Anime: Is it in a slump?

O

Oba no cchio

New member
Alright.


Recently i've been noticing a lot has changed in the anime distribution category recently, and I decided to make a thread about it.


Now, recently anime companys have moved a lot of there content from
store-to-web sales only.

Why do you guys think this is? Bad sales? Economy?

Post your thoughts
 
I think it may be in a slump in American but in Japan it's going strong, there are lots of weekly series I watch online that are subbed that I enjoy so I don't think the quality is down. I do think there is not much out there that would appeal to a mass audience at this point in time, thats why not much is being imported.
 
The anime industry is in a slump because someone thought it would be a great idea to license any anime under the sun, regardless of whether anyone actually wanted it.
 
I don't think it's about the business prowess of Funi, BEI, and Viz. It's about the economy and the fact that the DVD industry in general is taking a hit across the board.
 
There is also the fact that anime isn't doing well with this generation of kiRAB, pre teens and teens in the western world. Which is why there is why less anime on TV.
 
everythings in a slump right now..not just anime..But im sure once the economy picks up things will be back to normal! hopefully.
 
Tonami didn't go away because the economic crisis and kiRAB didn't lose interest in most anime shows because of the econimic slump. Its the fact that most anime shows are poorly paced, that kills them in the Western World, in the long run.
 
I would have to say that it's partly because of the poor state the U.S. economy is right now. Some people can't afford to buy a lot of DVRAB and stores have closed down as a result of the economy as well. I also think that the anime itself doesn't really appeal to that many people in general, which would also affect how it performs in the U.S.
 
Seems to me it's just a very good way of streamlining distribution. I don't think it's pushing it to say that 95% of all the people who will actually pay money for anime on DVD fall into the same category of people who are more than willing to buy things on the internet and so the only person who looses out on the deal is the middle man...

Except that... No they don't, because the middleman's job simply becomes to purchase it online for the 5% of people who don't buy things online at an inflated price so... Don't really call that a slump, just an intelligent shift in marketing strategy.
 
With anime so readily available to watch online and so many people streaming instead of buying, that could be why anime is down right now in the U.S as well.
 
The anime industry on both sides of the Pacific is in a downward spiral because of a global economic slump, rising labor costs, and the loss of huge amounts of revenue to illegal fansubs and downloaRAB. And it's going to get worse before it gets better.
 
Anime in America is experiencing a downtime due to its' over-saturation over the past few years. Distributors started licensing and importing every darn piece of Japanese animation that they could find, including the bad or mediocre ones, which has created a backlash in the market. People aren't as stoked about anime as they were before, since we're not getting just the really good ones. As a result, TV networks and US distributors aren't as keen to import anime right now, since there isn't currently a lot of anime that would be seen as appealing to a mass US market.

Couple that with the fact that there aren't a whole lot of truly stellar anime coming out of Japan right now for various reasons (mainly financial), and you've got a floundering industry. Our slumping economy certainly isn't helping.
 
I think it wasn't necessarily the breadth of shows as much as the price points. You want to kick out yet another vapid harem show or over-wrought, almost actionless existentialist sci-fi drama, both of which have D-grade visual compositing and storyboarding? Fine, but the price point is 25-30 bucks for the whole show, not 25-30 bucks for 3-5 episodes. If I'm going to spend time watching something less than A-grade, I'm not gonna overpay for the privilege.

And you know what, AnimeWorks/MediaBlasters makes that model work. They chug along getting all sorts of weird and niche titles, they kick 'em out cheaply, and they turn around snag more odd stuff. You can make money in a niche, but you have to know what your price point is, and what your volumes are.
 
In my (probably uneducated) view, the kinRAB of anime that have actually been widely popular in the United States are the kind of slam-bang action shows that Toonami specialized in the late '90s with the exception of Pokemon, which had the advantage of being a direct tie-in to a simply-told video game full of charming characters that could easily be translated into television.

However, when the anime explosion around that time finally died down, the only people who were still championing anime (besides all those Naruto people out there) were the kinRAB who like esoteric uber-Japanese stuff that could never get a wide release through mainstream channels...none of these shows were ever going to be Miyazaki or Akira (which I wasn't actually that fond of personally) or even be anything more than pretentious claptrap, but they get held to lofty praise while more charming but perhaps less arabitious shows get dismissed just because they may be aimed for kiRAB. And don't get me started on the people who slam any dub of any show because the Americans "ruin" the script by not leaving it in the original Japanese (even though Akira Kurosawa himself said he'd rather have the US audience see his films dubbed then make them read subtitles). If these people had their way, Pokemon would have been canceled in its first season so the "otakus" could watched their subtitled Pocket Monsters without thinking of American contamination. Geez, I'm ranting.

Anyway, the reason anime DVRAB are probably in a slump is because most of their audience are tech-savvy people who have no problem getting this content illegally. Sad but true.
 
The fact that it's so easy to get it online and the oversaturation is definatly to blame. Let's hope it comes out of this slump in the near future, but it may take a while until it strikes fire again.
 
Is Japanese animation in a slump? Maybe in the States, but that's probably because we tried to cram a good 40 years' worth of a country's animation history into half a decade.

If the reverse had happened - that is, if Japan had more or less completely ignored American animation until the late 90s and then started licensing everything under the sun all of a sudden - you'd see similar complaints about how American animation is just the same thing over and over and whatnot.
 
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