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This Week in Anime
Over Hype and Anime Stagnation
by Lucas DeRuyter & Steve Jones,
Steve and Lucas dissect what's really going on in the anime industry and what needs to change—and how elf ears are an indispensable part of the deal.
Disclaimer:The views and opinions expressed by the participants in this chatlog are not the views of Anime News Network. Spoiler Warning for discussion of the series ahead.
Steve
That's understandable. Lots of elf anime lately. Hard to keep them all straight.
Anime elves are having a moment right now, and I can dig that!
While I think more casual anime audiences hyped Frieren up more than they should have, and the anime devolved into some "shonen fantasy adventure" genre fare by its end, it did broaden the horizons of those same casual audiences and give them a better sense of the different kinds of storytelling in the anime medium. I should really search up that series and...oh! Looks like Frieren's director, Keiichirō Saitō, kicked up some discourse!
For some context, Saito has recently been working with the Global Anime Challenge, a Japanese government-sponsored program looking forward to the next generation of animators. We actually have another interview with them published here on ANN.
As an aside, that's a pretty big deal. While the industry has grown a lot, the traditional avenues of training new talent haven't scaled up appropriately. The ideal is that you have in-studio mentorship that can nurture young animators and give promising artists opportunities like storyboarding, directing, or otherwise honing their animation abilities. However, many productions are relying on external animators wherever they can get them to squeeze out an episode on time, one at a time. That's neither sustainable nor a good way to induct people into the industry. The GAC is a think tank focused on that and related issues.
While I'm not well-versed enough on the Japan side of the anime industry to offer a strong opinion on GAC, I can say from my perspective as a professional anime-knower that the industry desperately seems to need this program and others like it. Mainstream US press reported on the labor issues plaguing the anime industry as far back as 2019, and those issues have been an open secret to global anime professionals since well before then.
As with many problems, the pandemic certainly did not make things any better! As part of GAC, Saito has another interview on Mantan Web where he talks more about overseas fans in a few responses, and those are the comments, translated in the aforementioned video, that we're springboarding off today.
I am genuinely torn on my reaction to Saito's comments! On the one hand, I can totally see how someone could conclude that US anime fans only ride hype trains for the biggest releases of a season when, as Jackie points out in ANN's video, an anime like Solo Leveling sweeps the Crunchyroll Anime Awards.
However, people like us who are more active in the US side of the anime industry know that the CRAAs haven't been capturing the best of what the medium has to offer for a while now, and that Solo Leveling's popularity here feels like it's almost entirely manufactured and the result of Crunchyroll throwing all of their promotional weight behind every season.
I mean, notions of merit aside, if we're talking about the Anime Awards in general, I'm suspicious of how much weight those even have on the Japanese side of things. There's certainly been a push by Sony to make them more important, like moving the ceremony to Japan, but I don't know how much they actually mean to creators, whether or not they win them. Saito doesn't even mention the Anime Awards in that Mantan interview.
Personally, I certainly think Frieren possesses more artistic merit than Solo Leveling, but I'd say the same for most other shows pitted against Solo Leveling this past year. You and I were not alone in rolling our eyes at that.
I guess that may be one definite thing separating Japanese from Western audiences: caring about the Anime Awards.
You're right in pushing back on me for taking this in a "fandom wars" direction. I think what I'm trying to express is that, while there is some truth to what he's saying about the western anime fandom, that opinion isn't wholly accurate. It's odd for it to come from the director of Frieren, as I think that show benefited tremendously from the bandwagoning effect he describes.
Or maybe I'm taking umbrage with the idea that this over-inflation of a specific release is a phenomenon that specifically takes place outside of Japan, when I can think of plenty of anime that are maybe unduly popular in Japan but have a more tepid reaction internationally. Gachiakuta is maybe the latest example of this, as it's my understanding that it's doing quite well in Japan right now but hasn't hit escape velocity in the States.
The problem he's describing isn't a unique one to Western fandom, either. If you look at isekai, that genre's popularity and insularity were fostered on sites like Narou, and you certainly can't blame Western fans for that! Japanese anime fans love dreck, too.
Still, I also get where Saito is coming from. As the anime market becomes increasingly international, so too does the audience's influence on what becomes popular and what gets made. And a broader audience doesn't necessarily translate into a broader-minded one. If anything, I'd say it's the opposite.
Agreed! If anything, he's somewhat advocating for safeguards or at least mindfulness around trend chasing in the anime industry and studios putting making a mega-hit above building up a sustainable collection of works that can foster future generations of talent.
By comparison, many companies in the video game industry spent the last decade chasing the live-service model that made a handful of gaming companies ridiculous amounts of money, but also directly resulted in the tremendous number of layoffs that have plagued the industry over the past decade.
We can also look at the American film industry as another example. As it happens, I just watched Jaws as part of its 50th anniversary screenings. Wonderful movie. But its success told Hollywood executives that they could make bank by investing in big action and effects-driven spectacle films that could reel in a mass audience. As a consequence, the space for smaller, pricklier, creator-driven films shrank.
Arguably, this philosophy reached a fever pitch in the 2010s as our oversized corporate overlords stuffed us to the gills with superhero flicks, an onslaught which is only now finally abating.
While other industry and economic factors like the expanding and bursting of the streaming bubble and corporate consolidation are more responsible for the current state of the US entertainment industry than superhero movies alone, that trend chasing has also had an impact on people working in production. A lot of superhero movies rely on VFX and VFX artists to fill those films with special effects, and studios have been suppressing unionization efforts in that sector to keep production costs down.
The VFX industry might be our best analog to the state of the anime industry. In that ANN interview, Takafume Nakame, a producer also working with GAC, actually mentions the labor movement led by Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata back when they were at Toei. Unfortunately, he mentions them as the most recent example of a labor movement that actually made some headway. That's a bummer.
While unionization isn't a panacea, it's an important tool in balancing power between workers and executives. Because if executives have all the power to call the shots, they are more likely than not going to go with the safe bet. And that's going to be the lowest common denominator-type productions made cheaply and with little regard for the creatives working on it. That's the endgame you have to worry about.
Fortunately, it seems to me that the anime industry is pretty far away from this endgame and trending ever further away from it. You and Chris discussed a few weeks back how stacked this season of anime is with queer, and queer leaning, anime. Furthermore, between CITY The Animation, My Dress-Up Darling season 2, New Panty and Stocking, and even a few other shows, it's undeniable that some of the best and most interesting work in anime is happening outside of the shonen genre right now.
Maybe that's what rubbed me the wrong way about these comments. The attribution of trend-chasing issues to the anime industry becoming more globalized, when more niche anime has never been bigger outside of Japan! Also, while I think that production companies/committees are finally starting to invest more regularly in markets outside of Japan, we're still a long way from international opinion driving decisions at these companies in any meaningful way.
Regardless of country of origin, the loudest collective voice is going to lap up the crowd-pleasers. The newest Demon Slayer film has been smashing records, and that's just the first of three of these. People, by and large, want more of what they already know they like, and companies are all too eager to give that to them.
Then again, I try to tell myself I have to be careful when I'm making generalizations about the wider anime fandom, because I do not have a clear window into it. I'm part of a vanishingly small group of people who write about anime professionally, and many of my peers are part of the same, so we don't exactly make up a representative cross-section of the entire population of anime watchers. The eye-opening thing about Solo Leveling's win was this idea of a "silent fandom" of people who loved the series but didn't otherwise participate in the scene as you and I know it.
To be clear, there's nothing intrinsically wrong with being a casual fan of anime. We're all casual fans of something. But maybe a problem arises when the collective voice of the casual fans drowns out the voice of the passionate ones.
The big problem is that so much of the western anime fandom is rooted in digital communications, and a lot of digital infrastructure is now skewing towards promoting people and things that are already popular, or entities that are willing to pay money to astroturf their opinion (thanks, Musk).
But to your point, the popular stuff in a given medium is always going to take up most of the oxygen in the room, but I think folks like us in the anime trenches can still make an impact. I remember a time when One Piece was considered the weakest of the Big Three (have we done a TWIA on how overused that framing is? If not, we should!). However, critics and anime writers of all stripes never stopped singing its praises, and today it's more popular than Naruto and Bleach combined.
From my experience working as an Anime Community Manager, the western anime fandom definitely has a short memory and is prone to latching onto seasonal favorites, but as the community continues to get older I'm confident that will change. I believe that the majority of people are inherently curious and, with how varied anime as a medium is, folks can't help but explore different kinds of titles as they grow more familiar with the art form.
That pipeline will always exist, sure, but is it being supported by the current industry? You can probably attribute a lot of that seasonal turnover and short-term memory to the glut of shows coming out every four months, most of which end up disposed of or forgotten. I'm sure part of Saito's frustration comes from a perceived lack of risk being taken, whether it stems from a top-down or bottom-up direction.
Yes, good, thoughtful anime continues to be made, and I consistently content myself with a handful of gems each season. But if I think back on the last series I watched that felt truly risky, singular, and experimental, I might have to go back to Sonny Boy, and that was four years ago.
Moreover, Saito directed my favorite episode of Sonny Boy, so I don't bring it up out of the blue.
This might be the difference between you (and Saito) and me. It's great that a work that felt transgressive to the medium was released as little as four years ago! With how collaborative and expensive anime production can be, I don't expect works that elevate the medium to release as often as they do in, say, music or drawn art.
Don't get me wrong, I would love to see more cool shit that I've never seen before in anime (and every other artistic medium I love, too), but I don't think the clip it's moving at is anywhere close to stagnant. Or maybe I just make a habit of ignoring the trends in this space that don't do much for me, haha.
I don't mean to put words in Saito's mouth, either. His original statement is pretty broad, after all. But his resume suggests a restlessness. He isn't directing the next season of Bocchi, and he's only staying on as a consultant director for the next part of Frieren. I think he enjoys trying new stuff more than settling into a rhythm. Plus, you have to consider how much the public wants him to stay on those projects. Intentional or not, he goes against the grain.
I'd also be pretty happy if we got one good, far-out anime experiment every four years. But I can also imagine an industry that isn't so hell-bent on making 50-60 new shows each season, that doesn't work its animators ragged, and that actually invests in their careers. That's the kind of environment that could be more conducive to trying new things. Which might be why Saito is bothering with GAC and getting interviewed like this in the first place.
That's an entirely fair read on both his comments, actions, and the overall state of the industry. Right now, it feels like the stuff that's actually pushing anime forward as an artistic medium is a consequence of the unsustainable number of anime produced every season, rather than the kind of work that's prioritized in today's anime landscape.
To put it another way, it feels like a work like ZENSHU. which gets to the heart of the passion and creativity driving this field, only exists because of the unsustainable number of anime released every quarter, and that reducing the output would mean that we only get safe-bet adaptations of already popular manga or light novels.
As someone who cares about art WAY more than rich people getting richer through art, I agree that this isn't the best prioritization, and I hope that Saito, GAC, and future creators and organizations can change this aspect of the industry.
That's a fair point! Although I don't think the industry needs to shrink drastically to make a positive difference. Maybe we can cut the number of isekai/litRPG series per season by half. That'd be a start. Nobody's gonna miss Scooped Up by an S-Rank Adventurer! Statistically, I bet you, the person reading this, didn't even know that's a show airing this summer.
It'd be disingenuous of me, too, to pretend like exciting anime isn't being made anymore. 2025 gave us Apocalypse Hotel for crying out loud.
Hell, even some of the projects that should be a safe bet are becoming lovably extra! While Demon Slayer might be an incredibly safe, if after effects heavy, production, DAN DA DAN has been doing some top of the class work in terms of using color direction and audio to elevate any given scene.
What DAN DA DAN is doing isn't groundbreaking or experimental by any means, but it does feel like it's pushing the medium forward in its own way, and I hope its burgeoning mega-success inspires other teams to get a little funky with their adaptations (so long as it's not at the expense of their health or well-being).
Even the DAN DA DAN manga is notable for its outside-the-box approach for the shonen sphere, and its success despite that. Although the fact that I still have to measure my praise in terms of shonen boundaries is, arguably, a big part of why we're having this discussion. There's no denying that the majority of shows to blow up in the Western fandom are shonen or shonen-adjacent, and you can further narrow most of those down to works published in Weekly Shonen Jump. That doesn't make for the most diverse diet.
So long as general audiences view anime (and most forms of media) as sources of comfort or distractions rather than art meant to challenge and inspire, these dietary changes will be slow going. But you and I know how tasty anime fruits and vegetables can be, and I'm down to continue to advocate for the "anime clean plate club" if you are!?
Always! And lest I get too down on my fellow Americans, the recent critical and box office success of as weird a film as Weapons proves that we have a sizable audience here that seeks out new and unique art. If anime producers do intend on listening more to international audiences, I hope they realize we aren't a monolith either.
Nobody knows what the next hit is gonna be until somebody makes it, and the only way to discover new audiences is to make different stuff! While there's never been a perfect way to make new and interesting art, people have always found ways to make cool new shit, and I don't think that's going to stop anytime soon.
If I may make one suggestion to the powers that be: disregard everything else I just wrote and keep making elf anime. You've struck gold. Just keep digging and drawing their ears longer.
Steve and Lucas dissect what's really going on in the anime industry and what needs to change—and how elf ears are an indispensable part of the deal.― Steve and Lucas dissect what's really going on in the anime industry and what needs to change—and how elf ears are an indispensable part of the deal. Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the participants in this chatlog are not the views o...
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