You knew it was coming sooner or later.
In another blow to the meme of Based Japan, I regret to inform you that anime did not escape the blast wave of Cultural Ground Zero.
H/t to author JD Cowan, whose post last week inspired this one.
To give an example of the “factory line” mentality of creation, let me bring up the ever-popular example of anime. This is a medium that has had its battles with corporatization and creativity for ages, and recently seems to be in a real quarrel with itself trying to figure out its path forward. Right now the industry is in a spot that will define where it goes in the future. But it also still has life in it, unlike in the west.
Currently the anime industry is doing battle with the nostalgia trend the entire world appears to be caught in, delivering new adaptions of classic anime like Spriggan, Bastard!, and even new City Hunter movies (the Spriggan one is made by the JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure guys and is particularly good, by the way), while also carrying trends like moe idols and shonen adaptions on the other side of the spectrum. While some think the industry is at an all-time low, this is partially because there is too much glut and a lot more trash being produced than there once was. Back in the 1990s there was less being produced, but the quality ratio was a lot higher than it is today. If one focuses on the material outside disposable glut, you can still see the spark in the industry.
There’s good reason for nostalgia in anime fandom. This infographic JD found says it all.
Your aesthetic preferences in the above aside, the first two are better character designs because you get a sense of the character’s personality on her face with just one simple look. The facial features are more defined which lends to a resting face that allows personality on it by default. The character is built to have a character, at a glance. The remaining three designs don’t say anything, and can be interchanged with any character to mean anything with what the animator wants to get across.
This makes it easier for the animators and designers, but it doesn’t add more for the viewer.
The progression goes from 80s: good, 90s: perfect to mounting levels of hideous mutation as the fallout from Ground Zero multiplies genetic damage through the generations.
A cursory glance at the 90s and aughts images tells you right away that something horrible happened. The cancer hair alone speaks volumes.
It’s not just my personal tastes, either. JD and I submitted the above image for Twitter’s consideration. Here’s how users reacted:
So much for progress.
In a tragic irony, the pursuit of efficiency took an art form at the height of its powers and laid it low with dull colors, absence of depth, and terminal overdesign.
Another factor I’ve heard from old school otaku is that one guy used to mix the paints for almost all anime studios back in the day. But he had a massive heart attack and had to retire in 1998.
The lack of an apprentice to carry on his craft is just one sad consequence of demographic decline.
Back to JD …
As a matter of fact, one bigger trend that appears to be going by the wayside (slowly) is the corner cutting that once used to define the industry so well. the anime industry has always had a problem with being a content mill at the exchange of focus …
For instance, a Shonen series like Naruto would go on weekly without breaks for years, even decades, suffering in animation and writing quality as oodles of terrible filler content had to be squeezed out while the manga was still going. It led to a rocky experience at the expense of quality. That’s 52 episodes a year with no break, constantly
The wholesale switch from from cell-painted to digital animation was a mistake.
No need to say any more. I’ll just show you.
File under: Portraits of Decline.
These many years I’ve grappled with why I went from a hardcore otaku in the mid-late 90s to leaving the hobby in the aughts and never looking back.
Now I understand why.
I didn’t leave anime. Anime left me.
If you’re fiending for mecha action in the vein of 80s and 90s Gundam, I’ve got your fix right here:
You can see the art style switch directly with Big O. I couldn’t find any source directly saying it, but just from looking at it the first season (aired in 1999) has the cel animation look and the second season (aired in 2003) has the digital color look. Art wise everything else is on point, and the new character designs are well done and fit perfectly in the Dark Deco with tokusatsu influence world that the first season had set up. But the color and shading is all off.
Compare these two screenshots, the first from episode 1 and the second from episode 15:
https://i.imgur.com/cxAfaQ8.png
https://i.imgur.com/yJ4sCk3.png
Both conversations in dark areas and both with a non-standard angle. If you ignore the colors they actually are pretty similar in terms of style and quality. But the first immediately seems moodier and more “lived in” just due to the color mixing.
During the filming and animation of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, animation director Richard Williams insisted on making sure all the animated characters were lit in a manner consistent with the real-world light sources in each shot. This rigorous approach culminated in the scene wherein Roger’s head bumps an overhead lamp that goes swinging, casting random light around the room. The animators put in long hours to ensure the light and shadow on Roger matched the circumstances. Hence the animation term “bump the lamp” which is industry slang for “go the extra mile.”
Not all 80s and 90s anime bumped the lamp, but almost nothing post-1998 does.
Anime as an industry always had standards, and while not all those standards are good (52 episode yearly series going away is a uniformly good thing for everyone involved), the commitment to building a world of wonder for the viewer was always at the top of the list. That is why, today, the only real studios that keep that spirit alive are those still run by talent from the Golden Age, whether it be the ex-Madhouse guys at Bones and MAPPA, or the action lovers at David Productions, or the ex-Gainax guys at Trigger, even Sunrise can still bat a homer every now and then. But they are the minority, and everyone knows it.
About the time anime went digital in the early 2000s was also the era of internet piracy becoming standardized. The ballooning costs mixed with corner-cutting practices and overpriced home media (which STILL exists) caused the suits to make a crackdown on the industry. It is weird how you here so much about reaching the western market now, because in the ’00s, they weren’t even spared a thought, not that this was an altogether bad thing, we want Japan to be Japan, but they didn’t focus on the majority of their own base, instead deliberately aiming for Otaku interests and heavy merchandizing over all. Otaku will buy everything attached to their waifu, they have no ambitions for higher art, and what they enjoy requires little in the way of designers or hardcore animators to tackle. They are the easiest way to get a return on cheap product.
However, that clearly wasn’t enough, as in the 2010s there was an obvious shift made to reach western audiences again. But they did it the right way, by creating the sort of series that would have been big over here back in the day. They didn’t pander. My Hero Academia, One Punch Man, and Blood Blockade Battlefront, surpassed the digipaint era, and reminded the west why we liked anime to begin with. But those were still being made by the above studios, the majority do not hit those heights.
I think what the issue is, is that because of all the craziness of the past quarter century and pandering and appealing too so many different groups, production committees, and demographics, anime has an identity problem. It would probably take a real collapse, and starting from the ground up, to really nail down that purpose and ambition again.
As an aside, one thing I do hope that happens with the rise of ONAs (the most popular anime of 2022 was the Cyberpunk: Edgerunners anime, and it was an ONA) that we can get an explosion of creativity similar to the one that came with the OVA boom. We need a return to the smaller teams of ambitious creatives hungry to tell stories again.
Interesting. This is the first I’ve heard of that ONA term.
There is an interview for Overman King Gainer involving Tomino and a younger colleague (maybe the writer?) Tomino is deeply apologetic throughout the interview, saying that he does not believe that the show achieved the artistic goals that he had hoped for. His younger colleague instead talks about how it’s a fun show with interesting characters and exciting battles. On the one hand I understand that you don’t talk about your show being a failure on an interview meant to hype the show. But on the other hand it was clear that Tomino was approaching the show as an artist trying to express a story with a clear theme and his younger colleague was just trying to get the show to stand out from other mecha shows of the moment.
As a long-time anime fan, I’m more than inclined to agree & disagree.
I think we’ve lost something truly special when it comes to traditional animation. As an artist I love seeing people’s drawings come to life, hand drawn, hand painted on paper & cels be used in a way to create something truly spectacular and allow the artist to be pushed to their limits in how far they can go to bring something alive and it breaks my heart in more ways than one that we’ve shifted away from the traditional method onto more cost-effective ways of creating animation. Granted there are and have been some gorgeous attempts digitally in recent years and examples that have really stood out in how far the technology of animation can go, but we should never forget what the past gave us and how we used it to make things.
When it comes to the design style there’s definitely a drop in quality, I love the 80’s/90’s era and even some of the 2000’s styles but lately as we’ve seen various phases bop in and out we’ve seen the quality in certain styles drop and lack what made anime such a unique thing. Once in a while you will get a series that stands out by the studio that makes it, how it looks and what it’s based on.
But I think the hugest problem anime has now it’s too much of the same thing and very little room to let anything have ability to stand out, it’s kind of why so many anime now falls to the wayside and we’re swamped with the generic types that are factory made and are just there to fill the void.
There needs to be at some point a quality control and decrease the amount of what gets made and keep it to a certain point of what can and can’t be made and don’t be so eager to make a thing and quickly send it out.
Because right now Anime (this thing that once had some degree of vitality to it) is beginning to feel as hollow & artificial as plastic.
Great article btw.
What I can tell you from my experience is that 25 years ago, I had this cool hobby that only my inner circle seemed to understand. Whenever a buddy said, “Hey, I just got my hands on [New Series X], let’s check it out!” we knew we were in for a good time, sight unseen.
None of that is the case anymore, and we’re trying to figure out why. None of the usual suspects: technology, international finance (on its own), globalization, corporatism, success defeating itself, etc. seem like sufficient causes.
Not sure how relevant this is to the 90s, as things were much different then, but the mid and late 80s saw such a surge in ambitious anime projects (especially movies and OVAs) because the immense wealth of 80s Japan produced such a huge glut of capital that even fresh-faced students straight out of art school had little trouble finding some angel investor to bankroll their experimental and highly ambitious animated film/OVA series. Maybe some of those people were skilled enough to continue finding work into the economic depression of the 90s, but then that supply gradually dried up, leading to studios having to take fewer and fewer risks to make ends meet? It might explain some parts of the puzzle.
The Bubble Economy played a role to be sure. Day traders with more money than sense were to the Japanese animation industry of the 80s what the mob was to the New York indie film scene of the 70s.
The economy collapsed, but the anime industry grew regardless, even opening up more and more studios for kids coming fresh out of college.
I wish I could find that BBC report I used to have on my blog, but the YouTube video vanished. It went into detail about how much money they were putting in but receiving little in return (passing the blame onto piracy instead of production committee and executive budgets where they belong) and how insular anime was getting. This was around the time the western bubble popped due to there being a short supply of the sort of thing we liked being brought over at the time. It was pretty clear watching it that the problem comes from the lack of ambition or excitement for higher things.
Perhaps it’s all related: the bubble popping, the post-War high finally wearing off, and the lack of hope for a better future untied from dead 20th century dreams. A perfect storm of a crash, everything hitting at once.
It is not really anything more complicated, than the fact that Japanese companies at this time would take on more and more debt to finance the future projects they’d take on next as standard practice in this era. When you realize that anime studios, as a business model, didn’t make money on selling the anime outside of video releases and merchandising, nor did they actually save money to service that debt they were taking on, it becomes all too easy to see how it came crashing down after a short while in the 90s when Japan started tightening it’s spigot of easy credit. Nowadays, most anime is used in a similar way that Marvel Comics are, material to sell something else the company actually makes money on.
Around what year did all those events intersect?
In terms of the Anime business model? This goes back all the way to the original run of Astro Boy in the 60s. In terms of the credit crunching, and general Japanese economic malaise? While the seeds were planted in the early 80s with rampant speculation in various markets, these chickens wouldn’t ultimate come home to roost until around 1991, if the collapse of the Japanese money supply, and the Japanese bond market are anything to go off of. A collapse that, if you believe the more radical economists out there, the Japanese still haven’t recovered from, economically or culturally speaking, save for becoming allergic to holding debt of any kind.
“You see, whether you can draw like this or not, being able to think up this kind of design, it depends on whether or not you can say to yourself, ‘Oh, yeah, girls like this exist in real life. If you don’t spend time watching real people, you can’t do this, because you’ve never seen it. Some people spend their lives interested only in themselves. Almost all Japanese animation is produced with hardly any basis taken from observing real people, you know. It’s produced by humans who can’t stand looking at other humans. And that’s why the industry is full of otaku!”
-Hayao Miyazaki
I’m stealing that quote.
Careful now Brian, lest a deluge of insufferable and defensive weebs screech at you that you’re taking Miyazaki out of context
A lot of people get mad at the likes of Miyazaki and Tomino talking like this, thinking they hate and look down on the medium they work in. The greater point they are making is that creating art in the animated medium is more important than constructing “anime” as a cliché product. Use the medium, don’t allow the surface level understandings and fetishistic preferences drive consumption and enjoyment. It’s the difference between the creator mindset and the Fanatic mindset.
One of the reasons I would peg the peak of anime from the mid-70s to the mid-00s as sort of ramp up and ramp off points of when that thought process is what drove the industry, even over merchandising and advertising. You still get the good stuff, but it’s an outlier now.
Ask guys like Miyazaki and Tomino, and they’ll tell you they’re animators. The point being, their inspiration came from Disney, the pioneering French cartoonists, and real life. They weren’t trying to be “anime directors.”
Brian, et al.
What about the localizers? @kukuruyo complains bitterly how much they’ve ruined anime.
Did the localizers particularly the English speaking ones also contributed to anime ground zero?
xavier
I doubt it. For one thing, localisation couldn’t have contributed to anime’s decline in its home country, being exclusive to foreign markets. Plus, up until about 2016 or so, when the Death Cult’s grip on pop culture became strong enough for them to openly flout their social and moral agendas in full force, anime localisation was mostly alright. Sure, you had bad dubs, but the worst you would get was some ham-handed hack-job like 4Kids’ One Piece dub (which, incidentally, only happened because 4Kids accidentally got the rights for One Piece in a package deal with Shaman King – they didn’t realise that they were buying a show considerably more risqué than their typical childrens’ fare).
MODERN localisation is terrible, sure, but a large part of the reason why this is so is because anime and videogame localisation is a decent entry-level job for the Woke English Majors churned out by modern universities. This, combined with the general increase in power of the Death Cult, leads to nonsense like the translation actually OUTRIGHT CHANGING the meaning of dialogue purely to turn it into a Death Cult Sermon. (Mind you, some of the casualties of this are trash themselves, like Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid).
If you like Ghibli films (and you should) I invite you to watch “The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness”, a great documentary on the making of “The Wind Rises” (which is a masterpiece).
There is a fascinating clip in there of, I believe, Toshio Suzuki, one of Ghibli’s big three along with Hideaki Anno and Hayao Miyazaki, speaking to the company and informing them that their goal was NOT to make a profit, but to make great films. This would have been the earlly 80’s.
This is the reason Studio Ghibli has operated on razor thin margins since its founding – and is also the reason why Miyazaki, a communist until he became disillusioned with them in the 90’s (perhaps not so coincidentally when he started making his best films), made such brilliant films. Commie or Nott, Miyazaki was always first and foremost an artist. And it showed.
On the topic of anime, at some point I would be interested to get your take on some of the more recent anime that buck the downward trend. Notably Mob Psycho and Spy X Family. Both have some remarkably pro-social messaging.
ONE (author of One Punch Man and Mob Psycho) makes some of the most interesting fiction coming out of Japan. Maybe it’s because he’s such a unique case: he makes manga for fun, and the fact that he succeeded at all is something of an accident. He published his stuff online as low-budget webcomics and eventually an illustrator decided to redraw them more professionally, making the comics most people are familiar with. Maybe this is part of the reason why his works deviate so much from the norm? One thing I was particularly surprised by was Mob Psycho’s outright advocacy for humility, which isn’t something you saw much of in anime even in the olden days.
ONE is remarkable in his pro-social ideals bucking the trend of insular and pandering works growing in the industry.
One Punch Man could have easily been a sneering deconstruction of hero stories and instead ends up being about the importance of both interior and exterior strength and how the former being neglected leads to evil. What would normally be a shallow gimmick comic in the dead western industry turns out to be a clever reaffirmation of classic heroism.
Mob Psycho 100 eschews the ever-popular “eccentric loner vs the braying masses” modern trope by emphasizing relationships and honesty in love as things to strive for. What could have easily been a tired nihilistic screed about selfishness and the importance of being antisocial that smothers the industry ends up instead showing how such attitudes poison and destroy.
It is almost like he takes every bad modern trope in the modern industry and works it out to its logical conclusion, finding out where it all goes wrong and how to walk the right path instead. It is actually quite remarkable.
He just started the series Versus with a new artist, and what is starting as his version of 47 Ronin looks like might still be that, albeit in a different way than originally thought. Regardless, his penchant for wholesome themes and true heroism still shines through.
And yet in all of those, evil is evil, good is good, and he also uses the comic book format to its fullest. Definitely one of the strongest creators in the medium today, Japan or not.
As a long time anime fan, I just couldn’t agree more with this assessment of why 80s and 90s anime will always be far and away superior to modern dreck. Sure, there some exceptions to the rule regarding modern anime like Space Battleship Yamato 2199/2202 and Gundam Thunderbolt, but A) like I said they’re the exception, not the rule and B) those are still old school anime, just with a fresh coat of digital paint.
One thing I will disagree with you on is that while the 90s was very much the apex of anime, so was the 80s. I mean there’s a very very VERY good reason why shows like Zeta Gundam, Super Dimension Fortress Macross, Gunbuster, Bubblegum Crisis, and especially my mac daddy VOTOMS are still fondly remembered, and not just for the storytelling and world-building either. You could definitely tell a lot of passion went into creating the characters for these anime in both the 80s and 90s. From VOTOMS’ Chirico Cuvie’s world weary and brooding visage to the hard rockin’ and hard livin’ attitude of Priss from Bubblegum Crisis, the anime of the 80s definitely knew what it wanted and by God they were gonna stick with it, come Hell or high water.
A concept to keep in mind here is Simpson’s paradox. That’s the tendency of macro-level trends to disappear the closer you zoom in on a sample.
For example, Zeta Gundam from 1985 is my favorite Gundam series. And 2002’s Ghost in the Shell: Standalone Complex is my favorite anime series of all time.
You’re right that the 80s had more than their fair share of classic anime. And while the industry’s output in the aughts tended toward purple goo, we still got some diamonds in the rough. But the 90s saw the peak alignment of aesthetics, story, and character.
So on average, if you have to pick between a random anime from the 80s, 90s, or 00s sight unseen, your best bet is to go with the 90s.
Well now that you mention the 90s being the apex of anime itself, did I mention that Neon Genesis Evangelion is one of my favorites alongside the likes of Iria: Zeiram the Animation, Armitage III, Green Legend Ran, Gundam 0083: Stardust Memory, Martian Successor Nadesico and of course the mac daddy of all super robot epics Getter Robo Armageddon?
So, you are indeed correct that the 90s aesthetic is popping all the capacitors. I’m just saying that one shouldn’t skip on the 80s aesthetic too if we’re talking about banger after banger after banger. Hell, a lot of people consider the 80s and 90s to be anime’s golden age for very very VERY good reasons. Not the least of which is the storytelling involved. Is the 80s aesthetic perfect? Not really, that’s more the 90s we’re talkin’ about.
Also big kudos for you having Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex as your main favorite anime (it’s certainly up there with VOTOMS as my main favorite as well).
I can only speak for myself, but there is a reason I mark the peak of the form from the mid-70s to mid-00s. Usually if you pick something in that span, there is a very good chance of it being worth your time even if the aesthetics or general animation aren’t as strong as they could be. Things like bad color palettes or choppy animation can be overlooked if the spirit is still there underneath the production troubles.
Whenever Discotek announces a new license I don’t know much about, I like to look it up and, should the subject have been created in that time span, one can just about always expect a quality not present in the industry today, at least on a wider scale. The more generic releases from then are lightyears ahead of the more generic ones today. That is most definitely a sign of decline for the industry.
There is an early color anime movie from 1969 called Flying Phantom Ship that is barely over an hour long, and yet it is far more ambitious, spirited, and engaging than any anime film I’ve seen in years. And this is back in the early days of the industry. But when you have folks like writer Shotaro Ishinomori (I don’t have to mention who he is) and directed by Hiroshi Ikeda (went on to be one of the key people at Nintendo) as well as some early animation work from Miyazaki, it’s hard not to see the different between how it was then and how it is now.
I doubt there aren’t creative people there now, but they are certainly not allowed much breathing room outside of a handful of studios.
Man, all this discussion is making me wish I had any exposure to all this cool stuff.