Marketing Otaku Anime
An alternative take at the eternal struggle of copywriting (read the comments there!) anime for an American audience–the shoppers of America’s big-box heartland–is that it really doesn’t matter. At least not in the way fans think of it.
Let’s take a well-known import of Japanese media in America–wacky Japanese game shows in which the contestants are battered and embarrassed by a barrage of otherwise unimaginable activities if not for the fact that somebody out there had to imagined them first for it to exist. It’s on par with weird sex videos from Japan in terms of sheer otherworldliness.
It’s not unexpected for the people who gave us the high school girl that asked for nobody other than aliens, time travelers and espers to befriend her, perhaps. But the subtlety of that concept is already a mile beyond the veracity an one-liner could express, with the likes of “octopus porn” or “a story of love, dreams, and perseverance” or “watch silly Japanese get dunked in goo!”
Let’s re-examine this divide between works that are layered and works that are less so. Author gave us some other examples which goes to the heart of the matter. For instance, Manabi Straight, he says, is a political thriller. I’m in no position to disagree, having claimed it being one of the best demonstration of the Kingdom of God I’ve laid eyes on. Religion and politics! (No wonder nobody licensed Manabi Straight.) These forbidden family dinner topics would hardly be the first thing one expect to grace the cover of such DVDs, I admit, but it’s there if you choose scratch deeper.
But what is probably a better example is Simoun. It is light years beyond the likes of Divergence Eve’s “come for the tits, stay for the sci-fi thriller” fishing. It’s a show where you don’t need yuri goggles to see the yuri, but the yuri is actually a lie. It’s the kind of anime that even a 500-word post would fail to really get to the heart of what makes it a great story to a wide range of viewers. It’s unreasonable to expect 1-liners to capture even a fraction of Simoun’s glory.
Perhaps another way to think is that copywriting is just some cheap marketing. It’s like the barkers that work out front of strip joints and gentlemen’s clubs. Do we expect people to purvey works that pander to immediate gratification or through thorough research, sampling, and the testimony of critics, fans and friends? In the case of most anime, it’s both. But copywriting obviously is just one form of marketing, to aim for the former. All this is to say, if we take the frame of mind of a fan we would naturally feel ill towards copywriting, like how some feminists may feel ill towards women who work those joints and the related forms of degrading marketing.
But when it comes to anime, there are notable exceptions–when a show it’s constructed with a certain disposition in mind. Say, Excel Saga? Divergence EVE? Or Simoun?
If I want to make just one point, it would be that otaku anime (unlike, say, Saiunkoku Monogatari) aims at a specific audience who are familiar with the work pandering to them. It isn’t to say no one else would like otaku anime, those outside of the target audience, but those kinds of shows generally dispenses the pleasantries and instead exercise their art within the difficult-to-define space within that genre. It’s like saying a $15 bowl of ramen is the best ramen you’ll ever eat in NYC–how do you justify it? And how can you explain it with a simple 1-liner? It’s extremely difficult to do copywriting for a general audience for a niche work, that’s just how it is. So why fret?
And we see that not all anime does this. Excel Saga is a good example of a gag anime that has some universal appeal but is very otaku in terms of its target audience. People ate the humor and the gags up, but to understand its full excellence requires an appreciation for the numerous in-jokes that most people just would not understand, let alone finding them an important addition to their Excel Saga experience. It’s a step up from Divergence EVE, which has this fanservice factor, a candy shell if you will, that dresses something probably more substantive, filling for the audience that enjoy that sci-fi space genre. I mean, that’s true for a lot of anime that use fanservice as a way to get people interested, to try out the show in the first place.
Simoun, ultimately, is the kind of show that plays to this marketing limitation. There’s no point trying to say how awesome a show is just on the cover. It can cite to reviews (or better yet, awards it won…LOL) but for most anime in America, it’s a crap shoot. The only thing Simoun got going at first is just the very natural girl-on-girl covers with all the naughty poses and body positions. It is the only barker speak Simoun has. Those quick, tender kisses and flowing tresses might have a certain appeal, but I don’t think that’s what makes the show worth watching.
At the same time, fans of the show may read and see those things and think “hey this is not (quite) what the show is good for!” And they would be right. However I think the series itself is a bait and switch, so when that marketing speak reaches the eyes of someone who is curious but ignorant, it actually accomplishes the proper effect. The misleading copywriting actually sets up the lies. It is a trap.
And Simoun is better off with its traps, I think we all can agree. When the traps are not so good, that’s when copywriting becomes misleading and people whine and all that. Worse, you get the people buying something totally misleading!
It would be perfect to wrap up this post with some copywriting from Simoun’s R1 DVD release, but the blurbs on the DVDs read more like, well, honest-to-goodness plot summaries. All that is to say, I think, whoever wrote them actually saw the show? It’s a wild guess, but in the end fans do the best at promoting the shows they love, right? Modern technology transforms copywriting via things like customer reviews might work better!
Gonzo Is Snarky
People knows about fansubs even in Japan. Industry people. I recall once such instance when the ROD TV core creative team was fielding questions @ Anime Central 2004. I believe was Hideyuki Kurata-san who asked the panel audience “how do you know about ROD the TV? It’s not in the US yet.” The answer was not awkard, and IIRC someone in the audience gave a very good, short, snappy summary of the nature of fansubbing. We all nodded to concede its impropriety yet its necessity, even our creators.
The reason I thought about that was watching Gonzo’s Welcome to the NHK, I realized the OP used 3D text that dropped shadows and ran on chroma key for overlaying and underlaying. In the scene where various women walked past the screen it was pretty obvious what was the trick–the uniform colored background probably made it easier. That was the key. “Why the uniform background? Was the text applied after animation”? And as a rule of thumb, it was–that’s how we can get “clean” OP and EDs. “Wow, that’s like something you can pull off in aegisub if you spend enough time doing it.” Click. Wasn’t this something we saw in Shinsen’s Speed Grapher subs? How they managed to string the song lyrics into the slideshow ED with a uniform background color?
Could the two be possibly related? They are both Gonzo shows… I mean, it is probably more likely that whoever was doing the credits just went to town and did a great job “adding” to the opening animation. More importantly it was probably coordinated, as the flat BG was kind of necessary for post-processing. Or it just could be someone trying to “fix up” a poor production? I don’t know.
Put Your Hands to the Skies and Say…
Or in this case, scream CUZ THEY GOT THE KARAOKE TRACKS!
NHK ni Yokoso anime’s most notable feature for me is its ending song. The opening animation is delightful, too, but it isn’t nearly as entertaining. I suppose they only thing more they could have done is actually draw a baby. (That might be a little too creepy for some of us, though.)
Sometimes it’s just what you need after realizing how much smiliarity you share with the average NEET hikikomori.
Oh, yeah, I need romanji lyrics too! Hook a brother up yo.
[Update +8h]
Momotato = Awesome, and Great.
Love Languages For Lonely Losers
Living from moments of affirmation to the next, challenged by the harsh reality of both that they are rare and they are sometimes colder than what you’d expect, I return to question how I live as a fan, and as a person.
That’s what really pushed a story like Welcome to the NHK to my mind’s fore. The manga takes a much more worldly and humane road. Do people even think about having your parent walking on you while masturbating? Or rather, they probably don’t do so out of a positive force, but out of fear. That’s something I can’t really relate to well, but maybe you can tell me just how often this happens.
But we need not to go there–that’s just funny hijinks which makes Welcome to the NHK an edgy story that may be relevant to our interests. What is definitely relevant to mine is how it talks about the NEET/hikkikomori generation. How luxury provided us with escapism. How while hard work pays off usually, but laziness pays off now always. Or for some people, the journey to find your soul is long and tedious. Idealism battles realism, and unfortunately sometimes one has to die. Or sometimes it is just a sad fact of life: not everyone can make it out there. Rejection is a part of life.
In as far as generally emo people are difficult to confront and communicate with, anime can be a powerful platform to communicate something. Real life caseworkers for hikkikomori patients do rely on some of these common topics like video games and manga to start knocking. Persistence to push them to face the music works sometimes, too. It’s about communication, either by charm or by force.
Originally I was going to talk about love languages, but this thread of thought bridges the divide from literary to the literal. The sad fact is that a large number of Japan’s youths are locked up. It happens for all kinds of reasons which I won’t get into here. Be it a middle school in Hokkoaido or Neo Venezia on the Planet Aqua, there’s a connection. It’s about the uplifting message of humanism.
KOTOKO said so as much when she was asked. No man or woman is an island, and it’s hard overcoming that oppressive lie, that gap between what you think it ought to be and what it really could be. People like her puts that kind of emotion into the work they produce. It’s sympathy, compassion, love.
And just in so many ways love can express itself, we are not going to see what we are not looking for. If your definition of love is narrow, you are going to miss a lot of love speak. If you can’t sympathize, you will have problem understanding a lot of love speak. If you can’t love, then there’s nothing to be said. In as much reality is cruel, it’s important to hold onto some trace of innocence and ideals to keep you living like a person who can speak love.
Waves of Anime Porn Make Way to Foreign Shores
As droves of fans come into realization of anime’s pornographic nature, fundamentalists’ and conservatives’ fears materialize.
“I never knew,” a desperate mother of three boys, ages 17, 16 and 12 exclaimed. “I thought they were just like any other cartoons on TV, you know, where a cat chases a mouse or maybe some superhero fights crime. I never realized that would make my boys turn into perverted monsters.”
While Omonomono withheld the family’s name at their request, Professor Mark Jones, who teaches Japanese sociology at the Kurel University of Long Island, described this family as something we will see more of as anime becomes even more mainstream in America. “Anime is like a gateway drug. While it is fairly ordinary and it is just like anything else on TV, it decreases your resistance to other two-dimensional forms of pornography. When mixed with pornographic elements, anime porn can be awfully addictive and destructive,” Jones remarked.
“What’s worse,” Jones added, “is that often anime that, at first glance, seems innocent enough, can embed sexually-charged messages in which may increase the tendencies for minors to seek out pornography.”
It is no surprise, as well, that Japanese import of DVDs and, especially anime and anime porn, have been on the rise. According to the Japanese External Trade Organization, the number of Japanese anime DVDs exported to the United States has increased from 1.5 million in 2001 to 12 million in 2005. To make some sense of the numbers, Jack Chabowski, a manager from a US-based anime distributor, noted that one of their top-selling title, Pirate Jazz, sold a net total of 1 million units since its debut in 2003 as of mid 2005. “There must be a lot of horny Japanese people in the US,” he commented. “Anime DVDs imported from Japan are almost always in Japanese only, and you need to know Japanese to understand them.” Chabowski further commented that a Japanese anime DVD “usually cost twice to three times as much as you would pay compared to a domestic release of the same show.”
What’s more, anime fans in the US have long since realized the pornography problem associated with anime, and also “manga”–Japanese comics. Several locales in the US have at one point decided to ban certain anime and manga, because of its outright pornographic content disguised in innocuous “how to draw” books or in shows aimed at teenagers.
“Yeah, it’s all porn, or porn-like material that meant to tease without actually showing anything, so you can catch it on public TV,” commented one experienced fan who goes by the nickname “Crack.” “It’s all porn, really,” Crack continued. “Some of the shows are meant for little kids, so it’s hard to see what’s pornographic about it–but plenty of adults jerk off to those children’s TV shows.”
The fan response is not uniform, that said. Plenty of people insist that anime is no different than any other animated form of storytelling. Many vendors as well chose to limit the goods they sell to non-pornographic materials or not to focus on this explosive new market, not giving way to their bottom line. Others mock in defiance at the possibility of anime porn gaining serious traction in the US.
In today’s society where violent video games get the blame for turning teenagers into suicidal homocidals, what can parents do to watch out for their children? Some parents are in plain paranoia, and they are rightfully fearful–after all, they’re running out of things to blame. Others turn to conspiracy theories. One such person, a Japanese who faces the same problem in his home society, commented that the media cartel in Japan is bent on turning the world into passive sheep, who escapes reality and into the fantasy world, addicted to anime, manga, and pornography. The irony is thick as his writing is currently adopted into an anime TV show in Japan right now.
