However, to me this is a good thing, in terms of cultural diversity. Trying to adapt anime to more mainstream tastes in the name of global profit would do it a disservice.
And a large portion of those who do watch is due to a small number of very popular tentpole series. Most anime productions cater to a relatively niche nerd/geek audience.
TFA quotes 31-32% of people (young and old) in Japan as anime watchers. That is very mainstream!
Your argument is like trying to claim Metallica is not mainstream. Sure, most people do not listen to them, but everyone has heard of them. I would wager back in the day less than 32% of people listened to Michael Jackson.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/807367/marvel-movie-view...
To me it's just bad data, pretty much asking for folks to be like "no". But also I can't find anyone having bothered to do any other data collection on it.
Such a hysterically bad take that it calls into question your entire point.
Quick list of cartoons that have an incredible variety, both in terms of animation quality, sophistication of humor, and target demographic:
- Steven universe
- Bojack Horseman
- adventure time
- helluva boss
- Invincible
And this is just within the last decade. Want me to go farther back?
- Animaniacs (the original series)
- Spaceghost Coast to Coast
- Justice League
- Ugly Americans
I'm also excluding for the most part animated comedies, such as Futurama, South Park, the entire Adult Swim lineup of the late 90s / early 2000s.
Most american animation seems to be: stuff aimed at young children (pixar type shows), super hero adjacent stuff, or adult commedy (like south park). A few exceptions here and there but on the whole there just isn't that much variety.
- slice of life
- isekai
- shonen
Here's a few more: (not super hero, not necessarily geared towards children, and not comedy)
- Owl House
- Pantheon
- Infinity Train
- Final Space
- Castlevania
I think you're simply less well versed in the variety of western animation. There's also not nearly as much MONEY in western animation, so of course there's less of it.
In anime not too unusual to see shows like Showa Genroku Rakugo Shinju which is a historical drama that follows the apprentice of a master stage entertainer in the Showa era. Very niche, but also quite interesting. Stuff like that almost never gets animated TV shows in the US.
USA certainly produces a lot of entertainment and celebrates niches.
What's weird and interesting though is that Japanese Anime covers just so many genres (including edutainment. I'd add Ninja Girl and Samurai Master as a very educational plot about the Warring States period of Japan). Maybe even Kenshin as a more mainstream historical fiction about Mejia Era / dawn of industrial Japan as the perspective of an old Samurai assassin.
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USA has assassins creed for example (or Canada does at least??) but that's a video game. Shogun and Game of Thrones has fantasy + history in them.
I guess general USA entertainment certainly covers all the genres. But anime alone attempts to cover all the bases. That's quite unique for a medium IMO.
I would consider Final space to be adult commedy (wikipedia also describes it that way)
The owl house literally won an award for best childrens tv (albeit it does look deep enough to be enjoyed by adults)
Infinity train is fair, but also cant even legally be purchased, which isnt exactly a great sign.
The other two are fair examples. (I never claimed there are none, just that its pretty limited)
> There's also not nearly as much MONEY in western animation, so of course there's less of it.
Sure, but that is both a cause and effect of it failing to capture audiences the way anime has.
Yes, but it also has a large adult following. It is not TARGETING children unlike a show like Blue's Clues. Therefore I don't think you can classify it as you put "pixar level children shows" (which I don't even know what that means).
> Wikipedia describes Final Space as a comedy
Maybe... personally while I think Final Space does have comedic elements - it also has an overarching storyline and is more of an epic adventure dealing with tragedy, death, and loss at a pretty adult level.
> Infinity Train can't be legally purchased
Literally this has nothing to do with the main point which was that western animation does not have variety
> Sure, but that is both a cause and effect of it failing to capture audiences the way anime has.
We weren't discussing whether or not something appeals to an audience. We were discussing whether or not there was sufficient variety. I think the root of our disagreement is in "volume" and I would argue that there is plenty unless you absolutely need to be consuming media every day.
There might be significantly LESS from a quantity perspective, but the DIVERSITY in shows is 100% available if you know where to look.
And in fact the actual OP post that I was addressing (because I think we're getting a bit off track) was that "cartoons in the USA fall under the rough set of same humor or writers" which is, assuming one possesses even a modest amount of experience with western animation, patently false.
That's kind of my point though. There are exceptions (for a recent example i really liked "undone"), they just tend to be few and far between.
Around 20 years ago, I tried watching a few US cartoons and comics to get better acquainted with the culture, but they were all pretty bad.
Without listing specific cartoons that you watched, it's hard to know where you "went wrong". Part of it might have been a culture gap - pop culture heavy cartoons wouldn't really appeal to somebody who didn't grow up in the US.
This could have just as easily happened to you if you'd moved to Japan and been exposed to shows like:
- Failure Frame (PARALYZE POISON PARALYZE POISON LOOK LISTEN LOOK LOOK) - if you get this joke, you get it.
- Faraway Paladin (devolves into some of the cheapest flash animation YTMND level I've ever seen)
- Diabolik lovers (...)
Conversely there's a lot of good anime out there as well:
- Cowboy Bebop
- Mob Pyscho 100
- Hells Paradise
agreed. redo of the healer or bastard would fit "trashy male power fantasy" a lot better.
I was optimizing on controversy with this pick. Looks like it mostly worked given the conflicting viewpoints that have come up.
There's very well written drama in Jobless Reincarnation. But it is also paired up with a literally panty worshipping (holy artifact of Roxy) panty-thief.
There are a lot of harem anime out there that do not do that type of deeper character work and function solely as male power-fantasies. See, for instance, Tsukimitchi or Rosario X Vampire
That was and still is my point
The reality of child abuse is neither solved nor rebuked by depictions or explorations of psychology in adult fiction.
Come on, don't try to kid me. It's there for the same reason all the other seinen anime have a ton of borderline softcore porn tropes in them.
I'd recommend reading deeper into the scholarly literature of sexual themes in anime and manga before assuming that fans necessarily interpret 'children' into the text. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26639806
The researcher I'm quoting (who's by far not alone on writing this topic in his field) is Patrick Galbraith, a researcher and associate professor of cultural anthropology at Senshu University in Tokyo.
The difference is that Jobless Reincarnation plays out these sexual situations out to the full extend of their drama (ex: Paul Grayrat is caught making a child with the hot maid, there's multiple episodes of fallout because of this as Paul and Zenith, his first wife, have arguments over this).
I'm not sure if this is a teaching moment for Rudy (the main character) though, as it becomes clear that the entirety of the Grayrat line is full of sexual deviants and even some inbreeding.
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Doing the sexy time with the hot maid is... I mean.... its a trope. Its normally a comedy routine. But its played straight here.
Stealing the panties the main character's 40+ year old hot teacher (who is from the demon continent so she looks like only a teenager) is... a comedy trope in anime. (Ie: Panty stealing is all over Konosuba, a comedy anime). But its completely different when its played out straight and in a dramatic anime.
Being open with what fetishes you're cool with, and which ones make you squeemish is part of growing up. I can comfortably say that the stuff Jobless Reincarnation takes as core plot points are uncomfortable to me / "squicky" and unsatisfying sources of drama for me. And due to their long history as a comedy trope in older anime, its difficult for me to take it seriously.
Perhaps your argument is that the "point" is to take these adultery scenes more seriously and think deeply about them and the characters they affect. Except I already know that adultery is wrong, that panty stealing is wrong and I don't have any plans to do either.
So as a source of Drama, my overall confusion with this show is "Why are you dramatizing porn/harem/eroge plots?".
Uh no. Its a stupid plot for stupid porn-level writing setup. I don't consider it a source of drama at all. Personally anyway. I see that a lot of other people seem to like it so I don't want to hate on it too much or cause undo harm to your opinions or whatever. But... its really hard for me to take the eroge/hentai level plots seriously in Jobless Reincarnation. That's all.
Even if I 100% recognize that the author works very hard to set up these situations and think out the fallout and drama in a reasonably "realistic" way (or at least, all the characters acting like they should while still qualifying for the trope). And I think that's the part a lot of people like: the deep thought the author put into this work. Thinking deeply about how all these characters would act in the face of these sexually deviant actions.
I personally couldn't get very far into Jobless Reincarnation. So I'm on the haters side. But in any case, the controversies of this anime are well known.
> I personally couldn't get very far into Jobless Reincarnation.
explains your choice. Based on how other modern isekais typically go, it definitely starts out looking like this one is going to go down a similar route, but it really doesn't. The overall character development for the main character is about him figuring out how to relate to others and develop healthy relationships instead of the fixations and fears he started with.
It's a modern Fate/Stay Night. It took a lot of trash Isekai tropes but played them straight and dramatic.
Like F/SN took your harem tropes and video game stats and crafted a magic system out of it... Jobless Reincarnation starts with panty thieves, sex scenes, voyeurism, a harem of three girlfriends and the tries to reverse engineer a story out of the tropes.
It's good for what it is. But it doesn't change that it's fundamentally starting with so called trashy tropes.
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It's clear that they're setting up a love triangle between the Red Head Tsundere hothead, the quiet traditional wife type, and his hot teacher who is a 100+ year old demon but looks like a teenager.
Like, there's more merit to this than maybe I'm making fun of. Because the author tries really really hard to make these situations play out with how a real life person might react to these revelations. But that doesn't change the fact that I can smell these trash tropes from a mile away.
Subjectively, I think Saber/Run/Sakura of Fate/SN played out more realistically with their harem tropes than Jobless Reincarnations Roxy/Sylphie/Eris.
There's the benefit that F/SN are three different universes so each waifu pick is a totally different story. Jobless Reincarnation is on the other hand separated out by many years. But it's bloody obvious that all three girlfriends are going to come back together later for your old school anime triangle drama.
I guess that was what I liked with F/SN. The three girls were not yet another cheesy triangle.
In before people furiously try to rationalize by saying, "Well sure she looks like she's a prepubescent 12 year but ACTUALLY she's 3000 years old", yeah okay sure - but as the saying goes "if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck...".
Can you have "Western" anime? Some hardcore otakus scoff at the idea. If you made an animated version of Star Wars - is that anime? Is Avatar: The Last Airbender an anime?
"Chinese anime" or "Korean anime"? Again, some would scoff at the idea. But what is all that Hoyoverse stuff? Or all those Korean webtoons (though that's really more comparable with manga - and the korean word "manhwa" uses the exact same Chinese characters as "manga").
The anime community has, for as long as I've been a part of it (13 years or so), decided that anime is "animation made in Japan". This heuristic has actually worked pretty well.
But the lines are increasingly blurred.
- Japanese produced shows are outsourcing some animation to China and Korea, and sometimes taking direct funding and story writing input from the USA.
- Non-Japan produced shows are taking notes on what works, drawing on it for inspiration, and in rare recent cases even outsourcing animation directly to Japan.
- There is a TON of money in gacha games, and the biggest "anime" titles some people may recognize are gacha games, butand the majority of those are run 100% by Chinese companies. Ironically, sometimes sending them over to Japan for the TV adaptation.
Just like food: Italy may have "invented" pizza, but New York pizza is now its own thing.
On the higher quality end of the spectrum, I think one of the main differentiators is just how seriously the staff takes the production. They lean into the cinematography, storyboarding, directing, music, choreography, etc just as much or more as one might expect from western live action prestige TV. This is exceedingly rare in TV animation in the US and is only really seen in our animated movies (which are rare these days, at least in 2D form).
The other thing is that high quality anime is exceedingly good at building atmosphere and creating vibes. Half of the enjoyment of Cowboy Bebop for example is just basking in the ambience.
To be fair, most Japanese anime is also meant for kids and teens, but they were willing to explore content that would absolutely shock Western parents (violence, sex, nudity, as well as more nuanced stuff like sociopolitical commentary).
Is this different today? I feel modern Japanese anime is more toned down compared to say, the 1990s, while non-Japanese animation has been “toned up” in content.
Rather than "if", here's two instances of that idea I know of:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_Squad_Isekai
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvel_Anime
Edit: And it actually looks like some anime studios did get in on Star Wars: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars:_Visions
Are you unaware of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars:_Visions
??
Avatar, Star Wars, even Boondocks comes up.
I think My Adventures with Superman was Korean at least, but stylistically it's close to anime.
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The one people may have forgotten about is RWBY, which was the famous Texas Anime (erm... Texas made anime-inspired art?) that split so many people with debates on 'Anime or Not'.
I would definitely think that all the French-Japanese and Italo-Japanese coproductions of the 80s somehow qualify as western anime, yes. See for exemple Ulysses 31 and Esteban: Child of the Sun.
Then you have things like Radiant which a “manga” by a French artist in French which was turned into an anime by a Japanese studio.
I guess there probably is animation made in the typically Japanese somewhere. I can’t really help you there because I only read mangas and never watch adaptations (they are always strictly inferior to the material they adapt). So the only Japanese/Korean animation I watch is original content of which there is sadly very little.
There's not really anything stopping creative individuals who aren't Japanese from producing anime. The thing that many attempts miss (and I suspect what makes hardcores bristle) is that they tend to miss the point in one way or another, resulting in a product that might have many of the outward characteristics but ultimately misses the mark.
In my opinion Avatar is actually pretty close. I've seen clips from various animated productions from France that also seem to capture a similar spirit.
Similarly: One Piece / Luffys gears have been confirmed to be various powers that Tom and Jerry (the cartoon cat and mouse) have done over the decades with Gear 5 being a full on cartoon logic power up.
The amount of play and borrowing from Japan to America and back to Japan and back to America is epic.
Samurai films are inspired by Westerns. But then Star Wars was inspired by Samurai films.
Bouncing back and forth between the two cultures is part of the fun of it all. Including borrowing words like anime, Isekai. Or Japan borrowing the letter 'H' (ecchi) from us with completely new meanings.
it can be a great art form. even some of the emotional pornography can have artistic merit (recently: Frieren). but increasingly, despite diversity in genre and visual presentation, all anime just tries to push the same emotional buttons of loneliness, belonging, connection, in a very heavy-handed way that is more about provoking the emotions in the body than about artistic expression.
not everyone has those buttons, which is why anime fans are a devoted minority, and why it seems like lonely, traumatized, and marginalized people are drawn to it.
Western cartoons aimed at kids recycled the "power of being yourself" to death. Ask my tweens about the shows they've watched, and they'll pick apart how repetitive the story beats are between them.
The beats that anime is recycling may be different, but all of them get tiresome and feel pandering.
It's a bit social commentary (not very heavy but you can feel it). But I don't think it's about loneliness or relations much at all (I guess the Walrus and the Nurse Llama have a bit of a romantic fling but I don't consider it a major part of the show).
I'd say one of the major villains is someone who has fallen into the stereotypical gachapon gamer / whale / hikkomori type shut-in that sounds like you'd enjoy him as a villain.
So rather than catering to that demographic, OddTaxi skewers it by clearly marking that character as villainous.
It's just a solid Film Noir murder mystery, except the main character is the Taxi Driver with damn near perfect memory and facial recognition rather than a proper detective. It takes some time and discussions with various people around town to figure out the murder plot, but I was quite satisfied by it.
It's a dry show with a lot of talking. The bulk of the show is just the Walrus / Protagonist picking up customers around town, talking with them for 5 minutes and dropping them off.
But it's those discussions alone that leads him to the murder plot. It's really fun to see how everyone around town was so close to the murderer.
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I agree with you that there's a genre of anime that celebrates or dramatizes the Hikkomori / shut-in type (ex: Re:Zero, Jobless Reincarnation). But at this point, the Hikkomori is a stock character, just one tool to tell a story.
There's a lot of different uses of the "emotionally stunted Hikkomori" (ex: Anohana is the Hikkomori who through the drama of a Ghost coming back to talk with him, he gets pulled out of it and emotionally heals).
But anime and anime culture is above all, about stock characters that are borrowed, remixed, and turned into something new in the next story. The emotionally-stunted Hikkomori can become the hero in Re:Zero, the antagonist of OddTaxi, or a source of Comedy in Devil is a Part-Timer.
Frieren seems to cover a lot of Hikkomori Tropes (emotionally stunted character who is suddenly learning how to deal with emotions as she interacts with humans). So I think you're right in that she's seemingly related to the trope. I don't think I thought of her like that before but it seems to match up more-and-more that I think of it. She has all the markings of a Hikkomori in terms of attitude and even story progression (Himmel had to convince her to get up and try)
that’s not all of what bothers me though. if you look at Frieren, every main character is going through some kind of lonely attachment thing, even the ones that follow other stock character archetypes. it’s the whole show. It’s also the main drama in Spy x Family (another show that’s good on the merits).
I recently watched the first episode of “Wind Breakers”. They set you up for 5 minutes to think it will be about a strong guy fighting his way to the top. Surprise! It’s actually about belonging and finding friends who care about you.
Fine to have works of art about lonely people coming together and finding belonging. But it really is weird how much of a dominant theme this is, seemingly in the majority of new anime and manga.
“Chainsaw Man” is interesting because it sets up and subverts this at every possible turn, over and over.
If you dig through the older stuff for just the gems, you'll be ignoring a mountain of "emotional pornography" shows from the past that are largely ignored today because they weren't especially good art.
The unstated thesis might just be surprise that this once-nerdy stuff has become mainstream at all and therefore has investment potential that was heretofore unrecognized.
You do not have to watch too much of it to get the sense that writers are just going nuts tossing stuff against the wall and seeing what sticks. Endless remixing of ideas from what came before, and outside influences.
Example: Legend of Black Heaven, which featured a middle aged retired rockstar guitar player working as a software engineer, who is tracked down by aliens to get him to use his guitar playing as a weapon in an intergalactic war. Sure, why not? Is it good? Debatable. Have you seen anything like it before? Unlikely.
I think he's a middle manager, not an engineer. His title is "Section Manager" and I only remember this because the Japanese title of the show is Kacho Ouji, which translates to Section Manager Ouji or Section Manager Prince if you translate his name
Overlord does a better job with grimdark. I'm fond of Log Horizon though S3 sucked. Solo Leveling came out the same time as Weakest Tamer began a journey to pick up Trash, and that was delightful for me.
I think the visceral stuck at the bottom of the ladder feeling was better handled by weakest tamer. A young girl who was forced to run away from home because her village considered her 0-star skill literally a heresy and religious blight.
Unlike Solo Leveling, the Weakest Tamer actually sticks with the plot. She never becomes much more powerful than she was, and instead leverages her relationships / friends she makes rather than literally solo leveling.
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The Isekai / Reverse Isekai genre is literally animes biggest genre right now. There's so so so many better shows out there than Solo Leveling.
But I guess the question is: what do you like about it? Solo Leveling is a passable male fantasy do-it-myself-by-plot-armor always win kind of show. But.... This plot honestly has been done better back by Sword Art Online (and I didn't even like that anime either).
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Jobless Reincarnation, despite all the controversy, is probably the local optimum on that 'Do it myself' / solo leveling / get stronger loop.
Hmmmmm... I'd give either Reincarnated as a Slime or I'm a Spider, So What? As my top picks on this genre / storytelling style. For personal enjoyment. Maaayyyyybe Re:Zero if you're into the body horror stuff that Solo Leveling also does.
But that’s a different plot than Solo Leveling, and in particular, a female rather than male power fantasy. (Social control vs individual strength.)
Your criticism that Solo Leveling isn’t something it wasn’t meant to be is strange.
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The number of anime that goes in the direction of Weakest Tamer is ... much fewer. A bit of variety and branching out is nice.
I'm not even sure what in Solo Leveling sets it apart that all the other shows didn't do better.
I can say that Overlords focus on leadership / kingsctaft is next to none. Slime's leadership and optimism sets it apart from Overlord even if Overlord does the leadership thing better.
Demon Slayer has better animation.
Sword Art Online came out first and was freshest (there were older Isekai but not this Solo Leveling type aloneness / level up grind).
Spider So What was one of the most compressed boss raid stories with the shear number of fights being quite impressive.
Shun is an underdog who is suddenly thrust into war because the Spider Demon Queen attacks. He obtains the sacred power of the hero and is the one destined to kill demon lords.
Fortunately for our Spider protagonist, Kumoko is not the demon lord but just an underling (a major underling... but nonetheless an underling) of the Spider Demon.
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IMO, it's fun to see Shun do 'Regular Isekai Things' while Kumoko has to survive in the dark dungeon.
It's also very interesting to me that Shun's entire world and story ends up being irrelevant in terms of world powers.
Still, I love street level and other such 'less powered' beings in my stories. It gives you a sense of what the ordinary humans are up to while our Spider is leveling up in the dungeons.
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Solo leveling doesn't do the power of friendship thing that Shun and his party does. But otherwise, Sung Jinwoo is a chosen 'hero' of sorts thrust into a role. Much like Shun is suddenly chosen by God to be a hero as the skill passed to him.
It's from Shuns perspective that we see how Kumoko's far away actions have a rippling effect onto human society. It's an integral part of the story despite being a bit more boring.
E.g. One Piece, Naruto, Bleach, Attack on Titan, etc.
That’s why properties like Star Wars rose to prominence as well:
> underdog protagonist stereotypes of a loner, outcast, who develops a tight knit support group or team on their quest to overtake or defeat a great evil in the world
I'm genuinely not trying to be a shithead or anything, it's just a style that lends itself well to industrialization and specialized tooling to speed up the process of creating. Unless you get into highly stylized executions, if you as a company just want to turn out a perfectly average and forgettable anime, you can do so at scale pretty easily, and the glut of artists looking for work means you don't have to pay a lot for the labor either.
I have nothing against this but frankly as a creative it is slightly demoralizing to see just more and more consolidation and mechanization in industry. There's so little that feels genuinely creative anymore, and it feels like year over year the art people produce is crushed harder and harder into pre-made molds that do well on content algorithms.
Maybe nobody else gives a shit.
You obviously didn't watch enough varied western cartoons. The following are just a small sample of different, highly varied western studios/artists.
1. Don Bluth
2. Hanna-Barbera
3. Pixar
4. Bill Kroyer
5. Ralph Bakshi
6. Mike Judge
7. Genndy Tartakovsky
8. Vivienne Medrano
9. Jerry Rees
An artist with a unique vision and aesthetic. Samurai Jack is one of my favorites.
There's a grain of truth here. A huge grain. The US comics were long stunted by the Comics Code of 1954: http://www.mit.edu/activities/safe/labeling/comics-code-1954
It had been revised a bunch of times, but arguably it went away only in early 2000-s. Mostly because of the anime/manga influence.
Anime includes masterpieces like Spirited Away, trashy harem / male fantasies like Jobless Reincarnation, touching dramas like Anohana, female oriented romances like Fruitsbasket, literally pornography like... Erm... Well you know.
Etc. etc. etc.
It's not fair to compare one anime with another. It's not like cartoons in the USA that fall under the rough set of same humor or writers. Anime is much broader and thus has something for everyone
And anime also has a lot that you'll hate. I personally hate recent male fantasy trends like Solo Leveling for example (despite enjoying Overlord, a male fantasy from yesteryear).