I have never watched a Digibo video before and I found this struggle to sit through. I thought that as a known anime Youtuber Digibro would be crafting an argument, something substantive which would merit a thoughtful response. This is not the case. It would be generous to claim that Digibro is making an argument in this video. An argument has structure, it has premises supported by evidence which lead to conclusions. Digibro presents a wildly free-wheeling rant about everything under the sun: his own personal bugbears, the 80’s Japanese bubble economy, musings about his morality, his business advice for anime studios, D-tube and ways to monetize his K-On! Youtube videos – the list goes on. It’s a very messy video. He brings up certain topics (Devilman Crybaby, Youtube’s problems, CG crowds) drops them and then picks them up again later, seemingly without any thought of drawing the arguments together into once place. I’m not even sure what his conclusion is, as there are so many ‘potential’ conclusions one can draw from this video depending on your own preconceived opinions. In short, I think this is a pretty bad video and I feel the need to say my piece about it.



I don’t intend to address all or even most of the points he raises because he doesn’t put enough effort into the majority of comments to actually warrant a response. However, I think it is worth addressing some of his larger claims because they mirror arguments that have been floating around online for years and so I feel like replying to them. They fall into the following broad categories: “The Business of Anime” and “Anime Old vs New”.





Avoid talking from a place of ignorance



Digibro repeatedly offers advice and tips about how to make the anime business ‘better’. This wouldn’t be a problem if Digibro understood the anime industry – but he appears unfamiliar with the way the business operates. As such his comments come off as naïve at best and insulting at worst. If he spent some time doing the research to under the business models used by companies in the industry, he might be in a better place to offer feedback on it. Specifically, Digibro errs about the entire nature of the industry and the reasons why anime is produced in the first place.



Anime is a business



Consider the following comment by Digibro:



“There's no fucking reason to get into anime for the money. If you treat anime like a business, you are missing the fucking point, because yes, you can turn a profitable show every once in a while…”



Here, Digibro is specifically talking about artists and animators working inside anime studios, but it seems to suggest an ignorance about the wider industry. Anime is a business enterprise. It always has been. It is not (generally) a space wherein artists create art for art’s sake. Yes, there are plenty of people within the business creating artistic works and looking to tell interesting stories, but those people exist within a specific economic reality (e.g. earning enough money to keep the lights on). That Digibro appears to reject or ignore this fact seems to be one reason why he holds so many other confusing views.



Why anime is produced



Digibro appears to both be annoyed and mistaken about why and how anime gets made. There are numerous comments he makes throughout the video that illustrates this. Here’s one example:



“I view Devilman Crybaby as symbolic. Masaaki Yuasa teamed up with Netflix, because he realized that it was not in his best interest to market his show to a niche audience of Japanese anime fans nor even to the broad general public of Japan. He knew that the best way to market this show was internationally, because it was a product and he geared the product towards that audience”



None of this is correct. I’m not sure how Digibro reaches this conclusion, apart from the fact that it neatly slots into place with a thesis that he’s trying to weave (namely, that anime should try and strive for broader appeal). Masaki Yuasa did not choose to ‘team up’ with Netflix to create the series, instead, Aniplex approached him with the idea of the project. Aniplex and Dynamic Production are the companies that created the series and organised a deal with Netflix to release it. Moreover, I can’t find any comments from Yuasa that suggest he was aware of/targeting an international audience, so Digibro is just pulling this from thin air.



There’s one particular tangent that Digibro dives down that really highlights both ignorance of the subject and his naivety about business:



“(A)What I don't get is it wouldn't even be hard, to like, change the nature of what people are producing. (B ) If a producer walks up to an anime studio holding a light novel, there should be someone there to slap it out of their hands, and then slap them in the face, (C) and tell them to get that fuck shit out of here…(D)Like, why do you have to make anime for anime fans?.... (E) Why don't you get on the internet go on pixiv and find some artist who does all their stuff in like this really specific aesthetic that's really popular…match that up with a screenwriter whose proven themselves with some cult hits and make something low-key with it.”



There’s so much here that I am struggling to breathe. Let me try and go through this chronologically, I have added some references in the above (A,B,C,D,E) quote to help make it easier to digest:



A) The idea that the specific process by which a piece of entertainment is produced in a well-established industry could just be casually changed and that it wouldn’t even be ‘hard’ seems to be, on its face, ridiculous. I don’t really know how live action TV shows are changed, but I wouldn’t presume to imagine that it could be ‘easily’ changed. That Digibro can so casually toss out this comment speaks to an almost child-like understanding of the world.





B) The idea that producers should stop adapting known properties (LN, manga, whatever) is complete madness. The vast majority of anime that’s made today, and has ever been made, is adaptations. This is because anime is produced by “production committees” – groups of companies who are looking to sell some product. In the case of adaptations, they are looking to sell the original source material – a work with a proven track record and built in fanbase. Beyond this, there is the aim of selling merchandise and hopefully some BD’s/DVD’s as well.





C) The idea that any anime studio would turn down work (assuming their schedule isn’t full) is ludicrous. If anime studios aren’t producing anime all the time they risk being closed, so of course they’ll try and work on anything they can get their hands on to stay afloat. Now this DOES cause real problems, such as the glut of anime on the market today, but Digibro fails to understand the root cause of this issue and certainly fails to offer any solution to the issue. If smart people in Japan had a solution to this issue I imagine we’d have seen it by and it feels like we’re not likely to see this trend correct itself until a bunch of studios collapse.





D) Anime will always be produced for anime fans because, well, they make up the core audience. To imagine that studios will stop catering to this audience anytime soon is crazy. Now, Digibro isn’t wrong when he suggests elsewhere in this video that there the companies producing anime should be looking to expand their audience beyond Japan, but I think its pretty clear that they’re already in the process of doing this in various different ways and different business models are being explored and have been for many years.



Gonzo is perhaps the most infamous example of a studio trying to cater to a Western audience, and in the boom years of the early 2000’s (pre financial crisis) they kept setting their stories in Western locations with various degrees of success. Hayo Miyazaki, through taste or preference, always generally created works that didn’t appear overtly ‘anime’. Production IG are keen to appeal to the West, as we can see from the FLCL revival. Numerous Production Committees have had foreign streaming services such as Crunchyroll sit on them. So it’s not like companies in Japan aren’t aware of this broader market but they are still very focused on their core market. Streaming, despite it’s popularity, is not going to make them as much money as selling things like merchandise and film tickets to their core audience.



E) Digibro’s ‘advice’ is not very realistic, for numerous reasons. Digibro appears to be under the impression that anime studios are entirely in control of the works they create. Unfortunately, this is not always the case. What often happens is that a Production Committee will ‘hire’ a studio to work on a project – that studio didn’t come up with the idea behind the show, nor do they own it. Their contracted to work on it, and if they’re lucky and it does well they may receive some share of the profits.



A few studios are big enough to sit on Production Committees and chose what they want to work on, but that’s not always the case. Even the one’s that can chose what they’re creating, such as KyoAni, produced adaptations. This is because makes more sense to work on an established work rather than an original.



Leaving aside the exact mechanics of it (a process more complex than looking on Pixiv) creating original works is very risky. There’s no ‘original material’ to promote, and therefore they really do have to sell BD/DVD’s and merch etc to be a success. Moreover, there’s no guarantee people will care for your characters/story because they are completely untested in the market. It could be a big flop, and if you’re an anime studio that’s sitting on a Production Committee you’ve put your own money up front to pay for the series. That’s a serious commitment to make.



Digibro makes a few other comments about anime production but I really can’t say on this topic any longer because it’s giving me a headache, so I’m going to move swiftly onto his other area of criticism: old vs new.



Anime was better back in the day



I am incredibly tempted to summarise Digibro’s position on the subject of old and new anime as “Shit was better back in the 80’s when they made real anime” because that’s basically exactly what he says.



“Check this out! So, a few months ago, I made a list of like every single film that came out in the 70s and 80s as well as every single 80s OVA, since OVAs only came into existence in 1984. What I have found is that the 80s was in fact the greatest decade in anime history.”



However, there’s nothing interesting about this opinion because I stumble across this nostalgia-tinted viewpoint every other week. It would barely be worth even talking about if Digibro didn’t make several somewhat ridiculous comments in support of this position. Let’s look at a few of them!



Passion and craft



One theme running throughout this video (I won’t say it rises to the level of an argument because it’s only touched on sporadically) is that of the ‘passion’. To summarise, back in the day, passionate creators would work hard to create well crafted works of art. By contrast, modern day creators are just looking to knock out as much crap as possible for a quick buck. To quote Digibro himself:



“I remember the good ole’ days. ‘Cause, when you look at those old movies, you can tell that these things were made out of passion.”



“Not really caring about the level of quality, mostly concerned with filling their lives with as much crap as possible. In that industry crafted work does not thrive. OVAs that aren't tied into an existing franchise are dead. Anime films are struggling to hold on after they lowered the bar for themselves considerably at the end of the 2000s.”



Firstly, I find it hard to stomach the notion that those currently involved with the current anime industry don’t have passion for their work. It’s not only incredibly insulting to everyone currently working in anime, but it’s clearly wrong judging by the amount of great work that gets produced every single year. I particularly like Digibro’s comment about anime films getting worse at the end of the 2000’s. Not only is this difficult/impossible to quantify, but Digibro doesn’t even try to do it.



Secondly, it’s clear that quality works do thrive. It’s hard to go the list of best selling and most popular works without seeing well made works. They might not all be classics, but to use Digibro’s words, there’s clearly passion involved. Consider works like Kizumonogatari (which Digibro does, but he writes it off as an anomaly), One Punch Man, Your Name, In this Corner of the World, JoJo’s, Mob Pyscho 100 and others. Yes, sometimes a very well-made show won’t be financially successful, but the same is true in every single entertainment industry. Anime is no different.



Art and the Bubble Economy



Digibro notes that that craziness of the Bubble economy in Japan allowed for Japanese creators to produce radical works of artistic merit such as Mamoru Oshii’s Angel’s Egg. He seems to understand this period of artistic freedom was an anomalous and came to an end but he still seems to hold it against modern works that they aren’t as radical as Bubble-era stuff. Weird.



Production Quality



Digibro makes some dubious claims about the quality of anime production in the 80’s, which essentially imply that it’s a high-watermark for the entire industry. This is a very popular line of reasoning from people who like to argue that all anime looks bad now compared to how it was ‘back in the day’. Here’s Digibro’s own words:



“However, after that bubble economy crashed in the early 90s, a lot of that money went goodbye. You compare the average 80s OVA with the average 90s OVA, you're going to see a noticeable dip in quality.”



Firstly, to make this claim he compares Dominion Tank Police and T.T.S Airbats, two works which have pretty similar production quality. Secondly, he produces no further evidence to support or his claim, nor does he even produce a framework by which works could be judged. In reality, there’s plenty of 80’s OVA’s that look awful and a number of 90’s OVA’s that look great. I’m not sure why Digibro makes so many completely unsupported statements like this throughout the video but it’s fairly frustrating because he seems to imply he has authority and understanding over a subject that he’s actually ignorant about.



If you ditch the lens of OVA’s and instead examine television series overtime, you’d observe a trend that Digibro seems unable or unwilling to see: that TV anime often looks great. Production quality, despite the many problems in the industry, is still more impressive now than it was in the 80’s. There are shows being made today which would have been impossible 20 or 30 years ago. I’m thinking of things like Hyouka, Denno Coil, One Punch Man, Mob Psycho 100, Nichijou, Space Dandy, both FMA’s, Tatami Galaxy etc.



Of course, what I’m doing above is cherry picking some examples to prove my point. This is exactly what Digibro does when he goes on about Ghost in the Shell and Akira. The reality of the matter is that, once you go beyond the ‘best of the best’, most anime isn’t that great. This true regardless of the decade that you’re in. The 80’s doesn’t proportionally have a higher degree of great anime than other decades. The only thing it does have is an abnormally large number of people cherry picking specific works from within it to try and make nostalgia-fueled argument.



I’m concluding, which is to say, I’m running out of energy



In his 26-minute-long tirade, through accident or insight (largely accident, I feel), Digibro makes a couple of comments about the state of anime which are not entirely inaccurate. But such moments are few and far between compared to the sea of incorrect or misguided comments that Digibro makes. Ultimately I would not recommend watching this particular videos and I hope that, in the future, he will do a little more research before trying to talk about a topic.