Forum - View topic

Answerman - Why Were Anime Budgets So Big In The 80s?

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),

Over here, Mitsubishi Motors took over Chrysler Australia many years ago, and more recently Japan Post bought Toll Holdings (transport/logistics company).

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).

With talk about the anti-Japan sentiment in the 80s in America, I can only imagine how hard it must have been for anime clubs to function the way they did and the efforts the anime community made at the time to spread their hobby.

This is why I feel that the 20th century fandom doesn't get enough recognition for its efforts in pioneering anime into the media powerhouse that it is today.

When I first got into the fandom in the '90s, I remember being more amazed by the art direction and framerate of '80s anime OVAs and movies compared to what was new at the time. Anime like Robot Carnival, Akira, and Project A-ko looked like they went all out with their animation even approaching Disney-quality levels. '90s anime movies like Ghost in the Shell (1995) and Tenchi Muyo In Love looked as though the animation was more constrained by comparison. Like if an object wasn't required to move, it stayed stagnant.

Quote:

My question is why did these studios get so much money to make these OVA's, movies and TV shows

I grew up in the 80s and starting watching anime in earnest maybe right at 1990, so it included a lot of the 80s stuff. And from my recollection I would scratch TV shows off that list. The OVAs and films, but most definitely the OVAs, seemed big budget animation wise, but TV shows on the other hand were pretty crappy budget wise. Ranma 1/2 and Kimagure Orange Road episodes like the rest of the shows all took shortcuts and economic animation measures whenever they could.

It also didn't help matter that a lot of shows often ran for a year or more because of their large episode counts (50 to 100+ eps. was the norm in those days) as the cour system really didn't exist in the form it does today. Inevitably, the animation was gonna suffer as a lot of those series had a lot of errors both in the animation and the sound at times.

Answerman may actually be understating the extent of anti-Japanese racism in the 80s.