It's easy to dismiss Hayao Miyazaki as a cranky old man, but even a cranky old man can be right. And when he claimed that one of the biggest problems in the anime industry is that it's staffed and run largely by otaku (his word), he's spot-on. But what he's talking about is only one part of a larger, more complex problem: the way fans and creators can become negative influences on each other.
The core of Miyazaki's premise is sound: the anime industry is staffed and run by people who are, by and large, bringing what I guess could be called otaku sensibilities to their work as its major motivator. One of Miyazaki's biggest and most on-target jabs involved character designs, where he said (I'm paraphrasing) how only a man who had never seen a girl in real life could draw girls that looked like that. Isn't the function of an artist, after all, to see things as they actually are and then transform them?
Yes, I know it's a debatable position — I suspect somewhere out there an abstract artist is laughing up his sleeve at that argument, for instance — but it is part of a larger core point. Miyazaki feels the anime industry is being run both by and for otaku, and I'm fairly sure he means to use the word in its most derogatory sense: people whose interest in anime is largely obsessive, fetishistic, closed-ended, a substitute for a good life instead of a component of it. And such closed-endedness, such self-serving behavior is no way to run a creative industry — yes, even one that's being conducted explicitly for profit as a business.
Two halves of a whole
An industry run by and for its fanbase is doomed to become that much less truly creative or innovative over time. There are parallels here beyond anime or even the new strain of an apparently geek-run Hollywood (don't kid yourselves, folks; it's people with money who run Hollywood; always have and always will). Consider the English-language literary world, where prize committees, showy language, flashy topics, and cross-blurbing between authors have eclipsed good reading tastes and thoughtful criticism. I get the impression many of the folks in such circles are playing to their own industry colleagues as aggressively as they're playing the audiences they claim to be courting — and that, in fact, the audiences and the colleagues are either the same exact people or self-selectedly so much of the same stripe that it hardly matters.
How things got this way is actually not that important, but I have my own speculations all the same. Some part of me wonders if the cutthroat nature of the anime industry is to blame. Its terrible working practices encourage something like a 90% turnover rate over the course of two years. Only the hardest-core fans would survive there; only the people who would want to be kings of such a hill would bother to stick around. I suspect that may be painting with too broad a brush (and one dipped in tar, to boot), but I do worry about how the anime industry builds in its own incentives to be a dead-end career.
The deeper problem is that an otaku-led industry and an otaku-dominated audience are two halves of the same whole. Each feeds the other; each creates a dependency on the other that either one alone couldn't.
Gaze not too far inwards
When I wrote about how anime as of late sees one of its biggest missions as identifying and catering to an increasingly narrow, self-selecting audience, it was clear to me then how this stood out in contrast with previous generations of audiences. Once upon a time, "anime fans" or "otaku" didn't self-identify the way they do now. There were just people, mostly young people, who watched cartoons. The diversity of approaches and titles was healthier because it was aimed at people who were "viewers" first and "fans" second.
Now there's barely a single show in a given season (and if there is, it's usually a Noitamina project) that hasn't been contrived as a direct and shameless appeal to the kinds of tastes that otaku, mainly the ones in Japan since they're the core audience, self-consciously cultivate. A show like Meganebu! would have had no market two decades ago, because the obsessional culture of otakudom to support such an insular show didn't exist then. And based on the show's dismal sales, maybe it's not marketable today either.
To some degree, all fandom is insular; that's part of why it's called fandom. But one of the perpetual risks of fandom is how it cuts one off from as much as it exposes one to. When one's energy for discovery and appreciation — or creation — is funneled into too small a receptacle, it turns sour. And when people who harbor such an attitude are put behind the wheel, we shouldn't be surprised when they augur into a tree.
Understand that I'm not saying all otakudom is a morass of navel-gazing fetishism. But it can sure feel like it, even to other people who want to call themselves fans of one kind or another. When untested against reality and the rest of life, including the rest of creative life, any fandom becomes introverted and sterile. And the more such insularity is unthinkingly supported on both sides, the less we'll see in this field of everything that was truly diverse and original about it in the first place.
