Today, critique has little place in anime magazines. There are very few active writers with a working understanding of the history of the animation industry.
However, those with such an understanding are making efforts to spread that knowledge via a variety of formats and to stimulate discourse on relevant issues.
For example, the aforementioned Hikawa Ryūsuke has contributed a number
of detailed histories for DVD and Blu-ray booklets and self-publishing critical pieces for sale at dōjinshi events. He also teaches a course on anime critique at Ikebukuro Community College and recently started an anime course for postgraduate students at Meiji University.
In a bizarre twist of fate, the fan culture that created the anime boom and kickstarted the anime magazine industry ultimately led to the downfall of anime magazines as a space for discussing the mainstream value and acceptance of anime. There are writers willing to produce critical content, but anime magazines are the domain of powerful multimedia corporations and fan culture remains active only within the dōjinshi circles that research, share and discuss a wide range of ideas – not in the pages of the magazines on the bookstore shelf.
Several magazines, such as Animage Original and Anime Style, have attempted to fill this critical gap, some more successfully than others. Animage Original is an offshoot of Animage and caters to the older generation of anime fans interested in production techniques and behind-the-scenes commentary on old and new anime, with rough production sketches featured on the covers as opposed to commissioned artworks like regular magazines. However, the publication ended in its seventh volume. Anime Style, in its incarnation as Gekkan (Monthly) Anime Style, was a similar magazine in tone, but each issue devoted almost its entire content to one seminal work of animation. Gekkan Anime Style was able to select ‘old’ titles with no new sequels or spin-offs as its main special features, because it was not actually marketed as a serialised publication.
Instead, each issue came with a small ‘Nendoroid Petit’, a smaller version of Good Smile Company’s Nendoroid figures, which are deformed versions of popular characters spanning a wide range of anime, old and new. The figure was marketed as the main product, with the accompanying magazine, despite having over a 150 pages, being the ‘bonus’ included.
Strictly speaking, prior to becoming a monthly in 2011, Anime Style (under Oguro Yuichirō’s direction) attempted to promote critique, though its life as a print magazine was short and ended in the same year as its inception (2000).
Web Anime Style, the online version that followed, provided information on animation production and history through exclusive interviews and its return to print as a monthly through the Nendoroid marketing venture proved successful.
However, it was clear that the figures were the major pull and after a hiatus upon its sixth volume in February 2012, it became a quarterly until April 2014 after
which it released issues sporadically; however it recently succeeded in a 2015 crowd-funding campaign to turn it back into a quarterly. Having dropped the Nendoroid gift, the latest issues focused on recent big-name anime movies such as Hosoda Mamoru’s Wolf Children and Kenji Kamiyama’s 009: Re:Cyborg, and hit series like Shirobako and Sound! Euphonium – demonstrating the belief that anime magazines indeed need to deal with current works to be relevant.
In terms of manga, the committee system of animation production has allowed for publishers to have more control over IP, and multimedia diffusion of IP has become the norm. The four-pronged strategy combining manga, OVA, TV and theatrical animation releases was revolutionary for the Patlabor franchise in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Now that such cross-platform media is commonplace, anime-based manga has increased and, in some cases, manga based on video games have kickstarted spin-off anime productions. As mentioned above, animators drawing manga was a novel concept in the 1980s and formed the basis for The Motion Comic and other such manga magazines.
In 2011, Kadokawa Shoten led the field with Newtype Ace, a 600-page monthly manga magazine running serialised comic adaptations of major Bandai Visual anime properties such as Macross, Yamato and Tiger & Bunny. The magazine was established after the relatively short life span of Macross Ace, a spin-off of Gundam Ace (in turn, a spin-off of Shonen Ace), which were manga magazines collecting stories set in the Macross and Gundam worlds, respectively, thus expanding the scope of the anime shows and, in a sense, serving the fan base by providing ‘world building’ aspects in a way that marked them as different from the old anime magazines. However, Newtype Ace also folded very quickly in 2013, after only twenty-three monthly issues. Many of the series it hosted have moved over to other Kadokawa publications and some have re-launched on their new Comic Walker online service, viewable free of charge.5 Numerous publishing houses launched similar online manga services in 2014 and at time of this writing one can sense a new paradigm on the horizon for the Japanese comics industry and its now symbiotic relationship with other media.
5 Mikimoto Haruhiko’s Macross the First is one such example: a new adaptation of the 1982 anime in the style of Yasuhiko Yoshikazu’s Gundam the Origin, the latter having been greenlit as a new anime series in 2015, coming full circle from anime to manga back to anime.
Conclusion
As this chapter has shown, it took around fifteen years from the advent of
‘terebi manga’ in 1963 for Japanese animation to be recognised in as a viable subject for magazines in its own right. Once anime magazines were established separ ately from the manga magazines in which they originated, anime steadily developed from a minor subculture to a major one. Many hurdles still remain for the further development of anime journalism. Today, manga critique and studies is making commendable headway, but it seems that the analysis of the history and evolution of animation, its techniques and its position within society, is undergoing stagnation.
These days, hardcore fans get their behind-the-scenes information from Internet sites and discussion boards, negating the need for animation magazines to provide scoops. Yet, the illustrative aspects of magazines remain intact, where the goal is to run manga serials and produce commissioned illustrations the reader can own and keep. This gives further justification to the notion of a magazine as a predominantly visual medium and recent years have seen a resurgence of anime-based manga in many anime magazines. It would seem that serious analysis and critique has little place within the visually dominant magazine format. Even if an anime journalist wants to stimulate discourse, the production committee system poses many obstacles: editorial control and unreasonable conditions for interviews result in neutral, ‘safe’ articles. Thus, simple visual illustrations are favoured.
Fans originally established the market for anime magazines at a grassroots level, working in tandem with writers and creators, when publishers had little knowledge of the subject. Today, anime magazines interact with writers and creators much less. This activity has largely been taken on by dōjinshi. These trends are seen in the evolution of the formats of the magazines themselves.
They do not simply reflect trends in animation style and content, they also reflect the changing relationship between the readers and publishers. While aspiring manga and anime professionals may have once made impromptu visits to studios (see Break Time, 1984, p. 17) or become involved through personal acquaintance, the proliferation of animation schools and academies is establishing a structure for entry into the industry. It remains to be seen if software like MikuMikuDance will provide budding animators with their
big breaks.6 Even if this were to happen, the independent nature of such productions would relegate most (if not all) discussion and critique to online forums and blogs rather than the pages of an anime magazine.
There do appear to be other avenues for anime critique and journalism, such as the courses previously mentioned and dōjinshi by writers like Hikawa Ryūsuke and Fujitsu Ryōta, some of who are also involved in government-sponsored oral history archives currently in development (Media Geijutsu, 2015). Already, there is a wealth of information stored in these publications in need of proper cataloguing and recording. The continued analysis of anime magazines can provide a clearer image of the make-up of the animation subculture, the industry itself and its relation to society on the whole; it can also draw many comparisons between the growing fields of anime and manga studies.
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