True facts: the great success of animation
Animation films are now among the biggest box office successes but it has not always been so. Let’s get back over the triumph of Japanese animation cinema!
Animation has always been popular in Japan but, like for Disney movies, mainly with well-known family works such as Doraemon, Anpanman, or Case Closed. This kind of anime usually has quite a good audience. Yet, and despite the many productions released every year, few of them reach the widest audience.
Akira in 1988 became the first popular animation big success, firstly in Japan, but especially abroad where the film boomed.
A few years later, Hayao MIYAZAKI was the first director meeting such a huge worldwide success, thanks to Princess Mononoke in 1997, after a 35 years’ career in the industry. Through repeated successes, he achieved to convey aura and prestige to animation cinema, something that had always been denied by Japanese cinema elites.
It allowed many works to see the light of day. Targeting a mass audience or watching animation films stopped being associated with the image of the “otaku”. The many awards won at cinema ceremonies abroad confirm this trend. The 3D computer-animated film Stand by Me Doraemon will be a box office success too in 2014.
Lately, the huge success of YOUR NAME. by Makoto SHINKAI restored the public’s interest for this type of productions, since Hayao MIYAZAKI had retired in 2013 after The Wind Rises.
Japanese animation is 100 years old: come celebrate with us!
No comment