. Needless to say, that didn't create much good feeling with the US, as we still had no clue about Japanese culture for most of the 80's, and only knew about the samurai, the Yakuza, nameless penguin-flocks of loyal corporate salarymen that business negotiators saw, and, of course, old WWII-Pacific grudges.
Mostly, people on the West Coast--where much of the US media images were coming from--were seeing US corporations bought out by Japan investors, creating the image that Japan was out to "take over the world"....again. Michael Crichton's "Rising Sun" is particularly a product of its decade, and the era certainly wasn't helped by the aforementioned overconfident Japan claiming that they WERE going to. The 80's saw a lot of goofy deconstruction of "the Enemy"--Just look up what people back in the 80's thought "Sumo wrestling" was, since the image of a big 600-lb. belligerent, bellowing blob with a samurai haircut was just made for zeitgeist. Even though Robotech, Star Blazers and Voltron were airing on (cheap) local UHF stations in '84-'85, and catching the first generation of high-school kids that would later take it to the college campuses, that just added to the joke, as most audiences still saw the shows as cheap, goofy foreign imports--rather like those World Masterpiece Theater cartoons on Nickelodeon--and laughed at the bad Harmony Gold dubbing and "yap-yap-grr" mouth movements. Cyberpunk, OTOH, was mostly influenced by Blade Runner in 1982, depicting a San Francisco-influenced southern California that was pretty much all Japantown and Chinatown by the 21st century. That not only created the "Kanji is cool!" image, but also the idea that if it's the future, there should be neon signs and noodle stands on every back alley, just like Tokyo and Hong Kong. |
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Vadara
Posts: 61 |
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If Yakuza 0 is any indicator, 80's Japan was wild, to say the least.
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Zeino
Posts: 1098 |
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To be perfectly honest, I think having high-budget animation is the only real reason to really watch the vast majority of the OVAs and movies for the 80's Boom era now because the occasional gem like the early Ghibli movies, The Wings of Honneamise, Gunbuster and Gundam 0080 aside, they were forgettable at best and and outright edgy garbage like M.D. Gist at their often worst. Far from being dark times in my view, I think the 1990's up to the present day have been far better for anime despite lower budgets and economic troubles.
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dormcat
Encyclopedia Editor
 Posts: 9902 Location: New Taipei City, Taiwan, ROC |
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At the highest point of bubble economy in late 1980s, Japanese college seniors were invited by perspective companies to visit their resort-like training facilities away from large cities, with all expenses covered PLUS lots of valuable souvenirs, trying to persuade them to sign the lifetime employment contract before competing companies do the same (some of those resorts have no means of communication for students).
This overheated boom was unthinkable to those post-bubble graduates (Shūshoku Hyōgaki or "ice-age of employment" from 1993 to 2005) and now their children (experiencing "the new ice-age of employment" after 2010) as well. |
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hyojodoji
Posts: 584 |
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Since some people have said that Nissin Food Products does stress interview, that commercial by Nissin Food may be a 'boomerang', a self-deprecating joke, or a caution to students who try to get jobs at Nissin. By the way, is your having mentioned a Nissin commercial related to the broadcasting of Manpuku, whose hero is modelled upon the founder of Nissin Andō Momofuku, who had been a Taiwanese? |
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BodaciousSpacePirate
 Subscriber Posts: 3017 |
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If The Five Star Stories were to be known for just one thing, it would be gorgeous visuals... if they were known for just two things, it would be gorgeous visuals and staggeringly incoherent franchise mismanagement. Don't even get me started on how poorly they handled the manga's English-language release (the easiest way to get it was through the Protoculture Addicts Magazine webstore). It's definitely resulted in some of the best fan-produced model kits I've ever seen, though. I started work on a resin Knight of Gold earlier this week, and the detail on it is absolutely stunning. |
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Philmister978
Posts: 308 |
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And don't forget that much of the animation from America in the 80s that wasn't done by Filmation or shipped to Taiwan, Korea or Australia was done in Japan (think early DiC, Transformers, Centurions, DuckTales and the like. Even the Smurfs had one of its seasons co-animated by Toei). |
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Alan45
Village Elder Posts: 9849 Location: Virginia |
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@BodaciousSpacePirate
Actually the Five Star Stories manga wasn't all that hard to obtain. I got it without difficulty from my local comic shop as it came out. Granted, I had to preorder it each time it was solicited in Previews but that was because the shop had quit carrying manga by that time. My only problem is that they just quit offering it after the first 10 volumes. My understanding was that Toy Press, the publisher was owned by Nagano and that FSS was its only product in the US market. |
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BodaciousSpacePirate
Subscriber Posts: 3017 |
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You were very lucky, then, as I had tremendous trouble finding anyone who would carry it, and so I only ended up with 18 of the 26 books they split the first 10 volumes into. It's nice to know that other people had less difficulties, since it's a great series. |
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Silver Kirin
Posts: 1122 |
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I think it's funny to watch some movies from the 80s where people thought that Japan would be a major cultural and economic power in the future like Back to the Future II, Blade Runner and Robocop III. The only major Japanese buyout of an American company that still seems weird to me is Columbia Pictures, seeing the Sony logo before a movie starts and ends looks so out of place beacause I always see Sony as a tech company.
Speaking of anime, it seems that the 80s was the only time for people like Miyazaki and Takahata to open their own studio (and even then I heard that they had problems to secure funds), how OVAs become popular and the sheer variety of mecha shows like the ones made by Sunrise. But it looks that Akira was the end of the anime boom of the 80s, even though it was an ambitious project I heard it bombed at the box office. In my opinion anime entered into a bit of a dark age until Evangelion arived in '95 and then the industry exploded in the late '90s when shows like Pokémon were broadcasted worldwide only a few years after it aired in Japan. |
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Scalfin
Posts: 249 |
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Where did the forum moderators hurt you? |
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