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Don't worry, Japan's got this. There is a rich pipeline of mangas (comics) to anime (2D animation) that is alive and well there. The U.S. is obsessed with mas

Don't worry, Japan's got this. There is a rich pipeline of mangas (comics) to anime (2D animation) that is alive and well there. The U.S. is obsessed with massive studio efforts that all resolve to the exact same character design and animation style (people want the familiar!) But there is a ton of innovation (including AI and 3D usage) as well as a system to support skill handoff that exists outside of Hollywood.

cosmic_cheese 1y ago
Oh I know, I’ve been keeping up with anime for the past 20+ years. It has its own set of concerns, mainly centered around worker conditions and oversaturation, but there’s plenty of good stuff to be found. It’s just unfortunate that its American counterpart is so much weaker. You still see a handful of titles getting released, but it’s nothing to what we were producing back in the late 90s and early 2000s. American animation also had a distinctive style to it and it’s sad to lose that.
busterarm 1y ago
Lulwut. Economics have been bad for anime studios and there have been tons of closures in recent years. Outsourcing to other countries has been standard practice since the '70s -- lots of production is moving to China and donghua popularity is growing (just look at To Be Hero X)... TV series season lengths have been cut in half for the last decade+ and the amount of variety in shows produced has gone through the floor... For feature length productions it's pretty much only series special movies for the big hit shows or Makoto Shinkai. Industry figures over there have been publicly gloom and doom about the state of the industry for years.
- cosmic_cheese 1y ago
  There probably needs to be a change in financing models if the Japanese animation industry is to remain healthy long-term. Kyoto Animation has a good thing going. They do everything in-house and their currently-airing CITY has incredible production values and was fully finished before it began to air. That model might work for some other studios too. With modern Internet crowdfunding, a return to the OVA model of the late 80s and early 90s where productions were funded directly by viewers could make a comeback, which could be cool since it’d give more relaxed schedules and unshackle studios from broadcast regulations.
- Apocryphon 1y ago
  Judging by what gets debuted in Netflix for American audiences, aren't a lot of anime these days also created with 3D CGI animation anyway?
  - busterarm 1y ago
    Actual 2D animation has been dead everywhere for 20 years, yes. The death was pretty much simultaneous in the US and Japan with Whatever Happened to Robot Jones? & Astro Boy (2003) being the last shows fully animated on cels, in 2003. Sazae-san used cels for the openings and endings up until 2013. Kind of a tangent, but I had a bunch of friends finishing their animation programs at SVA in the early 2000s and they had to do everything traditionally and they all made a huge push to "#Save2D". I personally spent several months helping most of them scan their thesis projects for free. Despite a lot of willingness the studio support just wasn't there and even with all of them established in their careers now there's just no hope of doing anything that way. I kinda felt bad that they were trained in and judged against a process that's basically dead. Not to say they didn't learn anything but a tremendous amount of their time and money was effectively wasted. And then so many of them spent their first few years working in industry heavily exploited by the local studios, including years of unpaid work in most cases.
    - dmonitor 1y ago
      "actual 2D animation" being limited to pen/paper on animation cels is a narrow definition. Shows such as Primal are digitally animated using modern techniques, but it's still hand drawn rather than being fully puppeted like many other shows https://youtu.be/2ZUWGoEbbSs?si=_RxP5RdoyHfXN4Dx https://youtu.be/2ZUWGoEbbSs?si=_RxP5RdoyHfXN4Dx
      - Apocryphon 1y ago
        Yeah, there's a clear stylistic difference between anime that incorporate 3D-looking effects (as in many Netflix series) and ones that don't.
      - busterarm 1y ago
myrmidon 1y ago
I'm not a big believer in the current manga => anime pipeline, there is just so much badly animated slop around (Frieren was admittedly nice, though). My absolute favorite for japanese animation (and criminally underrated!) is Redline (2009)-- huge recommendation.
- dmonitor 1y ago
  I've come to accept that a large amount of poorly made slop is simply a necessary part of the ecosystem. It means funding is aplenty and new hires have cheap projects to work on. The philosophy of only funding big budget winner projects means every new project is ride or die, and leads to less risk-taking. You need to give projects the opportunity to fail in order to get truly interesting media.
  - corimaith 1y ago
    Unfortunately it's actually the opposite. The 90s and 2000s which had far less funding and popularity also coincided with a large amount of ambitious originals and OVAs. We can almost directly correlate the increasing popularity of the medium since 2015 and the decline of such originals in favour of cheap adaptations and remakes. The thing about all that extra funding is that most of it goes to the committee, not to the studios and animators working on it. And because the total manpower of the industry is so limited, that means that an excessive number of projects crowds out the labour that it becomes much harder to try out risky, experimental new things as one might have a decade ago. As the director of Code Geass stated; It would be literally impossible to air Code;Geass today. And the industry does suffer for it, because while there may have been many mega hits, they all largely lack lasting impressionns and fail to reach the legends of the past.
corimaith 1y ago
The Anime Industry may be getting popular right now, but internally what's happening is getting highly unsustainable. The industry has lost alot of the confidence in return for excessive risk-tasking today, with the complete decline of ambitious originals and OVAs in favour of continous adapatations and remakes. But they're running of material to adapt now, but they won't do originals, which is leaving between a rock and a hard place.

cosmic_cheese 1y ago

Oh I know, I’ve been keeping up with anime for the past 20+ years. It has its own set of concerns, mainly centered around worker conditions and oversaturation, but there’s plenty of good stuff to be found. It’s just unfortunate that its American counterpart is so much weaker. You still see a handful of titles getting released, but it’s nothing to what we were producing back in the late 90s and early 2000s. American animation also had a distinctive style to it and it’s sad to lose that.

busterarm 1y ago

Lulwut. Economics have been bad for anime studios and there have been tons of closures in recent years. Outsourcing to other countries has been standard practice since the '70s -- lots of production is moving to China and donghua popularity is growing (just look at To Be Hero X)... TV series season lengths have been cut in half for the last decade+ and the amount of variety in shows produced has gone through the floor... For feature length productions it's pretty much only series special movies for the big hit shows or Makoto Shinkai. Industry figures over there have been publicly gloom and doom about the state of the industry for years.

cosmic_cheese 1y ago
There probably needs to be a change in financing models if the Japanese animation industry is to remain healthy long-term. Kyoto Animation has a good thing going. They do everything in-house and their currently-airing CITY has incredible production values and was fully finished before it began to air. That model might work for some other studios too. With modern Internet crowdfunding, a return to the OVA model of the late 80s and early 90s where productions were funded directly by viewers could make a comeback, which could be cool since it’d give more relaxed schedules and unshackle studios from broadcast regulations.
Apocryphon 1y ago
Judging by what gets debuted in Netflix for American audiences, aren't a lot of anime these days also created with 3D CGI animation anyway?
- busterarm 1y ago
  Actual 2D animation has been dead everywhere for 20 years, yes. The death was pretty much simultaneous in the US and Japan with Whatever Happened to Robot Jones? & Astro Boy (2003) being the last shows fully animated on cels, in 2003. Sazae-san used cels for the openings and endings up until 2013. Kind of a tangent, but I had a bunch of friends finishing their animation programs at SVA in the early 2000s and they had to do everything traditionally and they all made a huge push to "#Save2D". I personally spent several months helping most of them scan their thesis projects for free. Despite a lot of willingness the studio support just wasn't there and even with all of them established in their careers now there's just no hope of doing anything that way. I kinda felt bad that they were trained in and judged against a process that's basically dead. Not to say they didn't learn anything but a tremendous amount of their time and money was effectively wasted. And then so many of them spent their first few years working in industry heavily exploited by the local studios, including years of unpaid work in most cases.
  - dmonitor 1y ago
    "actual 2D animation" being limited to pen/paper on animation cels is a narrow definition. Shows such as Primal are digitally animated using modern techniques, but it's still hand drawn rather than being fully puppeted like many other shows https://youtu.be/2ZUWGoEbbSs?si=_RxP5RdoyHfXN4Dx https://youtu.be/2ZUWGoEbbSs?si=_RxP5RdoyHfXN4Dx
    - Apocryphon 1y ago
      Yeah, there's a clear stylistic difference between anime that incorporate 3D-looking effects (as in many Netflix series) and ones that don't.
    - busterarm 1y ago

myrmidon 1y ago

I'm not a big believer in the current manga => anime pipeline, there is just so much badly animated slop around (Frieren was admittedly nice, though). My absolute favorite for japanese animation (and criminally underrated!) is Redline (2009)-- huge recommendation.

dmonitor 1y ago
I've come to accept that a large amount of poorly made slop is simply a necessary part of the ecosystem. It means funding is aplenty and new hires have cheap projects to work on. The philosophy of only funding big budget winner projects means every new project is ride or die, and leads to less risk-taking. You need to give projects the opportunity to fail in order to get truly interesting media.
- corimaith 1y ago
  Unfortunately it's actually the opposite. The 90s and 2000s which had far less funding and popularity also coincided with a large amount of ambitious originals and OVAs. We can almost directly correlate the increasing popularity of the medium since 2015 and the decline of such originals in favour of cheap adaptations and remakes. The thing about all that extra funding is that most of it goes to the committee, not to the studios and animators working on it. And because the total manpower of the industry is so limited, that means that an excessive number of projects crowds out the labour that it becomes much harder to try out risky, experimental new things as one might have a decade ago. As the director of Code Geass stated; It would be literally impossible to air Code;Geass today. And the industry does suffer for it, because while there may have been many mega hits, they all largely lack lasting impressionns and fail to reach the legends of the past.

corimaith 1y ago

The Anime Industry may be getting popular right now, but internally what's happening is getting highly unsustainable. The industry has lost alot of the confidence in return for excessive risk-tasking today, with the complete decline of ambitious originals and OVAs in favour of continous adapatations and remakes. But they're running of material to adapt now, but they won't do originals, which is leaving between a rock and a hard place.