It’s About Bitterness, or Yes, Gundams Don’t Kill People, Tomino Does.
Looks like I got called out? I appreciate it, actually. People looking for Gundam ranting shouldn’t be expecting it in the rest of this nonsense I’m writing. Fair warning.
But I don’t really have too much to say on this topic. I mean, companies don’t make anime, people do. Companies just make it possible. After all, a company is just a label for a type of organization, and you need a certain level of organization to accomplish a big task like making an animated TV show or full-length feature film.
But what he says here is pretty much one way to explain why that is, and it’s a good way to look at it. (Well, bitterness is a terrible motivation to withhold information if you ask me).
First thing first: if you worked at any corporate outfit (as in, far most non-mom-and-pop operations) you will sign a nondisclosure agreement. Nondisclosure agreements generally all say the same thing–that you can’t say “secret” stuff about work! What’s “secret?” For example, time-sensitive information that has value (either because fans crave (as in, you can sell it) or because withholding it gives you an economic advantage (as in, if you tell, you lose out)). Obviously that is the first and the foremost reason why anime industry people don’t give out juicy details. This little note is something people take for granted but I think some of the younger anime fans online probably wouldn’t know how pervasive this is. It’s an old-man knowledge.
Second: Anime is really marketed as a consumptive good. And for that matter, it’s disposable and almost fungible. Who made what is not exactly something marketed save for people who’ve made a name for themselves, and so naturally the viewers aren’t peppered with this information.
This is particularly true when it comes to the more grunt-y jobs like in-betweening, marketing, and producing shows. In light of that it’s sort of easy to keep tabs on directors, art directors, designers, actors, composers, and even the SFX guy. (I mean heck, that’s actually important and it’s so rare to see anyone talk about the studio/people that does sound effects for anime.)
Let alone animators.
But, yes, people make anime. The business stuff is interesting and all and it’s amusing to look at how Lawson is sort of two-faced on Bandai Visual, but that gets into TL;DR territory for me. Bottom line is, as long as people make rational decisions based on both their long term and short term needs and potentials, both fans and companies stand to profit.
And bitterness is not a rational motivation.
I guess here’s a hat off to every single fansubber and commercial distributor who bothered to translate credits, because, believe it or not, it does make a difference.
Animé is mushrooms?
Now that’s an interesting concept.
lol fungi joke you got thar.
Corporate secrecy’s a good point. And
Allow me to add my hat to the collection being taken off.
Just a thought, but I’m starting to wonder if the non-disclosure agreement isn’t starting to get in the way of anime companies. I have a feeling that they’ve worked under the same type of mindset for so long, that it almost promotes people to not really care. I mean I was fairly skeptical about the news I was hearing about the companies starting to hurt financially right up to the time Geneon collapsed. Partially because I don’t trust ANN (okay, it’s not just ANN, but I just have that reporter’s skepticism pounded into me for so long that I’ve started to wonder whether I believe anyone) and partially because I wasn’t seeing any numbers (which is mostly due to protecting information from their competetors). I honestly think I would have agreed a lot sooner otherwise.
So to get to my real point and stop wandering off, I’m wondering if the PR firms (or people, because I’m not entirely sure that they’re big enough for firms) for the anime companies might need to take a lesson from Tylenol back in the 80s. And realize that sometimes owning up to a problem is actually more beneficial in the long term than hiding it.
I think it’s more complicated, and it has to do with press coverage, but I’d say that more interaction between the fan and the companies, the better. Given the scale, size, and market for your average anime, it can’t hurt.
I love it when fansubbers put up ALL of the credits - not just the “important” ones like the voice actors and director or producers … or even the artists doing the opening or closing themes.
I’ve noticed that people in North America (the US in particular) have some sort of vendetta against corporate business. This vendetta carries over into the world of anime and manga, sadly. Corporations are evil and only serve the rich and it should be abolished and such. It’s a mantra I hear far too often. What’s worse is when you call these people on it … mentioning that, well, without corporations they wouldn’t have fancy computers (or computers at all, but ESPECIALLY the fancy ones), processed (re: sterilized) food or even the clothes they happen to be wearing (name-brand shoes are always a favorite) they get pissed off and scream about my ignorance or alligience to evil. It’s just MY shit they hate, nevermind their cultish rhetoric.
Yes, some corporations are blinded by dollar signs and, perhaps, produce inferior product in order to keep more money … but for the most part, they realize that REAL quality can add up to more in the bank. American animation seems to be catching on to this, ’bout damn time really …
Then again, what do I know? Leave me to cuddle my sweat-shop-made UFO Catcher and my shitajiki in peace.
Of course it’s not in the companies’ interest to disclose that kind of information, even if it’s not topical.
Let me analogize here. I subtitle stuff. It’s not all that hard - a significant amount of what I do is done, for free, every day. My value-add, as it were, is entirely in the bits that you can’t just look up on the animesuki or doom9 forums. It’s in the response to the company when they ask “why is this particular subtitle not working?” and I can tell them that it’s because it’s in the wrong format, or around a chapter mark, or something like that. I’m not about to write a manual and give it out; the reason that it’s me getting employed, as opposed to the guys who’re already working for free, is because I know this stuff and they don’t. Them not knowing it is part of my stock in trade!
Similarly, I don’t disclose what I make, even though I’m under no contractual obligation to stay quiet on the issue. I don’t want to deal with lowball bids. I don’t want my clients thinking “we can save 5% if we go with this other guy”. I want potential subtitlers to bid so high that they get ignored, or so low that the client won’t trust them to deliver. If they have to guess at the proper price range, that’s good for the established subtitlers, i.e. me.
Whole industry, same thing. Nothing any of the companies are doing is rocket science, after all. There’s plenty of people with the skills necessary out there; if you thought you could do a better job of bringing anime to market, you certainly could. But actually making a business case to do it, now, that’s hard; you don’t know the money you need, you don’t know the contacts, you don’t have the experience to know who you should be talking to and who is just going to ignore you. This makes it hard to raise the capital - who wants to invest in a project where the expected return is “who the hell knows”? Who wants to pay to assemble a team to work on something when you have no idea who can even give you permission to do it? How do you bid when you don’t know the market numbers? How many sales can you rationally expect?
The anime companies stay quiet on these things because it’s a good defense against new companies; if the information just ain’t out there, it’s almost impossible to assemble a plan to raise capital. To a lesser extent it’s protection against each other, though the companies typically know significantly more about what’s going on with each others’ projects than the consumer can know.
Beyond all that, though, there really isn’t an upside to carrying out a detailed dialogue with the fans. For one thing, sometimes the sausage-making process ain’t pretty. It’s hard to say “we agree with you that doing it this way is stupid, but the Japanese licensor has three brain cells and specific instructions on the topic, so there’s nothing we can do.” (Well, it’s easy to say it internally. But if you say it in public, it’s a little embarrassing, especially if you have five other shows in negotiations with the same three-brain-cell moron.) Sometimes it’s just a matter of the most annoying fans being the ones who bother you most often.
I think it’s instructive that no US anime company runs a forum; Manga E’s attempts at the same fared not well. Of course Chris and AoD serves as a good proxy… but in a real sense, having a conversation with the fans is difficult and not particularly rewarding. You run into a lot of “I can’t tell you why” or “I have numbers that I can’t share” or “no, there are not millions of fans who want to see Dokuro-chan, you told me that at the last ten conventions, please just shut up about it already!” That’s not even mentioning the guys who are purely gunning for reasons to pirate your products…
Seriously, is there any actual advantage to being more transparent? I mean, I’m willing to talk about what I’m doing here and there, but I can’t see that it makes the subtitles come out any better…
Sorry to poke into the thread late - just got back from California. ;p
Reason to be transparent? The same reason why people run seminars, sell books and go to get MBAs I guess. Information sharing is a contextual exercise based on relationships. Fans and companies have a certain relationship and some information sharing is obviously good (like, buy our product X when it comes out!) and some obviously not (like running a forum…btw I think Synch Point’s forum is still up, lol). Different industries have different quirks about it, but it’s hard to just say there’s nothing to gain by sharing.
It’s just one of many things about any relationship.
Well, I won’t claim that there’s absolutely no benefit to dialogue with the fans.
But at the same time, there’s also a cost. Not only is it taxing the resources of the person on the company side, but it’s also quite corrosive from a morale perspective - said schmuck is going to get yelled at for absolutely no good reason, and knows it. It’s a lot of added stress on someone who’s probably already a little wound up (after all, they work for an anime company; this is not something a “normal” person does.)
You can ameliorate the effects by having someone whose job it is to be the “face” of the company, but that’s largely self-defeating; there’s little point in having dialogue with a marketer. They’ll know what’s in the marketing material and that’s it - they’re much less likely to be versed in what’s actually going on in production, or to understand various issues a fan might have.
I don’t know, maybe it would work better if it were even more honest and straightforward. There were several times where I would have much enjoyed just saying “you are a rude idiot, please do not ever speak to me again, and preferably commit suicide.” Hell, I even offered to kill one particularly noxious poster. (My price? One taco. Not even a good taco. A Taco Bell taco. And it was a great lark when one day, incensed, my boss stormed into my office, slammed a taco down on my desk, and departed without a word…)
Those considerations are certainly worth thinking about. But a taco bell taco is, well, pretty sad, man. You lived in Texas right? How can you even stoop so low…
I think communications and marketing is easy to be mediocre, and like most things, hard to excel in. So if you don’t have the right persons to do the job it will be expensive.
That was more or less the entire point - that even in the land of good tacos, his life was not worth a good taco. ;p
I was thinking that you must be pretty desperate, maybe you should rethink your analogy a little…