Japanese/Korean/Chines Productions and Other Productions

zombie_pegasus said:
I would be all for allowing French, Italian, Thai, and Filipino anime into the database but the problem is the fact that the line has to be drawn somewhere. Japan does make 60% of the world's animation, but I'm not sure how this was calculated and it may even include animation outsourced to Japan. MAL has always only accepted anime from those three countries (or four, including North Korea) and I don't think they have much reason to change it. It would change the whole idea of the site if all professionally produced animation was allowed. Even terms like "shoujo" and "seinen" feel a bit out of place on manhwa and calling Dick Figures an "ecchi comedy ONA" or My Little Pony a "magical shoujo series" would just feel weird, not to mention how differently anime and Western series are aired.

TomDay said:
MAL is mostly just focused on japanese content, which is understandable. japanese content is already a lot so subgenres like chinese and korean work will be lower than the regular.

Loki940 said:

Why especially Japanese (no need to ask but welp), Korean and Chinese ?

Loki940 said:
What prevents you from doing a "general" animated shows database ?

lanblade said:


This is a bit of a legacy. A long long time ago before the internet was invented, anime and manga looked the same to Westerners. All we knew was that it came out of East Asia and looked cool and it looked NOTHING like the stuff America or France or Russia was making. Nobody could read the scribbles (no google translate) to tell if it was made in Japan or China or Korea. Especially since a lot of the stuff was bootlegs coming out of China or Korea. It was a giant mix (there was Thai, Indonesian, and Singaporean stuff in there too but very little). As time went on we got smarter and figuring it out. With the advent of the internet we were able to figure out countries of origin, creators, production years, etc. And we saw that these 3 countries were the biggest producers of the media we loved. So we made anime and manga databases around them and excluded everyone else because it we only wanted to continue to follow the 3 countries who made 99% of the things we loved coming out of East Asia.



There's a website that already does that, it's IMDB. They have animated shows from every country (as long as people submit them to the database).
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2309107/?ref_=fn_al_tt_3
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1751105/?ref_=fn_al_tt_6

But doing a "general" animated shows database no longer makes it myanimelist. It would have to become myanimationlist or mycartoonlist. Well you are always free to make it yourself. There is mydramalist which works the same as MAL only allowing Japanese, Korean, and Chinese dramas.

And there's a website that does classic old animated shows.
https://www.bcdb.com/

MAL has no incentive to change the bedrock of its foundation. It's like asking a Christian church that they should worship Vishnu too.
But there websites out there being created that do what they want to see. Like Hummingbird with its anime-inspired section.

Loki940 said:

Does China and Korea really produce a lot of animes (Not asking for Manhwa/Manhua) ? Haven't seen a lot of them. Actually the only I knows are Cupid's Chocolate and Gin no Guardian that is not yet aired.

lanblade said:


They do.
https://myanimelist.net/clubs.php?cid=41909
https://myanimelist.net/clubs.php?cid=42215
The biggest issue is that this is a user-submitted database. Not many people speak+read Chinese or Korean on MAL. It's hard adding their anime since you have to research in their languages. We did a general head count in the Chinese anime club and from 1 streaming website alone there are about 1,500 Chinese anime that need to be added to MAL's databse. Who knows how many more are scattered across other Chinese websites.