After being lured into anime fandom through hard-edged science fiction and edge-of-your-seat action-fests I’ve always wondered how exactly I started to gravitate towards the whimsical drama and slice-of-life drama; my DVD collection and watch lists have taken on a split personality of sorts with the gritty thrillers and cyberpunk on one hand and mellow realistic fiction on the other. A sub-genre of sorts (we anime fans seem to love our categorising, preferably using as many loan-words as possible) to the lighter and softer side is that of iyashikei, which has taken on greater importance for me as time goes on. The strange thing is that it’s all too often overlooked by fans, hence my raving about it here.

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Looking at animated films being released today, many big-budget titles use the quality of their computer graphics as a big selling point in a similar way that live-action blockbusters do when boasting about the quality of their ‘special FX’ and stunts; it’s so commonplace now that it hardly feels worth mentioning any more. Looking at the likes of Final Fantasy: Advent Children, Appleseed and Karas, it’s easy to wax lyrical about how they’re pushing the envelope in terms of technology but it makes me wonder how much better this wizardry can get – for all its shortcomings, Advent Children looks spectacular to the point at which it’s photorealistic. Things will continue to improve no doubt, but if visual shininess were to be measured somehow the evolutionary curve may be levelling off pretty soon.

If the coolest-looking stuff won’t look markedly better, where can studios go from there? As well as making the best look even more cutting-edge, CG is beginning to make more modest productions such as made-for-TV shows cheaper and easier to produce. I’m sure that it’s technology that has made the sheer number of new series increase in recent years – desktop PCs and graphical software have become so integral in studios’ inventories that it’s now hard to imagine how they could manage without them.

I won’t delve into the relative merits of CG over traditional cel animation in terms of what looks nicer from the audience’s point of view – even recently, we’ve all seen CG that looks great and hand-drawn stuff that looks downright awful! It’s fair to say though that graphical and animation computer technology is here to stay and will continue to play an important part in how animated film makes it to our screens.

A rather odd (and quite saddening) trend I’ve noticed, which coincidentally recently turned up in a great post over at Hop, Step, Jump!, is how there are countless new TV series these days but relatively few anime feature films and even fewer OAVs. Jeff’s observations echoed my own thoughts and offered some real food for thought – the likes of Bubblegum Crisis, Riding Bean and Gunbuster were defining moments in anime in the late 80s and early 90s…yet the only well-known OAVs of the past few years that I can name offhand are Gunbuster 2 and Macross Zero. Even then the former is a sequel and the latter is part of a bigger franchise – common features that modern OAVs have these days. Some are retellings, some are alternate endings but very few are ‘stand-alone’ works in their own right, which is a shame when they are free from the constraints of scheduling and budgets that affect TV shows.

Feature films are always going to be in a minority because their production is so expensive and time consuming but as long as there are the likes of Satoshi Kon and Makoto Shinkai I feel that the cinematic anime movie is in safe hands. In these days of importing, widespread DVD sales, internet downloading and increased awareness of anime internationally, surely there’s just as much a place for the straight-to-video movies and series as there always was? Jeff’s post and the comments from various readers that follow however offer some sobering explanations as to why the OAV format is no longer popular or even financially appealing; that said the technical advances, in my opinion at least, could actually be an advantage in keeping the format alive.

My wild stab in the dark is this: with the (theoretical) means to create a worthwhile feature film or short series being able to sit on one animator’s desk what’s to stop smaller, independent studios or even individuals using the CG technology born from the bigger studios’ endeavours to make their own more modest ones? After seeing what Makoto Shinkai did with Voices of a Distant Star and Yasuhiro Yoshiura with Pale Cocoon, I realised that you don’t need armies of programmers and painters in a large studio to make a good movie. Granted, some of the technology is still out of the range of Joe and Jane Average – programs such as Lightwave still require top-of-the-range hardware and a well-stocked wallet, retailing at nearly $US1000 for the program alone – but computer animation software provides much of what you need apart from the obvious factors of time, skills and inspiration.

Then there’s the problem of promotion to consider: the OAV and movie formats are riskier than the made-for-TV but these days we have the power of the ‘net to spread the word on the latest releases. Online press releases and streamed trailers are already in use but what about sidestepping the packaged media entirely and selling downloads? There are issues here of course that would need an editorial of their own to discuss more fully but selling new film in an online download format could be a viable option, especially when there’s no backing from a big corporation in terms of distribution.

As far as the debut efforts of Shinkai and Yoshiura are concerned, two swallows don’t make a summer; I’m not expecting an indie anime movie explosion and new ‘golden age’ of the OAV! Nevertheless, the technology to make and promote animated films without so much as touching a pot of paint and a film cel exists and continues to improve – it’s not impossible to imagine self-contained feature films that can become popular amongst DVD buyers and the online community without ever being broadcast in a TV slot, or even make their debut in a cinema. The ability to tell a great story through film is still a rare and precious talent but for that minority of gifted individuals, could it be that the means to ‘go it alone’ and make their own films is more readily available than ever before?