Animation in the media

[Aaron Gerow]

Animation seems to be the focus of attention from various places these 
days.

In its Monday morning edition (the 24th), the Mainichi Shinbun ran an 
editorial on Japanese animation--it's a rare event when a major newspaper 
does a full editorial on a subject like that. The editorial basically 
acknowledged the general trend in official opinion these days that, with 
the rise of a global "contents" industry, Japanese animation, which the 
editorial says holds 60% of the world's share of broadcast animation, 
should be considered a major export item for Japan. But the editorial 
also took up Miyazaki Hayao's warnings that Japanese anime is in trouble. 
The main problem is a hollowing out of the industry, as young talent are 
leaving to go to the more lucrative game industry and much of the actual 
work is being farmed out to Korea, China, and other countries. The 
editorial cited as one of the main problems the copyright arrangements 
between Japanese television stations and anime production companies which 
tends to give too many rights to the stations, thus leaving the 
production company with less opportunities to profit on its work. It said 
the METI has warned stations about this as well.

The editorial did not report this, but another problem area might be the 
decline of manga. Kodansha, one of the major manga publishers (it, of 
course, publishes other things as well), reported its first losses in its 
history, mostly due to its manga division. The industry is blaming this 
on cheap second hand book stores like Book Off, but many others are 
saying that young people are just not reading much manga these days.

Finally, in good news, it was nice to see Tokudane, the best of the 
morning TV wideshows, doing a 15 minute report this morning on Yamamura 
Koji, the experimental animator whose Atama-yama was nominated for the 
Academy Award for best animated short. They showed lots of clips from his 
works and emphasized that of the 5 films nominated, only his was not done 
on a computer (the 10 minute film took 2 years to make apparently, with 
13,000 drawings). Perhaps this will boost his chances. The show also 
joked about him being the Tanaka Koji of the animation industry. 
Certainly, as with the Nobel prize winning Tanaka, probably 99.9999% of 
the viewing population had not heard of him before his nomination.

Aaron Gerow
Yokohama National University
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