How Has Anime Changed Over the Past 15 Years?
Ask John the same question, and you can read his answer.
It is a tough question to tackle, so I felt it was unfair to criticize him behind his back. Rather, I want to supplement his survey of the last 15 years of anime by pointing out some key changes that JP and I (mostly I) felt that was too important to be left out of John’s answer. There are also some erroneous bits, but I’m going to ignore them for now (ie., LOL moe and tsundere in anime predates 1995 kkthx).
Japan, now online: Between 1995 and 2010, cellular phone penetration has skyrocketed in Japan. If you recall Makoto Shinkai’s 5 cm/s, that was a key plot device in the first segment, especially coming into the film as a generation who find their cell phones second-nature. I presume this is how most modern Japanese teens and young adults feel about cell phones. Of course, Japan is this weird place where more people go online and do their internet stuff via cell phones than with their personal computers, so that also means places like 2ch is really a socially important thing today. Let’s not even go into how important 2ch is for anime fans of Japan. And 2ch didn’t officially exist until 1999.
The impact of 2ch on anime is hard to point and cite authoritatively, even if I’m sure we could cite to a bunch of stuff. It is, however, notable as a way for industry folks to gauge and interact with fans. Leaks to 2ch is almost like a marketing tool nowadays. (Kanatagatari’s leak is widely thought of as on purpose, for example.) We have anime and manga made about the Train Man story, which is essentially a national-cultural nod to 2ch. Obviously 2ch gets referenced in anime and manga, too. Still the real impact of 2ch has on anime is on the fans, on the fan industries (read: doujin market), and as a social hub that can make or break a work. Gurren Lagann episode 4 anyone?
And that’s just 2ch. Blogging; Mixi; online stream sites like Nico and Youtube, DTO sites, paid-streams, even the likes of Crunchyroll and foreign-operated licensees all play a notable role in the evolution of anime especially in the latter part of this decade. Pixiv and similar communities fostered growth of talents, even if only in part. It also presented a fan-facing revenue stream, complemented that whole “Comic Market” mentality that, well, we’ll get right to it.
Get yer coterie mag p0n0s here, sorted by fetishes: Doujinshi proliferation has changed the game. (And yes, it’s a game that got a lot more fun to play with the internet.) Of course, like the internet, its actual impact on anime is unclear. We do know that most if not all major fan-facing companies attend the twice-a-year Comiket, which has some kind of gross transaction volume in the millions-of-dollars range, so they know they’re swimming in the same dirty dishwater that they wash their second- and third-rate late-night anime in. Anyways, plenty of people attend Comiket with single-minded purposes in terms of what they’re going to buy–just a few things from their favorite shows or circles or whatever. (Although many buy more than just that, sort of like a “might as well” kind of thing.) You could have a fulfilling Comiket experience if all you did last year was play Touhou games, having seen no anime and read no manga. Or whatever the niche that is popular at the time.
And it’s not just Comiket. The whole doujinshi “industry” is like that. There is a business/legal/fiance side to the doujinshi experience that is quite fascinating, but it’s safe to say that unless you are Rekka Katakiri, you can probably get away with all that wholesale copyright infringement for $$$. Well, in the sort-of-but-not-quite way.
The impact of the doujinshi scene and culture on anime is profound, on one hand, but also nonexistent on another. It might still be exaggeration, but more than a handful of today’s creators came from that thing I called dirty dishwater. Some became actual animators, no less. But outside of shows like Comic Party or Nogizaka Haruka’s Secret or the like (and these franchises address doujinshi do so to ride the wave, the fad, not really for “reals”), just what can we draw from it that meshes the pre-existing anime industry and production process with the still-congealing fandom mashup brewing inside the doujinshi soup?
If anything, it’s one increasingly self-referential soup. Here is a million-dollar idea (I hope it’s already done!): TV Tropes site in Japanese.
Viva la Revolución (sort of): This loose collection of fans who are interested in a wide variety of different things are now brought together (congealing?) under the same banner of “otaku” or “Akibakei” or whatever. Comiket and the doujin movement certified its economic impact. Akihabara is thriving for most of the past 15 years. This economic movement necessarily also means an explosion of content–how else can you monetize more? How can players in the business catch up to the surge? If anything, that was the single, largest change in the landscape of TV anime in the past 15 years. JP hammers home very well the whole explosion of anime on TV in the past 10 years, starting in like, ‘99. This is all thanks to the blossoming of that movement, both economically and culturally. But if there’s a narrative to this post, it is that there is also a technological and business part to it. The business model of anime had to evolve to capture that market opportunity. And there are 4 parts to this:
Viva la Late Night Animu: John’s answer points to one key thing about anime in Japan–there is a clear divide between mainstream anime, which are shows people are familiar with in terms of a broadcast model–TV stations pay studios to make crap, and recoup by ads. Late night anime, on the other hand, is a jointly produced product/advertisement that airs during infomercial slots. Today, more than half of the TV anime we fans look forward to every day are originally aired as late night anime. In reality it’s probably somewhere close to 90%, even if we include the OAVs and films.
I think Wikipedia’s write-up on late-night anime is worth reading, but you can begin here.
Viva la DVR: Because seriously, you had to be some serious hikki’ to stay up and live 2ch-spam while watching your favorite anime (long live anime on Nicovideo). And what would happen then if your favorite animu aired at the same time? Sane people just DVR that crap. Besides, real otaku archives that stuff anyways as it was the practice, long before there were DVRs, so it didn’t hurt too much to air anime late at night. I guess here is where I also mention the internet thing, in regards to DTO, streaming, bittorrent, etc.
Again, the anime evolution story is one that tells how the technology tail wags the cultural dog, which wags the econ/business tail, and back again. I mean, yeah, DVR is not revolutionary by any means, but it was just one of those things that predated 1995 that yet made a huge difference. Just like moe and tsundere (ie., the cultural dog). The explosion of cheap late night anime titles is made possible not only through the increased amount of outsourced animation work to Korea, China, Vietnam and elsewhere, but also through new production methods. And it’s through the flood of cheap, late night, specifically-targeted anime that we get this moe trend at all.
Viva la Cee Gee: Digital inking is one of those production methods that really took off in the last 15 years. The digital ink technique was gaining a lot of momentum in animation production during the mid to late 90s. People traced and painted on cels on top of inked sketches of inbetweening back in the days; that’s nuts, coming from today’s production style. Cel paint is nasty stuff! That’s just one example. Anyways, 2d computer graphics-based animation processes are how everything is animated today, as switched from (now so-called) traditional animation. But what was upsetting was how during the late 90s and early 00s, everybody had to cope with this new technique that was much more cost effective. Even guys like Hayao Miyazaki (who went on record to say he dislike doing it). As with any new technique, people didn’t get it right on the get go. Still, the end product looked passable especially on cheaper shows.
But during that time there was also a movement for computer generated graphics. Remember the new Sol Bianca? People struggled as to how to incorporate that sort of animation into the more flattened, 2d production stuff. The result was a mixed bag, and more works failed than there were successful. If we fast forward to today, full computer-generated animation is used mostly as a cost cutting technique. Off-the-cuff, half of this season’s OP sequences exploit that for animated backgrounds, something I consider as one of the most expensive thing to animate in terms of man-power and talent. Worse, you have problems as detailed by Oshii’s interviews for The Sky Crawlers, where he had to resort to using fully computer-generated models to animate certain things because there weren’t enough manpower to pull of what he wanted to do by hand. This is very different than the American use of computer-generated graphics today, as seen in basically any animated feature film out there, where millions upon millions of dollars are dumped into making that 3DCG stuff look better than ever.
Long story short, the rise of computer generated graphics in anime is one that is driven by the bottom line; the end product suffered because of it. That is, until production processes improved and animators gained experience over the past 10 years to master the technology. Personally I think it is the biggest change in the past 15 years in anime and one that really driven anime in terms of how one show looks differently than another. And it isn’t the Otaking Johnson nonsense either. It’s, again, a narrative about one thing wagging another that wags yet another thing, a chain reaction.
And it might not be unfair to say that, because of this, animators are paid like crap? Just going on a limb here–the bottom line drives wages down, and according to at least one senior animator, because of the change in production process animator wages do not align with what they do today. As such there is a brain drain with people fleeing to game production and other trades. And yeah–
Viva la Console Gaming: Video game x anime x manga was nothing new in 1995. If you read any gamer retrospective of the naughties, they tend to include the Playstation 2 in there, being one of the defining platform of video gaming in the past 10 years. Coming from an anime otaku perspective, it is the unsung narrative that gets lost in all that moe whining and what have you. The Dreamcast and the Playstation (1 and 2) were home to countless franchise crossovers, you wouldn’t even believe. And for the most part it is a lost space for western gamers. But every popular anime title had a game (or more).
But as a gamer who is gamer second to being the depraved moe freak that I am, when I think about today’s video games, I think about Love Plus, that Deathsmiles port, Tokimemo 4, IM@S, and along those lines. When I think of the past 10 years, I think Key games, Da Capo, Sakura Taisen, Xenosaga, Disgaea, what have you. That is a major missing piece in the international discourse on video gaming. I mean, Sakura Taisen is finally making an English port this year, so it’s as good as any time to do it.
If you study the history of eroge, I think it’s worth noting that if Funimation can claim that Shuffle anime sells well…Well, I’m not sure if I can describe how I connect those two dots, but I can wholeheartedly agree that it begins at To-Heart. This is not really a major push in the evolution of anime, but it’s definitely a factor especially within the fan space. I mean, between the properties belonging to Key, Type-Moon, and ZUN…that’s a lot of doujinshi. And mindshares. And if you don’t see the common thread between those three, well, that’s for another post, another day.
Bonus: this also applies as a matter of evolving aesthetics in the past 15 years. Thanks, Playstation.
Let’s also not forget that during the past 15 years, video gaming evolved from a billion-dollar industry focused on hardware sales to a multi-billion-dollar (10B+) industry focused more on software sales! Granted that last bit is more a past-5-years thing, but anime can always use more help to get monetized.
The bubble: The last main thing that John sort of left out and I want to talk about is this so-called bubble. We know that anime consumption in the west was a driving factor to a degree as far as business decisions made domestic to Japan when it comes to anime production. Creatively, they really never catered to the west (there are just a handful of exceptions), but it doesn’t mean they don’t budget in oversea licensing revenue when they contract for committee profit sharing! Let’s end this post with a question: well, do they still?
On the whole topic of the explosion (or EXPLOSION, if you’re Bardiche), I feel like there’s a short period of time in that 1997-1999-ish area where the tail hasn’t quite wagged the dog yet in terms of production capability and economics. The computer technology isn’t quite there yet (and the staffs aren’t accustomed to it yet and haven’t really figured out what to do with it) and the outsourcing is still pretty rough. It’s almost a given then that this lapse between what can be produced and what is demanded gave us those yashigani anime like Lost Universe and Gundress.
This is also why I’m not sure if the big surge in production around 2002 comes from the bubble or as a kind of proof that the system is now working. Or hell, it’s probably both. And speaking of the bubble, it peaked in 2006, which just so happens to be a year when we started seeing a resurgence in yashigani titles like Musashi and Cabbage Love. Perhaps that was a peak in both demand and in production capacity?
I didn’t want to remember Lost Universe D:
But there could have been a peak in production capacity in 2006. I mean, 2006 was a bountiful year, so to speak. 2010 so far feels distinctively less overwhelming than 2009, just as a reference point.
I found it hard to read either article. The one you link to is just some guy comparing old to the new and then spouting of some stuff. Then yours just seems kinda obvious to me. You know, all those things. Well, I guess people who haven’t been with anime for a while might find these interesting.
Probably would have been easier to just write, “It has gotten better.” And leave it at that.
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I think we’re still at the point where the doujinshi side doesn’t contribute THAT much to the production side of anime. The anime industry continues to inject life into doujinshi culture in a more or less one-sided way, season by season.
The imminent arrival of the Black Rock Shooter anime, however, is a bit of a game-changer.
Well, that’s why I said it’s hard to point to something. Black Rock Shooter is not a game-changer as much as Tsukihime was IMO, but BRS is one of a kind…being original and all.
In a way, that doujinshi leap to industry as far as properties go are often the work of one singular player, more so than a trend. Again, it goes to say I don’t know where we can point to anything doujinshi and say how it contributes, beyond the HR aspect.
Doesn’t the explosion in the amount of TV anime being produced almost directly correlate with the big turn-of-the-century anime boom in the US? Personally I got into anime right about then - first run of Evangelion on Australian TV was in the early half of 1999, and I made the transition from Evafag to Animufag around about the end of 1999 / beginning of 2000, fueled mainly by early digital fansubs, which also had a boom at the same point.
It has an effect, that is for sure. The word is that at one point some production relies up to 50% of its income from foreign licensing. But those days are over, of course.
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