Higher Than I'd Thought
Mar. 3rd, 2020 08:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerWhile I haven’t seen the anime series proclaimed “the most satisfying of 2019,” that report still caught my attention for a subtitle that 35.15 million people in Japan watched anime last year. My immediate reactions to that did include supposing some certain number of those people had seen little more than the most respectable wide-audience theatrical features (and perhaps only via later airings on TV, too), but the number still seemed higher than anything that might have been in my mind before.
Back when I sorted out there was animation being made in Japan I imbibed a certain amount of declarations that “cartoons aren’t just for kids over there.” Years later, though, as one anime boom went bust the rhetoric twisted towards insinuations not as many people in Japan watched anime as we’d once thought, and those who did weren’t necessarily respectable members of society. Noticing reports that ten thousand Blu-Rays sold could top the charts didn’t help there either, and the numbers crept lower over time until they don’t seem made as big a deal any more.
It was something, then, for the shadowy penumbra of “people who watch but don’t buy (discs, anyway)” to expand so far. Still, a comment the biggest group of viewers were in their forties did remind me of all the rhetoric about how American superhero comics became hermetically sealed to the entry of new readers and have been stuck with the same aging fanbase since the 1990s and just might have kept impressions from changing beyond all recognition.
Back when I sorted out there was animation being made in Japan I imbibed a certain amount of declarations that “cartoons aren’t just for kids over there.” Years later, though, as one anime boom went bust the rhetoric twisted towards insinuations not as many people in Japan watched anime as we’d once thought, and those who did weren’t necessarily respectable members of society. Noticing reports that ten thousand Blu-Rays sold could top the charts didn’t help there either, and the numbers crept lower over time until they don’t seem made as big a deal any more.
It was something, then, for the shadowy penumbra of “people who watch but don’t buy (discs, anyway)” to expand so far. Still, a comment the biggest group of viewers were in their forties did remind me of all the rhetoric about how American superhero comics became hermetically sealed to the entry of new readers and have been stuck with the same aging fanbase since the 1990s and just might have kept impressions from changing beyond all recognition.