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INTEREST: Gundam Director Shinji Takamatsu Responds to NHK's Anime Industry Special

With so many shows relying almost exclusively on disc sales

TV airings in Japan will probably have to make more time for commercials.

The Japanese animation industry, as it stands today, dependent on DVD sales and etc., is killing hundreds of franchises of the manga adaptations.

Takamatsu said that utilizing technology such as AI and CGI will not help the anime industry because it will put animators who already make low wages out of work.

PFdaCIA wrote:

The Japanese animation industry, as it stands today, dependent on DVD sales and etc., is killing hundreds of franchises of the manga adaptations.

This is only true for original anime.
All the other anime based on manga and Light Novels, depends mostly on how many mangas and light novels are sold during and after the anime is aired, as was discussed in the forums so many times before.
For these kind of anime adaptations, DVD sales are only a extra profit to help recoup the initial investment.

Quote:

Takamatsu said that utilizing technology such as AI and CGI will not help the anime industry because it will put animators who already make low wages out of work.

I agree 100%
Also, anime have a peculiar art and even if sometimes CG can help in some scenes, it should only be used to that. Using techniques that don't use CG is what makes anime so different from the usual cartoons nowadays.

No, no: I was not talking about the original source of adaptation. Often the sale of DVDs [physical media] are irrelevant, in others not, but not properly necessary for the franchise of the original source, ie, the manga is maintained. I say in the sense that it kills franchises from television series, from adaptation to TV. Many series are well-produced, adapting good manga and somehow becoming famous via online streaming and TV. But they do not gain continuity because nobody wants to buy the physical media. In a survey of top 100 anime that marked the season, there were franchises ranked that deserved continuation, being them of more than one season. However, the low adherence per season was causing sales to become irrelevant.

So for TV and Streaming online the franchises die. It was in that sense that I meant it. The original material will always sell, regardless of the adaptation.

The other popular suggestion, cutting the number of shows produced, is a band aid on the larger issue. Fewer shows will only mean more folks out of work in the anime industry, but folks who are working only doing so in the same conditions. Producers are still going to keep trying to make as much profit as possible, and that means keeping labor costs as low as possible. Just because the number of shows produced a year gets cut in half, doesn't mean paychecks are going to rise by anywhere near an equitable amount. That's just not how businesses work.

PFdaCIA wrote:

No, no: I was not talking about the original source of adaptation. Often the sale of DVDs [physical media] are irrelevant, in others not, but not properly necessary for the franchise of the original source, ie, the manga is maintained. I say in the sense that it kills franchises from television series, from adaptation to TV. Many series are well-produced, adapting good manga and somehow becoming famous via online streaming and TV. But they do not gain continuity because nobody wants to buy the physical media. In a survey of top 100 anime that marked the season, there were franchises ranked that deserved continuation, being them of more than one season. However, the low adherence per season was causing sales to become irrelevant. So for TV and Streaming online the franchises die. It was in that sense that I meant it. The original material will always sell, regardless of the adaptation.

Are you talking if a anime will have multiple seasons or if is only a 1 cour anime and if a bad DVD sales will affect the making of more seasons? (sorry, because English is not my first language sometimes im lost in translation)

China is throwing fist-fulls of the stuff at them, they just don't want to take it and are doing a horrible job of utilizing what they do take because they don't want to give up their financial control, and also because the production committee system is completely dysfunctional, in my opinion. Streaming revenue is also much more substantial than I think Takamatsu is letting on. Maybe he doesn't look at the numbers, but they are pretty noteworthy while disc sales are pretty insignificant.
Ultimately, I think Takamatsu is being too much of an apologist, he's living in the past, and his stubbornness is blinding him from any potential solutions. The situation is pretty abysmal, but he seems to be grumpily whining about how any change is useless. That's not a very productive mindset. Don't just wait for it to collapse, work to fix the problems as much as you can. There are a number of studios making changes internally to that end, and we should definitely be praising and encouraging them.

Yes, I mean more seasons in a series, giving her a closed end. That's what I meant by "several franchises die because of selling DVDs" and so on.

Ehh, no, not really. I mean, yeah, that is how business works, but the ideal here is to increase the amount of money allotted to each production, increase the production values to each of those productions, and decrease the overall number or productions. This is the kind of thing that is sustainable. It's what KyoAni does right now and it works just great for them. The problem is of course that moving to that model is incredibly challenging and risky, it literally goes against any short term economic logic, and because of all of that, it will need a significant catalyst. I'm all for free markets, but I think this is a case where regulation would really need to be enforced that forces the change in the industry.

The idea that only the source material sales or only the disc sales matter are both equally unlikely.
There are a lot of different groups chipping in to fund anime for every project and every one of those groups has different interests. So for example, as has been stated in here, saying that the boost the manga or LN gets is all the people care is obviously not true since the people who are chipping in money to get rights to sell the music won't get anything out of manga/LN sales and couldn't care less about those manga/LN sales.
Likewise with other aspects, they all matter and if you only get LN/manga sales while the show tanks in every other possible thing you could imagine you're going to have people who are losing money outside of the publisher of the source material and thus will think twice about doing something like that again.

Likewise the idea that it's an industry that relies soley on disc sales to recoup the costs seems to be something a bit of the past. I know people always claim that the money they get from companies overseas must be peanuts and doesn't even make a difference but if this can be trusted:
http://aja.gr.jp/?wpdmdl=1005 (and I think it can) you can see that since 2015 the revenue they're getting from overseas seems to be the biggest portion by now.

So I'd personally take this all with a grain of salt. Yeah disc sales are down and all that, for sure but as long as they don't close their eyes stubbornly holding on to those old ways I don't really see it as this big disaster

The Japanese animation industry, as it stands today, dependent on DVD sales and etc., is killing hundreds of franchises of the manga adaptations. It was the fact [although some people are not aware of this] that the very economically stable region [at least outside the anim industry] is still politically and militarily unstable. The first crisis in that region could put the Japanese economy in bankruptcy!