by Ryan Mathews

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December 2000

Experts point to an alleged decline in the quality of new anime as evidence of anime's death throes. We've already seen OAVs dwindle down to small numbers as the market for them evaporated. A brief boom in television series replaced them, to be replaced themselves by "half-series" of 13 episodes as the full 26 began to seem like too much of a financial gamble. Now observers in Japan speak of a flood of derivative, poorly written and animated anime hitting the airwaves, as if the only anime that can find funding is anime that is cheap to produce and takes no risks.

I'd like to know what anime they're talking about, and how bad it truly is. Is it anime that would be universally regarded as crappy, or only by those "experts" who have particular tastes? I wonder if this anime is anything like Lost Universe. Let me be blunt: by any objective measure, Lost Universe sucks. The animation is sub-standard, the character designs are crude (and change several times in one episode), the heroes spend most of the time yelling at each other, and the villains are unoriginal.

So why am I enjoying it so much?

Lost Universe is truly the guiltiest of my guilty pleasures. I'm really having fun watching the show, even with its numerous flaws. It's funny. It's funny enough that I don't care when the camera pulls in tight on a cel, rendering every speck of dust in crystal clarity, or when the animators seem to forget how to draw Cain and Millie's faces. I'm even watching the ADV dub, which renders all the yelling and screaming in screechy English. I think I spend about as much time laughing at the show as I do laughing with it, but the point is I am laughing, and I'm going to keep buying the series.

I don't know if I could enjoy an entire slate of series like Lost Universe, but the fact that I do enjoy it gives me hope that, should anime truly fall into the toilet, I could still find one or two series I'd love in spite of their flaws.

And quite frankly, I have trouble believing that anime is ever truly going to get that bad. Right now, I'm in the middle of watching some of the best anime I've ever seen, titles like Cowboy Bebop, Trigun, Photon, and Outlaw Star. Of course, there's usually a delay between the release of anime in Japan and the time it makes it over here, so what we're buying tends to be anywhere from one to four years old. Still, I find it hard to believe that anime could fall from Cowboy Bebop to Lost Universe in just a few years. I have to believe that good anime will continue to be produced, despite the market's troubles. Perhaps not as much of it, but then how much do we truly need to keep the market healthy on this side of the Pacific? Only a small percentage of all the anime produced makes the trip across the ocean to begin with.

So keep the faith, anime fans. There will always be something to spend your money on.

How about some web picks?