Today’s post is a guest essay by author JD Cowan:
Anime in the ’90s was being squeezed out during Japan’s economic bubble popping, but it was still being produced in the highest quality possible. Despite the downturn, anime was still growing domestically and abroad. And it was still aiming high.
Where the damage was done was the ’00s. It wasn’t just the switch over to digipaint, but also the misused budgets, the increasing inward turn of projects, the abandonment of the worldwide market (people forget that the first industry crash happened in the ’00s) and the deliberate aim towards otaku to try and combat the explosion of online piracy. By the end of the ’00s, there was little left of what made the industry what it was from the ’70s to the turn of the millennium.
I will put in that I think there was a bump in quality in the ’10s by a combination of studios seeing the writing on the wall amidst the flood of low budget junk flooding the industry through the insanely high number of studios that just pump out seasonal product. Studios like Bones, MAPPA (before their recent employee scandals), Madhouse, Sunrise, the above Khara and Trigger, and some others like UFOtable and David Productions, were able to bust through the noise and deliver top notch shows. They had even managed to work around the digital format to bring back a lot of color and liveliness to the proceedings.
The biggest problem I have with the industry in the ’20s is that is too big for no discernable reason. They pump out way too much trash and disposable generic fluff that no one either watches or buys and is a waste of everyone’s time. Yes, there is more being made than ever before, but if you cut out the filler than you are still left with about the same level of quality a random season would have had back in the day. There are plenty of good and great manga like Green Blood or Heart Gear that would have made for perfect anime, perhaps even in the recent ONA format that would allow for more creativity in expression, but they simply aren’t being adapted. Instead, every season is flooded with the same generic product, which has been a problem since the mid-’00s.
Related: Anime Ground Zero and The End of Gainax
I feel like there is a lot of talent in the industry that isn’t given enough time to shine because of how a lot of it is setup for a climate in the industry that no longer exists. They need to change their model and focus to adjust with the fact that it’s not the ’00s anymore, and realize a lot of those changes were ill-advised even at the time.
When I look back and watch even mediocre OVAs from the late ’80s and ’90s, I see a level of ambition in most of them that is not being as fostered today as it should be. Instead, it feels like a bunch of studios scrambling to stay afloat so they can put out more generic product. What is the point of that?
Of course, at least the Japanese HAVE an animation industry at all. Most of the West threw theirs out ages ago for low IQ fart humor and generic feminized adventure product stained with Current Year tropes.
The only real solution I see for animation as a whole is to dial it back and allow creators room to breathe. The anime industry getting rid of yearly series that run 52 weeks out of the year is uniformly a good thing. Patience and allowing studios time to focus on making the best animated creation they can will lead to both better animation and better end results. Of course that means the audience needs to also adjust their expectations of no longer getting constant product pumped out to meet insatiable demand, but it has to happen.
Animation as a whole is not in the best of states, and it hasn’t really been since the 20th century ended, but we can make steps to finally improve it. We just have to finally change our own unrealistic expectations of said industry.
Ed. – In response to commenter Rudolph Harrier, JD adds:
OVAs had the backing of sponsors and production companies to cash in on the then-new home video market to offer original product. Unfortunately, it’s mostly turned into trading card style “exclusive” episodes licensed out to different markets which sometimes even makes them hard to license out over here (the My Hero Academia OVAs, for example, have still not released over here and MHA is the biggest anime property going right now), they’re never really exclusive or original ideas anymore, which is a shame.
The ONA could theoretically be a venue for experimentation, or at least a way to allow less obviously pandering material the light of day, but even the best examples, like Spriggan, Pluto, or Cyberpunk Edgerunners, were only allowed to exist because they are already part of big IPs. Right now it’s just being used as another market to tap when the TV airwaves are full, which, again, is a shame.
Recently I’ve been looking into older animation and seeing how all over the world there were inventive projects like Heroic Times, Felidae, Son of Stars, or the Japanese OVA/movie boom, all the time back when hand painted cells were common, makes you really appreciate how much could be done that has been seemingly forgotten thanks to the format change since they were abandoned.
The best competition for Disney was once an ex-employee making a mythologically-tinged adaption of a children’s book out of a garage, and now it’s another corporation copy-pasting outdated Shrek humor on the next CG winking “comedy” mascot.
Animation has so much potential, and now it’s just this. It’s disheartening.
Hopefully we get more independent projects like Lackadaisy going, because it’s going to be up to indies to bring that spirit back.
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Another issue is that expertise within the anime industry is being lost. It used to be that junior animators would sit down with experienced animators or episode directors and be shown their mistakes and taught how to improve, but nowadays it is increasingly common for isolated animators to be hired off of the internet and then sent orders to fulfill without anyone to mentor or guide them. A lot of specialized skills like mecha or cars or creature animation aren’t being passed down, hence why their increasing replacement by 3D CGI.
True. The same fate befall the craft of cel paint mixing. That knowledge wasn’t passed down when the master retired, so it’s now a lost art.
I took an animation history class last semester and it described the resources Walt Disney poured into his studio to help his animators. The live drawing classes with people and animals alone would be an unthinkable expense today, but Walt understood the power of his artists. He made a bunch of money but he also spent a lot of money, walking a fine line financially and almost going bankrupt during the 30’s and 40’s.
With the pseudo-perception of a fleeting high demand market share, anime production had to become streamlined and cheapened. There is no time to teach someone their mistakes when impossible deadlines are looming over your head. This goes both east and west. I find it funny people are making videos again about the sweatshop workplace environments in the manga and anime industries. We’ve known it for years, but the invisible hand of the market never corrected those problems. People kept consuming to get their hit and the industry kept humming along.
To answer JD’s question about ‘why’ the high volume of anime even though the quality suffered. I think back to a video I once watched about the making of Treasure Planet, the subsequent fall of 2D animation at Disney, and the rise of 3D. I was shocked to learn that while 3D is more expensive to make (or was), it can be produced much faster. Disney was playing the law of averages with this hoping that at least one of their movies would stick and pay back the loss on the others that they would make. I wouldn’t be surprised if the anime industry was following a similar premise.
My hope is Japan realizes they don’t need to drown us in anime for any market dominance. The failure of American entertainment has already convinced us enough that anime is a way to go. Japan can have the rare luxury of taking their time to deliver smash hits on their own time and we will keep coming back because they can make genuine entertainment.
I too share a huge gripe about the cheap garbage that is coming out of Japan. I’m tired of seeing 80% of manga being sold to cater to the horny, lonely, basement dwelling weeb. Same goes for the anime being made. I’m at the point where I rarely touch any new stuff. It’s a miracle I found a new manga to read last year. It’s called Colorless. I picked it up for a few reasons: 1) the art style is awesome 2) It was the only manga on the shelf without an anime adaptation – not exaggerating. The second reason makes Colorless novel because it feels like they’ll make anything into an anime. I’m sure in time it will be animated (if not by me, someone else officially), but for now, I’m enjoying it while I can.
If all else fails, I’ll just need to hit up places where indie manga thrive like Webtoons and such.
A lot of folks will tell you it’s a good thing there’s more anime/manga than ever before, but few will admit that most of it bland and formulaic at best. Right now there is a new revenge manga named Kagurabachi running in Shonen Jump (yes, the same magazine as Fist of the North Star and Dragon Ball) that is currently one of the best selling series in the magazine due to feeling so fresh despite its classic premise (it even got licensed to come out here so early because of rave reception overseas), but its rankings in the magazine itself have been pretty abysmal. When the top selling magazine in the industry can’t even support an up and comer with great potential, even as a megahit like My Hero Academia is ending, then that doesn’t dispel the sinking feeling I’m getting that the Japanese audiences are retreating into safe corporate formula over fresh approaches to tried and tested ideas or anything actually new.
To be clear, I don’t think they’re anywhere near as bad off as we are here, but I am seeing a lot of cracks in the foundation that have had many years to be patched. That they haven’t been even addressed almost certainly means disaster sooner than later.
That said, I am happy to give recommendations to anyone who is interested. There is much good still being produced that simply isn’t getting the focus it used to thanks to how flooded the industry is these days.
“A lot of folks will tell you it’s a good thing there’s more anime/manga than ever before, but few will admit that most of it bland and formulaic at best.”
This is partially how I feel about the indie era we are in. It’s nice artists have an easier time making good art and getting it out there, but finding good art is like searching for a needle in a haystack. It’s a chore.
In line with your comment, more isn’t always better. There are downsides to unlimited options.
There’s barely anything being made that interests me which is why I’m at the point where I’m trying to develop the skills to make the entertainment I want regardless if others like it.
In 80’s anime you often see perspective shots done just for the sake of perspective shots. The classics are:
1.) A character runs down a stairwell and the camera follows, requiring the angles of the stair to be redrawn on every frame.
2.) Similar to 1, the characters are running down a hallway and the camera starts behind one character but rotates to the front.
3.) A car chase (or just characters driving) where the camera rotates around the cars.
4.) A character does a dramatic pose and the camera rotates around him.
I remember Cat’s Eye and Creamy Mami doing this a lot. There’s one shot in particular near the end of Creamy Mami when there is a long conversation in a car with the producer and the camera smoothly changes its angle five or six times for no reason other than to liven up the scene visually. Project A-Ko doesn’t quite do this because the backgrounds are too detailed, but they still change the angles on the characters as much as they can while doing cheats like using speed lines to obscure the background or simply rotating and panning the image (A-Ko and B-Ko’s fight at the midway point is a great example of this.)
In modern anime you will see them use similar animation techniques on the characters if they have enough money for a big fight scene, but the backgrounds will rarely change and any cars or robots will ALWAYS be CG. Of course, that’s preferable to the west where any “serious” animation will be entirely CG. Though if you want to see the last gasp of the west trying similar things, look at Titan AE by Don Bluth. Sure much of the movie is CG, but the characters (minus the evil aliens) are all hand drawn and they do some pretty crazy things with rapid camera movements that still look great.
What’s interesting is that you can see newgrounds animators and the like still trying out these techniques, though obviously with a one man amateur job the overall quality is going to be lower.
You see this trick in a lot of old 8 and 16-bit Japanese video games, too. The format they were in caused then to think outside the box in how to present what they wanted to present. Parallax scrolling and weird angles were very common, and they gave everything a unique look.
One perk of the ONA format: it would seem to lend itself to some kind of Neopatronage model more easily than OVA, right? I’m trying to envision some sort of scenario where creators crowdfund animation projects and then get an established, competent studio (Japanese or otherwise) to take on a contract to bring it to life. Or the other way around: studios pitching ideas, and animating the ones that generate the most interest/support. That would be a great way to cut down on the glut of trash tier anime, right?
Aside from reducing the risk of will-people-buy-this-or-not inherent in the OVA format, it would seem to be a potential way for likeminded fans to see the stuff they want animated get made, in a way that was never really possible before. All of this would work best if decoupled from a specific platform, I suppose, as ONA seems to have the connotation of anime on large streaming platforms like Netflix, etc.
Studio Trigger funded the Little Witch Academia second movie via Kickstarter some years back so it’s possible something like that becomes more commonplace.
I keep hoping more mangaka will use the online comic sites to make their own unique series (possibly even a staff like Clamp) and then use that to parlay it into a crowdfund for their own ONA project. I honestly think that approach has legs. With the advent of AI translation, they can even get overseas audiences interested as well. There is a lot of potential.
I’m generally pretty downbeat on AI and modern tech, but thinking over this a bit, I can see how there’s potential to actually harness it to make good art and empower creators, so perhaps I should try being less negative.
I can still find manga I want to read, though, whereas I haven’t seen an American comic that appealed to me in years. Oh wait, I enjoy the IDW Sonic the Hedgehog. So there’s that. 😀
The ONA is a short-term solution at best. In the long-term, I believe that the entertainment industry as we know it now is going to go extinct, and it’s going to be brutal.
If LLMs continue their current pace of development (and right now the biggest bottleneck is simply feeding these systems more and more data to fuel that development), then it’s only a matter of time until you will be able to have an AI generate entertainment for you that’s tailored to your specific tastes. I just can’t see any studio being able to compete without attempting to use the technology themselves, or trying to have it outlawed entirely.