Boom and Bust: The clamorous rise and inexorable fall of mainstream anime
Ryan Matheuszik runs the
V-SWAT anime club in Vancouver,
British Columbia and is occasionally a guest columnist on Ryan Mathews'
Last Exit Before Toll on The
Anime Web Turnpike. Akadot recently asked
Ryan to weigh in on the state of anime in the western hemisphere.
- Luis Reyes
As guest columnist for this month, I suppose I should live up to my reputation and pick something extremely controversial to
rant about. However, since Akadot has impressed me with its high standards of reporting as of late, I'll try to keep it civil. - Ryan Matheuszik
Near the end of the 1990s, I made a dire prediction about the fate of anime in North America. Taking a hard look at the state
of the industry - as well as anime fandom - I suggested the disturbing possibility of a crash in the anime industry. And now, some
years later, I find myself asked to revisit this topic in a climate that may remind some of my original discourse all those years
ago.
|
|
In the beginning there was no Anime. Japanimation was an art form primarily confined to Japanese soil, and what few titles
did make it to North American were badly edited and horribly dubbed. In the mid 80s, fans of this novel form of animation began
to import copies of Japanese animation and spent considerable time and effort reworking it into a form easily accessible to all -
even those that did not understand Japanese. These early fans were dedicated and extremely loyal to the art form. They were so
passionate about Japanimation that their efforts spawned a niche industry of studios, such as US Renditions and US Manga Corps,
who would license and redistribute Japanese animation. Anime as we now know it in North America was born.
Through the years, in an effort to increase market share and expand the industry, anime has inevitably become a lot more
mainstream. Ravers, clubbers, and a number of "alternative media" fans have been introduced to the anime scene through aggressive
marketing tactics undertaken by American distributors. But how dedicated are these fans? To them, anime may just be the next
trend, the next hot topic of the month. What happens when these "fans" get tired of anime and move on?
In the early 90s a similar situation happened in the comic book industry. Superman was killed off, foil covers hit the scene,
and soon a lot of people were buying comic books - not to read them, but for the "collectable" value. More and more people began
buying comics, some for collections, others merely because the comic scene had become the next "in" thing. This created a kind of
miniature bubble economy (just like the tech stock sector, but that's another analogy …), with issues becoming highly overvalued,
and a flood of quickly produced and overabundant series beginning to overwhelm the market. A few years later when these "false
fans" of the comic book scene moved on to the next big thing, the industry all but collapsed. The glut of titles meant that the
surviving base of comic fans could not hope to support the industry. The comic industry is only now climbing back to the levels
it enjoyed before the boom.
Currently a lot of the anime fan community is comprised of bandwagon jumpers who, when they tire of the "flavor of the month"
status anime is currently enjoying, will move on to the next trendy thing. Meanwhile the anime companies are releasing huge
quantities of product into this expanded market. When these "false fans" get tired of anime, the resulting collapse of the target
market will kill off a lot of the anime industry.