Anime is an extremely lucrative market, and Westerners spend an absurd amount of money on it, with Hollywood missing out. It's not because it's Japanese, or its weirder quirks, it's just because Japan is making it and Hollywood isn't, because Hollywood is institutionally incapable of believing people want (a) weird fantasy (b) that takes itself seriously (c) in quantity over quality, or even that adult media can be animated in the first place.
I really don't think it's that hard to imagine the same is true of manga vs books. The manga section at any serious bookstore is the size of 3-4 other sections put together, and it isn't for no reason. Even if you assume it's a graphic-novel-specific preference, for every one Western hit like Bone, there's fifty more equally massive hits out of Japan, because they simply try more often. Authors making weird stuff in the West are unable to enter traditional publishing (with the industry learning the exact wrong thing from the YA phenomenon) and frequently settle for a web serial + Patreon model, whereas if they were in Japan there's a well established light novel to manga to anime to movie pipeline.
I love graphic novels but have almost no interest in superheroes, so I'm very thankful to Japan for hard carrying the industry in that regard. You can find Manga about pretty much any topic and level of sophistication.
Weird stuff in the west exists, but lives as amateur/fan fiction online, with patreon being the big funding method. I believe this is directly due to publishers hesitance to touch anything "weird", just like you said with Hollywood.
I don't know. As an Asian who has grown up reading manga I find anime generally very cliche. More than Netflix shows. Especially those adaptations from light novels.
Cliche is why people love it. We’ve become an overly analyzed, postmodernist hellscape with our media. A lot of people really want to see cute anime Waifus acting stereotypically. They really want to see it, badly.
They also like when women start to take notice and dress like the anime characters do. Women love anime because the men in anime usually look very attractive, and in the fujoshi anime that they often watch, the men are willing to be gay.
It's the variance in plots in Manga/Anime that's the thing.
Some of my very favourite anime have been about:
- Kid learning Go (the board game) from the ghost of an ancient grandmaster (Hikaru No Go)
- Baking bread (Yakitate!! Japan)
- Playing Tennis (Prince of Tennis)
There is exactly zero chance that "Hollywood" would make any of these.
What does "Hollywood" mean in this context? Cause there are so many western movies and TV shows about sports and cooking. Of course you won't see Hollywood make the exact Prince of Tennis because, uh, it has been made.
There are shows about cooking, but not many fun ones.
The Bear is definitely a good show and kinda about cooking, but it's definitely not a relaxing watch even though it's been winning comedy Emmys :D
As for sports Friday Night Lights is the only one that comes to mind, I watched it because it was good, not because it was about American Football (a sport I couldn't care less).
But the basic premise was that manga and anime allow the authors to go _completely_ bonkers with their ideas with no limitations on what's marketable.
Like One Punch Man shouldn't work, but it does. Or Reborn as a Vending Machine, I Now Wander the Dungeon is one. Or Delicious in Dungeon another one.
They're all way too wacky to ever pass the gauntlet of middle management deciding what goes on air in the US.
Sounds like committees....animes tend to have a visionary person who writes the core story and characters.....
Hollywood is filled with board rooms of groups who are all incentivized in a way to 'get buy in' through concessions....
the first concession is the art...the vision....
Anime tends to have a pipeline. A lone auther (possibly with an illustrator) writes a light novel. Popular light novels get a manga adaptation. Really popular ones get an anime. At this point, I'm half convinced that most anime is made as an advertisement to sell more books.
This pipeline isn't exactly unique to anime. The book -> movie pipeline is very real in western media. The big difference I have noticed is actually that anime makers tend to be less visionary than western movie makers, and instead give you a much more faithful translation of the source material to the TV screen; whereas Hollywood adaptations tend to take much more creative liberty (usually for the worst).
> Sounds like committees....animes tend to have a visionary person who writes the core story and characters.....
Funny, I've heard the exact opposite complaint a lot, that every anime in the last 20 years is made by committee and that's why the vast majority of anime are just slavish adaptations of already-successful manga, and even the few original anime projects that happen tend to be retreads of genre cliches.
That's the complaint I've heard; I suspect it's slightly exaggerated. But the last real auteur anime I can think of is 2002's Voices of a Distant Star, and Shinkai has followed up by retreading the same ground over and over (thematically at least) ever since.
I was thrilled when Love Death & Robots came out on Netflix. I hoped mature animation would pick up a bit in western media. That didn't happen unfortunately.
The pipeline you mention has been a key factor in my kids learning to enjoy reading. They went from anime to manga because the manga often runs ahead of the anime and they wanted more from the world. Then they started reading more novels. They skipped the light novel step, likely because there's very little availability at Barnes & Noble or local used book stores.
When the local theater runs Studio Ghibli or anime like Your Name I make a point to go even though I'm not too fond of the theater experience these days because I want more!
Hollywood also appears institutionally capable of making movies where the actors enunciate properly, where the effect soundtrack isn't louder than the speech, and where nobody is mumbling.
I've given up on them. Sure, fine, that's not how people talk in real life. Whatever. I want to hear what they have to say, otherwise what's even the point?
I really don't think it's that hard to imagine the same is true of manga vs books. The manga section at any serious bookstore is the size of 3-4 other sections put together, and it isn't for no reason. Even if you assume it's a graphic-novel-specific preference, for every one Western hit like Bone, there's fifty more equally massive hits out of Japan, because they simply try more often. Authors making weird stuff in the West are unable to enter traditional publishing (with the industry learning the exact wrong thing from the YA phenomenon) and frequently settle for a web serial + Patreon model, whereas if they were in Japan there's a well established light novel to manga to anime to movie pipeline.