Ask John: Why Don’t Anime Compete for Multiple Film Awards?

Question:
Why is it that, outside of The Wind Rises, anime licensors have never campaigned for an Emmy or Golden Globe Award? It can’t be because their shows are of the genre mold, since that hasn’t stopped The Walking Dead from being a contender. And it can’t be because they’re animated, since Family Guy, South Park, and The Simpsons have all been contenders in that category. So what holds back an anime series or film from being able to compete for those awards?

Answer:
I’ll remind readers that more than one of America’s smallest anime licensing companies literally consist of one person supplemented by freelance, contracted-per-title employees. Promoting a title for awards consideration is expensive and time-consuming, as sufficient promotion to ensure viable award candidacy necessitates plenty of mainstream exposure and plenty of “greasing the wheels,” including letters and sample DVDs to award voters, and a lot of personal goodwill between voters and producers. The few anime that do campaign for year-end awards typically vie for the Oscar because it’s the biggest, most prestigious award, and the award most likely to generate a financial boost for the submitted title. The Emmy awards, for example, are primarily for television programming. Very few new anime titles air on American television, limiting their candidacy for an Emmy award. Furthermore, when licensing contracts typically stipulate a maximum number of promotional/screener DVDs that may be produced and distributed, and the the cost of publicizing anime titles to award voters – just in printing and mailing costs alone – totals so much, entering anime titles into consideration for multiple year-end awards is a daunting and largely hopeless challenge. Outside of America’s hardcore otaku community, anime titles are not well known, and award voters are typically very mainstream, conservative evaluators that gravitate toward safe, popular, mainstream American productions. Audiences may like to hopefully believe that award voters actually consider each title objectively, strictly in terms of artistic and cinematic quality, but such hope is totally unrealistic. In a hypothetical competition between a thousand randomly selected American television viewers presented with South Park and Attack on Titan, the later will never win. Anime is too foreign, too “different,” too obscure to compete evenly against well-known, established American programming that’s specifically designed to appeal to mainstream American tastes. From an outsider’s perspective, the possibility of an obscure, foreign program securing more voter support than a mainstream American publicity juggernaut like the Simpsons, Family Guy, or The Walking Dead is so remote and unlikely that even making an attempt to submit anime into competition is parallel to just throwing away money that could be better spent on licensing additional titles.