Studio Ghibli has released an average of a feature a year since then, alternating between the productions of Miyazaki and Takahata: Miyazaki's Laputa: the Castle in the Sky (1986), My Neighbor Totoro (1988), Kiki's Delivery Service (1989) and The Crimson Pig (1992); and Takahata's Grave of the Fireflies (1988), Only Yesterday (1991) and Pom Poko (1994). Many of these have become Japan's top-grossing theatrical films, live-action or animated. Takahata's Pom Poko was also submitted as Japan's candidate for being an Academy Awards nominee for the Best Foreign Film Oscar. Some other notable theatrical features during the past decade include writer-director Katsuhiro Otomo's cyberpunk thriller Akira (1988) and director Mamoru Oshii's adaptation of Masamune Shirow's sci-fi manga novel Ghost in the Shell (1995).

Crying Freedom, 1988. An example of adult-themed, violent and sexually explicit anime for the home video market. Courtesy of Fred Patten. © 1988, 1993 Toei Video Co., Ltd.

Original Anime Video
The second development was the emergence of the home-video market. Beginning in 1984, animation began to be produced especially for this market (resulting in a Japanese-created English term, OVA or OAV--for Original Anime Video--which has been adopted by American anime fandom as well). OAV animation is usually higher in quality than TV animation, but not as rich as theatrical animation. As with most aspects of popular culture, 90% of it is little better than trash, while 10% may be brilliantly imaginative and innovative. Video productions can run from a half-hour to 2 hours, and from independent titles to serials of from 2 to 10 videos. OAVs are often better than either movies or television for stories which are too long for a standard theatrical release, but not long enough for a TV series. The OAV market is not subject to the public standards for television, so it often becomes notorious for its most lurid examples of violence and pornography. At the other extreme, some of its better examples (such as the Patlabor near-future police-procedural dramas or the No Time for Tenchi teen sci-fi comedies) have become so popular and acclaimed that they have led to their own anime TV series and theatrical films. There are anime-fan magazines devoted to just the anime video market, which list an average of 40 to 45 new releases per month, one-third of which are brand-new OAVs, with the rest being reissues and video releases of theatrical, TV and foreign titles. These OAV titles are the main source for the anime being released in America today, since their licenses are more affordable than those of expensive theatrical features or of multi-episode TV series.

Today, animation in Japan is considered to be in a creative doldrums. Due to the sheer volume of the output over the past three decades, the good ideas have "all been used up." The current trend is for OAV remakes of anime favorites of 20 or 30 years ago, featuring a flashy 90s art slant and a more "sophisticated" (cynical) story line--very similar to the American trend for turning classic live-action TV series into big-budget theatrical films. But many of the titles and concepts that are stale in Japan are still fresh to American audiences, so anime still has an encouraging growth period ahead of it in the US.

Fred Patten has written on anime for fan and professional magazines since the late 1970s. He currently writes a regular anime column for Animation Magazine.