Why 2021 Proved Anime Was A Mistake
At the beginning of every year (well, since 2019 anyway…) I take stock of the highlights of the previous year in anime. During 2021 I watched probably more anime in one year than in any other year of my life, for good or ill. With the COVID-19 pandemic demolishing anime production in 2020, the industry rebounded in 2021 with an avalanche of content, much of it excellent.
However, before we celebrate 2021’s greatness (in a future article), let’s truly eviscerate the malformed effluent that spewed forth from a broken industry. An industry that takes the technicolor dreams of children and artists, only to spawn hope-draining abominations like EX-ARM. We’ll start by elucidating the background situation that became the breeding ground for horror.
Pandemic Backlog
2021 was always going to be a challenging time, following 2020’s severe contraction of the anime industry’s output. To put things in perspective, 409 individual anime properties (this includes entire TV shows, ONAs, OVAs and theatrical movies) were released in 2019, dropping to 351 in 2020, similar to 2009 levels when production volumes were marginally less insane. Due to the sheer number of delays to 2020’s planned releases, 2021 jumped back up to 412 shows, and this was during an ongoing pandemic. Animators were not only made to work hard, but to do so under such unprecedented pressurised circumstances.
The Committee System
Anime studios rarely own the material they produce, instead they are contracted by Production Committees comprised of representatives from multiple interested parties (manga/light novel publishers, music companies, movie studios, TV networks, videogame companies, merchandise companies, etc). The committee has the final say on budget allocation and timescale. In turn, most animators are work-for-hire, i.e. not employees of the studios and therefore not eligible for benefits such as paid vacations, paid sick leave etc. They are treated as disposable assets with few rights, and are viewed as easily replaceable if they step out of line/become exhausted/drop dead.
Even if an anime is stratospherically popular, the studio never sees an extra penny above their initial contract fee. All profits go to the committee, the rights holders, the feudal overlords. Even “top-quality” anime is produced extremely cheaply, and success almost never trickles down to the creatives actually producing the animation itself. Wages are permanently low, working conditions poor.
Ufotable Tax Evasion
So with this context, it’s perhaps understandable (if not entirely justifiable) that famed studio ufotable’s founder Hikaru Kondo found himself in hot water, after getting caught evading more than 138 million yen (US$1.25 million) in taxes. He admitted that ufotable made a loss on every anime they made (yes, that includes the unbelievably successful Demon Slayer).
Kondo explained “The quality demanded of anime keeps increasing … but because the production costs offered by the clients are relatively low, every time we produce a work, we always end up in the red. (ufotable)’s profit comes from the cafe business and the sale of goods. We have been able to continue our animation production because of these two areas. If our works do not become a hit … we will not be able to pay our staff salaries or recoup the production costs. I wanted to reserve a sufficient amount of cash so that I wouldn’t have to worry about working capital in case something happened.”
Kondo siphoned money out of his profitable anime-licensed cafe business and kept it in a safe, just in case the studio ran out of cash, leaving him unable to pay his workers. Surely there is something utterly broken with this industry structure?
MAPPA Hates Its Workers
MAPPA’s a great studio, right? Look at this list of their recent, high-quality work: Zombieland Saga Revenge, Attack on Titan: The Final Season, Jujutsu Kaisen, Dorohedoro, Kakegurui. Surely they must treat their animators well? On May 14th 2021, Mushiyo, one of MAPPA’s most prominent animators, quit his job at the studio due to terrible working conditions. In a series of (now private) tweets, he expressed his regrets at working hard to join MAPPA, and revealed that employees were obligated to work excessively.
Mushiyo criticized MAPPA’s decision to work on four shows at the same time instead of properly training its team. He compared his work environment to a “factory” where bottom rung animators were tasked with correcting issues instead of drawing and creating their own animation sequences. He also stated “As far as I can tell, about 80% of the employees had similar complaints at the time.”
Mushiyo confirmed he had found a job at another studio, but that’s besides the point. Can he really expect to be treated much better elsewhere? About the only studio widely known to treat its animators with the respect they deserve is Kyoto Animation, and it suffered a devatastating blow following the 2019 arson attack that killed 34 of their staff, injuring 36 more. Kyoto Animation is a relatively small studio, working at the pinnacle of the industry where other studios can never hope to reach given their current financial limitations.
Netflix Makes Things Worse, Underpays Animation Teams
Back when Netflix made big promises about entering the anime industry in a big way, many fans were justifiably hopeful that an influx of money would help to stabilise the overworked, over-saturated anime industry. They were so, so wrong.
Ippei Ichii, veteran animator (Kill la Kill etc) alleged that a Netflix producer offered to pay MAPPA 3,800 yen (US$34) per cut. “The budget for TV series is between 3,800 to 7,000 yen, so if you accept that offer, the unit price for animators would go down,” Ichii explained. Freelance aniimator Zayd Ghassan added “The usual 4500 yen per cut is already bad enough,” “What is Netflix thinking allowing them to pay less than the average? For all the exorbitant amount of capital they have, it’s a problem that they’ve started to place orders with such low rates.”
Instead of acting as a force for good, the mega-rich multinational corporation is muscling into the previously limited market and attempting to drive costs down even further, risking destabilisation of the entire industry. Why did we ever think it would be any different? Full-time animators in Japan can make as little as $12,000 USD annually. How can they be expected to live in one of the most expensive countries on earth on such a pittance? And still somehow produce high quality work? It’s little better than slavery.
Wonder Egg Priority — How To Sacrifice Staff And Screw The Landing
Much like MAPPA, another supposedly high-quality studio that’s trashing its own reputation by overworking its animators, is Cloverworks. Wonder Egg Priority was one of 2021’s best anime. A breathtakingly creative, beautiful, emotional show, it was an anime-original spectacular. Unafraid to tackle dark themes like suicide, self-hatred, self-harm, and sexual abuse through the lens of its central quartet of complicated teenage girls, it looked set to make some kind of grand statement, provide some kind of overwhelming emotional catharsis.
Unfortunately its production fell apart, with an unplanned recap episode after episode 7 (always a sign of trouble brewing beneath the surface) and an unwise deviation into weird sci-fi in its latter instalments that muddled the already murky thematic waters. Amid rumours of conflicts between primary creative staff, and unreasonable production demands from the studio, one producer was allegedly hospitalised twice with severe dehydration and exhaustion, only to self-discharge following intravenous rehydration to go straight back to work.
The final straw came with the delay of the final episode 13 by almost three months. Wonder Egg Priority’s staff were all contracted to work on the next season’s Shadows House. There was no time for them to work on WEP’s conclusion. The episode wasn’t even written, and production work on it didn’t even commence until a month before it was due. So disorganised and last-minute was the production, that huge numbers of scenes were outsourced to emergency fill-in animators across the globe. The episode entered second key animation a mere five days before it was meant to air, perhaps explaining why it looked like garbage compared to the previous installments.
Fans will probably never be able to forgive Cloverworks for the abomination of an ending that shits on everything in the preceding twelve episodes, actively making the entire show worse. It would have been better if it had been cut short with an inconclusive ending, rather than subjecting viewers to that offensive narrative abortion. Fundamental conflict between creative staff or studio mismanagement, perhaps we’ll never know the true culprit for the disaster that was Wonder Egg Priority’s ending, but unfortunately that wasn’t Cloverwork’s only monumental fuck-up that season.
A Tragedy Of Wasted Potential: The Promised Neverland Season 2
I have never been so angry at an anime in my life. About six episodes into the second season of what used to be one of my favourite series, I screamed “What the fuck were they thinking?” and switched off, never to return. What an incredible turnaround compared to my enthusiastic reaction to the fantastic first season. Cloverworks utterly screwed the pooch, one of the worst adaptation hatchet jobs in the history of filmed media.
The Promised Neverland season one covered just over 4 volumes worth of material in 12 episodes. This was a well-paced, tense and exciting show, a practically perfect adaptation. Then season two chopped out arguably the manga’s best story arc and telescoped over fifteen volumes worth of material into eleven episodes. Predictably, this was an unmitigated disaster that led to the main creative staff removing their names from the credits of the final two episodes. Apparently they were awful. I don’t know. I refuse to watch them.
I can only assume this disastrous adaptation choice was driven by committee, motivated only by money, without consideration of the merits or needs of the material. With the source manga already completed, did they believe that the property could not sustain the further three seasons it probably required to properly adapt? (Many shonen anime are produced mainly to drive sales of ongoing manga series.) Of course, that argument doesn’t hold water when one considers the success of Demon Slayer, its anime ongoing, earning its corpulent production committee billions, its manga concluded in 2020.
I guess Neverland’s production committee were just idiots.
Anime Must Burn — EX-ARM
Until this year, I’d never group hate-watched anything. Until this year, I’d never come across anything so ground-breakingly, abhorrently inept as EX-ARM. Each Sunday evening, a group of shell-shocked, Stockholm-syndromed AniTAY waifs synchronised their streams, and through the wonder of Discord audio, suffered together through whatever the hell this was supposed to be. It certainly wasn’t anime by any stretch of the imagination.
Yet another addition to Crunchyroll’s Original Hall of Shame, EX-ARM was a CGI-animated shitstorm directed by a man who knew nothing about animation and animated by a company who had never made anything outside of videogame cutscenes. It showed, oh dear lord, it showed.
Presumably Crunchyroll was part of this steaming turd’s production committee, and was tasked with rounding up staff to produce it. I can only imagine that this director and studio were somewhere around the 98th choice, as how else can you explain the decision to give these people employment? Anyone else even half-to-a-third even slightly more competent was probably slaving away on some now-forgotten ecchi isekai show, leaving only the animator equivalents of those annoying little floating shits you can’t get rid of no matter how many times you flush.
If anime was a mistake, CGI anime was a war crime. The bastards keep committing them too. Why don’t they ever learn? I still can’t believe they had the hubris to market this with the tagline “Declaring war against all scifi series around the world”.
Ecchi Trash: The Hidden Dungeon Only I Can Enter
While we’re on the topic of ecchi anime, it’s always been with us. It’s nothing new. I usually avoid the subgenre like the plague. Occasionally it’s funny and disarmingly charming like How Not to Summon a Demon Lord, and then sometimes you end up with brainless shite like The Hidden Dungeon Only I Can Enter. I drew the short straw and ending up covering this for that season’s AniTAY Early Impressions article series. At least I actually managed to finish watching that show. Why does some anime have such a fascination with brother-sister incest? I HATE IT.
More Ecchi Trash: Girlfriend, Girlfriend
I did not manage to finish this braindead excuse for a romantic comedy. Perhaps the worst possible advertisment for polyamory, I could stand only five episodes of watching the three most stupid, most vacuous idiots make the most terrible relationship decisions. When they added a third girl who stalked the other main characters by camping in their yard (while attempting to make racy YouTube videos), I was out. Not just criminally un-funny, but offensive and gross. Perhaps this was meant to be a parody of the romantic comedy genre, but the thing is, a parody is also meant to be humorous. UGH. Perhaps anime deserves to die if crap like this keeps being shat out of the moist, dripping production-hole.
Who Needs Coherent Storytelling Anyway? Haruhi Suzumiya Got Away With It: Peach Boy Riverside
Oh look. More ecchi. With Peach Boy Riverside, the random ecchi scenes are completely incongruent to the overall serious fantasy story that attempts to tackle racism and prejudice. It’s a shame said story is rendered incoherent by the inexplicable decision by the director to order the episodes non-chronologically. This actively damages the flow of the plot (the original manga is told in linear order) and presents as gimmicky and arbitrary. Perhaps creators, high on their own creative juices, do sometimes need to be told “no”. I expect the show would be best watched in chronological order, so consult a wiki before starting. It’s a passable fantasy with a breakout demon bunny girl and occasional discordant tentacles.
World’s End Harem Postponed After Broadcasting Only One Episode (Shame They Didn’t Cancel It Entirely)
Oh. Even more ecchi. So cursed was this anime’s production that they broadcast only one single episode before cancelling the entire thing, delaying it by a season and restarting from episode one in Winter 2022 instead. Will this have bought more time to polish and improve what sounds like “what if Y The Last Man, but exploitative, bottom-denominator, incel-baiting, softcore porn trash”? Perhaps this will be the shiniest turd ever produced, I’m placing bets on yet more delays and further humiliation to come.
Tokyo Babylon Cancelled Following Blatant Plagiarism
Originally scheduled to air in April 2021, Studio GoHand’s adaptation of manga quartet CLAMP’s beloved 1990s manga Tokyo Babylon was completely scrapped following discovery of multiple instances of character design plagiarism (essentially they ripped off copyrighted clothing designs without seeking permission from the original designers.) CLAMP and their production company were unsurprisingly furious and fired GoHands. They apparently plan to restart production from scratch with a different studio. Will GoHands ever work again following this embarrassment? Does anyone care? The world certainly doesn’t need another Handshakers or W’z.
Was this plagiarism a symptom of the impossible time constraints placed upon studios by production committees? Anime is famously produced right down to the wire, sometimes with episodes presented to TV stations mere minutes before broadcast. Why take time to painstakingly design characters’ clothing when so many professional designer photographs are so easily available to copy on the internet? You can’t make something high quality, cheaply and quickly. You have to choose a maximum two of those things. GoHands chose wrongly.
Just Because Death Note Was Good Doesn’t Mean Platinum End Isn’t Derivative, Offensive Trash
A show that made me so progressively more unhappy with each successive episode that I gave up after nine, Platinum End is a Bad Show. It blatantly plagiarises the far superior, bonkers and fun Mirai Nikki (The Future Diary), yet completely fails to understand what made that show so entertaining. Platinum End’s main character is so frustratingly passive, with a deeply stupid, selfish belief system. We don’t care about his attraction to the similarly vacuous main female character, also hopelessly passive. The main antagonist is a cackling machiavellian version of Death Note’s Light Yagami but without any of his redeeming features or even twisted morality. It’s all so derivative.
Death Note (by the same writer/artist team of Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata) was an admittedly edgy grimdark story, but it had interesting characters and a compelling central moral conflict. Platinum End has none of these. Instead it’s filled with pointless nastiness, boring characters and a meandering plot following unoriginal stereotypes doing horrible things to one another. A show unafraid to pointlessly murder children for “shock” value, don’t bother with it. Platinum End will rot your soul.
Endings Are Important, Mmmkay? 1) Remake Our Life! — SPOILERS
Talking about murdering children, who would have thought that fun time travel/second chance at rectifying mistakes college drama Remake Our Life! would end with our protagonist prioritising his selfish desires and wiping his delightful, cute child from existence. What a bastard. From a show I initially really enjoyed, I really hated this ending.
As a father myself, I felt that Kyouya’s decision to prioritise his work life over family life was unconscionable. I get that he had unrealised dreams, but… he had a gorgeous wife, a wonderful, loving child, and a steady job. Who’s to say he couldn’t continue to pursue his dreams from there? But no. This is a product of Japan, where it’s normal for a man to work himself to an early death, and barely see his family, when youth is idolised as the only time of freedom in one’s life, so meaningful changes can only be made by the young. How utterly depressing. No thanks, I hate it.
Endings Are Important, Mmmkay? 2) Fena Pirate Princess — SPOILERS
Ah, the curse of the Crunchyroll Originals once again. This was almost good. I actively willed it to be good. At the beginning, Fena looked great. A fun adventure show with pirates! Ninjas! Battleships! Then came odd mystical stuff about Joan of Arc reincarnations. Okay, it’s anime, not that weird. Then the creepy antagonist with an icky fixation on the main character’s mother, transferred to her daughter. Hmmm, sailing into troubled waters there. And then… and then… whatever in the hell that ending was supposed to be?
It became clear in the final few episodes that Fena had bitten off far more than it could chew narratively, that short of an extension of a further twelve episodes into a mythical second season, there was little chance the story could be concluded satisfactorily. Those fears were well-founded, as viewers were faced by an incoherent, discordant finale that failed to resolve multiple plot threads, robbed the main character of any choice or agency, fucking erased her memory and left her in the care of her sulky, personality-bereft love interest, as if all of that was somehow fine. What a waste of time, an interesting concept and wonderful character designs. Any ending would have been better than this scurvy-ridden bilge.
Endings Are Important, Mmmkay? 3) Higehiro: After Being Rejected, I Shaved and Took in a High School Runaway — SPOILERS
I can’t believe I was taken in by this. I thought maybe this anime about an older man and an underage teenager will be different. Perhaps I was spoiled by the infinitely superior After the Rain. What a way to completely ruin an entire show with an ill-considered, morally repugnant ending. It would be best to stop watching this crap perhaps two episodes before the end.
Just pretend that 26-year-old full-grown man Yoshida and runaway high school girl Sayu part, after a heartwarming few months of living together, as platonic friends. Pretend that Sayu grows up and finds a boyfriend her own age, a relationship without creepy power dynamics. Pretend that Yoshida finds love with one of his very eligible female colleagues who deeply care for him. Pretend that none of the kow-towing to Sayu’s horrible, abusive mother happens. Pretend that Sayu doesn’t eventually run back to Yoshida to confirm her immaturity and susceptibility to what amounts to Stockholm Syndrome. Just pretend that for once, anime didn’t essentially promote paedophilia. Again.
Torture Porn — Redo of Healer And A Society Hurtling Towards Hell
Finally, and leaving the worst until last, the anime industry unleashed this upon the world. Perhaps the most offensive, abusive, and downright odious “entertainment” product I have ever had the misfortune to experience, Redo of Healer made me despair not just for anime, but humanity in general. So lacking in any positive aspects, Redo seems to be the absolute nadir of human morality, unchained from any kind of decency, concepts of beauty or narrative purpose. Main character Keyaru was wronged, you see? Therefore he must rape, abuse and murder his way across the land until his thirst for revenge is sated. It’s disgusting. If there’s anything that could put people off anime for life, it is this. It’s not worth sating your curiosity to watch (I survived only two episodes). It isn’t even funny. Whoever made this should be ashamed of themselves.
Conclusion
So this year, in many ways, was a terrible year for the anime industry as a whole. Severe production problems, exploited workers, ecchi trash and stupid creative choices blighted our favourite entertainment medium. I don’t know how to improve things from here, as usual that’s in the hands of the people with the money, and they’re never particularly predisposed to positive moral choices, are they? The more riches you accrue, the more selfish and unconcerned with the fates of others you become. As Netflix increase their subscription fees worldwide, expect them to squeeze anime studios yet further. Big companies won’t save us, and there are multiple reasons that attempts to start animators’ unions in Japan fail.
Thankfully it’s not all doom and gloom. A welcome effect of the titanic flood of anime is the presence of so many good things. Next time, I promise to be entirely positive as I look back at the very best 2021 had to offer. See you again soon!
