Japanese-Western co-produced animation: What namespace?

So not too long ago, crazysamaritan brought up that they put Lupin III The Italian Adventure (Part IV) in the WesternAnimation/ namespace instead of the Anime namespace because it was created for Italians and got the Short Run in Peru treatment there because of its popularity. They compared this to Western cartoons outsourcing their animation to Asian studios; however, I believe this isn't a good comparison because shows like The Transformers and Tiny Toon Adventures have entirely American production/writing staff, with the only Japanese involvement being with animation. Lupin III: Part IV's production staff, however, is entirely Japanese.

Then you have actual Japanese/Western co-productions (such as Sherlock Hound, which has both Italian and Japanese production/writing staff) in the Anime/ namespace.

IMO Lupin III: Part IV should be moved to the Anime/ namespace.

Rock'n'roll never dies!

Is it reliant on the nationality of its staff (Japanese), and if so, what to make of the number of non-Japanese animators working in animation studios in Japan? Is it reliant on where it's produced (Japan) and its target audience (Japanese viewers), because even then, Japanese studios often create works targeting outside demographics, some even paid for by foreign entities. Finally, is it anime if a Japanese person helms it no matter what, like in the case of Yuasa taking over an episode of Adventure Time? Or is anime just a medium for storytelling that has certain design traits and story hooks? Is stuff like Totally Spies! anime or just an imitation? All these questions and more make up a complex network of different answers on how to define "anime."

This website chose "country of release" as the deciding metric. Short Run in Peru does not apply to Part IV because there were two episodes that never aired on Japanese television and were only released as a DVD exclusive. In contrast, all the episodes aired on Italian cable. SRIP does not cover "gets special episodes only for them". This series was made to air in Italy and was repackaged for the domestic market, including having a different opening credits for the two countries.

Link to TRS threads in project mode here.

So it's quite comparable to Sonic X (which also coincidentally happens to be animated by TMS): The source material was made by a Japanese company as a franchise/character that could appeal to Westerners (esp. Americans), and the franchise as a whole has been more successful in North America and Europe than it has been in Japan.

At first, Sonic X was only supposed to last two "seasons" adapting Sonic Adventure and Sonic Adventure 2 as well as a short arc adapting Sonic Battle. Then, due to its success in the west, 4kids asked the Japanese producers to make a third "season" which was aired on TV outside of Japan, but was dumped on streaming services in Japan (mind you, this was the mid-to-late 2000s, when linear TV was still the stronghold) and never aired there until 2020.

It's still in the anime namespace.

EDIT: Read about The Big O's situation in that article and it also had a similar production situation to Sonic X.

If this were an easy decision, I would say we put all animated works into the Animation/ namespace.

Edited by ccorb on Jun 7th 2021 at 8:49:37 AM

Rock'n'roll never dies!

There was a brief discussion about this a while back. I'll paste in what I said there, word for word, although some of it doesn't apply here.

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1. Are we sure that "first released" is the rule?
2. Are we sure that '"first released" should be the rule?

I'd prefer if we had some safeguard against Short Run in Peru situations. I'm not comfortable with calling (for instance) Space☆Dandy anything other than anime, despite the majority of episodes having aired in the U.S. before Japan.

I had a dog-themed avatar before it was cool.

Wait, "first release" is the rule?

I was musing on Miraculous Ladybug as another 'gray area' work: the people who conceptualized it were French, it's set in France, it's made by a French studio in collaboration with Japanese and Korean studios... but it was released in Korea a month and a half before it was released in France.

And how does 'first release' square with a global company like Netflix (fwiw the question that prompted the reply in the OP was Netflix original Trese), which drops things on the same date everywhere? Is it that Netflix is an American company?

Edited by Synchronicity on Jun 7th 2021 at 3:12:58 AM

I was asking whether "first release" was the rule.

Miraculous is one of the obvious cases for why it shouldn't be.

I had a dog-themed avatar before it was cool.

I was responding to this line in your linked thread, which sounded definitive:

Let's say, hypothetically, we decide on "home country of the creator" as the line. What works would need to be moved?

I had a dog-themed avatar before it was cool.

There's WesternAnimation.Rugrats, created by a Hungarian and an American. I believe Gabor Csupo was a naturalized citizen when the show was in production, but it would have to be moved to Animation/ if we decided that the show was Hungarian.

Also Rocket Power and Aaahh!!! Real Monsters would have to be moved.

EDIT: For a more clear example, the show with the page Synch made, Trese, is based on Filipino source material and The Other Wiki says it's a Singaporean production, so it would go to Animation/.

Whoops, 'd

Edited by ccorb on Jun 7th 2021 at 4:59:14 AM

Rock'n'roll never dies!

Csupo was naturalized, and wasn't the sole creator. I said "home country" instead of "nationality" to avoid this sort of situation.

I had a dog-themed avatar before it was cool.

Wikipedia thinks it's anime, for what it's worth.

If a tree falls in the forest and nobody remembers it, who else will you have ice cream with?

Trese has:

• Filipino showrunners (the writers of the original comic)
• American director^note Filipino-American
• Both Filipino and American casts
• American animation studio
• Asian investors/producers
• American distributor
• American-first release date by a day^note  (assuming the goal is not to drop at the same time, since it's a half-day time difference)

By comparison, Animation.Next Gen has:

• American directors and cast
• Chinese production company
• American distributor (also Netflix)
• Netflix set the release date everywhere except China, where it was shown in theaters a year later

Edited by Synchronicity on Jun 7th 2021 at 4:29:45 AM

I might split the formats of AnimatedFilm/ and AnimatedSeries/, but otherwise yeah.

As long as we separate "mediums" by country of origin, there isn't a simple rule that works for everything and problems will arise because of globalization trends.

Link to TRS threads in project mode here.

To simplify this a bit, let's go with "initially intended first country of release" if one obviously exists (preventing the Short Run in Peru situation.)

This is why I really hate splitting media namespaces by culture.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Yes. On the Namespace Map it says that South American animation goes under Animation/ and not WesternAnimation/. If you spend enough time lurking r/asklatinamerica you know that would be enough to set off every local on there.

Edit: For a test I checked every (non-web) animated series on Argentine Media and all of those series are in WesternAnimation/. Ditto with Brazilian Media.

Edited by ccorb on Jun 8th 2021 at 8:24:10 AM

Rock'n'roll never dies!

We should just have one Animation namespace and call it a day.

If a tree falls in the forest and nobody remembers it, who else will you have ice cream with?

Ideally yes.

Practically, doing so with what we got now will be a lot of work. So it is more feasible to come up with guidelines.

I'd say we look at the production company first. If it's 100% Japanese writers/producers, it belongs in Anime/ even if it's pandering to non-Japanese. Not a single Italian was in the creative team of Lupin III The Italian Adventure, so it strikes me as a shoehorn to call it Western Animation.

Edited by ccorb on Jun 8th 2021 at 7:17:03 AM

Rock'n'roll never dies!

Would we move G.I. Joe: Sigma 6 as well? The "production company" was 4Kids, which is actually a dubbing/licensing company who sourced out their writing to the Japanese animation studio GONZO. As far as I know, it was never broadcast in Japan (they didn't even hire voice actors, they just wrote the script), but the main creators were all Japanese and it was paid for by an American company which translated their script and paid for English voice actors. This is another example of a series created by a Japanese company for a Western audience.

Following that, we should move Robotech to WesternAnimation/, because the production company was American.

Your comparison to Sonic X doesn't work here; we aren't talking about continuing an existing work, we are talking about a self-contained series marketed to a specific country. That country happens not to be Japanese and because of our strange sorting, it produces issues.

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Changing the policy from "country the work is first released in" (even excluding SRIP) to "country the creator lives in" isn't going to remove ambiguity and hard decisions. It'll just mean different arguments over what counts. That was the point that I was making by providing the earlier link.

Link to TRS threads in project mode here.

@ccorb, Hungary is in Europe, so that would still count as Western Animation.

Actually, animated works from former Iron Curtain countries (including Yugoslavia) go under Animation/.

back lol

I like the idea of AnimatedFilm/ and AnimatedSeries/ namespaces.

I also think that animation could go under a single Animation/ namespace, since the first option would be too much work.

Edited by callmeamuffin on Jul 27th 2021 at 10:40:16 PM

Come play Character Uplift Game!

I would like to do that as well, I am sure someone could throw together a bot that would make doing this, not a living nightmare.

Though if we were to do that I wonder what we would do with the Western Animation Media Category.

CM Sandboxes, MB Sandboxes

For what it's worth, the combination of animated films and tv shows into the same namespace has sometimes lead to works not being eligible for the Franchise/ namespace, when they would have been if there were two different namespaces.