Interesting Facts About Anime

There’s some interesting stuff that I would like to share that is half silly bizarre facts to some history lesson about anime just to have contrasting themes of the blog but also because it’s just randomness to put into the interwebs. Hope you enjoy this blog, and make sure to comment what you think. Let’s get into it!

Horses Are Now Anime?

The viral anime about talking horse girls, Uma Musume is based on actual real horses; each one being named after an actual horse that was approved by the actual owners of the horse makes for this anime, you would think nothing until you learn this interesting fact. This makes the anime go from a typical sports anime with the usual dozens of characters to every character actually being important because it’s based on real life, it’s actually something really cool when anime has references to real life or makes something real into anime. It brings my appreciation for said things to another level, Uma Musume may not be as weird as that centaur anime but it’s actually not just doing anthropomorphic anime girls anime but having some meaning behind which makes the series more beloved as it drives traffic to those horses. It’s no surprise that Japan tries to make everything and anything cute, and horses are not no exception; well I knew they were cute when I saw that horse on Instagram talking with a cute Japanese voice. Uma Musume was just ahead of its time and always beat the world in terms of being very weird or eccentric if you want to call it that.

A Bizarre Anime

Following on from weird stuff, I want to spread attention to a very short form anime that came out 7 years ago but still has left a mark on everyone who seen and maybe not in the best way; the anime is called Henkei Shoujo to some this is a masterpiece of an anime, to others it is the biggest pile of garbage they have seen. Why has this anime been so polarising?? Well, for me to explain without you seeing maybe downplay a lot of the anime but I will do so anyway. The anime is kind of hilarious because it follows this girl going about her day when she sees another girl doing the weirdest thing imaginable like drinking gas out of a gas pump at a gas station then she turns into a vehicle or aeroplane. If you go into this blind, it’s the biggest flashback of weirdest and will make someone unsurprised by Japan’s weird behaviour to question their life and why they decided to click play, well the intellectual will find this anime to be amazing at how to can juxtaposition an innocent anime into an explosion of questioning what the flip just happened.

Now this anime is short so hopefully we get to see another season but people will be prepared this time so I doubt it will have the same effect as before, but seeing the idea of transformer anime girls may actually be an amazing show if they decide to become series as I would actually watch something like that. Our main female protagonist of Henkei Shoujo went through so much trauma to see these girls being at the wrong place at the wrong time, which may have felt like a dream to them and displays some of what the audience is thinking which makes the anime funnier in a way if you’re not baffled by what you just saw making it a brilliant anime for being only 5 minutes and not so great animation.

Astro Boy

People may not know the significance of Astro Boy and Osamu Tezuka, people may just think it’s a really old anime that was one of the first popular anime but the story goes much deeper than that. Way back in the 1960s before Astro Boy anime was rarer and didn’t get pumped out, it was just a niche thing that was copying Disney in a way with their own style and culture until one man had an idea to make his own animation. Tezuka was genius and dumb at the same time, he made this manga called Astro Boy which I love because it brings advanced sci-fi with the appeal to any audience that made it an enormous success. The idea was that he thought I could make my own anime and show these big studios, so he invested basically everything to make this for this gamble that it would work and it did work. It was such an immense success that they put out weekly episodes making a billion in profit overall, showing that this industry model would work; so Toei copied him and made their own anime being put out on a weekly schedule making the anime we know and love or hate today. It’s amazing how one man created the modern anime and doesn’t get recognition outside of Japan, so that’s why I put this on here because it is the most interesting fact you could see about anime.

The Anime Industry is in Trouble

Tezuka may've made this industry popular as the boiling point of mainstream anime, however with the rapid growth of anime it has caused a huge problem for people making it that an episode can cost 100k to 200k or even a million if they are someone like MAPPA, so most anime is made at a lost which is making the industry lose money each week. That some studios go under or even stay in debt and get loans just to continue to make their next big anime. Not only that the amount of time they have to make an episode is insanely short when you realise that there’s 24 frames a second for 24 minutes or 20-18 minus op/ed, that’s a lot of work which they have to draw each frame, and also plan and all the other jobs that it’s huge job just to make one episode.

Forcing workers to be overworked to the point of death, that now studios are outsourcing work to china like it’s an anime sweatshop. Anime has become the SHEIN of animation. Who knows when anime will collapse in on itself but thanks to anime getting rapid growth around the world, we may see a shift in anime to the global stage to sustain itself which will make the old mentality of Japan nationalism to be broken. So whenever anime gets a new age, it will be because of the problems surrounding anime and will spark a tremendous uproar of controversy. However, this is all a theory and may go completely different. We all love anime and hopefully one day there’s a solution to this problem and that it goes in the right direction.

Hayao Miyazaki

Tezuka was the face of anime but you can’t have him without Miyazaki, you could see them as lawful evil vs chaotic good. It’s nothing new that we all know about how much Miyazaki hates anime and what's become that it has become something of internet jokes about Miyazaki making the most beautiful stuff and being depressed while Junji Ito making the most morbid stuff and being sunshine and butterflies. So why is he like this? It’s often thought that he believed that anime was a mistake and was seen as just being hateful towards humans, like very cynically. However, if you learn about the industry and then see his beliefs you realise he is right. He believed that anime was only set in fantasy so that anime gets popular not from beautiful films like he worked on but fan service or other gripes.

Although, that’s not even the bigger picture as you have to understand where Miyazaki came from in the industry, just like similar to Tezuka it starts with Toei Animation he worked for them until he realised that people were getting overworked because of the effects of Astro Boy so he set out to make a union for these workers for better treatment however it didn’t work out in the end as it was disbanded. It did a lot of help for the industry at one point however they could help the Toei workers and not the industry. Hayao Miyazaki, has seen the industry go from amazing revolutionary accomplishments to a machine that is eating itself and that the majority of it is senseless garbage. I respect him even more after knowing the full picture because he really cared about the art form, showing you can make great timeless films but his passion was killed because of what he saw was the unfortunate decline of the industry and the fire that made it.

Thanks for Reading!