Sunday, March 28, 2010

China Dives Into Anime

The Middle Kingdom is interested in expanding its artistic horizons (as it is so many other things):

... With government subsidies, Chinese animation companies tripled their presence at this year's Tokyo anime fair even as the overall number of exhibitors declined. The four-day event through Sunday, one of the world's biggest anime-related trade shows and festivals, featured a "China-Japan Anime Summit" along with multiple China-themed lectures.

"China is a big market, and everybody is trying to get in," said Jimmy Tse, chief executive of Top Art Investment Ltd., which makes the panda Komazawa craved. "And the Chinese people, they are starting to think, 'How come I'm manufacturing for someone else?' Why are we not creating anything ourselves?'"

China's growing ambitions coincide with an ominous industrywide slump in Japan. ... Since 2006, ... a trend toward adult-oriented (and often sexually explicit) niche titles have turned off the general audience. Moreover, the industry is losing young talent due to persistently low pay and poor working conditions, forcing Japanese animation companies to outsource much of their work.

"The Japanese anime industry basically gave China, Korea and all these countries the keys to the candyshop"...

Low pay? Crappy working conditions? Who would have thought?

Happily, the United States doesn't have problems like that. We're far more enlightened.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

99% of Japanese cartoons are crap. Juvenile pap. There's a very, VERY small handful of stuff worth viewing, but the poor storytelling in most is very off-putting except to those who have indiscriminate tastes.

Japan has been outsourcing it's animation for decades to China among other places. There will be no difference.

Anonymous said...

I guess the large market for the "crap" you mentioned means that you're the only one that has good taste. Oh well, I guess the rest of the world is crazy and you are the only normal one.

As for Japan outsourcing to China, it will be sad cause right now that is the only Japanese thing that's making money for them right now.

Anonymous said...

Anonymous #1 said "99% of Japanese cartoons are crap. Juvenile pap. There's a very, VERY small handful of stuff worth viewing, but the poor storytelling in most is very off-putting except to those who have indiscriminate tastes."

This is true, except you wrote "Japanese" instead of "American" (a very common typo).

Anonymous said...

I agree. Most Japanese cartoons are silly, and make little sense. Sometimes they're visually interesting, but most of them are badly drawn and designed, and strictly for small children.

Anonymous said...

Japanese Cartoons are successful with children, no doubt. But the stories don't connect with people in either Europe and North and South America. Most of them are just awful, but many are trying things that are interesting, if not fully thought through. This is often taken as "different" rather than "good," and different is at least not the status quo.

Anonymous said...

So, if these cartoons are animated in China, are they still called Japanese cartoons?

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