Ask John: Is Moe Anime Just a Passing Trend?

Question:
I’ve noticed alot of shows now rely heavily on moe-fetish elements. But I’ve also noticed that most anime in the late 80’s/early 90’s period was mostly plot driven. I’m not going to argue that there’s still a fair amount of shows aimed for audiences looking for “substance,” but the more mainstream and popular anime today do seem to aim at the rather moe/otaku centric crowd. Although we might again encounter another paradigim shift of shows that take themselves seriously, do you think the advent of these new “moe” anime shows is just a trend?

Answer:
It’s virtually impossible for a foreign outsider to gaze into Japan’s anime industry and fan community and make predictions about the ways that community will evolve. However, taking the history and evolution of anime into perspective, I can’t believe that today’s moe and maid fetish anime represents the final and ultimate evolution of anime as an art form. I hesitate to call moe a “trend” because that moniker suggests that moe is just a temporary fashionable phase in anime. I think it may be more appropriate to call moe an evolutionary plateau in the ongoing development of the anime art form.

Anime of the 1960s had relatively primitive animation, but contained introduced many of the founding principles of contemporary anime. 70s anime may be characterized by the introduction of a sense of scale and melodrama, as represented by titles like Aim for the Ace, Space Battleship Yamato, Rose of Versailles, and Mobile Suit Gundam. The 1980s were a period characterized by experimentation and the diversification of anime. The first true pornographic anime premiered in the 1980s. And the OVA format was introduced in the 1980s, which allowed for an explosion of experimental and intentionally cryptic anime works. The 1990s may be characterized as a period of developing sophistication technically with the premier of Nadia in early 1990, and later revolutionary shows like Tenchi Muyo, Escaflowne and Evangelion that introduced major advancements in technical competence and the intellectual content of anime.

If the 1990s established the anime as a skillful, respectable artistic format, the 2000s have been the decade of fans reaping the benefits of the advances of the 90s. The 1990s established anime as a recognized artistic and commercial force, so in the 2000s the anime industry and the otaku community have literally come out of the shadows in full force, proudly displaying their fascination with two dimensional characters, sexy sterotypes, and vicarious existance. The majority of anime from the 2000s seems to be less concerned with trying to establish its validity and reason for existance, and more concerned with simply satisfying the desires of anime fans and consumers. In a sense, anime of the 2000s seems more overtly commercial than anime of the past. The contemporary sense of anime is that it’s not trying to prove anything; it’s just trying to appeal to otaku.

I don’t know how long the current zeitgeist of anime will last, but I have no doubts that it will eventually give way to a new characteristic tone. I don’t think that the current fascination with moe is a mere trend. I think it’s an actual evolutionary step in the continuing development of the anime art form. On one hand, sometime in the future anime could turn darker and more serious in a reaction to the current tone of anime. I suspect that it’s also possible that anime could develop a softer, more peaceful and dramatic tone as it grows with today’s fans who get older and seek less sensationalistic and hyperbolic anime that suits their maturation.