Honestly? I think anime will crash soon, but I highly doubt it will completely die out. Most likely we'll see a lot of studios dying out and a lot less anime being made, followed by something of a rebirth as smaller, dedicated groups of super-fans/artists start making more stuff- with the modern computer age, the days of having to scrounge plastic bags to make cels out of are over- with a sufficiently good computer and a scanner, a small team with sufficient skill could make anime, somewhat in the fashion of the indie game industry (though hopefully with less pretentiousness and corruption). Heck, we could see a new OVA boom ala the late 80s.

I reckon Japan as a whole is in for something of an economic crash, but I find the idea that the country is going to go "extinct" ludicrous. By the time things start getting that bad, then either people will have worked out what the problem is and will start making serious efforts to fix it, or (most likely) we'll all be dead from nuclear war/mass degeneracy outbreaks.

I wouldn't go that far. Disney stopped making hand drawn films here in the states that didn't lead to a bunch of smaller studios trying to save hand drawn animation, it just led to hand drawn animation going extinct here in the west. Japan and Korea are the only places where hand drawn animation hasn't died out yet, and that has more to do with cultural reluctance to change than with any artistic integrity (though I don't doubt the integrity of Anno and his peers).

Squigsquasher wrote:I reckon Japan as a whole is in for something of an economic crash, but I find the idea that the country is going to go "extinct" ludicrous.

Given Japan's birth rate and lack of people interested in having sex, it wouldn't surprise me if Korea has to Annex Japan to save it's collapsing economy like it did in Cloud Atlas (the book not the movie).

It's cyclical. All countries go through population booms and busts, and Japan is headed for a hard one. I don't know what will shake it up, but I am very concerned about what it could be, considering that there seems to be a shift towards the hard right in Japan (which, in all honesty, is hard to gauge: simply being more noisy than everyone else doesn't necessarily mean more power).

How that's reflected in anime (at least the industry) would be an interesting barometer. I think the bigger point of contention is not the content of the anime (which seems to be doing just fine in terms of production and output), but the nature of the anime industry itself. From what I've seen, it's abysmal, in terms of how content is acquired and then produced, how employees are treated, the actual production process itself....

In a lot of ways, the anime industry has become similar to and reflective of the rest of Japanese work industry, and this is starting to have a clamp on society at large. Shockingly, you can't overwork people consistently and then be surprised that their quality of work drops.

Well, let's suppose anime does decrease in influence the way Anno predicts it one day will. What would take its place? Japan is pretty much the only part of the world in which animation has been used to create works in a number of genres we tend to think of as being the realm of live-action. You don't see works like Eva coming from the US, or Europe, or even other Asian countries, that's for sure (then again, you don't see them coming from Japan that much anymore either, but that's another story).

http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/interes ... ew-decades

Anno's not the first person to say that Anime is going to die within our lifetime. Dai Sato (writer of Cowboy Bebop, Eden Of The East, and Ergo Proxy) made a similar prediction back in 2010.

Well, 2014 was the year were the most TV anime ever was produced. Seems like a strange and baseless thing to say.

I thought what Anno meant is a matter of quality over quantity (which if that's the case, can't say I disagree).

Late night anime is supported by a very small hardcore market of otaku who buy all the merchandise. As it continues to refine itself to cater to such a small market, it is developing into fairly baroque forms which make broadening that market difficult -- when the criterion of success is typically whether the title had enough cute girls that the buying public could find their ideal girlfriend amongst, other qualities fall by the wayside.

I suppose when American start paying bigger bucks for streaming rights than the Otaku base back at home, we might not only see another bubble, but also a bit of a shacking up of the industry. Maybe we'll even see stuff like Ergo Proxy and Michiko to Hatchin again. :)

The last US anime boom resulted in Big O season 2 (as a direct commission, co-produced by Cartoon Network). Ergo Proxy and Michiko e Hatchin were fruits of the economic good times before the '08 crash; entirely home grown.

A decade on, and the otaku market is becoming ever more outré in its taste -- we seem to have gone past incest and are moving on towards bestiality as the titillation du jour (MonMusu, Jitsu Watashi wa...); and bubbling under will be adaptations of titles like "I stepped in front of a truck and reincarnated as a slime-girl in a generic JRPG world" (not an actual LN title -- yet -- just a synopsis of the latest sort of niche stuff that has surfaced on /a/ in the same way that the current wave of fashion did a while back).

Mr. Tines wrote: "I stepped in front of a truck and reincarnated as a slime-girl in a generic JRPG world"

Done right, this might be the satiric comedy of the decade. It's bound to happen. It has to happen.

Mr. Tines wrote:entirely home grown.

Home grown?

arilando wrote:Home grown?

By Japanese production companies (however outsourced the scut-work), for a Japanese audience. No filthy gaijin were consulted in the making of these anime.

Anno has now "clarified" his statements on the matter.

Good to know that one of the larger segments of the field I'm moving into won't be dying after all. I suppose I'll use that birthday cash to treat myself to some anime, put some cash in the industry and all.

Xard wrote:It'll probably be good thing, considering that if anime industry was a person he'd deserve to end up in the nastiest spot of 2nd or 3rd circle of Dante's hell. Fuck this shit, really. Anime was healthier when focusing on children shows and having occasional space opera for teenage boys. Maybe downsizing they'll refocus on core cartoon demographies instead of greyhaired remaining otakus who wasted their semen on PVC figures.

While I do wish Japan wouldn't always cater to the typical otaku I also don't want to see anime become purely kid oriented. I enjoy a good lighthearted shonen anime but it would get tiresome if everything was DBZ and Pokemon and would ruin one of the main appeals of anime for many. The west making animation purely kid focused gave us the animation age ghetto. If Japan did the same something like Eva could never exist again.

From Eva Fan, today/yesterday:

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— twitter-user (@username) date

What Anno is saying is that Eva has kept anime alive for twenty years and now someone else needs to stop adapting galges and produce something worth debating every minute aspect of.

That's probably also why he made 3.33 suck, so that people would't continue thinking that the industry will forever be supported by Eva.

The old "3.0 sucked because I didn't like it" debate.

It's the best Rebuild film. But like everything it's all just the sharing of opinion.

LeoXiao wrote:That's probably also why he made 3.33 suck, so that people would't continue thinking that the industry will forever be supported by Eva.

Or maybe Anno just make a bad Movie (two bad movies, 2.0 have lot of problems too)