The other day I let slip to a friend that I was planning a review of a "classic" anime — my word — and he replied, "So what's the difference between a 'classic' and something that's just plain 'old'?" Stuck for a reply, I hazarded: "A fanbase?"
He had made a point, even if he hadn't intended to. How, and to what end, do we define something as a "classic" — especially when we're dealing with a medium that is only a couple of generations old in the form we have come to understand it?
"Classic" vs. just plain old
At first it seems like the wise thing to do to talk about "classic" anime is just constrict the time frame, as a nod to anime's relative newness. Don't talk about something released at least twenty years ago as the cutoff for whatever classifies as a "classic"; talk about something released at least ... oh, ten years ago. Problem solved. But I'm not convinced the problem is one of longevity alone. What's the real criterion for an anime classic aside from just age, or whatever marketing terminology the publisher uses on the spine or O-card?
It occurs to me that one of the complications that arises when talking about these issues is the simple fact of persistence. Things, as a whole, hang around a lot longer now than they used to in the cultural ecosystem. Digital publishing, for instance, all but guarantees that a manga title can remain available all but indefinitely — barring whatever license-window stipulations have been imposed on it (and I'm convinced over time those too will come to mean less and less). Persistency is taken far more for granted than it used to be; hence the frustration most of us are likely to feel when a title disappears from Crunchyroll or Netflix.
Out of that comes the need to develop a new criterion for what constitutes a classic, other than something that just gets resurrected every few years for a new printing. For an anime to remain fresh and provocative — especially given how quickly entertainments of any kind age and grow stale — it has to have something that allows it to reach across time to any number of new audiences. A lot of things from earlier generations and eras are not improved by being the product of an earlier age (although that can be fun); instead, they're constrained by it. Not every audience is willing to do the outreach needed to meet an older show half-way; who reading this is willing to make the time to watch something like Dororo, which isn't even in color? And so, more often than not, it falls to the work itself to do the heavy lifting, to declare itself as a classic anew to each arriving generation.
Two criteria and in between
There's no shortage of candidates for shows we can comfortably call classics at this point, even if we tighten up our standards. The hard part is figuring out why the label should be conferred on any one title at all.
Shows that gain classic status seem to have one of two qualities: spectacle, or sincerity. They either have some fierce, bold vision that hasn't been tempered by time and casts a long shadow all its own — or they inhabit their moment in time so completely and honestly, and tell a story that stands so well on its own, that they become timeless by proxy. Sometimes you get a rare hybrid of both: the Studio Ghibli films, for instance, have both spectacle and sincerity in volume, sometimes in the same production. Even when I'm not always convinced emotionally by some of their stories, I'm never in doubt about the storytelling and production being the kind of master-class work
AKIRA still speaks to us not just because it looks cool; it has something to say above and beyond that, one that dates very little, even if it is rooted in a deeply cynical reading of human nature. I think Gurren Lagann, for instance, is likely to survive its moment in time, and maybe Kill la Kill as well. The things that make them entertaining and outlandish aren't tied too closely to the circumstances of their creation or the fads of the moment, and they have both spectacle and sincerity of their own in different measures.
Other criterion also come to mind, but they tend to be edge cases. Some shows have classic status conferred upon them not just because they have stuck around for a long time, but because they elected to do something with that longevity. I give Naruto the nod not merely for its longevity and persistence, but for the way it parlayed that into something like a statement about both its main character and the audience that grew up along with him. The child is father to the man, and mother to the girl, in more ways than one with this show. One Piece, on the other hand, I don't get the same vibe from; the show doesn't so much evolve as just gain more moving parts as it goes along. The latter has spirit and spunk, but the former has soul to boot.
Sometimes timelessness is more a product of how slowly the rest of us move than anything else. I suspect ideas about gender roles will remain regressive enough that in another decade Princess Jellyfish and especially Wandering Son are still going to seem painfully funny and poignant (in that order). Part of me wishes they didn't have to, but we live in a world where social progress is not a given. Because of that, both shows end up being quite moving in markedly different ways, and for reasons that aren't likely to age poorly.
What about humor? This might be even tougher to suss out. What we used to laugh at once, we might not laugh at any longer; what was spontaneous may just seem shrill, or appallingly tasteless. I might still giggle at something like Golden Boy, if only because it and my own watching of it were products of a more innocent age. It's harder today to watch things that get their laughs out of sexism and leering (as opposed to mocking or kidding those things, which are not as easy to pull off as it sounds). FLCL, on the other hand, holds up tremendously well. Its maniac inventiveness, its raunchy allegory, and its sheer watchability haven't dated one bit since it first dropped onto our heads fifteen years ago. It still refreshes the parts other anime do not reach.
What are you looking for?
Then there are titles that are called classic because of the shadow they cast over everything that has come in their wake. Said shadow is not always a positive influence. Evangelion, the original, is my poster child for this problem. Its original burst of recognition came by way of how it upended certain conventions — although, in the long run, it seems only to have served to replace those conventions with other, even more ossified ones. I'm not sure how much of that is the show's fault, though (it's at least much due to the opportunism of all those who came in its wake as anything else), but I do wonder if the show's lasting impact is more due to that, or the compulsive maintenance of a tradition across generations of fandom, than because of an honest appraisal of the show's merits.
Here we have the hard part: telling the difference between something that has landmark status, whatever its merits as entertainment, and something that really does stand the test of time as storytelling, entertainment, popular art. The argument I don't want to make is that for something to pass the test of time, it has to radiate a saintly aura of timeless aspiration; it just has to work, and work on terms that we can still connect with to some degree. Evangelion may well fit that mold, apart from my own grousing about it — it's loaded with emotion and ambition, palpable even to those who've already seen one of that show's endless clones or descendents.
Those two attributes I've called out above — being dazzling, or being heartfelt — each have within them different ways of calling out to a viewer across time. It isn't the animation style or even the mecha designs that draws one generation after another back into the original Gundam or Macross; it's the way those sprawling stories are told, and the characters used to tell them. The CGI of a show like Macross Plus is dated by today's standards, but it serves the show's functions, and it complements the story it's swaddled in.
Whenever talk begins of what constitutes a classic, most everyone, critic and not, starts with their own votes, their own outlook, their own feelings. They bring all the old stuff off the shelf, blow the dust off it, make an argument for it from their point of view. But outside of arguing from their own tastes (and if a lot of people all really, really like something, maybe there's more there than a herd mentality), they're talking about what dazzled them. When they're not talking about what dazzled them, they're talking about what moved them. Sometimes they talk about both at once. You can't go wrong with either of those attributes, and if we're to have a living conversation about what anime we cherish and why, those two things seem like the best place to start.
