Neon Genesis Evangelion director Hideaki Anno doesn’t believe creating for the global market is the way to go. “I’m sorry, but the audience will have to be the one to adapt” – AUTOMATON WEST
Posted by FeliCaTransitParking
Neon Genesis Evangelion director Hideaki Anno doesn’t believe creating for the global market is the way to go. “I’m sorry, but the audience will have to be the one to adapt” – AUTOMATON WEST
Posted by FeliCaTransitParking
3 Comments
As far as entertainment goes, that’s on point. People shouldn’t try to make shows, movies, games, etc. to please everyone in every culture because it will please no one and generally be a shit product at worst and blandly mediocre at absolute best. Anime shouldn’t try to cater to the western market because then it will lose the flair that makes anime unique and popular.
I think this makes a lot of sense for many Japanese artists; the *mystique* of their culture is a major point of foreign interest. On the other hand, what China has done with some *donghua*, such as *To Be Hero X* (which is clearly meant to appeal to a broader audience, unlike wuxia or xianxia), has been impressive as well. Korea has also been making great strides in broadening the appeal of its media to reach wider global audiences. Collaborative projects with Western IPs, such as *Cyberpunk: Edgerunners*, have had a lot of success too. He’s both right and wrong in saying this, as the situation is fairly nuanced.
The portion of ‘the global market’ *that actually cared* was already there, going back decades.
The other side of ‘the global market’ always needed to be told to take a hike, ***they never once needed to be catered to,*** everything invested in trying to please them was burned money. Zero times a million equals zero.
>The Evangelion director remarks that such works can be well received overseas as well, given that the audience understands the intentions and nuances of the narrative expressed in Japanese. However, he also says that as a creator, he can’t accommodate his work to the audience. “I’m sorry, but the audience will have to be the one to adapt,” he added.
Once again, Japan resists the international commands to change. Regular people aren’t the ones issuing those commands, regular people either *consume the product* or ***don’t*** *consume the product.* The people who ruined all the western shows don’t need to force eastern shows into the same mold.
>But a part of why Japanese works haven’t been able to make it to the West until now is because “we were kind of bad at selling them,” the Evangelion director remarks.
Hire the most capable fans (not preachy strangers) to localize and then market the resulting products entirely via internet without the use of conventional distributors. When a show gets a mobile game don’t just make it as a one-off generic gacha clone to sit on a shelf with the thousands of others, roll all your brand’s shows into a common online world with a cash shop that allows people to pay as much as they want so superfans can crowdfund story/show production without needing to rely on the same price per customer times however many heads.
“Pay as much as you want” doesn’t fit *shows* as well as it fits *game*s, games as a concept are often under-exploited by show brands because there’s too much quantity and too little quality. If a company with several long running famous shows poured its long term efforts into maintaining *just one* mobile game, the result would stand head and shoulders above the *average* mobile game. A larger and more persistent crowd would materialize, with more habitual big spenders.