Has the “Anime Bubble” burst?

…Are they kidding?
There’s a decline, but it isn’t really enough to start wavering about how anime is dying.

Oh, darn.
With Anime in the decline, whatever shall I do in Japan?…

I guess it comes down to what you get out of it. If anime serves as something to plop your kid down in front of while you’re busy, that’s easy – they don’t complain too much about cheap animation or crappy story arcs. It’s another thing if you like it for the artistry that goes into it, but this still isn’t the end of the world.

Even if anime production becomes scarce, thanks to the internet we’ll still have access to some of the fantastic artwork out there done by our favorite anime artists (and it doesn’t have to be by stealing it – there are more than a few excellent artists who offer up their artwork proudly online). Let the sweatshops shut down. It doesn’t mean that the glut of artists and creators will crawl under rocks and disappear.

Manga itself, from which so much anime has originated, will always be around, whether larger publishing companies are willing to fund them or not. If doujinshi these days can be published with as much quality as any other manga by independent publishers, there’s no reason we won’t also be able to get some quality work by original writers and artists out there. Hopefully this will even encourage artists with great ideas who may have previously been turned away by larger publishers. Perhaps it’s just how this business is changing, and it may eventually be for the better from a creative standpoint.

Of course, the problem with the artists taking over will always be money. They work themselves to death to begin with just to meet deadlines in both print media and animation production, for very little pay. Working independently will mean they’ll have to work just as hard, on top of paying to publish their own work and get it out to the public for a smaller return (then again, I don’t know what the artist’s cut is from a major manga publisher out here. I don’t imagine it’s much). Full scale animation production will be trickier to handle in an independent way, since it requires teamwork, and the cost of equipment use and materials can rise pretty quickly. In the meantime, there are Flash snippets here and there by individual animation artists that can be found online. Not all of it is the greatest quality, but perhaps if there’s a real desire by artists to animate their own work (and if they have the time needed to do it), we’ll start seeing more and better things emerge.

So, after all of that blither – all hope is not necessarily lost, though there is a downside. If the anime artists are driven enough to keep working in the conditions they are already reported to put up with presently at the studios, we may still be able to see great things from them independently if the whole business ends up crashing. On the other hand, if former anime artists and creators lose their jobs and are forced to go into other businesses doing equally exhausting jobs, they may no longer have the time or energy to work on their art…Though even in that instance, there’s still likely to be a handful of artists here who may well be privately bankrolled and encouraged to continue creating through bad times in the business. We’ll just have to see how it pans out over time.

Either way, anime itself isn’t going to disappear even if it takes awhile for production companies to regroup and figure out how to do business without losing more money than it’s worth. I trust people to have enough brains to eventually figure out a solution that will be able to fund their production companies while making anime affordable enough for people to turn away from illegal downloads and start paying for it again. Does anyone know whether Crunchyroll has been very effective in their efforts to get people to pay for anime online?…Not that it’s of much use to anyone in Japan, but it might be a start in general.