Tomoko Hosaka quotes me in this piece on China 's mounting successes in the field of animation. Does the country pose a real threat to Japan's anime industry, or are they just another "acetate tiger"? Truth be told much of the content currently being produced in China is kids' fare, but the same could be said of the Japanese animation industry fifty years ago as well.
Speaking of kids' stuff from fifty years ago, one producer Hosaka interviewed cited Osamu Tezuka as an example of what sets Japanese anime apart from that produced abroad. He's absolutely right, but not for the reason he thinks.
Tezuka was a visionary with the storyboards but not so much with the balance sheets. He successfully established a marketplace for televised anime, but the absurdly low sums of money he agreed to per episode established a culture of poverty that persists in the industry to this very day -- a phenomenon popularly known as "Tezuka's curse." While it's true that his characters enjoyed massive popularity throughout the world, it's also true that his company went belly up in 1973. One thing is for sure: no matter beautifully executed classic "golden era" anime might be, it's no guarantee of future success.
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