Anime L.A. 2012 started off on a thought-provoking and contemplative note, with a Friday evening panel called "Anime Then and Now" - which was intended to be a nostalgic look back with Robert Napton and his Bandai colleagues Loy Fruel, Anthony Foronda and Taku Otsuka. With the breaking news of Bandai Entertainment's slowdown/shutdown this past week, the hour-long panel turned into something much different: a profound assessment of where the anime industry is now, how it got there and what we as fans can do to support it. More on this below.
Stan Sakai was the Guest of Honor, so Usagi Yojimbo (above, with Ala the Anime L.A. mascot girl) was featured throughout the weekend.
A few obligatory cosplay photos. Amuro Ray and Char rediscover their enmity for each other, poolside in Southern California...
... while anyone who has the skills and puts in the hard work to make the Kusuri-uri costume from Mononoke deserves to have their photo taken as much as possible. ;)
And something odd: a fan gathering, not announced in the program book, unofficial and off the books, for a webcomic called "House Stuck." About a hundred fans, many cosplaying the comic's characters (with yellow and orange horns), took over the patio at the LAX Marriott at dusk on Saturday for their own tribal get-together.
A webcomic, with fans devoted enough to cosplay and carve out their own meeting at a local anime convention. Could this be the wave of the future?
A Journey in the Way-Back Machine
I'll get to the Bandai panel momentarily, but first a bit of personal history.
I discovered anime around the end of 2005, beginning of 2006, when I started watching Vandread, Street Fighter II and Mirage of Blaze on the Starz network. Despite being Japanese-American, I didn't know anything about anime or manga but I was fascinated by what I saw and knew I had to find out more about it.
I remember driving down to Anaheim for Anime Expo 2006, saying to myself in the car, why am I doing this? I don't know anything about this stuff and I'm driving all this way! But I had to find out more about anime, what it was and why it intrigued me so.
At Anime Expo 2006, I bought my first DVD box set (Mirage of Blaze - Media Blasters drew the first blood from my anime fan wallet ;)), and went to a Digital Manga Publishing panel at which they announced their upcoming yaoi manga releases - and that was it. I've been a huge anime and manga fan ever since.
Around the end of 2007, I started working in the industry. I did the English adaptations for Broccoli's sola and Nui!, and the yaoi manga Cigarette Kisses, which was later picked up by Aurora Publishing, for whom I also did freelance work.
For Robert Napton and Bandai Entertainment, I did the English adaptations for the first three Code Geass novels, and copy editing on several Gundam 00 and Eureka Seven novels. I freelanced for Tokyopop, doing copy editing work on over 40 manga books including Hetalia, Future Diary and Gakuen Alice, and for Digital Manga Publishing where, in addition to yaoi novels, I've been the English adaptation writer for the Yashakiden series of horror novels by Hideyuki Kikuchi.
I was thrilled and honored to actually be working in the industry that produced the entertainment that I loved. Everything was fresh and new to me, and everywhere I looked I saw stories I'd never seen before, coming from a lifetime of consuming mainstream American entertainment.
I discovered new anime series and new manga series everyday. Tokyopop's manga books took up an entire aisle at Borders bookstores. It was all big and growing and incredibly exciting.
In 2005-2006, I walked into a world of entertainment and an infrastructure that I thought would be there forever. I didn't know then that I'd become a fan at what was possibly the very peak of anime and manga's popularity in the U.S.
Anime Then and Now
Robert Napton opened Friday night's panel by stating that he and the other panelists couldn't say anything further about the restructuring, other than the information that had already been released.
The four panelists then talked about how early on - years ago - anime companies used to recruit their employees from the fan base, as the fans were the most knowledgeable about anime. Their passion about anime created in them a kind of booster's enthusiasm, and being an anime fan back then meant you were an active promoter and you tried to spread the word about anime as an art form as much as possible.
They said that in the early days fans had to be more social as videotapes of anime were hard to come by, and only by trading tapes and watching anime together did anime fandom spread. Now, people generally watch anime alone on their computers and the social aspect has shifted from old-school anime clubs to conventions, particularly with the cosplay phenomenon.
Napton noted that anime fandom itself appears to be increasing, but that that doesn't necessarily translate to increased market sales. He analogized it to the housing bubble in the U.S., acknowledging that there had been an "over-saturation" of anime DVDs that had contributed to the anime market declining. He added that the Internet has been a "random factor" in further diluting anime sales, and as a method of distribution hasn't been truly monetized yet.
He also noted that the anime series of the '80s and '90s were stronger in terms of storytelling than much of the anime being produced today, citing examples such as Macross, Evangelion and Cowboy Bebop, calling them "hard stories." The others on the panel added that fan service has become a huge factor, noting that K-ON merchandise is the top seller in Japan.
Although Napton and the others were careful not to discuss Bandai's restructuring, Napton did mention that he had read the comments on Anime News Network's interview with Ken Iyadomi this week. He was surprised that many of the commenters were surprised that the Japanese commitment to the U.S. market is now wavering - that the Japanese are beginning to reconsider the U.S. market for anime.
Towards the end of the hour, Napton asked the audience where they thought the industry was heading, and how to support the industry. Justin Sevakis of Anime News Network said that eventually there would be premium box sets for collectors, and streaming anime for everyone else. Yours truly mentioned Crunchyroll as part of the solution, i.e., legal streaming anime with paid subscriptions.
'Art is what links everyone'
Napton concluded the hour with a few personal remarks, saying that this was his last panel and that he didn't think he would be employed in the anime industry again. He encouraged everyone to continue supporting the industry, saying that "art is what links everyone."
If Robert Napton leaves the industry, then the industry has lost a gentleman and true professional. He has been a fantastic representative for anime in the U.S. and he will be deeply missed from the scene.
For myself, all of the companies I have worked for in this industry save one are now gone: Broccoli, Aurora, Tokyopop and now Bandai Entertainment.
What can we do to support the industry? I'm going to keep that foremost in my mind this year, and put my money where my mouth is. We're at a crucial point now for the survival of anime and manga in the U.S. Let's do our best to keep it alive and make it thrive - even as the ground shifts below our feet.
5 comments:
Good post, and very interesting to read your history with anime. I came to it, believe it or not, through AMVs on YouTube, which not only introduced me to some good anime but to some good bands, as well. I'm not sure how I got hooked on manga, but suddenly I found myself with an insatiable appetite for it, and rapidly focused on BL. (As it happens, Mirage of Blaze was one of the first anime sets I bought, although Loveless was *the" first.) This was in 2008.
Great post.
Your description of recruiting from the fans reminds me of science fiction -- a lot of the notable writers of the Golden Age (and later) started out as fans.
I can believe the AMVs hooking you in. I actually didn't discover the existence of AMVs until I'd been an anime fan for a while. When I did, wow. Some of them are fantastic.
As to the industry recruiting from fandom, I wish there was more cross-pollinating between the Japanese industry and American fandom in general. If they understood where we're coming from, they might learn to market to us more effectively so that they could still profit, and we could get our anime. Just my humble opinion. =D
Great post, Jan. Really wishing I could have made it there, and to this panel this year. The dialogue has been exciting the last few weeks.
What's been happening with the US anime industry in recent years is very sad. And it's really hard to find someone or something to blame other than simply the changing times and technological advances. I think the real boom for anime started in the early 2000s when my fandom truly took off - media stores like Suncoast (now out of business) had walls of anime DVDs and anime was flourishing on Toonami/Adult Swim. Unfortunately I was still in high school at the time so I couldn't get an anime-related job then =/ 2006-2007-ish was when I noticed that things were starting to deteriorate.
The rise of streaming video sties, the fandom getting younger with interest shifting elsewhere, the bad economy, an oversaturation of anime being produced - many factors come into play with what's been going on with the industry, and it's a real shame.
I could go on but I plan to write a post about the same topic too. I'll just say that I'll do my best to support the series I love (as it's just too hard to buy every series I watch) by buying DVD/BD sets and authentic character goods.
@winterkaijyu - Thanks, and I just left a comment on your post (love the Mike Toole clip, btw). Hope it posts (I sometimes have trouble posting comments unless it's "pop-up" like I have on my blog :0).
@Yumeka - I swear I saw a Suncoast store last year at Del Amo Mall. It lives, at least in Torrance! o_O
Yeah, it's hard to know what more to say about the industry. I was in shock when I heard about Bandai. You heard Justin Sevakis at the panel we went to, predicting at least one more publisher would go out of business this year. There almost aren't any left to go out of business at this point. :(
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