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Ekuljf's avatar

Western audience's general disinterest in the art of anime is because they are primarily interested in its otherness/ escapism. For various cultural reasons their own society's artistic output has been severely eroded in recent decades so they've just migrated to anime. Also artistic interest in general is in the doldrums in the West and that's only been getting worse. Even for the more committed ghibli or anime fan, I'm often surprised how superficial the interest is. It's a tiny minority of the Western anime fan, who delves deeper into their understanding of what they are actually consuming. The western reaction to Boy and the Heron is quite a good test, many Western anime fans had no idea what they had just watched, because in reality they are 'culturally' illiterate in key areas. Even some people who label themselves 'ghibli nerds' seemed confused. Which is astonishing to me because that film was such an obvious homage to so much art, ideas and anime and Ghibli history it just seemed impossible not to be obvious. There is still no wiki page for Hiroshi Ono.

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Joseph Barry's avatar

"Still, for many anime fans, real-life Tokyo must feel as exotic a destination as Macross City felt for me as a kid. And, come to think of it, most of the stuff I watched back then was set in thinly-veiled fictionalizations of real-life Tokyo, so maybe we’ve just come full circle."

Much to be said here. So much contemporary American discourse on public transit and city building are so often met with the likes of "look at how they do that over in Japan!" and as artists create fictionalized versions Tokyo based on their real experience, those fictional cities have fueled foreign perceptions about seeing Japan as this exotic future in a cyclical manner.

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