The Golden Years of Anime

[Casual Shinji]

It's mainly a tropes thing, in that they don't seem to be there. And Kon adressing things other anime wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole: Homelessness, aids, the elderly. Heck, Paprika even had a morbidly obese man in a realistic setting.

There is no such thing as a story without tropes. [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/columns/moviebob/7190-Trope-a-Dope]

For literal examples, just visit the TVtropes pages for Paprika or Paranoia Agent.

An in the more general sense, if you mean that it's tropes are not as apparent, that's mostly because you are intentionally comparing it to the worst possible counterexamples.

Paprika talks about AIDS, and other anime doesn't, therefore Paprika is "original".

So what? Chihayafuru is about the card game of karuta and other anime doesn't therefore Chihayafuru is original.
Steins;Gate discusses the John Titor story and other anime doesn't, therefore Steins;Gate is original.
Nazo no Kanojo X shows drool-tasting fetishism and other anime doesn't, therefore Nazo no Kanojo X is original.

It's not that hard to be original in the sense of "bringing up themes that other anime don't".

Your measurment of "originality" has more to do with feeling classy and sophisticated about discussing social issues, than with the show actually being more different from others than those from each other.

I don't really get why you're taking such offense to me stating Kon was very outside the anime norm. He was.

Anime is a lot like the comicbook and videogame industry; Everything is "sexified". It's all designed to slick, sexy, and cool. Any theme or idea that is unable to adhere to this is either ignored or not given much budget.

Kon's work deals with issues that are deemed not marketable and generally thought of to scare people away, and does it in an extremely high profile way. Tokyo Godfathers is a big budget epic animated movie about... three homeless people and a baby in a real and grim setting. And when the last time you saw an anime that dealt with the issue of taking care of the elderly?

 

[Entitled]

The thing is, a good story will not build itself around Tropes. Tropes are the terms applied to storytelling conventions after the fact. If you start out a story by going "I'm going to make a story about a Shrinking Violet Woobie who Rages Against the Heavens while fighting the Big Bad who is a Complete Monster", you're doing it backwards.

That sounds like a rather arbitary definition of "good story".

Now that I think about it, this might be a part of that concept that I likned to earlier, about the different art philosophies of the east and the west.

That was about visual styles, but the same can be applied to narratives as well. The west is a bit obsessed with verisimilitude, making the viewer forget that it's all just a story. Once a female lead gets identified as a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, that's already a failure, as if the writer just got caught failing to pretend that she is a real woman. At the same time, anime studios are explicitly advertising how their next heroine is a "new type of Tsundere", showing off how cleverly the writer arranged the older tropes, just as a japanese painter arranges visual symbols, a poet aranges kanji, or a gardener arranges plants and stones.

Besides, like I said Satoshi Kon's style was really pretty much a subgenre on it's own, surrealist social criticism, which TVTropes would call "Mind Screw" and "Take That".

 

[Casual Shinji]

BUUUUSSSSTTTTEEEEEERRRRR BBBBEEEEAAAAAMMMMM!!!!!

I'm not a huge fan of Evangelion but I really love Gunbuster, partially because of all the ridiculous super science and hugely detailed robots. Also yeah... The Gunbuster March, Gunbuster Pose, Buster Beam and Izunama Kick might just be the greatest things ever.

It's been a long time since I've seen it, but I'll always remember it for its melancholy. The fact that warp travel aged the world around the pilot, ostensibly having the world move on without them. That's still one of the most interesting things I've ever seen in any story.

And that ending is just bittersweet as fuck. I still don't know if I should be overtaken by grief or overtaken by joy.

Also, the unnecessary nipple slips.

 

[PedroSteckecilo]

Kon's work deals with issues that are deemed not marketable and generally thought of to scare people away, and does it in an extremely high profile way. Tokyo Godfathers is a big budget epic animated movie about... three homeless people and a baby in a real and grim setting. And when the last time you saw an anime that dealt with the issue of taking care of the elderly?

Roujin Z!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roujin_Z

A pretty entertaining film put together by Katsuhiro Otomo of Akira Fame. It's pretty much entirely about taking care of the elderly... and Robots... it's also about Robots.

 

[Entitled]

Anime is a lot like the comicbook and videogame industry; Everything is "sexified".

Or like Hollywood, or best-selling novels, baroque paintings, medieval worldly literature, pop music, folk music, and basically anything popular.

It's all designed to slick, sexy, and cool. Any theme or idea that is unable to adhere to this is either ignored or not given much budget.

You are really stating truisms here. OF COURSE most themes are expected to be slick and cool. That's kind of the definition of slick and cool: things that you want to see more of.

And yes, it's inevitable that more works will be about things that people find attractive, than intentionally scaring them away with disturbing themes.

Rare, but there always are counterexamples. The horror, and tragedy genres for example, are about things that people don't "want" in a certain sense.

Tokyo Godfathers is a big budget epic animated movie about... three homeless people and a baby in a real and grim setting. And when the last time you saw an anime that dealt with the issue of taking care of the elderly?

All I'm saying is, that while making shows about grim unpleasant social issues is "original", since no other show does that, it's in no way MORE ORIGINAL than the million other ways in which a writr can twist audience expectations. Maybe it's more classy, or more socially relevant, but not "more original".

"Most anime characters are young... therefore mine will be old!" is not a fundamentally more creative process than "Most anime takes place in modern japan... therefore mine takes place in ancient Rome!"

The quality is in the execution. Something that Satoshi Kon was actually great at, but so are many other artists even if they don't mention AIDS and old people and ugliness but mention other rare themes like NASA or Jazz, or microeconomics.

 

[Casual Shinji]

Kon's work deals with issues that are deemed not marketable and generally thought of to scare people away, and does it in an extremely high profile way. Tokyo Godfathers is a big budget epic animated movie about... three homeless people and a baby in a real and grim setting. And when the last time you saw an anime that dealt with the issue of taking care of the elderly?

Roujin Z!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roujin_Z

A pretty entertaining film put together by Katsuhiro Otomo of Akira Fame. It's pretty much entirely about taking care of the elderly... and Robots... it's also about Robots.

That's actually the movie I was refering to. Satoshi Kon wrote it.

 

[Casual Shinji]

snip

We can probably keep going back and forth till the cows come home, but fact of the matter is that anime is generally aimed at kids or the geek crowd. Same with comicbooks and videogames. And concepts that can't be marketed toward either typically don't find any foothold. And when they do, it'll be on a shoelace budget.

Kon's movies seem to come from a mindset of wanting to tell this particular story rather then wanting to appeal to anyone in general. And in anime that's pretty damn rare.

 

[Entitled]

snip

We can probably keep going back and forth till the cows come home, but fact of the matter is that anime is generally aimed at kids or the geek crowd. Same with comicbooks and videogames.

Yeah, and what do you think, who is buying Satoshi Kon's shows? Perfectly Ordinary People? Like you said, they are "not marketable" and "scare people away": It's the same anime fandom, the kind of obsessive connoisseurs who would buy a weirdly unappeling anime just to support originality, just maybe the individuals with darker tastes and more hipster/artsy interests.

And that doesn't mean that Satoshi Kon was "pandering" to otaku. I think you are overestimating the number of shows that are so blatantly pandering to any demographic that you can visualize the developers rubbing their hands and evilly laughing about how they just exploited the K-on audience. Most small-scale artists are really just trying to tell stories, regardless of how popular their stories end up being.

Yes, you can tell that Satoshi Kon really just waned to tell his stories. And Spice and Wolf's writer Hasekura Isuna really just wanted to tell a story about medieval trading economics, wolf spirits, and love. If his reason wouldn't have been to write some niche unpopular topic that he is very passionate about, he could have just chosen a more accessible plot to begin with.

For that matter, pretty much every anime is made on a shoelace budget for a small unpopular audience, instead of pandering to the larger masses. That's exactly what I love about the medium, and about the way it's organized. That being made for a handful of otaku can help quirky niche works like Paranoia Agent, Steins;Gate, Chihayafuru, Fate/Zero, and Nazo no Kanojo X, to exist. Nowhere else could you find so crazy ideas, such diverse genres, and so much new IP every season, than among Otaku.

You are just looking at it with a glass-half-full perspective, and inherently assume "pandering" if the characters are attractive, or the plot is cool which happen to be the two basic "tropes" that you use as markers to sign "unoriginality". And then you glorify the same level of originality as long as it doesn't include these two markers.

 

[kortin]

You're old. They aren't your anime; they aren't the anime you grew up watching.

There's no such thing as "golden years" of anything that's not completely and totally subjective.

 

[Julius Terrell]

I think it's more about perspective and age. Japanese anime as a medium is getting older and therefor allowing people to have many different perspectives. Hollywood just doesn't have that kind of reach. The ability to give EVERYONE what they want is a beautiful thing.

I hope the medium continues to grow in diversity. Being an older guy, I can remember when hollywood had it's good years. It makes me really sad to think that those great years will never come back. You just have to move on and find shows that entertain you.

 

[FireAza]

While there was certainly a "golden age" for the anime home video market that has long passed, I don't think a golden age for the medium itself has passed. Granted, today we're seeing a lot more "safe" anime, designed to appeal to fans and make money without much risk. But quality anime is still being made, with shows like Croisée in a Foreign Labyrinth, My Little Sister Can`t Be This Cute, Usagi Drop and My Ordinary Life. And there's still experimental anime being made, with shows like Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt, Bakemonogatari and Puella Magi Madoka Magica.

 

[allways2edlast]

I'm going to sound like I'm saying what some other peolpe have already said and what everone knows, but I feel like throwing in my two cents.

What i'm seeing from a number of peoples comments is that "anime from this time period is good because (list said anime.)" where its old or new. But when it comes to that, the number of animes being made has greatly changed.

In 1969 they were 11 animes release in that year. In 1979 18, 1989 27 and 1999 67, if wiki is right, and if so holy crap! thats a jump. from 1997 38 animes then in 1998 it grow to 60, (ironically the same year cowboy bebop came out.) This year we will have 93 new animes release. So we have more release per season now than they were released per year a few decade a go. I think that has a lot to do with it.

I don't know how many animation studios they are operating in Japan, how much it would cast and how may they can release pair season or year. I know it very from how many episodes they are, aswells as episodes length, But im sure a considerable amount of money. If you facing a large amount of steep competition you wan't to put in what you target demographic wants. In anime that happens to be teenaged boy. Thats why theys so maney shows about: hights schools, gaint robots and random fanservices shows. Aswell as show aimed at girls, like shoujo anime.

the easy way to be sure that said show will be watched, studios often make adaptations of popular mangas, light novels and visual novels. They know the fanbase will buy them.