The Old School Otaku Lounge

Note for any mods: I'm not sure if it exactly belongs here but since the video focuses on anime (there's some part that talks about Youtube but that's near the end and doesn't take up the majority of the video), I figured it was safe to place it here.

Note: This isn't about the creator of the video, Digibro. So I don't mind if there's some offhand comment or if you're questioning or criticizing him but discussion on any events or drama is unnecessary and not of the main topic of this discussion.

Context

(Most of what was written was describing Digi's points and I don't necessarily hold every single belief he has.)

So lemme put some context on what the video is about (since it's about 25 minutes long and I imagine some would appreciate this): Basically the overall video is about how the anime medium has accepted mediocrity. Digi (worth noting he's around his mid 20s), the person behind the video, states that more titles are being produced with smaller budgets as well as aiming for certain niche demographics while creativity is neglected. Essentially quality control seems to be absent for most titles while there's a lot of inbreeding going on creative-wise. (For those confused about the inbreeding comparison: At 19:35 in the video, he mentions a quote from Anno about looking outside of anime for influences. While Digi didn't say it himself, I thought how this kinda sounds like the process of a cell copying itself despite having damaged DNA. No I'm not saying "lol anime is cancer" but the process just reminded me of it)

Topic
So in the timestamp I both put in the URL code and specified, Digi talks about how he made a list featuring anime films and OVAs from the 80s. Basically he mentions how because of the economic boom Japan was having, films and OVAs were able to get away with quality animations and original and creative stories/designs. After the bubble popped in the late 80s, this changed. Eventually OVAs as was known in the 80s and 90s have disappeared and are for existing titles now. Anime films lowered the bar at the end of the '00s. Which leads us to now. While there's a few titles that defy the trends, most are just "endless torrent of new crap that's getting cheaper [...] each season [while new studios keep popping up]."

Focused section is from 11:41 to around 15:00.
https://youtu.be/GHGAgE19NFE?t=11m41s


I know this discussion has been talked about a lot of times in the past but I figured it would be interesting for those who haven't been able to properly formulate thoughts and feelings on the subject. I've wondered if this was just another example of someone complaining about how a certain era is better than [the current year]. Personally, I can see the points that are brought up. I know ultimately, it comes down to making cash but it's still a concern either way.


I'm sorry if there's any typos or grammar errors. I'm typing this at 4:30am so yeah. I've just wanted to share and see what others think about this. I've wanted to post this for a few days now.

there was plenty of mediocre animation being produced in Japan in the 1980s, but "Digibro" never saw it, because he lives in America, where if it wasn't at least visually interesting, nobody bothered to localize it. In short, Japanese animation fandom in the 80s and 90s was self-selecting for awesome.

Cherry pick some titles and then try to make the case that they're representative of the output of an entire nation's industry as a whole? Sure, why not. Just don't pretend that you're doing anything meaningful. The sad part is that these days, YouTube videos like this are taken as gospel, and the only way to counter them is for me to grow a neckbeard, get a camera, and start making my own YouTube videos, and that's not happening.

I was kinda done when this "bro" decided to plaster his videos with 90's Netscape gif all over the damn screen to make it edgy or some crap. That might have been the only thing i cared about in that snippet, and the fact on where he gathered those gifs in the first place.

Dave, keep being the clean cut "Anime Expert," your better off blowing up the bandwagon than trying to hop on it.

davemerrill wrote: ↑Tue Apr 24, 2018 4:29 am [...]

I know Digi has seen and enjoyed anime titles that have come out in the last 15 years or so. But I'm not sure if he has seen the less good titles from around that time. I know he watches a lot of titles for modern stuff since his situation allows him to (having a Patreon and all that).

Yeah, most are taken as gospel but from what I've heard from a friend and a few others, the anitube (anime youtube; basically content creators focused on making analysis or topics on stuff) tends to be stupidly hostile. That and most of the people making the videos may not have the necessary knowledge, experience, or info source for what they're covering.

DKop wrote: ↑Tue Apr 24, 2018 6:51 am I was kinda done when this "bro" decided to plaster his videos with 90's Netscape gif all over the damn screen to make it edgy or some crap. That might have been the only thing i cared about in that snippet, and the fact on where he gathered those gifs in the first place.

IDK if he did it or his editor but I imagine he'd likely would accept that. Digi is into vaporwave/future funk stuff (as I am) so the gifs/visuals might play a part in that. I don't know how it makes it "edgy" though. Maybe the part where he's explaining how everyone is streaming and we're just chowing down on visual junk food.

The CG would probably still suck even with a bigger budget, because there is a group of influential creators who are trying to find the "limited animation" of CG, but who haven't found it yet.

The reason there aren't more big-ticket anime even when there is plenty of money is largely political. A lot of that money is coming from overseas, especially China; however, the existing production committees don't want to give overseas companies a majority stake in their committees. So the compromise is to accept the money, and then spread it out over however many shows are necessary to keep them in a minority status. (Unfortunately, they underestimated quite how much money there was available to be thrown and the animation studios are running out of animators, leading to the crazy schedules we are seeing.)

Akira and Ghost in the Shell are great, sure, but I think it would be a little misleading to hold them up as examples of how the industry worked back then. There were forgettable anime as well that were, well, forgotten. (^_^;)

Oops, forgot a source for the production committee claims: https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/intere ... em/.110624 (^_^;)

I've toyed with the idea of posting the video up here but frankly, I'm kind of glad someone other than myself did.

I, frankly, disagree that there is just as much mediocrity today as there was in the past. I think the ratio of good to bad is very much the same as it has always been. It's the ratio of good-to-bad-to-mediocre that has changed. A glance at the number of anime produced each season should be stunning--more anime is produced per season than was produced per year in the 1990s. The numbers continue to grow and the mass of mediocrity is a natural result of the shotgun approach that the Japanese anime industry is taking. However, the problem isn't mediocrity but oversaturation, which is a point I think Digibro approaches but doesn't actually address. Everything else is a symptom and not the actual problem.

To be clear, I will reiterate--I believe the ratio between good and bad anime is still roughly the same. It's the amount of mediocrity that is produced each year that has exploded. This is a result of an oversaturated market.

This is a bad thing for a few reasons. First, oversaturation leads to audience fatigue and therefore a shift in audience perception. Second, it leads to a consumption-based model where anime is no longer rewatched or digested but rapidly consumed in massive quantities, leading, ultimately, to disposability. Thirdly, it makes finding the truly good or truly bad much more difficult than it was in the past. Fourth, due to fatigue, it can lead audiences to mistakenly consider mediocre anime to be "bad" when, in reality, they're really not. Fifth, oversaturation smacks of being an economic bubble, with all of its attendant consequences being possible in the future.

Digibro does make a number of points that I think are also correct. Anime has become thoroughly postmodern, self-referential, and exists in a very closed-loop continuum alongside manga, light novels, and visual novels. This stifles innovation and imagination. Miyazaki once opined that he hated how people didn't look outside of this bubble for inspiration. There have always been archetypes in anime but the tendency for cliched character templates has become more common than it was before (often simply because of the sheer volume of work being produced). While archetypes have always been a sort of literary shorthand, they've actually become a driving force based on fetishization (cf. Saito Tamaki's book Otaku: Japan's Database Animals where he discusses the database model of finding shows based on one's preferred "waifu" type). Again, however, I think this is a problem of oversaturation.

Another point which a different Youtuber made (building on Digibro's video) is about the lack of real auteur vision in much of the anime produced today. While there are a few genuine auteur directors out there, such as Yuasa, Shinkai, and Yamada Naoko, when you consider the massive amount of anime being produced today and compare the numbers of this generation's auteurs to how many auteurs emerged from the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, the immense dearth of creative vision being expressed is failing to really push the medium in ways that it once did. Anime by committee is often as safe and bland as Hollywood films by committee. Even then, I would only really characterize Yuasa's work as risk-taking, since Shinkai and Yamada are gorgeous yet their storytelling and visuals are often quite "safe."

Bad anime is just as important as good anime because bad anime isn't always bad because it is stupid or has crappy animation. Bad anime can be like bad films--occasionally you get bad ones that were bad because they took risks and failed. Nevertheless, those failures can be instructive and can help further the medium and push things in new directions. Risk-taking is important because failures can be learning experiences and help creators to refine their work and technique. The 1980s was one of those time-periods that produced a lot of real stinkers when it comes to OVAs and films, yet those stinkers were still important to the evolution of the medium and exploration of genre possibilities.

Anime has never been without its problems. Each generation has seen its own succession of issues and difficulties. For example, the problems described above have occurred before with the Real Robot genre in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The market became flooded with uninspired, bland pastiches and imitations of previous works and failed to refine or develop the genre in any meaningful way. This, ultimately, led to a brief crash of the genre sometime in the very early 1990s before it was revitalized (briefly) by Evangelion. However, the difference between the Real Robot decline of the late 1980s and today is that this is currently an industry-wide phenomenon that has effected a number of genres across the spectrum of anime content.

I think I've talked about this before. I feel the difference is, back in the day animation staff were all 'just making the donuts', you know? Devilman, Cutie Honey, Mazinger Z, all that mattered was sling some paint and shoot some cels.

Then comes the '80s and fanboys started entering the industry, because people WANTED to be part of the magic, and making something like the shows they enjoyed in their youth, only with more 'cool stuff'. 'Fan Service became not an Easter egg snuck into a shot for giggles, but the REASON for the scene in some cases. Panty shots. Itano Circus. Those insane flashy shots in the OP for Bryger (horribly off-model but so filled with energy it became a cliche by itself).

So the fanboys got to do stuff. Then the 3rd generation of staff came up, people who loved what the fanboys were doing, wanted to be JUST LIKE THEM only taking it to 11.

Harem comedy? Let's make one with 15 girls in it! MOE? How fetish-tastic can we make the outfits on this show? Even the few mecha based shows tended to overdo the fan service (and by fan service I don't just mean boobs and panties, but mecha action as well -flashy transformations, that entire OP to Dragonar, so on and so on).

But the problem seems to be, a lot of the craftmanship has fallen by the wayside. Those early Toei shows may have indeed been 'donuts' and cranked out so quickly that sometimes, well, the yummy cake was a bit oddly shaped. Today the 'donuts' are perfect, but all the same, and somewhat bland.

There was no excuse for the horror of Fist of the Blue Sky, and even LESS excuse for the current season. Meanwhile the staff of Lupin III pt. V is really hitting it out of the ballpark.

So it seems to me.

Fvlminatvs wrote: ↑Wed Apr 25, 2018 12:55 pm

Bad anime is just as important as good anime because bad anime isn't always bad because it is stupid or has crappy animation. Bad anime can be like bad films--occasionally you get bad ones that were bad because they took risks and failed. Nevertheless, those failures can be instructive and can help further the medium and push things in new directions. Risk-taking is important because failures can be learning experiences and help creators to refine their work and technique. The 1980s was one of those time-periods that produced a lot of real stinkers when it comes to OVAs and films, yet those stinkers were still important to the evolution of the medium and exploration of genre possibilities.

I would rather watching something try and fail than something to be bland and safe. At least with seeing something fail, you get an idea or want to get an idea on what the director was trying to do, and at least lets other people take what something was trying to establish and build on to be more successful. If something failed, you can see in the cracks what the directer wanted to do or what the technology was trying to do.

The perfect example of this is CGI. 90's anime like Initial D (which people can take it or leave it on how it looks) was doing something interesting in making a car racing anime. Even though looking back the tech was low grade, it eventually got better looking and the cinematography of the races improved. When I first saw Initial D, I had no issues on how dated the CGI looked, I just thought that how the races were framed and shot were done in ways that wasn't done on cinema beforehand, or took different visual perspectives than what was in cinema before the series was released. That's what made Initial D have a huge impact on me as an anime fan, and made me an automotive fan that I am today because of just how cool I thought the show looked. If it was done in hand drawn animation, it would've taken way to long to do those races to meet the deadline for the show production and probably would have looked worse than using CGI. For those who say that show is a failure just based on how it looks, I see it as early building blocks in progress for CGI to come in animation.

Granted, good and bad came out of that from shows that have done CGI later. Aramaki films that use CGI seem to be the better looking films in terms of CGI animation, and the worst ones come from television series. The thing with television is that most of that stuff if not all gets cleaned up for release on the home market, where as for the film its the final product in the end, it has to look good going out the door.

80's anime had its fair share of OVA stinkers, but its interesting to try and understand what the directors were trying to do with their works (MD Geist is one that i'll defend in not being "all that terrible"). I think there were some stinkers that didn't sell well financially that to me there was nothing wrong in its art style or story (California Crisis and Angels Egg come to mind with really interesting art). So even despite the stinkers of the 80's, they're still really important in the end to anime fans who are interested in that decade.

SteveH wrote: ↑Wed Apr 25, 2018 6:56 pm I think I've talked about this before. I feel the difference is, back in the day animation staff were all 'just making the donuts', you know? Devilman, Cutie Honey, Mazinger Z, all that mattered was sling some paint and shoot some cels.

The 1960s and 1970s are the era where, in both the West and Japan, quality in animation took a nosedive. I remember reading somewhere that Friz Freleng, one of the Big Names that worked on Looney Tunes during his youth in the early 20th century, remarked during the late 20th century before he died that animation during those times was utter garbage. In the West you have the Hanna-Barbara cost-cutting and time-cutting techniques. In the East, a whole host of other techniques were also designed to cut costs, save time, and take shortcuts.

Then comes the '80s and fanboys started entering the industry, because people WANTED to be part of the magic, and making something like the shows they enjoyed in their youth, only with more 'cool stuff'. 'Fan Service became not an Easter egg snuck into a shot for giggles, but the REASON for the scene in some cases. Panty shots. Itano Circus. Those insane flashy shots in the OP for Bryger (horribly off-model but so filled with energy it became a cliche by itself).

If you ever get the chance, you really must watch the J-drama Aoi Honoo (aka "Blue Blazes") which takes place during this time period. The characters are actually historical manga and animation greats from the late 80s and early 90s when they were in college. It is interesting to see these guys geek out exactly in the manner you are describing and wanting to be a part of the magic.

The 1980s was also the time when the Real Robot craze took off and started to churn out loads of uninspired Gundam and Macross pastiche in order to sell toys. The average lifespan of a show was 18-months to 2 years because by that point the toys would have reached peak sales.

That, however, was only one genre.

So the fanboys got to do stuff. Then the 3rd generation of staff came up, people who loved what the fanboys were doing, wanted to be JUST LIKE THEM only taking it to 11.

The Moe boom was definitely part of it but the massive shift in anime disposability was a bit more gradual and brought about by a sort of coming-of-age of a new generation in Japan. Evangelion helped create the sekai-kei boom, of which there were many uninspired imitators (and a few excellent forays into the genre) but then Haruhi, Clannad, and K-On! dropped like a bomb on the anime industry and we saw a complete and total paradigm shift. While light novel and visual novel adaptations had been around for a while already, suddenly the entire continuum saw a massive amount of sales and subsequent investment, as well as a boom in webmanga and web-based visual novels (many of which would get bought out and printed traditionally) in order to cash in on the latest trends. Much of this was made possible by the Internet--it was easier for an individual to keep their finger on the pulse of what was trendy without having to spend millions of dollars on research like firms had once done.

Meanwhile, both in the West and in the East, the Internet became the driving force behind consumer-demands research. This meant that the technology itself became a gate-keeper as those born in the Showa era started falling further and further behind those born in the Heisei era. In addition, the kids born during the Heisei period were much more open about liking a lot of anime--I have personally met many Japanese college students and young professionals that all are very open about liking anime to foreigners and to other Japanese, indicating that at least some genres now have mainstream appeal and aren't "just for kids and loser otaku" anymore. Although I'm just speculating here, I think this swelling of mainstream interest in Japan has also caused the old school Japanese otaku to become utterly outnumbered, both in real life and online and thus their interests are commercially irrelevant.

DKop wrote: ↑Wed Apr 25, 2018 7:10 pm80's anime had its fair share of OVA stinkers, but its interesting to try and understand what the directors were trying to do with their works (MD Geist is one that i'll defend in not being "all that terrible"). I think there were some stinkers that didn't sell well financially that to me there was nothing wrong in its art style or story (California Crisis and Angels Egg come to mind with really interesting art). So even despite the stinkers of the 80's, they're still really important in the end to anime fans who are interested in that decade.

Your point about Initial D is right on. You can actually see, season-to-season, how well the animation and CG evolve.

Some of the films that didn't "do well," like Wings of Honneamise, were actually quite excellent but they were never going to be able to break even because they were so expensive. Either way, Wings is a great example of a film that didn't actually bomb--it wasn't taken out of theaters early for poor ticket sales and in fact, some theaters kept the film running for a few weeks longer than they regularly would have. It's problem was that it cost more than it's budget allowed and the only reason that it didn't shutter Gainax at the time was the fact that their leadership didn't have the business acumen to call it quits (thank God).

Films and OVAs that don't perform well initially would often find gradual acceptance and increased sales over time. This sort of thing happens in the West, too. If I recall, for example, one of the best horror films ever made, John Carpenter's The Thing, didn't do well domestically in the United States but is remembered as, again, one of the best horror films ever made. Hindsight is 20x20.