The Anime Boom Proves Disney Made a Huge Mistake

When I first started getting into anime in my early teens, it was virtually impossible to find in the mainstream. I belonged to anime clubs that worked for years to get stores to carry anime media and for broadcasters to take it seriously.

Today, streaming services like Netflix say half of their subscribers watch anime, and this unique Japanese export has become a mainstream phenomenon. Which, to me, clearly indicates that Disney made a huge mistake in abandoning their traditional animation.

The studio that forgot its roots

Disney built its empire through 2D animation. He advanced the art and got the world to take the medium seriously with his feature films. Ironically, the Japanese animation industry took inspiration from Disney’s work. Early anime pioneers such as Osamu Tezuka (from Astro Boy fame) cited Disney’s animated works as inspiration for what we know today as anime.

Disney has also always pushed technical boundaries, with early forms of rotoscoping being a key innovation. Then Disney failed in its attempt to focus on live-action content in addition to animation, although still aimed at families and children. No, not his current obsession with live-action films, but before films like Alladin And The Lion King. Yes, this 90s golden age for Disney was actually a recovery after an ill-fated attempt to move away from Disney’s strong sequel. However, it didn’t work out financially and so Disney had to return to animation.

Unfortunately, that didn’t last very long and today every Disney movie is an entirely CG film or a live-action remake of an animated classic that no one asked for. The fact is, although these films are often criticized, they have generally been a huge financial success. That makes this situation somewhat different from that first failed attempt at becoming a live-action company before the 90s and the big Disney revival.

Anime filled the space left by Disney

I don’t know the exact business reasons discussed behind the shutdown that led to the end of 2D animation at the company, but I imagine it was partly due to how labor-intensive 2D animation is compared to CG or live-action production. I also feel like in the US at least, 2D animation is often seen as old fashioned or obsolete. Which might be the same thought process that gave us all these terrible live-action anime adaptations.

The problem is that when it comes to a particular medium, the notion of “obsolete” doesn’t really apply. Newer musical genres do not replace older ones, for example. It’s just more or less popular over time. So it’s completely legitimate to say that 2D animation is not that popular anymore, and therefore, as there is less demand for the product, you are going to reduce or eliminate it.

The thing is, given the explosion in anime’s popularity in the West, it wasn’t the 2D animation itself that people were perhaps tired of. Clearly, audiences are hungry for interesting stories, and 2D animation as a medium allows you to tell certain stories in a way that no other format can copy.

Disney’s miscalculation

THE Demon Slayer: Mugen Train The film has grossed over half a billion dollars as of this writing, surpassing the major big-budget comic book films it shared theaters with. Sure, it’s not the billion-dollar gross that some of these live-action Disney films have generated, but it’s not what you’d expect from a world that seems to have moved beyond traditional animation.

What makes this calculation even more wrong is that Train Mugen was made on a budget of $15.7 million. The fact is that the same computer technologies that brought us CG animation and CG in live-action films have made it easier and faster to produce something that looks like traditional animation. You can make something look entirely like old-school hand-drawn 2D animation or a hybrid of mediums. Think about Into the Spiderverse as an obvious example.

Anime, and increasingly its Chinese and Korean counterparts, tend to tell a wider range of stories. Animation is treated as a medium and not a genre. So you’ll have everything from kids’ shows to mature stories for adults. This is an area that Disney hasn’t ventured into much, and it might actually be part of the key to bringing the former king of the medium’s American animation back into the game. After all, they released Who framed Roger Rabbit? under its Touchstone Pictures brand.

The future of animation belongs to the dreamers again

The good news is that it seems Disney realizes that losing its institutional knowledge of 2D animation may not have been the best idea. In an interview (via the Hindustan Times), Disney animation director Jared Bush indicated that Disney wanted diversity in content and had a 2D animation team again.

Does this mean we’ll see more 2D animation work at the level of The Lion King again, it’s anyone’s guess, but I still want to hope that Disney returns to bringing us some of the best 2D animated features in history.