This Week in Anime

Anime Ads and Commercials

Steve
Why not? As a country, last week we celebrated the biggest conglomeration of grey areas of the year. The Super Bowl isn't merely about my beautiful birds winning or the hammering of a whole new set of nails in Drake's coffin. It's the grand spectacle of capitalism laid bare, one-million-dollar advertisement at a time. And somehow, that makes talking about a bunch of goofy anime commercials seem much more palatable to me.

Go birds!

I guess that's the unnerving thing to think about. There may be a cabal of anime nerds running these advertising firms (and hey, AMC, that idea's a freebie if you want to make a sequel to Mad Men), but I suspect the truth is more mundane. The simple fact is that anime and manga are popular in the West now. We're a chunky enough demographic to be pandered to. We possess the money that American corporations want. That should frighten us.

Moreover, I can remember when I was alive when this would have been unthinkable. It wasn't that long ago.

Looking at ads that ran in America, it runs the gamut. Do you remember those Ford ads that dubbed over Dragon Ball Z and Sailor Moon, a la the "abridged" series phenomenon from early 2010s YouTube? These were—and are—deeply strange.

Sure, the "Fusion" joke writes itself, but otherwise I have no idea what the genesis of this would have been.

It's wild. Although to be fair, you can't find these on any official Ford channel anymore (at least none I could find). That brings me to a tangent that I only just realized during my weekly TWIA research: commercials disappear. There's no incentive for corporations to preserve them after an advertising campaign is finished, and I found a ton of dead and/or privated links while looking for the ones I could remember. Practically everything I found, I only found thanks to unofficial reuploads.

It's super important! You can argue the artistic value of an advertisement, but regardless, these are pieces of art that real people worked on. There's always going to be merit in preserving them for future consideration, whether that ends up being appreciation or denigration.

Graphic design is clearly their passion. That's a potent irony in this particular discussion: big corporations think anime can be used to sell their own products, but they don't put nearly as much effort into promoting anime itself to a general audience. Or even to the specific audience of anime fans. I rely on friends and ANN to tell me what anime are airing where and when each season.

I can also remember when Crunchyroll's social media presence was fun and informative. It would consistently advertise all of its pickups, not just the big ones, and its posts had a more personal touch. That spirit seems to have been excised as the company has grown larger and more corporatized.
On a related note, Twitter was the wild west for a while once corporations figured out they could get a lot of traction if their social media presence was more "casual" and/or targeted at niche demographics, such as anime fans. I'm thinking of that period when every Arby's tweet that crossed my feed looked like this:

Never forget o7.
At the time, I distinctly remember rolling my eyes at Arby's stuff, but now, it's quaint to think of a period when that was the most annoying thing about Twitter. I yearn for those innocent days of people photoshopping Nature Valley granola bars onto anime girls. We didn't know how good we had it.

Unfortunately, yes.

The reality is that the anime advertisement game in Japan completely eclipses ours. That shouldn't be surprising, since they've been at it for much longer, and it's a lot easier for them to tap into the pool of industry talent. Rie Matsumoto's post-Blood Blockade Battlefront career, for instance, has been mostly advertorial work. Of course, I wish she could direct another series, but she doesn't phone anything in here.

She also did this wonderful Pokémon retrospective, again collaborating with Bump of Chicken. If any ads count as art, these have to be among them. They're a far cry from drawing a Ford Fusion over footage from DBZ.

It's strange, but strange in the way that all product placement is. I'm sure Emperor Palpatine's beautiful mug has graced some pretty wild packages. As far as anime in particular goes, I think it's instructive to look back at last year's WcDonald's campaign, which leaned on a lot of exaggerated anime tropes for its global audience. It practically looks like a parody.
Contrast that with an anime McDonald's advertisement that aired in Japan, which has a more low-key, slice-of-life tone. Also yuri.

While I'm not one to gatekeep people, I don't extend the same courtesy to corporations (no matter what the Supreme Court says). I was born in the anime mines. Molded by them. You can't just waltz in and say, "How do you do, fellow weebs?" I want an honest effort, not some low-hanging fruit shitpost. That being said, the proliferation of the anime aesthetic abroad is a feature, not a bug. Say what you will about "Cool Japan," it's made some significant cultural inroads in the past decade.

I'm skeptical about how much you could attribute to Cool Japan as a rigidly defined government program. It's probably more likely that the increased availability provided by the internet and publishers had more of a hand. But soft power is soft power. And if the US continues to double down on dismantling every single one of its international tendrils, I don't think it's crazy to consider Japan's cultural relevance growing even stronger. Maybe even superpower-strong.
But this means we also need to consider anime as an arm of propaganda, advertising's insidious twin. Luce is a great example. As someone who was raised Catholic, I can't help but find the whole ordeal hilarious. Thinking about it from the Vatican's perspective, they know the Church has a serious (and deserved) image problem. It's a huge deal that they gravitated towards an anime-like mascot to appeal to the public. That's fascinating to me.

Nobody knows what the future will hold. But I do know what the past holds and it's not all rosy. Luce is eyebrow-raising, but she's quaint compared to an infamous piece of anime propaganda like Chouetsu Sekai, the OVA series produced by Aum Shinrikyo in 1991. Yes, the same Aum Shinrikyo cult behind the sarin gas attacks in 1995. You can watch their leader talk about levitation and astral projection in cartoon form. It's only a YouTube search away. It's wild.

Notably, this was produced by the cult. They founded a studio to do it. As such, it's extremely amateurish and poorly put together, so it's bad to watch even if you discount the cult quackery. But it is a fascinating example of how anime can be wielded for actual evil. Also, it's the source of that "moshi moshi, Jesus desu" meme.

Anime and cult propaganda aren't exclusively old hat either. Happy Science has regularly produced animated films for over three decades. Eleven Arts licensed some of these Laws of the Universe films for theatrical runs. ANN accidentally published an ad for them once! It might seem silly, especially when you watch these trailers and see all the new-age cult hits—UFOs, lizard people, crystals, etc.—but it's more important than ever to be cognizant of how close this rhetoric is to the mainstream. The line between advertisements and propaganda can blur too easily for comfort.

But that's enough of me and my soapbox. Let me ask you a more important question, Lucas: have you heard of Hatsune Miku?

Advertising isn't a four-letter word. It can produce some legitimately cool stuff. Sometimes, it cooks hard enough to launch a figure like Miku with enough escape velocity to make people forget she's an ad in the first place. I don't think about Miku like that. I, too, think of her as the cool blue twin-tails girl who gets all the good fan art. Since we started this column talking about football, I'd be remiss not to mention the Chargers' 2022 schedule advert. It's charming and you can tell that real anime appreciators worked on it.

At the very least, that should help heal my YouTube algorithm after I subjected it to all of these bootleg commercial recordings and cult indoctrination videos.