I gave my quick thoughts on a few shows that demonstrated,
one way or another, that the target audience for anime is kids (or so they
say). Pokémon, Neon Genesis Evangelion, and Hellsing
all hold a separate but equal place in my heart in terms of anime. I still
watch Pokémon as it comes out. I like
to go back to Evangelion at least
once a year. Hellsing still keeps my
interest even after watching the so-so (compared to the OVA) TV series,
watching the OVAs, and reading the manga. You’d think that after so many
iterations of the same thing, you’d just get sick of every adaptation. But you
just can’t get sick of Alucard ripping people to ribbons.
Before I go into an extended analysis of the appeal to
adults and children in one series or movie (it’s likely going to be a movie), I’d
like to give some history of children’s anime from my perspective and
knowledge. This is for two reasons. 1. I want more time to pick something and
2. Knowing the background is nearly as important as the analysis itself.
First, a few points brought up to me. 4kids has tons and
tons of merits (as much as they did to One
Piece, they still have merits). They brought anime to a huge audience with Pokémon and they knew they hit gold at
just the right moment. Yu-Gi-Oh came
two years later and that was, arguably, the second biggest thing to happen to
children’s anime (after Pokémon).
But, to target kids, what do you have to do? You have to put the anime in the
right time slot and you have to make that anime as accessible to kids as
possible. Take out any reference to Japanese culture (“No! My donut!” screams
Brock as his rice ball is caught by a Pokéball) and, most importantly, air it
alongside the other Saturday morning cartoons or just morning cartoons in
general.
This wasn’t necessarily a bad thing back in the early stages
of the anime boom. Pokémon actually
preceded the big anime boom of the early 2000s by two or so years. Yu-Gi-Oh just barely by a year or two at
most. But they provided a great stepping stone for anime to get itself into the
spotlight.
But it wasn’t all great. 4kids was Americanizing these shows
to a dreadful extent and its time placement put it where misconceptions were
the only thing that could grow from it. Both of these were necessary to
properly market the shows, but it led to a drastic change in perception about
anime. Prior to this, arguably the most know form of anime was hentai. Because
you only heard of it if you were older and older males (anime’s target
audience) typically like pornography. And that will, of course, lead to hentai.
So in that case, this new misconception is a good thing. Because I’d rather not
have to write a piece about how anime isn’t all hentai (though shows like Kissxsis and Oniichan no koto don’t make that case very easy).
But something happened around 1996 that changed that
landscape a bit. Anime was no longer clearly a kids show to some people. Dragonball Z changed it into a hit teen
show, akin to the superhero shows and other things that were airing in the
afternoon on Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network. That’s not to say that kids didn’t
watch it. I remember coming home from third or fourth grade (1998 or so) to
watch Dragonball Z on Toonami. But DBZ was the perfect testosterone fest
for budding teenagers as well.
What Toonami and 4kids has done to the anime industry and
for us as fans has been great an unquantifiable. I can say with almost 100
percent certainty that I wouldn’t be an anime fan without 4kids’s adaptations
and the Toonami block on weekday afternoons.
So here’s how these misconceptions started. Or at least how
they probably started. So what does appeal to us as adults in anime? And what
appealed to us as kids in anime? Certainly the visuals compelled us to like it
when we were kids and the complex mythology compel us to like it now. But more
on that next time.
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