Stills from the movie "Ghost Blade Infinite Train" (2020), which surpassed Spirited Away and became the box office champion of Japanese domestic films. (Infographic/Figure)
At the end of the year and the beginning of the year, three Japanese animations attracted the attention of netizens at home and abroad. First, in the last week of 2020, the theatrical version of "Infinity Train" of "Devil's Blade" ranked first in the history of the Domestic Box Office in Japan, breaking the record held by Spirited Away for nearly 20 years. Then there are the progressions of two phenomenal animations – the final chapter of the theatrical version of Evangelion is set for January 23, 2021 (later postponed due to the impact of the epidemic); manga artist Yuhiko Inoue announced on January 7, 2021 that "Slam Dunk Master" will be re-filmed, or the manga "National Competition" will be brought to the screen.
It's been 26 years since the premiere of Evangelion and the premiere of the last animated movie on Slam Dunk Master. In the past 26 years, the children who used to watch "Slam Dunk Master" have entered the age of standing, and the production mode and industry rules of Japanese animation have also undergone earth-shaking changes.
<h3>Two modes of the rise of Japanese animation</h3>
How to balance the artistry of animation with the attributes of goods is a problem that Japanese animators have to face. The two peaks of Japanese animation, Hayao Miyazaki and Osamu Tezuka, represent two typical attitudes to dealing with this issue.
Miyazaki and his Studio Ghibli have always been committed to the concept of producing high-quality animation. Every animated Ghibli film invests a lot of money and effort in order to achieve very high quality in all aspects of the film, and use this high-quality film to get the corresponding returns.
This approach at Ghibli has been quite successful. Half of the top 10 grossing films in Japan are from Ghibli. Among them, the 2001 film "Spirited Away" has been the holder of The Japanese box office record for nearly 20 years. Spirited Away is also the only non-English film to have won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature Film. Both commercial and artistic, Spirited Away can be seen as a typical example of Ghibli's creative philosophy.
But there is only one Ghibli in the entire Japanese animation world. Even Ghibli produces at most one animated film a year, which is completely unacceptable to other animation companies in Japan.
The vast majority of Japanese animation companies have adopted the exact opposite strategy. This strategy was first implemented by Osamu Tezuka and his bug making company. That is, at a lower cost, a large number of animations are produced, and mainly TV animations are the mainstays, winning with quantity and selling small profits.
In order to keep costs down, Osamu's early animation works were based on Osamu Tezuka's own manga, which saved the payment of the manga's copyright fees; in production, these TV animations used the screen, greatly simplified the background and character movements, and used "one beat two" or even "one beat three" as a conventional means. (Animation is like a movie with twenty-four frames per second, and "one shot two" means that a picture is shot twice, so that a one-second animation only needs to produce twelve frames, which is equivalent to cutting the workload in half.) The same goes for "one shot three". While reducing the intensity and cost of work, this practice also loses the smoothness of the animation and the viewing experience. ）
Even so, animation was still costly, especially in the era before the popularity of computer painting, where painting was done on celluloid and then shot frame by frame with a camera. At that time, only a few companies could produce TV animation, such as Toei Animation, Sunrise, Bug Productions, and Dragon Child. These companies generally only produce TV animations with original comics. This is done partly to eliminate the risks of original uncertainty, and partly because, in an era when the Internet was not yet widespread, promoting an original animation was a costly and ineffective thing. Therefore, when Miyazaki wanted to produce the anime "Valley of the Wind", he was also asked to do the manga of the same name for two years.
At that time, the investment in the few original TV animations came mainly from toy companies like Bandai. They invest in original animation more to market toys with the help of animation, so the directors and screenwriters of these animations are often asked by the management to watch a few toy robots make up dozens of episodes of animation.
At that time, TV animation, dozens of episodes or even hundreds of episodes, were common, which was also for the establishment of intensive animation projects and the cost of cultivating audiences.
The general production level of such TV animation can be imagined. This continued until the first half of 1990, when Slam Dunk Master was last animated. Yuhiko Inoue, who has a high pursuit of quality, was dissatisfied with this, and he later created the manga "REAL", which he complained that "it takes two minutes to dribble through the half" and "it takes half an episode to shoot a three-point shot". In the end, the 1995 animation of "Slam Dunk Master" came to an abrupt end after the county competition.
Also in 1995, this traditional animation mode was changed by the advent of an anime, "Evangelion" produced by Hideaki Anno and his GAINAX.
Evangelion (hereinafter referred to as "EVA") is fundamentally different from the TV animation mentioned above - it is an original animation, "only" 26 episodes, and it was produced by GAINAX.
GAINAX is an animation company founded in December 1985 by Hiroyuki Yamaga, Hideaki Anno, Yoshiyuki Sadamoto, Takami Akai, and several other young people in their twenties. Before EVA, gainax produced only animations such as Wang Li Cosmic Army, Leaping Peak and Sapphire Mystery. Although these three animations have gained a good reputation because of their excellent quality, but also because of their investment in work costs, each work will eventually be unable to make ends meet, and the company's deficit is getting bigger and bigger.
IN THIS SITUATION, GAINS DOESN'T LOOK LIKE IT CAN MAKE TV ANIMATION. At that time, EVA producer Toshiren Otsuki came up with a genius solution, he found a group of advertising agencies, record companies, TV stations, toy companies, etc., to invest in animation production. And the business such as pre-publicity, broadcast channels, post-broadcast peripherals and DVD sales are handed over to the corresponding professional companies to operate. In this way, gainax only has to do a good animation.
This is the production committee system that continues to this day, and its early investment not only solves the problem of animation production funds, but also brings resources from all aspects of peripheral product design, sales, distribution, etc., and incorporates animation works into the inherent network of those merchants. These factors add up to the possibility for animation companies to shoot diverse original animations. Because as long as you shoot a good work, the resources gathered by the production committee will help you spread it.
Such a system was very beneficial to all aspects of Japanese animation, and the Japanese animation industry has since entered an era of blossoming flowers. Many of the classic Japanese animations we are familiar with now and the animation companies that make them, such as Bones, STUDIO 4°C, Zexcs, ufotable, P.A. WORKS, A-1 Pictures, etc., basically sprung up after this.
Stills from the movie Slam Dunk Master (1995), the latest theatrical version of the comic, 26 years ago. (Infographic/Figure)
<h3>Box office champion "just mismatched"? </h3>
However, more than two decades later, the production committee system, a model that once brought endless vitality to Japanese animation, has become the biggest factor restricting the development of Japanese animation. So much so that Hideaki Anno, who created this model, once said publicly: "The life of Japanese animation is still five years left." ”
In fact, all this was already doomed at the beginning of the establishment of the production committee system.
The initial investment of funds, although the animation company can produce animation to carry out more projects, but it also means that when the animation makes money, all the financial owners who have invested in the early stage must come to share a piece of the pie. The various publicity and sales channels provided by the production committee, although the animation DVD and various peripherals have higher sales, but it also means that those really profitable sales links, animation companies actually have no right to speak. In other words, animation companies have changed from independent companies that do their own projects and start businesses to "hit workers" of capital and large companies.
The most typical example is the pioneer of the production committee model, EVA. After the animation of "EVA" was broadcast, sales of peripheral products alone reached 100 billion yen. The producer's GAINS HAVE ALL ADDED UP TO FILL THE COMPANY'S PREVIOUS DEFICIT.
The production committee system makes the entire market look more and more prosperous, and the categories and peripheral products are becoming more and more diversified, but as an animation company that is really in the front line of animation production, it still has not escaped the fate that has begun since the era of Osamu Tezuka - as low as possible, making more animation products, in order to "make small profits and high sales" and make a hard money.
In recent years, animation companies have become even worse off.
In the past, although animation companies did not make much money, they still had autonomy over the content they produced. Nowadays, with the popularity of social media, user feedback is more rapid and intense. The capitalists are no longer satisfied with just controlling publicity and sales, they direct animation companies to produce animation works that "do what they like" based on the audience preferences analyzed by big data.
This approach runs counter to the basic original of animation. What makes animation commercially valuable is its own artistic value. As Jobs put it, "Before the invention of the automobile, you asked consumers what they wanted, and they would say, 'Want a faster horse!'" People don't know what they want until you put it in front of them. ”
Japanese animation companies are becoming less and less autonomous, but the demand for Japanese animation works in China, Europe and the United States is increasing. In 2020, the number of new anime produced in each quarter has almost doubled compared with a decade ago, and the number of Japanese animation practitioners is far from catching up with this growth rate.
The combination of these factors has led to the fact that the current Japanese animation is full of homogeneous and roughly produced works, especially anime adaptations of light novels that travel through other worlds. Anime fans refer to it as "toilet paper light reform", and every quarter spits that these animations have become their fixed entertainment.
Such animation has greatly lowered the expectations of the audience, and under the background of peers, an animation that can cater to the audience preferences obtained by big data analysis, has enough topic discussion, and is well-made is enough to achieve unimaginable success in the animation industry in the past.
The most typical example is "Devil's Blade", the original work of this animation was serialized in "Weekly Shonen JUMP", and its plot can be said to be a good combination of the "friendship", "effort", "victory" and "bondage" elements of the traditional shonen manga of "Weekly Shonen JUMP", and the "emotion", "CP" and "bento" elements that are popular with the audience now. ufotable's excellent and highly stylized animation production, as well as the 19th episode of the animation with a high degree of topicality to "out of the circle", together created the "Devil's Blade" manga sales of more than 60 million copies, the average volume exceeded 3 million copies, and the animation sales volume was the second place in 2019. The theatrical version of "Infinite Train", released in 2020, grossed 36.18 billion yen, breaking the box office record of "Spirited Away" for nearly 20 years.
But when we compare Devil's Blade with the Japanese anime that it can go down in history, we find that the quality of Devil's Blade doesn't seem to be enough to support such an exaggerated achievement. Its success is more like a success story under the current industrial entertainment system, rather than a "work" that cannot be copied and has a unique charm like the "Spirited Away" it has just surpassed. Perhaps today's Japanese animation industrialization system is too mature to be satisfied with mass production of "fast food" that can bring enough profits.
It was because of witnessing these circumstances and deeply understanding that all of this was inevitable that Hideaki Anno would utter the phrase "There are still five years left in the life of Japanese animation."
After all, those who can devote themselves to the animation industry and stick to it are those who love animation the most. It is precisely because of these people that animation does not really make people feel desperate. After all, this is an era when even "Slam Dunk Master" can restart production.
Southern Weekend Contributing Writer Seaman