Anime, Cartoons, and the “Taco Bell Effect”
At the 94th Academy Awards this year, the presentation for Best Animated Feature was preceded by a standup routine where Lily James, Halle Bailey, and Naomi Scott — all of whom have played Disney Princesses in live-action remakes of Disney’s animated movies — joked about animated movies as being something children enjoy and parents have to suffer through. While definitely insulting and belittling to the medium of animation, this opinion is decidedly common among American moviegoers and TV viewers. That, of course, is not a new observation. To most Americans, animation is viewed as, if not exclusively for children, then at least exclusively childish.
Perhaps this view — that American cartoons are inherently immature — is indirectly responsible for the popularity of Japanese anime among many American adults, myself included. Anime covers genres and demographics that American animation usually doesn’t, and this might mean that many American animation fans who seek material that is more mature and serious have no real choice but to watch anime. And anime is immensely popular in America. In 2020, Demon Slayer: Mugen Train earned $47 million in American theaters alone, no small feat for an R-rated animated movie released during the COVID pandemic.
So if anime is so popular, and is seen as having more “mature” clout than American animation, what’s stopping the major American film and TV studios from making comparable works? On the surface, it would seem the obvious thing to do. A large market for them clearly exists, and if American studios could produce what anime fans like, then it stands to reason they would be successful.
The problem is, history has repeatedly shown that this isn’t the case.
I call this the Taco Bell Effect. Imagine you’re an aficionado of Mexican food, and know dozens of culturally authentic recipes by heart. You probably wouldn’t consider Taco Bell to be genuine Mexican food, or even a decent substitute for it. The Taco Bell Effect, in short, is the phenomenon where a domestic imitation of a sought-after foreign commodity is rejected by established consumers of that commodity.
Exo-Squad, in the image above, was a textbook example of this. Billed as “The American Anime”, it was intended as a competitor to Japanese series such as Macross, Gundam, and GunBuster. However, it never managed to establish itself as a franchise, and was cancelled after two seasons. Many other attempts by American TV networks and movie studios to court anime fans have fallen flat for largely the same reason. A more recent example was High Guardian Spice, a series produced in-house by American anime distributor Crunchyroll. High Guardian Spice was reviled by Crunchyroll’s primary audience of anime fans, many of whom saw it as a second-rate imitation of fantasy anime like Little Witch Academia.
Another part of the problem may, in fact, simply be the word “anime”. In Japanese this word simply means “animation”, and is applied to everything from Pokémon to Pixar. But outside of Japan, it refers specifically to Japanese animation. In other words, it’s an exotic commodity, and a big part of its appeal to non-Japanese audience comes from that “exotic factor”. You’ll never see an American equivalent of Naruto or Yu Yu Hakusho because the core concepts of those shows — ninjas and samurai — are inherently Japanese. The word “anime” is, for many fans, subconsciously linked with this exotic image. The American anime fandom, in other words, is simply the most recent incarnation of what literary critic Edward Said called “Orientalism” — that is, the fetishization of all things East Asian as an exotic “other”.
So if American animators are to aim for the sort of audiences that anime attracts, they will obviously need to try something different to avoid running afoul of the Taco Bell Effect. But what? One possibility might be to look at the history of comic books. For a long time comic books were considered strictly children’s fare. In the late 1980s, however, titles such as Maus and Watchmen were rebranded as “graphic novels”, a phrase that gave them more literary pedigree and made it seem socially acceptable for adults to read them. Perhaps what American animation truly needs to do, in order to break its glass ceiling, is to find a phrase akin to “graphic novel”.
But what would that phrase be? Americans are clearly willing to watch serious adult animation, but only if it’s labeled as anime. Hence we have, for example, Netflix listing American animated dramas like Castlevania as anime, presumably to attract Americans who wouldn’t be caught dead watching a “cartoon”. How do we win these people over?
Unfortunately, there’s no simple answer to that question. Animation developed along different lines in Japan and the United States, and for one to directly imitate the other may turn out to be a fruitless endeavor. If American animation is to achieve the same genre diversity and popularity with adult audiences as anime, it will have to be some other way.
