Why is Anime so popular in the West?

Cafe Society
1

… At least among a fairly sizeable subset of people?

Obviously, like any genre of work there’s going to be outstanding stuff, good stuff, most stuff, and crap stuff. But it seems that, especially amongst computer people and a lot of “alternative” types, Manga and Anime are really popular.

I’d appreciate it if we could avoid turning this into a “List/Discuss your favourite Anime/Manga” thread, and with that out of the way… I’ve never really gotten into Anime myself (and I’m not deriding it), but I’ve often wondered what the attraction is for people from such a different culture to the one that created it.

Anyone got any insights to offer?

2

I’d say the big one is this; it’s cartoons, but for adults.

Obviously there’s anime aimed at kids, and by “for adults” I don’t mean the old popular conception of anime. But it fills a niche that’s extremely useful. There’s the good points all cartoons have; they cost to animate, sure, but you can do things with animation in terms of “effects” you could never do with live action, or couldn’t do without costing the Earth; they have a lower believeabilty threshold, so poor CGI in live action making the whole thing look bad transfers to effects being exactly the same as the rest of the show. And of course there’s the general styles of animation that you can’t do in live action. And, really, we don’t really have long-running cartoons that aren’t for kids (or, at least, aren’t comedy), full stop. It’s an entire field of potential interest that’s almost entirely overlooked.

Too, we get the good stuff, or at least, the stuff that it is believed can be marketed well to us. We don’t get to see the dross (well, much) so already the bar is raised a bit; there’s certainly crap stuff, we just don’t see it as much.

3

Say, you’re into something. Be it cars, mugs, cats, whateverthehell. You’ve admired / collected / studied them for years. Then, you find out there’s a whole new continent you never heard about, and they have other cars/mugs/cats! Sure, they’re a bit different then what you know and Sturgeon’s law applies, but there’s some good stuff there.

Applied to the anime thing; if you’re into shows/movies, and suddenly you find a new source for shows/movies, why not?

4

Is it though?

For all its popularity, publishers have been pushing manga on libraries as the next big thing for about five years now, aren’t only a few series’ known by more than a few people in the West?

I know you don’t want a list of animes, but after the top five or ten franchises, isn’t everything else pretty niche?

And beyond a kids show like Pokemon, I don’t think any anime has broken out into any kind of mainstream appeal. Contrast that with smaller hit TV shows like Glee or something, which hit a lot more people.

5

I think the cultural stuff is actually part of it, rather than a hindrance. I’m not quite as keen on anime and manga now as I was in high school, but when I was really into it, part of the interest definitely came from the cultural differences going on with the material. For example, I was especially fond of supernatural stories and the ghosts/spirits/etc in the stuff I was reading and watching were radically different from the traditions I was accustomed to…and I really came to prefer the Japanese stuff.

I don’t think that really explains everything, but I do think that it’s a big part of the attraction for many people – a whole stash of shows and comics that are fascinatingly alien.

6

Japan imports their culture pretty strongly. Someone in the US picks it up and likes it and their friends st art hearing about it. One or two friends pick up on it and the virus spreads.

7

It’s not just cartoons for adults. We have those over here, too. But anime seems to keep the fantastic elements in American adult cartoons. They have all the appeal of kids’ cartoons, but they make them more complicated.

There’s a lot of other stuff, too, but that’s a lot of it. The only other thing I’ll point out is that most anime seems to be more complicated than most American TV shows. There’s an appeal of not being treated as if ViewersAreMorons.

8

Anime gets around a lot of the problems that regular television of movies have in the us. For example, because of the fact that it is an animation, special effects etc… are cheap and available to be shown exactly the way the direct wants them. Fight scenes can be violent, showing all sorts of terrible injuries and wounds without needing the self censoring that goes on here for greater consumer pallatability. Same rule applies for sexual scenes, or nudity in general. Basically, the product that you get is often a truer vision of the director’s and writer’s vision. It allows a huge amount of freedom in terms of genre, as well as visual style.

9

You can’t underestimate the fact that anime is Japanese, and that a much larger subset of “computer people” and “alternative types” are hardcore Japanophiles compared to the general public. For Japanophiles, their interest in Japan is not limited to cartoons alone; it’s everything in “Glorious Nippon”. Pocky, J-Pop, and bento boxes, anyone?

10

Anime, even in Japan, are largely targeted towards nerd audiences. Hence, it’s more likely for Western nerds to like them as well. Manga, on the other hand, have a wider audience because there’s lots of reading time in Japan (train rides). But, since the US is more TV/movie oriented, people are more likely to get into Japanese stuff via anime. And of course since that’s where the audience is, nerd-centric manga tend to be more likely to be translated.

11

I’m pretty nerdy and I dislike anime, even to the point where calling it anime sounds pretentious to me and I prefer Japanimation.

12

FWIW it’s not just the west; friends tell me that it’s crazy-popular in the middle/near east too.

13

I don’t think its fanbase is sizable. Anime is aproximately as popular in the US as soccer is. Some people really like them, but most people never watch either. The small number of fans tend to be very enthusiastic, though.

14

Originally I got into anime because the art was so much better than anything else. I liked and appreciated the care and artistry in the detailed animations. Then after watching a few I found I liked it even more because of the unusual(for the West) subject matter. The stories are so wild and unhinged sometimes which makes it so much more compelling than Western animation, or Western entertainment in general.

15

Japanese cartoons have been popular in the West since 1963 - Astro Boy beat Superman in the ratings. Since then, various anime series have gone on to become cultural touchstones in America - nobody saw the Hollywood movie, but everybody knows who Speed Racer is.

The variety of UHF stations in the 70s and 80s filled their morning/afternoon programming with syndicated Japanese cartoons like Eighth Man, Amazing Three, Prince Planet, Gigantor, Marine Boy, Kimba The White Lion, and later Battle Of The Planets, Star Blazers, the five series that made up Force Five, and a host of other shows.

Rap artists name-drop Voltron, there’s a Robotech feature film in the works, and Sailor Moon not only got a generation of girls to watch cartoons, but back to buying comic books as well.

For kids watching cartoons at the time, the stark contrast between, say, Rubik The Amazing Cube or Turbo Teen and something like Robotech is startling. Many of these kids grew up wanting to find out more about Japanese animation, and discovered Japan has been cranking out cartoons for fifty years. A lot of them are junk, but the ways they fail are at least different from the ways American cartoons fail. And after the hundred and fifteenth iteration of “kids and dog solve mysteries” the cliche of the five-member-team-super-robot series is a refreshing change.

It’s worthwhile at this point to mention that America is actually behind the curve when it comes to the appreciation of Japanese animation. Europe went absolutely crazy for super-robot cartoons in the 70s - Ufo Robo Grandizer, a show about a badass from outer space who has his own flying saucer which contains an ultrapowerful superdestructive fighting robot and who battles space aliens, one of whom occasionally splits open his face, longways, to reveal his tiny, hectoring wife who lives inside his skull - was the number-one rated television series in Italy. Asia, South America, even the Middle East has a long history of lovin’ the anime.

Bottom line: the Japanese know how to make exciting, colorful, entertaining animation for children and adults. It’s no surprise people everywhere like it.

16

This is the link that BigT was trying to post:

17

It’s no more surprising that anime and manga became popular around the world than that sushi and karaoke became popular.

18

Good film is good film, no matter where it’s from. The fact that I’ve seen and enjoyed good Japanese movies is no more remarkable than the fact that I’ve seen and enjoyed good French movies, or good Russian movies, or good Italian movies. Of course, foreign films of any sort are somewhat niche, but then, so is anime.

19

Yea, if someone asked me if I liked anime, I’d probably say yes. But I’ve pretty much only watched the nine or ten anime movies that get recommended a lot, plus five or six series that are similarly considered by most Dopers anyways to be really great. I’m sure if I did the same for American cartoons, or really any media from any country, I’d think that genre was pretty awesome too.

Sort of an application of Sturgeons law, if 99% of anything is crap, that means there’s 1% thats decent.

20

The question the OP poses is one of the great, inexplicable mysteries of life, so far as I’m concerned.