The Golden Age of Anime Discussion

ThatAnimeSnob said:
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These two factors (creative liberty and appreciation) are severely limiting the years when anime could be considered to be in a golden age. For most of their existence, anime studios either had no funds to properly create what they wanted to create and had to cater to a niche audience, or were forced to cancel projects and leave titles incomplete because they didn’t sell. On the other hand, for a long period of time, anime studios were not credited properly for what they were making. A huge amount of classic cartoons was animated in Japan, and without proper advertisement, very few realized that what they were watching was not made solely in America or Europe. This also includes a huge number of anime that were exported, heavily edited, and promoted as western productions.


So, if we strip away all the years when anime studios were not funded properly, or anime were not as popular, what are we left with?
- 1988 to 1991, the time when the west witnessed en masse how detailed animated movies could look like.
- 1995 to 1997, the time when sci-fi series became popular on television for the first time.
- 2002 to 2008, the time when the Big Three and the first blu-ray titles came to be smash hits thanks to proper advertisement and a good economy.
- 2012 to today, the time when titles like Sword Art Online and Attack on Titan brought a new wave of fans and rejuvenated the industry.


These 4 periods can be considered golden ages in some way or another, but not in the same volume. The era of high budget movies for example didn’t make that much money and as it was proven it was way too costly to keep going based only on cinema tickets. Television and manga were the mediums that were making most of the money. The era of sci-fi series was good but was not promoted that well in the west, mostly because of bad dubbing and the unwillingness of distributors to take anime seriously. The Big Three / blu-ray era is indeed the best time when anime and manga were selling well and the studios were flourishing.


Something I can’t say about the years we are going through right now, because the economy is bad and piracy hurts the sales a lot. Also, the fact that we have so many sequels and reboots means that there is not much room for creativity and the industry is supported mostly by the inland consumers we commonly call otakus. It needs to pander to them more than before. Not that there wasn’t any pandering done in the past; it’s just that when you rely a lot on a certain group of old fans, you need to cater to their specific tastes and not move too far off from what they want. This is why the animators can’t create what they want to create with the same ease as they used to before.


Also, the fact that anime are, thanks to the internet, far more accessible now than ever before, does not make the era better. We are able to find and watch a title from any year, but this does not mean we support the current era financially so it can maintain its state. Thus I agree mostly with Digibro, even if I use slightly different criteria. 2002 to 2008 (especially the last 3 years of this period) was the golden age of anime.