Anime today is awful. Everything airing is crap, and fans have horrible taste. Why can’t we go back to the good old days of anime?
Oh right, because they never existed.
I like to say that the “good old days of anime” are approximately five years before the complainer became an anime fan. When you’re just getting into the genre, you’ve got the entirety of anime at your disposal, and can choose to watch your top 1% and nothing else. As Scamp said, it’s as if all your favorite shows came out in a year.
The problem is when you expect everything to be that good. Because if you think of it, the modern classics—Evangelion, Cowboy Bebop, pretty much everything on Bob’s list—only makes up the tiniest fraction of what was airing at the time. There’s always been terrible anime on TV—it’s only that we’ve forgotten it in the shadow of what was actually good.
Actually, I think we’re more fortunate than ever now that everything is at our fingertips. In the ‘90s and early ‘00s, Western anime distributors had to pick and choose only the few shows they thought had the likeliest chance of doing well. They were right for the most part given that many of us remember that period as a kind of Golden Age of anime, but think about what we missed. For example, it’s a crime Turn A Gundam isn’t in the west yet.
Because one thing people forget about when they say “modern anime is crap” is that what’s good and what isn’t is personal preference. I thought Free! Eternal Summer deserved an A; you may think I’m utterly blind for thinking so. And that’s fine—the point of the matter is we all have the opportunity to try it out and see for ourselves.
For my husband, John, it’s always the good old days of anime. He’s married to an anime reviewer who watches roughly eight shows a season. Out of those, I recommend maybe one for him to watch, and he loves it. I am an anime oyster, filtering out the crap. You have anime oysters too—reviewers.
So my suggestion, if you’re sick of watching anime you don’t like: start following the recommendations of somebody you trust. Read anime reviews. Don’t be me, be John. Follow the three-episode rule. And only watch what you love.
Print by Ben Huber
29 Comments.
And even the “good old days” aren’t what we like to think they are. I’m a strong dissenter when it comes to “Evangelion”, for instance; I think the show has done as much harm as good to anime, and that the good and worthy things about it are mixed in with a farrago of other things that are nowhere nearly as good.
If I find one good-to-great show a season, that’s fine, and I rarely have time for more than that anyway. Last year we had “Space Dandy” and “Chaika”, and I’m happy to put them side-by-side with most anything from the past.
That’s the other thing about looking back over one’s shoulder with rose-colored glasses on (pardon my mixed metaphor): it keeps you from seeing the good things that are right in front of you, some of which actually do build on the past in creative and constructive ways. “C: Control” and “Mushi-shi” and “Steins;Gate” are as good as, if not better than, anything from the so-called “good old days”. I wouldn’t want a world that didn’t have those as well.
I don’t have a good ol’ days of anime. EVERYTHING IS AWESOME IN ANIME, is actually how I feel, but I have limited watching potential, so maybe that’s why. I have to cherry pick what I watch with my limited time.
@Crimm:disqus I suppose “have limited time to anime” is another way to guarantee a great experience! Plus, if you don’t mind watching things late, you can avoid a good series with a terrible ending, too!
Yeah I actually use anitwitter to judge what are must watches based on the trends and screencaps.
Eyup. The “good old days” are pretty much only good if you’re not actually old enough to remember “gems” from the 90s OVA market like Jungle de Ikou, or monstrosities spawned from the 2000s Anime Bubble like Najica Blitz Tactics. And while it’s probably better in the long run that we’ve collectively wiped that stuff from the fandom consciousness, it does lead to a lot of “Moe/Fanservice/LNs/Whatever is killing anime!” rhetoric. No it’s not. Anime has already survived much worse. Calm down. We’ve had two new Ikuhara shows in 5 years. I think anime is going to be okay.
@redcrimson:disqus I was just informed that Anichart has an archive, and just look at the crap that aired simultaneously with Neon Genesis Evangelion, wow http://anichart.net/archive/fall-95 Anime has always been cheap and weird.
Oh yeah, wow. Just look at that junk! El Hazard and Sorcerer Hunters, wooooow. Ghost in the Shell and Gunsmith Cats did come out that season, though. Neat.
Kinda makes you wonder if fans 20 years from now will be chuckling about how Black Bullet aired the same season as Ping Pong, or whatever.
No one cares about Ping Pong though.
I just caught up on Parasyte, an Anime that just launched last year. Then I went and hunted down Saint Seiya, the first Anime I ever watched (dubbed in Spanish as my family was living in Paraguay at the time). Since it was Crunchyroll, they of course had the original version with subtitles.
That show is _dated_, and not in a good “golden age” way. It’s not directly comparable to Parasyte because the latter is of a different genre, to be sure, but I feel like we’ve actually come a long way from the typical Anime of the 80s. Saint Seiya was basically a Sailor Moon with boys from an earlier era, but I’d take the latter over the former.
There are definitely timeless classics from that era. But every era produces classics; to compare the whole field of modern Anime to the very best of previous eras is always going to be misleading. That’s the problem with “golden age” reasoning in general, especially in the arts.
One of the things that goes with having a nostalgic attachment to a show from a past era, especially one you grew up with, is that it becomes hard to see the ways it’s not aged well, because you might well have aged along with it. Things that look “classic” to you just look old to other eyes now. (The worst case is when they’re actually downright repugnant to newer viewers.)
@GenjiPress:disqus true, you can’t forget the nostalgia factor. I have not been shy about discussing how much I freaking LOVE Nerima Daikon Brothers, but that’s partly because I have good memories attributed to that show. Today it looks pretty sloppy.
The real classics, the ones that last, are the ones that will outlive anyone who has a reason to be nostalgic about when they first came out.
But nostalgia is important. Art isn’t this thing that stands outside of human lives. We love it precisely because of how it ties into our own lives, as a marker for a point in time or the relationship we have or had with those who we shared the experience with.
This is a great point and one worth expanding on in a future post. Look for it from me (at Ganriki.org) at some point.
See, that’s interesting, because I only saw the Saint Seiya anime properly only a few years back, with me finally finishing up the first major story arc via the Cinedigm DVD boxset last year, and I still enjoy it. I admit that the anime is very flawed, & I prefer the manga, but I guess I don’t have that nostalgia affecting me in any way to make me feel less of a show like Seiya.
Hah—well I’m not going to try to persuade you not to like it! :)
If anything, anime now is a hell of a lot better than in the past. Good anime before 200 came maybe once every 3 years, now we get a good 3-5 good anime every year. Still, out of over 7,000 titles, most are average or below average.
I agree, and let’s face it — out of the number of titles that come out in a given year, I really don’t expect more than a few to be good to great to begin with. It’s just Sturgeon’s Law in action.
That’s exactly what Neil Gaiman said at an anime film festival I attended some years ago–that Sturgeon’s Law does apply to anime. Make no mistake–there are several older titles that I like very much (COBRA, MACROSS, ZETA GUNDAM…) but I’ve liked a good chunk of stuff that’s been released in recent years, such as ATTACK ON TITAN and GARGANTIA.
I’ve noticed that once something reaches a certain point of “good”, though, my own expectations tend to expand past it. E.g., “Gargantia” — I liked it, but I would stop short of calling it a classic, as it fell down in a few areas. That’s me, though, not the show; it’s nice that something is able to go that far at all, and so I have to tune my own response accordingly.
The funny thing is, if anything, things are the exact opposite for me. Back when I first started really getting into anime, I would try all sorts of things that looked even remotely interesting to me, which, while it did let me discover some things that are still favorites to this day, also meant I watched a lot of crap. Now, because I know my tastes and I’m more aware of what kinds of shows I probably would or would not like, almost all the shows I finish now I would consider “good” or better, with a large majority of it “very good” or better.
Right. The more conscious you are of what you like and why, the easier it gets to determine that something isn’t your cuppa. The one downside with that is, it also becomes harder to stretch a little and get out of the bubble when it’s worth it.
I always fine the “good old days” talk entertaining, because it’s constantly a popular topic in any medium. People are always ready to don their nostalgia goggles & wax poetic about how good everything was in the past, and most of them don’t realize how silly that sounds.
I got into anime back in 2004, but I’ll gladly admit that some of my first anime series weren’t all that great. I’ll admit that I’m an odd duck in this regard, though, since I still haven’t yet watched the requisite Evangelion TV or Cowboy Bebop (I did see the Bebop movie, though, which was awesome), so I essentially kept myself from expecting the highest caliber from everything, which I think has helped temper my expectations for stuff. I don’t consider everything crap, I actually subscribe to the proper definition of Sturgeon’s Law (It’s not “X% of Everything is Crap”, but rather “Out of everything, only X% is Excellent”, which carries a very different meaning), but I know that not everything will be amazing. Still, if I end up enjoying something then that’s enough for me.
For me, I think a good amount of great or, at least, entertaining titles have been coming out for some time now. All I know is that my “to watch” list just keeps on growing.
Now if I could just make that three episode rule a solid personal law. I wind up watching a series sometimes all the way to the end, convinced that it will suddenly get better. Then, well it never does and I realize that I wasted my time.
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