I'm away from my editing rig so let me see if I can name all of the (unnamed) anime in this video from memory and inference, by order of appearance we should have: Pop Team Epic Me!Me!Me! City Hunter '87 Berserk '97 Gurren Lagann Made in Abyss Akhashic Records Lucky Star Claymore Kindaichi Shounen no Jikenbo Royal Space Force Black Magic M66 (Akira) Urusei Yatsura (0079) (Macross) Gunbuster (Lupin III) (Ashita No Joe) (Ace Wo Nerae) Hakujaden The Wind Rises Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken Project A-Ko Cowboy Bebop Yu Yu Hakusho Ghost in the Shell '95 Lodoss War Patlabor TV (Bebop) (Evangelion) (Sailor Moon) Evangelion Bebop Lain You're Under Arrest Remy Iketeru Futari (I think?) Spirited Away [Walt Disney on the Multilevel Camera] You're Under Arrest Evangelion Berserk '97 Bebop Utena Bebop (Sailor Moon) (Cowboy Bebop) Stand Alone Complex Tenchi Muyo Yu Yu Hakusho (Sailor Moon) Huggto Precure Jigokuraku Jujutsu Kaisen 08th MS Team I forgor, wasn't this G-Reco? Outlaw Star (Initial D) Lain Kinos Journey FLCL Mushishi Texhnolyze Highschool of the Dead (Evangelion) Candidate for Goddess Highschool DXD Welcome to the NHK Space Dandy Cyberpunk Edgerunners Animementary: Ketsudan Mnemnosyne Ben-To Bastard (Nausicaa) Ninja Scroll Photon (Urotsukidoji) Chained Soldier Something about instant death powers? Idk and idgaf Magical Shopping Arcade Abenobashi (everything in the isekai section is labeled and I don't remember the ones that aren't right now), The mystery clips are cuts by Shingo Fujii and Yutaka "GOAT" Nakamura in the promo for "Line Novel", some LN site starting again at 14:49 Oreimo Highschool DxD i forgor Guilty Crown Ground Control to Psychoelectric Girl (in background) Seitokai Yakuindomo Ano Natsu De Matteru Seitokai Yakuindomo Vending Machine Isekai Space Dandy Casshern Sins K-On The Tatami Galaxy Nichijou Psycho Pass Vivy Vampire Hunter D Bloodlust Lain Pompo The Cinephile Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken (Girls Last Tour) (Blend S) Cyberpunk Edgerunners Frieren Dungeon Meshi Maddox Ai City Akira Vampire Hunter D Bloodlust Ghost in the Shell '95 Mahoromatic Bebop Movie Frieren Redline Shirobako Jigokuraku Violet Evergarden Eizouken Frieren A Silent Voice Bebop The Great Pretender Paranoia Agent Dungeon Meshi
Thank you for listing that! I don't know if it would be possible but in future videos, would it be possible to add it directly to the clip? I've been loving your essays and how they are contextualized into literature, culture and history. Keep up the great work!
@adiyo011 If I do another video like this I'll consider it. I don't want to overwrite the TH-cam closed captions for people who might want/need them, but it might be ugly to have every frame captioned in the video itself.
I've been saying this for a long time: the viewing habits of western anime fans - to watch as many new shows as possible that debut every season - is totally unhealthy. Anime is the only entertainment medium where this is encouraged to such a degree, and when you step back for a second to think about what you're doing and compare it to how other forms of media are consumed, you begin to see how ridiculous it is. Imagine if you attempted to watch every new American TV show that debuted in a given year, both on regular TV and on streaming services - or worse yet, attempted to listen to every new song uploaded to Spotify. Honestly, if I did that, I'd probably come away thinking most of it was garbage too. It's so much more sustainable for the long term survival of your interest in the medium to be picky, to focus on just two, maybe three new shows that strike your interest. And hey, maybe go back and check out some of the shows you missed from years (or decades) past while you're at it. That's what I've been doing for years now, and I've been a fan of anime since 1999 whose passion for the medium has never been greater.
@@droopy_eyes It's not that bad a comparison. The number of anime series or for that matter OVA's we got coming West during the 80s and 90s would barely fill a couple of VHS tapes per year - even with the fan trading. It introduces a selection bias; the only way we'd get an anime here in the West was if it was already successful enough in Japan a company thought it'd be worth the time and expense of bringing it over or it had already developed a fanbase in the West that was dedicated enough to produce a fansub or fandub. All that's really happened is that filter has been removed. Back in the 80s and 90s a mediocre or worse anime wouldn't usually make it outside of Japan, today it's on Crunchyroll.
You're right! It's not healthy and it can cause burn out of the passion. Though there's also nothing wrong with fans enjoying a medium so much, they would go out of their way to consume everything they can get their hands on. Right now, everything that is currently coming out. Possibly with the an eventual goal of every title in existence. These fans just really love the medium. The same way movie buffs love movies or music fans love music. They don't just casually enjoy the thing, but become superfans of the thing instead. They want to know everything there is to know about the thing.
The shelf life for Anime also became way shorter. 90s Anime could keep you hooked for years because it was such a slow drip compared to today. That's another reason why the 90s feel far more "full" or "complete".
Man back in the 90s when you watched anime on TV it would take literally 6 months to a year to go through the series. Or in the case of Dragonball Z, literally 7 years. If you were able to afford anime on VHS, or even find any at all, you would rewatch the same episode several times because that stuff was EXPENSIVE. I remember how I had the first two Sailor Moon tapes and I must have rewatched those 10 times each. A season of anime on VHS was physically large and could easily cost $200, often more. ($200 in 90s money btw, so $400 or more today.) Then DVDs came around, and if you were actually buying those instead of sailing the high seas, those were $30-40 a season. Now it's all streaming and you binge an entire series in two days for functionally pennies. Not that it was necessarily better in the 90s or that it's better now, but man how we consume anime has come absolutely so far
The actual answer is that the 2008 financial crisis shifted the earnings of the anime industry from normalish people to the worst otaku scum (who would spend almost all of their disposable income on merch) during the early and mid 2010s. In this environment, fanservice was cheaper and had better ROI than framerates or plot. Now that the cash flow of anime is shifting to a broader and more global audience, they are toning down their more hentai-like wish fulfilment anime.
@@marcodaddario3965You are thinking of the GREAT animes capable of keeping you hooked for years. There has always been a lot of trash and only some gems between them. I would even say there are more great animes today than before. Just the last few years we got a lot of soon to become classics like Vinland Saga, Mushoku Tensei, The Apothecary Diaries, Vivi's azure eyes, Frieren, Violet Evergarden, JJK, Demon Slayer, To Your Eternity, Call of the Night and a ton more I dont mention since I have not seen them yet or they belong to genres I dont follow.
@@hypothalapotamus5293 There's probably more "I can't believe it's not hentai" anime recently than ever, particularly with HiDive's offerings (Gushing Over Magical Girls and Chained Soldier) this season.
There's alot over staturation of degenerate stuff now in Anime. I know fanservice has been a thing since the 80's of Anime. But there wasn't as much of it then compared to now. I'm not saying the 80's or even 70's era of Anime was perfect. It was definitely flawed . But there is alot of good Anime that came out back then , that still hold up by today standards of Anime in 2024. I still like some new Anime coming out too. I just wish the Anime industry was more willing to take creative risks , instead of giving us bad degenerate fanservice Isekai Anime all the time. Like who asked for these shows? I want more Anime like Achient Magnus Bride or Heavenly Delusion or frieren beyond journey's end or Vinland Saga season 2.
Anime nowadays is like surfing through TikTok and TH-cam. 90% of it is a sea full of brainrotting cat vomit that you have to swim through to get to the 10% that's actually good.
"Was it 2007 as it became clear that the old studios were overheating and working their staff to death?" I think that would have raised Miyazaki's opinion of anime.
There's a video where a guy talks about Miyazaki and his ideas of environmentalism through both the movie version and manga version of Nausica of the Wind and he touches briefly upon this.
Oddly comforting to see that not much has changed. Im sure in the 2030s people will look back at the 2010s and 2020s bundle up all the great shows that came out in the decades and say "Wow anime was so good in those days" when we are currently living through it and saying "There is only a few gems in the sea of trash".
Same goes for every decade in every fandom. With pretty much every thing there are hundreds of movies/songs/books created every year but most are forgettable, 10-20 years later people only remember the few really good ones and compare them to the forgettable examples of the current year.
@nobodyimportant2470 well almost all media. Video games used to have more bangers per year than now. After 2010 the amount of good video games a year has dipped.
@GutsOfRivia that is just a straight up lie. More than 10 fantastic games came out this year and we're only at March. And there's more to come in the next months. Just from the top of my head i can cite Persona 3 Reload, Yakuza 8, Tekken 8, Under Night in Birth 2, Penny's Big Breakaway, Balatro, Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, Unicorn Overlord, Duelists of Eden, Granblue Fantasy Relink... With Helldivers 2 and Dragon's Dogma 2 coming in the near future along with many more
There are more anime than ever so there is more crap anime than ever. But we continue to get a lot of great anime. In the 2020s so far we've received JJK, Akudama Drive, Vivy, Mushoku Tensei, 86, Ranking of Kings, Odd Taxi, Urusei Yatsura (2022), Spy x Family, Chainsaw Man, Summertime Rendering, Bleach The Thousand Year Blood War, Cyberpunk Edgerunners, Heavenly Delusion, Oshi no Ko, Rurouni Kenshin (2023), Frieren Beyond Journey's End, Suzume, and The Boy and the Heron as far as premieres go and continuations/endings for Attack on Titan, Mob Psycho 100, My Hero Academia, Demon Slayer, Dr. Stone, Gintama, Fruits Basket (2019), and Vinland Saga. I think anime is in a very good place right now in terms of number of quality shows. What anime needs to improve on is providing better working conditions for animators who are overworked and underpaid and training more future animators.
Yes, it's the sheer volume of releases. There is a LOT of really good stuff coming out these days, but there's also a crapload of junk like in every human artistic endeavour. The problem is also a matter of perception, because people has the unhealthy habit of consuming anime like Japan is gonna stop making animes tomorrow and watches stuff they clearly don't like just because it's "anime" instead of being a little bit more selective.
Personally, as someone who has watched Animes from the 70s onward, while I dont think it ever got "bad"... but I do think there was a quality loss in the 2000s onward. It might just be an American's perception, but before the Anime explosion in the US in the late 90s, they were more selective about what was being brought over here. I used to go to Conventions and buy tons of fan subbed stuff. Stuff that would never come out over here. By the late 90s, everything I was buying fan subtitled was coming out commercially a short while later. I literally remember buying and watching the first few episodes of Cowboy Bebop fan subtitled and thinking "This would be fantastic if it came out in the US, too bad it never will". A few months later it was here, as was everything else I had bought in that last convention run. As Anime exploded, they started bringing over anything and everything Anime. Of course you are going to see a quality dip, but most of it was still top notch. Then you had Japan's economy crash of the 90s, and by the end of the decade is when I feel it really hit the Anime industry hard and I feel like you started to see quality dips, particularity in story, IMHO. When they started making stuff for America instead of the Japanese. It felt, at least to me, like crap was being churned out for money and less care was put into it. There was defiantly some good stuff too in the 2000s on, but it felt at the time like we had hit its peak and was going downhill. And today, it feels like many of the Anime coming out, using newer technology, don't look as good to me. There is a reason why shows like Meglobox boast "00s style animation" as a selling point.
Just an aside about the "it got too horny!" section: There's something incredibly funny about grognards whining about the excess of pervy fanservice in modern anime when there's an interview with Miyazaki from 1979 where he complains about otaku making racy figurines of Clarisse from The Castle of Cagliostro and a year prior Rumiko Takahashi had straight up named the protagonist of her hit manga Urusei Yatsura after the famous pinup model Agnes Lum. Criticising Japanese popular culture for its sexism and fetishisation of youth (sexual and otherwise) shouldn't be off the table-it certainly isn't among Japanese fans, artists or academics-but certain Western fans can be really myopic, ahistoric and frankly shockingly Orientalist about the subject, and that's before you can even get into the undercurrents of sex-negativity and kinkshaming. It makes having a conversation about this stuff in good faith really exasperating. As for the current state of affairs: I think the anime industry is kind of in a weird spot right now. There's a production bubble rivalled only by the mid 1980s which is inevitably going to burst and screw over a *lot* of people, but that looming threat is only fuelling the expansion of that bubble as different production committees and publishers try to get in while the getting's good and capitalise on the hottest trends as quickly as possible before that stops being viable. As a result, for all that there are many, *many* slapdash productions coming to television and streaming essentially unfinished and all sorts of bad ideas getting greenlit in the hopes of seeing healthy returns, the industry is also producing some truly incredible work at an unprecedented volume, some of it wildly experimental, some of it just representing mastery of the fundamentals. It's kind of an amazing time to be an anime fan, but there's a slight dread to it, too, I guess? When it comes to what period I think is "the best," however… I dunno, I think my nostalgia bias leans towards the '00s, as I only really started taking a serious interest in anime around 2009 or so-the first series I actually followed as it came over here was Madoka Magica-and so a lot of my formative experiences with the medium were watching series which had come out in the past decade or so mixed with series from the early 2010s which were new and exciting at the time. The '00s also saw the first wave of light novel adaptations when the medium was still fairly new and experimental, as well as the tail end of the post-Eva boom of deeply weird original television anime, both of which speak to my personal sensibilities. That said, there are plenty of newer and older series which I love to death, so while the nostalgia is there, it's not absolute by any means.
As a 90s person who grew up watching anime (and a bunch of other Asian media) on VHS regularly all my life thanks to access to local import stores, anime has kinda always been full of a little bit of everything both good and bad because like any other medium you just have to find what clicks with you. Now that other people have greater access to the entirety of the medium, that means they're being exposed to the stuff they never would've been before, day-slop included. It's like talking about how American daytime TV is bad because it's all soap operas and reality shows, while singing the praise of K-dramas, forgetting that you're only being exposed to the best shows after all the bad ones have been filtered away by time. People forget that when you consume art, that art is a mirror- it reflects the people who made it, the environment that created them, and the people who are there to witness it.
My dad was born in Soviet union and he was a total anime fan back then. In 60-70s, USSR showed a ton TOEI anime in cinemas. "Puss in boots", "Taro son of dragon" , "Flying ghost ship" to name the most popular ones. However, Japan soon stopped making anything like that. Miyazaki did make some great movies which me and my dad really love, but other than that there's not much for him to like about 80s or 90s or 2000s or todays anime
90's or 2000's anime definitely had a specific vibe that can make a person say "They don't make them like they used to" that I think is worth remembering. Building on. That turns into "Anime is bad now because..." for a reason I think is more specific to anime than just nostalgic memories. I think there is a certain type of person who's ideal of what anime is is a genre or collection of genres, probably related to cool guys doing cool things. And not the full picture of what it is. So anything outside that looks like a perversion. I want to say you can boil it down to anime "becoming bad" whenever the person thinks anime became about "cute girl shows". Maybe Haruhi? I remember that being a bit of a turning point for some people. Remember, anime got a reputation in the west for being "more mature" than western cartoons, not just because GiTS, Akira and Bebop look a certain way and that perception still has some effect. The thing is, shows with that 90s feel still come out. Edgerunners and Megalobox come mind. And every singe time you will see comments saying that it's saving anime or they finally made a good show again. Yeah, I think it's a lot of people that just really like Ninja Scroll and can't admit that that's just they're preference and not what anime is.
I think the main change might just be the format. It's not just anime in that respect - back in the 80s and 90s episodic content tended on average to run to the 60 minute mark, or rather 45 minutes with the commercials. Today the 30 minute episode is more common (which is usually closer to 20 minutes with commercials). In terms of both the production and the consumption side that introduces differences - if you're splitting 720 minutes of content into 12 discreet blocks there's some big differences in what you can do in terms of storytelling compared to splitting it into 24 blocks. Similarly watching 720 minutes of story is going to feel different if it's in 12 chapters than it is in 24. I suspect when people talk about that '90s feel' a large part of it is hearkening back to those 60 - 120 minute OVAs rather than the 30 minute bite sized chunks we get today.
I mean if an anime made it all the way to f****** VHS in America was probably half decent in the first place. Our choices were more restricted back then than what we have now with piracy
90's anime can often be enjoyed by a wider variety of people. They take more influence from live action movies. You can show Cowboy Bebop to your normie dad and he'll likely be "That's pretty cool." You can't do that with alot of modern anime.
@@adrianaslund8605 It's more a quantity thing. If anything it'd be more possible these days simply because there's a greater variety of anime available; in the 90s it was by and large either action or horror, today you can add in RomComs, slice of life, drama, thrillers and pretty much any other genre you care to name, you just might need to dig through a layer of isekai to find them.
Black Lagoon is canonically (or back on some 2000s forums) the most Cowboy Bebop-like anime, at least in the category of “anime for people who don’t like anime.” I didn’t see it in your list of ‘00s classics…
I think visible edge of Black Lagoon turns a lot of those people off. I'd be inclined to agree with you if we were just talking about like the first season but the second season and the OVA leave such a bad taste in my mouth that I'm probably a little unfair towards it. It becomes way more self serious than it can support
@@TheBellman BL is definitely not as singularly great as CB but I'd argue that a lot of its sensibilities (especially its heavy western cultural influences) puts it in the neighborhood of Bebop, and even their subject matter is very similar. I think Second Barrage does ramp up the violence and content matter, though my distaste with it is more like I find the last arc pretty boring (the details of Balalaika's Soviet career aside). I do admit the OVA feels like senseless nihilistic violence, even if the Grey Fox subplot activates the same part of my brain that's into Metal Gear Solid and Spriggan.
BL is one of the best in the loose genre of "things like Cowboy Bebop". It's problem is that while there's enough humanity in the characters to stop it from being what I call edgy it's still too crass and violent to scratch the same itch for some people. The Bebop crew are basically aristocrats compared to Lagoon crew
Your conclusions are very agreeable. The main issue is that I can't tell sometimes if you're referring to your own opinion or those of other people whose arguments you're talking about, especially with the ecchi stuff. Some clarifications and additional appreciations of detail would've been good too. For example, you called the tsunderes you showed palette swaps of each other but as someone who assumes there's always differences, there's no credence to that claim if I don't understand why they are almost "exactly the same" character-wise. I see RogerSmith2004 already wrote a comment about this. Also, Initial D First Stage is good! But yes I agree that people need to look more broadly to understand that anime is more than just what's popularly trending and to find stuff that appeals to them.
Palette swap tsundere are Louise Shana Taiga and Aria. They are voiced by Rie Kugimiya aka the "Tsundere Queen". The character are particularly notorious and really similar. The voice actress also played a lot of other popular tsundere to the point that she almost defined the character archetype. You can probably find louise Shana and Taiga right away by just searching for the word "tsundere" instead of their name.
I've come to acknowledge that anime has never gotten bad but also that the industry and audience's tastes have completely changed from what it used to be. It is undeniable that some classic anime masterpieces are products of their time with charm and aesthetic that will never be replicated again. by the same token, a handful of anime from this era of anime will also become fondly remembered classics in due time. It is a shame the OVA format has greatly diminished; that was a great source of passion projects being brought to fruition. The multi part movie series Girls und Panzer has gotten really reminds me of those old days.
I think that the 90's were peak anime. While there are anime gems started post 2000, like early Naruto, Hunter x Hunter, Ranking of Kings, Gurren Lagann, Odd Taxi, One Punch Man, Mob Psycho 100, and a few others, they feel far and between the diversity, freeness, and absolute madness of the 90's. To name some I love: Saber Marionette J (got my whole family into anime), Tenchi Muyo OVA, Photon the Idiot Adventures, Dragon Half, Yu Yu Hakisho, Ruroni Kenshin, Ramna 1/2, Magic Users Club OVA, Experimental Lain (more fun on rewatches), Outlaw Star, Trigun (first half of the show), Great Teacher Onizuka, Irresponsible Captain Tylor, Escaflowne, Evangelion, Oh My Goddess, Mini Goddesses, Blue Seed, and Berserk. Technically One Piece (1999), but that's splitting hairs since it's greatest years are much later after it's start. Even some of the more average can be fun like Magic Knight Rayearth, Golden Boy, Love Hina, Sargent Frog, Demon Eyes Kyo, Gasaraki, FLCL, Yamato Nadeshko, Generator Gawl, Gokudo, video girl AI, Slayers, Fushigi Yugi, Lost Universe, Nadesico, etc. It is lower budget than the 80's, but it feels more experimental, and free. It's the decade I return to when I want a good laugh or high kinetic energy. This is no shame to later decades, but I feel this decade just had far more hits for me than any other. I wasn't a fan of Gundam Wing, never finished it, but it was fine. Digimon Tamers is fine too. I love the soundtrack for .hacksign but it's unbearable to watch after the first 6 episodes. Overall mostly positive memories of these shows and I have gone back many times to rewatch a bunch of them. A few notable manga for me since I read far less manga than watching anime. Yu-gi-oh's first 7 volumes before it focused on card games. I also strongly recommend Angel Densetsu.
Hikaru no Go, original Fruits Basket, Samurai Deeper Kyo and Angelic Layer aren't 90s anime. Due to there being no year 0 in the calender you can count 2000 as the 90s as long as you count 1990 as in the 80s but you've still listed shows that began or ended in 2001 and later.
@@AC-dk4fpUpdated. I saw a lot of these as a kid. So some of them I assumed were 90's when not. I'll replace them with Escaflowne, Oh my Goddess (and Mini Goddesses, and Fushigi Yugi). Still tons more of great titles, hope you found one or two on the list you hadn't checked out and get to enjoy. :D
@@televisedfeedback6660 You should watch Gungrave, Jubei-chan the Ninja Girl (both seasons) and Kurau Phantom Memory if you haven't. Going to assume you know what Samurai Champloo is. Trying to watch Red Garden right now pity the American dub is dated. Also need to finish Uta Kata but maybe I should finish Mahou Tsukai Tai first you may be correct. Sacred Slayer Matoi and Dimension W had descent retro energy if you didn't catch them. Oku-same wa Mahou Shoujo and This Ugly and Beautiful World kind of killed my interest in stuff being high energy and nothing else. Futakoi Alternative is still smart and interesting. Mini goddesses was unwatchable when I tried to rewatch it. World God Only Knows, School Rumble and Monthly Girl's Nozaki-kun just hold up better for me than 90s comedies. 16-bit Sensation Another Layer was pretty deep recently as well.
@@AC-dk4fp I know most these Anime but there's some of them that I don't know. I'll definitely write them down to watch . I like watching Anime I never heard of .
The problem is that a lot of things need to come together to make a truly great anime. Animation, story, characters, voice acting, and sound design/music, and what makes a show like Frieren stand above the rest is that it actually has all of these, just like Bebop did back in the day. Shonen series like JJK and Demon Hunter get a lot of attention because they're hitting the obvious ones, but will never measure up to the likes of FMA due to weakness of story and character. Then you have the reverse in shows like Ranking of Kings, which although true in style to the source material has art that is offputting to a lot of viewers, despite a fantastic story and characters. Where the Isekai glut fails is when the majority of shows are more or less doomed to failure because no attempt is made to make even one of these things stand out, so for every Mushoku Tensei (which I'd claim hits all those categories at least in S1, but a point can be made against one specific character) you wind up with a dozen of The Great Cleric, KamiKatsu, or the like that are so disposable that you know a second season will never happen. Worse still is that is seems to have devolved into ultra-specific subgenres like "reborn as an otome villainess", "kicked out of the hero's party", or "I want to lead a quiet life doing specific activity" where there's show after show after show when it should have stopped at one - it's like if every US network had made a "bar set in Boston comedy" in the 80s because Cheers was popular.
You had me till the Initial D slander. Everything about the show from the music to the horrid 2000s cg cars gives it the perfect level of goofy that has endeared it to people for so long.
The way the characters look and acted as well. It's so unique compared to the generic slush we get today. I don't drive nor am I a fan of cars and I loved the first season my brother first watched it when he was 30 and he loved it, went further than me. It has a certain charm to it.
The annoying thing about Isekai is how it limits creativity. So often I find myself thinking, "why does this NEED to be an Isekai?", and the answer I keep coming up with is that the author couldn't be bothered to build a world distinct from videogame mechanics, Japanese cultural familiarity or with characters that didn't need gary-stu foreknowledge of a previous life to exploit. Does Ainz Ool Gown need to be a Japanese salary man? The author tries to have his cake and eat it too by having all the important decisions essentially decided by Ainz's Lich intelligence and nature that overwrites any impulse the human may have anyway. The human internal monologue is only a comical façade for the actual lich character of Ainz. Does Rudeus Greyrat need to be an Otaku NEET? Why couldn't his be the story of a prodigy of his age unravelling the mysteries of the world? Is it because the author is a disgusting Otaku who can't help self inserting into an incestuous sexual relationship with a twelve year old? What impact does Naofumi Iwatani's origin from earth have on his story? None at all, but we need an excuse to shoehorn videogame mechanics into a fantasy setting. Why does Ken Usato need to be Japanese? or Rimiru? or Tanya Degurechaff? Why does she HAVE to be a Japanese salaryman? What is added except an excuse to contrive this character into a cute little girl instead of an alternative history Clausewitz or von Manstein with magic artillery and a personal story with alt-God? I'm sure every author self-inserts, and I'm certainly not against power-fantasies, but it's just so shameless in most Isekai and the quality of the authors in the junk food literature that is the LN market really strains my patience. Look at the eminence in the shadow, I like it but it's mainly just 70% comedy and 30% flashy action for it's own sake, it does fall flat sometimes when it tries to drag along it's serious story, but that's the tension that this type of genre entails. It makes serious stories contrived and funny stories weighed down. Maybe the only option is to commit one way or the other like Konosuba or SaO, (even if the latter wasn't well executed).
Pretty much. I'm sure I've forgotten more crap anime than I remember. The funny part is how often today's 'great' anime jogs the memory - Frieren? Basically 3x3 eyes for Gen Z ....
@@markwatson8714 This is my absolute favorite way of discussing(dismissing) new anime ngl. Bunny Girl Senpai? Haruhi for Zoomers Darling in the Franxx? Gainax for Zoomers
@@TheBellman What are you're thoughts on Vinland Saga season 2 or Gundam Witch From Mercury? Both are pretty good Anime in my opinion. I really liked the Anime ID-Invaded, Pet , Sonny Boy, To You're Eternity and Acca 13 as well.
@@markwatson8714 I never expected someone to mention 3x3 eyes. I renember watching the Anime ova and seeing the Manga in middle school online. I was born in 2001. I think Frieren is pretty good. I totally get that it's not for everyone. Some people like other Anime more than Frieren.
@foregroundeclipse8725 I like the Vinland Saga manga a lot and it seems like a decent adaptation. Haven't gotten to GWitch yet but my friends like it which is a good sign. Have only watched one or two episodes of those other shows but I liked them all well enough. I have a Plan to Watch list a mile long and a lot of the shows are recent
For me I just like retro in general whether it’s from the 80s, 90s or early 2000s or even 2012 idc I’m a sucker for anime before the industry blew up around the world I grew up in the early 2000s so it’s definitely a nostalgia thing I’m not gonna lie I do look back on early 2000s shows and 90s shows and movies with rose tinted glasses because I was only a dumb kid
I think I'm more drawn to the older style of old Anime and it's experimental phase . I totally get where you're coming from. I think I'm a little biased towards old Anime myself . I like new Anime too, but I prefer older Anime .
OP: you cant say you love 90s anime because you love 1 90s show! Also OP: shows multiple examples of great 90s shows, of which, i can add more examples, if i chose to. 😐
I made a blog post about this when KILLlaKILL was released, and the "How saved is anime today?" memes were abundant, and I still maintain my thesis that western audiences are conflating "community" with "good". Your anime golden age took place when you were in your anime club in high school and it was easy to gush with others, to watch communally. Now that you're an old fart it's hard to find those communities, even in web spaces, especially the social media based in conflict, like twitter. Add in that there was the Adult Swim explosion circa 1999, and they had YEARS of backlog of GOOD series to flood the airwaves with, and there's just this perception.
I don't know, man. I feel like you cherry picked your statements to make up a straw man argument to prove a point that is somewhat pointless. Not to say that there aren't any people who say that anime got bad or whatever, but this discussion could go a lot deeper and be a lot more meaningful. You ended up going on a lot of tangents that didn't add anything to the theme and didn't reach any conclusions. Something tells me that you didn't do a lot of research to make this video, and your statement comparing Madhouse to Mappa kind of proves it. This feels like a twitter thread stretched for over 20 minutes.
This video left me with a lot of thoughts on it, overall I thought the video was interesting. Sorry for the long wall of text: 1:13 This was a strong point to start the vid with, considering people always seem to use these Miyazaki quotes and think he's talking about isekai anime or something, I highly doubt the guy even knows what those are. Normally when you hire animators for a production, you look at their past work, but Ghibli sidesteps this completely. For How Do You Live, there was a very strict test to apply with specific things they wanted you to reproduce, including sending your submissions via snail mail. 3:47 Aw, Iketeru Futari isn't a classic, but it had its funny moments. 4:11 Is there a source on this? People tend to say that, but a friend of mine who is trying to watch every OVA ever made seemed to think that the production value from 90s OVAs was better. Either way, I can't say for sure as my knowledge on OVAs from the time is quite limited. 4:45 Ok, I love this! I've been constantly making a habit of trying to organize everything by what president was in office. Like for Precure seasons, "Bush era Precure", "Obama era Precure", etc. I mean you already see this when people talk about Showa era anime or tokusatsu, or like Heisei era. Why not with presidents? 4:56 I agree with this, especially when people obsess over "90s aesthetic" and it's legit just Sailor Moon or Toshihiro Kawamoto designs. Like there were other aesthetics nor were those really the dominating look of the decade lol 6:58 This is a bold statement. I haven't watched Initial D so I can't say for sure what I'd think. 9:09 I recall Sho Aikawa talking about this many years ago, where he felt like late night was the new OVAs in that you can show a lot more kind of stuff. And I do think that is applicable in a number of ways, though TV anime at the time could also be pretty racy even before late night. The Rumiko Takahashi works from the time (UY, Maison, Ranma) had a lot more fanservice than say Inuyasha in 2000 did. There was also stuff like Machiko-sensei and Pastel Yumi. 11:36 While I'd say the Rie Kugimiya shows had similar appeals, I think Shana, Taiga, and Louise are all very different characters (I'm not too familiar with Hidan no Aria, so I can't say about that). Shana is more focused on her duty as a Flame Haze, and so a lot of the show is about her experience with Yuji changing her from being overly focused on her mission to being more open with herself and being more open to other people. She doesn't even have a name at first. You can really see this development in Season 3 where Shana and Yuji kind of change positions in the show, where she has to face off against him. There's also a strong family dynamic between them, where you see Wilhelmina interact with them but also Yuji's mom, so they feel closer with their general circle than in the other two works. With Toradora, one of Taiga's main conflicts is her problem with her father, which isn't really a conflict in Shana at all. And Taiga herself is portrayed as someone who acts really tough, but then you see the real her and she's a total klutz, she is messy, she sneezes due to all the dust in her home. Ryuji has this selflessness about him, and he isn't viewed well by the school either due to his eyes making him look scary. So they end up agreeing to help each other out, grow closer as a result, and they win appreciation of the school, whereas Yuji from Shana doesn't really have an issue with the other students. In Zero no Tsukaima, it's speaking a lot more to a greater societal issue with the world. Louise is a product of her society. Her family is very high class, and she wants to prove herself, but is bullied and looked down on by her classmates because of her poor magic ability. When she summons Saito, she has to grow to reconcile with her feelings for him considering he's a "familiar" and far from this high class noble (not to mention Louise gets jealous easily due to her own insecurities). The story of ZnT focuses heavily on what it means to be a "noble" and challenging a lot of the formalities. I think very much of the conflict later on in the series where Louise tries to make Saito act more "noble like" in order to win the approval of her sister, Eleonore, only to prove how ridiculous all of this is. The other important thing is that Saito isn't exactly a great person himself either, since he tends to be incredibly lustful and thoughtless. Unlike in Shana and Toradora, there's this very antagonistic dynamic between the two of them, where Saito will try to get back at Louise. Ultimately, in the series, Louise being able to perform void magic and Saito inheriting the power of Brimir is what allows them to stop the war and prove themselves. You can find this common thread in all of them where they "open up more" but the backdrop and their general attitude I think are different. Shana is definitely most mellow of them, and she starts out a lot more quiet. Louise is the most abrasive due to her upbringing and her society. I could go on, but I realize that perhaps I am just being the database animal here lol. 12:42 I remember Outbreak Company. Ichiro Sakaki is a pretty prolific light novel writer with many successful works that have been made into anime including this, Scrapped Princess, and Chaika. 13:13 It's hard to really ignore that a lot of the isekai and how they are written are influenced by the platforms they are on (Arcadia, Shousetsuka ni Narou) by amateur writers trying to cater to a TH-cam-esque algorithm. In those conditions, it's really difficult to write a story the same way as you have to keep sort of adjusting the story to what the audience wants, otherwise you are just going to lose your audience. So there is a difference between works like Outbreak Company and Marchen Madchen, which were written by light novel authors with years of work under their belts, compared to something like Death March. 15:18 Yeah I get kind of bummed out by that fact, because I do think there's tangible differences between a number of these works that make them interesting to me for different reasons. But certain genres kind of get simplified down a lot by people unfortunately. 16:48 Was Girls' Last Tour a commercial failure? I remember it being one of the more loved shows that season. Admittedly it wasn't as popular as Blend S (in both BD sales and MAL popularity at least), but the manga for GLT is quite beloved, and the show had its audience. I wouldn't say it was like Warau Salesman New or anything. 19:13 I think the problem is the lack of proper training, so you can't really bring enough new animators in to offset the older ones that are dying or are retired. I don't think getting people off of Twitter is the answer if all of their stuff is being corrected heavily. People's perceptions are definitely coloring it, because it's happening to anime they care about. When series like Kiss Dum and Polyphonica were melting in real time in 2007, it wasn't the big shows (people would say this about Gurren Lagann not knowing who Osamu Kobayashi is). Now it's happening to One Punch Man, Jujutsu Kaisen, originals like Wonder Egg that garner a huge audience, so they are seeing it. But I don't think it's unfair to say that it is getting harder and harder to make a great production every year due to the industry circumstances and how fragmented it's become. Either way, I do understand this video is talking about very specific people. I don't have any particular issue with more niche or otaku aimed stories, as long as it's interesting to me is all that matters. But I get a lot of people are into anime for the social aspect and just want something they can talk about with their friends. That's why I always have a hard time believing that stuff will get "rediscovered as classics" years later, because it feels like to me people are caught in the seasonal grind specifically so they can be part of the conversation every week. I feel like it's even happening with "classics" where something like Spice & Wolf is getting remade specifically for people who don't want to watch a show from 2008. But that's where I am at, thanks for putting the vid together. I'd love to see the sources in the description or pinned comment, just as a general practice so I can read more about it.
I can't find great sources to the effect, but Girls Last Tour but based on the BD sales GLT barely broke even for White Fox. Obviously there might be alternate revenue streams (BD sales were already a questionable metric in 2017) and the show might have had a long tail since it has seemed to gain some cult status, but it definitely didn't pop. It was just the best example of cult anime still being made and being passed over by the mainstream. The fact that there wasn't a season 2 or seemingly anyone else picking up Tsukumizu for animation seems like evidence enough that it wasn't rewarding. Yea I'm not being hard on Outbreak company, it's a fun series, it just has had limited staying power. I don't really read a lot of LNs so I'm not really suited to covering the topic but there's definitely a lot to be said about how there are structural incentives that shaped the storytelling of LN's after the early 10s. I definitely can imagine how there is a cause for concern in terms of the animation workforce but given how much better basically everything today looks compared to the dozens of A-1 Pictures shows from the mid-late 10s I have a hard time believing that there is that strong of a downwards trend.
@@TheBellmanYeah I see what you mean about Tsukumizu. It is a shame if the work didn't pop off, since I think the later developments in the manga really make the work come together in a big way. As well as it being a quality work, I think it had that memetic aspect to it what with the dabbing in the OP that could catch people's attention (though Blend S at the time also had the big OP meme). I feel like there's someone out there (not me) who could make a whole piece about how memes have helped certain anime gain more of an audience.
In regard to Miyazaki’s comment, I think more context needs to be added. If I’m not mistaken, he’s talking about a cultural form of anime consumption that shifted from a child centered demographic, to a teenage/otaku culture that transformed anime to what it is now (good and for worse). I think that’s a distinctive cultural trend that you can’t just brush off as “my decade is the best era”, or simply a medium of consumption that is like anything else westerners consume. Anime culture is very integral to the identity of Japanese youth post war, and with that, a lot of the internal dialogue within the medium reflects that identity. I think people tend to forget that now that anime is mainstream and globalized.
The video is on point. It just boils down to two things: 1. there's a LOT more of everything than there was 30-40 years ago. 2. There are a LOT more ways for fans to blast unqualified opinions and bad takes. Thats all there is to it. There's always going to be good anime and bad anime. Some genres die (real robot mecha for instance) but overall nothing changes. Well except for Shinkai lowering the standards of what people consider to be "artistic" anime If I would add a number 3, it would be, "3. people need to stop worshipping Cowboy Bebop."
It's pretty insane to go from talking about how making generalized statements is bad and then 1 minute later saying that watching Initial D first stage is objectively a miserable experience. Kind of hard to take a video essay seriously at that point.
getting older and not being able to relate to high school anime characters but can relate to spike from cowboy bebop is why , and the sexualization of really young characters is weird after you are 30
Most western (U.S) Japanese animation fans are not the best people to listen to when it comes to amation criticism. Sadly, a lot of people have a myopic and limited view of the animation on a global level. If they say what was coming out of Europe since the 40s they would lose their mind. Big mention to Soviet Animation and Hungarian animation in particular (France goes with out saying)
@@MechasterReal youtube is pretty cool. web archive as well. I reccomend looking up lists on loneliness and then looking for the ones that look interesting to you. Some really good ones are The Son Of The White Mare and The Time Masters
What many don't understand about what director's like Miyazaki say when they talk about anime having fallen is that they grew up in a time where anime barely existed. There was a wondrous feeling that anything was possible with this medium. they are primarily disgusted with the indulgence and gluttony that the medium has become known for. It's part of the reason that many in the west can't take anime seriously. It has never been grown up and seemingly never will so long as people continue to "consume" anime. Miyazaki has talked about certain big budget Hollywood studios and American television in the exact same way he talks about anime. The artistry of the medium has been subsumed by the profit motive and in this effort the vast majority of what gets made (or funded) tend to all be the same shade of stupid designed with tropes that exploit lonely young men (with some rare exceptions here and there). A work of art to someone like Miyazaki is meant to comment on life, not make you escape from it, not delude you into ridiculous unhealthy fantasies. This in essence is the problem with not just Anime, but Cinema as a whole. A sentiment I imagine many great director's of time past like Tarkovsky, Bresson, Kurosawa, etc.. would all agree with.
This is most likely the point lmao. It got sidetracked as soon as it was brought up. It may as well not be there. And with it, the same old tired discussion
Frankly in terms of the hit rate on artistically or even just aesthetically interesting works coming out, TV anime is in a much better place than Hollywood cinema. The latter truly is stuck in a rut of producer-mandated creative mediocrity and technical incompetence that there seems to be no clear way out of. You still have to do some digging to find worthwhile TV anime, but on average it's much less compared to the digging needed to find worthwhile mainstream cinema.
I watch 90's anime simply because i like styles and animation. While good animation of 90's impresses me more than good animation of modern anime, even bad animation of 90's Anime looks more appealing that bad animation of modern anime. Not to mention i love when characters sometimes move like cardboard cutouts. I also just love limited animation style. I love watching obscure 90's stuff as well. I like it even more than mainstream stuff. I love GS Mikami.
Anime in the 80/90/ early 00 were classics you remember and revisit still today ... after that anime turns mostly to soulless fastfood, especially the overpresent Isekai crap nowaday ... might still fill shortly some basic desires, easy consumed, fast forgotten, soon replaced with something identical/similar ... The soul and diversity that once made the Anime Genre is mostly gone today (also something very similar is to be noticed in the Video Game Industry) ... that make it very hard for people to feel something or emotionally (or financially or timewise) serious invest into it Anime ... An other "fail" is the americanisation of animes - it does not refer to the lack of showing nipples (something even present in old stuff like Gundam, Macross or Ranma), but also to not making meaningfull endings to most stories in hopes to maybe create a neverending franchise
idk what you are talking about but I first watched inital D in 2022 (and Ib have no praticular interest in cars) and I LOVE every season, also the dfirst season. I hate when people genrealize something to be 'bad' when it's not even the truth. I rewatched Initial D countless times and love it every single time.
Great video, as someone who is only tippiing their toes in the 90s and 80s era myself and luckily never got through the slog that is watching anime seasonally (if something is good i tend to just watch it after its fully finished) i sometimes tend to forget that what im watching from those eras are often what people consider the peak of that era as all the trash has long since been forgotten. And while i have a strong preference for the aesthetic of this era of anime thats also something thats purely bias. Youre right its not fair to compare every show that comes out this season to the 3 best shows/movies from the 90s, mostly when the people saying they prefer the 90s would rarily have watched more than 5 shows from that decade. That being said as someone who has a strong preference for the mid 90s to the mid 2000s of anime i wonder if there isnt more to go off here or a deeper way to look at it. I feel like what might be a worthwhile comparison is to compare the last decade of anime to that decade in terms of what are the most highly watched / rated shows per year. What i found was that (of course alligned with my taste) almost every year after 95 to 2000 (i havent really compared past this), the top 3 to 5 anime shows or movies would consistently be better than anything that people rate highly or is popular from the last 5 years of anime. With maybe the exception of 2023 which i think was a really good year for anime all things considered. On the other other hand i feel like iim very biased because a lot of the shows i see that are popular are shows that i just dont like, popular shows like aot or spyxfamily arent bad they just arent shows i enjoy which might make me biased in this comparison. Uh this long winded explenation is here because im kinda curious on what your take is on this? comparing the best shows of the late 90s or early 2000s compared to the besst shows of the last decade would you say these 2 are still equal in quality or do you think there is a clear winner in terms of quality (be that narratively or visually) between the two. Uh anyway great video, ill stay watching your stuff in the future !!
@@obarich oh yeah i havent checked the anime of that one out because ive been on some other stuff but i adored the manga and heard its a great adaptation so i have nothing but high hopes for it
Nah, you're right. The peaks of the 90s and 00s are higher than the current peaks, even if they were also just diamonds in the rough. As much as I like its spiritual successor, Madoka Magica, nothing is even remotely as ambitious and extremely thematically dialled in as Revolutionary Girl Utena.
Well.if that's all you got from this,that just means you never liked anime in general in the first place,you just enjoyed the pearls with original takes of the year . In every kind of medias,there is always masterpieces that come every once in a while, you can't just ''expect'' to get them to be served at you on a silver plate all the time.
I’m not trying to sound like an old head but, I feel like every anime now kinda feels the same now. More in the character archetypes I mean everyone getting a power up the main character always being a loser in the beginning and the side characters are just vegeta clones . Idk just feel like the creativity is at a stand still rn
I think its a little cheap honestly that you only looked at the new shows for two seasons in the 1990s. Cause scrolling down a little there was tons of bangers that were continuing DBZ, Yu Yu Haskusho etc.
Anime was heavily curated by television companies back in the day, we only got to see the 3-4 good series that year that executives lovingly handpicked out of 100's of trashy yaoi/yuri fanservice anime. Now we get to see the 100's of series that wouldn't have made it onto Cartoon Network or SciFi channel. Of course most of them are bad. It's like if you exported every single daytime tv sitcom and soap opera to Japan and expected them all to be well received. There would probably be a few hits like Friends, but I doubt American comedy or drama would appeal to most Japanese and they would think we were just a bunch of horny people who make hamburger jokes all day.
5:30 I throw Samurai Champloo, Outlaw Star and Trigun in the similar to Cowboy Bebop bin, especially Trigun. It is wholly unique though, nothing will completely map on to Cowboy Bebop though
I feel like the rot really began around the mid 2010s. Make no mistake, terrible anime has always existed, but it doesn't seem like we get those occasional iconic gems anymore that usher in new anime fans. I'm talking about the Evangelions, the Death Notes, the Gurren Laganns, the Madoka Magicas, the Attack on Titans. We don't even see any great sports anime anymore like Haikyuu!! or Kuroko no basket. It's still primarily over-done isekai and harem anime.
Some of my all time favorites today have grown to encompass: Steins;Gate, Psycho Pass, Ergo Proxy, Higurashi (VN included), School Days, Re:Zero, Asobi Asobase, Konosuba, Danganronpa, Hell’s Paradise, Death Note, 86 Eighth Six, RDNDBGS, Texhnolyze, Another, Angel Beats, Mirai Nikki (mostly for Yuno), Eden of the East, Charlotte, Engage Kiss and Kaguya-Sama: Love Is War just to name a few. But all of these instill a different feeling within me and can be anything from similar to one another or quite different. I personally usually enjoy plots and themes that are of a darker setting or have a lot of concepts of existentialism and philosophy. I love anime that’s rich in its characters and the plot of the anime itself. I also account for things such as music, art style, cinematography, direction, dialogues and voice acting. All of these elements come into play when creating any anime and are all important elements for creating a lasting and memorable experience. I also enjoy psychological thrillers and horror related media, such as Higurashi, which can be VERY dark. My tastes can be quite diverse and even so for what I consider to be some of my favorite anime. But I always usually tend to consider darker plots, themes of existentialism or anime with characters that suffer greatly or face relentless tragedy to be more appealing and considered to be a Magnum Opus by my own standards. However, when such media is quite effective and well crafted, it truly affects you, you can empathize with it and feel yourself moved by its contents. Thus, over time you may find your feelings and thoughts being swayed by what you consume, as an effective artist will pluck the harp-strings of your heart with ease. Sometimes I’ve found myself so moved by a piece of media, a movie, show, anime, music, novel or speech that I can feel it weigh on my psyche. I’m reminded of when I first played through the VN of Higurashi: No Naku Koro Ni and began to feel the madness of Keiichi during the Onikakushi arc. The music, sound effects, writing, characters and theme were all so well down developed that I began to ponder on just how powerful paranoia and terror can be. It should be needless to say, that consuming too much content of such a dark or deep caliber can even be deadly to your psyche and you could find yourself in a fit of despair, wrath or mania. The human mind can be quite malleable to outside stimuli, sometimes acting quite subtly in its effect, or quite drastic. Therefore, I always like to stress to everyone that it’s important to mend your mind, to meditate, find some way to make peace within you or consume something that brings you a sense of childlike joy or silliness. The work is indeed quite a macabre and painful place, yet, it’s not always this way, there’s always glimmers of hope within hopelessness. In a sense, this is how I feel about my guilty pleasures, one of which is indeed harem anime, or romcoms with a heavy focus on the comedy and a laxness and ease to the romance. For example, ‘Girlfriend, Girlfriend’ or ‘Aharen-San’ and ‘More Than a Married Couple but Not Lovers’. It’s something I can usually chuckle at, relax to and feel peace from. There’s plenty of Harem anime that I’ve watched wherein, I’ll feel a sense of embarrassment or perhaps, bashfulness; or find it humorous as a concept or the jokes to be funny. But I very much consider Harem genre to a guilty pleasure, I just believe it has its purposes outside of… well, you know.
I'm more of a casual viewer & less of a consumer when it comes to animated works produced from japan. I mostly prefer a story that has two or more genres or atmosphere like it could be a combination of scifi, thriller, adventure or action. As well as other narrative elements like the story being both character + plot focused at the same time while still maintaining a theme or message which i not only find stimulating or immersive for my adhd brain but also makes the work alot more convincing & meaningful to digest. I am not too big on romcoms, power fantasies, isekai & fighting/sports series which seems to dominate in today's anime industry.
In my opinion there's not enough anime with that Saturday Morning feel to them. Look at Samurai Pizza Cats, Shinzo, Tonde Buurin, Flint the Time Detective. I want to see 25-50 episode long anime with "Story of the week" kind of vibes. One of old Anime i'm currently watching is Brave Express Might Gaine, and it's bloody gorgeous. Same with modern mecha, i don't see those "Saturday Morning" vibes in them. They mostly too plot heavy, not enough simple "Story of the week" stuff.
These do exist they just don't get liscensed or get dubbed straight to English language TV so you don't notice them. When people talk about watching 'all the anime' they're talking about the late night timeslot stuff not all the cartoons actually being aired in Japan. Fansubbing got killed off by streamed simu-dubs that's why it appears like kids shows stopped existing. Then some of the high quality kids shows get randomly region locked even when they do appear subtitled on official streaming sites. Mecha shows are definitely much rarer but there's still more PreCure than one can ever care to watch if you really want an ok Saturday morning series.
This video popped up on my feed to check out and I'm glad that even with the title being "click bait"-ey, this was a great look/discussion about anime as a whole for what's truly considered a good or bad show. You've gained a new sub for this, thank you.
@ The Bellman You forgot about Key The Metal Idol, Texhnolyze, Jin-Roh, Ergo Proxy, Now And Then, Here and there, Escaflowne, Angel's Egg, The original Legend Of The Galatic Hero's, Captain Harlock, Galaxy Express 999, Rainbow Rokubou No Shichinin, Casshern Sins, Ashita No Joe , Rose of Versailles (etc)
Calling danmachi just "videogame setting" is unfair to it, Danmachi is way more dnd than it is just "videogame" having some videogame terminology like status or monsters dropping magic stones are there to enhance the story in the former's case and expand the worldbuilding in the latter's case and not because "it's easy to appeal to a videogame demographic this way" which is the actual issue with isekai anime that use videogame-y stuff
As someone who grew up in the 80s 90s and went thru 2000s as an adult. I still felt 2010 were truly the peak years. There’s tons of actual good show during that time. I can name you total shat in the 90s and early 2000s which were totally made for fan pandering
It’s funny that people call all anime bad when they barely go out of their comfort zone to find stuff because my favorite anime Kaiji came out in 08 and nobody talks about it in the casual sphere and I found it because I wanted something different and went out of my comfort zone. The quote from Miyazaki makes me laugh mainly because when you look at who he is and what he actually did for the industry which was bumfuck nothing other than making movies, the guy didn’t pass on anything to any protégés because he hated them or they hated him. Even then Miyazaki trusts no one but himself and is a miserable man because of it he has no true influence on the industry because he didn’t pass anything on to the next generation so if anything the “reason” anime became bad was his fault. I hold the belief that only 20-30% of all media ever made is actually good and that percentage is going to get smaller as time goes on and more media gets made. I think this because as time goes on more and more generic slop will be put out because of this most media is just forgettable not because it’s “bad” but because it has no substance to it and we’re really seeing that now because of TH-cam and social media.
In the 80s and 90s anime was pushed to the limit no CGI, now everything is computer generated and no new ideas we have this thing now isekai just a copy paste
Anime became "bad" when the floodgates of accessibility were opened and we were no longer limited by the cherry picked selection given to us through television. The production of anime has also skyrocketed in the past 15 years, so naturally more of something means there will be more bad content coming out. Certain genres have seen better days in the past (i.e. OVAs, isekai, mecha, shoujo), but other such as shounen-fighting, sports, seinen, sci-fi, and even fantasy rival the "good 'ol days" if not better in some aspects. The best part of modern anime is the variety of genres explored at all, which is easy to see as long as you aren't completely focused on the negatives and mountain of repeated isekai/ecchi anime airing each season.
I don't know what people yapping about there are tons of good released this year also last year anime is getting better and better look at Marvel it's dead, dc is long gone and Hollywood movies aren't doing any good too only anime industry standing tall.
anime was always bad, we just only remember the few good examples in the sea of bad which gives us a skewed perspective that anime somehow got bad, same with music
I’m a huge fan of older anime but that’s because it’s hand drawn. Hand drawn animation in general is so incredible to look at. It can look as gritty or as colorful as you want, there’s a distinct style to each work, and when you watch older stuff like Speed Racer, Ashita No Joe, and Gundam, or even 80’s stuff like Akira or Angel’s Egg, you can picture the work that went behind it. I just don’t like most newer stuff because of the generic, plastic art style of them.
Me too. That's why I always collect anime dvds/blu rays from the 70s 80s 90s because there are so many titles I've never seen and I love revisiting childhood favorites from my Toonami days. Like my favorite anime of time is Urusei Yatsura (1981). It's just the joy of discovering something new that's old. It's like treasure hunting.
I agree on your take that when people compare the past to the present, the past is often this amalgamation of cherry picked shows from decades, while the 'present' could just be this years shows(or even just the current season). There's a mix of good and bad every year, and for me there's been some great shows in recent years that hold up just as well as stuff I liked 20-30 years ago.
Ppl started tuning into the most generic anime’s like “Shield hero” When back in the day we would’ve assumed with a titles like that , that it wasn’t gonna be anything than a generic anime. Now these days they purposely give anime some goofy ass names . Anime to me used to be more mature than American animation but with the isekai anime taking over it feels like that is reversing and yes I know we still have more mature content to watch but it doesn’t feel like the focus honestly . Can’t wait to see Kaiju no 8 tho
I do think (from threads I've read of people that actually know the topic) that you're overlooking a bit of nuance with regard to the rise of Narou-Kei series. But otherwise, nice job. Basically true enough here. I also have no idea who Miyazaki is as a person. (I've never met the guy.) But I think a lot of people over here project the caricature of a "wholesome patriarch" of their family onto him. Some nice, sexless guy who's only ever been kind to them and did nothing else in their lives. (This despite the fact that if grandpa didn't have some form of libido you wouldn't exist.) I think it happens because of the close association he has to Disney and people's view of Walt which is also very skewed in the "he was a wholesome christian man" kind of way he tried to outwardly portray himself. Seeing clips like the Nausicaa boobs comment or the one about Kiki endear me to him more than his "anime is trash" takes because they seem more genuine and haven't been politicized as much. But then again, is he like me? Or is he much worse than me? I don't know. But I follow that gold-standard Francine Alice Frensky advice as often as I possibly can: "Sometimes it's best not to know anything about celebrities." I know that's a weird tangent. I'll leave now.
Original anime being non-existent nowadays has definitely dampened my experience with modern anime. Wolfs rain, eureka seven, bebop, haibane renmei, lain, rahxephon, Arjuna earth maiden. At one point of time my criteria for watching shows what "angle" the show is as going for not necessarily the synopsis and I really can't do that with modern anime. Even when it looks great, it feels way more tame than before on many levels whether it be themes, pacing, tone ect. What I favored most and most looked forward in the medium to was anime exploring more topical subject on a conceptual level, in a way live action couldn't. We don't have any shows that use science or philosophy as a conceptual backdrop anymore. World building generally feels way more phoned in than it did before leading to most shows that have promise for me being mired down by excessive exposition and tropes applied even lazier than they were in the goofiest 90's straight to video camp. I'm retrospect I realize many of the shows I like from that era were the culmination of many factors that are well beyond the reach of, well anyone. They were the unique brain children of people we only got to hear from because of it's profitability, which has since waned. I think anime was better back then but I will acknowledge that no amount of complaining will bring it back.
Haibane Renmei was a manga adaptation it was just a doujin. Peachy pretentious stuff like Wolf's Rain was never the deepest style of anime anyway. Orbital Children was modern SF in 2022 and sucked because of it. Futurism sucks right now anime is just following the trend.
I disagree severely with your comment that initial D first stage is "a miserable experience" (it's actually the best season by an insane margin) but regardless I agree with you on just about everything else. I just love the way hand painted cel animation looks, and that's not nostalgia, I didn't start watching anime until a few years ago when I was almost 20. Maybe this isn't all that relevant but I've always found the concept of being an "anime fan" very weird. I like good things. Deciding to specifically be a fan of media from one country in particular just seems very odd to me in general. I would never call myself an anime fan, I just like some shows that are anime. And I like a lot that aren't. Anime literally just means cartoons from Japan, and that covers a theoretically infinite scope of what an "anime" might be and chances are you probably don't like everything under that umbrella. So if you don't like horny comedies (like me) then something like 80% of the entire release schedule is uninteresting.
So , against your point, I'd double down. I watched 2000s animes when I was a kid on animax. That was the start for me. Some were from the 80-90 era tho. If we have to compare numbers, the work it took to publish a show or a piece was in it self the realization of the "why" in terms of quality. That's why the ratio of good anime released/total releases in the 80-90 are was like 5-10 times better than today. This is a hard guess, but none the less, take any genre, Shounen, we have a bunch of mid, cliché shows just to keep the view counts and to milk the cow, to the point that I'd even take such away from the box we put them in. School and all, nice, sometimes harem sometimes just not at all to try and be mature. It's action shows, like I'll remember anything 30 years from now. Isekai, we have good shows, we have just shows, then we have so many copycats that doesn't even tell a story or fetch a real comprehensible world in it. Mecha, we had potentials, for the sake of the genre, I'm gonna put Neon Genesis in a different box, cuz the anime it self is just something the creators had to wet 4-5times again to give it's ending any justice. You can't really see anything from the story apart from the drama, and soo I'd say it's more of a psycho drama. I can't, maybe Knights & Magic was somewhere there. One very exclusive part we left in the 80s 90s to rot is Seinen, that many remember as a Retro something and to be honest, it is. Today they make shows for grown up toddlers. And soo, we'll see have todays stuff will be remembered, there's a long way that doesn't seem all nice and tight, and only then we can tell if 90s or 80s were the real gold. I only say it's a bleak chance, cuz I can't remember 1 relatable character that I could personally carry for 40 years over, where as I can and will remember Marlene and Yuji from Blue Gender and the fun little Alicia who was already a meme back then. I will remember Lina, Gourry, Zelgadis and Sylphiel from slayers. Amelia less soo, she was annoying as being the whole point of the character. You'll ask me, "who you remember from after" I'll go "Kazuma, Kazuma!" " Hai, Kazuma desu!", that's all.
Anime never became bad, it feels that way because the price it paid to become unbelievably popular as 2010s progressed, I can even say that it finaly got recognition it deserved for years but of course some mainstream content it offers nowadays just isn’t anime at its best
Nudity was more of a representation of the themes and lended itself with more artistry among the the body of work, than stuff today which is just there to be smut and nothing else. Take Chun lee taking a shower in street fighter II film for an example. Its titillating yes and a little erotic, but it’s not suggestive in your face to the point of being porn and fan service. Even the scene itself is serous and dark. Try and find a single nudity scene of anime that represented like that in the modern era outside of a few large production films and you won’t find it. Nudity = porn or fanservice and nothing else. In the old days that was not always the case.
I like a lot of anime but the series I can just not get over is Bakemonogatari. The story is amazing but what really completes it for me as probably my fav piece of media ever is how SHAFT adapted it to animation as this off the wall, wildly experimental avant garde piece... taking lots of inspiration from film noir and french new wave films. it fits the source material perfectly and this style we rarely get to see done so well in anime. The Kizumonogatari films are probably the most beautiful works of animation i've ever seen. i'm so happy the series is finally returning this year 🥰 we even are getting a new Madoka movie as well! it's an exciting time to be an anime fan at least for me cause the stuff i care most about is still going strong
Good presentation. To say that modern anime are bad is the same as saying that modern music is bad because you listen only to what's on the radio and the old songs they are playing are the best from their era. In both cases, you invalidate the worth of the new releases that are objectively good, while at the same time, you ignore the fact that in the past every form of media was filled with as much filth as today. What matters the most is the quality of an anime to become a classic and each decade so far has produced its fair share of anime with this property. Look at Frieren or Apothecary Diaries, very recent releases that will be as good 50 years from now as they are today. The first episode of Attack on Titan aired more than 10 years ago, and people will remember it for many decades to come. I watched Death Note in 2007 when it aired and people are still talking about it today and recommend it as a gateway anime for those uninitiated. Back then it was a good anime, today it's a classic.
I think a lot of people do not understand the simple fact: money. There are SO MANY people who compare OVAs and movies to TV shows. Of course the budget is bigger, so is the time limit, the animators are better, more experienced too. In modern anime outsourcing is very common too, usually shading and motion is the most noticeable thing what suffers, and now most anime is just an advertisment to sell merch or the source material. As for why 80's looks so good its simple: japan quickly figured out how to make an economic boom through technology. They took something what existed, remolded it and made it better. Then came the 90's and the 00's, the advancement slowed out, so did the money. This was the era where people started going out in public in anime t-shirts, and it became somewhat accepted, thus the demand grew. I remember around 2010-ish it became "cool" to be the video game-loving nerdy guy too, as the definition of nerd itself was shifted from the tech-obsessed quiet guy who can give you some obscure anime on VHS into a funkopop collecting soylent drinker.
Anime is still as great as always. Every season has more great stuff than I can even watch. Sure, 90's anime has a great aesthetic but so does new anime. "the horny" is great to have and people won't stop liking Isekai just because you've seen too much of it. And I couldn't care less about anything Miyazaki or Anno has said, their complaing has been annoying for decades and at this point I just tune it out.
As you've said, the problem is more about how much fat there is. For me, I stopped watching anime around 2007, but then I started watching again in 2016, and I found myself just going back and figuring out what gems there were that I might have missed in the 2000s decade. By 2018, I generally just stuck to a pattern of only watching stuff that's no less than 5 years old, because it gives me time to let the consensus show which ongoing anime is still hitting its strides, and what gems were largely missed in that time frame.
I'm personally an incredibly picky person when it comes to media, and anime is not exception. I've probably only watched around 30 to 50 animes in my lifetime but I think 90% of them were quality ones and I constantly rewatch them. This is probably why I have a vastly different perception of the medium than most people (both avid anime consumers and non anime watchers) who tend to think of the industry as degenerate fetish cartoons for losers. The thing is, anime is just another form of expression. Saying that anime is bad as a whole would be like saying that cinema as a whole is bad. Even as someone picky with media, my favorite animes come from all decades (from the 70's to the 2010's), quality doesn't inherently belong to an era, even if certain periods had a better quality-quantity ratio than others. I believe nowadays anime is mostly garbage (quantity) but it's not dead, in the same way a form or expression such as painting or literature can never truly die.
How ironic Re:Zero caused 500+ Isekai anime to release since Re:Zero is KADOKAWA anime and most isekais are KADOKAWA. They thought they can replicate success of Re:Zero without understanding why Re:Zero is behemoth in the first place. Ironic part is Re:Zero also has subversions of cliche isekai, having dark fantasy world, not having any guilds dungeons and such.
I'm away from my editing rig so let me see if I can name all of the (unnamed) anime in this video from memory and inference, by order of appearance we should have:
Pop Team Epic
Me!Me!Me!
City Hunter '87
Berserk '97
Gurren Lagann
Made in Abyss
Akhashic Records
Lucky Star
Claymore
Kindaichi Shounen no Jikenbo
Royal Space Force
Black Magic M66
(Akira)
Urusei Yatsura
(0079)
(Macross)
Gunbuster
(Lupin III)
(Ashita No Joe)
(Ace Wo Nerae)
Hakujaden
The Wind Rises
Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken
Project A-Ko
Cowboy Bebop
Yu Yu Hakusho
Ghost in the Shell '95
Lodoss War
Patlabor TV
(Bebop)
(Evangelion)
(Sailor Moon)
Evangelion
Bebop
Lain
You're Under Arrest
Remy
Iketeru Futari (I think?)
Spirited Away
[Walt Disney on the Multilevel Camera]
You're Under Arrest
Evangelion
Berserk '97
Bebop
Utena
Bebop
(Sailor Moon)
(Cowboy Bebop)
Stand Alone Complex
Tenchi Muyo
Yu Yu Hakusho
(Sailor Moon)
Huggto Precure
Jigokuraku
Jujutsu Kaisen
08th MS Team
I forgor, wasn't this G-Reco?
Outlaw Star
(Initial D)
Lain
Kinos Journey
FLCL
Mushishi
Texhnolyze
Highschool of the Dead
(Evangelion)
Candidate for Goddess
Highschool DXD
Welcome to the NHK
Space Dandy
Cyberpunk Edgerunners
Animementary: Ketsudan
Mnemnosyne
Ben-To
Bastard
(Nausicaa)
Ninja Scroll
Photon
(Urotsukidoji)
Chained Soldier
Something about instant death powers? Idk and idgaf
Magical Shopping Arcade Abenobashi
(everything in the isekai section is labeled and I don't remember the ones that aren't right now),
The mystery clips are cuts by Shingo Fujii and Yutaka "GOAT" Nakamura in the promo for "Line Novel", some LN site
starting again at 14:49
Oreimo
Highschool DxD
i forgor
Guilty Crown
Ground Control to Psychoelectric Girl (in background)
Seitokai Yakuindomo
Ano Natsu De Matteru
Seitokai Yakuindomo
Vending Machine Isekai
Space Dandy
Casshern Sins
K-On
The Tatami Galaxy
Nichijou
Psycho Pass
Vivy
Vampire Hunter D Bloodlust
Lain
Pompo The Cinephile
Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken
(Girls Last Tour)
(Blend S)
Cyberpunk Edgerunners
Frieren
Dungeon Meshi
Maddox
Ai City
Akira
Vampire Hunter D Bloodlust
Ghost in the Shell '95
Mahoromatic
Bebop Movie
Frieren
Redline
Shirobako
Jigokuraku
Violet Evergarden
Eizouken
Frieren
A Silent Voice
Bebop
The Great Pretender
Paranoia Agent
Dungeon Meshi
Thank you for listing that! I don't know if it would be possible but in future videos, would it be possible to add it directly to the clip?
I've been loving your essays and how they are contextualized into literature, culture and history. Keep up the great work!
@adiyo011 If I do another video like this I'll consider it. I don't want to overwrite the TH-cam closed captions for people who might want/need them, but it might be ugly to have every frame captioned in the video itself.
Urusei Yatsura my beloved
After Chargeman Ken, everything has gone downhill.
Can someone tell me what the anime with the grim reaper looking guy on the horse was? At 17:31
I've been saying this for a long time: the viewing habits of western anime fans - to watch as many new shows as possible that debut every season - is totally unhealthy. Anime is the only entertainment medium where this is encouraged to such a degree, and when you step back for a second to think about what you're doing and compare it to how other forms of media are consumed, you begin to see how ridiculous it is. Imagine if you attempted to watch every new American TV show that debuted in a given year, both on regular TV and on streaming services - or worse yet, attempted to listen to every new song uploaded to Spotify. Honestly, if I did that, I'd probably come away thinking most of it was garbage too. It's so much more sustainable for the long term survival of your interest in the medium to be picky, to focus on just two, maybe three new shows that strike your interest. And hey, maybe go back and check out some of the shows you missed from years (or decades) past while you're at it. That's what I've been doing for years now, and I've been a fan of anime since 1999 whose passion for the medium has never been greater.
@@droopy_eyes It's not that bad a comparison. The number of anime series or for that matter OVA's we got coming West during the 80s and 90s would barely fill a couple of VHS tapes per year - even with the fan trading. It introduces a selection bias; the only way we'd get an anime here in the West was if it was already successful enough in Japan a company thought it'd be worth the time and expense of bringing it over or it had already developed a fanbase in the West that was dedicated enough to produce a fansub or fandub. All that's really happened is that filter has been removed. Back in the 80s and 90s a mediocre or worse anime wouldn't usually make it outside of Japan, today it's on Crunchyroll.
You're right! It's not healthy and it can cause burn out of the passion. Though there's also nothing wrong with fans enjoying a medium so much, they would go out of their way to consume everything they can get their hands on. Right now, everything that is currently coming out. Possibly with the an eventual goal of every title in existence.
These fans just really love the medium. The same way movie buffs love movies or music fans love music. They don't just casually enjoy the thing, but become superfans of the thing instead. They want to know everything there is to know about the thing.
Most people who like an anime are watching maybe one at a time.
Ever hear of the movie pleasant ville?
Not sure most people seems accurate @@banquetoftheleviathan1404
Anime never became bad, it just got easier to consume and we got more of it, and so the good ones became harder to find.
The shelf life for Anime also became way shorter. 90s Anime could keep you hooked for years because it was such a slow drip compared to today. That's another reason why the 90s feel far more "full" or "complete".
Man back in the 90s when you watched anime on TV it would take literally 6 months to a year to go through the series. Or in the case of Dragonball Z, literally 7 years. If you were able to afford anime on VHS, or even find any at all, you would rewatch the same episode several times because that stuff was EXPENSIVE. I remember how I had the first two Sailor Moon tapes and I must have rewatched those 10 times each.
A season of anime on VHS was physically large and could easily cost $200, often more. ($200 in 90s money btw, so $400 or more today.) Then DVDs came around, and if you were actually buying those instead of sailing the high seas, those were $30-40 a season. Now it's all streaming and you binge an entire series in two days for functionally pennies.
Not that it was necessarily better in the 90s or that it's better now, but man how we consume anime has come absolutely so far
The actual answer is that the 2008 financial crisis shifted the earnings of the anime industry from normalish people to the worst otaku scum (who would spend almost all of their disposable income on merch) during the early and mid 2010s. In this environment, fanservice was cheaper and had better ROI than framerates or plot.
Now that the cash flow of anime is shifting to a broader and more global audience, they are toning down their more hentai-like wish fulfilment anime.
@@marcodaddario3965You are thinking of the GREAT animes capable of keeping you hooked for years. There has always been a lot of trash and only some gems between them.
I would even say there are more great animes today than before.
Just the last few years we got a lot of soon to become classics like Vinland Saga, Mushoku Tensei, The Apothecary Diaries, Vivi's azure eyes, Frieren, Violet Evergarden, JJK, Demon Slayer, To Your Eternity, Call of the Night and a ton more I dont mention since I have not seen them yet or they belong to genres I dont follow.
@@hypothalapotamus5293 There's probably more "I can't believe it's not hentai" anime recently than ever, particularly with HiDive's offerings (Gushing Over Magical Girls and Chained Soldier) this season.
I will not tolerate Initial D slander. 😡
what else can you do tho?
@MechanicalRabbits
What I'm saying. I can't believe he threw Initial D under the bus like dat. It's a pretty good Anime and Manga series honestly.
Ikr? I watched it about 4 years ago and it’s an only sports anime I like.
bro first stage is so good... and I didn't watch that anime until I was 30.
@@snazzydrew It ruled so much, I don't think there's any other anime that's made me a fan of an entire new music genre
"Anime was good when I was the one who spent time watching it, everything is cr*p now".
That's such a Hayao Miyazaki thing for Hayao Miyazaki to say.
What shows
There's alot over staturation of degenerate stuff now in Anime. I know fanservice has been a thing since the 80's of Anime. But there wasn't as much of it then compared to now. I'm not saying the 80's or even 70's era of Anime was perfect. It was definitely flawed . But there is alot of good Anime that came out back then , that still hold up by today standards of Anime in 2024. I still like some new Anime coming out too. I just wish the Anime industry was more willing to take creative risks , instead of giving us bad degenerate fanservice Isekai Anime all the time. Like who asked for these shows? I want more Anime like Achient Magnus Bride or Heavenly Delusion or frieren beyond journey's end or Vinland Saga season 2.
@@foregroundeclipse8725
How many series you watch so far and what other sort of creative ideas would you like to see ?
He really is the old man of the industry.
@@foregroundeclipse8725how to tell you've never watched 80s/early 90s anime without telling you've never watched 80s/early 90s anime
Anime nowadays is like surfing through TikTok and TH-cam.
90% of it is a sea full of brainrotting cat vomit that you have to swim through to get to the 10% that's actually good.
"Was it 2007 as it became clear that the old studios were overheating and working their staff to death?"
I think that would have raised Miyazaki's opinion of anime.
Indeed
I'm not so sure. Miyazaki was trying to unionize animators in the 70s.
There's a video where a guy talks about Miyazaki and his ideas of environmentalism through both the movie version and manga version of Nausica of the Wind and he touches briefly upon this.
lol
@@sarahhirsch8919stevem?
Oddly comforting to see that not much has changed. Im sure in the 2030s people will look back at the 2010s and 2020s bundle up all the great shows that came out in the decades and say "Wow anime was so good in those days" when we are currently living through it and saying "There is only a few gems in the sea of trash".
Same goes for every decade in every fandom. With pretty much every thing there are hundreds of movies/songs/books created every year but most are forgettable, 10-20 years later people only remember the few really good ones and compare them to the forgettable examples of the current year.
@nobodyimportant2470 well almost all media. Video games used to have more bangers per year than now. After 2010 the amount of good video games a year has dipped.
My thoughts exactly
@@GutsOfRivianah your just biased cause you haven’t found any good games
@GutsOfRivia that is just a straight up lie. More than 10 fantastic games came out this year and we're only at March. And there's more to come in the next months. Just from the top of my head i can cite Persona 3 Reload, Yakuza 8, Tekken 8, Under Night in Birth 2, Penny's Big Breakaway, Balatro, Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, Unicorn Overlord, Duelists of Eden, Granblue Fantasy Relink... With Helldivers 2 and Dragon's Dogma 2 coming in the near future along with many more
There are more anime than ever so there is more crap anime than ever.
But we continue to get a lot of great anime. In the 2020s so far we've received JJK, Akudama Drive, Vivy, Mushoku Tensei, 86, Ranking of Kings, Odd Taxi, Urusei Yatsura (2022), Spy x Family, Chainsaw Man, Summertime Rendering, Bleach The Thousand Year Blood War, Cyberpunk Edgerunners, Heavenly Delusion, Oshi no Ko, Rurouni Kenshin (2023), Frieren Beyond Journey's End, Suzume, and The Boy and the Heron as far as premieres go and continuations/endings for Attack on Titan, Mob Psycho 100, My Hero Academia, Demon Slayer, Dr. Stone, Gintama, Fruits Basket (2019), and Vinland Saga. I think anime is in a very good place right now in terms of number of quality shows.
What anime needs to improve on is providing better working conditions for animators who are overworked and underpaid and training more future animators.
The Pareto principle always applies - 80% of everything is dreck.
People never take the numbers into account. All they see is a ton of crap anime and it's just because the difference in quantity from then to now!
Yes, it's the sheer volume of releases. There is a LOT of really good stuff coming out these days, but there's also a crapload of junk like in every human artistic endeavour. The problem is also a matter of perception, because people has the unhealthy habit of consuming anime like Japan is gonna stop making animes tomorrow and watches stuff they clearly don't like just because it's "anime" instead of being a little bit more selective.
Glad to see some Akudama Drive appreciation
say what? they brought back fruits bascket and rurouni kenshin??
Personally, as someone who has watched Animes from the 70s onward, while I dont think it ever got "bad"... but I do think there was a quality loss in the 2000s onward. It might just be an American's perception, but before the Anime explosion in the US in the late 90s, they were more selective about what was being brought over here. I used to go to Conventions and buy tons of fan subbed stuff. Stuff that would never come out over here. By the late 90s, everything I was buying fan subtitled was coming out commercially a short while later. I literally remember buying and watching the first few episodes of Cowboy Bebop fan subtitled and thinking "This would be fantastic if it came out in the US, too bad it never will". A few months later it was here, as was everything else I had bought in that last convention run. As Anime exploded, they started bringing over anything and everything Anime. Of course you are going to see a quality dip, but most of it was still top notch. Then you had Japan's economy crash of the 90s, and by the end of the decade is when I feel it really hit the Anime industry hard and I feel like you started to see quality dips, particularity in story, IMHO. When they started making stuff for America instead of the Japanese. It felt, at least to me, like crap was being churned out for money and less care was put into it. There was defiantly some good stuff too in the 2000s on, but it felt at the time like we had hit its peak and was going downhill. And today, it feels like many of the Anime coming out, using newer technology, don't look as good to me. There is a reason why shows like Meglobox boast "00s style animation" as a selling point.
Just an aside about the "it got too horny!" section: There's something incredibly funny about grognards whining about the excess of pervy fanservice in modern anime when there's an interview with Miyazaki from 1979 where he complains about otaku making racy figurines of Clarisse from The Castle of Cagliostro and a year prior Rumiko Takahashi had straight up named the protagonist of her hit manga Urusei Yatsura after the famous pinup model Agnes Lum. Criticising Japanese popular culture for its sexism and fetishisation of youth (sexual and otherwise) shouldn't be off the table-it certainly isn't among Japanese fans, artists or academics-but certain Western fans can be really myopic, ahistoric and frankly shockingly Orientalist about the subject, and that's before you can even get into the undercurrents of sex-negativity and kinkshaming. It makes having a conversation about this stuff in good faith really exasperating.
As for the current state of affairs: I think the anime industry is kind of in a weird spot right now. There's a production bubble rivalled only by the mid 1980s which is inevitably going to burst and screw over a *lot* of people, but that looming threat is only fuelling the expansion of that bubble as different production committees and publishers try to get in while the getting's good and capitalise on the hottest trends as quickly as possible before that stops being viable. As a result, for all that there are many, *many* slapdash productions coming to television and streaming essentially unfinished and all sorts of bad ideas getting greenlit in the hopes of seeing healthy returns, the industry is also producing some truly incredible work at an unprecedented volume, some of it wildly experimental, some of it just representing mastery of the fundamentals. It's kind of an amazing time to be an anime fan, but there's a slight dread to it, too, I guess?
When it comes to what period I think is "the best," however… I dunno, I think my nostalgia bias leans towards the '00s, as I only really started taking a serious interest in anime around 2009 or so-the first series I actually followed as it came over here was Madoka Magica-and so a lot of my formative experiences with the medium were watching series which had come out in the past decade or so mixed with series from the early 2010s which were new and exciting at the time. The '00s also saw the first wave of light novel adaptations when the medium was still fairly new and experimental, as well as the tail end of the post-Eva boom of deeply weird original television anime, both of which speak to my personal sensibilities. That said, there are plenty of newer and older series which I love to death, so while the nostalgia is there, it's not absolute by any means.
Evangelion ruined a generation.
Theres nothing wrong with the pervy anime it is funny
Cut down on Thesaurus
As a 90s person who grew up watching anime (and a bunch of other Asian media) on VHS regularly all my life thanks to access to local import stores, anime has kinda always been full of a little bit of everything both good and bad because like any other medium you just have to find what clicks with you. Now that other people have greater access to the entirety of the medium, that means they're being exposed to the stuff they never would've been before, day-slop included. It's like talking about how American daytime TV is bad because it's all soap operas and reality shows, while singing the praise of K-dramas, forgetting that you're only being exposed to the best shows after all the bad ones have been filtered away by time. People forget that when you consume art, that art is a mirror- it reflects the people who made it, the environment that created them, and the people who are there to witness it.
When you were born the year anime died
My dad was born in Soviet union and he was a total anime fan back then. In 60-70s, USSR showed a ton TOEI anime in cinemas. "Puss in boots", "Taro son of dragon" , "Flying ghost ship" to name the most popular ones.
However, Japan soon stopped making anything like that. Miyazaki did make some great movies which me and my dad really love, but other than that there's not much for him to like about 80s or 90s or 2000s or todays anime
90's or 2000's anime definitely had a specific vibe that can make a person say "They don't make them like they used to" that I think is worth remembering. Building on. That turns into "Anime is bad now because..." for a reason I think is more specific to anime than just nostalgic memories.
I think there is a certain type of person who's ideal of what anime is is a genre or collection of genres, probably related to cool guys doing cool things. And not the full picture of what it is. So anything outside that looks like a perversion. I want to say you can boil it down to anime "becoming bad" whenever the person thinks anime became about "cute girl shows".
Maybe Haruhi? I remember that being a bit of a turning point for some people. Remember, anime got a reputation in the west for being "more mature" than western cartoons, not just because GiTS, Akira and Bebop look a certain way and that perception still has some effect.
The thing is, shows with that 90s feel still come out. Edgerunners and Megalobox come mind. And every singe time you will see comments saying that it's saving anime or they finally made a good show again.
Yeah, I think it's a lot of people that just really like Ninja Scroll and can't admit that that's just they're preference and not what anime is.
I think the main change might just be the format. It's not just anime in that respect - back in the 80s and 90s episodic content tended on average to run to the 60 minute mark, or rather 45 minutes with the commercials. Today the 30 minute episode is more common (which is usually closer to 20 minutes with commercials). In terms of both the production and the consumption side that introduces differences - if you're splitting 720 minutes of content into 12 discreet blocks there's some big differences in what you can do in terms of storytelling compared to splitting it into 24 blocks. Similarly watching 720 minutes of story is going to feel different if it's in 12 chapters than it is in 24. I suspect when people talk about that '90s feel' a large part of it is hearkening back to those 60 - 120 minute OVAs rather than the 30 minute bite sized chunks we get today.
Dororo 2019 had that old anime feel, too.
I might give Edgerunners a chance if you say so. I had no clue it was another anime that has that old feel.
I mean if an anime made it all the way to f****** VHS in America was probably half decent in the first place. Our choices were more restricted back then than what we have now with piracy
90's anime can often be enjoyed by a wider variety of people. They take more influence from live action movies. You can show Cowboy Bebop to your normie dad and he'll likely be "That's pretty cool." You can't do that with alot of modern anime.
@@adrianaslund8605 It's more a quantity thing. If anything it'd be more possible these days simply because there's a greater variety of anime available; in the 90s it was by and large either action or horror, today you can add in RomComs, slice of life, drama, thrillers and pretty much any other genre you care to name, you just might need to dig through a layer of isekai to find them.
Black Lagoon is canonically (or back on some 2000s forums) the most Cowboy Bebop-like anime, at least in the category of “anime for people who don’t like anime.” I didn’t see it in your list of ‘00s classics…
I think visible edge of Black Lagoon turns a lot of those people off. I'd be inclined to agree with you if we were just talking about like the first season but the second season and the OVA leave such a bad taste in my mouth that I'm probably a little unfair towards it. It becomes way more self serious than it can support
@@TheBellman BL is definitely not as singularly great as CB but I'd argue that a lot of its sensibilities (especially its heavy western cultural influences) puts it in the neighborhood of Bebop, and even their subject matter is very similar. I think Second Barrage does ramp up the violence and content matter, though my distaste with it is more like I find the last arc pretty boring (the details of Balalaika's Soviet career aside). I do admit the OVA feels like senseless nihilistic violence, even if the Grey Fox subplot activates the same part of my brain that's into Metal Gear Solid and Spriggan.
BL is one of the best in the loose genre of "things like Cowboy Bebop".
It's problem is that while there's enough humanity in the characters to stop it from being what I call edgy it's still too crass and violent to scratch the same itch for some people. The Bebop crew are basically aristocrats compared to Lagoon crew
@@HonestObserver😂
I read that as bl (boys love) and was super confused how bl came up. 😂
@@lightspaceman5064Bebop crew are an Ocean’s 11 suave heist team while the Lagoon Company features a Tarantino ultra-violent archetype.
Your conclusions are very agreeable. The main issue is that I can't tell sometimes if you're referring to your own opinion or those of other people whose arguments you're talking about, especially with the ecchi stuff. Some clarifications and additional appreciations of detail would've been good too. For example, you called the tsunderes you showed palette swaps of each other but as someone who assumes there's always differences, there's no credence to that claim if I don't understand why they are almost "exactly the same" character-wise. I see RogerSmith2004 already wrote a comment about this. Also, Initial D First Stage is good! But yes I agree that people need to look more broadly to understand that anime is more than just what's popularly trending and to find stuff that appeals to them.
Palette swap tsundere are Louise Shana Taiga and Aria. They are voiced by Rie Kugimiya aka the "Tsundere Queen". The character are particularly notorious and really similar. The voice actress also played a lot of other popular tsundere to the point that she almost defined the character archetype. You can probably find louise Shana and Taiga right away by just searching for the word "tsundere" instead of their name.
15:10 seeing a guilty crown clip in a anime video essay is not on my 2024 bingo card but it is appreciated
guilty crown eh? k thanks that clip looked cool may check it out
Guilty Crown had issues with it's writting unfortunately. :(
I've come to acknowledge that anime has never gotten bad but also that the industry and audience's tastes have completely changed from what it used to be. It is undeniable that some classic anime masterpieces are products of their time with charm and aesthetic that will never be replicated again. by the same token, a handful of anime from this era of anime will also become fondly remembered classics in due time. It is a shame the OVA format has greatly diminished; that was a great source of passion projects being brought to fruition. The multi part movie series Girls und Panzer has gotten really reminds me of those old days.
I’m a genuine fan of late 60s- early 70s anime, I wish more people would talk about how the first ecchi was a shoujo magical girl anime😭
I think that the 90's were peak anime. While there are anime gems started post 2000, like early Naruto, Hunter x Hunter, Ranking of Kings, Gurren Lagann, Odd Taxi, One Punch Man, Mob Psycho 100, and a few others, they feel far and between the diversity, freeness, and absolute madness of the 90's.
To name some I love: Saber Marionette J (got my whole family into anime), Tenchi Muyo OVA, Photon the Idiot Adventures, Dragon Half, Yu Yu Hakisho, Ruroni Kenshin, Ramna 1/2, Magic Users Club OVA, Experimental Lain (more fun on rewatches), Outlaw Star, Trigun (first half of the show), Great Teacher Onizuka, Irresponsible Captain Tylor, Escaflowne, Evangelion, Oh My Goddess, Mini Goddesses, Blue Seed, and Berserk. Technically One Piece (1999), but that's splitting hairs since it's greatest years are much later after it's start. Even some of the more average can be fun like Magic Knight Rayearth, Golden Boy, Love Hina, Sargent Frog, Demon Eyes Kyo, Gasaraki, FLCL, Yamato Nadeshko, Generator Gawl, Gokudo, video girl AI, Slayers, Fushigi Yugi, Lost Universe, Nadesico, etc. It is lower budget than the 80's, but it feels more experimental, and free. It's the decade I return to when I want a good laugh or high kinetic energy. This is no shame to later decades, but I feel this decade just had far more hits for me than any other.
I wasn't a fan of Gundam Wing, never finished it, but it was fine. Digimon Tamers is fine too. I love the soundtrack for .hacksign but it's unbearable to watch after the first 6 episodes. Overall mostly positive memories of these shows and I have gone back many times to rewatch a bunch of them.
A few notable manga for me since I read far less manga than watching anime. Yu-gi-oh's first 7 volumes before it focused on card games. I also strongly recommend Angel Densetsu.
Hikaru no Go, original Fruits Basket, Samurai Deeper Kyo and Angelic Layer aren't 90s anime. Due to there being no year 0 in the calender you can count 2000 as the 90s as long as you count 1990 as in the 80s but you've still listed shows that began or ended in 2001 and later.
@@AC-dk4fpUpdated. I saw a lot of these as a kid. So some of them I assumed were 90's when not. I'll replace them with Escaflowne, Oh my Goddess (and Mini Goddesses, and Fushigi Yugi). Still tons more of great titles, hope you found one or two on the list you hadn't checked out and get to enjoy. :D
@@televisedfeedback6660 You should watch Gungrave, Jubei-chan the Ninja Girl (both seasons) and Kurau Phantom Memory if you haven't. Going to assume you know what Samurai Champloo is.
Trying to watch Red Garden right now pity the American dub is dated. Also need to finish Uta Kata but maybe I should finish Mahou Tsukai Tai first you may be correct.
Sacred Slayer Matoi and Dimension W had descent retro energy if you didn't catch them. Oku-same wa Mahou Shoujo and This Ugly and Beautiful World kind of killed my interest in stuff being high energy and nothing else. Futakoi Alternative is still smart and interesting.
Mini goddesses was unwatchable when I tried to rewatch it. World God Only Knows, School Rumble and Monthly Girl's Nozaki-kun just hold up better for me than 90s comedies.
16-bit Sensation Another Layer was pretty deep recently as well.
You forgot Key The Metal Idol. That's a pretty good Anime ova series.
@@AC-dk4fp
I know most these Anime but there's some of them that I don't know. I'll definitely write them down to watch . I like watching Anime I never heard of .
The problem is that a lot of things need to come together to make a truly great anime. Animation, story, characters, voice acting, and sound design/music, and what makes a show like Frieren stand above the rest is that it actually has all of these, just like Bebop did back in the day. Shonen series like JJK and Demon Hunter get a lot of attention because they're hitting the obvious ones, but will never measure up to the likes of FMA due to weakness of story and character. Then you have the reverse in shows like Ranking of Kings, which although true in style to the source material has art that is offputting to a lot of viewers, despite a fantastic story and characters. Where the Isekai glut fails is when the majority of shows are more or less doomed to failure because no attempt is made to make even one of these things stand out, so for every Mushoku Tensei (which I'd claim hits all those categories at least in S1, but a point can be made against one specific character) you wind up with a dozen of The Great Cleric, KamiKatsu, or the like that are so disposable that you know a second season will never happen. Worse still is that is seems to have devolved into ultra-specific subgenres like "reborn as an otome villainess", "kicked out of the hero's party", or "I want to lead a quiet life doing specific activity" where there's show after show after show when it should have stopped at one - it's like if every US network had made a "bar set in Boston comedy" in the 80s because Cheers was popular.
You had me till the Initial D slander. Everything about the show from the music to the horrid 2000s cg cars gives it the perfect level of goofy that has endeared it to people for so long.
The way the characters look and acted as well. It's so unique compared to the generic slush we get today. I don't drive nor am I a fan of cars and I loved the first season my brother first watched it when he was 30 and he loved it, went further than me. It has a certain charm to it.
The annoying thing about Isekai is how it limits creativity. So often I find myself thinking, "why does this NEED to be an Isekai?", and the answer I keep coming up with is that the author couldn't be bothered to build a world distinct from videogame mechanics, Japanese cultural familiarity or with characters that didn't need gary-stu foreknowledge of a previous life to exploit.
Does Ainz Ool Gown need to be a Japanese salary man? The author tries to have his cake and eat it too by having all the important decisions essentially decided by Ainz's Lich intelligence and nature that overwrites any impulse the human may have anyway. The human internal monologue is only a comical façade for the actual lich character of Ainz.
Does Rudeus Greyrat need to be an Otaku NEET? Why couldn't his be the story of a prodigy of his age unravelling the mysteries of the world? Is it because the author is a disgusting Otaku who can't help self inserting into an incestuous sexual relationship with a twelve year old?
What impact does Naofumi Iwatani's origin from earth have on his story? None at all, but we need an excuse to shoehorn videogame mechanics into a fantasy setting.
Why does Ken Usato need to be Japanese? or Rimiru? or Tanya Degurechaff? Why does she HAVE to be a Japanese salaryman? What is added except an excuse to contrive this character into a cute little girl instead of an alternative history Clausewitz or von Manstein with magic artillery and a personal story with alt-God?
I'm sure every author self-inserts, and I'm certainly not against power-fantasies, but it's just so shameless in most Isekai and the quality of the authors in the junk food literature that is the LN market really strains my patience.
Look at the eminence in the shadow, I like it but it's mainly just 70% comedy and 30% flashy action for it's own sake, it does fall flat sometimes when it tries to drag along it's serious story, but that's the tension that this type of genre entails. It makes serious stories contrived and funny stories weighed down. Maybe the only option is to commit one way or the other like Konosuba or SaO, (even if the latter wasn't well executed).
Been watching since the 80s. Sturgeon's rule applies- It was always 90% shit.
Pretty much. I'm sure I've forgotten more crap anime than I remember. The funny part is how often today's 'great' anime jogs the memory - Frieren? Basically 3x3 eyes for Gen Z ....
@@markwatson8714 This is my absolute favorite way of discussing(dismissing) new anime ngl.
Bunny Girl Senpai? Haruhi for Zoomers
Darling in the Franxx? Gainax for Zoomers
@@TheBellman
What are you're thoughts on Vinland Saga season 2 or Gundam Witch From Mercury? Both are pretty good Anime in my opinion. I really liked the Anime ID-Invaded, Pet , Sonny Boy, To You're Eternity and Acca 13 as well.
@@markwatson8714
I never expected someone to mention 3x3 eyes. I renember watching the Anime ova and seeing the Manga in middle school online. I was born in 2001. I think Frieren is pretty good. I totally get that it's not for everyone. Some people like other Anime more than Frieren.
@foregroundeclipse8725 I like the Vinland Saga manga a lot and it seems like a decent adaptation. Haven't gotten to GWitch yet but my friends like it which is a good sign. Have only watched one or two episodes of those other shows but I liked them all well enough. I have a Plan to Watch list a mile long and a lot of the shows are recent
For me I just like retro in general whether it’s from the 80s, 90s or early 2000s or even 2012 idc I’m a sucker for anime before the industry blew up around the world I grew up in the early 2000s so it’s definitely a nostalgia thing I’m not gonna lie I do look back on early 2000s shows and 90s shows and movies with rose tinted glasses because I was only a dumb kid
I think I'm more drawn to the older style of old Anime and it's experimental phase . I totally get where you're coming from. I think I'm a little biased towards old Anime myself . I like new Anime too, but I prefer older Anime .
OP: you cant say you love 90s anime because you love 1 90s show!
Also OP: shows multiple examples of great 90s shows, of which, i can add more examples, if i chose to.
😐
Can add more examples
@@juan-ij1le berserk, slayers, any of the 90s gundam series.
I made a blog post about this when KILLlaKILL was released, and the "How saved is anime today?" memes were abundant, and I still maintain my thesis that western audiences are conflating "community" with "good". Your anime golden age took place when you were in your anime club in high school and it was easy to gush with others, to watch communally. Now that you're an old fart it's hard to find those communities, even in web spaces, especially the social media based in conflict, like twitter.
Add in that there was the Adult Swim explosion circa 1999, and they had YEARS of backlog of GOOD series to flood the airwaves with, and there's just this perception.
I am amused of how murica people think that their expirience applies evrywhere in the world
I don't know, man. I feel like you cherry picked your statements to make up a straw man argument to prove a point that is somewhat pointless. Not to say that there aren't any people who say that anime got bad or whatever, but this discussion could go a lot deeper and be a lot more meaningful. You ended up going on a lot of tangents that didn't add anything to the theme and didn't reach any conclusions. Something tells me that you didn't do a lot of research to make this video, and your statement comparing Madhouse to Mappa kind of proves it. This feels like a twitter thread stretched for over 20 minutes.
"When did Anime become bad?"
This is a trick question, right? Right.
This video left me with a lot of thoughts on it, overall I thought the video was interesting. Sorry for the long wall of text:
1:13 This was a strong point to start the vid with, considering people always seem to use these Miyazaki quotes and think he's talking about isekai anime or something, I highly doubt the guy even knows what those are. Normally when you hire animators for a production, you look at their past work, but Ghibli sidesteps this completely. For How Do You Live, there was a very strict test to apply with specific things they wanted you to reproduce, including sending your submissions via snail mail.
3:47 Aw, Iketeru Futari isn't a classic, but it had its funny moments.
4:11 Is there a source on this? People tend to say that, but a friend of mine who is trying to watch every OVA ever made seemed to think that the production value from 90s OVAs was better. Either way, I can't say for sure as my knowledge on OVAs from the time is quite limited.
4:45 Ok, I love this! I've been constantly making a habit of trying to organize everything by what president was in office. Like for Precure seasons, "Bush era Precure", "Obama era Precure", etc. I mean you already see this when people talk about Showa era anime or tokusatsu, or like Heisei era. Why not with presidents?
4:56 I agree with this, especially when people obsess over "90s aesthetic" and it's legit just Sailor Moon or Toshihiro Kawamoto designs. Like there were other aesthetics nor were those really the dominating look of the decade lol
6:58 This is a bold statement. I haven't watched Initial D so I can't say for sure what I'd think.
9:09 I recall Sho Aikawa talking about this many years ago, where he felt like late night was the new OVAs in that you can show a lot more kind of stuff. And I do think that is applicable in a number of ways, though TV anime at the time could also be pretty racy even before late night. The Rumiko Takahashi works from the time (UY, Maison, Ranma) had a lot more fanservice than say Inuyasha in 2000 did. There was also stuff like Machiko-sensei and Pastel Yumi.
11:36 While I'd say the Rie Kugimiya shows had similar appeals, I think Shana, Taiga, and Louise are all very different characters (I'm not too familiar with Hidan no Aria, so I can't say about that). Shana is more focused on her duty as a Flame Haze, and so a lot of the show is about her experience with Yuji changing her from being overly focused on her mission to being more open with herself and being more open to other people. She doesn't even have a name at first. You can really see this development in Season 3 where Shana and Yuji kind of change positions in the show, where she has to face off against him. There's also a strong family dynamic between them, where you see Wilhelmina interact with them but also Yuji's mom, so they feel closer with their general circle than in the other two works.
With Toradora, one of Taiga's main conflicts is her problem with her father, which isn't really a conflict in Shana at all. And Taiga herself is portrayed as someone who acts really tough, but then you see the real her and she's a total klutz, she is messy, she sneezes due to all the dust in her home. Ryuji has this selflessness about him, and he isn't viewed well by the school either due to his eyes making him look scary. So they end up agreeing to help each other out, grow closer as a result, and they win appreciation of the school, whereas Yuji from Shana doesn't really have an issue with the other students.
In Zero no Tsukaima, it's speaking a lot more to a greater societal issue with the world. Louise is a product of her society. Her family is very high class, and she wants to prove herself, but is bullied and looked down on by her classmates because of her poor magic ability. When she summons Saito, she has to grow to reconcile with her feelings for him considering he's a "familiar" and far from this high class noble (not to mention Louise gets jealous easily due to her own insecurities). The story of ZnT focuses heavily on what it means to be a "noble" and challenging a lot of the formalities. I think very much of the conflict later on in the series where Louise tries to make Saito act more "noble like" in order to win the approval of her sister, Eleonore, only to prove how ridiculous all of this is. The other important thing is that Saito isn't exactly a great person himself either, since he tends to be incredibly lustful and thoughtless. Unlike in Shana and Toradora, there's this very antagonistic dynamic between the two of them, where Saito will try to get back at Louise. Ultimately, in the series, Louise being able to perform void magic and Saito inheriting the power of Brimir is what allows them to stop the war and prove themselves.
You can find this common thread in all of them where they "open up more" but the backdrop and their general attitude I think are different. Shana is definitely most mellow of them, and she starts out a lot more quiet. Louise is the most abrasive due to her upbringing and her society. I could go on, but I realize that perhaps I am just being the database animal here lol.
12:42 I remember Outbreak Company. Ichiro Sakaki is a pretty prolific light novel writer with many successful works that have been made into anime including this, Scrapped Princess, and Chaika.
13:13 It's hard to really ignore that a lot of the isekai and how they are written are influenced by the platforms they are on (Arcadia, Shousetsuka ni Narou) by amateur writers trying to cater to a TH-cam-esque algorithm. In those conditions, it's really difficult to write a story the same way as you have to keep sort of adjusting the story to what the audience wants, otherwise you are just going to lose your audience. So there is a difference between works like Outbreak Company and Marchen Madchen, which were written by light novel authors with years of work under their belts, compared to something like Death March.
15:18 Yeah I get kind of bummed out by that fact, because I do think there's tangible differences between a number of these works that make them interesting to me for different reasons. But certain genres kind of get simplified down a lot by people unfortunately.
16:48 Was Girls' Last Tour a commercial failure? I remember it being one of the more loved shows that season. Admittedly it wasn't as popular as Blend S (in both BD sales and MAL popularity at least), but the manga for GLT is quite beloved, and the show had its audience. I wouldn't say it was like Warau Salesman New or anything.
19:13 I think the problem is the lack of proper training, so you can't really bring enough new animators in to offset the older ones that are dying or are retired. I don't think getting people off of Twitter is the answer if all of their stuff is being corrected heavily. People's perceptions are definitely coloring it, because it's happening to anime they care about. When series like Kiss Dum and Polyphonica were melting in real time in 2007, it wasn't the big shows (people would say this about Gurren Lagann not knowing who Osamu Kobayashi is). Now it's happening to One Punch Man, Jujutsu Kaisen, originals like Wonder Egg that garner a huge audience, so they are seeing it. But I don't think it's unfair to say that it is getting harder and harder to make a great production every year due to the industry circumstances and how fragmented it's become.
Either way, I do understand this video is talking about very specific people. I don't have any particular issue with more niche or otaku aimed stories, as long as it's interesting to me is all that matters. But I get a lot of people are into anime for the social aspect and just want something they can talk about with their friends. That's why I always have a hard time believing that stuff will get "rediscovered as classics" years later, because it feels like to me people are caught in the seasonal grind specifically so they can be part of the conversation every week. I feel like it's even happening with "classics" where something like Spice & Wolf is getting remade specifically for people who don't want to watch a show from 2008.
But that's where I am at, thanks for putting the vid together. I'd love to see the sources in the description or pinned comment, just as a general practice so I can read more about it.
I can't find great sources to the effect, but Girls Last Tour but based on the BD sales GLT barely broke even for White Fox. Obviously there might be alternate revenue streams (BD sales were already a questionable metric in 2017) and the show might have had a long tail since it has seemed to gain some cult status, but it definitely didn't pop. It was just the best example of cult anime still being made and being passed over by the mainstream. The fact that there wasn't a season 2 or seemingly anyone else picking up Tsukumizu for animation seems like evidence enough that it wasn't rewarding.
Yea I'm not being hard on Outbreak company, it's a fun series, it just has had limited staying power. I don't really read a lot of LNs so I'm not really suited to covering the topic but there's definitely a lot to be said about how there are structural incentives that shaped the storytelling of LN's after the early 10s.
I definitely can imagine how there is a cause for concern in terms of the animation workforce but given how much better basically everything today looks compared to the dozens of A-1 Pictures shows from the mid-late 10s I have a hard time believing that there is that strong of a downwards trend.
@@TheBellmanYeah I see what you mean about Tsukumizu. It is a shame if the work didn't pop off, since I think the later developments in the manga really make the work come together in a big way. As well as it being a quality work, I think it had that memetic aspect to it what with the dabbing in the OP that could catch people's attention (though Blend S at the time also had the big OP meme).
I feel like there's someone out there (not me) who could make a whole piece about how memes have helped certain anime gain more of an audience.
In regard to Miyazaki’s comment, I think more context needs to be added. If I’m not mistaken, he’s talking about a cultural form of anime consumption that shifted from a child centered demographic, to a teenage/otaku culture that transformed anime to what it is now (good and for worse). I think that’s a distinctive cultural trend that you can’t just brush off as “my decade is the best era”, or simply a medium of consumption that is like anything else westerners consume. Anime culture is very integral to the identity of Japanese youth post war, and with that, a lot of the internal dialogue within the medium reflects that identity. I think people tend to forget that now that anime is mainstream and globalized.
The video is on point. It just boils down to two things:
1. there's a LOT more of everything than there was 30-40 years ago.
2. There are a LOT more ways for fans to blast unqualified opinions and bad takes.
Thats all there is to it. There's always going to be good anime and bad anime. Some genres die (real robot mecha for instance) but overall nothing changes. Well except for Shinkai lowering the standards of what people consider to be "artistic" anime
If I would add a number 3, it would be, "3. people need to stop worshipping Cowboy Bebop."
It's pretty insane to go from talking about how making generalized statements is bad and then 1 minute later saying that watching Initial D first stage is objectively a miserable experience. Kind of hard to take a video essay seriously at that point.
Overall great video... But c'mon, Initial D S1 is good!
getting older and not being able to relate to high school anime characters but can relate to spike from cowboy bebop is why , and the sexualization of really young characters is weird after you are 30
Most western (U.S) Japanese animation fans are not the best people to listen to when it comes to amation criticism. Sadly, a lot of people have a myopic and limited view of the animation on a global level. If they say what was coming out of Europe since the 40s they would lose their mind. Big mention to Soviet Animation and Hungarian animation in particular (France goes with out saying)
Is there any good place to see any?
@@MechasterReal youtube is pretty cool. web archive as well. I reccomend looking up lists on loneliness and then looking for the ones that look interesting to you. Some really good ones are The Son Of The White Mare and The Time Masters
nah its the weebs who shouldn't be taken seriously
@@danielg.w5733 what is ”loneliness”? Is it like a list hosting website?
I think it’s because those sometimes don’t have english translation
What many don't understand about what director's like Miyazaki say when they talk about anime having fallen is that they grew up in a time where anime barely existed. There was a wondrous feeling that anything was possible with this medium. they are primarily disgusted with the indulgence and gluttony that the medium has become known for. It's part of the reason that many in the west can't take anime seriously. It has never been grown up and seemingly never will so long as people continue to "consume" anime. Miyazaki has talked about certain big budget Hollywood studios and American television in the exact same way he talks about anime. The artistry of the medium has been subsumed by the profit motive and in this effort the vast majority of what gets made (or funded) tend to all be the same shade of stupid designed with tropes that exploit lonely young men (with some rare exceptions here and there). A work of art to someone like Miyazaki is meant to comment on life, not make you escape from it, not delude you into ridiculous unhealthy fantasies. This in essence is the problem with not just Anime, but Cinema as a whole. A sentiment I imagine many great director's of time past like Tarkovsky, Bresson, Kurosawa, etc.. would all agree with.
This is most likely the point lmao. It got sidetracked as soon as it was brought up. It may as well not be there. And with it, the same old tired discussion
Frankly in terms of the hit rate on artistically or even just aesthetically interesting works coming out, TV anime is in a much better place than Hollywood cinema. The latter truly is stuck in a rut of producer-mandated creative mediocrity and technical incompetence that there seems to be no clear way out of. You still have to do some digging to find worthwhile TV anime, but on average it's much less compared to the digging needed to find worthwhile mainstream cinema.
I watch 90's anime simply because i like styles and animation. While good animation of 90's impresses me more than good animation of modern anime, even bad animation of 90's Anime looks more appealing that bad animation of modern anime.
Not to mention i love when characters sometimes move like cardboard cutouts. I also just love limited animation style.
I love watching obscure 90's stuff as well. I like it even more than mainstream stuff. I love GS Mikami.
Anime in the 80/90/ early 00 were classics you remember and revisit still today ... after that anime turns mostly to soulless fastfood, especially the overpresent Isekai crap nowaday ... might still fill shortly some basic desires, easy consumed, fast forgotten, soon replaced with something identical/similar ... The soul and diversity that once made the Anime Genre is mostly gone today (also something very similar is to be noticed in the Video Game Industry) ... that make it very hard for people to feel something or emotionally (or financially or timewise) serious invest into it Anime ...
An other "fail" is the americanisation of animes - it does not refer to the lack of showing nipples (something even present in old stuff like Gundam, Macross or Ranma), but also to not making meaningfull endings to most stories in hopes to maybe create a neverending franchise
idk what you are talking about but I first watched inital D in 2022 (and Ib have no praticular interest in cars) and I LOVE every season, also the dfirst season. I hate when people genrealize something to be 'bad' when it's not even the truth. I rewatched Initial D countless times and love it every single time.
Ive come back to it like 20 times in my entire life. And i love it every time
Great video, as someone who is only tippiing their toes in the 90s and 80s era myself and luckily never got through the slog that is watching anime seasonally (if something is good i tend to just watch it after its fully finished) i sometimes tend to forget that what im watching from those eras are often what people consider the peak of that era as all the trash has long since been forgotten. And while i have a strong preference for the aesthetic of this era of anime thats also something thats purely bias. Youre right its not fair to compare every show that comes out this season to the 3 best shows/movies from the 90s, mostly when the people saying they prefer the 90s would rarily have watched more than 5 shows from that decade.
That being said as someone who has a strong preference for the mid 90s to the mid 2000s of anime i wonder if there isnt more to go off here or a deeper way to look at it. I feel like what might be a worthwhile comparison is to compare the last decade of anime to that decade in terms of what are the most highly watched / rated shows per year. What i found was that (of course alligned with my taste) almost every year after 95 to 2000 (i havent really compared past this), the top 3 to 5 anime shows or movies would consistently be better than anything
that people rate highly or is popular from the last 5 years of anime. With maybe the exception of 2023 which i think was a really good year for anime all things considered.
On the other other hand i feel like iim very biased because a lot of the shows i see that are popular are shows that i just dont like, popular shows like aot or spyxfamily arent bad they just arent shows i enjoy which might make me biased in this comparison. Uh this long winded explenation is here because im kinda curious on what your take is on this? comparing the best shows of the late 90s or early 2000s compared to the besst shows of the last decade would you say these 2 are still equal in quality or do you think there is a clear winner in terms of quality (be that narratively or visually) between the two.
Uh anyway great video, ill stay watching your stuff in the future !!
Frieren Beyond Journeys End is pretty good
@@obarich oh yeah i havent checked the anime of that one out because ive been on some other stuff but i adored the manga and heard its a great adaptation so i have nothing but high hopes for it
Nah, you're right. The peaks of the 90s and 00s are higher than the current peaks, even if they were also just diamonds in the rough. As much as I like its spiritual successor, Madoka Magica, nothing is even remotely as ambitious and extremely thematically dialled in as Revolutionary Girl Utena.
I only watch old shows because I trust in survivorship bias to only give me the good stuff
> Shows like Initial D first stage are objectively a miserable experience
öÖö
This video cometary has convinced me to never watch anime again...
Good
Well.if that's all you got from this,that just means you never liked anime in general in the first place,you just enjoyed the pearls with original takes of the year . In every kind of medias,there is always masterpieces that come every once in a while, you can't just ''expect'' to get them to be served at you on a silver plate all the time.
Or, dont watch shit anime. Unfortunately if youre like me thats basically all of it
@@vodkawhisperer3923 I'm okay with people like you and OP not watching anime
I’m not trying to sound like an old head but, I feel like every anime now kinda feels the same now. More in the character archetypes I mean everyone getting a power up the main character always being a loser in the beginning and the side characters are just vegeta clones . Idk just feel like the creativity is at a stand still rn
I think its a little cheap honestly that you only looked at the new shows for two seasons in the 1990s. Cause scrolling down a little there was tons of bangers that were continuing DBZ, Yu Yu Haskusho etc.
I saw all of initial D for the first timetwo years ago and I loved it. I don't think it's a miserable experience at all.
Never really. Just the amount of bad shows increased. There are still a ton of good ones released, it's just harder to find them now.
Anime was heavily curated by television companies back in the day, we only got to see the 3-4 good series that year that executives lovingly handpicked out of 100's of trashy yaoi/yuri fanservice anime. Now we get to see the 100's of series that wouldn't have made it onto Cartoon Network or SciFi channel. Of course most of them are bad. It's like if you exported every single daytime tv sitcom and soap opera to Japan and expected them all to be well received. There would probably be a few hits like Friends, but I doubt American comedy or drama would appeal to most Japanese and they would think we were just a bunch of horny people who make hamburger jokes all day.
This is why I prefer reading manga
Visual Novel chads stay winning
Bruh this video basically summarises my feelings on anime at this point, pretty much hit the nail on the head
I truly think there is nothing more blinding to humanity than nostalgia.
5:30 I throw Samurai Champloo, Outlaw Star and Trigun in the similar to Cowboy Bebop bin, especially Trigun. It is wholly unique though, nothing will completely map on to Cowboy Bebop though
I feel like the rot really began around the mid 2010s. Make no mistake, terrible anime has always existed, but it doesn't seem like we get those occasional iconic gems anymore that usher in new anime fans. I'm talking about the Evangelions, the Death Notes, the Gurren Laganns, the Madoka Magicas, the Attack on Titans. We don't even see any great sports anime anymore like Haikyuu!! or Kuroko no basket. It's still primarily over-done isekai and harem anime.
Evangelion was not original nor unique. It was a copy and paste of most Animes that came before it..
Death Note was mid.
Basically, anime as a medium always trash but they have tons of great stuff hidden under them
Some of my all time favorites today have grown to encompass: Steins;Gate, Psycho Pass, Ergo Proxy, Higurashi (VN included), School Days, Re:Zero, Asobi Asobase, Konosuba, Danganronpa, Hell’s Paradise, Death Note, 86 Eighth Six, RDNDBGS, Texhnolyze, Another, Angel Beats, Mirai Nikki (mostly for Yuno), Eden of the East, Charlotte, Engage Kiss and Kaguya-Sama: Love Is War just to name a few.
But all of these instill a different feeling within me and can be anything from similar to one another or quite different.
I personally usually enjoy plots and themes that are of a darker setting or have a lot of concepts of existentialism and philosophy.
I love anime that’s rich in its characters and the plot of the anime itself. I also account for things such as music, art style, cinematography, direction, dialogues and voice acting. All of these elements come into play when creating any anime and are all important elements for creating a lasting and memorable experience.
I also enjoy psychological thrillers and horror related media, such as Higurashi, which can be VERY dark. My tastes can be quite diverse and even so for what I consider to be some of my favorite anime. But I always usually tend to consider darker plots, themes of existentialism or anime with characters that suffer greatly or face relentless tragedy to be more appealing and considered to be a Magnum Opus by my own standards.
However, when such media is quite effective and well crafted, it truly affects you, you can empathize with it and feel yourself moved by its contents. Thus, over time you may find your feelings and thoughts being swayed by what you consume, as an effective artist will pluck the harp-strings of your heart with ease.
Sometimes I’ve found myself so moved by a piece of media, a movie, show, anime, music, novel or speech that I can feel it weigh on my psyche. I’m reminded of when I first played through the VN of Higurashi: No Naku Koro Ni and began to feel the madness of Keiichi during the Onikakushi arc. The music, sound effects, writing, characters and theme were all so well down developed that I began to ponder on just how powerful paranoia and terror can be.
It should be needless to say, that consuming too much content of such a dark or deep caliber can even be deadly to your psyche and you could find yourself in a fit of despair, wrath or mania.
The human mind can be quite malleable to outside stimuli, sometimes acting quite subtly in its effect, or quite drastic.
Therefore, I always like to stress to everyone that it’s important to mend your mind, to meditate, find some way to make peace within you or consume something that brings you a sense of childlike joy or silliness.
The work is indeed quite a macabre and painful place, yet, it’s not always this way, there’s always glimmers of hope within hopelessness.
In a sense, this is how I feel about my guilty pleasures, one of which is indeed harem anime, or romcoms with a heavy focus on the comedy and a laxness and ease to the romance. For example, ‘Girlfriend, Girlfriend’ or ‘Aharen-San’ and ‘More Than a Married Couple but Not Lovers’. It’s something I can usually chuckle at, relax to and feel peace from.
There’s plenty of Harem anime that I’ve watched wherein, I’ll feel a sense of embarrassment or perhaps, bashfulness; or find it humorous as a concept or the jokes to be funny. But I very much consider Harem genre to a guilty pleasure, I just believe it has its purposes outside of… well, you know.
I'm more of a casual viewer & less of a consumer when it comes to animated works produced from japan. I mostly prefer a story that has two or more genres or atmosphere like it could be a combination of scifi, thriller, adventure or action. As well as other narrative elements like the story being both character + plot focused at the same time while still maintaining a theme or message which i not only find stimulating or immersive for my adhd brain but also makes the work alot more convincing & meaningful to digest.
I am not too big on romcoms, power fantasies, isekai & fighting/sports series which seems to dominate in today's anime industry.
In my opinion there's not enough anime with that Saturday Morning feel to them.
Look at Samurai Pizza Cats, Shinzo, Tonde Buurin, Flint the Time Detective. I want to see 25-50 episode long anime with "Story of the week" kind of vibes. One of old Anime i'm currently watching is Brave Express Might Gaine, and it's bloody gorgeous. Same with modern mecha, i don't see those "Saturday Morning" vibes in them. They mostly too plot heavy, not enough simple "Story of the week" stuff.
These do exist they just don't get liscensed or get dubbed straight to English language TV so you don't notice them. When people talk about watching 'all the anime' they're talking about the late night timeslot stuff not all the cartoons actually being aired in Japan.
Fansubbing got killed off by streamed simu-dubs that's why it appears like kids shows stopped existing. Then some of the high quality kids shows get randomly region locked even when they do appear subtitled on official streaming sites.
Mecha shows are definitely much rarer but there's still more PreCure than one can ever care to watch if you really want an ok Saturday morning series.
This video popped up on my feed to check out and I'm glad that even with the title being "click bait"-ey, this was a great look/discussion about anime as a whole for what's truly considered a good or bad show. You've gained a new sub for this, thank you.
@ The Bellman
You forgot about Key The Metal Idol, Texhnolyze, Jin-Roh, Ergo Proxy, Now And Then, Here and there, Escaflowne, Angel's Egg, The original Legend Of The Galatic Hero's, Captain Harlock, Galaxy Express 999, Rainbow Rokubou No Shichinin, Casshern Sins, Ashita No Joe , Rose of Versailles (etc)
Calling danmachi just "videogame setting" is unfair to it, Danmachi is way more dnd than it is just "videogame" having some videogame terminology like status or monsters dropping magic stones are there to enhance the story in the former's case and expand the worldbuilding in the latter's case and not because "it's easy to appeal to a videogame demographic this way" which is the actual issue with isekai anime that use videogame-y stuff
Anime peaked around 1985-1995, give or take a few years in either direction.
As someone who grew up in the 80s 90s and went thru 2000s as an adult.
I still felt 2010 were truly the peak years.
There’s tons of actual good show during that time.
I can name you total shat in the 90s and early 2000s which were totally made for fan pandering
Tf? You’re completely wrong. Anime peaked around mid 2000’s like most things
Anime peaked in 2007. 1984-2007 were the best time for anime.
Wow! You went the entire length of the video without mentioning Sturgeon's Law. Frankly I'm impressed.
It’s funny that people call all anime bad when they barely go out of their comfort zone to find stuff because my favorite anime Kaiji came out in 08 and nobody talks about it in the casual sphere and I found it because I wanted something different and went out of my comfort zone. The quote from Miyazaki makes me laugh mainly because when you look at who he is and what he actually did for the industry which was bumfuck nothing other than making movies, the guy didn’t pass on anything to any protégés because he hated them or they hated him. Even then Miyazaki trusts no one but himself and is a miserable man because of it he has no true influence on the industry because he didn’t pass anything on to the next generation so if anything the “reason” anime became bad was his fault. I hold the belief that only 20-30% of all media ever made is actually good and that percentage is going to get smaller as time goes on and more media gets made. I think this because as time goes on more and more generic slop will be put out because of this most media is just forgettable not because it’s “bad” but because it has no substance to it and we’re really seeing that now because of TH-cam and social media.
It always was bad and simultaneously it never was. That's because it isn't a monolith.
11:52 how dare you, I'm a telecomms engineer, that joke hit me like a truck
In the 80s and 90s anime was pushed to the limit no CGI, now everything is computer generated and no new ideas we have this thing now isekai just a copy paste
Great video. Which anime are at the bottom left and top middle @ 14:55?
Jormungand and Katanagatari
Anime became "bad" when the floodgates of accessibility were opened and we were no longer limited by the cherry picked selection given to us through television.
The production of anime has also skyrocketed in the past 15 years, so naturally more of something means there will be more bad content coming out. Certain genres have seen better days in the past (i.e. OVAs, isekai, mecha, shoujo), but other such as shounen-fighting, sports, seinen, sci-fi, and even fantasy rival the "good 'ol days" if not better in some aspects. The best part of modern anime is the variety of genres explored at all, which is easy to see as long as you aren't completely focused on the negatives and mountain of repeated isekai/ecchi anime airing each season.
I don't know what people yapping about there are tons of good released this year also last year anime is getting better and better look at Marvel it's dead, dc is long gone and Hollywood movies aren't doing any good too only anime industry standing tall.
anime was always bad, we just only remember the few good examples in the sea of bad which gives us a skewed perspective that anime somehow got bad, same with music
The brief instant that you showed Record of Lodoss War at 2:53 gave me chills. Wtf why does that anime do that to me
Almost my thoughts exactly and I love the variety of clips you pulled making this a very engaging watch. You did good, dude!
I’m a huge fan of older anime but that’s because it’s hand drawn. Hand drawn animation in general is so incredible to look at. It can look as gritty or as colorful as you want, there’s a distinct style to each work, and when you watch older stuff like Speed Racer, Ashita No Joe, and Gundam, or even 80’s stuff like Akira or Angel’s Egg, you can picture the work that went behind it. I just don’t like most newer stuff because of the generic, plastic art style of them.
Me too. That's why I always collect anime dvds/blu rays from the 70s 80s 90s because there are so many titles I've never seen and I love revisiting childhood favorites from my Toonami days. Like my favorite anime of time is Urusei Yatsura (1981). It's just the joy of discovering something new that's old. It's like treasure hunting.
I agree on your take that when people compare the past to the present, the past is often this amalgamation of cherry picked shows from decades, while the 'present' could just be this years shows(or even just the current season). There's a mix of good and bad every year, and for me there's been some great shows in recent years that hold up just as well as stuff I liked 20-30 years ago.
Ppl started tuning into the most generic anime’s like
“Shield hero”
When back in the day we would’ve assumed with a titles like that , that it wasn’t gonna be anything than a generic anime. Now these days they purposely give anime some goofy ass names . Anime to me used to be more mature than American animation but with the isekai anime taking over it feels like that is reversing and yes I know we still have more mature content to watch but it doesn’t feel like the focus honestly . Can’t wait to see Kaiju no 8 tho
I do think (from threads I've read of people that actually know the topic) that you're overlooking a bit of nuance with regard to the rise of Narou-Kei series. But otherwise, nice job. Basically true enough here.
I also have no idea who Miyazaki is as a person. (I've never met the guy.) But I think a lot of people over here project the caricature of a "wholesome patriarch" of their family onto him. Some nice, sexless guy who's only ever been kind to them and did nothing else in their lives. (This despite the fact that if grandpa didn't have some form of libido you wouldn't exist.) I think it happens because of the close association he has to Disney and people's view of Walt which is also very skewed in the "he was a wholesome christian man" kind of way he tried to outwardly portray himself. Seeing clips like the Nausicaa boobs comment or the one about Kiki endear me to him more than his "anime is trash" takes because they seem more genuine and haven't been politicized as much. But then again, is he like me? Or is he much worse than me? I don't know. But I follow that gold-standard Francine Alice Frensky advice as often as I possibly can: "Sometimes it's best not to know anything about celebrities."
I know that's a weird tangent. I'll leave now.
the coloring in 90s cell animation was more vibrant than the bland washed digital inks used now
When it became mainstream, so that would be 2019
Original anime being non-existent nowadays has definitely dampened my experience with modern anime. Wolfs rain, eureka seven, bebop, haibane renmei, lain, rahxephon, Arjuna earth maiden. At one point of time my criteria for watching shows what "angle" the show is as going for not necessarily the synopsis and I really can't do that with modern anime. Even when it looks great, it feels way more tame than before on many levels whether it be themes, pacing, tone ect. What I favored most and most looked forward in the medium to was anime exploring more topical subject on a conceptual level, in a way live action couldn't. We don't have any shows that use science or philosophy as a conceptual backdrop anymore. World building generally feels way more phoned in than it did before leading to most shows that have promise for me being mired down by excessive exposition and tropes applied even lazier than they were in the goofiest 90's straight to video camp. I'm retrospect I realize many of the shows I like from that era were the culmination of many factors that are well beyond the reach of, well anyone. They were the unique brain children of people we only got to hear from because of it's profitability, which has since waned. I think anime was better back then but I will acknowledge that no amount of complaining will bring it back.
Haibane Renmei was a manga adaptation it was just a doujin.
Peachy pretentious stuff like Wolf's Rain was never the deepest style of anime anyway.
Orbital Children was modern SF in 2022 and sucked because of it. Futurism sucks right now anime is just following the trend.
I disagree severely with your comment that initial D first stage is "a miserable experience" (it's actually the best season by an insane margin) but regardless I agree with you on just about everything else. I just love the way hand painted cel animation looks, and that's not nostalgia, I didn't start watching anime until a few years ago when I was almost 20. Maybe this isn't all that relevant but I've always found the concept of being an "anime fan" very weird. I like good things. Deciding to specifically be a fan of media from one country in particular just seems very odd to me in general. I would never call myself an anime fan, I just like some shows that are anime. And I like a lot that aren't. Anime literally just means cartoons from Japan, and that covers a theoretically infinite scope of what an "anime" might be and chances are you probably don't like everything under that umbrella. So if you don't like horny comedies (like me) then something like 80% of the entire release schedule is uninteresting.
It never did, nice try
So , against your point, I'd double down. I watched 2000s animes when I was a kid on animax. That was the start for me. Some were from the 80-90 era tho. If we have to compare numbers, the work it took to publish a show or a piece was in it self the realization of the "why" in terms of quality. That's why the ratio of good anime released/total releases in the 80-90 are was like 5-10 times better than today. This is a hard guess, but none the less, take any genre,
Shounen, we have a bunch of mid, cliché shows just to keep the view counts and to milk the cow, to the point that I'd even take such away from the box we put them in. School and all, nice, sometimes harem sometimes just not at all to try and be mature. It's action shows, like I'll remember anything 30 years from now.
Isekai, we have good shows, we have just shows, then we have so many copycats that doesn't even tell a story or fetch a real comprehensible world in it.
Mecha, we had potentials, for the sake of the genre, I'm gonna put Neon Genesis in a different box, cuz the anime it self is just something the creators had to wet 4-5times again to give it's ending any justice. You can't really see anything from the story apart from the drama, and soo I'd say it's more of a psycho drama. I can't, maybe Knights & Magic was somewhere there.
One very exclusive part we left in the 80s 90s to rot is Seinen, that many remember as a Retro something and to be honest, it is. Today they make shows for grown up toddlers. And soo, we'll see have todays stuff will be remembered, there's a long way that doesn't seem all nice and tight, and only then we can tell if 90s or 80s were the real gold. I only say it's a bleak chance, cuz I can't remember 1 relatable character that I could personally carry for 40 years over, where as I can and will remember Marlene and Yuji from Blue Gender and the fun little Alicia who was already a meme back then. I will remember Lina, Gourry, Zelgadis and Sylphiel from slayers. Amelia less soo, she was annoying as being the whole point of the character.
You'll ask me, "who you remember from after" I'll go "Kazuma, Kazuma!" " Hai, Kazuma desu!", that's all.
Blud watched Animax Central and Eastern Europe feed 🤩🤑😎
Anime never became bad, it feels that way because the price it paid to become unbelievably popular as 2010s progressed, I can even say that it finaly got recognition it deserved for years but of course some mainstream content it offers nowadays just isn’t anime at its best
Nudity was more of a representation of the themes and lended itself with more artistry among the the body of work, than stuff today which is just there to be smut and nothing else. Take Chun lee taking a shower in street fighter II film for an example. Its titillating yes and a little erotic, but it’s not suggestive in your face to the point of being porn and fan service. Even the scene itself is serous and dark. Try and find a single nudity scene of anime that represented like that in the modern era outside of a few large production films and you won’t find it.
Nudity = porn or fanservice and nothing else. In the old days that was not always the case.
90's started us off, but Objectively. the 2000's - 2010's was the best.
My favourite anime is hedgehog in the fog
Based
This video reminds me sturgeon’s law.For those who don’t know sturgeon’s law states that 90% of everything is crap.
I like a lot of anime but the series I can just not get over is Bakemonogatari. The story is amazing but what really completes it for me as probably my fav piece of media ever is how SHAFT adapted it to animation as this off the wall, wildly experimental avant garde piece... taking lots of inspiration from film noir and french new wave films. it fits the source material perfectly and this style we rarely get to see done so well in anime. The Kizumonogatari films are probably the most beautiful works of animation i've ever seen. i'm so happy the series is finally returning this year 🥰 we even are getting a new Madoka movie as well! it's an exciting time to be an anime fan at least for me cause the stuff i care most about is still going strong
So I'm not allowed to call anime bad anymore?
so true
@@TheBellman It's going to be really hard to come up with an excuse not to watch the latest seasonal anime with the boys 😅
It’s not bad, it has always been *down* bad
Good presentation.
To say that modern anime are bad is the same as saying that modern music is bad because you listen only to what's on the radio and the old songs they are playing are the best from their era. In both cases, you invalidate the worth of the new releases that are objectively good, while at the same time, you ignore the fact that in the past every form of media was filled with as much filth as today.
What matters the most is the quality of an anime to become a classic and each decade so far has produced its fair share of anime with this property. Look at Frieren or Apothecary Diaries, very recent releases that will be as good 50 years from now as they are today. The first episode of Attack on Titan aired more than 10 years ago, and people will remember it for many decades to come. I watched Death Note in 2007 when it aired and people are still talking about it today and recommend it as a gateway anime for those uninitiated. Back then it was a good anime, today it's a classic.
Anime from 1988 too 2020 were goated
*1988-2010
I think a lot of people do not understand the simple fact: money. There are SO MANY people who compare OVAs and movies to TV shows. Of course the budget is bigger, so is the time limit, the animators are better, more experienced too. In modern anime outsourcing is very common too, usually shading and motion is the most noticeable thing what suffers, and now most anime is just an advertisment to sell merch or the source material. As for why 80's looks so good its simple: japan quickly figured out how to make an economic boom through technology. They took something what existed, remolded it and made it better. Then came the 90's and the 00's, the advancement slowed out, so did the money. This was the era where people started going out in public in anime t-shirts, and it became somewhat accepted, thus the demand grew. I remember around 2010-ish it became "cool" to be the video game-loving nerdy guy too, as the definition of nerd itself was shifted from the tech-obsessed quiet guy who can give you some obscure anime on VHS into a funkopop collecting soylent drinker.
Anime is still as great as always. Every season has more great stuff than I can even watch. Sure, 90's anime has a great aesthetic but so does new anime. "the horny" is great to have and people won't stop liking Isekai just because you've seen too much of it. And I couldn't care less about anything Miyazaki or Anno has said, their complaing has been annoying for decades and at this point I just tune it out.
As you've said, the problem is more about how much fat there is. For me, I stopped watching anime around 2007, but then I started watching again in 2016, and I found myself just going back and figuring out what gems there were that I might have missed in the 2000s decade. By 2018, I generally just stuck to a pattern of only watching stuff that's no less than 5 years old, because it gives me time to let the consensus show which ongoing anime is still hitting its strides, and what gems were largely missed in that time frame.
I'm personally an incredibly picky person when it comes to media, and anime is not exception. I've probably only watched around 30 to 50 animes in my lifetime but I think 90% of them were quality ones and I constantly rewatch them. This is probably why I have a vastly different perception of the medium than most people (both avid anime consumers and non anime watchers) who tend to think of the industry as degenerate fetish cartoons for losers. The thing is, anime is just another form of expression. Saying that anime is bad as a whole would be like saying that cinema as a whole is bad. Even as someone picky with media, my favorite animes come from all decades (from the 70's to the 2010's), quality doesn't inherently belong to an era, even if certain periods had a better quality-quantity ratio than others. I believe nowadays anime is mostly garbage (quantity) but it's not dead, in the same way a form or expression such as painting or literature can never truly die.
How ironic Re:Zero caused 500+ Isekai anime to release since Re:Zero is KADOKAWA anime and most isekais are KADOKAWA. They thought they can replicate success of Re:Zero without understanding why Re:Zero is behemoth in the first place. Ironic part is Re:Zero also has subversions of cliche isekai, having dark fantasy world, not having any guilds dungeons and such.