At the beginning of July I was privileged to speak at a symposium on Transnational Perspectives in Anime. It was held on the Lancaster University campus, co-hosted by Dr. Zoe Crombie and Japan Foundation London; I took part from my desktop. It was a truly fascinating day, sparking new ideas and new insights about the way in which anime, always an art form that crosses national and cultural boundaries, has expanded into virtually every corner of the world thanks to the ever-increasing speed, connectivity and affordability of broadband technology.
My short presentation has been turned into a short essay for publication alongside the other brilliant papers presented at the event. It aims to add another tool to the kit scholars can use to examine anime’s global strength and consider its future. I call it transgenerationality.
The word is a bit of a mouthful, but it describes a big process. It describes the way anime grew in Japan in the post-Occupation years, where the population reflected the postwar baby boom with a third of all Japanese aged under 15, and two-thirds of their elders of working age. That created a huge audience for anime on Japanese TV and all its spinoff merchandise. It fuelled what Mark Steinberg defined as the “media mix” – the ability to leverage the success of a title across multiple platforms and media, each building on the success of the other. Many of those childhood viewers dropped out of anime fandom as college, romance and other hobbies opened up to them, but enough stayed fans as they grew older to keep the anime engine turning throughout Japan’s boom-and-bust cycles.
Anime’s success also supplied a steady stream of recruits to the industry that had captivated them in childhood. Despite fierce competition, appalling pay and poor working conditions, people just wanted to make anime. A few became major names, but for the majority of Japanese anime recruits, it was about just being in the industry.
Sixty years on, things have changed dramatically. Like many affluent nations, Japan has a falling birthrate and a booming population of over-65s. The anime industry in Japan has been sustained since 1963 by new young consumers and new young workers. Both are now in short supply, to the extent where studios are looking to AI as a solution to create in-between sketches – the drawings that fill in the gaps between one frame and the next, creating animation.
Thanks to broadband enabling access, there is a huge young population of anime consumers and workers developing outside Japan. And I’m not talking about Europe or North America. They have great animators and artists but they too are part of the old-world problem: falling birthrates, ageing populations. In India, Africa, South America, the Arab world, there are populations like that of post-Occupation Japan, with large populations of young consumers and workers, fusing their own style and culture with their respect and love for anime to make new animation – part of anime’s cultural heritage, but speaking with its own voice rather than simply pastiching influences.
What impact will this have on what we might call the motherlode, the anime made in Japan since the middle of the 20th century that has inspired this global renaissance of animation?
We’ll have to wait and see. Anime is living in interesting times.