The new literalism plaguing today’s movies

In my pod we've got the theory that more people in the US like anime than domestic pop culture. All the time my son and I have random encounters with people who like Goblin Slayer or Solo Leveling or Bocchi The Rock but never find anybody who is interested in new movies and TV shows. They say Spongebob Squarepants has good ratings -- of course it has good ratings because it is on all the time. People mistake seeing ads for a movie for anyone being interested in the movie.

I don't like (most) Anime (I feel like it's one way I diverge from typical geek culture) but I do often like foreign movies and TV shows more than domestic ones. That's probably an effect too.

On the flip side, I've heard the blandness of larger ticket domestic US films in terms of things like sexual, religious, or political themes attributable to global distribution. Many culture are much more sexually conservative, and most overseas cultures outside maybe Canada and some of Europe would not get (or care about) US politics.

> more people in the US like anime than domestic pop culture

Difficult to get viewing figures for that, but I find it hard to believe. That does feel like a bubble effect. And possibly a piracy bubble effect too.

In fact the difficulty of getting meaningful viewing figures out of streamers is probably a big part of the problem. Nobody knows what's actually popular. Even those supposed to be getting royalties had no idea (wasn't there a strike over that?). And the streaming services themselves pay far too much attention to the first weeks, preventing sleeper hits or word of mouth being effective.

Anime is such a broad genre that it is completely normal to dislike most of it.

Part of the bubble is generational, what my parents watch, what I watch and what my kids watch are all very different. Aka the death of "four quadrant" entertainment.

Even just saying "watch" feels off as so much of my kids time is spent with franchises in Roblox or other online games.

Riffing on your SpongeBob comments.

It drives me crazy that all the streaming services seem to only push about 20 different choices from there catalog.

Each row of choices contains the same titles as the previous row. It makes no sense to me why should the service care at how popular any single title is as long as we are subscribed to their service.

They are hampering discoverability.

> It makes no sense to me why should the service care at how popular any single title is as long as we are subscribed to their service

I suspect that, like google's notorious killing of products with "only" tens of millions of users, this is a problem of internal structure. I bet that ranking of who gets into that row is a reflection of the social hierarchy between producers at Netflix whose compensation depends on it.

> They are hampering discoverability.

At some point Netflix really focused on this, then like google throwing away search, they lost it.

Well also SpongeBob is excellent and one of the greatest shows ever made.

I don't know if it's really anime eating movies' cake. But anime is generally FAR more on board with literalism than movies. If anime is really eating movies' market share, the lesson movie makers need to learn is to be more on the nose, not less.

Anime is the US is about a $2.5B industry, whereas just movies and just box office revenue in the US is about a three times that at around $7.5B. Anime is doing great here and growing fast, but I think you are in a bit of a bubble as far as anime. It tends to be a "bubbly" subculture, so not surprising.

> At some point Netflix really focused on this, then like google throwing away search, they lost it.

I believe Netflix had a big catalog when people signing their rights thought it was not going to work. Once the model was proven everyone created their platform and stopped licensing to Netflix. Then Netflix had to get closer to making their own shows, and their "discoverability" features centered around hiding how few movies they have.

I don't tend to like generational analysis because it obscures the Diffusion of innovations analysis:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovations

People think of anime as "for young people" and maybe it is -- but I first saw Star Blazers circa 1981 and thought it was the best thing I ever saw on TV, then about ten years later Urusei Yatsura and Ranma 1/2 and Tenchi Muyo and Guyver and I still watch it. Anime is actually the center of a "media mix" that includes manga, light novels, visual novels, video games, web novels. streaming and other channels. In Japan there must be plenty of people my age who had the same experience starting with Gundam or something like that.

Granted I don't talk to a lot of Xers who like anime, but I sure see it in 20-somethings. (To be fair I see a lot of people who have an obvious squick reaction when they say "I don't care for anime")

Another case where generational analysis goes wrong is in the analysis of TikTok vs YouTube. I'd argue that most of the cultural changes (personalization economy, filter bubbles, an environment where Zohran Mandami does well, ...) actually happened with YouTube but we didn't notice it because it had a broad base, happened slowly, and personalization is deceptive since you don't see what I see -- but TikTok seemed to come on so fast and was visible to people because it affected an "other".

Anime is more a medium than a genre; it's like saying one does not like claymation or live-action movies.

Please, anime today is purely for children and teenagers. The golden age of serious anime is long over.

is it true that anime is more literalist than cinema? assuming we're looking at anime with an older target market than kids

Even then, the adult stuff was still appealing to me as a kid. Take me back to Cowboy Bebop on Toonami..

Well domestic pop culture is shadow of what it was back in 2012. And the 2012 otaku culture itself was alot more unrestrained than it is today. If anything, anime has generally gotten alot more sanitized and homogenous which has contributed to it's acceptance to the larger mainstream community. Tolerate it or not after all, lolicon was a major part of that preceding era, but it's far more controversial today than it was back then with modern audiences. Alot of what was achieved back then is literally not possible today. It's just that mainstream pop culture has declined even worse that people are moving to the former.

I’m a Gen Xer. Voltron and Robotech were the big ones for me and my friends but these Americanized shows didn’t lead us to anime in general. We weren’t really exposed to real anime and to the degree we were (Akira comes to mind) we couldn’t get our hands on it. Even as a teen when I could finally buy it on VHS selection and availability were very limited. (Manga was somewhat more available.) It’s not surprising to me most of our peers don’t watch it. I still watch it now and almost have the same problem from the opposite angle: There’s so much available finding the good stuff that isn’t just yet-another mediocre shonen or isekai, or is cringey soft porn is difficult.

Your Name is a title that for me reminded me why I became an anime fan many years ago. In 2016 when it came out, anime as a whole was well into its slop era, but Your Name has near Ghibli tier animation and powerful emotional themes rooted in both traditional and modern Japanese culture. It was the exception that proved the rule about anime slop.

I’m sure this is the majority of it but it’s an incomplete analysis. Netflix is hampering discovery of even what they do have. I can go to a friends and they can pull up their Netflix with things I had no idea were currently on offer.

What in your mind was the golden age of serious anime? There's tons of trash today (cough 99% of isekai cough), but there was plenty of trash in almost any era of anime. How much god awful "harem anime" came out in the 90s/00s?

Anime has the same discoverability problem as film and other media.

The anime that you mentioned are things that are popular _right now_. There are a few shows from a decade or so ago that people are told to go watch and do but only a few.

How many newly minted anime fans do you know that are going and digging through the 80s and 90s OVA trash that really defined the medium? (and for every one of those there are 50 more who will complain to you about the animation quality because they were raised on nothing but full CG animation...)

That's just as niche as being a cinephile is today.

The ratio of diamond to coal is the point. Of course you may always find an exception, but like you say there's tons of trash today.

People consider the 80s to early 90s the golden age, not 90s/00s it isn't something I just made up. On average there is an undeniable drop in animation quality and story quality compared to past eras.

Anime is going to explode. Just did some google fu and apparently 50% of millenials and gen z watch anime weekly. Boomers probably watch almost zero anime so once the demographics shift in 30-40 years, you might expect half of all americans to watch anime weekly by these trends. And this is just considering present rates not the fact that these rates have been increasing over time.

My social circle is into afrobeats and amapiano and, to a much lesser extent, american film. I think people just gravitate towards their niche.

Yeah, the forecast I saw researching my comment is it is going to get to about $8b by 2033 - which will make it about as big as the movie box office sales industry.

How many movie cards can they put on a screen at once...10, at most. How are they supposed to show you what is "on offer"? If their catalog were 10x smaller or 100x larger, they can only show so much.

I supposed they could email customers an excel document. But short of that, they have to make choices about what to do with the pixels on their page, and those choices represent filtering what they show you. How is "hampering discovery" different than what they are physically forced to do?

My complaint is that the repeat the same titles in multiple rows on the same screen.

Oh right, that’s bad.

Sure. That’s not what I mean though. I mean that every time I go to my page it’s roughly the same and only changes based on what’s new that they’ve decided I’ll like. Years ago when they were doing the long tail business model they had an idea what I like. The t feels like they now have an idea of what they’d like me to like.

If I scroll down far enough I’ll loop around and if I scroll through the categories given they’ll overlap. But if I go to someone with different enough taste I’ll see there are things I’d like to be aware of which I don’t k ow how to engage without already knowing about them. We expect this for languages foreign to us but why is it also true for anything the least bit challenging to one’s usual taste?