Judging by fan adoration, I get this feeling that anime in Japan are not made by ginormous animation companies trying too hard to produce the same samey conformant goop as everybody else, which seems to be a problem that EE.UU. and Europe do have. Or am I wrong?
Otaku/doujin culture, and the creative industry that rose around it in Japan, is as good as it gets when it comes to finding good ideas and propping them up. Basically anyone who can draw can release their own manga/webnovel/illustrations on pixiv, twitter, and others, get a couple volumes out with this or that publishing house, see where it goes and whether the public catches on. Self-publishing plays a huge part in this, whether it's doujinshi (self-made [often derivative] books sold at conventions like Comiket, Comitia, or online, with a substantial proportion of r-18 [but not only] content), doujin music albums, indie games and visual novels, etc.
Funding for anime adaptations is plentiful, and fan support helps bridge the confidence gap where production committees (consortiums of multiple publishing/IP companies pooling the money to distribute the risk) won't go for more indie / experimental works. Profit is recouped on developing the brand and merch, while leaving plenty of room for directors and studios to establish their own auteur identity. Studios are getting leaner and more focused these days, splitting off into smaller entities kicked off with a project or two with more margin for talent to shine.
It's not all perfect, though. Freelance work and lack of mentoring has really put a dent into the supply of new animators, who lack job security and often swing between studios left and right, but there are industry efforts to fix this and preserve knowledge, with the oldest pioneer animators now starting to hit their 60's and 70's.
Please explain how “funding is plentiful” for the industry - as an American Musician and artist, I am truly curious how money is available to creatives in Japan in this sector. Thank you!
It's plentiful in PPP terms I suppose. Japanese wages are very low, they wouldn't be able to fund even one of those ugly Netflix adult comedies where it's made in Flash and called Big Balls or something.
You're probably only being exposed to the best and most notable anime, which is giving you a very skewed perspective. In fact every season (anime releases follow a seasonal pattern; Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall) there's tons of same-y and uninteresting trope-filled anime. Most seasonal anime just takes some basic premise as a starting point and then it fills in the rest of the details with tons of tropes, or it copies the key details from other successful entries in the sub-genre. If you started following every anime season you'd quickly notice how many derivative anime are released each season.
You can check it out for yourself, go to anilist.co, and filter for Year 2024, and then filter again for each Season. There's tons of fad-chasing, aside from the major standouts. It's honestly a shame because some of these slop-tier anime still tend to get beautiful animations, but their stories and writing in general is really bad. Sometimes you get an F-tier story with S-tier animation.
> you'd quickly notice how many derivative anime are released each season.
Never could get used to the term 'derivative' in that context. Everything's derivative. Hard to know what word to use instead, but I just wouldn't attach an adjective in the first place and just skip past it. For instance, I don't call a particular reality show derivative, I'm just not really going to be interested in the first place, odds are.
I'd say that this is a wrong take considering how many seasonal anime these days can be described by the template "______ used to be an ordinary Japanese dude who got transported to another world with an overpowered skill".
No you would not be correct. In fact the explosion of certain genres of anime have been extremely cookie cutter.
Thats not to take away the enormous contribution made by fansubbers. Some of them are absolutely amazing. I remember seeing some of these techniques used in School Rumble years ago, and they also went out of their way to translate visual puns for western audiences.
There's a quality filter over it because people don't want to translate all the slop. In particular Kadokawa has seemingly replaced half the industry with bad "isekai" fantasy novel adaptations.
But there's also several long running toy commercial series for kids like Pretty Cure. They're better than any other country's toy commercials but still that.
