Anime Ja Nai

Japan Times: Future of 'Anime' Industry in Doubt

Tales of gloom and doom in a industry once believed to represent a future cornerstone of Japan's economy! After two years, the young woman profiled by the Japan Times reports making less than $800 a month of ten hour days. The industry lays much of the blame on losses from piracy, which is true as far as it goes and a serious problem that needs to be addressed. But all the piracy countermeasures in the world can't fix an industry that's fundamentally broken.

Saying that one is a fan of anime is like saying one is a fan of TV. It's a medium rather than a genre and needs to be judged by the content. And while there are undeniable bright spots like the occasional Miyazaki film, crossover hits like The Animatrix or Afro Samurai, and arthouse fare like Tekkon Kinkreet, it is growing harder and harder to deny that the quality of the content is really going downhill as a whole.

Working conditions in the anime world are terrible. Anime is associated with cutting-edge imagery abroad, but many of the animation studios I've visited here are run like sweatshops. The buildings are run down and the equipment is outdated. The hours are long. The pay is abysmal. The skillset is highly specialized and difficult to apply elsewhere; most kids with a knack for animation are wooed by the (slightly) higher-paying video game industry right off the bat. And more and more of the basic work needed to train the next generation, such as "in-betweeing," is farmed out to second- and even third-world countries, including by some reports North Korea. All of this has resulted in a serious hollowing out of the industry.

The motley crew of die-hards left can be an insular, isolated bunch, often incapable of producing anything other than fare that appeals to people exactly like themselves. The biggest local hits are super-niche moé and lolicon fare brimming with inside jokes and anime stereotypes that few other than dyed-in-the-wool otaku can decipher. The "golden age," in which ambitious directors transformed anime from kids' stuff into a mature vehicle capable of telling stories that appealed to broad audiences, is essentially over. That's fine; nothing lasts forever. The problem is that the industry's momentum has dramatically slowed, and piracy is only partly to blame. For all the talk of it being Japan's Next Big Thing, anime as a whole is moribund. It is an inbred little medium that is rapidly in danger of becoming irrelevant, precisely and ironically at the very moment when the world is finally starting to pay serious attention. Anime industry, heal thyself. You can do better than this -- both for your own members and for your audience.

Comments

[thomas]

I think you hit the nail on the head with your last paragraph. Although there's been a few good series lately, most of it is garbage appealing to the H-game & dating sim loving crowd, with rather mysogynistic views on the female characters and non-existent plots. I've found that most of the series that are touted by some anime fans as "appealing to the anime fan due to references" actually are not appealing at all to the occasional to average anime fan. Most of them are in fact quite mediocre at best, and often unwatchable due to too many obscure references unless you're a hardcore otaku. Some other series are just re-hashes of previously released series, with the additional fanwank added in (although this also happens in the Western world at this moment). Weeee! Well, at least I've been spending quite a bit less on anime lately...

[llxwarbirdxll]

You make a good point, but that damn song is stuck in my head now. ANIME JA NAI HONTO NO KOTO SA

[Roger]

Very succinct. 99% of anime hasn't appealed to me in many years, but I remind myself that I'm not 14 any more. However, I try and put myself in the mindset of that 14 year old and he wouldn't like any of this stuff, either.

[Cheschirecat]

I've been saying this for years, unfortunately. The early 2000s held some groundbreaking stuff, like Bebop, JinRoh, Blood, FLCL, for my money, Trigun, and others. I sort of mark the death of anime somewhere around the advent of FLCL, but that may be due more to my personal declining interest in the medium from the mid 2000s on. I spent last year in Japan, and I was hard pressed to find anything that looked intellectually stimulating at all. Gurren Lagan is the only thing on my horizon that I remotely look forward to...

[Steve Harrison]

I'm going to take a slightly different tack.

The reason why anime is in the dumper is because there's a lack of competition in toy companies, who used to be the key sponsors.

These companies (Bandai, Takara, Tomy, Nomura, Clover, Takatoku) were in constant battle for shelf space, which meant sponsoring shows to push toys to screaming 8 year olds, but the anime producers had to provide content that would, if not engage and entertain, at the very least would not bore the parents forced to watch along with little Taku-chan.

Now, all that is left is Bandai (the giant) and Takara/Tomy (a much lesser company then they used to be, altho I hear they're strong with some pre-school licenses like Thomas the tank engine), so, for all practical purposes, if you can't get Bandai to come onboard as a sponsor, you're done.

So, lacking the giant sponsor, it's natural that the studios will pitch concepts that can only succeed on late night pay sat channels, backed by video/music companies who wish to promote the flavor of the moment singer/actress, and the best way to get those (more and more important!) home video sales is to cater to the obsessed fetish-driven otaku, where they will shell out $200 for a nearly naked PVC figure (cost to make- $5, thank you China for your slave workers) licensed from that show....

But who knows, I just care that the new Mazinger Z series appears to be made of 100% awesome power.

[dave merrill]

Nailed it, Matt.

[Todd Ciolek]

When was this "golden age" of anime again? The late 1990s?

[AcroRay]

I dropped by an area anime specialty store (a rare thing in my part of Pennsylvania) and after spending a half hour looking around, all I walked out with were used $2 VHS copies of a Bubblegum Crisis music video collection and the dub of Golgo 13: Queen Bee. There was really nothing 'current' in the licensed releases in video, merchandising and manga that interested me enough to spend cash on it.

There were times a decade or more ago that I'd have walked out of there broke and wanting more. I think most of my tastes in those days have been sated, and nothing new really inspires much consumerist enthusiasm in me (except perhaps the new Macross, Votoms, and things I just can't get as licensed imports). Anything else - like the Higurashi & Ikkitousen manga or the Vampire Hunter D books - I can get at my local mainstream bookshop.

Otherwise, I've been spending most of my anime hobby resources lately collecting merchandise, video and legacy items from properties I loved back in the 80s. That doesn't say much for the medium's current offerings.

[Tim Eldred]

Pick a medium, any medium--it can only be as good as its writers. No show will sell a product if the target audience isn't hooked by the writing. Art may grab the eyeballs for episode 1, but writing has to bring them back for episode 2. I'm sure there's good writing going on in anime at the moment, but it's the exception to the rule whereas it used to BE the rule.

More and more, this looks like the US comic book industry, and anime has just entered the 'Image Comics' phase. For us, that ended with a severe contraction that pushed a lot of people out. I predict we're within 2 years of seeing the same happen in anime. Hope I'm wrong. That was a painful time. Ironically, it's what knocked me into animation.

[MattAlt]

Good points all. A couple of clarifications:

I know this is like painting a big fat target on my head, but to me the "golden era" extends from the late Seventies with the Yamato films and Gundam and runs through about the mid-90s, with Evangelion being one of the big signposts at the end of the road. Evangelion was both a watershed in the maturation of the medium and a death knell in the sense that it established a situation where it became okay to forget about everyone but otaku when you made an anime. When you stop considering the average specimen of humanity, you lose touch with the mainstream audience. And you need those people to really make a difference.

A lot of recent stuff -- even some things I see mentioned in the comments above -- is fun, but so filled with references and archetypes and in-jokes that I can't imagine showing them to people who aren't already thoroughly steeped in the anime idiom. I think that's the big problem now. You don't have to know a thing about anime to enjoy Castle of Cagliostro, Megazone 23, Akira, etc. You just had to be a fan of the respective genres (action/adventure, SF, whatever.) Somewhere along the line a lot of people in the anime industry started forgetting that.

[MattAlt]

One additional note: I'd been meaning to mention this, but there was an article in the Nikkei Shimbun (Japan's equivalent of the Wall Street Times) several months back in which a consortium of anime industry people actually petitioned the Japanese government for an intervention, because working conditions had become so intolerable. I don't know whatever happened to the effort but will check into it.

[Moo]

I think the "golden age", for those of us coming to this from an American background at least, would be the mid-nineties to the mid-00s. That roughly covers the time frame when anime took off like a rocket in the US and very much so represented a hip "edge" in American pop culture and subculture to the point at which the penetration of anime in the US was so heavy that finding anything still edgy in the sea of information became a sisyphean task.

[Steve Harrison]

The 'golden age' of INTEREST in anime in the U.S. was 1999-2005, this was the 'bubble' time.

I think for most fans, those who have been at it more than a couple of years, those who were in the life before the bubble, the Golden Age was likely 1978-1992, or what Matt said. :)

[Todd Ciolek]

Matt: That period would be the best choice if you wanted the anime equivalent of the American comic book's "golden age," an era where a lot of enduringly popular franchises and big names were established (even though anime was a wasteland from 1990 to 1994). A lot of alleged classics from that time are now hilarious kitsch, but then so are plenty of old superhero comics.

[MattAlt]

Righto. The point isn't specifically when I consider the golden age to be, but rather the fact that the industry is dying by inches, and working conditions are by all accounts pretty grim. How is the anime industry going to represent Japan's "gross national cool" and "soft power" (as has been touted in the past) when its employees aren't paid enough to make a living wage? More than a quarter make less than one million yen (about $9,000 ~ $10,000) a year. A YEAR! That's below the poverty line.

[Steve Harrison]

The only answer, the obvious answer is the sponsors have to step up and be willing to pay more for the program in anticipation of the profits from the licensed goods sold.

But the PROBLEM with that is, that will further shrink and 'otakuize' the product in search of that 'sure bet' income.

Kinda like how Bandai has started a special 'Gundam' branch, seperate but EQUAL to the general toy and hobby branches. Which I think is a HUGE mistake on Bandai's part and will end up costing them much money. but hey they didn't ask me. :)

Because crap is crap.

It can be fixed, with strong will and firm emotion, but it takes looking in the mirror and knowing what's gone wrong, and the Japanese animation industry just won't do it.

[Todd Ciolek]

Matt, I think that if there's any wide-scale solution, it lies in that government funding you mentioned above. I'd like to hear how that turned out.

There aren't many other options today. There's no economic bubble to support the anime industry at home, and no fan horde willing to throw money at it from overseas. If the government wants anime ambassadors that anyone will notice, it'll have to pay for them.

[MattAlt]

>>I'd like to hear how that turned out.

The most recent news on that front isn't specifically related to anime (though anime is included under its purview). Earlier today the Japanese government announced the foundation of "Japanese Brand Support Centers" in its embassies around the world:

http://headlines.yahoo.co.jp/hl?a=20090302-00000034-fsi-bus_all

Designed to support (how isn't specified) both corporate and individual entertainment content creators in obtaining profits from foreign licensing, it certainly isn't a bad thing. But it focuses entirely on the end products, not the production side of the equation. (Of course, the more money a company profits from its products, the more it can afford to pay its employees. In theory.)

[Evan Minto (Vampt Vo)]

From what I see at conventions, there's definitely a lot of fan interest here in America, and American distributors have done some really cool things lately to combat piracy (notably online streaming like CrunchyRoll and Hulu).

I'm really hoping that Japanese companies can finally start to innovate as much as their counterparts across the Pacific. Anime fandom is still growing here in America, so if companies would turn their attentions to the Naruto fanboys in other countries rather than the very niche moe-fetishizing otaku in Japan, they'd probably have a much better chance for wide appeal, and hopefully some respectable profit. As Matt says, that can *potentially* go into the pockets of employees.

Speaking of that, wow! I mean, I knew working conditions were bad, but $9,000 a year? That's downright criminal.

@Tim: Interesting point about the Western comics parallel. It'd be a shame to see anime turn into the current comics market, in which almost everybody's trying to be edgy and dark and appeal to a niche that's insufferably steeped in its own mythos. Essentially, it would be the pendulum swinging from the loliporn extreme to the opposite, equally detrimental extreme.

[hillsy]

I don't know about relying much on the American market. From what *I* see at the conventions people are going to scoop up character goods, cosplay, and make fanart/fanfic. The anime and it's creators are almost secondary. These folks don't seem to be buying DVDs (look at Best Buy's current situation - Steve-O can comment on that).

[Steve Harrison]

Hillsy is correct, the current AmeriOtaku doesn't give a flying fig about the show, about BUYING the show, they've already watched it fansubbed, or MAYBE bought the HK/Taiwan bootlegs (because why pay $29.99 MSRP for 4 episodes when you can buy the entire series for 20 bucks, right?) but nonetheless, they've got the whole thing on their hard drive and it's without value, while the PVC figures and hugpillow covers and dirty, filthy dojinshi are valuable and thus lots of money gets spent on that.

I think it's starting to impact the manga biz too, the scanlations. Free is always better to those who place no intrinsic value on the actual product.

Anime fandom, at least for the AmeriOtaku, feels that a con isn't for celebrating the shows, a con is supposed to be a weekend long rave free of parental constraints (and thus much bad behaviour and stupidity). They're wrong, and within 2 years that massive body of teens is going to be gone, because anime isn't 'cool' anymore, and they're not getting that 'peer identity' feed from some popular show running on Cartoon Network in the afternoon.

It's all complicated but the threads that tie it all together are pretty obvious to me :)

[Evan Minto (Vampt Vo)]

Hm, that's a really good explanation of the convention mentality, Steve. And yeah, it's true that the anime DVD biz is dying a rapid death. That's why I'm a big supporter of streaming video.

Even if we got another breakout television hit a la Fullmetal Alchemist, the fans would have subs up months before the TV broadcast, effectively killing any potential for new fans to be made into paying, supporting consumers via either DVD or TV. After all, the first thing they'll do after seeing the first episode on TV is look up free episodes online.

I like the idea of legal, ad-powered streaming video because it can provide an alternative that is high-quality, quick, and FREE, just like fansubs. Imagine if the first entry in this search - http://www.google.com/search?q=watch+death+note+free+online - was Hulu, which legally streams the show. Fans would be unwittingly providing ad profits for Viz, and wouldn't be heading to garbage sites like deathnote.tv.

[Steve Harrison]

But you see, I don't WANT to watch anime in a little window via a special (and different for every service) viewer.

I don't WANT to watch dubbed only content, or 'pro subs' that are so achingly bad it makes me pine for the horror that is Taiwan bootlegs.

I don't WANT DRM loaded downloads.

I want to be able to pick a disc out of my library and watch an episode whenever I want to watch it, dubbed or subbed as I choose, and not have a time limit or be tracked as to when or how often I watch.

I don't watch anime on my computer (unless it's encoded so poorly that the ONLY way to watch it is on my iMac.I'm looking at YOU Fox TV DVDs.), I use my iMac for the internet and writing and my music.

I was here in 1979 before there WAS any pro anime releases, I'll be here after the AmeriOtaku have gone off to the next EXXTREEMMEEE entertainment. :)

[Tim Eldred]

I'd like to point out that *not* paying for the anime itself isn't a new thing. We used to get all our anime for free by tape trading, then we'd spend money on the merch. If everything is being pulled back to that model, well, it means that's the model most consumers want.

There will always be purists who insist on buying commercial copies, just as there were in the tape-trading days. The point is, that model worked before and can work again. It's just going to mean less anime gets made. Which is TOTALLY FINE by me.

[MattAlt]

I love owning something as much as the next guy but no matter how you slice it the era of physical media (whether DVD, blu-ray, or whatever) is rapidly on its way out. The future is going to be on-demand, full-resolution video streaming through a device that is either integrated with or hooked into your TV. (This is already a big part of the iTunes and the Xbox Live service). The big question is how exactly to monetize it. When it happens on a mainstream scale (and it will) it is going to turn the anime industry on its head: currently the majority of an anime production budget goes not to the studio as you might expect, but to buy timeslots at "key" (major) TV stations. Streaming would basically take these stations totally out of the current equation.

Whatever the case, that is all supply-side stuff and doesn't affect the issue at hand: low salaries and appalling working conditions. The ironic thing is, those were the norm even BEFORE piracy started taking a huge chunk out of studios' revenues. The treatment of animators and the piracy of content are indirectly related, but they are absolutely going to need to be addressed separately.

[Steve Harrison]

Streaming may be inevitable, but it's a LONG way from happening. There's not as many people with the super fat broadband that can handle what even cable and sat can deliver as people seem to think.

The average person is not at all cool with the idea of paying $100 and up to 'watch TV', esp. with the idea of having to pay MORE on top of the access, as VoD calls for.

And people LIKE to own stuff. They like to have that control.

I think that the simple fact there's been a call that streaming content (aka that dirty word, video on demand) has been coming REAL SOON NOW since....hurrrrm....1996..well, you know, even a broken clock is right twice a day blah blah. :)

And yes, I knew about the buying of timeslots. That's been going on as long as I've been watching this stuff and likely before.

Yes, the animation staff needs to be paid better. It's probably past time they get something going, same as the seiyuu did a few years back seeking residuals from their work as well as all that undocumented income from overseas sales. I doubt anything will happen because the demand is there and producers will just farm out the entire process to Korea or some such instead of keeping the key cels and storyboarding and setti work in Japan....and THAT would be sad because man, it can look really crap.

[MattAlt]

I agree that streaming isn't going to fix much in the short term. But it's a definite "sea change" on the horizon. In the meantime, the best shots for a relatively quick fix would seem to be a tax break and a subsidy for studios so that they can at least break even on every episode they create (in the current system with the key stations taking so much of the sponsor's outlay, the studios actually lose money on each episode they animate, making up the difference with DVD/merchandising sales.) China is already offering tax breaks for its studios to make them even more competitive.

[MattAlt]

Tim Eldred says: "It's just going to mean less anime gets made. Which is TOTALLY FINE by me."

This echoes a sentiment I see again and again on Japanese-language anime blogs: there's actually a glut of content, most of it niche, and the market would probably be healthier with fewer series being released.

[Steve Harrison]

Matt, I hear (see?) what you're saying, but no government help will address what I see as the core problem, the lack of sponsors to foist true competition and thus make studios and networks take some chances and break out of the ever tightening circle going on currently.

I mean, I know I'm at a huge disadvantage being so out of the loop with current stuff, but it seems to me that if you don't have Bandai, Takara/Tomy, Lotte, Nintendo or Sony as a key backer, you're forced to find lots of 'little' companies that don't HAVE the money to spend that would better the life of the animation staff.

And the big boys? They've become very 'risk adverse' over the past few years, I think.

So how do they change THAT paragidm? I doubt strongly WAVE can afford to pony up a couple mil to fund a Galient relaunch...

[Naeko]

The problem of fansubbing or DVD rip distribution is so widespread that potential customers no longer buy. They have become accustomed to assuming that future releases will always be available via the piracy distribution networks.

FUNimation had the right idea when it offered to use the DMCA against fansubbers on behalf of Japanese copyright holders. Since the thieves are already non-repentant, perhaps what the industry needs to do is actually file some lawsuits to the bitter end against say the top ten largest fansubber groups via DMCA and use the DMCA provision that charges the court costs to the pirates. That would at least make the pirates act with less impunity.

[MattAlt]

For better or worse the genie is already out of that particular bottle. At this point, the only way to beat the pirates/fansubbers is to going to be to play the game even better than they do: international development and licensing for simultaneous multilingual releases in various media, whether it be theatrical / TV (for the cream of the crop) or online (far more likely given the limited demand for a lot of this stuff.)

Working in localization I can tell you that sort of thing is far, far easier said than done, so I feel for the studios/distributors. But considering that a concerted legal campaign by Hollywood and the American music industry haven't really put a dent in illegal downloading, I can't see the anime industry faring much better.

[Japanese words]

I recently heard about the difficult times that the Anime industry is facing. Though when you look at work schedules/conditions, its not just the anime industry who have these conditions.