Why Is Anime Good?

What precisely is good about anime/manga is highly debatable, to say the least. Nor is it something that we need to discuss for the purpose of defending anime watching, as long as we have evidence that anime is worth watching. As the Buddha remarked on someone asking after the nature of heaven & hell rather than how to obtain enlightenment:

It is as if a man had been wounded by a poisoned arrow, and his friends & relatives procured him a surgeon. But the man says, “I will not have this arrow out until I learn whether my injurer were Brahmin or Kshatriya; tall, short, or medium; black, dusky, or of yellow skin; from this or that city; whether it be an ordinary or claw-headed arrow…” The man would die without learning all this.

But let’s discuss it anyway.

I have heard people say that the edge comes from American media’s abandonment of the serial format in favor of a static episodic format that would syndicate profitably and which would draw no criticism by its anodyne content in which the good guys always win, or from maintaining a diversity of genres ranging from moralistic child tales to comedy to business wars to detective stories while American comics slowly degenerated into ever more involuted superhero comics and American TV retrod the same action-adventure formulas. What follows is my subjective take, gleaned from my own idiosyncratic anime watching, book reading (eg. Notenki Memoirs), and SF reading habits. This seems plausible to me, anyway. Defending anime on esthetics grounds seems easy. American cartoons were, before the advent of anime, marked by an episodic format that destroyed any detailed overarching plot-line, and were not visually accomplished; further, they were highly stereotyped and commercial enterprises, in a bad way. Japanese productions were quite commercial too, but the devil is in the details—Mobile Suit Gundam was designed to sell toys, but has become so much more than a model advertisement. In America, it would never have become more. Japan hosts amazing fandoms like Touhou Project or Vocaloids which invite participation⁶⁷, but one of the most active fandoms in America, for George Lucas’s Star Wars (& MLP:FiM to some degree), is characterized by the copyright holders doing their best to limit fans to passive consumption⁸:

“We’ve been very clear all along on where we draw the line,” said Jim Ward, vice president of marketing for Lucasfilm. “We love our fans. We want them to have fun. But if in fact somebody is using our characters to create a story unto itself, that’s not in the spirit of what we think fandom is about. Fandom is about celebrating the story the way it is.”

American animation was ham-stringed to be both a single medium and a single genre (children’s). In comparison, Japanese animation was a single medium that covered every genre that TV covered⁹. One could grow up in Japanese animation, from Hamtaro to challenging films like Mind Game. One could not do this with American animation. (Director Hideaki Anno has wondered “if a person over the age of twenty who likes robot anime is really happy.” The jury is still out for Japanese robot anime, but American animation has already pled guilty & been sentenced.)

Further, anime excelled in genres that American TV confined to ghettos. There are many fine fantasy and SF anime from the 1990s, but I find it painful to try to watch live-action American products like Hercules or Babylon 5. The counter-examples like The Matrix almost prove the point—the Wachowski brothers having been quite explicit about their debt to anime, and sponsoring The Animatrix (in addition to even remaking an anime, Speed Racer).

What competition does anime have in America?

• Movies?

  Disney was a big player here, but as Anno says, their output is highly limited and they’ve been burned by big animation failures such as Treasure Planet or The Black Cauldron. Pixar comes to mind for repeated excellence, but that’s a Disney second-party and again just one studio with inherent limits. There’s Dreamworks, but you don’t need to be a film critic to see that they chase Pixar’s taillights, and like Disney & Pixar, they are focused on the occasional film release.

• TV?

  There’s a lot of TV kids animation, but they seem to be focused almost exclusively on either preteen stuff (Disney Channel and Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network), or on crappy low-budget adult comedy (Adult Swim—Comedy Central runs little animation nowadays). Further, they’re all pretty episodic—the sustained dramatic plot arcs and development that is an anime signature is usually non-existent. (And this despite technological advantages and larger budgets than anime.¹⁰) For many decades, American animation has been a disappointment outside of Disney.

  “The visual aspect of comics is what got me into the profession in the first place. It seems ridiculous to not take advantage of that to the fullest extent you can. Animation is, I think, the fulfillment of the cartoon. There is nothing you cannot do in animation. Unfortunately, animation has not taken advantage of that either, and usually ends up with stupid stories or crude art. The whole cartoon industry has degenerated over the years.” —Bill Watterson, 1989

  The interesting thing is that thinking back to my childhood, as painful as the live-action SF or fantasy were, there were actually a lot of good cartoons. I remember thinking to myself at some point while watching Nickelodeon in the early 2000s that there just didn’t seem to be any new cartoons there that were anywhere near as memorable as Ren & Stimpy, Rocko’s Modern Life, Doug, Aaahh!!! Real Monsters etc.—apparently the ’90s have been dubbed the Renaissance Age of Animation or the American animation renaissance and more specifically, the Disney Renaissance eg. Duck Tales (comments). Shows like Ren & Stimpy were ugly, yes, but in a fundamentally different way from most American animation, and that redeemed them artistically (even if I still struggled to watch much Ren & Stimpy).

  But as good as the ’90s were for American animation, the good times never last and Japanese animation stood in the wings waiting for its opportunity, which would come in the late ’90s and 2000s.

To get an example of what I mean, look at the 2 seasonal listings (eg. those charts posted for each season) for anime. There’s not always a lot of good stuff, but there are still usually 4 or 5 series a year worth watching. And that’s not counting any movies or OVAs that may be releasing. (Can you imagine the Garden of Sinners movie series being done in America? Impossible!) Heck, the Noitamina¹¹ block alone probably show more sophisticated, artistic, and adult-watchable anime every year than Disney or Pixar. Anime producer Hiroaki Inoue estimated in 2003 that, despite the small anime industry in Japan (most work is outsourced)¹², still “roughly 80 thirty-minute episodes of anime are produced for weekly viewing on Japanese TV, for a total of about 4000 episodes a year; on top of this, roughly 15 animated theater-bound movies are made per year, and about 100 thirty-minute OVAs”. Inoue suggests that the crucial ingredient is not so much that anime adopts plot-intensive arcs, but simply that they sometimes are produced by people with an idiosyncratic vision, and there are enough tries that the occasional diamond is created¹³. (As compared to live-action, the virtue of animation is that it makes the easy things hard, but the impossible harder.)

And this happens, year after year.

Critically-acclaimed series like Samurai Jack were a reaction to the demonstrated consumer demand for long-form series. Truly episodic TV fictional shows seem to be ever rarer, and survivors from earlier eras, like The Simpsons, have grown more plot-oriented—in an earlier Flintstones era, it would have been edgy to merely reference events from previous seasons and unthinkable to kill Maude Flanders. It’s interesting to speculate on why. I’ve heard many theories, from DVRs to premium cable channels like HBO to greater IQ¹⁴.

What’s interesting about anime is that if you look at American print SF & fantasy and whatnot, it’s wildly creative and fascinating, but anything in moving pictures is either a critically successful failure or dreck. In Japan, the literature isn’t so impressive (with honorable exceptions like Haruki Murakami), but the manga and anime are really good. They Were Eleven would be merely a mediocre short story if it were published in an American SF magazine, but instead, it’s one of the better SF movies around (because all the American SF movies are so bad). Or consider Star Trek; while Star Trek has been hugely popular in American SF circles almost to the point of synonymity, Star Trek was merely fairly popular in syndication in Japan¹⁵. American TV series offer another case in point: one of the best received SF series of the 2000s was Firefly, which was almost surely influenced by the popular 1998_28ya anime Cowboy Bebop.¹⁶ None of the SF stories in either Firefly or Cowboy Bebop break new ground in SF, instead trading in classic SF stories and tropes; but they do so in a polished, stylish fashion.

From that perspective, it’s not a surprise that if we look at the respective markets, we find that American print SF is very popular in Japan¹⁷, and Japanese anime/manga is very popular over here. You might call this comparative advantage at work.

But what do I know? Maybe anime is really about preparing Americans to be colonized by their Japanese masters¹⁸ or maybe the real reason is that anime is so stereotyped & repetitive & poorly animated & over the top that even mentally defective nerds can enjoy it, and so they do. Perhaps anime gained a toe-hold here and grew exponentially because it is bad:

“Raiders of the Lost Ark is a robust potboiler, tongue-in-cheek, very competently done. I think it’s enjoyable, but even among those who don’t, it’s hard to see the film attracting actual derision. Boredom or irritation, probably, but nothing more. Star Wars, on the other hand…. From one perspective, it’s an entertaining space opera, but from a slightly different perspective, an imperceptible twist of the glass, it’s laughably awful. Utterly ridiculously bad. And it’s this very badness that makes so many people take up arms in its defence… The quality of the work, in the face of such glaring shortcomings, becomes a matter of faith – and faith is a much stronger bond than mere appreciation. It drives fans together, gives them strength against those who sneer. The sneers make their faith even stronger; the awfulness of the work reassures them of their belief. And so the fan groups of Tolkien, Star Trek, Spider-man, Japanese kiddie-cartoons etc. develop an almost cult-like character. I need to stress that I’m just talking about aspects of badness; the above works all have their many admirable qualities which attract people in the first place (though in the case of Anime I’d be hard-pressed to tell you what they were).” –“objects of fandom”, Stephen Bond

I have no idea how to respond to such an argument (what could disprove claims like those he makes?), but will simply note that it seems like an awfully suspicious damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don’t line of thought.