Although asked in the context of Miyazaki’s and Ghibli’s views on the primacy of the feature film, this question covers an issue that’s been debated in the anime business and anime scholarship for decades. It’s a really interesting question, because some people undeniably consider feature films superior to other forms of moving picture, but when you examine the topic more closely, many of these people have also danced with the devils of TV, advertising, and even video games.
Both Takahata and Miyazaki joined Toei to make feature films. At the time, films were accepted as valid art forms, whereas television was a newcomer, widely viewed as a suitable medium for mass market entertainment, advertising and news, but cheap and disposable.
The rise of TV anime cemented these views. Osamu Tezuka’s Tetsuwan Atom, sold to the US that year as Astro Boy, launched on Japanese TV on New Year’s Day 1963. It was a hit with young audiences, and before the end of the year three more studios were making anime for TV, including Toei. TV production schedules and the cut-throat competition with American cartoon imports meant that budgets for TV anime were frankly ludicrous; Tezuka adapted the limited animation techniques he learned watching American cartoons to enable his team to turn out episodes on time and on budget. They were inventive in driving the story forward, creating memorable characters and exploring situations as deep and serious as any feature film, but the look of their product was rough by comparison with Toei’s Hakujaden and Paul Grimault’s La Bergere et le Ramoneur, the feature films that had drawn Takahata and MIyazaki into animation.
To Miyazaki, anime was TV anime, unknown before the 1960s. Toei categorised their feature films as manga eiga – cartoon films. In several 80s pieces reprinted in Starting Point 1979-1996 Miyazaki links manga eiga directly with the experiences of his childhood, where a cartoon movie or short was something rare, an experience to be treasured. He connects anime directly with airline food, personal computers and “fancy” foreign cars.
Mass production, for him, devalues the product. It’s partly nostalgia, partly snobbery and totally subjective: the movie director who drives a cheap mass-produced foreign-made Citroen 2CV is sneering at airline food, people with expensive foreign cars and Nintendo Famicoms, while lamenting that popular animation in Japan is less the equivalent of a pair of handmade shoes and more the result of an industrial process.
Both he and Takahata worked on TV anime at Toei. The major part of their work between leaving Toei and setting up Studio Ghibli was on TV anime. Japan’s small anime industry looked at Tezuka’s success and followed the money, in the process expanding, collapsing, contracting and compromising until cheap global access enabled the behemoth it has become today. It wasn’t what the two friends came into the animation industry to do – and yet their studio has worked on advertisements, computer games, and TV. Ghibli profits considerably from the sale of mass-produced merchandise, and has even gone into the theme park business: the company that resisted Disneyfication is willing to follow Disney on its own terms.
There has been heated debate in the anime industry about the meaning of manga eiga and anime since TV anime became so widespread. I couldn’t go into much detail during the Q&A, but for both animators and anime historians in Japan, there are serious semantic issues around which term you favour for which project. It can even impact teasing and marketing a new title – Satoshi Kon labelled his unfinished project Dreaming Machine as manga eiga to raise, challenge and subvert the nostalgic feel-good aura the term generates. (If you’d like to explore further, there’s an excellent article on Animation Obsessive that visits some of the opinions and arguments in Japan between the 1980s and 2020.)
So yes, there are definitely people inside and outside the anime business in Japan who consider feature films inherently superior to TV anime. That idea springs partly from generational shift, partly from views on the value of traditional craft skills, partly from the snobbery that rejects mass production and partly from the fact that until very recently feature film production and transmission technology was superior to its TV equivalent. On the other hand, expectations of pacing and plotting have changed, and current equipment exposes the image to intense high-resolution scrutiny. To many 21st-century anime viewers old-school material – whether feature films or TV series – can appear less than perfect.
The choice of which term to use may be made by a film-maker setting up expectations of a new feature or a cutting-edge studio defining new ways of making anime for TV. The argument on which term to use may be made by directors, historians, researchers and journalists, each with their own biases. The argument on which is better – feature or series, old or new – rages on.
The one sure thing is that fans consider their favourite show, regardless of whether it’s a TV series, TV special, made-for-video release or feature film, as the best anime ever. And that is absolutely correct.