Ask John: Were the 1990’s a Bad Influence on the Anime Industry?

Question:
Looking back, were the 1990s a bad influence on the anime industry?

I’ve noticed that a lot of the freedom and creativity of the anime industry has vanished since the 1990s, and I think it’s because a precedent was unknowingly set up where only past popular franchises are heavily relied on as “new, high caliber content” for today’s releases.

I remember the early 90s, and I think about the various titles in various formats that I had to choose from: OVAs, single season series, multiple season series, stand alone movies, movies based on a series. Stories were based off of everything from manga to original screenplays to video games, and there were far fewer re-releases and remakes. But by the end of that decade, anime was more focused on releasing twenty-six episode, single season titles that mostly went nowhere. The 2000s felt like were only trying to push out single season series in fancy collectors boxes, but even those titles were throw away names that people only vaguely can recall today (Trinity Blood, Witch Hunter Robin, Basilisk, Great Dangaioh, Reign: The Conqueror, Weiss Cruz, to name a few).

Today, I see a large focus on new anime being based on what was popular in the 1990s, and sometimes even the 2000s. Evangelion is getting remade into a new movie series, Berserk was remade into movies, Hunter x Hunter is being remade as a new series, Joe Joe’s Bizzare Adventure is being remade, Hellsing Ultimate, Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood, Golgo 13, Guyver TV series, etc. And while none of these titles are bad at all, it feels like companies are unrealistically looking back towards what sold well in the past to remake and re-release today for lazy profit.

It seems like studios are following a particular formula for their titles that aren’t remakes, but are copies of past ideas used in 1990’s anime, like depressed/sexually repressed teenagers in large robots, kids that hunt/capture monsters, and schoolgirls/children with magic powers. I’m sure someone as knowledgeable as you can list off a tremendous amount of anime today that are unique and varied. Yet the exposure to them is painfully less experienced by fans than how we became aware of new titles in the 1990s; and even still, they were all new in the 1990s with very little rehashing of previous ideas and methods of anime story telling.

So, after this long diatribe of mine, thinking that studios are mainly relying on previous money makers as a basis for what is being made today, did the 1990s lead the industry down a path of inevitable staleness and failure?

Answer:
I actually don’t think that targeting the 1990s as a decade that current anime is heavily indebted to, for better or worse, is an inaccurate assessment; however, I do think that context is tremendously relevant to the observation. The 1980s were the anime industry’s “golden era.” Japan was at the peak of its wealth, and anime was finally beginning to emerge as both an influential and more importantly provocative Japanese art form and as a creative art. So a great amount of investment was dumped into anime during the 1980s, resulting in many of the franchises that are still today among the most beloved of all anime titles.The result of the golden age of anime was the 1990s. Although the uninhibited funding of anime production evaporated in the 1990s, the evolution of creativity and sophistication that arose in anime in the golden age continued to develop in the 90s. From the day-glo, poppy, self-absorbed era of the 1980s, the reactionary 1990s saw the rise of consumer internet and information trade & conservatism. From bubbly, free-wheeling 80’s anime like Urusei Yatsura, Dirty Pair, City Hunter, St. Seiya, and Orange Road, anime in the 1990s matured and became more sophisticated: Eatman, Escaflowne, Evangelion, Berserk, Cowboy Bebop, Ghost in the Shell, Sailor Moon, Cardcaptor Sakura. The tone and look of 90s anime is appreciably different from 80s anime.

While the 1980s were a period of wild, unrestrained experimentation within anime, resulting in eclectic productions like Angel’s Egg, Harmagedon, Machikado no Meruhen, Birth, Bobby ni Kubittake, Cool Cool Bye, Ai City, To-y, Robot Carnival, and Honneamise no Tsubasa, the 1990s focused heavily on original productions and adaptations of video games and manga because the light novel format hadn’t yet exploded in popularity. But while the 1990s did produce a lot of exceptional anime, the decade was also responsible for a tremendous amount of really awful anime: Akai Hayate, D-1 Devastator, Wolf Guy, Gene Diver, Red Baron, Mars, Tight Road, Ehrgeiz, DT Eightron, Gulkeeva, Chouja Reideen, Mermanoid, Gandalla. With the contraction of the Japanese economy and the sudden evaporation of a lot of production investment, the anime industry was forced to begin focusing more efficiently on marketable shows instead of eclectic, niche productions. Furthermore, the increasing technological sophistication that the 1990s introduced, including consumer broadband internet and the DVD format, combined with the core otaku fan community that really developed as a considerable consumer market in the mid 1980s all caused Japanese publishers, distributors, and producers to realize that anime production was a viable, significant revenue creator.

In effect, anime production from the 1960s through the late 1990s was funded by external investors but largely supervised by animators. Especially during the golden age many studios and creators had an unprecedented carte blanche to indulge their creative aspirations. But the 1990s were the decade that began a shift away from studio control to producer control. Noticeably from the 2000s onward, as anime suddenly turned into a worldwide home video commodity, the number of TV anime productions grew explosively. The concept of long-running shounen action anime that got their start in the 1980s with Hokuto no Ken, St. Seiya, and Dragon Ball became an established anime production model with shows including Hunter x Hunter, Konjiki no Gash Bell, D. Gray-man, Groove Adventure Rave, One Piece, Fairy Tail, Naruto, Bleach. The harem anime trope that premiered during the golden era and established itself in 90s productions including Tenchi Muyo and Love Hina, likewise became recognized as a reliable, marketable trope that producers could exploit over and over again to generate new shows and more sales. Producers realized during the tail end of the 1990s that children’s “hobby anime” including monster-collecting and collectible card game anime were new genres that could be endlessly recycled, with each new iteration enticing new fans and some amount of left-over fans of the genre.

As the digital era emerged at the end of the 1990s and burgeoned in the 2000s, traditional print sales began diminishing in Japan. Publishers including Kodansha, Shueisha, Enterbrain, and Mediaworks realized that anime could be used to generate consumer interest in more than just children’s plastic toys and manga. So anime became more focused on generating sales and income to prop up revenue declines in other production mediums. Furthermore, observers should notice that the 1990s are now 20 years ago. In other words, today’s working Japanese adults who own homes, have steady jobs and disposable income, and can afford luxury goods like Blu-ray discs, figures, and collectibles are people with fond nostalgia of watching Evangelion, Cardcaptor Sakura, Sailor Moon, Hunter x Hunter, Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure, Ghost in the Shell, and Berserk when they were children and teenagers. So while today’s anime industry can introduce new franchises like Love Live, Hero Bank, Yokai Watch, Majin Bone, Hamatora, Captain Earth, and Soredemo Sekai wa Utsukushii for today’s viewers, the industry can also bring back past viewers by capitalizing on the nostalgia of old, familiar titles and styles.

Anime is and has always been a business, but the era when artists like Osamu Tezuka and and Koji Morimoto, and visionary producers including Eiko Tanaka, and Mitsuhisa Ishikawa and Takayuki Goto could establish their own studios to make the anime they wanted to make is largely in the past. Hopefully Hiroyuki Imaishi and Masahiko Ohtsuka’s foundation of studio Trigger in 2011 serves notice that creativity does still have some ability to determine its own future in the anime industry. In the 21st century anime is a product typically originated by publishers, producers, and executives. Then anime studios are hired to breathe animated life into the concepts that publishers and producers want animated. These days, when animators themselves want to create their own, original ideas, they’re frequently faced with the options of raising their own production funding, as I.G did to produce Kick Heart, or founding their own studios, as Yutaka Yamamoto did to produce anime like Blossom & Wake Up! Girls, and Hiroyuki Imaishi and Masahiko Ohtsuka founded Trigger to produce Little Witch Academia and Kill la Kill.

But veteran fans shouldn’t get too jaded or allow selective recollection color their perspective. Today’s anime fans that were introduced to anime in the 1990s may think that everything seemed new and original back then, and everything now is derivative. But, in fact, much of the anime from the 1990s was adaptations of pre-existing material, and shows that seem highly original, like Evangelion and Cowboy Bebop, are heavily indebted to earlier anime like Mazinger Z and Lupin III. Tenchi Muyo borrowed a portion of its scenario from Urusei Yatsura. Utena was heavily inspired by Rose of Versailles. Fushigi Yuugi bears some similarities to the lesser-known earlier film Like the Clouds, Like the Wind. Rurouni Kenshi’s wandering samurai idea dates back at least to Dororo. Just as new fans in the 1990s saw all anime as fresh, unique, and exciting, today’s new fans see shows like Nobunaga the Fool, Seikoku no Dragonar, and Bokura wa Minna Kawaisou without seeing the roots of Kishin Heiden, Zero no Tsukaima, or Maison Ikkoku within them. Ultimately, the key to appreciating, and more importantly, enjoying anime is being conscious of the past but focused on the present; enjoy the unique characteristics that each anime offers rather than seeing only the redundant, derivative, and unoriginal.