Eras of Anime

[runesaint]

I remember our discussion here on old school, new school, middle school...but while I was out for a walk, I stumbled across an article today that mentioned 'classic' and 'modern' titles.... and found it amusing that the 'classic' is from 1995, and the 'modern' is from 2006. So, clearly, something about 28 years old is classic (I wonder what they might think of Space Battleship Yamato, 49 years old this year), while something 15 years old is 'Modern' (I wonder then where they would put Spy Family, just one year old now).

Out of curiosity, then, are there any particular 'eras' or times or decades that any of you put together? The bulk of the things I am familiar with are roughly from 74-84, then 84-94, then 94-2004. Most things that I am aware of that are more recent than that are remakes or continuations of the same (Gundam Origin, JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, Legend of the Galactic Heroes Die Neue These - none of which I have gotten around to watching yet) with, I admit, the single exception of Spy x Family.

[Drew_Sutton]

I think with regards to anime, terms like "classic" and "modern" are essentially moving goal posts as classic always seems to be fixed somewhere between 20 and 30 years before and modern is usually the last 3 - 5 years to current. And I think it's been that way a long time. In the mid to late 2000s is sort of when a general trend of "classic" anime discourse started (mostly around how awful a lot of contemporary anime of the time were or were perceived), the majority of that was from two and a half decades prior, with some splattering from the 1970s and 1990s. As a lot of that discourse itself is closer to the twenty-year mark, that post has shifted. I think a lot of the fans setting the dividing line of classic as being something like 1995 are probably themselves in their mid-20s to early-30s, as those drew the 20 years old line in the 2000s were.

Anyway, I mostly measure anime in decades, even though I recognize that 10-year-increments are only mathematically even and history and culture rarely follow that trend. In lieu of that, I also will look at an overall theme or trend of a given time: super robot shows really hit a stride in the 1970s, real robot shows in the 80s, harem/love dodecahedron of the 2000s, isekai types now. It works in broad generalizations but also does a poor job of highlighting anime that are also popular but do not fit that dominate genre trope. You could try to segment anime by its imperial era (Showa, Heisei or Reiwa, mostly) but on the edges of those eras, things will naturally blur together as they do trying to measure mathematical decades. I've done a panel before focusing on a particular imperial era and even though it was a shorter era (especially compared to Showa and Heisei), it really was not quite as thematically or stylistically complete as one would hope.

The only 'era' I consistently put together is the Bubble Era, mostly for when I was doing Akihabara Renditions, and that was arbitrarily set from the late 1970s to the mid 1990s. And it's only because those are the anime that I care about the most for better or worse. As the Bubble Era loosely follows a corresponding historical period, you could try to segment other periods around it - post war, rebuilding, the lost decade, etc.

[davemerrill]

My definition of "classic" has moved from 1990 until about 1995. I guess at some point the cutoff will be around the year 2000?

In terms of "eras" Japanese animation can be cut any way you care to slice it. I tend to lump things together in a matrix that combines both a historical timeline and a pop cultural context.

-1955-1965 could be seen as the era of Toei theatrical films trying to compete with Disney with varying degrees of success; past 1965/66 their films failed to get much traction outside Japan.
-1963-1973 could be the "Terebi Manga" era, driven by TV shows based on popular properties (Atom, Tetsujin-28, Sazae-san, Kamui, Babel 2) and driven by merchandise, advertising, and foreign sales for shows like Astro Boy, Marine Boy, Speed Racer.
-1974-1984 is the collision of the super robot boom, the Leiji Matsumoto boom, the Yamato boom, the Gundam boom, anime being seen as not just moving manga but as its own art form, birthing fandom not just in Japan but worldwide.
-1985-1990 is the OVA era where Japan's animation studios took the profits from their outsourcing gigs and just went wild.

Past 1990 you can pretty much say everything is either a sequel, a remake, or a video game, and you wouldn't be TOO far wrong.

[mbanu]

I think for the schools used here, the cut-off is "How likely is it that otaku will participate?" There are fans that are older than old-school, but other than a few outliers, it seems like they don't spend much time on message boards, maybe because their bread-and-butter was APAs and con room-parties. On the other hand, a new-school fan might find a message board different than what they were used to, as it has no upvote/downvote system and is text-first rather than images-and-video-first. So it selects for new-school fans who are willing to try something different to learn about the past.

As a middle-schooler myself, I probably lack the awareness to categorize other middle-schoolers.

[mbanu]

For the anime itself, I think the big cultural split is availability -- I noticed this listening to a recent review of Blade Runner that mentioned that it was derivative of Film Noir, without really seeming to realize that in 1982 VHS was still in its infancy and there was no internet, so unless they had a local TV station that played noir films there would have been no frame of reference.

I think that each anime-fan generation had its own blind-spots. For the anime middle-schoolers, I think it was, "If it's not online, it doesn't exist", because we became fans during the Great Pirate Wave where torrents upon torrents of anime were available, and the first semi-comprehensive anime databases like the Anime News Network Encyclopedia were developing.

[davemerrill]

For the anime itself, I think the big cultural split is availability -- I noticed this listening to a recent review of Blade Runner that mentioned that it was derivative of Film Noir, without really seeming to realize that in 1982 VHS was still in its infancy and there was no internet, so unless they had a local TV station that played noir films there would have been no frame of reference.

Not to sidetrack, but Film Noir was definitely part of film culture in the 1980s - every large American city had a rep cinema regularly programming noir films, local TV stations big and small would screen noir movies, and 70s and 80s film was filled with remakes, reinterpretations, and re-imaginations of classic noir films, from Polanski's "Chinatown", Rafelson's remake of "The Postman Always Rings Twice," right on through DePalma's "Body Heat." "Blade Runner" was part and parcel of this "neo noir" trend. Newer generations might see "Blade Runner" as some sort of innovative original vision, but at the time it was seen as a SF update of a Raymond Chandler novel, in much the same way "Outland" was a science-fiction version of "High Noon."

[mbanu]

Maybe also off-topic, but thank you for the info! I had never heard of the term rep cinema before; that helps fill in a gap in my understanding of how people related to these things.

It also helps confirm the opinion of the reviewer, that Blade Runner did not deserve the praise it received. Maybe this is a case of lost-in-translation, as a lot of old-school Japanese animators seem really smitten with Blade Runner...

I guess to bring it back to Eras of Anime, another thing to look at is what they did with the noses, as it seems like it waffled back and forth between "noses are great, and should be drawn in great detail!" and "no True Anime Character has a nose!"

[davemerrill]

Glad to fill a knowledge gap. I have to correct myself - Brian DePalma directed "Body DOUBLE" while Lawrence Kasdan directed "Body Heat". Come on guys, get some new titles.

I was a teen in the 1980s and as someone who watched a lot of movies on TV and spent a lot of time in the bookstores, it seemed like half the books on the "movie/entertainment" section of the bookstore were about Film Noir. If you felt like catching a tense 1940s or 1950s thriller and you lived near a big city or a university town, chances were pretty good a repertory theater or a college cinema group would be screening something.

The first place I ever saw Kurosawa films, 2001, and Citizen Kane were rep cinemas. Atlanta had three or four different rep theaters, all screening something different every week. The Georgia State theater varied between second-run new films, cult movies, and classics - I caught "Little Prince And The 8-Headed Dragon" there on a Saturday morning. And the local midnight movie programs at various theater chains would screen everything from rock concert films to Monty Python movies, and always the Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Personally I think "Blade Runner" probably gets some undeserved praise. It's a great LOOKING film, but if I have to watch a Ridley Scott film from that period I'm gonna go with "The Duellists."