Last Friday night, I finally watched Akira. I know, I know.
I’m part of the Toonami Generation of anime fans, sometimes known as the fourth wave of anime fandom. As a result, I came into the fandom with a pretty massive backlog, spanning the ‘70s, ‘80s, and ‘90s. Some of that I’ve gone back to, like 1979’s Mobile Suit Gundam, and some I’ve totally missed, like Ghost in the Shell. Some would argue that this oversight makes me a bad anime fan. I don’t care if I’m a bad anime fan, and I hate efforts to police fandom.
Instead, I’d argue that the reason you should watch the classics has nothing to do with other peoples’ perceptions of you.
Remember when I was talking about the “good old days” of anime? That blog post focused on how people use the good old days as an excuse to disparage modern shows. But there’s another truth to it, and it’s that cream always rises to the top. When people are talking about an anime ten or twenty-seven years later (as in the case of Akira), the reason it hasn’t left the public consciousness is because it still holds up.
In some ways, Akira is not my cup of tea. For one thing, it is excessively and graphically violent. However, it’s animated as smoothly and vividly as today’s digital animation. It has a jarring soundtrack that still unsettles viewers today. Where many of the older shows I’ve watched more too slowly for my tastes, Akira flies by in an instant. If I’m going to watch a movie that’s not in my preferred set of genres, I want to watch a movie like that: fast-paced, eye-catching, and profound.
But I realized something while I was watching it, and it’s that maybe older generations of fans aren’t policing younger fans when they harp on the classics. There was a lot of crap anime made in the past, but ones we still remember today are often worth the watch. There’s definitely a relationship between a show’s age and its current buzz, too. If it was made in 1979 and people are still raving about it, it’s probably worth the watch today.
Just don’t confuse nostalgia for quality. I’ll always love Gundam Wing because it was one of my first shows ever, but I wouldn’t recommend it to today’s brand new fans. (Not that they’d have time for it—with a backlog spanning from the ‘70s to today, they may never have to watch anything but the top 1 percent of all shows.)
So there you go. The “good old days” of anime can be a gatekeeping concept meant to shame new fans—or a helpful trick for discovering old good anime that’s new to you. Your own attitude makes the difference.
20 Comments.
Over the past few years I have been working to ‘combat’ those who cling only to the ‘old school’ of anime and eschew modern shows. I love the past, have been an anime fan since ’91. But I love what modern animation techniques are doing for the industry. I have literally watched Akira over 200 times, spending most of my summer before high school watching it 2 or 3 times a day. Had nothing else to do! While I love it, it is not my favorite anime movie. Right now that title goes to The Girl Who Leapt Through Time…aside from the sci-fi aspects those movies are worlds apart! I struggle against peoples nostalgia being mistaken for quality, not only in anime but in other things as well. There was a pile of crap back then just as there is now and it really all comes down to taste. Last year I number crunched all the TV shows between 1980-1999 and compared them to 2000-2014, picking out the ones I really enjoyed and came up with about the same percentage. In both time periods my own personal tastes led to me really truly enjoying about 2.7% of the TV anime made.
http://hereisgreenwood.blogspot.com/2014/07/favorite-tv-anime-1980-1999.html
http://hereisgreenwood.blogspot.com/2014/07/favorite-tv-anime-2000-2014.html
The “nostalgia ≠ quality” concept is an important one, because it allows us to separate our personal feelings about something from our professional evaluation of it. I have a massive fondness for certain shows that were “gateway drugs” (a term I revile), but I know better than to recommend them, because I know that what made them appealing was largely a product of how they inhabited their particular point in time.
As for “AKIRA” itself — see http://www.ganriki.org/article/akira-at-25/ for the full review — I have mixed feelings about it that have grown more ambivalent over time. As a work of animation art, it’s absolutely a landmark; as cinema, it’s overwhelming; as a story, it’s an example of Katsuhiro Otomo’s cynical worldview, where science mainly exists to get the human race in trouble, politics is a sinkhole of ambitions, and the most sympathetic characters in the story are a bunch of no-future punks. But I’d rather tussle with a story that has pointy parts and sharp edges than ones where my fingers just slide off one smooth surface after another.
@GenjiPress:disqus this comment sounds like poetry. Beautifully put.
Oh, yeah, one other thing about “AKIRA”: despite all that I could say is wrong with it, it has aged well. It doesn’t have the cheesy, dated look I associate with its contemporaries. I think it stands a good chance of crossing over into timelessness before much longer. If it hasn’t already done so, that is.
Maybe it is because I am not as steeply entrenched in the anime forums, blogs and other online communities, but I am not sure where Lauren is coming away with the impression that the community would consider someone a bad anime fan if he or she did not value the classics above newer works.
Both Anime News Network and IMDB have tallies of which shows the fan base consider the best. Although one could definitely take issue with whether shows that are the highest rated are actually “the best,” they do show that fans have held new shows such as Attack on Titan or Steins;Gate are on par or better than “classic” properties such as Cowboy Bebop or Rurouni Kenshin: Trust and Betrayal.
http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/encyclopedia/ratings-anime.php?top50=best_bayesian
http://www.imdb.com/search/title?at=0&genres=animation&keywords=anime&num_votes=1000,&sort=user_rating&title_type=tv_series
However, I do think it is important to recognize that the ’08 recession and the Internet have had impacts on anime production. Even in Japan, anime remains a fringe industry (though hopefully that will change as Japan looks on in envy at the massive international success of Korean television and music). Anime in Japan has remained conservative during times of prosperity and shrunk during times of recession. Many of the best “classic” anime, such as Eva or even Akira, are characterized by risk and high upfront costs. Akira for instance did not do well at the box office and was originally considered unmarketable in America. Moe, however, can have lower investment and animation costs and apparently has broad appeal upon the Japanese fanbase. Moreover, in the Internet age, Japanese companies market these products specifically at the receptive segment of their fanbase, eschewing any need for broad-based appeal.
Have these factors actually impacted the anime industry? We’d have to do more empirical research to be sure, but I do think there was a period in between Gurren Lagann and Steins;Gate/Madoka Magica (2007-2011) where the anime industry was hit especially hard by the economic downturn and seemed the most risk averse. Even then though, although moe began to appear everywhere, many companies also went back and finished or remade classic anime, resulting in Fulmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood and Inuyasha: The Final Act.
I guess I’m surprised because my impression was that the community, through review sites such as ANN and consensus building mechanisms such as ranked community lists, has quickly embraced new anime properties. There will always be radical, judgment opinions on Twitter and the blogosphere because, well, that’s the problem with Twitter and the blogosphere. It is easy to post a complaint and those complaints attract attention and potentially misrepresent the community.
It’s true I’m not one who interacts with the community through Twitter (and this has been my only blog comment so far). I also recognize that, radical as whiners on Twitter and the blogosphere may be, it is important to counteract their toxic opinions. It just seems important to also point out how unrepresentative those opinions might actually be.
@disqus_X0xhsAYPj9:disqus you’ve brought up some great points here, most importantly that tallies and rankings are a great place to get the pulse of the community, both old and new fans alike.
Another point worth taking from this is that the best of the new stuff (“Steins;Gate”, “Attack on Titan”, etc.) are as good as, or even better than, all the material routinely labeled as classic. It’s the same with movies: I wouldn’t want to do without “Citizen Kane”, “Casablanca”, “Some Like It Hot”, “2001”, “The Exorcist”, “GoodFellas”, “Oldboy”, or “The General”; the best of the current material is every bit as vital and important as the stuff from decades gone by.
I think the main issue being identified here is that some fans are terribly vocal about what constitutes correct fandom. This happens in film fandom, too, where a certain gatekeeper mentality holds sway. Sometimes that’s for a good reason: it doesn’t serve anyone to be ignorant of the genuinely great movies that shaped the landscape for film. But it can’t be done at the expense of a lively debate about what that landscape consists of and why, and what it takes to bring new titles into it.
Popularity does not always equal quality. I would argue it usually does not. Eva wasn’t expected to become as popular as it did and the level of popularity it received, along with Those Who Hunt Elves, is one of the main reasons why the anime industry shifted in focus relating to TV series’. A good, if somewhat cynical, way to look at TV anime is that it is considered little more than an infomercial for its source material and related merchandising opportunities.
That’s the conventional wisdom — they’re extended marketing methods for product franchises of one kind or another. But the attitude I’m coming around to is this: Just because it’s an extended commercial of some kind doesn’t mean it’s not also an art form. The way I put it is, “These things are art whether or not we like it and whether or not they’re intended to be,” and I think that in turn affects how they’re both created and appreciated.
Definitely! I’m finding myself enjoying more newer anime than older titles. I really enjoy the level of artwork in today’s anime compared to years ago. I tried to watch Blue Sonnet a few days ago…and just couldn’t get past the artwork and poor storytelling. I remember going back and watching the original Ghost In The Shell movie after watching GiTS Innocence to pinpoint the 2501 reference and was horrified by the quality of artwork in the original when compared. By comparison, I picked up the Akira bluray recently and was still not disappointed with the artwork in that movie. I’ve been working to overcome my aversion to wire-frame motion capture CG and haven’t let it stop me from enjoying Knights of Sidonia and Ronia the Robbers Daughter (CG in both shows are by the same company).
Art style is one of those things I don’t mind — I notice the difference, but I don’t think of it as being something that affects my critical opinion. I might not personally like the way a show looks, but everything looks the way it does as a product of its moment in time, and I have to be relistic about that.
Re: GITS – the original artwork is fine, and I was rather offended that Oshii wanted to redo some of the sequences as CGI. I’m glad the recent domestic reissue does not give us that version of the film.
Re: CGI – they’re getting better at it, but there’s always something jarring about the way it looks compared to hand-drawn animation. The whole point of animation, if you ask me, is to freely suspend disbelief in selective ways about the geometry and behavior of objects. CGI just seems to bring things back down to earth in a bad way.
@GenjiPress:disqus @disqus_kVvzChmZjW:disqus I’ve been reading this exchange all day and I’m glad that, if nothing else, this post helped connect two people whose opinions I admire.
>Definitely! I’m finding myself enjoying more newer anime than older titles
For me, it’s the reverse since no new anime is as good as some of the WMTs back then.
I feel like Ganriki recently laid out nice guidelines for discussing anime while avoiding bias or nostalgia. http://www.ganriki.org/article/what-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-about-anime/
Oh hey, Serdar’s the author!
Oh, and they were Lauren’s guidelines originally. Well, shows how closely I read. :-|
[…] published a compelling read that argues that, while a bit aged and antiquated in parts, we really shouldn’t shy away from watching these titles. They’re part of our heritage, as fans, and there’s a great […]
[…] published a compelling read that argues that, while a bit aged and antiquated in parts, we really shouldn’t shy away from watching these titles. They’re part of our heritage, as fans, and there’s a great […]
@GenjiPress:disqus nice comment, your right, watching classic anime has nostalgia effect on us,. one of my favorite classic animes were samurai x, dragon ball, and lupin the III. Buy Instagram Video Likes
I think you need to tell us more about your love for Gundam Wing. As my intro to Gundam, I love it too, but after watching other Gundam series it’s sometimes hard to put my adoration for Gundam Wing in words.