Why is Anime so Popular?

Meh, I just like the art and story.

I like the Pretty boys, the ongoing episode arc story-lines and the Continuity Nod of each show, plus the fact that there is a lot of 'Uncanny Valley' strangeness in anime

edited 5th Aug '11 2:28:35 AM by sabrina_diamond

Actually, "what makes anime tick" isn't so bad a question. The reason anime took off was because compared to American animation of the time the production values were a LOT higher. It wasn't cartoons made for 4 year olds anymore, there were complex plots and characters. That initial appeal gave it the foot hold that makes it so popular today. American shows are just now catching up, with Young Justice and Avengers EMH, and even those have some anime influence. It just took America longer to admit that just because something is animated it can't be dismissed as "kid stuff". The superhero genre is bringing America out of the Animation Age Ghetto finally, YJ in particular has better production values that a lot of anime does.

Honestly, it's not that I like anime, it's just that I like shows that happen to be anime. I still watch western shows and movies very often.

edited 13th Jun '12 9:35:15 PM by tvsgood

Word.

edited 14th Jun '12 8:46:55 AM by TheHandle

Similar reasons but I probably watch more anime than other stuff mostly because anime is more likely to have stories that I want to watch.

Why the necro? I really don't care what kind of animation it is as long as it appeals to me.

edited 14th Jun '12 5:59:51 PM by Enzeru

Pretty much this.

Though I will say that animation in Japan is just another medium, while animation in the West is only recently shaking off it's 'more for kids' reputation (I'm not sure if that's due to the influx of anime, but it might be).

That's pretty debatable. animation might be 'just for kids' in the West, but animation in Japan is 'just for kids and otaku'.

Now, manga is generally accepted as a medium with a universal audience, but anime most certainly is not.

Luckily otaku have lots of disposable income though.

The "Otaku" label only means that anime is a niche, not mainstream, but it's is not really a limit to the type of stories that can be told. The japanese animation ghetto is more similar to our Sci Fi Ghetto, than to our Animation Age Ghetto.

So it's accurate to say that it's "just another medium", because the fact that some of the Japanese squares might be sneering at it, doesn't influence the topic of this thread, that unlike Western Animation, anime medium is allowed to work with all genres, levels of seriousness, and art styles.

I'm more interested in asking, why don't western works have more diversity?

Maybe they have to pander a bit to do it, but they can sell slice of life anime about nothing. Things that have a leisurely pace, but aren't stupid.

Sometimes it seems western works are always have to have too much of a purpose. Or rather the purpose is far too committee-decided for my liking.

It's almost absurd how someone can write a series of short novels and have it adapted intact and with reasonable quality. And yet this is a regular occurrence for Japan.

So... Maybe it's like being indie for people who still like things to have production values?

Bad example, but basically we could do with a lot more creativity over here. Good new TV shows are far too infrequent.

I think, the main reason is that there Japanese people have different cultural expectations for realism in art.

As Peter Chung described it once:

He specifically talked about what influenced Japanese animation techniqes, but the same applies to storytelling, too.

Japanese stories are, in more than one sense of the phrase, two dimensional.

This is why some people call anime exceptionally original, while others call it cliché: It's both, at the same time. Just as the animators are openly "manipulating the puppets", the writers are openly putting together collections of tropes. From a western perspective, this can seem like a fault, because seeing that a character is drawn with an unrealistic 2D "anime face", and doesn't even lip-synch, would break the immersion compared to our realistic 3D, and so would the way she talks, being a Tsundere Childhood Friend archetype instead of a three dimensional human, with depth.

But on the other hand, this very method of putting the artist in plain sight, allows for more extreme stories. Just as 2D animation allows for wildly unrealistic things that you couldn't do in 3D, the way they deal with openly selling premises on their interesting combination of tropes, allows for strange genres, and more outlandish settings.

I would disagree with your analysis. I would say that the troupe based stories only apply when there are many expectations on a work, like when dealing with old/popular franchises like gundam, for example. And besides, that two dimensional thinking on a large scale has it's western equivalent in, for example, most Hollywood productions (not just blockbusters).

While here an animation series is usually a group effort based on what the director had someone else draw on the storyboard (one animator draws one character each for a certain scene, some others draw the backgrounds, etc.) in animation there is usually one guy who draws the important positions (key animation) and the remaining animators fill the in transitional drawings, the coulors, etc which is not necessarily more efficient (or fairer to the trainees) but does put emphasis on the vision of the individual, giving the supervisor more responsibility in the series' success (thus scaring many into playing it safe by using tropes) but most importantly, more creative liberty.

There are other differences, like the fact that usually it's the main writer that controls the plot, the events and the characters rather than the director who (with some rare exceptions) just deals with the way it is presented and animated, further separating the roles.

Overall, I would say that anime has more in common with what we usually would call author cinema or indie filmaking, brought over to a wider audience simply due to Japanese values, since the population in general is used to the idea that a firm is more of a family and its individual members have the obligation to contribute with their work, but I could be misinterpreting things since I'm not japanese.

Hollywood cinema is not two dimensional at all, in the sense that I'm talking about here. It's a typical front runner of the western "versimilitude" mentality, that stories needs to be immersive, instead of viewed in their frame as a piece of art.

Of course, it uses tropes, and even has it's own clichés, just like everything, but the point is, that it tries to hide them. When was the last time when a character archetype got acknowledged in the public consciouseness? Not only among tropers, (who are having an Eastern mentality ourselves, by believing that Tropes Are Not Bad), but in a real public?

The latest one was probably Manic Pixie Dream Girl, and that is mostly treated as a criticism, it is being called a shallow character, and being mocked for trying to manipulate the audience. With Hollywood audiences, the common belief is, that Tropes are Bad. They use the words "trope" and "cliché" interchargibly. If the audience notices that a trope has been used, it is already considered a failure, for being too unrealistic, and too predictable. It got caught red-handed at trying to evoke reactions from us with an artificial device in the supposedly organic story. It's like a theatre stagehand that was stumbling into the scene.

Meanwhile, in Japanese media, just as stage hands of traditional Japanese theatre are openly walking around on the stage in a black suit that is symbolically signing that they are invisible, anime is also openly putting it's tricks up front. Often, series are advertised with listing the protagonists' character archetype, or the setting trope.

It's not just a matter of some writers being very very creative, or playing it safe instead, but an entirely different ideal of what counts as creativity, and what is considered safe.

But that criticism of a work being cliche applies to the critics but not to the audience, like with films directed by James Cameron, Star Wars and many others. In fact most if not all trailers tell the audience what kind of tropes are present.

Besides, that argument would not apply to slice of life anime since the concept itself implies that you're portraying real life (even though most often than not it decays into cliches and weird events). I would even point out than most of western animation consists of comedies, especially because they're unrealistic. Perhaps the argument would then be that westerners do not make animation with more realism because they don't believe that the audience would take a bunch of drawings seriously, whereas the easterners do?

Going from a different perspective, I suppose one could argue that anime has more variety of styles which, although usually not realistic, do add to each shows uniqueness much like SamuraiJack's unique looks make it stand out against other western animation. But again, I think that variety has more to do with each show being a personal creation rather than the creators not caring about trying to make the show realistic.

edited 16th Jun '12 12:35:36 AM by luislucas

I can't say for certain whether Ever 9's but you haven't poked any serious holes in it really:

• Audiences now have a passing familiarity with tropes, and that's really all you need before you can accuse a work of being cliché.
• Tropes being evident =/= tropes being openly stated.
• I think it might be the case that western animation achieves true trope humour more often than live-action TV does.

Personally I feel Ever 9 is applying this theory to a greater degree than I would given that it's just about trope use, not why Japan seems to organically grow more variety, but he isn't necessarily wrong.

I was talking about western media in general. Western animation, is a special case.

Current 2D western animation is more unrealistic than anime, but that's part of the reason why it's in the Animation Age Ghetto. Because it willingly chooses to stay unrealistic, it isn't being accepted by the mainstream as serious storytelling.

Classic disney-style animated feature films were striving for verisimilitude, and they were taken somehow seriously. But as soon as we could, we replaced it with 3D CGI animation for all the semi-serious big budget movies, and 2D was reduced to flash-animated TV shows for kids, and it entirely stopped trying to be considered realistic or mainstream. now western 2D characters are much more stylized than either anime characters, 3D animation characters, or classic Disney characters. They are barely even humanoid, they have all sorts of skin colors, heads larger than bodies, thick black outlines, etc.

Compared this dichotomy that Peter Chung tried to define, and that I agree with, that Japanese art is somehow more openly artifical, while western art values verisimilitude (believability), the current 2D western animation is entirely off the chart, it's far more artifical and unbelievable than either of them.

It's like what happened to paintings after the invention of photographs. For hundreds of years, artists strived to create more and more photorealistic pictures, but as soon as cameras could do it more easily, they pretty much gave up, and turned to surrealism, and bringing attention to their personal art styles, and it became an obscure niche for art connoisseurs, just as 2D animation became a niche for kiddy TV shows, because the mainstream western mentality rejects non-verisimile art and entertainment.

Variety is just a consequence of that kind of attitude.

To put it in another way, Japanese audiences have a larger Willing Suspension of Disbelief, because they are more ready to allow strangeness with the Doylist explanation that "It's like this because the artist wanted to put it together this way", while the audiences of western stories are more likely to demand in-universe explanations for how everything makes sense from a Watsonian way, by insisting that it only makes sense if it could have as well really happened. That obviously limit the kinds of stories that can be told.

edited 16th Jun '12 4:51:27 AM by Ever9

Let me tell you why I love animu. I love animation, especially 2D. But US of A and €urope does not provide me with enough high quality, intelligent cartoons I can appreciate as an adult. That, and you get tired of comedies sometimes. I want more, and I want different.

This is where Japan (and to lesser extent, South Korea) comes in. They provide more supply for my demand. And The Country of the Rising Run makes a lot of MATURE SHOWS FOR MATURE ADULTS, which I appreciate. I appreciate really threatening bad guys. I appreciate credible-looking fighting where there is something at stake. I appreciate real threats. I appreciate politics. I appreciate philosophy. I appreciate cool action scenes. I appreciate characters who's mind is a battlefield. I appreciate quality(but not unnecessary) violence.

tl;dr Animu is more of what I already like. A LOT more of what I like.

edited 16th Jun '12 10:45:39 AM by KlarkKentThe3rd

This.

Indeed, that's something else I like.

I never get the feeling it's just trying to score "adult points" for the benefit of the people who use the rating system to gauge what's for children or actually mature.

No gratuitous swearing (at least not for no reason), but there's also a different reason for that.

I had intended on making this post earlier, but it didn't seem appropriate until now. Gonna kinda be a retread of what said, but oh well.

Part of what continues to bug me about "adult" Western cartoons is that, if you look close enough, they aren't really adult. They're adult in the sense that the characters swear every two minutes, or that blood and guts spill all over the floor, or get into sexual encounters that show female tits or gay men kissing or actual (yet censored) sex, all while making jokes about penises and vaginas along the way. It reminds me much of The Dark Age Of Comic Books, where "adult" cartoons are mature only at the surface level, and can in fact be considered immature as a result. Anime in general seem to avoid that and actually be mature through Character Development and thematic storytelling, which I like a lot.

Yeah, GOD KNOWS Disney ain't doing anything with 2D films, and every other Western feature film studio is only doing CG! I'm an artist who only draws. The initial reason I got hooked on anime was because Japan is one of the many foreign countries that still uses drawings as an appreciate art form.