Quote:
Originally Posted by Mushi
Well, Theowne, noticing your avatar/sig, I see you're a Miyazaki fan. So, I would assume that you have tastes more refined along the works of that great master. And there's certainly nothing wrong with that. I consider just about everything Miyazaki makes to be masterpieces.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Theowne
I don't think it's merely a matter of having a refined taste or not..... I know you didn't mean this in your post, but it reminded me of an earlier discussion where people threw around the term "elitist" towards people who don't like fanservice shows...I just don't think it's that simple.
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Interesting that "elitist" and Miyazaki get mentioned in two consecutive posts. It's notable, to me, that Miyazaki had once firmly insisted that Studio Ghibli produces
animation not anime.
Such is the level of esteem that most people have of the man that few believe that he was being aloof or arrogant. It's worth wondering, though, why he would make such a distinction. And, as
Theowne suggests, I doubt the reasons are as simple as Ghibli movies being more "refined" than pop-culture entertainment anime. If that
were the case, my opinion of Miyazaki would be knocked down a peg or two.
As this thread stands, we're not getting very much in the way of fruitful discussion. Most of the complaints voiced against anime here are so general that they can be applied to virtually any form of popular entertainment, from pulp-fiction novels to TV soap operas and Hollywood blockbusters.
So, if anything, the complaints are more about "popular entertainment" in general than about anime specifically. And the cognitive dissonance stems probably from the mistaken notion that anime is somehow more "elite" than Western entertainment — it
never was. It was simply a novelty to those who had first discovered it, relishing in the different approaches to storytelling not usually taken by Western producers.
And now that the novelty has worn out, jaded fans start longing for a Golden Age that never was. Heck, if
Slice of Life were around, he'd have a thing or two to say about this subject.
Personally? I don't really have any "hatred" for the medium or the fans in particular (I was just playing along with
james' quip). But I
do have plenty of disappointments about the
anime industry, from the creators to the production committees and the merchandisers. In general, that has been a bit too much parochialism, and not enough attempts to reach out to a wider global audience, let alone to more mature viewers.
Japanese video-game developers have long realised it, so why haven't anime producers? Your young, childish fans do eventually grow up into responsible, working adults. They don't all become otaku. Why isn't more being done to cash in on that wellspring of nostalgia?
Let's not forget that the anime that marked a high point in the medium back in the 1990s —
Akira,
Ghost in the Shell,
Cowboy Bepop and so on — had a particular appeal to audiences beyond Japan, precisely because they were very much made with a broader demography in mind. When people like Oshii and Anno moan about a creative dearth in anime, they are referring to that time of creative ferment now apparently "missing" in Japan.
To be sure, I don't really think any more that it had gone missing. But it certainly does seem harder to find today. Economic reasons have been cited time and again. I wonder. Perhaps it's more fundamental than that. But such insight is hard to glean from armchair critics. Only the people who work in the industry can really say what's going wrong.