Go on youtube, and all you can see is thousands upon thousands of videos with plenty of likes and support, decrying anime as misogynistic and sexist and whatnot. There is a lot of breadtube videos sharing their communist and feminist perspective on eastern media. An example is that mha video I posted before with 1.1 million views and 68k likes now. This is why anime should've never became popular in the west. Feminists genuinely need to fuck off. And there is also the popular sentiment feminists use when you bring up that anime made for women exists is that "female gaze" media doesnt objectify men and respects them as people and is about emotion and being well written, while "male gaze" media objectifies women (via camera angles or outifts), and is thus inherently misogynistic and toxic. Basically, male gaze = always bad and female gaze = inherently good and non objectifying. I saw a video where a feminist literally fucking said the anime free! (which features shot of boys abs constantly and is blatantly pandering to women) is just "using the male gaze on other men". Basically saying that sexualized camera angles and outfits on male character dont appeal to women, and overall camera angles and sexualized outfits on the other gender only appeals to men, but emotions and good writing is what the "female gaze" is (because I guess men are just sexist pigs and women are these enlightened beings, right?). Lmao at people saying that "japan is the most backwards and sexist nation", when americas top music videos and social media platforms have probably even more female sexualization, and also when africa and the fucking middle east exist lol.
And these people arent a small minority these videos and social media posts get a loy of likes and shares with shit tons of comments of people whining about muh soggy knees, this is what happens when anime becomes popular in the west.
I agree, but for slightly different reasons.
Animation in the West refused to break the "animation is for kids/family content only" mindset (despite the efforts of Fritz the Cat, Watership Down, Wizards, and Heavy Metal to change that), and so stayed relegated to little-kid content for the most part. So the Japs took over that part as Western animation stayed firmly in its television-era Saturday morning mindset. We COULD have had a better industry here.
And the reason for that mindset is historical; it really dates only to the television era, but the Hayes Code didn't help either. The earliest cartoons were clearly made with adults in mind. If the Hayes Code hadn't been a thing, racy Fleischer style cartoons could have existed alongside the more family-friendly Disney, and the landscape nowadays would be very different. Hell, I can only imagine how Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies would have looked if they didn't have the Code to reign them in (they had no oversight, and did what they thought was funny. Jack Warner didn't give a shit about cartoons, beyond that they made him money. If they didn't, there'd have been no animation department. Hell, he thought he owned Mickey Mouse, and didn't recognize Mel Blanc making fun of his voice via Sylvester.)
If the Code hadn't happened, there'd have been no NEED for Japanese cartoons to be a thing in the West, and no need for Western amimators to have to go live in filthy dog-eating Korea.
I don't know, even if the Code hadn't been created, major differences would have appeared between Eastern and Western animation. Western animators seem to equate adult animated content with taboo sexual hangups or dark psychological stories like the Maxx. Japan is more idealistic and focused on beauty and overall more diverse in genre.
That's where the effect of television comes in, along with the tendency to equate "adult" with "forbidden fruit". The Flintstones and The Jetsons were aimed at adults, but Code-style restrictions on broadcast television. All this kind of warped the North American attitude towards animation in general ... the same kind of way that live-action porno bans warped Asian animation, withthe hentai and loli and hypersexualization in general (whereas North American cartoon characters have mostly been ... not necessarily anatomically correct OR exaggerated (we know Daisy Duck is a lady by her clothes and the bow in her hair, and eyelashes. Japanese would put big ol' mammaries on that bird. ;) Yes, I'm aware of Clara Cluck, but she was a Mae West expy.)
Oh, movie recommendation of the week: Unicorn Wars (not to be confused with Unicorn: Warriors Eternal, which is also really good, because Tartakovsky) I don't know what it is about Italian movies, but the two other ones I saw were bonkers, and this is no exception.
That makes sense, particularly with ecchi shows like Tenjou Tenge. Ecchi content is fundamentally adolescent, unlike the grimdark envelope-pushing in American comics like Watchmen.
But also the 1980s with Transformers, Thunder Cats, Macross, Star Blazers etc was also a point of aligment when contemporary US cartoons were pretty similar to anime. The merchandising opportunities were there for kid's shows, but they just developed in different ways. From that point Japan flourished with stuff like Pokémon and America had shows like X-Men and Batman TAS that explored mature subject matter but never got anywhere near the proliferation or complexity of anime.
That might have to do with the nature and structure of television itself, or rather how that's different from Japan, with regard to seasons, and ratings, and how they determine whether or not a show is going to continue. Japan seems to allow their shows to actually go on and on and see a conclusion to its story; American television companies are very cancel-happy. The structure of seasons doesn't help, either, and I wish they'd do away with the concept completely. There's nothing worse than a show getting cancelled just as the story has just started to pick up.
Gargoyles certainly would have been better if it weren't for seasonality, I think.