Anime vs. Video Games

Via 1UP.com:

The tug-of-war between two of Japan's big pop-culture exports.

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apanese video games and anime stick close together. The two court similar audiences, and the cross-pollination goes far beyond the assortments of anime-based games and game-based anime. Manga creators and anime artists design game characters all the time, animation studios routinely work on games, and countless names jump from one field to the other. Cowboy Bebop writer Keiko Nobumoto worked on the first Kingdom Hearts. Gurren Lagann director Hiroyuki Imaishi crafted the opening of Samurai Legend Musashi. So it goes with a thousand more examples. Bore deep enough into just about any Japan-made game, and you'll see some anime influence.
This complex little web formed over many years of pop-culture symbiosis, as the fortunes of the nation's game and anime industries rose and fell. They're promoted, fed off, and perhaps even damaged each other. All the while, it's gotten harder to separate them.

THE NEW KID

Japan's animation market was well established by the time video games arose in the late 1970s. The anime industry had grown steadily since the first Toei films of the late 1950s and "manga god" Osamu Tezuka's pioneering TV series of the 1960s (which began with the international hit Astro Boy). Such films and TV shows were fixtures of Japan's entertainment, and a steady swell of hardcore fans was building around more niche shows.
The game industry, by contrast, was only beginning. Space Invaders had set the tone for a burgeoning generation of Japanese arcade games, and soon the likes of Pac-Man and Donkey Kong found worldwide fame. Yet this was territory the anime industry had explored already, as names like Astro Boy and Speed Racer proved successful in overseas markets years prior. Anime was a viable Japanese export long before video games came along.
As the game industry grew, however, so did its collusion with anime. The rise of Nintendo and the Famicom helped a great deal, and by the mid-'80s it was widely apparent that video games were no quick and dirty fad. The first major game-derived anime emerged in the summer of 1986 with two shamelessly commercial films. Super Mario Bros.: The Great Mission to Rescue Princess Peach showed off Nintendo's biggest characters, while Running Boy Star Soldier no Himitsu promoted Hudson Soft's shooters, game controllers, and early professional gamer Takahashi Meijin. In fact, Hudson embraced cartoons even quicker than Nintendo. By the end of the year, kids could watch Meijin and other Hudson characters in a TV series called Bug-tte Honey.
Both games and anime grew remarkably in the second half of the '80s, and they were aided by one thing above all others: a runaway economy. A housing bubble and financial growth turned the rest of the decade into a highly profitable era, and it showed. Anime expanded with the debut of direct-to-video releases, dubbed Original Video Animation (or Original Animation Videos). Freed from the restrictions of television, this new format allowed for shorter projects that were experimental, indulgent, and aimed at the rising tide of devoted young-adult anime fans. This widening audience of self-styled "otaku" covered all sorts of tastes, but most prominent was a demand for violence, sex appeal, and storylines beyond what was allowed on TV.
The games of the era quickly seized on this same trend. One of the first was Telenet and Wolfteam's Valis, a side-scroller released for home computers in 1986. It dressed a blue-haired, wide-eyed schoolgirl named Yuko in an armored bikini and droped her into a monster-filled fantasyland, a premise straight out of the era's niche anime hits (specifically, 1985's Leda: The Fantastic Adventure of Yohko). Valis became Telenet's top property in the years that followed, due in no small part to the advent of the PC Engine and CD-based video games. The new format allowed for cutscenes and voice acting in convincing anime style, and Valis was hardly the only game that took advantage of it. Cosmic Fantasy, Tengai Makyo, Emerald Dragon, Ys, and various others did their best to evoke Japan's animation trends, often employing anime studios in the process. Many games were following anime's lead as the 1980s concluded, yet that dynamic was about to change.

THE POWER DRIFT

As the '90s started, Japan's economic bubble ended. A recession set in by 1992, and leaner times ensued throughout the anime industry. Well-funded pet projects and big-budget films grew less frequent, and the realm of TV animation got cheaper and more predictable. Japan's game companies were by no means immune to the ebbing finances, but the biggest players were still doing well in overseas markets. Nintendo, Konami, Capcom, and other titans had little to worry about. Sega, for one, fared better in Europe and North America than it ever did in Japan.
"In the late '80s, the games industry was the poor sister and only people who were really into games wanted to work in it," recalls Jan Scott-Fraizer, who worked at various Japanese animation studios for 13 years. "But then there was a huge explosion in popularity and game company's incomes swelled tremendously. They started to poach talent from anime companies, so they were seen as a threat to some degree. Then the anime industry tanked in the late '90s. But games were booming, so there was a big loss of talent and anime became the poor sister."
The brightest Japan-bred games enjoyed international appeal, while the anime industry kept a much lower profile in North America and Europe. Officially released anime titles were still expensive and obscure in the U.S., and getting a steady supply of movies or TV series involved tape-trading and college anime clubs. This led to a strangely inverted relationship, one where games introduced many American kids to the look of anime and manga. Whether through the pilot portraits of U.N. Squadron or the animated cutscenes of the Lunar RPGs, video games were often the standard-bearer for "that big-eyed cartoon look" in North America. Indeed, as the U.S. anime market grew in the late 1990s, publishers often went for familiar game licenses, buying up everything from Capcom's generously financed Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie to a brief Panzer Dragoon video.
Anime and game companies were by no means bitter rivals, of course. Many anime studios continued to collaborate with game developers, and technology brought the two closer together.
"Game animation, especially openings, had increasingly more money put into it and we were working at video-level quality, if not movie, so it looked good but required more work," says Scott-Frazier, who handled compositing on the Ghost in the Shell PlayStation game's intro and served as technical director for the animated scenes in The Granstream Saga and Madou Monogatari. "Schedules were somewhat softer than anime series schedules at the time as well. The Ghost in the Shell game opening was really amazing, and really expensive, and opened the door to a lot of opportunities for us and others."
Yet the road to game development remained hazardous. Scott-Frazier states: "I did not want to work for a games company because the market changed so fast that one bad step could take a company out. I worked as animation supervisor for Quo Vadis 2, and shortly after the game was released, GLAMS, the company who produced it, took a huge financial hit and the president bailed out and ran off into the night. I watched a couple companies work hard on games but other companies released similar games before they did and sucked up the market."
Among the companies eyeing the game industry was Gainax. In 1987, the fledging anime studio secured a record-setting budget for their first film, the sumptuously animated Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honneamise. Yet the movie couldn't make back its expense, and Gainax struggled financially. They were quite familiar with video games, taking part in Alisia Dragoon and the popular Princess Maker titles. After they failed to turn profits with the TV show Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water in the early '90s, Gainax co-founder Toshio Okada suggested that the company give up on anime and create games full-time. Other founding members disagreed.
"Gainax's involvement in anime was the very thing that gave it its foothold in the gaming industry," studio co-founder Yasuhiro Takeda writes in The Notenki Memoirs. "Dropping anime in favor of games was precisely the wrong way to go about things."
Takeda would be proven right before long. After several false starts, Gainax launched a TV series called Neon Genesis Evangelion in 1995. It set an unsuspecting anime market aflame and led to two theatrical films and untold heaps of merchandise. It remains Gainax's biggest moneymaker today, and there's never a shortage of Evangelion inspired video games.
Others in the anime industry were willing to cross over to games during the 1990s, the most prominent case being Yoshinori "Iko" Kanada. One of Japan's most influential animators, Kanada first brought a fluid perspective to giant-robot shows of the '70s, and his style would appear in numerous anime landmarks: the Yamato series (known here as Star Blazers), Galaxy Express 999, Akira, and the films of Hayao Miyazaki. Kanada was widely revered for his animation, though his only directorial work was the 1984 video release Birth. In 1998, Kanada joined the staff of Square Enix. Though he returned to animation for the 2001 film Metropolis, the past decade saw him working primarily on the CG cutscenes of games like Final Fantasy IX and Crisis Core. Kanada passed away in 2009, his last credit coming as storyboard director on Final Fantasy XIII.

THE MODERN MESS

In the summer of 2008, director Satoshi Kon attended a showing of his films at New York's Lincoln Center, and a member of the audience asked how one might get a job in the anime industry. Kon, regarded as one of the best filmmakers in anime, half-jokingly responded that Japan's animators made so little money that he couldn't recommend such a career.
There was much truth in Kon's jest. The present-day anime industry is a grim place where funds are scarce, audiences are shrinking, and experimental projects are rarely approved. Anime has always been a largely commercial endeavor, but the current climate makes it especially harder to break out of convention. And this applies to the anime market in America as well as Japan.
The '90s ended on a positive note for anime in North America. After kids flocked to Dragon Ball Z, Gundam Wing, and the multimedia craze of Pokemon, TV stations grabbed more and more anime properties. Around 2005, anime had an international presence like never before. Cartoon Network's Adult Swim block dedicated hours to everything from Cowboy Bebop to Fullmetal Alchemist, anime sections at Best Buy and Suncoast took over entire walls, and studio Gonzo crafted a multi-million dollar TV series called Afro Samurai for Western audiences.
Everything came crashing down to earth in the decade's second half. The excitement over anime led to bloated prices and bidding wars among Japanese studios and North American companies, who often paid obscene amounts for shows before full production began. Meanwhile, many of these series failed to strike it rich in North America. Anime fans eagerly snatched up hits like Naruto and perpetual sellers like Neon Genesis Evangelion, but they showed far less interest in titles like Fighting Spirit or Tokyo Majin (the latter of which cost its U.S. licensor nearly $780,000). American anime publishers were laden with too many mediocre series that their teenage target audiences could just as easily swipe from the Internet. Many companies shut down, and today the market is dominated by one major survivor, FUNimation.
A second bubble had burst for anime, and it was yet another setback in Japan's animation sector. Today, the industry is plagued by low wages and a paucity of talent. Despite frequent claims of Japan's game companies losing their edge, they remain much more lucrative than their anime counterparts. A 2010 report from the Digital Content Association of Japan put the average yearly salary at 5,184,995 yen (roughly $66,000 today). Meanwhile, a 2005 release from the Japan External Trade Organization stated that two-thirds of anime industry employees made under 3,000,000 yen ($38,000), with one fourth earning under 1,000,000 yen ($12,000) per annum. In the face of such figures, it's apparent why the game industry is stealing would-be animators.

The industry still has its successes, usually bred from popular manga like Naruto and One Piece, but many studios now depend on a less mainstream taste called "moe."

"It's hard to use the word 'steal' when conditions are so bad for employees of the anime industry," says Matt Alt, a Tokyo-based author and translator whose work includes a number of game localizations. "Twenty-five percent of people in the anime industry aren't making a living wage. And since the majority of the grunt work, the 'in-betweening' that used to serve as a training ground for young talent, is being outsourced abroad, it's harder and harder to make one's way up the ladder. From that standpoint you can say that the game industry is a lot healthier of a place for the average employee right now."
The industry still has its successes, usually bred from popular manga like Naruto and One Piece, but many studios now depend on a less mainstream taste called "moe." Though vague in definition, moe frequently involves hyper-cutesy anime girls in one form or another, with the additional aim of lulling the viewer into some cartoon facsimile or nostalgia or romance. In its most virulent strain, the moe trend leads devoted geeks to obsess over fictional characters, and it's increasingly common in the game industry.
In fact, it's not difficult to trace anime's current reliance on moe back to video games, or at least to the realm of dating simulators. First introduced on computers in the 1980s, dating sims grew to include both adults-only fare as well as mass-market hits like Konami's Tokimeki Memorial. By the '90s, anime producers couldn't help but notice this highly effective way to court nerdy predilections. In contrast to the love triangles of '80s anime like Macross and Kimagure Orange Road, romances of the 1990s featured numerous female characters inexplicably falling for a nebbish male lead. Through series like Love Hina and the original Tenchi Muyo, the "harem" anime was established, and it conveniently lent itself to video games.
"Dating simulators and harem anime are sort of the sitcoms of the Japanese content world as they rely on comfortable, well-known situations and reliable, predictable protagonists and characters," Alt explains. "They're classic otaku products that appeal to the same sort of person who doesn't have a lot going on romantically in their real lives."
The past decade also saw the advent of visual novels, interactive-fiction tales driven by dialogue and branching plotlines. They've existed in the Japanese game industry since the 1980s (when Dragon Quest creator Yuji Hori got his start on murder-mystery titles), but the past decade witnessed a spike in visual novels that sparked their own multimedia franchises. Some of these visual novels lean heavily on the same props as a dating simulator, while others tell broader stories. Fate/Stay Night was originally an adults-only visual novel about a supernatural tournament waged by historical figures, but its ensuing mainstream popularity earned it a manga series, two different anime series, and at least three subsequent video games--one of which, Fate/Extra, was just released in North America. While most anime series are still based on manga or toy lines, each new TV season includes several shows based on visual novels or dating sims.
If many have forsaken animation for the fields of video games, others trudge on through the anime industry. One of the most oft-praised new talents in the field is Makoto Shinkai, who began his career as an animator at RPG powerhouse Falcom. In 2001, he left the company to write, direct, and animate a short film called Voices of a Distant Star. Its resounding critical acclaim led Shinkai to a coveted director's spot, and his most recent movie, Children Who Chase Lost Voices, premiered last year.
Yet Shinkai represents a mere handful of newcomers in an industry starving for fresh ideas. The anime world lost one of its brightest talents when Satoshi Kon passed away in 2010, and other directors find themselves limited to productions that pander to a small and none-too-discerning crowd. And while the game industry is clearly riding higher in finances and prestige, its deepest problems mirror those of anime.
"There have always been niche productions in Japan, and that has been one of its strengths as a content producer," Alt says. "But now many feel Japanese creators are suffering from a Galapagos effect, in which Japanese companies rely on safe bets for domestic sales rather than aiming for potentially higher profits abroad."
If Japan's game industry loses its wide appeal, it may well head down the same path that anime faces. And perhaps that's all the more reason for the two markets to combine resources. Whatever the future may be, they're in it together.

Todd Ciolek

Todd Ciolek blames the anime industry's woes on its failure to make a TV show about the Sega Genesis classic Trouble Shooter. There's your crossover smash, folks.