The Easier They Fall

Here at the Wasteland, we try to understand the appeal of entertainment beyond the aesthetic or the base level. This includes material that is a lot more controversial than it should be. Sometimes even mediums can be controversial. One of the most controversial types of entertainment, to this day, has been Japanese anime. There has never been a time when it wasn't a problem in some area of the west. And, to be quite honest, most of its controversy comes from an ignorance about the required medium involved in the production process: animation.

For some reason, it might be Disney but I tend to think it's a lack of ambition, animation has been considered kid stuff in the west since its early inception. And because of this myopic view, scam artists such as the ACT were allowed to come in and police an entire medium in order to water it down for two year olds at the expense of everyone else, mostly boys. Forget adults, kids between that ages of five and fifteen should be allowed to have their own entertainment, too. But in the west they've never really had that without heavy, and even laughable, censorship. Either their parents had to find tamer adult fare or the kids would have to put up with obviously gutted and hacked material the ACT and their cronies would allow them to watch. A teenager that just wanted to be treated like he had a functional brain was out of luck. This has been the case since television became a viable format for storytelling.

Enter anime.

Anime has had a contentious time in the western world since it was first introduced in the 1960s, especially in finding its place or niche. I would argue that it still hasn't found it yet. Anime originally came here as heavily edited syndication fare throughout the '60s and '70s, butchered in content for easy and cheap content for kids, but by the time of the 1980s things were beginning to change. Since this was the age of the Best Toys Ever Made, production companies were beginning to see the dollar signs in their eyes. They could do something with this whole offbeat corner of the world and their weird ideas.

It's easy to forget now due to all the problems the production company has caused for the industry since, but the series that really helped to turn this perception around was Robotech. Essentially a mashup of three anime series, Super Dimensional Fortress Macross, Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross, and Genesis Climber Mospeada, to get around the syndication rules of the time, Robotech allowed the burgeoning and thriving Japanese space opera series a place in the west for the very first time. This essentially changed the entire game, especially for kids in Gen X and Y who were just the right age for this new phenomenon.

As stated on the Arkhaven blog:

"Using some clever scripting editing, Macek cobbled these all together and created the massive Robotech Saga that spanned three generations. And the amazing thing is that it actually hung together. I for one certainly bought into it hook, line and sinker. I didn’t find out that it was three separate shows until I was stationed in Japan. I nearly concussed myself with forehead-slapping, it was so obvious in retrospect.

[. . .]

"Robotech still has a strong brand to this day. The same, sadly, cannot be said for the man who made it what it is. Carl Macek pretty much took Anime and introduced America to the grown-up art form we know today. After Robotech Macek started up his own company. Streamline Pictures."

Carl Macek is hated in anime circles today, mostly from the perception that he watered down anime and ruined the medium, when the truth was just the opposite. He was the first to try and get it out here as unblemished as possible to the masses. Considering no one had ever done it before, he had his hands full. Not to mention that he had to deal with the draconian anti-entertainment policies of the time.

But it was because of Carl Macek, Robotech, and Streamline Pictures, that the form made any sort of splash over here at all. While a certain company he left behind continues to hose the industry to this day, for no real reason or gain, anime soon blew up by offering those young kids and teenagers a whole new world that their parents refused to supply them. Throughout the '90s, anime exploded, and it all really went off when Streamline Pictures put out the 1988 anime movie, Akira.

The Arkhaven blog continues:

"It is quite impossible to explain how utterly mind-blowing Akira was. It still holds up well today but there was nothing at all like it in the America of 1990. The animation wasn’t cheap. Clearly, a lot of money had gone into this production. The setting was…familiar yet incredibly alien. The violence was surreal and hyper-realistic at the same time. The attention to every aspect of detail was immaculate. Akira wasn’t an entry-level drug. It was a big bolus shot of full power uncut heroin as your first try in the drug scene. You survived or you didn’t. That’s all there was to it.

"Fine.

"I loved it.

"And yeah I wanted more."

It's easy to criticize a movie like Akira now (In my controversial opinion, it is far less repetitive than the manga, and therefore a much better experience), but in the context of the late '80s and early '90s? This is what it was like for those of us seeing it for the first time. There wasn't anything close to this level, especially not in the barren western industry. Akira ended up changing the medium for a very good reason, and carving out a spot in the entertainment landscape that exists to this day.

And Streamline Pictures/Carl Macek was the one to help it do that in the west.

"I got my wish. Carl Macek’s late and much lamented Streamline Pictures did more than anyone else to bring Anime to America. Akira made enough money for Streamline to put it into a position to buy up pretty much the best of the best that was available at the time.

"And thanks to Japan’s Bubble Economy there was enough development money pouring into Anime combined with a straight-to-video market that was actually profitable at the time and you had a golden age of Anime taking off in Japan at about the same time that it first blew up big in America.

"Without Carl Macek, Anime may not have ever come to America. I know it’s hard to believe that now but trust me I’ve seen plenty of cool stuff never take off in this country."

Of course, in the early '90s, things were already changing. Western entertainment was beginning to fall in love with subversion and degeneracy. Family sitcoms were about how bad family was. Cartoons were becoming for "adults" (in a very different way than anime was) and dramas were becoming more explicit. Comic books were getting gorier and more extreme. Music was getting darker and more nihilistic. And the media loved to stir the pot. Do I have to mention the DOOM "murder-simulator" controversy? Or how about the "Satanic Panic" (which very much was satanic) which manipulated actual events into a media narrative by the actual abusers? A different world was being created.

Throughout the '90s, as western culture slowly imploded on itself, it was weird to see that one of the things Gen X and Y were flocking to was this obscure form of Japanese entertainment. Perhaps they appreciated the unfiltered and honest depictions of action, adventure, life, and death, that they were so denied by the western censors throughout their youths. Perhaps it was something new and novel, allowing them to see things they could never imagine otherwise. Either way, it was a much better alternative than much of what the west was offering at the time.

Regardless, the industry only grew throughout the 1990s. Streamline had built the market, but big fishes were starting to come into the pond. And they were hungry. Manga Entertainment busted open the doors to wider distribution with seminal titles such as Ghost in the Shell, Ninja Scroll, Patlabor, and Wings of Honneamise, all movies of the sort that had never had western equivalents of this stature before. This was a whole new world.

The cultural explosion of video games at the time also helped anime get in the door. The Street Fighter II animated movie, the Fatal Fury OVAs and movie, and Magic Knight Rayearth, among many others, were another way to get anime's foot in the door. Manga Entertainment's Street Fighter II V series was the first I ever collected on DVD, for instance.

Another big dog in the yard was Pioneer (later Geneon Entertainment), which put out Tenchi Muyo, Serial Experiments Lain, El Hazard, Armitage III, Paranoia Agent, Gungrave, and, of course, Trigun. You also can't forget Bandai Entertainment which brought over Gundam Wing, Outlaw Star, S-Cry-ed, Cowboy Bebop, G Gundam, Ghost in the Shell: Stand-Alone Complex, and Escaflowne, among others. Neither company is around anymore, but they definitely helped to make their mark.

Then you had Funimation and ADV Films (now Sentai Filmworks) come in during the decade, which more or less established the market as it is today. Where would we be without Dragon Ball Z and Sailor Moon eventually finding success in syndication? Not to mention teenage weebs hunting down Neon Genesis Evangelion VHS tapes.

And that is more or less where the industry was by the '00s. It had climbed out of the fringes of now-defunct VHS rental stores into big box stores where DVD boxsets were actually affordable. Things had changed in record time. Things were looking up. But the '00s themselves proved to be a very turbulent decade for anime itself.

As hinted at above, the Japan bubble burst for a while in the '00s, mostly due to the sort of series that were available to be imported and a contracting market. A lot of North American distributors didn't survive the 2000s. There were a few factors that lead to the change. There was the early shift from hand drawn cell animation to early digital painting (which has aged badly, there is no way around it) and changing Japanese trends clashing with the rest of the world. 

One of Bandai Entertainment's biggest bombs in the west, for instance, was the Lucky Star anime, which was in vogue with a new trend in the industry called moe--cute girls doing cute things. This was very popular among otaku in Japan, but not so much to the burgeoning overseas audience. As can be gleamed, the Gen X and Y kids that were now reaching adulthood did not connect with this new style. They came in the door for the animation and the wonder. Moe offered neither of these things, but in fact an insular world meant for a tiny demographic--one that would buy any and all merchandise with the right brand on it. This market never really existed in the west.

But it is also easy to forget that some of the biggest sellers over here (Cowboy Bebop, Outlaw Star, and Trigun) were near bombs in their country of origin. By the end of the '90s, Japan was beginning to give up on wonder and fantasy and was starting to turn inward to video games and plotless excuses to look at cute girls. This divide did hurt anime overseas, because there was a very real period between 2006 through 2015 or so, nearly a decade, where the most common form of anime, the one that had made the medium what it was, became second fiddle in the industry to this very alien one. And overseas audiences were walking away. 

This is a long way from the industry that made things like the Trigun movie purely because of its overseas success. Now it appeared that they were no longer interested in anything short of making money on a small cadre of hoarder otaku. What happened to that crazy, experimental, adventurous spirit that made anime overseas?

But this was all foreseen by people in the industry. Japan wasn't the same place it once was. From Yoshikazu Yasuhiko:

For those who don't know, Mr. Yasuhiko was part of the original wave of animators that came into the industry in the 1960s. By the 1980s, he had become a director himself, putting out the well-loved movies Venus Wars, Crusher Joe, and Arion, as well as the Giant Gorg series with Sunrise. His last project was Venus Wars in 1989 which was about the time when he realized that the industry was changing to the above state. Yes, he saw it coming from way back when anime was blowing up in the west. The original intent had shifted.

Mr. Yasuhiko states that while making Venus Wars he had been acquainting with the then-new generation of creators, known as the second wave. These are perhaps best known as people like Katsuhiro Otomo, Kenichi Sonoda, Hideaki Anno, and many more, who had an intense passion to create new worlds and would try anything to see if it worked. These people were responsible for much of what blew up in the mid-'80s through early-'00s overseas, much like Mr. Yasuhiko's generation was responsible from the classics from the 1960s through to the shift in the early '80s. 

By the 2000s, the old guard was all gone or retired (Rintaro's Metropolis in 2001, based on Osamu Tezuka's works, is probably the best swansong of this era), and the former mavericks were moving to different positions in the industry. This is about the time the crop of the third generation came in, mostly, as we can guess, through the digital shift and being more acclimated with newer technology. Nonetheless, they quickly made their mark. The sudden shift in the industry in the early to mid-00s is due to this sudden shift in personnel.

Much of this is inferred through Mr. Yasuhiko's statements, he doesn't say all of this outright, but you can read it for yourself in the book included in the recent Venus Wars re-release. You can see for yourself how the people in the industry had changed over the years just by looking it up. Either way, his bigger point is that the ambition and desire to create was disappearing, and he wasn't wrong.

Japan's economic bubble popped in the 1990s and it has never really recovered. They turned very insular, no longer wishing to connect, but to pander, and it has affected their art quite a bit. It makes sense that the new creators would go in this very different direction. Despite this change, many people still find Japan's manga, video games, and anime, far superior to what the west offers, and these people aren't exactly wrong. It is better, because the Japanese still respect the customer, at the heart of it all. The west gave that up long ago.

But that was back in the 2000s. We're two decades years removed from that time. So have things changed? Let us look and see.

Around 2015 or so, just as it did in the '00s, anime did begin another shift. Perhaps it was the arrival of a fourth generation, I can't be certain, but it was around this period that there was a very conscious attempt to go back to the well they had stopped pumping from. Not so much for the mindless nostalgia of the west, which just uses the shell of old things to sell new junk, but in the spirit of wonder that the old works were made of. It was as if they were trying to remember what they had lost.

While good anime certainly was not nonexistent between 2006 through 2015, it did appear to be relegated to the fringes, not promoted or pushed much by the industry, nor did it gain a foothold in a western industry that was rapidly contracting and struggling for air. But 2015 had a few megahits that were too hard to ignore, even for anime weebs that had long since given up on the medium. Just as the early works had to wow with their animation as well as their content to make a splash, so to did these series. One Punch Man and Blood Blockade Battlefront were the two that came out of nowhere to show off fantastic animation, unique storytelling, and that high energy flair that has come to be expected from the genre. They were hits that were far too difficult to ignore.

Trigun, Gungrave, and Blood Blockade Battlefront, all from the same man.

Blood Blockade Battlefront was written by the man behind Trigun, a manga writer from the '90s, but the director was a more recent talent, allowing her talent to flourish in a genre long-neglected by the wider industry. As a result, it became one of the biggest hits of the year. 

One Punch Man was Madhouse's production, but was mainly handled by younger studio Bones whose freelancers let it sing. The manga was already well-liked, but the extra effort the animators put into it drove the series into megahit status. 

There were other great series such as My Love Story! and Ushio & Tora which helped fill out the year, but those two are what set the trend going forward. With new seasons of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure adding to it, this became a very successful period for the industry.

In fact, the success of Blood Blockade Battlefront is what lead Shonen Jump to seek out Bones to do an anime adaption of Kohei Horikoshi's little known series you might know as My Hero Academia a mere year later. That's right, it started all the way back here in 2015. I also don't think it was a coincidence that they hired the writer of the Trigun and Gungrave anime series to be the head writer for MHA, either. They knew exactly what they were doing. They wanted My Hero Academia to be the sort of megahit they hadn't had worldwide since the 1990s or early '00s. And it was.

One Punch Man also brought western attention back to the manga industry that hadn't been given in well over a decade at that point, and this production inspired many future adaptions such as Mob Psycho 100. At the same time, the studio behind the JoJo's Bizarre Adventure anime continued their adaption were also brought on to new hits in things like Fire Force which were specifically aimed at the western market. The industry was quickly gaining ground again.

Ushio & Tora was also made by MAPPA, a studio staffed by ex-Madhouse animators hungry for more work. They would get into it over the next few years by putting out Garo Vanishing Line, Banana Fish, Dororo, and a few more upcoming works that look quite good. None of these would have been made even a decade earlier, despite their obvious appeal to wider markets.

Aside from that there were deliberate attempts to reclaim what was lost. Megalo Box, a series that will probably always be overlooked, used a deliberate grain technique in order to give the series a texture that made it look closer to an older anime, allowing it the tone it needed in order to work. Even now the series looks great, giving it the look it needed to sell the cyberpunk world it was portraying. I wish more anime would try this, because it adds a good deal.

All that aside, it is easy to see why anime now is more popular than any western alternative is. What exactly could compete with the above, especially in the animation or TV industry? There isn't a whole lot, especially as more and more people are cutting their cable.

Regardless, anime isn't going anywhere anytime soon.

Is the industry perfect? Not even close. But it wasn't even great back in the day, either. Nonetheless, this is the direction it should be heading in, the opposite path that Mr. Yasuhiko saw coming way back in the 1990s when he retired from the industry. Even he has since returned, working on the Gundam Origin anime. Things are changing like we knew they had to. We need to connect again, not shy away into our own little corners.

Of course, we're not the anime industry, but we still have to follow the same principle. There is a whole world of art out there waiting to be made and seen, and we should get to it. Whatever art you don't get around to making will never be made.

The ACT is long dead, you're not. There is nothing stopping us from creating any longer. Let's start acting like it.

For adventure, check out the first book in the Gemini Warrior series of swords, sorcery, heroes, powers, and portals! Book 2 is on the way very soon.