The anime industry has certainly gone through changes over the years. You could break it down into different eras, perhaps with the Golden Age being when early shows like Space Battleship Yamato and Speed Racer were laying the groundwork for the future popularity of the genre; the Silver Age, as Macross, Sailor Moon and Akira (a.k.a. “the first anime guys could talk about with girls”) exploded onto the scene; and the modern period, defined by the bursting of the licensing-for-broadcast-and-DVD-sales bubble, the rise of the Internet and the move from manual cel animation to digital production. The changes keep coming, of course, and these days anime companies have to learn to work with business models that didn’t exist a few years ago, for example distributing new series through legal streaming sites and the future prospect of crowd-funding anime projects. One thing the great sci-fi franchises of the 70s like Planet of the Apes and Star Wars showed us was that the licensed goods related to a property are worth more than direct sales (movie tickets etc.) of the property itself, and animation studios have been embracing this, licensing their characters in new and innovative ways…including advertising everything from Lawson convenience stores to horse racing and Mitsubishi cars.
Treating the anime world as a proper industry to be tracked and analyzed like any other is very much in vogue in Japan these days — there’s even a new quarterly magazine called Anime Busience [sic], which features articles on how Japanese companies can profitably export anime and related “contents” (though I really hate that word) to other countries, how different regions of Japan might market themselves through anime as Hakone has done, etc. Because Japan’s population has already started to contract, there’s a lot of fear that the domestic market for anime and related pop culture will also contract, and if it continues, Japan will eventually see its “Gross National Cool” eroded by South Korea or China. So anime creators need to look overseas for new revenue streams, though this is often difficult for various reasons, including differences in culture, language, and of course 常識 johshiki, or “common sense.” Taking a page from South Korea, which provides government money for marketing K-POP music and K-doramas around the world, the Japanese government is starting to be more supportive of anime creators, in part through NHK’s “Cool Japan” TV series.
Anime is popular all over the world, thouh making it profitable can be a challenge.
