VicunaBlue said:
Why has everyone been going so nuts about anime recently? I don't mean to offend any fans, but japan nuts used to be a RARITY. Now just about every visual major (its an arts school) draws "characters" and talks about anime. I'm not one to be absorbed into trends, but after friends continually whined at me for months, I decided to look up some shows on Hulu. And the thing I'm wondering is if Mature animation was accepted outside japan if people would watch that, or if there is something special about silly hair cuts.
Edit: I'm not saying that I hate Anime, there have been a few I've liked (Area 88, shaman king when I was young)
Well, I've waffled back and forth over the years.
I'll be honest, I was into Anime *long* before it was cool. We're going back into the 1980s when things like Robotech were around and I actually knew about the differances between it and the Japanese movies it was based on, as well as some of the wierd hidden bits (well known know) like being able to see Captain Harlock's ship in the backround of one scene, and The Orguss, and some other stuff. Along with this I course saw some of the actual Harlock stuff (Galaxy Express, etc..) the original Gundam series, and other stuff all in subtitles.
After a while you began to see Anime coming gradually into the mainstream, mostly in like the mid-late 1990s. For a while it was mostly really decent stuff for the time like when AD Vision was bringing "Devil Hunter Yohko" over. Anime started to become really big around the end of the reign of VHS tapes with the release of a (now well known) series called "Neon Genesis Evangelion" and indeed American Anime fandom can kind of be divided as pre- and post Eva. It isn't just that one series but also that around that time there were other good releases surrounding it like say Blue Seed which was being released at more or less the same time.
As time went on Japan kind of caught on to the idea that there was a lot of money to be made in the US selling overpriced subtitled tapes to fanboys. More and more stuff started to make it overseas, and for a while it was decent, but then a combination of things happened. For one American "censors" found out more about it, and especially what was in some of the uncut subtitled versions. This lead to more policing. Secondly Japan also fell prey to internal racism and a simple lack of quality products to send over to the US. Anything that was REALLY good needed to be either cut to death for release here (which means none of the fanboys would buy it, and instead get a fansubbed version), or saw domestic protest from Japanese fanboys threatening to boycott things seeing an american release and the like due to the believe that Americans seeing it would in some way cheapen it. I've actually read articles on the selling out of Japanese popular culture to America.
The end result being a ton of absolute crud being shoveled down the pipe and needing to increasingly dig to seperate the diamonds from the turds. The fact that we actually saw a bit of a generational transition with a bunch of kids coming into the anime hobby and pretty much grabbing anything that was "anime" drove a lot of people away and honestly did a lot to make the hobby increasingly dorky to the point where even a lot of nerds can't stand it.
Truthfully Anime is in sort of a downswing. A guy who is a visual arts major now who is interested in Anime (which involves highly stylized artwork, some of which is quite good) probably got into Anime right as it peaked and moved into visual arts before it really underwent it's current downswing (where indeed you'll notice the Anime sections in places like Best Buy *ARE* shrinking).
Someone looking at Anime nowadays for more or less the first time is 99% likely to have their first experiences be with total garbage. The fact that it takes "real fans" (so to speak) to tell newcomers what's good, in of itself is a sign of the amount of toxic waste flowing through this facet of nerd-dom. Given that even the most mind numbing anime probably has at least 50 vocal people who live on their computers and do nothing but search for people badmouthing it also gives it a bad reputation. Like anything, no matter how bad something is, someone will worship it, and they WILL make themselves heard.
The Anime you see on TV also has the disadvantage of being "sanitized" for TV. See Anime was never really deeply intellectual. I mean we're dealing with science fiction and fantasy done for an audience of about 13-14 years old on average. It's just that it had a tendency to deal with concepts that you just didn't see in the media much, especially 10 years ago. Demonology, Satanism, Nano and Bio technology, etc... it was around in novels and comic books but NOT in video form (though this is not the case anymore really except maybe with the demonic stuff). It also tended not to pull punches with violence and "Cut away" right before a blow landed like other media, and delivered on sex scenes. Well... today it's increasingly hard to find that kind of stuff.
See, Anime basically delivered on one's most basic nerd impulses. It increasingly does not do this.
Oh and for the record, stupid haircuts are a definate genere stereotype. Don't let anyone kid you about this either. To be brutally honest there is plenty of anime out there that exists to satire other Anime (it gets very involuted). There was for example an ongoing joke about this in an anime called "Elf Princess Rane" (I think I have the name correct) with a dude who couldn't keep his "awesome anime dude hair" defying gravity properly. The creators themselves freely acknowlege their own stereotypes for the most part.
In general I'm not quite the anime fanboy I used to be, it's just there isn't that much really good anime out there anymore. To get a "fix" I'm likely to have to go hunting fansubs and the like because it's almost a guarantee in my opinion that if it makes it to the US in any legitimate form it's either crap, or crap by the time it hits the shelf or TV network.
Consider that people sit around and tell you how awesome Cowboy Beebop is, now consider how bloody old that is. www.animevillage.com (now out of business) used to sell that on VHS and have polls up on "are you ready for the DVD Revolution?". DVD is now going down slowly and being replaced by the next gen (Blu Ray). This makes Cowboy Beebop a bloody media dinosaur, and given that a lot of people have to dig back that far to find something that is over the top awesome says a lot about the state of American anime releases.
>>>----Therumancer--->
