I'd personally put it at 2000 or 2006, but as pointed out above, that's "geriatric millennial" bias at work. I'd assess the cutoff for the viewerbase as a whole at around 2012-13. That was when the Sword Art Online / Attack on Titan boom brought a lot of new viewers into the anime scene, many of which were younger and less likely to reach back for titles that aired before they got into the medium. How many early 10s shows get much of any attention or recognition these days, other than the megahits like Steins;Gate, Madoka Magica, and the like?
2012-13 also marked the end of the era of fansubbing for most newly-airing anime. While legal streaming (from 3rd parties who duly pay agreed-upon licensing fees to Japanese content owners according to signed agreements, just like VHS/DVD/Blu-Ray publishers did for the previous two decades) had been present since roughly 2008-09, 2012-13 was when enough companies were in the game that almost nothing went unlicensed. After that point, groups pretty much gave up on translating anything that got same-day legal subs, since the vast majority of downloads went to direct rips of the legal streams by HorribleSubs (a brainchild of infamous fansub group gg!) and other entities. And even the download numbers for the legal-stream rips were and are dwarfed by the views of lower-quality re-encodes of those rips on bootleg streaming sites.
Pre 2000s (pre VNs adaptations era) Surely something else happened with anime in the 2000s, like, perhaps, the transition away from the cel-based animation techniques that had been the norm for the previous 40+ years?
Pre 2006s (4:3 era)
I sure do love modern, widescreen TV anime from 2006 or later like the ones in this list, along with others I'm probably forgetting.
Or maybe "The High-Definition Era" would be a better label for the 2006 cutoff, although a lot of the "HD" broadcasts in those early days were just station upscales of SD shows, many of which never saw a Blu-Ray release. Though the greatest difference between early 2000s and and late 2000s anime maybe isn't related to aspect ratios or resolutions -- it's that studios worked out the kinks and figured out how to make digitally-colored anime actually look good. Like how many of the first 3D console games in the N64/PS1 era looked pretty bad, but improved by the end of that generation and the beginning of the next. |