Anime Boston Final Wrap Up - Anime in the US Today
When I think about my weekend up here in Boston this year, I guess it can only be summed up into one word: different. Every little aspect of the convention experience seemed a little off this time around. It’s like having that little voice in the back of your head saying, “No, this ain’t right, something is very, very wrong here.” Was it a change in my personal situation and attitude? Possibly. But I think that it’s the change within the industry and fandom that caused this worry.
The biggest issue that I’ve been talking about all weekend is the fact that only three anime companies were present this year. If you go back to the Anime Boston of two years ago, you will see a much brighter picture. All the birds of the industry, from the tiny Synch-Point to the giant Bandai, couldn’t wait to strut their newly developed plumage to the crowd of onlookers. All the companies were snatching up titles left and right. Some of them even announced 5 titles that year! If there was a golden time for anime, that was it, and they were living it up for everything that they could squeeze out of it.
Last year, the companies returned to the stage, but many came empty handed. The pretty feathers from the year before were now dull. Everyone started to tremble as they saw sales not growing at the rate they needed to in order to survive. The only thing they could hope for at the time was to be saved by a couple of little ninjas, who were about to make their way over to the US with in a couple of months.
But the little ninjas didn’t save them. Only three companies came back north this spring, which left many to wonder what happened to the rest of the flock. One of them had died right before the journey, and the rest must have been too sick to even try. One show, no matter how popular it is, cannot save an entire industry. If that was the case, then what one show sparked the golden age of three years ago? Pokemon? Cowboy Bebop? Inu Yasha?
None of them caused the boom, it was the new, innovative ideas that sparked it. It was the fact that you could watch mature anime every Saturday night on Cartoon Network. It was the fact that you could either listen to your anime in Japanese or English all on the same disk. It was the fact that you could go to your local bookstore and discover the awesome sensation of reading something backwards.
But these changes came about 4 years ago, and nothing has changed since that time. Yes, many companies came in and joined the party, but no one brought anything new that wasn’t there before. Did the fans finally get sick of this anime thing? Did it completely die off like every other fad of the past?
Well, if fans had gotten sick of it, then why are these conventions seeing increased attendance records year after year? Anime Boston alone roughly sees a linear increase of 2,000 people every year. That means that attendance was actually the lowest during the “golden age” of anime, and is at it’s highest right now during the slump! Anime is not losing their fans. We’ve been sticking with it the whole time.
I think the problem with the industry right now is that anime is no longer a fad, it has become a part of our modern day pop-culture. That boom from four years ago was actually the point in time when that change happened. As the snobbish, college-aged anime bloggers that we are, I think that we often forget just what importance making an anime “mainstream” in the US really is. We somehow think that having something dubbed over takes away what makes anime anime. And then we use this bullshit reasoning to justify downloading “pure” fansub anime without paying a dime for it. But if it wasn’t for the work of the US anime companies making these titles mainstream, then how the hell would you ever discover anime in the first place?
The truth is that it is only us, the fansub community, that gave up on anime.
Looking at the audience at this year’s convention reminded me that “true” anime fans were still alive and living well in the world today. Since the event was held a month later then usual, most of the college “fansub” crowd had gone home for the summer, leaving only the innocent high school kids free to not be persecuted for still loving Adult Swim anime. And instead of putting up a snobbish attitude at the genre and criticizing it, they embraced it with loving admiration. We were all these fans at one point, most of us during the golden age. And so the golden age never went away, the same fans are still around. While many were lost to the evils of fan-subbing, more came up to fill their shoes.
So as more and more of these companies start to die off, many will ask “How do we make anime popular again?” However, that is impossible to answer because anime never stopped being popular. It’s just as more fans enter the mainstream, many of the previous fans enter the underground. So I think the issue that truly needs to be asked is “How do we win back the fansub community?” That is what ADV has been trying to figure out for the past year, coming up with little schemes that will hopefully lead to that break-through innovation that will win us back for good. I’ve been very opening supporting them and their efforts, and I am fully confident that they can do it.
I went to this convention with a slight motive: I wanted to tell the companies, particularly ADV, on what I think is the key to winning back the fansubers. The reason why the fansub community is doing the illegal downloading are all the same reason why we all turned to Napster back at the turn of the century - it’s easy, free, and offers a much larger variety of options then what’s on store shelves. Apple realized that the satisfying these conditions and just changing the “free” to “very affordable”, they can actually turn to profit for the record industry. And so they were to win back the Napster community with their iTunes service.
I believe the same can be done with fansubbers.
And so my question to the industry was meant to get them to start thinking about this concept, “What are your plans beyond DVD? Blu-Ray? HD-DVD? Downloads?” I didn’t really care about the Blu-Ray, HD-DVD part. I was well aware that they were never going to touch that subject at all. But I was hoping that they would realize that not only were those two formats dead to them, but so was DVD. Fansubs and bittorrents killed the potential anime DVD market. The true answer in that equation was downloads. Media Blasters shunned the idea, and I’m not surprised. I have a feeling that they will soon be in the same unemployment line as CPM any day now. But ADV answered the question as if online was the next step in their plan to “come out on top”, as Dave puts it. The company has already been experimenting with bittorrent promotions and video podcasts. And at the convention, he was dropping hints that “we will soon be able to get anime to the fans a lot faster then before.”
I would keep a close eye on ADV over the next year. I have a feeling they’ll find a way to change the entire fansub community very soon.
