"This isn't America we're talking about here - this is Japan. There's no particular stigma against anime, and virtually everyone has grown up watching it as a kid. Manga is read by the majority of the population too - I see at least as many bored salarymen reading manga on the subway as I do reading other books. Possibly more if anything."
Nope.Anime is considered something for kids in Japan too.If you're hanging alot around Akihabara maybe you don't see it.
Kids or perverts.The latest anime do not improve this image.Miyazaki did but he's a drop in the ocean.
I would disagree. Most of the people I know are university students, so the impression I have is surely biased towards what that segment thinks, but most people seem to just treat anime the same as any other form of film or TV. Some is for kids, some is for adults, some appeals to all ages. One example of a recent anime that was very popular would be Shingeki no Kyojin, which has been very successful.
It is a little outdated but considering the average still hasn't changed, it is realistically 4 dollars an hour. I guess I quoted from a very extreme example. That is still half of minimum wage though.
While I checked out the average wage, I found out that the average salary of a Russian doctor is equal to an animator.
4 dollars an hour?! ... Wow, fuck that shit. Is that real? Where's Bob when you need him?
I have no idea if it's true or not. But I will say that if it
is true, then since the minimum wage is several times that, it is their own fault for a) taking the job, and b) not immediately reporting the company to the police for charging so far below the minimum wage. Since there is no shortage of better-paid work than that (if anything there seems to be a shortage of workers for unskilled jobs here), people clearly don't take those jobs because they're desperate - which would suggest that only otaku who are obssessed with anime do them. Which thus leads to the problem Miyazaki describes.
Have all the people claiming that "Oh, nobody other than otaku buys anime, so making anime aimed at normal people wouldn't work", or "Oh, nobody would pay the high prices anime blurays normally sell at" stopped to consider that maybe, just maybe, "normal" people (ie. people who don't watch TV so they can jack off to semi-explicit shots of underaged cartoon girls) might buy more anime if it were targeted towards them?
Says the guy with an avatar from a show about underage schoolgirls whose character designs and fanservice inspired people to wonder if said schoolgirls were wearing panties or not. (But hey, I'm not judging here!) I've stopped to consider that, but I've also considered that the anime industry used to make more anime like that, but it failed. But anyway, I'll crossquote myself from MAL.
Touché. I used to like Saki for the mahjong, but I guess in light of Achiga-hen and now season 2 that claim is becoming more and more tenuous :p
There were more of the so-called "Type A" anime made ~10 years ago, not even in the 90s let alone the 80s. Stuff like Monster, Honey & Clover, Texhnolyze, Haibane Renmei, Paranoia Agent, Koi Kaze, Paradise Kiss, Heat Guy J, Speed Grapher (debatable perhaps?), Mushi-shi*, Planetes, Kino's Journey, GitS:SAC, Wolf's Rain, RahXephon**, Kurau Phantom Memory, and probably others I'm forgetting about. (Gonzo's numerous other early/mid-00s attempts at appealing to Western viewers instead of Japanese otaku also come to mind.)
The industry certainly tried, but those shows (many of them anime-original) didn't sell well enough or didn't reach enough people. And somehow, I don't think "you'd better make what we want, or a bunch of people who don't buy anime will continue to not buy anime" is a credible threat that will hold the industry's feet to the fire. It could be argued that the Western anime boom after Evangelion and Cowboy Bebop (and a little franchise called Pokemon, among others) fueled a trend towards "MoarSRS" anime, but when those projects didn't deliver the expected returns, the budgets for ambitious anime-original projects dried up. And with shoujo/josei content shifting more towards live-action, that leaves otaku-friendly manga/LN/VN adaptations as the main material being made.
*Which actually is getting a sequel, so maybe it didn't do too terribly.
** I see RahXephon as a moe harem comedy with other elements that convince the moe-haters to give it a pass, much like Steins;Gate.
This isn't America we're talking about here - this is Japan. There's no particular stigma against anime, and virtually everyone has grown up watching it as a kid. Manga is read by the majority of the population too - I see at least as many bored salarymen reading manga on the subway as I do reading other books. Possibly more if anything.
Manga may be considered okay depending on the title, but late-night anime (anything aside from Ghibli and similar blockbusters, Gundam, The Big 3 and a few other major shounen, Pretty Cure and similar Magical Girl shows, and all-ages family series that've been running for decades like Detective Conan, Sazae-san, Doraemon, etc.) is considered the realm of otakus, and displaying any knowledge or appreciation of them will get you stigmatized in polite Japanese society. Why should late-night anime studios make product for a society that hates them? Again, they tried in the past -- everything I listed above aired from 2002-05 -- but it didn't work. Businesses are going to do what makes them a profit and keeps them alive.
I believe it, again, depends on the anime and on the genre. There have been plenty of anime outside that small group which have been popular amongst the wider population, though I will admit that in general mostly not as popular as live action stuff lately. Again, Shingeki no Kyojin springs to mind as the biggest recent example. Manga obviously really does depend on the title, but I do see a huge number of people reading it on the trains - easily rivalling the number of people reading normal books. Although now I think of it, salarymen reading the latest issue of Jump do make up a large portion of that.
Ghibli films, when they hit cinemas, are invariably among the highest grossing films in the country. Not just among anime, but among everything - be it other japanese films, or the latest Hollywood blockbuster. Trying to say there is no market for anime targeted at anyone other than the crazy otaku who spend all their free time watching hentai and going to schoolgirl cafes in Akiba (yes, they exist. Yes, there are a lot of them. Yes, they are exactly how they sound) is just stupid. Because there really, really is.
Not everyone can be Ghibli. Miyazaki and Ghibli have the luxury of having their output being considered acceptable by the mainstream, while other studios do not.
Obviously nobody's going to be able to easily match Ghibli. But they can be popular. In terms of films, Persona 3 recently did pretty well in cinemas (based on purely anecdotal evidence since I'm too lazy to search for figures). TV anime suffers somewhat due to the difficulty of getting a decent timeslot on a non-anime channel, which makes it hard to attract the attention of anyone who isn't already an anime fan.
That is why anime only targeting this one incredibly niche market segment is a problem. It excludes the entire rest of the potential anime market, and due to the nature of the niche it's targeting, only ends up making anime as a whole look bad. And when that niche is no longer profitable - which will happen eventually, either due to demographic changes, social or economic changes, or just people losing interest - a lot of anime studios will be in a pretty sticky situation, having put all their eggs in that one basket.
So they should just make overambitious expensive normals-targeting failures and go bankrupt in a blaze of glory, rather than continuing to create what they like for their niche fandoms for as long as they can?
I think the problem is the industry is stuck in a bit of a vicious cycle at the moment. My current working hypothesis for how I think things have ended up the way they are goes something like this:
Anime was widely popular. Maybe not as much so as some live action TV, but generally pretty widely watched. Then, for various reasons (strongly linked with the deep and serious societal problems from which Japan is suffering, and which would be a whole essay in themselves, so I won't get into here), a certain kind of anime (and also game and manga) attracted a certain kind of fan, some of whom would become absolutely obsessed with it. In other words, what we now know as otaku.
These otaku, many of whom were young (high school or university) loved this anime so much that creating it themselves became their dream job. And so they all started taking jobs as animators. This, combined with the dedication of the otaku fanbase to spending vast sums of money on the anime they liked, led to the beginning of a subtle shift towards producing more anime targeting this audience. At the same time, costs were rising and so companies began looking for ways to cut costs. Anime is a very manpower-intensive industry, since each frame needs to be drawn by staff, so cutting staff costs is the logical first step to take.
Many companies did this by outsourcing a lot of work to cheaper labour in countries like China. However, some noticed the group of obssessive otaku willing to work at any price, and started hiring them at much lower than average wages. This in turn led to other potential employees becoming much less likely to join those companies, which, along with the already present trend towards more otaku-focused anime, in turn led to the hiring of even more otaku staff. This led to the otaku-focusing trend to become even stronger, which in turn led to alienating even more of their other potential audiences, which led to an even greater focus on otaku (as well as higher prices due to the gradual decrease in sales - and the fact that those buyers who remained were willing to pay them).
Now, while there are still many people who watch some anime, it is safe to say that the majority of it is roundly disregarded by most of the population, due to the reputation it has for being aimed at otaku. It has become very difficult to get anything other than late night slots on TV, and fewer people are willing to take a chance on paying the very high prices for an anime blu-ray they might see in a shop when they don't know if it'll be something they like (and indeed, many probably automatically assume an unknown anime which doesn't immediately grab their interest is just aimed at otaku anyway and ignore it).
Which gets us to the present problem: Most of the people making anime are otaku, and want to make anime for otaku. And those that don't, are stuck with the problem of marketing: If they make an anime not targeted at otaku, they risk alienating the core market, which means they risk their product becoming a flop if it isn't a hit with other demographics. But the only way to attract other demographics now most anime has become so niche, is to really go all out with a huge marketing campaign - which is financially impossible for most studios. There are, of course, other ways to try and market anime, but it's all a big gamble with massive risks for any studio which isn't in a financially strong enough position to absorb a big failure or two - and most aren't.
So they can't afford to risk making anime aimed at other audiences, because there aren't enough anime aimed at wider audiences. Until a few studios take the risk, and in doing so produce good shows which do manage to achieve some success, the chances of the majority of anime studios being able to to produce something of reasonable quality aimed at a totally new audience are pretty slim. So they continue to produce anime for otaku, which perpetuates the problem, and the cycle repeats.
I have no more clue what should be done about it than anybody else. And it might be that the only way to break out of this is as Miyazaki suggests - if lots of studios start paying decent wages to hire a bunch of non-otaku animators, then that might kickstart a gradual shift towards a more diverse industry. Or it may not - I really couldn't say. I can't think of anything else which might break this cycle though, so maybe the old man has a point.
As for the other thrust of Miyazaki's statement, where are animators and directors supposed to find time to people-watch? In their youths, they're told to focus all their energy on homework and entrance exam studies if they ever hope to get into university and find a decent job. And these days in Japan, if an adult male so much as breathes the same air as a girl under 20, he's going to have the police after him pretty darn quick:
http://www.sankakucomplex.com/2010/12/10/police-hunt-man-for-smiling-at-schoolgirl/
http://www.sankakucomplex.com/2011/07/19/police-hunt-man-spoken-to-by-child/
http://www.sankakucomplex.com/2009/04/27/police-hunt-man-for-asking-girls-directions/
http://www.sankakucomplex.com/2012/06/22/police-hunt-man-for-standing-at-station/
http://www.sankakucomplex.com/2012/11/23/man-hunted-for-overtaking-schoolgirl/
Your point is basically invalidated by you using Sankaku complex as a source, I'm afraid. You really cannot rely on any of the 'news' they report to even have any actual basis in reality, let alone be representative of the actual situation. So I'm just going to dismiss this bit entirely for now.
Although I will mention that Japan in general does have a bit of a paedophile problem - not just an otaku thing either. It is certainly a lot more common than in the UK. I've seen schoolgirls molested on the train before, more than once - and you've probably seen what Japanese commuter trains are like, combined with the general quiet "don't want to cause a fuss" nature of Japanese people it becomes very easy to get away without being noticed. The Japanese do also seem to be accordingly paranoid about it, which I imagine has led to a few incidents of innocent people being accused of it in the past. But not on anywhere
near the scale Sankaku would have you believe.
