Anime Slump: Decade Two

Anime creator looks abroad for a revival (Asahi.com)

It's dangerous to assign too much meaning to the comments of a single individual, but when one of the key staff members of cutsey-girl juggernaut The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya blames the anime industry's woes on moé, you know things are headed for trouble. Remember the State of the Anime Industry 2009? Sad to say things aren't looking any brighter in 2011.

Comments

[eric]

>"It is becoming the norm to order some of our work to anime productions in China and South Korea. Not because we want to suppress our personnel costs, but rather because we are unable to find enough people to work (in Japan)," Yamamoto, 36, said.

This sort of claim is almost always false. When they claim they can't find the people, they just mean they can't find the people at the price they want.

[ArthurFrDent]

that may be true, Eric... but from a business person's perspective, they are the same thing. in the supplyline of a product, you have to keep fixed costs down, and people are that. the only way this doesn't work is if there is no cheaper labor anywhere.

an artist who doesn't know this doesn't stay in business very long... and I have no idea what levels are above him in the publishing world. They all add to the overhead, and they REALLY don't add much to the value of the product. I hear that Japanese publishers are even more byzantine in their organizations than American ones... and that's saying a lot.

[MattAlt]

I think you're both right. Part of the reason studios can't find people at the price they want is because they operate practically at a loss under the production committee system. So while it's true that businesses will always try to source services/materials at the lowest possible price, there's so little "wiggle room" in the Japanese system that they have really dug their own grave. I hate to sound like a broken record here but there really haven't been any bright spots in the industry lately.

[wah]

While it is true that industry is very much in the shit, I think one good thing to keep in mind is that /everyone/ is in the shit. Maybe not for the same reasons, but if everything manages to recover in some way, I think the anime industry may get somewhat better just due to the fact that there may be more money to throw around in future, resulting in more of an economic cushion to put bets on weirder types of shows like they did in the past.

That said, they do certainly need to work on fixing their own problems. But considering how stubborn the guys upstairs are, I doubt that's going to happen...

I GUESS AS THE JAPANESE LOVE TO SAY, 仕方がない

[Steve Harrison]

I think the thing that keeps confusing me is, here you have exibitors (TV, Internet, Music, etc) that REQUIRE product, who MUST have new stuff constantly, and the makers aren't saying "Look, realistically, we can't provide content for (x) anymore. If you don't give us at least (g) we're not providing you what you MUST have to sell that commercial time etc" and then starting from that point, working to make it all better.

Of course for a time the exibitors can say "Up yours" and find other content and there will always be a studio who will kowtow and say "ANYTHING you pay is fine, GIVE US WORK".

And suddenly there's an animation studio doing inbetweening in some painfully obscure nation on an island where you can get a day's work for a banana.

[Bruce Lewis]

Perhaps anime as an art form is simply exhausted. It happens. After all, people still play ragtime music, but ragtime as an idiom is as dead as Scott Joplin. It may be that anime and manga were products of a unique cultural moment (postwar Japan) just as vaudeville, minstrelsy, and variety theater sprang from the rising middle-class culture of Gilded Age America and the early 20th Century. _Sic transit gloria mundi_.