downfall of anime industry?

[HomesickAlien]

Hi all,

Just wanted to know some opinions of yours. Maybe it was like this before and I didn't notice (or I am really getting old at last ). But the current and announced anime series are really for no brainers with (obviously) low budgets and ****py artwork that suck big time. Where are such highlights as Ergo Proxy, Claymore, Darker than Black etc. ? I am not sure if the anime industry realizes that you cannot make a silk purse out of sow ears? Anime should be fun of course, but please let our brain cells something to work with.

All the best,
HomesickAlien
 

[minglong]

Well, that depends. I think I might have a rough idea of the kind of genre you prefer based on the examples you gave but though there has been some relatively blah stuff, there have been some which I thought were pretty good like Ano Hi Mita Hana no Namae wo Bokutachi wa Mada Shira nai, Hanasaku Iroha, Gosick and Nichijou for awesome randomness.

It may just be that the stuff you like isn't showing up the past couple of seasons.

Well, there's always the staples of Naruto, One Piece and Bleach right?

[DualStorm]

Well, there is sort of a current trend in some current animes. But that doesnt mean that the anime industry is failing. And the definition of highlights are different to each individual, like how Claymore and darker than black are not highlights to me.
For me highlights would be EF ~ A tale of memories~, AIR, Clannad, Kanon, Utawarenomono and such.

But the current series like Madoka, Gosick, steins gate are quite nice.

[HomesickAlien]

Yeah, the topic title is a little bit exaggerated but I had to choose a catchy topic marker. "No good anime" and such would have called no attention. I just wanted to know what happened to the screenwriters for the aforementioned series. I simply don't want to see the 100th teenie highschool series with the stereotype reluctant kid hero who saves the day in the last episode. I am currently watching "Deadman Wonderland" and "Steins Gate". So far I am just watching because everything else is worse.

[minglong]

I still think that's somewhat subjective. You believe that everything else is worse probably because they're not in genres you prefer. There are plenty of current anime that do not follow the typical storyline you describe (or in fact have an overarching issue that requires a "hero" to solve).

[HomesickAlien]

You are probably right. Maybe there is some series I overlooked. There are so many around that one loses orientation.   

[Anonymoose]

Just wanted to know some opinions of yours. Maybe it was like this before and I didn't notice (or I am really getting old at last ). But the current and announced anime series are really for no brainers with (obviously) low budgets and ****py artwork that suck big time. Where are such highlights as Ergo Proxy, Claymore, Darker than Black etc. ?
 

If you consider Ergo Proxy, Claymore and Darker than Black as your 'gold standard' then you haven't been watching very long.  Try harder, and maybe watch something from 10+ years ago, because that's about when the industry shot itself in the head, and decided that pandering to mental defectives (NEETs and otaku) was better than making programs that the majority of the public didn't have to be ashamed of watching.

On the surface pandering moe shit is easy to make, and highly profitable because you can shovel it out by the bucket, and they lap up the merchandise for it nonstop.  But as they become more and more dependent on it, they stopped trying to be original which helped sour the western market, and they've skewed the economics of the domestic industry making it impossible to support anything high-budget for broadcast TV.  So now they've more or less painted themselves into a corner because the western market went bust, and anime in Japan has been relegated (about 90%) to the post-midnight 'infomercial' timeslots.  Where this is the important part- the producer PAYS THE BROADCASTER for airtime.  Unlike western TV, where a broadcaster buys a program and then advertisers pay to run commercials on it, most anime producers pay the TV station to show their program, and then they try to make a profit back by promoting and selling DVDs, BDs and merchandise.

Thanks to this model and the proliferation of premium satellite channels and OVAs, the volume of anime that Japan spews out has grown tremendously (go and look up the stats on the number of anime productions each year since about 2002), but the quality of writing and animation has gone down because it's all just the same copycat ****.  Maids, butlers, little sisters, vampires, zombies.. lather, rinse, repeat.

[Shuki]

The biggest downfall of the anime industry are its largely mentally challenged fanbase. I found that that the majority of people hardcore into anime as a genre suffered from excessive social awkwardness, and who could only really relate to the worlds created within the animation. Once you remove yourself from an anime hub, it returns to the normality of being just another genre... with its ups and downs, things you enjoy, things you don't. Quite seriously, the "newest" anime that I picked up and enjoyed was Baccano! and I'm not sure if it was because the series was genuinely brilliant, or if it was because it was something that I knew wouldn't appeal to the absolute morons who attended the anime clubs in the town where I live prior to about 2 months ago. Whichever it was, I love the series' that have the ability to challenge my thinking, like Higurashi, or that can make me laugh without making me feel like I need to be 5 years old or a complete degenerate to enjoy them. The anime I grew up with were series Ranma 1/2, 3x3 Eyes, Meitantei Conan, Tokyo Babylon, and Slayers... etc... and I feel that until the mass produced monstrosities of today can capture whatever it was that made me truly love anime as these series did back then, the entire genre is going to become just another fad.

[DerekJarman]

You may be right, but it totally depends on person's perception. As on the other hand you can observe the positivity of this anime industry, it has grown significantly in past years, with a rapid speed. So guess it will continue in the same manner!

[Anonymoose]

You may be right, but it totally depends on person's perception. As on the other hand you can observe the positivity of this anime industry, it has grown significantly in past years, with a rapid speed. So guess it will continue in the same manner!

Yes, it totally depends on person's perception.. where yours IS COMPLETELY WRONG.  By what metric has it 'grown significantly'?  By the fact that more titles get shoveled out every season?.. except of course they're almost always 13 episodes.. or sometimes too lazy even to make a whole quarter-season-worth of episodes, so 11 or 12 even.  (Name two original series in the last 3 years that lasted even 26 episodes, animated copies of manga don't count).  By the fact that they use the same tactics to push the same generic merchandise for every title to the same dedicated gullible fanbase?  By the fact that every season any slightly different concept is immediately copied by two or three others the next?

No, it isn't growing.  In fact it's shrinking, because fewer movies are produced, the TV series are shorter because there's no original content and no real story-telling going on, only tits & ass pandering to fanboys.  There's less sales of DVDs or Blu-Rays, and now of course a nearly non-existent overseas market because they threw away the things about anime that actually appealed to foreign audiences.  Titles like Bubblegum Crisis, Ghost in the Shell, Macross Plus or even Inu Yasha were huge in the west, but what do the Japanese continue to shovel out?  Steaming turds like Clannad or Kyokai Senjou.  And the contempt that the industry treats their customers with is AMAZING, and yet these feckless retards simply accept it.  The all-obscuring steam of censorship on broadcasts (So you have to buy the DVDs to catch a brief glimpse of animated titties!), the abbreviated stories that get finished in DVD-only OAV releases, or rewriting/re-releasing the same titles multiple times with different art designs/writers/studios over the course of only a few years (Gunslinger Girls, Minami-Ke and others).  Would anyone else tolerate this?

oh wait, I forgot about Star Wars fans..