Ask John: Why Hasn’t Original Anime Creation Exploded in America?
Ask John:
Question:
As a longtime anime fan, I must break the question. Surely, there is Good World Entertainment, the guys behind Voltron, and were the heads behind Avatar and Korra, Rooster Teeth, who are responsible for RWBY, The Boondocks, and even Netflix is aiming for anime production but…. One big question remains in my head. What hasn’t gotten the US, let alone the western world to have a big blowout explosion of manga and anime creators since the anime boom of the 1990s? Surely, such a wave of inspiration would have gotten tons of artists, writers and drawers, to have established its own industry, at least an underground scene, wouldn’t it?
Answer:
I’m not remotely any sort of graphic artist nor do I even know any animators, so I can propose a theory based only on my limited personal perspective. Anime has certainly now achieved the mainstream American recognition and acceptance that American fans of the 1970s to 90s once dreamed of. And naturally one may expect that the relative popularity of anime would inspire Americans to create their own productions. American efforts to create original manga burgeoned in the underground, independent comics scene in the early and mid 1990s then became a publisher-based effort in the early 2000s. But those efforts have waned while a trend of American created “anime” has never really launched. The reason seems to lay at the feet of two major principles: culture and economics.
Setting aside etymology for a moment, anime has always been an art form that originated in and continues to develop out of Japan. Although every human culture recognizes stylized caricature and art, Japanese society is uniquely receptive to “cuteness” and the distinctive design of anime, typified by human body proportions but disproportionately large eyes and mouths, and vividly bright coloring. In recent years China has been ramping up its co-production development of anime with Japan, outputting shows including Hitori no Shita, Bloodivores, Enmusubi no Youko-chan, Evil or Live, and RoboMasters. But China and its popular contemporary anime-esque productions including Zhen Hun Jie (Rakshasa Street), Quan Zhi Gao Shou (The King’s Avatar), and NanoCore seems to be the only country outside of Japan that is developing its own domestic anime-style industry. In 2003 Korean director Moon-saeng Kim released his expensive anime-inspired flop Wonderful Days. The heavily anime-inspired movie was Korea’s most expensive animated film ever made, with an estimated $9,750,000 budget that approached 11 million with publicity and distribution costs. But during the film’s two-week Korean theatrical release, it earned only 1.9 million. British independent animator Paul “OtaKing” Johnson has spent a number of years creating impressive 80’s style anime-inspired adaptations of Star Wars, Doctor Who, and Street Fighter. His work has brought him plenty of critical acclaim but little advancement into bigger-budget professional animation work. Producer Adi Shankar’s recent Castlevania animated mini-series can easily pass for “anime,” and seems to have been moderately well-received. But it doesn’t appear to have been successful or influential enough to encourage further similar productions.
While anime is more widely distributed, recognized, and understood in America now that it ever has been before, it’s still a very niche product. By a wide margin, American consumers still prefer American-style animation, thus explaining why Disney’s Frozen is tremendously more successful in America than Makoto Shinkai’s Kimi no Na wa, the most successful anime film ever released. Cultural demographics, in part, explain why small, indie-darling animation studio Laika produced the medieval Japanese animated film Kubo and the Two Strings while the powerhouse rival animation studio Pixar creates Coco, a film based on Mexican lore. Culture also influences the development of aspiring animators. American art schools notoriously concentrate their curriculum on “classical” forms and traditional methods of animation. Japan, on the other hand, has colleges and technical schools including Kyoto Seika University, Kyoto Gakuen University, Nihon Kogakuin College, and Tokyo Anime – Seiyuu Senmongakkou that aggressively encourage and teach Japanese style anime production.
When American art students aren’t being encouraged to develop foreign-inspired visual designs and animation styles, and American consumers express limited interest and support for Japanese style animation, there’s obvious reason why so few American creators aggressively venture into fostering their own “anime” productions. Animators need to support themselves. They get employed to work on commercial productions that market to mainstream American tastes. Note that even in Japan, the home of anime, launching an anime career without starting in college is oppressively difficult. Makoto Shinkai famously quit his job and cloistered himself in his apartment for six months to create his award-winning short film Hoshi no Koe, which launched him into eventual stratospheric success. Independent artist Soubi Yamamoto likewise achieved success and acclaim through dogged personal persistence. But over the past ten years, if so few breakout independent animators have established themselves even in Japan, where anime is most viable, achieving similar success in America must be exponentially more difficult. Creating animation requires extensive effort and, moreover, resources. Americans have tried before. RIAP (Running Ink Animation Productions) launched in 1991. White Radish was founded in 1994. But neither studio was able to sustain itself for more than a few years. More recently animator and director LeSean Thomas has found that working with Japanese production studios including Satelight & Yapiko Animation has been more fruitful for developing his vision of original anime than working with American-based studios. Likewise, American musician Porter Robinson turned to Japan’s A-1 Pictures to give his music video “Shelter” the authentic anime design he wanted rather than rely on an American studio. Even the currently popular Voltron: Legendary Defender, inspired by Toei’s 1981 series Hyaku Jyuou Golion, is actually animated by Studio Mir in South Korea.
From a consumer’s perspective, anime is definitely more widely acknowledged in America now than it’s ever been before. But there are far fewer American companies distributing anime in America now than were in the early 2000s. The American public nowadays recognizes what anime is but still doesn’t widely consume or financially support anime. 2D animation is increasingly marginalized in America as consumer tastes gravitate toward 3D CG. No American production studios are currently making and distributing anime-style animation. So one could argue that the market is ripe for amateur artists to pick up the slack and fill the void by aggressively promoting their own community of original American anime art. But the absence of such an underground, burgeoning American anime production industry suggests that there’s just not enough market support or interest to encourage and sustain potential animators. America has finally acknowledged anime, but America now seems content, from both a consumer & viewer perspective and from a commercial development perspective, to leave anime as a Japanese commodity, which explains why Netflix is commissioning dozens of anime productions from Japanese studios instead of investing in more productions like Neo Yokio. When inspiring animators see that there’s no market interest in or support for their original anime-influenced creations, I can sympathize with the reason why American artists aren’t aggressively trying to launch their own anime industry in America.
Related Posts
About The Author
john
Add a Comment
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Not to hijack…. But as my name entails, I do the hard truths and dirty work. Time to hit the ground running for me. Not for the feint of heart or for the more easily offended and utterly intolerable and ignorant. No apologies from me on these.
In my perspective, anime-anything creation hasn’t really exploded in the USA because of a few factors I can name off the top of my head: Cross cultural differences, differences in the values of actual creative works and sequential arts, and the inference of political, religious, and even corporate interests.
I’m not going to lie and say that the United States of America is the absolute worst country as of date to be a comic book author/artist and animator, and in some fields, a video game creator. Aside from some absolutely touchy current topics that I will not get into, even in my heyday of high school seeing the anime boom of the 1990s wash into a stream into the 2000s, trying to make sequential art in this country and do it successfully without the pitfalls is a Herculean task if you are a citizen of the United States.
For starters, sequential art is the United States’ (and Hollywood’s) whipping boy for anything that isn’t “acceptable” for anything “mainstream”. Even since the start of the animation business in the 1920s, the US government always had its eyes on and its hands at the ready to take away anything that wasn’t “constitutional” or “legal” at the discretion of the moral busybodies. Things only got worse as the 20th Century went along. You had the Tequila Bible scares of the 1930s, you had the Comic Book Burnings of the 1950s that made every kid burn their comics by fear that they weren’t “of moral fiber”, you had the censor and morality in media crazes that started in the 1970s and kept going hard on animation, and the stigmas that were born from these times just kept on going in the public consciousness.
Even then, American styles of animation and even art are ironically, extremely territorial and ironically conformist to the T. There are many stories of anime fans going to art schools and animation schools and getting talked down to by many teachers and professors that “anime isn’t art”. They fail to realize why their own tradition has failed in the public consciousness, yet need something to antagonize and lay all their blame for their failures. Meanwhile CalArts is trying to one up anime by featuring its own “traditions” yet failing to still understand why anime has its natural appeal. Critics and criterion of art in America is also unapologetically outdated, rooted in archaic and even racist and ethnocentric ideals, and even what I’d say anathema to the Constitution of the United States in a way.
Comic books are their own story in itself. Since banning almost any other story format and genre since the Comics Codes were formed, and by the industry itself by the way, this really hurt them in the long run. I’m not tossing shade at superhero fans, but the reality is that superheroes were molded to be the extensions of “Truth, Justice, And The American Way”, and yeah, there is a problem with that, when Superman went from being his own hero in 1934 to dying for DC’s bottom line in 1994, when “The American Way” is dictated to be the “Tyranny of the Majority”. The Comic Codes helped to only pigeon hole comic books as superhero media, and there is ironically no fault other than the industry’s own in this regard for bending over to censorship, government overreach, and even shortsighted blind greed. The Comics Crash of 1996 is also something that can still be felt today despite all efforts after, which killed the idea of comics being other than money pit collector’s trash and an “economically feasible industry” by the more moneyminded of society.
For better or for worse, anime is put on a pedestal here in the United States. Personally I’d say there’s more worse out of this because for a lot of Americans, especially for Caucasians, anime isn’t “natural” in their perspective. It’s “exotic, different, special”, or for the more blase and lowest common denominator mindset, “weird, strange, and wacky”. I acknowledge that in someway, but the main view that’s been going around is kind of the same problem with fetishizing Asian women and alienating Asian men in the US. It’s viewing anime more as an “other” and “them” sort of hobby than anything human in nature. This isn’t prevalent for all of (white) anime fandom, I’ve met more understanding anime fans than I have the worst ones in my waking life. But the perspective for anime to be a “pure untouched hobby” or an “exotic different thing” on an extreme extent is a mindset on par with stalkers of celebrities and the aforementioned fetishization. I’ve lived all of my life with anime surrounding me like as if I lived in Japan, and this kind of mindset really perturbs me. (ps This isn’t ammo for you “anime isn’t speshul my hobby is” obviously white insecure crab bucket mentality weight tossers, grow up.)
And I’m going to say it. Anime is unapologetically Japanese. It comes from a nation of syncretization and stressing harmony even if friction must come first before things get better. John explains the most of this in this article: https://www.animenation.net/blog/ask-john-why-is-the-world-fascinated-by-japan/ And before you can tell me that imagination and creative freedom exists elsewhere, don’t even try it. The United States hates reading and the arts, and its education system is among some of the worst in the world for pushing out peons, workers, and even criminals than any free thinkers and creative minds. This doesn’t even tie into materialistic religious intolerance pushed by televangelists and prosperity gospels that latched onto the morality in media groups or the more seedy of Hollywood that needs and desires manpower for anything you can think of. The dearth of creativity is also something the Military Industrial Complex and the prison industry want, as well as the jingoists and loyalists who lay themselves out on their roads like rugs and shine their boots for them. You can call me a conspiracy theorist, but I’ve correlated this with how the middle of the 20th Century in America had some of the worst rates of crime, and in relation of such factors like the reaction of corporations to the Civil Rights Movements and their expanse into globalization and foreign outsourcing to save on costs.
And I’m going to let the zoo out on this: this all stems from lives that are strictly driven politically like robots than anything human in nature. The United States has the absolute worst relations in the world with Asian nations other than business. The Mathew Ceodore Perry Black Ships Gunboat Diplomacy Mission, Yellow Peril Immigration Campaigns, World War II, Vietnam’s “De-Communist” War, Congress and Ronnie Regan destroying Japanese electronics on the White House Lawn, 1990s “Model Minority” racist harassment by “true human white Americans”, I can go on and on about this. The only nation that the United States respects in this instance is South Korea, and that’s because they do mostly everything that the United States says for them to do. The only other nation with the same amount of vitriol is the Netherlands, and history sure knows why (they also vehemently hate anime and manga too).
And if you think I hate the United States, go hate the First Amendment and go hate on anyone who has contributed to free thought, free will, free expression, free speech, freedom itself, and anything else that requires freedom in this great country- even world- of ours yet is still run by a bunch of braindead morons trapped by prejudice, bigotry, and bias. I haven’t even gotten to how anime really is a product of freedom in the first place.
The bottom line, if you want to make anime or something inspired by anime, go right ahead. The catch is, you will need to be like a superhero or a hero of legendary myth yourself to face all of these ugly biases, stigmas, prejudices, lies, and even truths to even dare to make a name for yourself.