Annual anime production?

[Brian Ruh]

That does seem rather high for theatrical animation. I agree that it would seem more likely if we're actually talking about animation production across the board rather than just anime films.

I'll look into the stats I have a bit further, although at immediate hand are a couple references that claim that by the early 2000s anime accounted for over half of the animated films shown worldwide (Yamazaki) and that "[b]y the 1980s, Japan had become a net exporter of programming, 56 percent of which was animation" (Stronach). Neither of which state the same thing you're trying to check, but someone might have confused the statistics.

Yamazaki, Ryohei (2003) "The Contents Business: Japan Power and Some Challenges." Japan Close-Up, Dec. 2003: 13-18.
Stronach, Bruce (1989) "Japanese Television," in Richard Gid Powers and Hidetoshi Kato (eds) Handbook of Japanese Popular Culture. New York: Greenwood Press. 127-165.

== Brian

--- On Thu, 2/5/09, Geir Friestad <geir at portman.org> wrote:

> From: Geir Friestad <geir at portman.org>
> Subject: Annual anime production?
> To: "KineJapan" <KineJapan at lists.acs.ohio-state.edu>
> Date: Thursday, February 5, 2009, 5:00 PM
> I'm currently doing a fact check on an upcoming book on
> anime, and
> one of the claims in it strikes me as rather exaggerated.
> Basically,
> it suggests that half of Japan's annual movie
> production was animation
> by 1999.