Animeis slowly becoming more mainstream in the West, but one executive doesn’t think that’s a good thing. Recent years have seen anime explode in popularity, leading Western companies to actively seek anime adaptations of their IPs, as has been seen withScott PilgrimandStar Wars’ recent expansion into anime. It seems like an inevitability that anime’s place in Western pop culture will grow, but that might not be as great as people think.
In a recent interview highlighted byAnime Corner, CoMix Wave Films executives Noritaka Kawaguchi and Mie Onishi spoke about how much Hollywood has been asking for anime adaptations lately, and the duo weren’t kind about it, asMie Onishi feels like Hollywood keeps wanting anime adaptations of Western stories because they view anime as cheap.
What I hate these days is that when I talk to people in Hollywood, they ask me, ‘Can’t you make this as an anime?’ What lies behind this is something like, ‘It’s cheap if it’s an anime,’ which really pisses me off."
While she might not speak for everyone, Onishi’s frustration speaks to a larger issue with anime and animation as a whole, and overall, it’s easy to see where Onishi is coming from.
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The Problem With Anime And Hollywood
If there’s any reasoning behind Mie Onishi’s criticisms of Hollywood’s stance on anime, it would have to come from how popular the medium has become. Even now, executives famously don’t care that much about animation, but anime can still be seen as being incredibly popular and mainstream, and more importantly, it’s something that will, on average, cost less than a live-action story.Hollywood executives keep wanting anime adaptations largely because they’re trendy, and that leads directly into Onishi’s feelings about them being cheap.
Not every anime is like that, however. WhileThe Lord of the Rings: The War of the RohirrimandNetflix’sDevil May Cryhave questionable quality, shows likeScott Pilgrim Takes OffandStar Wars: Visionshave a lot of love put into them, so it’s not as if every Western-based anime is a cynical cash grab. Unfortunately,the amount of Western-based anime made in bad faith far outweighs the amount made in good faith, so it’s hard to argue the idea that Mie Onishi doesn’t know what she’s talking about.
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Animation Is Slowly Gaining More Respect In The West
In the same interview with Noritaka Kawaguchi and Mie Onishi, they mentioned how there has been a major shift at the Academy Awards where animated films not made by major distributors can win, with the two of them citing the recent wins ofFlowand, of course,Studio Ghibli’sThe Boy and the Heron. They even say thatYour Namemight have at least been nominated if it were distributed by Sony instead of Funimation, so overall,as much as animation is being disrespected, there’s definitely been a change for the better in recent years.
That idea is good to think about, but it’s still far from perfect. The general public still has a false impression of animation being lesser, and for anime, specifically, it’s still rare for anime to be so much as nominated for the Academy Awards and other major Western awards, so unfortunately,animation still has a long way to go before it can be treated with respect in any and all forms. There’s no way of knowing how long that will take, but with how muchanimeand animation, as a whole, has been evolving, it hopefully won’t be too long.
