Has Anime Changed Over the Years? (In a Word, Yes.)

Not long ago I had something to say about the comparative poverty of fan discourse in North America regarding anime compared to other subjects, and especially homegrown science fiction, in spite of anime's long having had a very wide viewership. This seemed to me a matter of North American audiences (and I would imagine pretty much any non-Japanese audience), having little access to the tradition as a whole, and the cultural background producing it, imposing all sorts of limitations to their understanding of which the more astute cannot but be aware. Still, it does seem that there is something to be said about how anime has evolved over these last few decades which should be evident and meaningful even to those far removed from Japan. Simply sticking with the easiest, most clearly quantifiable and checkable, aspects of that change, let us start with a single genre, action-adventure. Looking at it you can see the way in which long series' have become much less common; how with even hit shows we are apt to get a single cour at a time, separated by gaps of years; and how episodic series' have become rarer, with more emphasis on long story arcs in series' of any length. It seems safe to say, too, that there has been a greater tendency to young adult protagonists "getting their start" rather than seasoned grown-ups; that even in this genre where action has always been prominent there is more emphasis on the action as such, and especially very long action sequences, relative to storytelling; and that where action-adventure is concerned we have fewer stories set in the contemporary "real" world, and less science fiction, and more fantasy; as should be clear from remembering how in the '70s and even the '80s figures like Lupin the Third, Fist of the North Star's Kenshiro and City Hunter's Ryo Saeba, and their very long-running adventures, loomed very, very large in anime's action-adventure landscape. You won't find anything like those series' (the protagonists and their themes, the tenor and rhythm and tone of their adventures) anywhere near the top of the field today the way they were in their heyday, if you can find really comparable work among the new stuff at all.

Moving away from the safest, most indisputable aspects of the matter--and from just this one part of the field to take in the broader view of the anime we have been getting (it's not all action-adventure, even if action-adventure likely accounts for more of it)--I can also point to the way in which the young adult-oriented fare has so often come from light novels relative to the manga with which the genre has historically been connected, and imported a certain sensibility along with them (aloof, cynical, with more than a little pseudo-maturity about it, the attitude of Haruhi Suzumiya's Kyon now commonplace). I can point, too, to the way more of the content seems to be aimed at the "hardcore" anime audience rather than a more general one, as seen not just in an increasingly frequent mining of the brand name and nostalgia value of old hits (like the belated "Parts" 4, 5 and 6 of Lupin III), but the propensity for material centered on "fan" characters and dense with allusion to their culture, epitomized by how much of the fantasy is of the "isekai" type, and this so frequently following a particular metafiction- and wish fulfillment-heavy pattern. (Specifically some "loser" suffers an accident and finds himself in a fantasy milieu where he can become a powerful hero, with said milieu likely to feel like a role-playing video game--e.g. they get hit by a garbage truck and wake up in the World of Warcraft, like in Jobless Reincarnation.) And I can point to how it seems that "shonen" material has come to dominate the market much more than was the case before, with fewer "seinen," "shojo" and "josei" hits (in particular shojo or josei score a hit on the scale of Fruits Basket or Nodame Cantabile now seem very rare), all as the "shonen" category would seem to have become more "female-friendly" in at least some respects (the "skirt-chasing" hero a lot rarer than in the day of Ryo Saeba). I think it also safe to say that the makers of anime seem to have played it "safe" more than before in ways extending beyond that reliance on old "brand names," both artistically (you probably won't see anything so experimental as Neon Genesis Evangelion today) and politically. (The way that a Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex or Blood+ took up themes like war, imperialism, capitalism, is something you probably won't find in a major new series, while the change is evident even at the level of "school life" stuff. A series like Great Teacher Onizuka took a critical view of bourgeois success-striving as hollow and frequently life-destroying, but for all its apparent edginess Assassination Classroom was at the level of Message thoroughly, indeed heavy-handedly, conformist all the way through.)

Even a few of these changes would be transformative for a medium. Taken together the lot of them are that much more clearly so--all as I can't help but notice the parallels between the developments I have described here, and contemporaneous developments in American popular culture. After all, here, too, we have seen a shift to shorter production commitments, with even network TV producing shorter seasons and fewer of them; and for a long time a stress on young adult fare, action, and fantasy over science fiction (all three indeed, since Harry Potter exploded); as looking at Fist of the North Star and City Hunter we are likely to be reminded of the contemporaneous American action-adventure of the '80s that now looks rather retro. Thus does it also go with the exploitation of old franchises seemingly put to rest long ago, and the politics, cultural and otherwise, of such fare--this no great age for either original content or politically challenging material in North America either. It is a reminder that if anime is a Japanese product, in the main made for Japanese audiences, such that attempting to write deeply about the form from outside that milieu has not been easy, the world of Japanese pop culture is not hermetically sealed off from that of the rest of the world, and in fact long in dialogue with it, that of North America most certainly included, as people everywhere are touched by the same social and cultural forces.