Forum - View topicAnswerman - Why Is Animation Only For Kids In The US?
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mangamuscle
Posts: 2658 Location: Mexico |
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Allow me to illustrate this quagmire. You have company W who owns company C and company D. Company D makes some popular animated TV series and company C is a TV cable channel. Therefore for company C to broadcast company D's cartoons is a win-win situation that will bring more subscribers and commercial ads and therefore revenue. But lo and behold, company W wants that each company to have separate income reports (and a company that does not get enough income gets the axe!). So company C prefers to broadcast their own productions, even if they have less popularity, any income they produce will be theirs 100%. So instead of gaining 20 coins and distribute 10 to each, company C gets 12 coins and the other gets none. Meanwhile the competence does not care about this separate income nonsense and gets 20 coins.
Seems to me some people at Disney are feeling summer of 2018 is too far away and therefore they decided to make a new season to keep the franchise warm in some kids minds, not necessarily because it was a good business decision. Otherwise, why restart a series that had already ended?
Yeah, the bunko LN imprint thought about the same (who needs another series?) when Haruhi Suzumiya was all the rage. I am old enough to know that you never place all your eggs in one basket, what is popular and what not today is the has been of tomorrow. Steve Ballmer (the prior head honcho at microsoff) thought the ipod was too little a market to make their own and compete with apple. Wal-mart thought the same about amazon. So tomorrow marvel might curse the day they decided not to purse more aggressively the direct to video market. |
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EricJ2
 Posts: 4016 |
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Actually, it's worse than that--For three years, Cartoon Network made the Superfriends the sole whipping-boy for their orchestrated campaign to bully Hanna-Barbera reruns off their network, by making sure the audience only associated H-B with Aquaman, the Wonder Twins, Jabberjaw, the Smurfs and Quick-Draw McGraw, and wouldn't miss them once they were gone. Unfortunately, it worked too well...ON WARNER. No matter how badly Warner wants to corporately market DC, they still have that personal-demon on their shoulder telling them that any Justice League reference will inevitably remind the audience of kitschy 70's Superfriends jokes, and "Wendy & Marvin" and "Aquaman talking to fish". (One failed CN Justice League pilot had a Superfriends update taking the 70's Legion of Doom "Challenge" canon into the present day, and doing a new version of the "Secret Origins" back-in-time storyline everyone remembered from that series....Past-issue much, Warner?) So Warner has two ways to try and fight their neurotic demons: Either fight them by overcompensating in the opposite direction and making their DC movies "Dark & Gritty", which created Zack Snyder, or give in with their Network-produced series and say "Okay, folks, we know you're laughing at it too", and turning Batman:TAS into the goofy tongue-in-cheek "Batman: the Brave & Bold", and turning Teen Titans into a CN retro-kitsch belch. Direct-video DC Animation still does what it wants, and has DC writers who want to immortalize all the classic print-comic arcs For Fans By Fans, but Warner can't make money off of it on their own network without listening to that little devil-on-their-shoulder of their own making... |
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BadNewsBlues
Posts: 6163 |
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Company W= Warner Bros. Company C = Cartoon Network Company D = DC Animation Though for what's it's worth your win-win argument seems little more than a pipe dream when the total overall costs of these shows are factored in.
Amongst who older, embittered animation fans complaining about how their kid's generation has it bad? And ironically hated on some of the shows their lamenting about being canceled? Like Teen Titans and Young Justice.
While Assemble's existence is owed to the original Avengers movie it's pretty much been setting up it's own continuity while occasionally incorporating elements from the movie(s) into itself. Ultron was introduced into the series long before Age Of Ultron dropped in theatres Ant-Man had already been featured in a season 1 episode before his standalone film came out (though his identity as was unknown initially) And of course Spider-Man showed up within the series at least once long before Civil War came out.
They already have animated shows already on TV so they don't really have to pursue that market as much. I mean yeah when Batman TAS was on television it got Mask of The Phantasm and Sub-Zero but did Warner Bros. have to create these movies which were effectively higher budgeted and somewhat better animated episodes of the show? No. The only characters I could see Marvel making animated direct to dvd films of is Fantastic Four & X-Men as they currently don't have any animated shows on the air....but with Fox owning the rights to those properties....I don't know. |
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leafy sea dragon
 Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
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The less well-known stuff in anime is pretty far off the mainstream, so it can be quite confusing to them. That, and a lot of anime, if not nearly all modern ones, have a pretty young cast of main characters, which could give the impression that they are for children...at least until the less kid-friendly stuff appears, in which case it really gets confusing and comes across like the violent comic books EC Comics was producing many decades ago.
They also have Guardians of the Galaxy and Avengers Assemble, though both seem to be pretty low-key series without much advertising. Neither of them are very good, personally. |
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EricJ2
Posts: 4016 |
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Not to mention renewing "Hulk and the Agents of SMASH", which may be the most insultingly flat-out moronic Marvel-based toon ever made. EVER. MADE. 
And that's including the anime ones. (Disney Channel does have a problem with "treating Marvel for kids", and making the heroes bicker like their intended 12-yo. audience, since they're aiming for a cable demographic. Back when Marvel was still relatively independent of Disney's MCU movie tie-in initiative, Disney Channel's earlier "Avengers: Earth Mightiest Heroes" and Fox's 90's "X-Men: the Animated Series" were considered the two best Marvel series ever made, live or animated.) |
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residentgrigo
 Posts: 2515 Location: Germany |
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@leafy sea dragon The current Marvel toons are less than ideal (the animation is well done though) but they are making serious money. A return to the less film advertisement driven / sophisticated Spectacular Spider-man (the best one), Earth´s Mightiest Heroes and 90s X-men would be welcome, but going kidZ only 100% "worked". Sigh, the Disney merger is starting to mess with the company from the point of a long time fan as me. Oh well, DC to the rescue
 ! Justice League Action looks great. Rebirth is also proving to be phenomenal. They even "fixed" Superman by going full late 80s / 90s, as BvS. The connected toon films should be rebooted next. The first good Superhero toon is lastly the forgotten Superman 1988:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superman_%28TV_series%29 @EricJ2 Nope. The Avengers: United They Stand and that 60s Spider-man über trash say hello. Here are the Flintstones selling smokes, "for children": 
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Minimimiau
Posts: 194 Location: somewhere on this planet. |
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I really enjoy this article. I can learn how anime really is in Japan. I have to say that in the past anime was mainstream and not like the article explain, a subculture.
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vallum
Posts: 58 |
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Please, don't believe in everything you read. The article has some flaws, as some here have already said. |
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residentgrigo
Posts: 2515 Location: Germany |
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Forgot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDMQ3tXNKgM is an up and comming youtube channel on the history of animation. The 1940s Fleischer Superman toon shorts had flawed writing but hot damn did they look amazing! This is Akira level quality and as influential.
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Jose Cruz
 Posts: 1790 Location: South America |
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According to anthropologists Japan is a country that lacks its own sense of centrality so it's mainstream culture is defined by the leading foreign countries, in the distant past Chinese culture defined Japanese mainstream culture, now European culture defines mainstream Japanese culture, hence, the intrinsically Japanese like animation and comics, becomes stigmatized. Its shows how third world Japan is in terms of mentality: only after the west began to show serious interest in manga that Japan opened up several manga museums. |
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walw6pK4Alo
 Posts: 9322 |
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It occupies both existences, actually. In the mainstream you have your One Pieces Dragon Balls, Narutos, Pokemons, Chibi Maruko-chans, etc., but the otaku subculture really isn't as small as everyone likes to pretend. If there are a few million dedicated money-spending otaku/fujoshi/otome/etc. fans across the country, that's enough to keep the industry going through various forms of media. They've forged their own self-sustaining subculture, one that allows for roughly 80-100 new late night to exist every year. America and the West in general doesn't have anything remotely like that for animation. The closest example would be all of those direct to video DC animated movies, but even those feel really sanitized and PG'd more than they should be. And then the counterargument brings up TV examples, they're all titles that have been around for several years already, if not longer, which parallels the mainstream for-family anime that have also been around forever. There's no constantly rotating new slew of material, you just have to hope that you get an Adventure Time or Steven Universe once every 3 to 5 years. I don't have to wait that long with anime. In the case of a season with no good shows to watch (not a personal problem, I always find something) then I only have to wait it out for 3 months before another 20+ series are introduced. But even then, I could simply dig into the archives and pull out another 50 or more older anime I've yet to see. That kind of desire to grow backlogs with Western cartoons isn't something I think anyone really does outside of films or nostalgic rewatches. |
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Kutsu
Posts: 570 |
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The issue is more in the lack of renewal in the mainstream. There used to be different shows you could associate to the mainstream for each decade :
-60s : Astro Boy, Kimba the White Lion, Gege no Kitaro... -70s : Lupin III, Dokonjo Gaeru, Sazae-san... -80s : Dragon Ball, Doraemon, Ashita no Joe, Touch, Dr Slump, Manga Nihon Mukashi Banashi, Urusei Yatsura... -90s : Chibi Maruko-chan, Crayon Shin-chan, Detective Conan, Pokemon, Kindaichi, Slam Dunk... -00s : Inuyasha, One Piece, Naruto, Atashin'chi, Pretty Cure, Prince of Tennis, Zatch Bell!... Which new show really broke into the mainstream in Japan this decade ? Yôkai Watch, maybe ? And even then it never managed to challenge the old shows. In the past decades you had Sazae-san actually getting beaten occasionally by a recent show. It could never happen today. |
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Moroboshi-san
 Posts: 174 |
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According to Nomura Research Institute there are about 110'000 anime otaku. It appears that the "few hundred thousand of these fans" referred in the article is an exaggeration. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otaku#Types_and_classification_of_Japanese_otaku |
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relyat08
 Posts: 4125 Location: Northern Virginia |
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That's from 2005, and is an internet study with a sample size of only 10,000. I wouldn't take it too seriously. And it is only in reference to open or self-identifying-Otaku. Closet Otaku is estimated to be as much as 20 times that. With casual anime fans, who don't identify as Otaku, but still support the industry at some level and keep track of what's new, being a substantial group on top of that. |
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Jose Cruz
Posts: 1790 Location: South America |
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It's hard to define how obsessive you must be to be an otaku. I was talking about that with movie fans in the US.
It's pretty much well stablished that watching movies is a mainstream hobby in the US. But, how many Americans are real movie otakus? I mean, the types that watched all Tarkovsky's movies and dozens of Bergman's and Kurosawa's movies. I would guess very few, around the tens of thousands, if not less. Even though hundreds of millions watch movies in the US only tens of thousands could be regarded as really serious movie fans. You cannot use data like, the number of people that discuss movies on Internet communities to try to measure the population of movie otakus in the US and hence try to find out whether movies are mainstream in the US or not. Measuring the number of movie otakus in the US will not allow anybody to know whether movies are mainstream or not, only that there are a few people in the US with really serious interest in film. In Japan, according to a Japanese guy I meet at MAL, there are about 4 million anime otakus, meaning, people who follow late night anime shows regularly. The 110,000 figure might be the number of really hardcore people that have watched thousands of shows. Anyway, it's not possible to clearly define what an anime otaku is, in that study they said the anime otaku would be people that identify themselves primarily as members of a group of hardcore animation fans, not all people who regularly watch animation. One indication of the numbers who watch late night anime is the jump in Attack on Titan manga sales after the late night show aired, increasing annual sales by 13 million books. Attack on Titan sales, before and after the late night Anime show aired in 2013: 2012 - 2,682,504 2013 - 15,933,801 Clearly, there must be a substantial number of people watching those late night shows, way more than 110,000. Also, it's easy to come up with examples of mainstream serious adult animation in Japan: Princess Mononoke, for example, or the two Patlabor movies (according to Miyazaki the first Patlabor movie was the top rented movie in the Japanese military), Only Yesterday, etc. |
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) is because for some schizophrenic reasons the executives at CN treat any property of DC comics as "acquired programming" unlike the shows they produce by themselves which are "original animated series". 
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