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This Week in Anime
Anime Ads and Commercials
by Steve Jones & Lucas DeRuyter,
From classic Toonami ads to the Catholic Church, Lucas and Steve take a look at the relationship between anime and ments over the years.
Disclaimer:The views and opinions expressed by the participants in this chatlog are not the views of Anime News Network. Spoiler Warning for discussion of the series ahead.
Lucas
Hey, Steve! We're functionally doing free promotion for anime IPs by doing this column and talking about them. What would you say if we got meta this week and talked about advertising in and around the anime medium?
Lord knows there are plenty of weird promotions, marketing deals, and ethical grey areas to talk about!
Steve
Why not? As a country, last week we celebrated the biggest conglomeration of grey areas of the year. The Super Bowl isn't merely about my beautiful birds winning or the hammering of a whole new set of nails in Drake's coffin. It's the grand spectacle of capitalism laid bare, one-million-dollar ment at a time. And somehow, that makes talking about a bunch of goofy anime commercials seem much more palatable to me.
First and foremost, GO BIRDS!
Go birds!
Second, I also thought the Super Bowl ads were pretty disappointing this year, with only a handful sticking out in my mind for positive reasons. While the Super Bowl has lost the ad juice, there's plenty to marvel at in and around the anime space!
I guess that's the unnerving thing to think about. There may be a cabal of anime nerds running these advertising firms (and hey, AMC, that idea's a freebie if you want to make a sequel to Mad Men), but I suspect the truth is more mundane. The simple fact is that anime and manga are popular in the West now. We're a chunky enough demographic to be pandered to. We possess the money that American corporations want. That should frighten us.
Moreover, I can when I was alive when this would have been unthinkable. It wasn't that long ago.
I know the goalposts keep getting moved on when anime has officially become "mainstream," but surely anime fans having enough money that major corporations taking notice of us is a pretty good reason to put that discourse to bed, right? As for the quality of those ads:
Looking at ads that ran in America, it runs the gamut. Do you those Ford ads that dubbed over Sailor Moon, a la the "abridged" series phenomenon from early 2010s YouTube? These were—and are—deeply strange.
Sure, the "Fusion" joke writes itself, but otherwise I have no idea what the genesis of this would have been.
Oh my god, dude, I still can't believe they left Mr. Popo in the Ford Fusion commercial unedited! A couple of runs of the anime didn't even let that happen!
It's wild. Although to be fair, you can't find these on any official Ford channel anymore (at least none I could find). That brings me to a tangent that I only just realized during my weekly TWIA research: commercials disappear. There's no incentive for corporations to preserve them after an advertising campaign is finished, and I found a ton of dead and/or privated links while looking for the ones I could . Practically everything I found, I only found thanks to unofficial res.
That, unfortunately, makes sense. I imagine the licensing agreements on these crossover promotions are incredibly specific and only cover a short time. Once the contract is up, neither party technically owns all of the ads anymore. This means that neither party can host them, and neither side is super motivated to go after third parties ing recordings to the internet. In my research, I found a whole little sub-culture of folks ing Toonami bumpers to different parts of the internet; which I imagine are also made unofficial for similar circumstances. Considering how important the tone, style, and format these ads were for the US proliferation of anime in the late 90s and early 2000s, it's cool to see people doing this preservationist work!
It's super important! You can argue the artistic value of an ment, but regardless, these are pieces of art that real people worked on. There's always going to be merit in preserving them for future consideration, whether that ends up being appreciation or denigration.
Agreed! Though, not all of these ads are created equal.
Steve, this is where I reveal to you and our readers that I get unreasonably angry every time I see this "Hulu Animayhem" ment at an anime convention. If I look at this graphic for more than five seconds I'm immediately infuriated by how obvious it is that Hulu's Disney overlords either don't know or don't care about, promoting the shockingly robust anime catalog they've compiled.
Graphic design is clearly their ion. That's a potent irony in this particular discussion: big corporations think anime can be used to sell their own products, but they don't put nearly as much effort into promoting anime itself to a general audience. Or even to the specific audience of anime fans. I rely on friends and ANN to tell me what anime are airing where and when each season.
Why are Naruto Shippūden and DBZ: Kai front and center in this ad when both ended years ago? And sure, Hulu's doing a little bit of new exclusive promotion here by feature Bleach: TYBW and Macross series! It's bad business to go wide with a product before you have your core audience figured out, and this half-baked ment to get casual anime fans to sub to Hulu irks me on so many levels.
I can also when Crunchyroll's social media presence was fun and informative. It would consistently all of its pickups, not just the big ones, and its posts had a more personal touch. That spirit seems to have been excised as the company has grown larger and more corporatized.
On a related note, Twitter was the wild west for a while once corporations figured out they could get a lot of traction if their social media presence was more "casual" and/or targeted at niche demographics, such as anime fans. I'm thinking of that period when every Arby's tweet that crossed my feed looked like this:
Some of the best ads are the result of the little guys in a given space swinging for the fences! I have too much self-respect to eat at Arby's but appreciate that someone there loves Hunter X Hunter enough to shout out a fight that will now probably never happen.
Also, speaking of Crunchyroll and Twitter, I can't believe we forgot to shout out the single greatest ment in all of anime in our Valentine's Day discussion last week!
Never forget o7.
At the time, I distinctly rolling my eyes at Arby's stuff, but now, it's quaint to think of a period when that was the most annoying thing about Twitter. I yearn for those innocent days of people photoshopping Nature Valley granola bars onto anime girls. We didn't know how good we had it.
Speaking of photoshop, do you that meme of anime girls holding up positive pregnancy tests? It's a girl! Or is it a boy...? Either way, pregnancy brings out a wide range of emotions in parents-to-be. Some people get excited, while others are...
Unfortunately, yes.
I was introduced to those edits under the pretense that they were a promotional campaign by the Japanese government to fight against population decline. I thinking it was probably bogus at the time, but now realize that the rumor was playing into some problematic "weird Japan" stereotypes.
The reality is that the anime ment game in Japan completely eclipses ours. That shouldn't be surprising, since they've been at it for much longer, and it's a lot easier for them to tap into the pool of industry talent. Blood Blockade Battlefront career, for instance, has been mostly advertorial work. Of course, I wish she could direct another series, but she doesn't phone anything in here.
She also did this wonderful BUMP OF CHICKEN. If any ads count as art, these have to be among them. They're a far cry from drawing a Ford Fusion over footage from DBZ.
To this day, that BUMP OF CHICKEN Pokémon video makes me wonder if Stephen King knows that Stand by Me is canon in the Pokémon universe. Since we know merch sales are built into a lot of an anime production's budgeting, it's not at all surprising to see ads featuring anime characters pop up as well. Especially when those anime were made by famously financially strapped studios like Gainax.
Shoutouts to Red Bard for bringing this strange Evangelion razor blade ment to my attention in 2019 via their YouTube channel! The teenage girls of the franchise being infatuated with clean-shaven adult men kind of undercuts some pretty critical themes of the original work, but that only makes this ad more of a sight to behold.
It's strange, but strange in the way that all product placement is. I'm sure Emperor Palpatine's beautiful mug has graced some pretty wild packages. As far as anime in particular goes, I think it's instructive to look back at last year's WcDonald's campaign, which leaned on a lot of exaggerated anime tropes for its global audience. It practically looks like a parody.
Hey, if Subaru came to thrive by courting lesbians, the same can happen for McDonald's!
But you are touching on why a lot of these more recent Western, anime-inspired ad campaigns don't work for me or on me. They rely on the novelty of the medium and how people don't expect it to show up in more everyday spaces. Meanwhile, anime has been a regular part of my media diet since I was 4, so I'm used to it being in the background of my daily life.
While I'm not one to gatekeep people, I don't extend the same courtesy to corporations (no matter what the Supreme Court says). I was born in the anime mines. Molded by them. You can't just waltz in and say, "How do you do, fellow weebs?" I want an honest effort, not some low-hanging fruit shitpost. That being said, the proliferation of the anime aesthetic abroad is a feature, not a bug. Say what you will about "Cool Japan," it's made some significant cultural inroads in the past decade.
The Catholic church didn't have to make a chibi anime mascot but they sure made a pretty good chibi anime mascot in Luce! Game respects game, Catholicism.
And I need to talk to a Japanese national who's fairly politically aligned with me about the Cool Japan soft-power effort! On the one hand, I keep seeing intermittent headlines about how the project's a failure and costing Japan money, but on the other hand, had arguably too much tourism for a while now and I don't think government programs need to be "profitable" to be successful.
Also, we've made semi-careers out of discussing anime, so somebody somewhere is doing a good job promoting anime and making people want to talk about it!
I'm skeptical about how much you could attribute to Cool Japan as a rigidly defined government program. It's probably more likely that the increased availability provided by the internet and publishers had more of a hand. But soft power is soft power. And if the US continues to double down on dismantling every single one of its international tendrils, I don't think it's crazy to consider Japan's cultural relevance growing even stronger. Maybe even superpower-strong.
But this means we also need to consider anime as an arm of propaganda, advertising's insidious twin. Luce is a great example. As someone who was raised Catholic, I can't help but find the whole ordeal hilarious. Thinking about it from the Vatican's perspective, they know the Church has a serious (and deserved) image problem. It's a huge deal that they gravitated towards an anime-like mascot to appeal to the public. That's fascinating to me.
Even as talks of the anime bubble bursting again become more common, anime is a rising tide right now and folks want to use it to uplift their ships. I'd love to be a fly on the wall and overhear the conversations that brought Luce into existence, but she's also not going to make me forget about the Catholic Church covering up of its priesthood committing habitual child abuse for decades. It's also easy to see anime's global rise as being at least partly due to the decline of American mass media. We've been complaining about Marvel fatigue for half a decade now, and Game of Thrones was the last big monoculture television moment, and it couldn't even stick the landing! I don't think American art and entertainment will ever lose its global cache outright, but there's certainly some correlation to anime popping off just as Western-produced media has a couple of down years.
Nobody knows what the future will hold. But I do know what the past holds and it's not all rosy. Luce is eyebrow-raising, but she's quaint compared to an infamous piece of anime propaganda like OVA series produced by Aum Shinrikyo in 1991. Yes, the same Aum Shinrikyo cult behind the sarin gas attacks in 1995. You can watch their leader talk about levitation and astral projection in cartoon form. It's only a YouTube search away. It's wild.
Notably, this was produced by the cult. They founded a studio to do it. As such, it's extremely amateurish and poorly put together, so it's bad to watch even if you discount the cult quackery. But it is a fascinating example of how anime can be wielded for actual evil. Also, it's the source of that "moshi moshi, Jesus desu" meme.
This is just more proof that anime is just like any other kind of art! Though it is good, morally neutral, and even some strange kinds of evil can proliferate!
Anime and cult propaganda aren't exclusively old hat either. Happy Science has regularly produced animated films for over three decades. Eleven Arts licensed some of these Laws of the Universe films for theatrical runs. ANN accidentally published an ad for them once! It might seem silly, especially when you watch these trailers and see all the new-age cult hits—UFOs, lizard people, crystals, etc.—but it's more important than ever to be cognizant of how close this rhetoric is to the mainstream. The line between ments and propaganda can blur too easily for comfort.
But that's enough of me and my soapbox. Let me ask you a more important question, Lucas: have you heard of Hatsune Miku?
Oh man, Hatsune Miku is such a WEIRD example of an anime-adjacent ment taking on a life of its own! Created as a way for Crypton Future Media to showcase and promote their Vocaloid software voicebank, she's now a part of the global culture!
She's a musical phenomenon in her own right, arguably a precursor to VTubing as a trend in streaming, and the motivation behind what seems like an unreasonable amount of fan art.
Advertising isn't a four-letter word. It can produce some legitimately cool stuff. Sometimes, it cooks hard enough to launch a figure like Miku with enough escape velocity to make people forget she's an ad in the first place. I don't think about Miku like that. I, too, think of her as the cool blue twin-tails girl who gets all the good fan art. Since we started this column talking about football, I'd be remiss not to mention the Chargers' 2022 schedule advert. It's charming and you can tell that real anime appreciators worked on it.
Oh buddy, if you liked the Charger's 2022 schedule announcement video, wait until I tell you about Hero Ball, Bleacher Report's comedic, anime-inspired NBA commentary YouTube series!
Sure, it's like an ad for two different brands and an entire artistic medium, but it's also bizarrely fun and a great way to get hyped about basketball with both March Madness and the NBA playoffs on the horizon!
At the very least, that should help heal my YouTube algorithm after I subjected it to all of these bootleg commercial recordings and cult indoctrination videos.
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