Ask John: Has Globalization Harmed Anime?

Question:
Has globalization helped or harmed anime? On one hand anime has much more exposure than ever before, gaining fans from all over the world. However, this exposure has allowed the rest of the world to see more of Japan’s weaker productions thus reducing the amount of potential fans who were shielded in the past by American distribution companies.

Answer:
Actually, I don’t perceive any way at all that the contemporary globalized popularity of anime has negatively impacted either the anime production industry or the Japanese nation. Globalization has expanded the consumer market for Japanese animation and brought international attention and respect to both anime and Japanese animators. However, particularly the digital era of international anime fandom has proven to be a double-edged sword for international anime fans.

Particularly since the early 1980s, when the OVA format emerged and television anime became more prominent, Japan has routinely produced a spectrum of good and bad anime. Naturally, most of the good programs tend to be remembered fondly while the weaker productions fade into obscurity. During the 1980s and early 1990s, largely the only anime reaching America was anime that individual American fans personally imported and shared within the small, underground otaku community. So mainstream Americans were largely not exposed to most anime of the era, and even the most hardcore American otaku had limited access to only typically better titles – productions that were unique and interesting enough to convince an American collector to import and share. Even the domestic anime industry boom of the mid 1990s through mid 2000s was tempered by natural market conditions. A whole lot of rather awful anime did get officially exported to America during the boom decade. However, with individual releases typically retailing at $30 each, anime like Spectral Force, Dark Cat, Space Travelers, Explorer Woman Ray, Dog Soldier, Genma Taisen, Landlock, Psychic Force, Jinki: Extend, Devadasy, Psychic Wars, Vampire Wars, Gundress, Kimera, and numerous other terrible titles ended up as fringe detritus that few American viewers bothered to purchase or watch.

The advent of digital distribution, first underground digital fansub distribution, then official streaming distribution, suddenly expanded global accessibility and exposure to anime from a minority percentage or, at peak, perhaps half, to suddenly nearly all contemporary Japanese productions. Suddenly, without media format or time delay or acquisition cost restrictions, global fans could tune in to a nearly full representation of all of the current anime available in Japan. Just as immediately, global fans realized that the anime genre is as stratified by good and bad as any other localized cinema demographic. But I wouldn’t call this suddenly epiphany “bad” for the anime industry itself. Anime itself had not changed at all; global viewers just got a sudden, startling, realistic look at the totality of Japan’s anime production variety. The contemporary opportunity to see and confirm that a lot of anime is redundant, derivative, bluntly commercial, or just plain bad has possibly discouraged or alienated a number of international “anime fans.” But if such “fans” were disillusioned and discouraged from continuing to watch anime only because they realized that not every anime is a unique and brilliant masterpiece, I personally question exactly how devoted these “fans” really were to the art form in the first place. Rather than discourage, exposure to a nearly complete selection of contemporary anime should excite and satisfy international otaku and encourage fans to appreciate even more the sporadic exceptional productions that rise above and distinguish themselves from the average.