Forum - View topicAnswerman - Why Is Animation Only For Kids In The US?
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MajorZero
Posts: 359 |
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Not really, especially when you already grew out of "edgy anime kid" phase. |
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Stuart Smith
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I'm aware of the rerun system, which Im not a fan of. Especially in extreme cases like SpongeBob SquarePants which has been on the same season for four years now and aired literally only one new episode in the entirety of 2014, yet was and is still considered a current show.It just boggles my mind is all. A lot of cartoons just randomly go on hiatus for months at a time mid-season. I was just commenting how most of those shows are years old, and in some cases already ended. When I think current shows, I consider what's airing right now week by week I can tune in to. Whether it's the latest episode of a long running shounen or shoujo, or a current one/two cour series. -Stuart Smith |
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MajorZero
Posts: 359 |
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I don't think it's called rerun system, let's just call it "Nielsen Families influence" (though, syndication is obviously a big factor in late cycles of show's life). The point is, on American tv, show either exists for several seasons or gets cancelled because of weak ratings too early, both things can be damaging from the creative standpoint and this is why both Live-Action and animation have plenty of examples of unfinished work. However, I argue that system like this is much more competitive and in a long run more beneficial for overall quality across the board than "one season and done" scheme which is practised on Japanese television. |
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Kikaioh
![]() Posts: 1205 Location: Antarctica |
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I think most adults, and quite probably most Japanese people, would feel that any grown-up dropping large amounts of money on highschool romcoms, ecchi battle harems, and moemoe "cute girls doing cute things" sorts of shows, aren't exactly the most "mature" apples in the bunch. TBH, if your apartment is decked out with dakimakura, fanservice pvcs, and miniature shrines to your favorite anime characters, you're probably taking escapism from the 'harsh realities' of adult life to some very unhealthy levels. |
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Mr. Oshawott
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I remember watch Western animated shows from the 1990's that had plenty of graphic content, despite airing during the daytime (Ren & Stimpy, Rocko's Modern Life, Cow & Chicken, etc.). Then there's the more serious, down-to-earth shows like Hey Arnold. Man, those were the days...
Nowadays, most shows seem to be only centered around mindless comedy. Yes, the Western animation scene is getting somewhat better since then, if certain shows like Steven Universe are anything to go by, but they still have a very huge mountain to climb. |
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Pierrot.
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Nobody is forcing your to watch those so called "edgy anime". There are plenty of anime with lots of varieties each season that are better than those limited number of western shows that come out each year. |
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HeeroTX
Posts: 2046 Location: Austin, TX |
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Here's the kicker to me:
In Japan, a great anime can be made and sold to the general public. They get plenty of anime movies targeted to the general population EVERY YEAR. In the US, we apparently think that if a "great" anime is going to be taken "seriously" or become popular, we should re-make it AS A LIVE ACTION movie. -Ghost In the Shell -> The Matrix -Speed Racer -Evangelion -Battle Angel Alita -Cowboy Bebop (I'm sure there are more I'm forgetting or don't know about (I'm going to ignore "Dragonball Evolution" for this particular topic)) Why, WHY if we take animation so seriously in this country did NONE of those either get American funding or even full American production for a theatrical ANIMATED remake but HAVE gotten either a full "live action" remake or optioned with extensive effort for a live action remake? For that matter, why do we get a ton of "live action" Transformers, GI Joe & Ninja Turtles(?!?) movies rather than a full theatrical animated version? (yes, TMNT got ONE 3d ( ![]() |
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mangamuscle
Posts: 2658 Location: Mexico |
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Man, can we stop with the chicken litle, "the sky is falling, the end is near, grab your waifus and run", it is getting kind of outdated.
By "using the japanese model" I never intended to mean "bring back animation jobs to america" (unless you mean latinamerica, which is also in said continent), I am just saying that instead of investing huge sums of money in watered down adaptions that no one is watching, they should invest in doing true adaptions of classic comics (they know what graphic novels have sold the most), the dark knight returns is a good start and the killing joke will be nice, but there are a bunch of other superheroes with great stories to be animated. While we are at it, they could also do something without superheroes (at the very least, some Swamp Thing from Alan Moore), that is what is great about anime, there is variety, even thought they also are afflicted with the copycat syndrome, there still is a lot to choose from.
It is called calcification, it is normal that as you grow older you get less and less interested in new media. As an example, except for opening and ending themes from anime series, I have stopped listening to so called modern music, I could not name of a song by Lady Gaga or Justin "blame it on canada" Beiber. For some reason I still can watch anime, after watching it for far longer than 12 years, yeah, some stories do repeat and there are some series I would not touch even with a ten feet pole, but there is always something that thrills me, relaxes me, makes me think or make me turn off my brain and watch the pretty pictures.
Yeah, PoDW looked really promising :/
The point is that if the first one was succesful, make another one, as I have mentioned before, there are a tons of good old (and new) comic stories begging to be animated. i.e. They could do one movie of Empowered and if it was successful enough continue releasing more.
This might qualify, but we need it to be a trend, not a blip on the radar ![]() |
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EricJ2
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Actually, it's the other way around-- 00's Producers wanted to get in "This 'Japanime' thing the young people are watching', but the only titles they know are the 60's titles they grew up with as kids (Speed Racer, Astro Boy, Kimba), or the same titles that they hear first-time Cartoon Network-raised fans throw around among themselves as the "Core" classics: Akira, Eva, Bebop, Ghost in the Shell. In Japan, ironically, if a manga sells well enough to be a hit with regular mainstream train commuters to be a bestseller, it immediately gets a LIVE TV or movie adaptation (Nodame Cantabile, My Love Story)--Not just because it's cheaper to make J-drama for prime time, but possibly because regular mainstream train commuters would rather just see their favorite book-story characters adapted without suffering the crippling public stigma and prejudice of being, gasp, anime watchers! |
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littlegreenwolf
![]() Posts: 4796 Location: Seattle, WA |
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The Dark Knight Returns The Killing Joke Oh hey, look. They already exists. Damn, look at American Animation already doing a whole ton of comic adaptions targeting adults. For years. And I've been watching anime for 20 years now at least, and it's hard to find something each season that doesn't make me want to stab myself in the eyes for various reasons. |
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H. Guderian
Posts: 1255 |
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Another thing to realize is a lot of Otaku are adults. And their interests change. Over here there are -no- cartoons for the average working person. A 10-year old isn't going to watch or enjoy a mindless healing anime, but sometimes it is what I need/want. A lot of us want to watch shows with things we want. We've been alive for decades and want certain things. Minastream shows are often insulted because they cannot possibly cater to everyone. Thusly the niche model prevails. Anime can do whatever it wants, and as long as it is pleasing people it gets made. Some shows become vastly experimental. But aiming to the masses keeps people from shelling out the big bucks.
Above someone mentioned some 'rare' Hulk stories that he claims people would pay Aniplex prices for. By all means, if our industry could experiment and deliver undiluted content people would start to pay up too. But I look at the new Voltron and Mr. Toole's assessment of its strengths, but then says its a Voltron for everyone. The transformation sequence of the robot calls back to GaoGaiGar. I don't want a mecha show for Everyone. I want a mecha show for Mecha fans, and the hard earned money I make will go to the people who are most accurate. I'll probably still enjoy the new Voltron, but I won't shell out money for it like I would a show I care more for. Now if you were to release me a GGG:Finale box set at Aniplex prices I'd buy two. Because I bought the main series at least twice already. The Western Industry doesn't treat us like adults, and until then the industry isn't going to gain respect. |
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HeeroTX
Posts: 2046 Location: Austin, TX |
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I'm sorry, honestly and sincerely without trying to be dense, I don't follow at all what you're trying to say with your example of US movies. Regarding Japan movies, Japan is making more J-Dramas, that's true (and I find that trend disappointing as well). But, I'd point out 2 things. #1. (In my opinion) they are following Hollywood's lead to an extent, and #2. (more relevant to this discussion) they are STILL making impressive animated movies. Whereas the US is not. Breaking it down. In 2015, "Anthem of the Heart" was released. I can tell you for a fact it was WIDELY advertised to commuters on the trains in Yamanote Line. In Japan, it was #50 in domestic (Japan) Box Office and earned around $8.5million. For perspective, that put it on par with "Kingsman", "Ant-Man" and "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles". (The #1 movie (In Japan) was Star Wars which made about $95million, ie. about 12x the BO of "Anthem of the Heart") For comparison, the US had 22 animated movies go to theaters in 2015 (harder to get "animated movie" breakdown for Japan, and I'm discounting things like "Det. Conan" and otaku fare like "Love Live" and didn't use exception cases like "The Boy & the Beast" (which pulled closer to 50% of Star Wars' box office)). Of the 22 animated movies in the US 7 "blockbusters" (all were targeted to children, "Inside Out" is the debatable "exception case, Pixar" movie) The next highest grossing movie was "Shaun the Sheep" (also kids movie) with a STEEP drop-off down to $19million. If we ignore the random "Dragonball Z" (ignore its performance in Japan too) movie and some "lesser" kids movies. We have a true "daring" animated release in "Anomalisa". It made $3.7million, or less than half what "Anthem of the Heart" made despite "Anomalisa" being Oscar nominated. Let's also compare it to Oscar winner "The Revenant". Now a DIRECT comparison is clearly unfair (Revenant had a wider release, won Best Picture, etc) Revenant debuted on only 4 screens. in 2 weeks on 4 it made $1.5million. In the same period on the same screen count, "Anomalisa" made $270k. The WORST performing "Best Picture" nominee (room) performed better in its first week (went to more screens on second week) than "Anomalisa" (3rd BEST performing "Best Animated Feature") in the same period. "Inside Out" (Pixar movie) made over $300million, after that, the 2nd place "Shaun the Sheep" Oscar nominated Feature made only $19million. The bottom performing "Best Picture" nominee (Room) made $14million, the next lowest (Brooklyn) made $38million. ie. The second WORST performing "Best Picture" nominee (which clearly was either a "box Office" flop OR an "indie art house" performer, made more money than ALL the "Best Animated Feature" nominees (minus the Pixar film) COMBINED. Compare that with an anime movie that in Japan, was not an "exception" case, that was (barely) in the top 50 for box office and performed comparably to US box office hits. (at $14million, the #2 "Best Animated Feature" (which was still a kids movie) did not even crack the top 100 in US box office) |
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mangamuscle
Posts: 2658 Location: Mexico |
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To tsukkomi or not to tsukkomi, that is the question.
Yep, you are well on your way to not liking any new anime released in a year in the near future; then you will join Miyazaki, Tomino and Oshii in saying that all new anime is plain garbage. |
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leafy sea dragon
![]() Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
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In addition, that's a very selective list. If we were to look back to 1994, given enough time, I could list at least a hundred American animated TV shows I've enjoyed, probably closer to 250 or 300 (or more).
Japan already has a thriving comics industry though, and I would expect them to pull from their domestic reservoirs before turning to other countries' comics. There's also the association, that only recently went away, of superheroes and sheer camp, as one of the first serious attempts to bring superheroes to Japan was Adam West's Batman. Then we got Japanese Spider-Man, which proved they had no idea what superheroes were like. It's changing now, of course, particularly with My Hero Academia (though I have a hunch that Kouhei Horikoshi is more in tune with western pop culture than your average Japanese person). As for series of home video releases, isn't DC doing something like this right now? Or is every story set in a different universe? I feel there's also the stigma of the straight-to-video movie, especially because of the low-quality Disney sequels that continue to come out to this day. (Then the people who made these got a theatrical release in Planes. Whether that movie is good because it succeeded with kids and merchandise or bad because the storytelling is terrible for anyone older than 10 is another matter though.)
Boys Over Flowers too, which was SO popular that Korea made a live-action adaptation of it too.
Currently, Archer, Family Guy, American Dad!, South Park, and to a lesser extent Brickleberry, Bob's Burgers, Rick and Morty, and The Simpsons are appealing to the average working class American. I don't necessarily like all of them, but they get a high enough viewership to remain stable and go season after season. As for a niche buying large amounts of money, that's not really related to being an adult at all. You can have minors who can pay large amounts of money for something they really like, and you can have adults who will refuse to pay a large amount of money for anything short of one-time expenses like cars and homes. Most of the people I know are in the latter category: They are not hardcore fans of anything but are casual fans of a large number of things. From a business perspective, a show that appeals to the masses is a gamble: The level of success can be all over the map. On the flipside, a show that appeals to a niche is more a safe bet: You will get a small but dedicated group of people who will pay to sustain you, but you likely won't be turning that big of a profit from it. And this applies not just to TV shows, but to pretty much everything. Personally, if I were a fan of some company, I would want them to produce mainstream stuff at least every now and then, because that's more likely to help the company sustain itself. Grasshopper Manufacture (Suda51's company) does this, making licensed games so they can get the money to make the games they want to make. Companies that are strictly niche are, more often than not, the first ones to go out of business when the industry contracts. |
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EricJ2
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Oh, they're making MOVIES--That's because most artistically ambitious Japanese animators don't want the lowbrow stigma of working for a commercially marketed series, and want to show how "un-TV" they are with their pretentious artistic/ambiguous features... Does the name "Mamoru Oshii" ring a bell? He used to do the Patlabor series. ![]() (A division that used to create what we US fans called the "Ebert List", when critics would go out and praise the "bold new artistic form" mushy impenetrable arthouse features like Paprika and GitS2, while, like Ebert, not even realizing TV anime existed and never having seen any in their lives.) And without going back over the whole historical rundown of Disney in the 70's--go read it yourself, it's too long to type again--that was exactly what we had over here in the mid/late 70's, when most animation worked for Saturday morning and the real Disney was too busy making Robin Hood and The Rescuers. Every arthouse-indie director wanted to do his own "bold" idea of animated storytelling in his own little self-run sovereign-island studio, and while that could occasionally give us a "Secret of NIMH", "Last Unicorn", "When the Wind Blows", "Watership Down" or Ralph Baskhi "Lord of the Rings"....it could also give us a Jimmy Murakami "The Mouse & His Child" or a Richard Williams "Thief & the Cobbler" or "Raggedy Ann & Andy". YIKES. ![]() Go rent "Waking Sleeping Beauty" for a historical rundown of what happened: If there's one thing that came out of the 90's Disney Renaissance, it's that mainstream commercial animation didn't have to be afraid anymore to be good, and by the time Williams' serious-animation-art-geek Thief & the Cobbler did come out in the 90's (yes, "studio messed-with", but you still can't polish a bizarre turd), it was not only seen as some alien relic from some long past time, but--for the crowning insult--everyone in the theaters thought Disney's Aladdin really WAS better. I can't think of a single better gravestone epitaph for what happened to the "Either Disney or Weirdo" days of 70's feature animation. |
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