One of the disheartening little discoveries that self-described proponents of anime encounter if they play the game for long enough is how the shows they think of as "classic" begin to seem just plain old to younger audiences. Out of that comes a tough question for anyone involved in the critical celebration of popular culture: How do you make a case for something whose look is out of vogue, or where the story itself is an artifact of an earlier age? And when you're dealing with a mainly visual medium, which of those two is the tougher sell?
We are, after all, talking about a medium where the vast majority of the appeal is in the visuals, and where a sizable (and, perhaps, growing) portion of the audience is made of casual viewers. If something looks classic to us, it just looks old to them, and that's typically where the conversation stops. Worse, asking them to ignore the way it looks often only calls all the more attention to the look of the thing; it's like telling someone not to think about a white elephant. Is there a way to stump for something that's outside of its moment in time to people who only think about the here and now?
I don't know much about anime, but I know what I like
The first thing worth grappling with is the expectations raised by that line of thinking. People with an investment in anime as a critical thing — as something to grapple with, think about, take apart, and put back together — are reaching out to a self-selecting segment of an audience that's already strongly self-selecting. The ones who respond to critical discussion of anime with more critical discussion of their own are rare.
Then there are all the others, the ones who aren't themselves critics, but who hear you out for the sake of getting a sense of what's worth seeing, most often just want a simple answer to a simple question: Is this show/movie/book worth my time? Questions about the historical value of something, or thoughts about how to see past its surface and into its depths, aren't typically part of the discussion for them. They may listen politely to such things, but it isn't why they bought a ticket and came into the auditorium, and it won't be what brings them back in, either?
Such thinking isn't confined to anime. Most people who say they "like movies" don't think of themselves as movie buffs, and so it shouldn't come as a great surprise when people self-applying the I-like-movies label aren't interested in movies made before they were born (or before they were teens), or movies not in color, or movies not in English. They watch what looks good, right now. Likewise with music fans: most of them are not going to listen to a given band just because it was "an influence" on one they happen to like now. They listen to what sounds good. There's no malice aforethought here, and it's unwise to interpret it as a sign of the End Times. It's just the rules of the game, and the only way to win at such a game is by way of a little legal cheating.
Start with the story
The best way to approach such a mindset within anime fandom, I've found, is not to talk about history, art styles, or any of that stuff at all unless someone specifically asks for it. Instead, talk about the story, because at the bottom of it all the story is what we respond most to even if we don't realize it. The acts of storytelling and story-comprehending may well be direct reflections of the mechanisms employed by the brain to make sense of the world and provide us with a survival strategy. When a good story hits us, it hits us deep.
Some of this came back to me as I was reviewing Noir and Cowboy Bebop, both of which are just old enough to be on the outer cusp of the current generation of fandom. There are people today who have been anime fans for a solid decade without having ever encountered either of these properties, and in both cases the strongest sell I could make for either one would be the story. Neither one has an art style that has dated all the much; in Noir's case, the one thing that seems to date the show the most is its pacing, an artifact of a time when you were more or less guaranteed 26 episodes to get things done.
But what if you want to stump for something of entirely historical value, like the black-and-white Dororo TV series, or the pre-Ghibli Miyazaki features? There, the imagery is about as welcoming to most modern audiences as a brick wall across a driveway. I ran into this myself back when Vertical, Inc. was reissuing the first wave of Osamu Tezuka's manga in English, and ran into terrible resistance from readers — even well-educated, curious, unprejudiced ones — who just couldn't get past his "cartoony" art style. They sure liked his stories, but the imagery short-circuited their ability to truly get behind them.
Maybe time is on our side
A few things give me hope that this mindset is not something that can last forever. For one, I can't help but wonder how today's art styles and image tropes — stilted-looking digital modeling, cheesy overused lens flares — are going to look in another twenty years. The art of yesteryear, whatever its stylistic peculiarities (line weights, shapes of eyes, etc.) had the benefit of being that much more the product of human hands. Digital production isn't a sin, but it shows off all too clearly the ways corners can be cut to hustle something through the pipeline. Hand drawings may age, but digital effects age with all the more appalling speed and permanence.
The other thing that gives me hope is the way less and less material is being lost for keeps — how we are moving to a culture where nothing ever really goes out of print. I have certain misgivings about that arrangement, but one of its unexpected by-products might be having everything "old" look new again, by dint of perpetual preservation. That gives everything — and I mean everything -- all the more of a chance to find a sincere, appreciative audience that it might not have had before, and remove the need to make a case for it in the face of indifference or trends of the moment. Maybe the best long-term solution to this problem, then, is the same thing that created it: time itself.
