This Week in Anime

Over Hype and Anime Stagnation

As an aside, that's a pretty big deal. While the industry has grown a lot, the traditional avenues of training new talent haven't scaled up appropriately. The ideal is that you have in-studio mentorship that can nurture young animators and give promising artists opportunities like storyboarding, directing, or otherwise honing their animation abilities. However, many productions are relying on external animators wherever they can get them to squeeze out an episode on time, one at a time. That's neither sustainable nor a good way to induct people into the industry. The GAC is a think tank focused on that and related issues.

Personally, I certainly think Frieren possesses more artistic merit than Solo Leveling, but I'd say the same for most other shows pitted against Solo Leveling this past year. You and I were not alone in rolling our eyes at that. I guess that may be one definite thing separating Japanese from Western audiences: caring about the Anime Awards.

Still, I also get where Saito is coming from. As the anime market becomes increasingly international, so too does the audience's influence on what becomes popular and what gets made. And a broader audience doesn't necessarily translate into a broader-minded one. If anything, I'd say it's the opposite.

While unionization isn't a panacea, it's an important tool in balancing power between workers and executives. Because if executives have all the power to call the shots, they are more likely than not going to go with the safe bet. And that's going to be the lowest common denominator-type productions made cheaply and with little regard for the creatives working on it. That's the endgame you have to worry about.

Then again, I try to tell myself I have to be careful when I'm making generalizations about the wider anime fandom, because I do not have a clear window into it. I'm part of a vanishingly small group of people who write about anime professionally, and many of my peers are part of the same, so we don't exactly make up a representative cross-section of the entire population of anime watchers. The eye-opening thing about Solo Leveling's win was this idea of a "silent fandom" of people who loved the series but didn't otherwise participate in the scene as you and I know it.

To be clear, there's nothing intrinsically wrong with being a casual fan of anime. We're all casual fans of something. But maybe a problem arises when the collective voice of the casual fans drowns out the voice of the passionate ones.

Yes, good, thoughtful anime continues to be made, and I consistently content myself with a handful of gems each season. But if I think back on the last series I watched that felt truly risky, singular, and experimental, I might have to go back to Sonny Boy, and that was four years ago.

I'd also be pretty happy if we got one good, far-out anime experiment every four years. But I can also imagine an industry that isn't so hell-bent on making 50-60 new shows each season, that doesn't work its animators ragged, and that actually invests in their careers. That's the kind of environment that could be more conducive to trying new things. Which might be why Saito is bothering with GAC and getting interviewed like this in the first place.

It'd be disingenuous of me, too, to pretend like exciting anime isn't being made anymore. 2025 gave us Apocalypse Hotel for crying out loud.