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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