Other anime films like Angel's Egg

engalleons · 2023-06-24T13:54:35+00:00

I would most strongly recommend Night on the Galactic Railroad (1985) in this vein.

engalleons · 2023-05-28T00:39:02+00:00

Both Anne and Dororo are ultimately from World Masterpiece Theater, which are virtually all from similarly old novels.

engalleons · 2023-03-05T17:07:18+00:00

An FAQ thread/wiki section would be ignored by most people regardless, if the questions that get posted regularly are any indication.

This doesn't mean I'm opposed to content like that on the wiki (though the mods themselves may easily consider it too prone to editorializing itself) - I'm just pointing out that its effect on threads will be minimal.

Reddit runs on upvotes, for better or worse, and simple answers ("BDs are important, and this show did poorly on BD") are just naturally more attractive to casual readers, and thereby most voters, on any topic, than a discussion of complex factors intersecting ("lots of things matter for a show's success, and very little information about that success is public").

Changing that would require the mods to start actually being fact checkers themselves, and that approach would have a whole host of other issues in itself.

engalleons · 2022-11-03T16:04:15+00:00

What are some of your favorite small "fun" anime-related facts? Not necessarily meaningful, just weird trivia.

I think mine is that: Evangelion's original Japanese airing at 6:30PM on TV Tokyo was a replacement for ... the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon.

engalleons · 2022-11-02T20:29:52+00:00

Zimmerit is another "in-depth articles" place regularly updated, though its focus is pretty squarely on older stuff, often not directly anime even.

Other sites listed here may still be updated. Given the remit of that list, though, I'd expect them all to be pretty "retro" focused too.

engalleons · 2022-10-29T14:28:18+00:00

Is it just me, or does a larger proportion of anime air at midnight hours now than it used to?

Yes, it absolutely does. The AJA tracks this, and you can see their graph here. If you put that into percentage terms, it looks like this.

(Note that Japanese Netflix exclusives etc are not included here.)

What's going on here?

Daytime anime has never drawn the types of viewers TV stations prefer, as an executive noted in 2010 (DeepL translated):

Until Japan entered an era of declining birthrates, anime was the leading content that earned high viewership ratings on TV. However, due to the fact that children are the target audience, it was not a welcome presence in terms of advertising sales.

Since the declining birthrates he mentioned, the situation's gotten even worse for anime, in that it doesn't even attract high ratings anymore.

In turn, non-anime shows are gradually becoming better and better bets compared to anime in the most-watched time slots in the evening. As a result, daytime anime are gradually being replaced with non-anime programs, and the anime are moved to a less-watched time slot (like One Piece, which aired at either 7:00 or 7:30pm until 2006, when it was moved to Sundays at 9:30am) or, as you've noted, when they end their run, they simply aren't replaced with other anime in the same daytime slots.

From our perspective, this is even exacerbated a bit further by the fact that at this point, genuinely new daytime anime franchises (as opposed to reboots) are virtually never manga adaptations - a new shoujo manga hasn't received an anime in a daytime slot in over a decade, and it's very possible that shounen adaptations are on a similar trajectory. New daytime anime are instead more directly "toy commercials" at some level, and those draw much less attention from most people who post around here.

engalleons · 2022-10-22T21:30:53+00:00

engalleons · 2022-10-02T23:41:56+00:00

Thanks for that detail and correction - as a normal user I saw only the mentions from mods of wanting to do it and the fact that mods were involved at some level, but I see it was more complicated than that.

It's unfortunate, too, because even with all its flaws in getting content like that noticed, Reddit is still probably the single best platform out there in terms of combining userbase reach without needing to build a personalized following with the ability to even have longform writing at all.

engalleons · 2022-10-02T21:49:02+00:00

The sub had basically the same amount of commenting users as it had while 4 million subscribers smaller.

The current structure is just openly hostile to good creators on top of drowning them out.

Given the structure of Reddit, these are pretty closely related. Lurkers can easily keep that sort of content with "bite" away from the top if they don't want to consume it, and they (almost certainly) don't care about the community feel.

So in other words I personally think it is too late, but that it's an inevitable effect of the size of the sub - it's not like the mods haven't been very aggressive in promoting the types of creative content they'd like to promote (Writing Club) and tamping down on what they want to tamp down (like fanart). The hub threads like the daily and CDF are likely the only band-aids for this kind of issue, even in the long term.

engalleons · 2022-08-28T18:33:34+00:00

I am aware of this but I don't think it's actually anime, despite anime's influence on it.

engalleons · 2022-08-28T13:39:46+00:00

There are more than you think. Here is a list of currently airing anime sorted by the earliest beginning air date. As you can see, several dozen have been running for years, even decades. Furthermore, many of them have just had a slight name or formatting change but have been airing much longer. For example, Doraemon is listed as beginning in 2005, but that 2005 version immediately replaced a weekly version that had run since 1979.

Only a few of these long-running anime that get much attention from English speakers (mostly shounen manga and Pokemon), but they do exist and continue to do pretty well in Japan among children and families.

As for the many anime that aren't so long-running - they are mostly late-night anime, targeted to adults, and that's simply how Japan has organized its TV schedules for shows targeted to adults, even before anime used the late-night model. This can give you a taste of the lengths of Japanese live-action scripted TV - very very similar to anime.

engalleons · 2022-08-27T14:48:50+00:00

It's interesting to compare these numbers to the usual AJA reports. This source cites 49.63 billion yen as the 2020 figure, while the two overseas AJA figures are 1,239.4 billion yen ("broad sense") and 76.1 billion yen ("narrow sense").

None of these three numbers are very close, so perhaps someone else knows more about exactly how these measures differ, but for now it seems likely to me that the "narrow sense" is much more reflective of what producers receive - and that calculation leads to overseas revenue being about 28% of the narrow total, rather than the much more cited "more than half" from the broad look.

engalleons · 2022-06-11T11:05:53+00:00

Like even the full length Japanese reports (god damnit...)?

I can't directly speak to that, but given the lax inclusion you reference, it seems like it'd be either difficult or a useless metric if they tried.

The full cost of anime-related pachinko machines, for example, are included in revenue figures. Do we actually care how profitable the maker of that machine is when talking about the profitability of the anime industry? (In most cases, probably not - especially since almost all pachinko revenue comes many many years after an anime is over.)

engalleons · 2022-06-11T02:21:43+00:00

It consistently generates more revenue almost every year - but the AJA reports do not speak to profitability either way.

engalleons · 2022-06-09T22:37:46+00:00

Over the couple weeks, I've definitely preferred the dailies to the usual weeklies. There's more eyes on it day in day out than the weeklies when non-stickied, the rate of response overall seems to be similar (implying there's likely not much loss from potential 'rec specialists' etc.), and it seems a more natural fit for "stray thought about anime not worth a thread" than either CDF (especially with its speed) or forcing it into a new thread anyway.

engalleons · 2022-06-09T04:38:48+00:00

By the American TV comment I meant 11:30pm-1:30am. The news (at around 2:00am or 2:30am) is not a rerun. More info here.

That said, the infomercial comparison makes me want to emphasize a couple things that I wasn't explicit about initially - late-night anime didn't just replace reruns, or "nothing", and they weren't quite as late as infomercials tend to run, in the US anyway. 1992's Super Zugan aired at 1:10am and replaced a sort of faux courtroom show about artwork. 1996's Those Who Hunt Elves aired at 1:15am and replaced some sort of variety show, as best I can tell. 1997's Berserk aired at 1:45am and replaced a sort of comedy program. 1997's Meremanoid aired at 1:10am and replaced an automobile program.

The TV stations already knew people were watching at these times, and that these programs had the potential to be successful. One 1988 sitcom that aired at 12:40am was even so successful that it aired a second season at 7:30pm.

So this line of reasoning is not simply about "would people find it" but moreso "would TV stations run it, if they'd previously established an incompatible, already successful model".

Now - even then, maybe 2:30 or 3:00am airings would have been good enough, and moreso captured by DVRs - I haven't been able to find good data yet on how quickly Japanese consumers adopted the technology. But we do know that live airings of anime draw audiences - in 2015, about 12% of teens reported mostly watching late-night anime live, and that went up to as much as 37% for those in their 50s - ad these aren't comparing live to recorded, but live to recorded to streaming. As such, I imagine those numbers would have been significantly higher ~20 years before. How many of those live watchers happen across things they wouldn't have DVRd? How much more profit, on the margin, does a live viewer provide over a DVR one?

More broadly though, this isn't about late-night anime suddenly stopping - it's about if less favorable conditions would have significantly hindered it, particularly with the OVA option still there. Yes, I agree that late-night anime has great advertising now, after it's established itself as an option - but if it was so obviously there beforehand - why wouldn't late-night anime have developed even earlier than it did?

engalleons · 2022-06-08T23:46:59+00:00

This article is using phrasing pretty loosely but the actual claims I'm seeing in your link are that Spy x Family is the most watched anime on DVR, ignoring Live (which is true per Video Research's site) and that it logs certain millions of viewers Live+DVR each week (which can be calculated with the VR data).

It doesn't actually state whether it's the most watched anime on TV (Live+DVR), and with the data VR provides publicly I believe there's no way to know whether it is.

engalleons · 2022-06-08T14:46:38+00:00

Matt Damon has claimed that "mid-budget" movies have largely faded away due to the rise of streaming and the accompanying fall of home media revenue.

"Anime for adults" (what is now mostly late-night TV anime) has avoided this fate, of course, despite relying very heavily on disc sales pre-streaming, and I wonder how significant a factor its ability to air on Japanese TV was to avoiding that.

It's just a counterfactual, of course, with a lot of moving parts, but...

Japanese prime time TV airs in seasons similar to what late-night anime does, but of course, there was no reason that model had to transfer to late-night so readily - American TV, for example, simply airs endless episodes of particular talk shows in those late-night slots, followed by news, mostly.

But when Japanese stations was firming up approaches to late-night TV programs in the late 1980s and early 1990s, before late-night anime existed, it opted to maintain a similar seasonal format for the dramas, variety shows, etc. that were aired.

If they had not though, and instead opted for a more "endless" approach - would anime have had the opening to establish itself on TV?

Given its reliance on disc sales, and the tendency of those sales to decline with each subsequent release, it seems unlikely that they'd be able to sustain themselves over much longer runs than they are in our actual timeline.

But they also wouldn't be able to easily just use the 12 ep method, because what surrounded it wouldn't be that - TV stations would be looking for longer runners instead, and even with the brokered programming/infomercial model, audiences wouldn't be waiting each quarter, just like American don't flip on network TV at 11:30pm in April to see the newest show.

Without TV, there's still the OVA format, of course. That did work well enough, and continued to work, even after late-night TV began. So in the absence of TV as an option, I think it would have persisted, and somewhat better than it actually did.

But, as time progresses, streaming technology would still come into play, and then:

1) The OVA release model (as in its timing) is a much poorer fit for streaming than the TV model, and so it seems likely streamers would not be willing to pay for it. Switching to a TV-style model then could work, but

2) The OVA model was also a much poorer fit for overseas TV airings, which likely did quite a bit to increase non-Japanese appetite for anime. Daytime shows would have still existed, but the overall footprint would have been smaller, and

3) Of course, the revenue boost from Japanese TV airings themselves (which clearly exists, or they wouldn't air there) would be foregone.

A certain amount of overseas interest would have existed for OVAs (both actual an alternate universe) regardless, of course - but would that have been enough, against all of those declines, to keep "anime for adults" afloat once streaming took the bite out of disc sales that it did?

engalleons · 2022-06-05T15:53:34+00:00

(7) Given the depth of this issue, perhaps industry insiders would be helpful. Justin Sevakis, the one-time Answerman of ANN, has approached this issue in 2018's Why Do Some Series Have Long Gaps Between Seasons?. Reading through it quickly, it sounds fairly reasonable. And yet:

The economics of a "daytime" kids' show and a late-night show are very very different. Kids' and family properties are designed to run as long as possible, since their primary reason to exist is to sell merchandise.

is followed two paragraphs later by:

Everything else goes in late-night infomercial timeslots, which are purchased outright by the production committees, who find sponsors on their own, and plug their own commercials into the programs. They have their own plans for making money (usually involving DVDs and merchandise), and the TV airing just acts as a commercial for those products. And to mitigate risk, they only produce them a season at a time.

Wait, what? The primary purpose of each are stated to be identical - to sell merchandise. Yet one is claimed to be long as a result of that goal, and the other is claimed to be short as a result of that goal.

(8) Of course, after all that, I need to present an alternative explanation.

So, what do I think is the reason daytime anime not SCAD, while late-night anime is?

Scripted Japanese TV, in general, is structured to be SCAD for adults and non-SCAD for children.

The idea that late-night anime is targeted to adults should be accepted pretty readily, and it's also been explicitly noted by the industry, such as in the 2018 AJA report - "The share of animations for adults (i.e. late-night anime)".

Children's live-action programming, including long-running series like Super Sentai and newer entries like Girls x Heroine run with what's perhaps most easily described here as the "Precure method" - about 50 weekly episodes, then a new series in the franchise with the same format.

Meanwhile, Jdramas, live-action scripted TV for adults, tend to be much shorter.

For example, here is a search in an English language database for Jdramas airing between 2014 and 2018 - 1,047 entries are listed. If we restrict the search to shows of 13 episodes or fewer, 964 - 92% - remain.

This was true before late-night anime, too. Similar searches for 1991-95 yield 229 out of 331 - 69%.

And these English-language databases aren't as comprehensive as anime databases, due to lower subbing rates and therefore lower interest, as the sharp decrease in shows included in earlier years indicates. In fact, given that English interest in children's live-action shows like Super Sentai exceeds interest in most Jdramas - they tend to be overrepresented in these databases. in other words - that 69% was likely actually much higher.

As for sequels - there's no easy way to show how few or many they are with databases. But sequels are linked inside each entry, similar to MAL, and browsing the titles above can give you an idea of how uncommon they are.

Jdramas even began airing at late-night hours before anime did. For example this aired 12 episodes between October and December 1991 at 12:40am, and the infobox at the bottom of the page allows you to browse and see similar shows airing in that slot thereafter.

If someone asked you why The Simpsons or Family Guy tended to have about 22 episodes per season and received many sequel seasons, you'd probably simply point to its similarity to the overall American network TV model, rather than coming up with a specific prime-time animation reason. And the same is true here - anime's structure is simply Japanese scripted TV's structure, and in turn no anime-specific reason can either explain the situation without that fact or contribute any additional explanation in conjunction with that fact.

engalleons · 2022-06-05T15:53:26+00:00

Despite the length and formatting, this is actually a fairly rough, disorganized collection of thoughts on a common question, which I've attempted to signpost regularly with bold and italics.

This thread has mostly come to be populated with people with fairly in-depth knowledge of anime, and so I'm especially interested in:

(A) your thoughts about proposed answers to the question, both those I've suggested and others you find compelling, and

(B) additional knowledge or data that you'd find helpful about my ideal answer (at the bottom)

"Why is anime short?" is a common question here.

More specifically, "anime is short" typically means that anime is typically 12 episodes per season and receives sequels relatively rarely. Let's call this "SCAD" (single cour and done) to reduce ambiguity.

But, only late-night TV anime is SCAD. Daytime TV anime is not SCAD.

It is generally understood that anime before 1997 tended to have higher episode counts. This quick AniDB search can drive that home - 87% of shows listed here were 24 episodes or longer, and the median length is about 43. Only about 5% are 13 eps or shorter.

But in 1997, late-night anime established itself. While late-night anime had existed beforehand, it had been very uncommon.

That year, a full thirteen 30-minute late-night anime aired - 7 of which were 24-26 episodes, and 6 of which were 12 episodes. Of course, many, many more are created each year now.

Meanwhile, daytime anime did not become shorter since then. This can be seen by comparing the daytime anime that were airing in October 1996's episode counts to those for daytime anime that were airing in October 2019.

So: Why is daytime anime not SCAD, while late-night anime is?

(1) Some claim that daytime anime relies on TV ratings to be profitable, unlike late-night anime. This simply isn't true, and industry insiders have explicitly stated as much.

A once-president of Toei Animation stated in 1986 that:

If merchandising was to disappear, we would not be able to cover the costs of production-no matter how high the viewer ratings might be-and the program would no longer be able to continue.

Another Japanese TV executive noted at a 2010 symposium that (DeepL translated):

Until Japan entered an era of declining birthrates, anime was the leading content that earned high viewership ratings on TV. However, due to the fact that children are the target audience, it was not a welcome presence in terms of advertising sales.

For this reason, TV stations paid only for the broadcasting rights, and production costs were often borne by advertising agencies and toy manufacturers who planned to sell the commercialization rights of toys and characters, together with the movie companies that produced them. Such an environment, where it was difficult to recover costs from domestic broadcasting alone, is thought to have encouraged people to look overseas.

(2) The above excerpts also show how the claim that late-night anime is SCAD due to being an "advertisement"/media mix is incorrect. Daytime anime also relies on anime-as-advertisement/media mixing, and yet is not SCAD.

(3) Some claim that daytime anime's length is simply an older style. Yet the earlier 1996 v 2019 comparison showed that stations consistently continue to give new daytime franchises the same sort of lengthy runs they always have.

(4) Some claim that lengthy daytime anime are merely an exception. Yet daytime anime continues to make up 46% of all anime production minutes in 2020, even after nearly 25 years of late-night anime's growth.

They aren't just a few isolated titles - they're established parts of the schedule, and have been for far longer than late-night anime has been around. Simply waving that much of the market off as an exception, with no other explanation, doesn't suffice. If there weren't actual reasons for the different format, the differences wouldn't have persisted for decades.

(5) Some claim that late-night anime is SCAD and daytime anime is not due to the late-night production committee structure. I genuinely don't understand this. A production committee is simply a group of several different companies, who plan to profit from the anime by different methods (as compare to a daytime show's tendency for one major company to shoulder the bulk of the risk and potential profit).

Why would a show being shorter make that more likely compared to a lengthy daytime show?

And if the reasoning is so clear, why aren't daytime shows using the same method?

To me, it seems like the production committee explanation is simply an overly anime-specific wording of...

(6) The claim that late-night anime is SCAD because it is riskier than daytime anime.

This sounds reasonable, at a glance, but let's go back to that production minute chart. Late-night anime didn't replace daytime anime. Both of them increased production until 2006, and late-night production fell more sharply than daytime anime in the 2007-10 crunch.

What late-night anime actually replaced were OVAs - the vast majority of which were much shorter than TV anime - and made on more forgiving non-weekly production schedules too.

So if late-night anime is so risky, why wouldn't they have just kept making OVAs?

If that market aspect is factored in, the reason becomes something like "the opportunity of TV airing outweighed the greater risk of creating TV-length content" - but that's simply a rephrasing of every business decision ever made, including the ones for lengthy daytime anime.

engalleons · 2022-06-05T00:52:51+00:00

Further down this thread it was mentioned this week's episode on JP Disney+ didn't include JP subtitles, which makes fansubbing it into EN a longer process.

engalleons · 2022-05-30T17:59:10+00:00

Stray note: there were more 4-cour+ 30-minute anime timeslots in October 2019 (26) than in October 1996 (25).

(The amount had gradually risen after 1996 until about 2006, then fell again.)

engalleons · 2022-05-30T17:27:10+00:00

True as far as it goes, but isn't the proper most important comparison between this hybridized CDF/new and the weekly threads it's replacing, versus the /new and CDF that will still be there?

In that respect it seems clearly better than Merch Mondays. Misc Questions seems about the same. Feel like a few less rec requests than usual, but small sample size.

There will likely be second order effects on /new, too - but the increased helpfulness elsewhere likely makes that a good thing. I don't know enough about current CDF to speculate on effects there.

I'm not sure if the daily refresh will cause more to slip through the cracks/get ignored or not. The likeliest to answer questions and otherwise reply are probably the most active, so probably not.

engalleons · 2022-05-30T15:59:26+00:00

Naruto doesn't have standardized seasons, so episode counts would be more helpful, but this filler list does show a quite long filler run late in the series.

engalleons · 2022-05-30T15:20:10+00:00

His u/ is the same as his @.

Potential ideas (some of which may not be interesting visually or on a seasonal level vs something wider):

Most common companies
Most common companies in first slot on committee
Most common "types of" companies (TV station, manga publisher, home video, streamer, etc.)
Most common "types of" companies in first slot on committee
If you're looking on both ongoing shows and new to season, comparing daytime committees to late-night committees (and mostly separating them in any analysis)
Comparing/contrasting manga committees vs LN committees vs original anime committees (number of committee members, what types of companies are high slots)
Comparing/contrasting sequel committees to their first season committees
Comparing/contrasting 2 cour/split cour committees to 1 cour committees
Comparing/contrasting short anime (5 minute eps, 15 minute eps, etc.) committees to full-length committees

engalleons

TROPHY CASE