To explain the context of this article to the times that it was created in, anime was the outlier to the mollified wasteland of American animation at the time. This was a topic that was often shadowed by both The Simpsons and John Lasseter at the time because of Nickelodeon’s and Disney’s nickel and diming with halfassed movies at the time to bank off of theater money: http://www.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DED0ySD51Z2U&usg=AOvVaw3lKsG5kDuctRHIKtvIsXSc&opi=89978449

It also doesn’t help that a lot of Americans at the time thought that animation was but a form of entertainment for only kids while they ate up pretentious “adult live action XXX” innuendo pussyfooting garbage thanks to both censors and Hollywood agenda flunkies. For an era of “kid power”, the 90s fizzled out into a world of contradiction where “kid’s stuff” was “bad” and being conformed into the mold society wants its people to be shaped into as “adults” was “good”.

Hindsight is 20/20 but a lot of you look stupid, imho. Nothing you could have done would have ever saved the anime industry, the Great Recession was an inevitable enormous shitshow on a huger scale than any of you at the time. Anyone who blamed moe and new anime at the time of this post deserved anything that the got coming to them.

In my perspective, anime-anything creation hasn’t really exploded in the USA because of a few factors I can name off the top of my head: Cross cultural differences, differences in the values of actual creative works and sequential arts, and the inference of political, religious, and even corporate interests.

I’m not going to lie and say that the United States of America is the absolute worst country as of date to be a comic book author/artist and animator, and in some fields, a video game creator. Aside from some absolutely touchy current topics that I will not get into, even in my heyday of high school seeing the anime boom of the 1990s wash into a stream into the 2000s, trying to make sequential art in this country and do it successfully without the pitfalls is a Herculean task if you are a citizen of the United States.

For starters, sequential art is the United States’ (and Hollywood’s) whipping boy for anything that isn’t “acceptable” for anything “mainstream”. Even since the start of the animation business in the 1920s, the US government always had its eyes on and its hands at the ready to take away anything that wasn’t “constitutional” or “legal” at the discretion of the moral busybodies. Things only got worse as the 20th Century went along. You had the Tequila Bible scares of the 1930s, you had the Comic Book Burnings of the 1950s that made every kid burn their comics by fear that they weren’t “of moral fiber”, you had the censor and morality in media crazes that started in the 1970s and kept going hard on animation, and the stigmas that were born from these times just kept on going in the public consciousness.

Even then, American styles of animation and even art are ironically, extremely territorial and ironically conformist to the T. There are many stories of anime fans going to art schools and animation schools and getting talked down to by many teachers and professors that “anime isn’t art”. They fail to realize why their own tradition has failed in the public consciousness, yet need something to antagonize and lay all their blame for their failures. Meanwhile CalArts is trying to one up anime by featuring its own “traditions” yet failing to still understand why anime has its natural appeal. Critics and criterion of art in America is also unapologetically outdated, rooted in archaic and even racist and ethnocentric ideals, and even what I’d say anathema to the Constitution of the United States in a way.

Comic books are their own story in itself. Since banning almost any other story format and genre since the Comics Codes were formed, and by the industry itself by the way, this really hurt them in the long run. I’m not tossing shade at superhero fans, but the reality is that superheroes were molded to be the extensions of “Truth, Justice, And The American Way”, and yeah, there is a problem with that, when Superman went from being his own hero in 1934 to dying for DC’s bottom line in 1994, when “The American Way” is dictated to be the “Tyranny of the Majority”. The Comic Codes helped to only pigeon hole comic books as superhero media, and there is ironically no fault other than the industry’s own in this regard for bending over to censorship, government overreach, and even shortsighted blind greed. The Comics Crash of 1996 is also something that can still be felt today despite all efforts after, which killed the idea of comics being other than money pit collector’s trash and an “economically feasible industry” by the more moneyminded of society.

For better or for worse, anime is put on a pedestal here in the United States. Personally I’d say there’s more worse out of this because for a lot of Americans, especially for Caucasians, anime isn’t “natural” in their perspective. It’s “exotic, different, special”, or for the more blase and lowest common denominator mindset, “weird, strange, and wacky”. I acknowledge that in someway, but the main view that’s been going around is kind of the same problem with fetishizing Asian women and alienating Asian men in the US. It’s viewing anime more as an “other” and “them” sort of hobby than anything human in nature. This isn’t prevalent for all of (white) anime fandom, I’ve met more understanding anime fans than I have the worst ones in my waking life. But the perspective for anime to be a “pure untouched hobby” or an “exotic different thing” on an extreme extent is a mindset on par with stalkers of celebrities and the aforementioned fetishization. I’ve lived all of my life with anime surrounding me like as if I lived in Japan, and this kind of mindset really perturbs me. (ps This isn’t ammo for you “anime isn’t speshul my hobby is” obviously white insecure crab bucket mentality weight tossers, grow up.)

And I’m going to say it. Anime is unapologetically Japanese. It comes from a nation of syncretization and stressing harmony even if friction must come first before things get better. John explains the most of this in this article: https://www.animenation.net/blog/ask-john-why-is-the-world-fascinated-by-japan/ And before you can tell me that imagination and creative freedom exists elsewhere, don’t even try it. The United States hates reading and the arts, and its education system is among some of the worst in the world for pushing out peons, workers, and even criminals than any free thinkers and creative minds. This doesn’t even tie into materialistic religious intolerance pushed by televangelists and prosperity gospels that latched onto the morality in media groups or the more seedy of Hollywood that needs and desires manpower for anything you can think of. The dearth of creativity is also something the Military Industrial Complex and the prison industry want, as well as the jingoists and loyalists who lay themselves out on their roads like rugs and shine their boots for them. You can call me a conspiracy theorist, but I’ve correlated this with how the middle of the 20th Century in America had some of the worst rates of crime, and in relation of such factors like the reaction of corporations to the Civil Rights Movements and their expanse into globalization and foreign outsourcing to save on costs.

And I’m going to let the zoo out on this: this all stems from lives that are strictly driven politically like robots than anything human in nature. The United States has the absolute worst relations in the world with Asian nations other than business. The Mathew Ceodore Perry Black Ships Gunboat Diplomacy Mission, Yellow Peril Immigration Campaigns, World War II, Vietnam’s “De-Communist” War, Congress and Ronnie Regan destroying Japanese electronics on the White House Lawn, 1990s “Model Minority” racist harassment by “true human white Americans”, I can go on and on about this. The only nation that the United States respects in this instance is South Korea, and that’s because they do mostly everything that the United States says for them to do. The only other nation with the same amount of vitriol is the Netherlands, and history sure knows why (they also vehemently hate anime and manga too).

And if you think I hate the United States, go hate the First Amendment and go hate on anyone who has contributed to free thought, free will, free expression, free speech, freedom itself, and anything else that requires freedom in this great country- even world- of ours yet is still run by a bunch of braindead morons trapped by prejudice, bigotry, and bias. I haven’t even gotten to how anime really is a product of freedom in the first place.

The bottom line, if you want to make anime or something inspired by anime, go right ahead. The catch is, you will need to be like a superhero or a hero of legendary myth yourself to face all of these ugly biases, stigmas, prejudices, lies, and even truths to even dare to make a name for yourself.