Re: Just how bad is this "slump" they say anime is in?
 

I've been thinking, could another factor that contributed to anime's downfall be that the industry began aiming itself at too many demographics? Prior to the Pokemon craze, I always associated anime with college-aged students, but after Pokemon came out, it seemed like the industry began moving more towards releasing shows for young teens and little kids. Maybe I just have a weird way of remembering it but to me it seems like after Pokemon became popular, there were less and less mature* shows (the stuff I wanted to see) and more and more kiddie shows, teen comedies, and shonen stuff. There was still mature stuff being released; I just recall it being overshadowed by a lot of teen and kiddie stuff.




*When I say "mature" I don't mean violent or pornographic movies; I mean movies that were aimed at people in their late teens/early twenties.

Re: Just how bad is this "slump" they say anime is in?
 

Something else I noticed was that there seemed to be less movies released as time went on. It seemed like distributors became more focused on licensing series rather than movies. I was never very interested in watching series, to be honest. From the get go, I thought they had little replay value. An initial viewing I was OK with; I just never thought I would have a desire or time to sit and rewatch a 50 or 100 or 100+ episode series.

Re: Just how bad is this "slump" they say anime is in?
 

And it didn't help that most of the anime movies released in Japan in the last ten years or so have been spinoffs of TV series, e.g. the Pokemon, Naruto, Doraemon, and Detective Conan movies, etc., plus the Full Metal Alchemist movie and a bunch of others. They've tended to be boxoffice hits in Japan, too, while more serious efforts tend to struggle. How many anime movies that weren't TV spinoffs even got released on DVD in the U.S. in the last ten years? I can probably list them all off the top of my head: TOKYO GODFATHERS, STEAMBOY, GHOST IN THE SHELL 2: INNOCENCE, PAPRIKA, SUMMER WARS, plus the Studio Ghibli releases: HOWL'S MOVING CASTLE, PONYO, TALES FROM EARTHSEA. Quite a change from the 1990s, right?

Re: Just how bad is this "slump" they say anime is in?
 

And here I thought I stopped watching anime because I had "outgrown" it (which is like saying you've outgrown architecture).

So it's not just me... a lot of people find the current stuff unappealing. :lol:

Re: Just how bad is this "slump" they say anime is in?
 

Again, it's a reflection of the anime industry in Japan, which has a lot of stuff for kids (mainly based on kid's or young adults manga, like Naruto, Bleach, One Piece, etc.) and a lot of stuff for the dedicated otaku who's into moe or whatever, but not a lot in between.

But I do think they released a lot of stuff that would have appealed to young adults, it just became a very very crowded market. I'm not sure which series you mean when you say pre-Pokemon; if you go by stuff that was aired on tv and available to a wide audience, like Gundam Wing and Dragonball Z, that was targeted at kids too. Sure there's Cowboy Bebop and FLCL and some other Adult Swim stuff, but you can pick almost any year and we could probably list a bunch of quality titles of a similar vein after that that just never got picked up. Once Cartoon Network decided that their original programming was more important/profitable than anime, there went the outlet (and even now, it is maddening how they schedule stuff like Young Justice and the new Thundercats).

Movies/OAVs must not be that popular and/or cost too much compared to a series or something. Funimation, for example, has only released a single One Piece movie here.

Re: Just how bad is this "slump" they say anime is in?
 

Many anime movies have come out here in the past few years, I think I will make an anime movie thread now.

anyone watch "The Girl Who Leapt Through Time" or "The Place Promised in Our Early Days" I just ordered the first one.

Re: Just how bad is this "slump" they say anime is in?
 

I would've thought it would cost less to license a movie than it would to license a 26 or 50 or 100 episode series.

Is One Piece doing alright over here? I don't have any interest in the show itself, but it seems like it's something that should be popular with teenagers. I don't recall hearing anything about it for the last couple years.

Re: Just how bad is this "slump" they say anime is in?
 

One Piece is not popular here, not compared to Naruto and Bleach, which is a bit surprising because it's sooo popular in Japan and has more ties with American culture (pirates as opposed to ninjas or shinigami) than either of them.

as for the tv series vs. movies/oavs, I meant more that there are probably more ways to repackage/get money from a longer tv series. A movie or short oav series has pretty much one shot to sell; tv series, even in this day and age of larger collections, are usually released in parts and then later a collection, etc. Plus, for something like an OAV which doesn't depend on TV to fund it, but on actual purchases, the pricing structure in Japan is very steep; you're not getting that kind of price here, but the studios may still expect a bigger licensing fee. I wonder how much Hellsing (the new one), for instance, cost to license, that's an OAV.

Re: Just how bad is this "slump" they say anime is in?
 

That's kind of like with Gundam, it's really popular in Japan, yet over here it didn't really make much of a splash outside of Gundam Wing. I've been thinking, maybe the anime boom was fluke? It seems so weird that a medium that mainstream audiences never paid attention to was all of the sudden really really popular, then crashed horribly a few years later. Maybe that shows there was never a major audience for anime to begin with? It was just Pokemon and a few other shows that were popular and the distributors went license crazy.

Re: Just how bad is this "slump" they say anime is in?
 

:wave: I saw the first one and liked it.

True, though--and we've probably discussed this before--the episodic-release system isn't nearly as lucrative as it used to be, when all series came out in those four-episode volumes, then larger collections. Give credit to Funimation for figuring out how to release Origin: Spirits of the Past at least four times on physical media (DVD, SE DVD, BD, Veridian). :D

Re: Just how bad is this "slump" they say anime is in?
 

It's even more strange that cons here in the US are growing! Anime Expo had an attendance of something like 100,000 last year! So many fans yet they're not buying anime....something smells fishy, and I think these torrent sites are huge part of the problem.

Re: Just how bad is this "slump" they say anime is in?
 

You named two that I didn't name. That doesn't quite add up to "many." Name any others released here in the 2000s that weren't TV spinoffs and if they qualify as "many," I'll stand corrected.

Re: Just how bad is this "slump" they say anime is in?
 

You didn't mention Millennium Actress, which also wasn't a tv spinoff. So that's three.

Re: Just how bad is this "slump" they say anime is in?
 

I'd even thought of it when doing my post, so I don't know why I didn't include it. And I'd seen THE GIRL WHO LEAPT THROUGH TIME only about a week earlier, too. So how I could have forgotten about it...

Chris's Anime Movie thread reminded me of a few others I'd forgotten, including SKY CRAWLERS, which I saw at Lincoln Center, APPLESEED, which I also saw on the big screen, and that one with ORIGIN in the title, and a few others he cites.

So--oops!--yeah, I stand corrected. :doh:

Which is fine--more anime features on the market is a good thing all around.

Re: Just how bad is this "slump" they say anime is in?
 

While I think pirating is a problem (and not everyone seems to think so), there are also other sources like Crunchryool where you don't need to buy anything if you just want to watch.

Anime fans, like manga fans, get impatient and want the latest releases right now; fansubs and fan translations (and crunchyroll) give that to them, for free. If you look at the Con fans, they're likely into the latest things, which is usually not the stuff that's coming out domestically. And once you've watched it for free, even the most diehard fan is hard pressed to go spend the money on every domestic release when it first comes out. And this must make it tough for the domestic companies to know which licenses to go after.

As an aside to the manga side of things, to combat this Viz started this online weekly shonen jump, where for a small fee you can have 100+ pages of shonen jump series every week, just two weeks after they are released in Shonen Jump in Japan. that's unprecedented, and it's not even available in Japan, and yet most of the comments I've seen online are: "yeah, but the fan translations come in on the same week, so why should I pay for a delay."

I'll agree that this is a niche and that the bubble has popped, but I still think there are enough fans domestically to support the industry; whether those fans are interested in supporting the industry is another thing entirely.

Of course, I'm the loser who paid Bandai a premium for those Gundam Unicorn Blu Rays that I'll probably never see finished...

Re: Just how bad is this "slump" they say anime is in?
 

The real question is, anything I posted on the movie thread that you want to see now? I didn't know about "Millennium Actress" and since I own "Perfect Blue" I want to see it. "Millennium Actress" poped up when I was looking for movies. I didn't list "Perfect Blue" becouse Amazon and RightStuf no longer sell it. "GHOST IN THE SHELL 2: INNOCENCE" is also hard to find.

I am going to add a few OVA's to the list.

Re: Just how bad is this "slump" they say anime is in?
 

Relevant article, detailing why prices are so high in Japan, the American market, part of why the boom went bust, etc.

http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/feature/2012-03-07

Re: Just how bad is this "slump" they say anime is in?
 

I like the movie thread, but it's a little sobering that it's not all that many posts.

Re: Just how bad is this "slump" they say anime is in?
 

What do you think about adding movies were you should watch the series first like "Clannad the movie", "Air the movie", "The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya", "Hetalia: Axis Powers - Paint it, White", and others?

I need help with finding more movies.

Re: Just how bad is this "slump" they say anime is in?
 

I was at Best Buy on 44th Street and 5th Avenue in midtown Manhattan yesterday and noticed that the anime section had been reduced to one shelf section - five shelves total top-to-bottom; width: three-and-a-half feet; approx. 40 items (including box sets and individual DVDs) on each shelf. Do the math.

A far cry from the heyday when that store opened a few years ago and the anime section extended down an entire aisle.

Re: Just how bad is this "slump" they say anime is in?
 

Has the anime section shrunk in relation to the rest of the DVDs, or have DVDs shrunk in comparison to the rest of the store?

Re: Just how bad is this "slump" they say anime is in?
 

The entire DVD section has shrunk to about half of what it used to be, with blu-rays taking over the other half. Something like that. I.e., it's the same space overall, but about half is devoted now to blu-rays, which aren't divided into genres, just alphabetical, plus a sale section.

Re: Just how bad is this "slump" they say anime is in?
 

I think the thread as devised is great--the problem is not enough releases.

Re: Just how bad is this "slump" they say anime is in?
 

I'll be honest, this thread has really struck a nostalgia nerve in me. The last couple months I've been reading and posting in this thread have been the most I've talked about anime in years. I've also been thinking about anime and my involvement with it a lot, and unfortunately the more I think about it, the more I think at this point I'm finished with anime.

In the last three or so years, I've just drifted too far away from anime to where it's just something in the back of my mind at this point. Not to mention that in the last 3-4 years, there has really been nothing released (that I've noticed) that I have had a real interest in checking out. The last new new show I watched was Gundam 00 in 2009 (which I didn't care for). In the last year I have bought only three titles: the two Galaxy Express movies last summer and the Gundam 0079 collection pt. 1 last November. On the other hand I've dumped seven or eight titles since the beginning of the year, including Hellsing Ultimate, which was a favorite of mine in '06 and '07.

Maybe nothing expresses my attitude toward anime more than when I dumped Hellsing Ultimate. I was looking over what remained of my anime collection, when my eyes came to rest on my four volumes of Hellsing Ultimate. I pulled the DVDs off my shelf and put them in my sell without giving it a second thought. The only thing that passed through my mind was "I wonder how much I can get for these steelbooks?"

As I think back, I realized I have been drifting away from anime since mid/late 2006. In 2006, I bought a couple shows that I ended up not caring for and afterwards, I took a step back and said, "Wow, look at all the money i wasted on shows that I ended up not even liking". I dumped those shows in the next couple days and that was the end of my anime blind buying.

Another factor that led to my drifting away was my discovery of this site. About a year earlier, I came across DVDTalk while looking for information on a Friday the 13th boxset and registered a few months later in October. Through this site, i was introduced to Criterions, art house films, foreign film (other than Japanese), and an appreciation for classic cinema. I did have somewhat of an interest in classic cinema because of seeing Nosferatu a few years earlier, but this site showed it to me in a different light. I guess you could say my interest in anime was gradually replaced by an immense interest in cinema itself. Two years later, right before I started college, I had my first major DVD purge, which consisted almost entirely of my anime collection.

I believe I was more in love with the anime subculture than the actual medium. Even during my anime heydays in my teens, I was never interested in seeking out anime (i did begin doing this in my late teens), i basically just watched whatever aired on cartoon network and Stars Action. But I loved going into Suncoast and looking at the anime figures, magazines, and wall scrolls and talking to other fans about anime. Even after I had my mini-crash in mid '06 and stopped blind buying anime, I still enjoyed visiting Suncoast and looking at the anime merchandise. This makes sense, considering my interest in anime began waning when the nearby Suncoast shut down in Jan '08. Even though I considered myself an anime fan for years afterwards, after Suncoast shut down I never felt that drive to get back into anime like I did during my earlier years. Maybe I wasn't a fan fan, but an overly-enthusiastic observer.

Re: Just how bad is this "slump" they say anime is in?
 

I appreciate your account, Big E, and I'm happy to hear that you've discovered classic cinema. I hope you pursue classic Japanese films (Kurosawa, Ozu, Mizoguchi, Honda, Fukasaku, Kobayashi, etc.) in the process.

For me, what keeps me interested in anime is the discovery of older stuff I haven't seen before. In Book Off last night, I picked up a DVD of six episodes from a 1975 series called "Ikkyu-san," about a young monk in feudal Japan. I spot-checked the DVD and was stunned by the beauty of the imagery. Same with recent viewings of classic anime TV series from the '70s: "Tomorrow's Joe," "Heidi, Girl of the Alps" and "Dog of Flanders." All were in Japanese with no subs.

I'm looking forward to the DVD release, with subs., of the "Galaxy Express 999" series from 1978-81. I have some eps. on fan-sub VHS tapes, but I'd love to see the whole series.