Guillotine

So, I was reading a blog post in one of my feeds today from AnimeNation answering  someone who asked whether Anime Studios accepted donations in order to keep an Anime running.

“When an average single anime episode costs $100,000 to produce, I simply can’t envision private individuals donating enough money to a production studio to significantly improve production quality over a span of episodes or even produce additional episodes. Maintaining a professional reputation and appearance is undoubtedly more valuable than the few thousand dollars, at most, that could be brought in from private donations.” (Read the full article here: http://www.animenation.net/blog/2009/09/24/ask-john-can-fans-donate-to-anime-studios/)

To add to the confusion of canceled anime shows there are a lot of misconceptions by fans… Especially those outside of Japan. Yes it’s easy to just say “Hey give them some money to keep making the show I like.” but aside from the sheer cost we are talking about  is the fact that the show was most likely canceled due to lack of interest. Let’s face it… If there were enough of a fan base demanding a show then some production company (like Kadokawa or Toei) would step in and either fund the studio, buy out the studio, or buy the show’s license and farm it out to one of their studios. Facts are facts… If a show got canceled it did so because there wasn’t enough interest it it in the first place.

The rest of the story after the jump.

Another factor to account for is the “foreign issue”.  Many American (and I’m sure other country’s) fans don’t realize that they are not part of the demographic when it comes to anime. The basis for what’s hot in anime comes from one place… Japan. That’s where these shows air, and that is where the fan base is. And truthfully by the time anime gets to the fans here it has already been out over there for a year or more, so whatever trend might have spawned that show probably has already passed, and if I have noticed anything over the years it is that the Japanese culture has a rather short attention span. By the time the rest of the world discovers some fad or trend  happening over there they are already on to the next big thing. So by the time most anime gets circulated over here it’s already old news there. Now you say “but the downloaders watch anime  the same time it airs.” Well… Yes, but if you research the numbers there are only a few thousand people outside Japan that are actually following each particular show as it airs.  The main mass of non-Japanese anime fans usually don’t find out about a show until it hits on DVD, and by that time the show has pretty much run it’s course over there.

One more misconception that plagues anime forums is the misunderstanding of how anime is created story wise.  Most anime is typically based on something else. Either a manga, visual novel, or traditional novels. Over here in the US we are accustomed to shows being made just as a show in itself. You have group of writers always coming up with stories, so a show can go on for many years if it’s good enough. With anime the studios are pretty much limited to the source material. A lot of shows end simply because the show based on a manga or light novel has caught up to the writer and simply have no more material to draw from until new volumes are written. This is the case with shows like K-On. How many people have been screaming because no second season has been announced? In that show’s case only 3 volumes of the manga have been released as of this moment, so until more story comes along there is nothing to animate.

Another case is with visual novels since they are stories with actual definite endings. Once the whole story has been told then there is no more material to draw from. The big issue these have is that they are typically older stories that are being made into anime so for example:  Phantom: Requiem for the Phantom is based on the visual novel The Phantom of Inferno which was released back in 2000. They are just out of story at this point so the anime will end. The rare exception to this would be if a company released a sequel, but even then very few visual novel sequels ever make it to anime (the only case I can think of where one has would be the To Heart/To Heart 2 franchise). So with visual novel adaptations what we usually get after the series are OVAs. These allow the anime studios to pretty much go wild. They can make up new stories, cover different routes, etc.

Truthfully though visual novels are created by game companies rather than story writers. A manga author may publish a hundred volumes thus keeping an anime adaptation alive for years, but game companies are usually on to other things by the time an anime hits so sequels to visual novels are not that common. Of course there are always exceptions like Navel’s Shuffle! which has two sequels (Tick! Tack! and Really? Really!), but I’ve heard nothing of any plans to animate either even though Shuffle! itself did amazingly well as an anime. Others like Kimi ga Nozomu Eien spawned parallel stories like Muv Luv, but it only made it into the Akane Maniax and Ayu Mayu Theater OVAs as cameos, although it could still make it into anime eventually.

At any rate. The points I have been trying poorly to make are… If a show ends or gets canceled there is a reason. Either it lost popularity, or it simply ran out of source material to adapt from. And the American anime fan base is not really taken into consideration for Japanese studios when determining what will sell. They are concerned about the primary fan base and the sponsors that pay for their shows. The concerns of the American fan base is pretty much left up to the licensing companies that bring the anime over as they are the ones who stand to lose or gain in the American markets.

Now that’s not to say that Japanese anime studios don’t care at all about Americans. We just aren’t their primary audience. The best way to try and keep a show running is the same way Japanese fans do it. Write letters to not only the studios, but to the creators of the source material as well. Let them know that people are interested.