A Parallax View | If I Were to Pick Four Works to Represent Japanese Animation in 2018…

A viewer of Japanese animation and films, with little experience of the world.

If I were to pick four works to represent Japanese animation in 2018, my criterion would be developments that hadn’t appeared in previous years. I’ve decided to divide the four places among four themes.

1. Social phenomena
2. meme
3. Women creators and women’s perspectives
4. Streaming backed by overseas capital and a “renaissance”

1. Social phenomena

I’m sure you can guess which work I mean. Just look at the Anime Buzzword Awards held by the Japanese website Gadget Tsushin:

Gold: Toru Amuro (Detective Conan: Zero the Enforcer)
Silver: Amuro’s women (Detective Conan: Zero the Enforcer)
Bronze: You’re a hater, huh? (POP TEAM EPIC)

Then there’s Niconico’s 2018 “Internet Buzzwords 100” ranking:

Grand Prize: POP TEAM EPIC
2nd: Virtual YouTuber
3rd: FGO
4th: Don’t you stop… (该)
5th: Dennō Shōjo Siro
6th: Toru Amuro
7th: Tsukino Mito
8th: Kamen Rider Build
9th: NIJISANJI
10th: Persona 5

Yes, the first anime to represent 2018 is—

Detective Conan: Zero the Enforcer

Toru Amuro’s achievement is that he set off a social phenomenon in Japan this year, becoming the nation’s dream husband for 2018. His spin-off manga, Zero’s Tea Time, even edged slightly ahead of the main series. With Amuro name seals leading the charge, all sorts of merchandise appeared: here was a man who could boost GDP. The Detective Conan franchise had never seen a frenzy like it.

The seal craze¹ even received official recognition: not only did Aoyama draw a new illustration, but official seals were released too.

Its actual box-office takings, though, fell just short of Code Blue: The Movie, starring Yamapi and Gakki—¥9.21 billion for Code Blue, ¥9.13 billion for Zero the Enforcer—costing it the year’s top spot among Japanese films. Last year’s domestic champion was Detective Conan: The Crimson Love Letter, but that film didn’t cause anything like this social phenomenon.

Personally, I think this could mark a dividing line in the history of Detective Conan. After a quarter of a century, this long-established franchise has finally made its transition, especially in the films: away from big-spectacle gimmicks—luxury liners, aircraft, Tokyo Tower, skyscrapers, nineteenth-century London, and so on—and toward character consumption, with enormous success. The first signs appeared in the twentieth film, The Darkest Nightmare, which was also a huge success and made considerably more than its predecessor. (The Darkest Nightmare took ¥6.33 billion, against ¥4.48 billion² for the preceding Sunflowers of Inferno, and ¥4.11 billion for Dimensional Sniper before that. You can see the jump.) I believe next year’s film, The Fist of Blue Sapphire, will also lean more heavily on its characters: Kaito Kid and Makoto Kyogoku, who’ll be making his film debut. Story-wise, this one also looks more like a romantic (dumbass) comedy.

What’s more, thanks to the overseas release of Zero the Enforcer, Amuro has already become a ten-billion-yen man, mainly on the strength of the mainland Chinese box office. This year also brought the concluding installment of the Mobile Suit Gundam THE ORIGIN film series. Add in Conan’s relentless Gundam references, and we even got a crossover:

Someone give this the anime marketing award of the year, please.

Toru Furuya, who voices both Toru Amuro and Amuro Ray, naturally became one of the year’s hottest voice actors, and hosted the livestream for Niconico’s 2018 “Internet Buzzwords 100.” Absolutely ruthless—getting the voice of the original Gundam protagonist to present an award to the Orga meme from Iron-Blooded Orphans…

2. meme (梗: gags and references)

Whether in Japanese animation or in film, I really think this was the year of the meme. So my second choice is—

POP TEAM EPIC

A shit anime with genuinely nothing left but memes. NO MONOGATARI! JUST [BLEEP]—KING MEME!!

When the first episode aired, I dashed off a response on Zhihu. I’ve decided not to change that answer: first, because I’m lazy; second, because I think my response to the first episode has the same here-and-gone quality as a flash mob. Let it sit there untouched and become history:

To sum up, both the topical subjects discussed above and the two questions I’ve just answered have to do with meta. This anime is meta from start to finish; everything about its form is there for meta. But I have to say, I came away still fired up but unsatisfied. I marvelled at—and admired—the production team’s nerve in playing with form, while also thinking: who could possibly find this dogshit form satisfying?! Are you trying to scare people off?!!

As I’ve said in other answers, this work has a flash-mob quality. It’s a shit anime, and the official word is explicit: there won’t be a second season. It also depends on the internet. Not only are its references inseparable from the internet, but after pretty much every episode, viewers go online to interact with other viewers, and even with the creator. Perhaps that interaction is what makes watching it a complete experience, the proper way to watch it.

It isn’t actually the first anime to depend on the internet like this. Last year’s Kemono Friends set off a huge wave of online interaction. Its director Tatsuki, himself a product of the dōjin scene, likewise came from the masses and went back to the masses, personally conducting in-depth exchanges with the broad masses of internet users. Further back there was Lucky Star, with its exceptionally keen feel for what was popular. It was also among the early works streamed on Niconico: its popularity, too, was inseparable from internet culture.

On the film side, it has to be Ready Player One and Ralph Breaks the Internet.

For all the talk of Ready Player One as a subcultural carnival, its core is thoroughly mainstream: people living in society must ultimately return to communicating in the real world. Even so, that crafty Spielberg still managed to fool plenty of subculture fans. He wrapped it all in the most mainstream Hollywood framework and got the whole audience swaying and partying together. For anime, manga, game, and film fans, references that the mainstream crowd doesn’t know offer a particular satisfaction: the subculture you’ve enjoyed shut away in your room, alone or with people online, has been brought into the grand halls of the mainstream. You get excited at a moment when you know more than the people around you, when you’re the only one who laughs. You leave the film with a sense of belonging: the interests you chose are right, they’re the coolest, and you don’t have to look to the grown-ups for approval.

The references in Ralph Breaks the Internet are much more broadly accessible, and much more closely tied to the internet—though, since they’re mostly references to the Western internet, Chinese audiences missed quite a few. The film is also a very successful example of internet marketing. With Easter-egg culture so popular today, the film got enormous exposure online through its Easter eggs. Its second post-credits sequence comes from one of the most popular surprise gags on Western social networks: NEVER GONNA GIVE YOU UP. Putting a time-sensitive internet meme into a post-credits sequence also stamps the film with the year 2018. Of course, its story certainly deserves criticism. What interests me, though, is that as arcades die out, these old arcade characters acquire a new identity on the film’s internet stage: memes. There is no instigator behind a meme’s spread—or rather, anyone might be an “accomplice.” These virtual characters, who have no actual identity and don’t exist in reality, thus have an unspoken affinity with memes. The most obvious example is Wreck-It Ralph turning into a mysterious internet celebrity.

This year’s SSSS.GRIDMAN in Japanese animation and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse in film belong here too. With both, the more you know about the Gridman or Spider-Man franchise, the more Easter eggs you’ll find and the more fun you’ll have. As I said about Ready Player One, this pleasure isn’t in the story itself but in the Easter eggs extending beyond it. You might even go online and throw yourself into feverish exchanges with fellow fans. This is the subcultural carnival—and it’s what drove the online carnival POP TEAM EPIC set off this January, earning it places on both buzzword lists above.

3. Women creators and women’s perspectives

I think this has been a year for women working in Japanese animation to shine. Compared with the anime made by men in previous years, the stories have noticeably more of a woman’s perspective. If I had to choose one, I’d pick Mari Okada’s directorial debut—

Maquia: When the Promised Flower Blooms

I don’t deny that Mari Okada is a highly controversial creator. But ask me to name a formidable woman in the industry, and she’s definitely the first person I’d think of.

In Japanese animation, directors generally rise through episode direction. The usual route is from jobs in key animation to jobs in episode direction, then to director. Some also come from production coordination or the art department. But moving from screenwriting to directing is genuinely rare. (It’s quite common in live-action film.) Still, think about it and her becoming a director makes sense:

• (1) She’s very good at getting the job done. Her work may divide opinion sharply, but she can generally deliver. (Mama Okada has certainly seen the bad reviews people give her online. For details, watch the autobiographical TV drama she scripted herself.)
• (2) She has a powerful desire for control. She wants an extraordinary degree of control over her work, and examples abound. On true tears, she argued with director Junji Nishimura. On anohana and The Anthem of the Heart, her arguments with the other two principal creators—director Tatsuyuki Nagai and character designer Masayoshi Tanaka—nearly broke up the team. In fact, one reason she became a director was that she felt a script couldn’t control everything in a film, whereas a director could. Personally, I also think creators who want control over their work are the most interesting. Creating means expressing yourself; controlling the work lets you defend that expression. And Mama Okada happens to be someone who believes in the appeal of words, as so many of her stories show.
• (3) She’s well connected, and people like her. Look at the credits for Maquia and you’ll see all sorts of industry heavyweights pitching in. Some came through the connections she’d built over more than a decade in the business; others were brought in by the man who recognized her talent, P.A.WORKS president Kenji Horikawa. That Horikawa trusts her, and entrusted his company’s screenwriter Keigo Koyanagi to her as a pupil, shows the goodwill she enjoys. She also contributed an original anime this year, DRAGON PILOT: Hisone & Masotan. Its chief director is Shinji Higuchi, who came out of GAINAX and is now a mainstay of tokusatsu cinema. Yes, when I first saw those two names together, I was floored. Who put them in touch?! Interviews also show the trust placed in Mama Okada by Masahiko Minami, president of the show’s animation studio, Bones. Scary how much goodwill she has… Connections and goodwill: never mind the anime industry, plenty of wage slaves need them badly, too.

Perhaps for these reasons, Mama Okada made her comeback in live-action film and television last year. She’s no longer taking on low-budget pink films—something like Hong Kong’s Category III films—as she did when she started out, but more mainstream work. There’s My Teacher, starring Toma Ikuta and Suzu Hirose; The Dark Maidens, starring Miss Yoshiko Sengen; this year’s autobiographical TV drama, How I Went from Being Unable to Go to School to Writing “Anohana” and “The Anthem of the Heart”; and next year’s live-action The Flowers of Evil, with director Noboru Iguchi, who comes from cult cinema. Just count the jobs Mama Okada has done: written pink films, written bishōjo games, written anime, directed anime, written mainstream live-action film and television, published an autobiography, written manga stories—the anime adaptation of her manga O Maidens in Your Savage Season is scheduled for next April… Scary…

As for women’s perspectives, I’ve written about this in another answer:

Okada’s attitude toward mothers is that a mother need not remain within the family; she can keep travelling. This is also the function served by the second female lead, Leilia… I believe this is Okada’s own view of women, too: a mother need not be tied down by the family. Before she is a mother, a woman is first of all herself—an independent individual.

And Mama Okada isn’t the only one who shone. There’s also Naoko Yamada, who directed Liz and the Blue Bird this year. Why didn’t I choose her? Personally, I think Mama Okada is a more unusual, more representative case. Liz and the Blue Bird, too, is an animated film that only a woman could have made. The audience is like the pufferfish in the film: the side of the square tank that the fish faces is like the cinema or television screen we face. We viewers are pufferfish kept within this work’s world, our gaze placed below the stage. May all the air before us be forever frozen, every scene inviolable—this is Naoko Yamada’s miniature garden of a world. It will not let us violate the girls with a prying gaze or pierce the membrane; all we can do is keep a gentle vigil.

Then there’s Hiroko Utsumi, who came out of Kyoto Animation, where she directed the first two Free! TV series. This year she delivered her first anime made at a company outside Kyoto Animation: Banana Fish. Its source is a shōjo manga by Akimi Yoshida, now forty years into her career as a shōjo manga artist. From the original manga to the anime, then, the creators are women. Yoshida’s best-known work in China is probably Umimachi Diary, which Hirokazu Kore-eda adapted—or should I say butchered—into the film Our Little Sister. The manga also reached its conclusion this year and was successfully licensed for publication in China, becoming Yoshida’s first officially published manga in mainland China.

For this one, I’d recommend the original manga over the anime. The manga takes place after the Vietnam War; the anime moves it to after the Iraq War. Utsumi clearly doesn’t understand the problems that come with adapting it this way. The rampant sex crimes, organized crime manipulating political power, teenage street gangs—this last element was probably borrowed from Akira—are all features of an American landscape that could only have emerged after the Vietnam War, even after the youth movements. They’re plainly out of place in American society today. A moment’s thought tells you why she changed the period: to cater to current tastes. What she does understand, by contrast, is what girls today like. There’s even a dedicated designer for the characters’ clothes, making them stylish, stylish, the height of style. In the manga, Shorter shaves his head at one point. The anime lets him keep his hair, the stated reason being that his mohawk is his trademark.

One more woman working in animation arrived late in the year, in December: Rie Matsumoto, director of the first season of Blood Blockade Battlefront. She directed an advertising music video for Lotte’s seventieth anniversary, Baby I Love You Daze.

But I think there are more moves to come after her two years of silence following Blood Blockade Battlefront. Let’s look at the video’s credits:

Theme song: BUMP OF CHICKEN, “Shinsekai” (“New World”)
Director: Rie Matsumoto
Planner and producer: Genki Kawamura
Character design: Yuki Hayashi
Animation production: BONES

That’s right. Who is Genki Kawamura? Toho’s ace producer. He’s the one responsible for the company’s summer films: The Boy and the Beast, Your Name., Fireworks, Mirai, Weathering with You—Makoto Shinkai’s new film for next year. I introduced him in this answer → What do you think of Makoto Shinkai’s new film, Weathering with You?

And he actually approached Matsumoto two years ago, while Your Name. was enjoying its hit theatrical run.

Yes. Two years ago, I called it.

I. CALLED. IT.

I just want to gloat a little. I can gloat about this for a year. And I still believe Matsumoto and Toho will come out with a bigger project.

4. Streaming backed by overseas capital and a “renaissance”

This theme actually has three parts: overseas capital, streaming, and renaissance. The work that best represents all three this year, directed by Masaaki Yuasa and based on Go Nagai’s manga, is—

Devilman Crybaby

Yes, when I discussed my three representative anime of 2017 at the beginning of this article, I also mentioned anime streamed by overseas powers such as Daddy Netflix. But this was the year Netflix really began to flex its muscles, so I’ve chosen this as the representative work.

You can read about the advantages and disadvantages of streaming for creators in all sorts of news reports. For us viewers, though, releasing every episode at once may change the way we’ve always followed anime. I watched all of Devilman Crybaby in a single night.

There’s also an exception among Netflix anime: Violet Evergarden, the big hit of this January. Unlike other Netflix anime, it didn’t release all its episodes at once—perhaps because it isn’t a purebred Netflix show. It’s one of the very few shows on Netflix released a week at a time, except in North America, where viewers have to wait until it finishes before getting it all at once. The Little Witch Academia TV series, another Netflix show, only went up on Netflix after its broadcast run ended.

As I remember it, the first anime with substantial ties to Netflix was P.A.WORKS’ fifteenth-anniversary production Kuromukuro in 2016. The model is now maturing, and in 2019 there’ll be still more new works from overseas streaming services, led by Daddy Netflix.

Another related development comes from Japan’s Fuji TV, which added a new anime programming block this year called “+Ultra,” with the aim of taking Japanese animation overseas. (It already had the “inverted A” noitaminA block, whose aim is to make anime that’s different; representative titles include Honey and Clover and anohana.) The new block works with streaming services, and its first show is Ingress, adapted from the AR mobile game. Here’s the release pattern: the day after the first episode airs on TV, the entire series goes online. Discussion builds online, and that popularity is then fed back into the television run.

Its director, Yuhei Sakuragi, is a CG animation director who first made his mark in the short-animation project Japan Anima(tor)’s Expo. He also worked with Hayao Miyazaki on Boro the Caterpillar, the short shown at the Ghibli Museum, and Miyazaki put him through absolute hell. He’s another up-and-coming director worth looking forward to. His new feature, The Relative Worlds, opens next January.

That covers the former; now for the latter, the “renaissance.” This isn’t particularly rare nowadays. What is rare is that this year has “four fifties”:

• The first fifty is the fiftieth anniversary of Go Nagai’s debut as a manga artist. So besides Devilman Crybaby, this year also brought Cutie Honey Universe and Mazinger Z: Infinity, both adapted from his work.
• The second fifty is the fiftieth anniversary of the start of the Lupin the Third manga’s serialization. Besides this year’s TV series, Lupin the Third Part 5, there’s the commemorative OVA Is Lupin Still Burning?, with original creator Monkey Punch as chief director.
• The third fifty is the fiftieth anniversary of the birth of the Ashita no Joe manga. I was quite surprised by how popular Megalo Box, which takes Ashita no Joe as its model, became on Bilibili. Its visuals were deliberately made at DVD-standard 480p resolution, so you’ll notice that only the opening and ending credit text is in HD—which doesn’t seem much use to me. On top of that, the lines were treated in compositing, in post-production, to resemble hand-drawn pencil strokes, broken yet still connected by fine threads. This, too, was done to imitate the texture of cel animation. Quite a few recent anime have used this sort of line treatment; Occultic;Nine is one. The trend also shows that the industry is feeling nostalgic.
• The fourth fifty is the fiftieth anniversary of the manga magazine Weekly Shōnen Jump. You can feel it in all the events being held for Jump titles this year. NHK also made a documentary for the occasion that you can go and watch.

The significance of bringing these two things together is that, for certain kinds of anime that now make many production committees recoil, overseas streaming powers may be the only ones who dare take them on. Older works, too, can be dug up and reworked, given a new chance to shine.

Those, then, are my four anime to represent 2018. To recap:

1. Social phenomena: Detective Conan: Zero the Enforcer
2. meme: POP TEAM EPIC
3. Women creators and women’s perspectives: Maquia: When the Promised Flower Blooms
4. Streaming backed by overseas capital and a renaissance: Devilman Crybaby

Editor’s note

Well, everyone’s coordinate system for Japanese animation in 2018 is different, and this article offers a parallax view. I added the Chinese gloss geng (梗) in parentheses after meme. I agree with the farsighted point Ma Xiaogua made in 2014: moyin (模因) is the more formal Chinese translation, but everyday usage needn’t sound so academic. “What ‘internet meme’ means often extends beyond the scope of memetics.”