Where can I find better anime?

[Elheru Aran]

Animation shows for kids are definitely in a bit of a ghetto nowadays. They're all imitating whatever they think is making money, so they're shit for the most part. If you want originality you generally have to look at stuff on streaming media.

Also, Crunchyroll and Funmation on Amazon suck. Maybe it's just my connection but I can't manage to get hooked up. Also, ye gads, 5 minutes of the same repetitive ad for Skyrim on PS4? No. No, thank you.

[U.P. Cinnabar]

Not a big fan of the Strike Witches or High School Fleet franchises. But, if half naked little girls with magic animal ears and fluffy tails are your thing...

[Crossroads Inc.]

There was a time in the late-90s and early-2000s where American animation was breaking out from the "kids show" area, where they could do more than just hide some adult themes in the TV-Y show. But now it seems you have to watch really..... poorly drawn shows to get it. Teen Titans gave way to stuff like... whatever, Rick and Morty or Adventure Time. And all I can think of is Amy's comment from Futurama: "And their ironic hipster parents will "love" it."

Apparently right now it's a hard time for young-adult animation marketing wise. A number of attempts didn't sell toys like hoped, and Laura Faust has relayed that right now most execs think "If kids want action, they'll go to video games."

On the bright side, Young Justice is being revived. Netflix has Voltron.

Not to derail things too much and turn it into a gripe fest... But...
This is so, so SO True, and so very sad.
The late 90's and early 2000's were a sort of "golden age" of cartoon shows that were a mix of "For kids" shows that were still genuinely entertaining, as well as "young adult" shows that were breaking from the "all cartoons are for kids." sickness. You had the massive DC universe of Justice league, Justice league unlimited and the more edgy "Batman Beyond". Even Disney had edgier shows like "Gargoyles".
On the kid side of things, Cartoon Network had a wealth of shows, Powerpuff Girls, Dexters laboratory, Samurai Jack (which still had its dark moments) and of course a host of others. And yes, before anyone says anything I know this sounds like a HUGE dose of rose colored glasses with high nostalgia-itcies. Well, perhaps it is... But measure it against the last 10 years or so of American animation...

I cannot point to an exact start to it, but there seemed to be a race to the bottom of sorts in terms of both animation quality as well as writing for shows. I Would say part of it could be linked to the start of "Adventure Time" in 2010 with it's bizarre animation style, shows like it and "Teen Titans" and a host of others grew from this washed out "flash animation" style of low quality animation. As if a symptom of this, writing and stories went to match it. Jokes became equally 2-dimensional, stories as well. And is it goes on it just gets worse....not sure where I am going with all this..but... UNG!

[TheFeniX]

But, if half naked little girls with magic animal ears and fluffy tails are your thing...

Hard Pass. As I get older, I have enough issues with teenagers being forced into deadly situations each week. I never understood the draw of doing this to little girls. Rainbow Brite is one thing, or even those other kiddie shows (my son watches one about elementary school super-heroes who are like.... animal themed or something), but gory exploitative stuff involving little girls (or boys, but girls seem to be the prime focus here) is just weird. I'm not saying it's creepy... but it's a little creepy.

The late 90's and early 2000's were a sort of "golden age" of cartoon shows that were a mix of "For kids" shows that were still genuinely entertaining, as well as "young adult" shows that were breaking from the "all cartoons are for kids." sickness. You had the massive DC universe of Justice league, Justice league unlimited and the more edgy "Batman Beyond". Even Disney had edgier shows like "Gargoyles".

Yea, anime took a huge dump in the early-2000s and American animation seemed to pick up the slack. I wonder if I too have rose-colored glasses, but I think back on some of the shows we had and it was ridiculous. And you can even go back to the early-90s and 80s when American animation was still pushing the limits of what was acceptable.

Western Animation had one thing going for it and one thing going against it IMO: Batman (after the Burton Batman which lead to the cartoon) and The Simpsons. Batman showed that comic cartoons could really sell and you could take a kids show and heap enough adult content on it to really make work for all audiences. This lead to a plethora of just really good comic shows and that Golden Age™ lasted a whole lot longer than you'd think.

But the runaway success of The Simpsons worked against animation outside that. Any cartoon not SPECIFICALLY geared towards kids (even if some adult themes were spliced in heavily) was basically DOA. A lot of shows got axed because they couldn't compete with a monolith (think of how WoW basically killed the MMO genre by being so good. Everything tried to ape WoW, obviously wasn't as successful, even if it made money, so was seen as a failure and axed). Futurama was left to do it's thing (thank God) only because Groening.

Now, comic shit is just EVERYWHERE. Hollywood is pounding it out like crazy and it's just feeling tired. But man "comics stuff is big, just put whatever license we have up into a show."

The early-2000s and anime dropping into some kind of black-hole of mediocrity really helped American animation shine at the same time. The writing was still solid, but the animation was taken to newer and better levels. I don't what kept this going for so long. Cheaper animation? More and better voice actors?

The stuff out of Japan post-2010's seems to have gone from "what's localized is bad, but there's a few gems" to "what's localized is good, with some big stinkers." I'm not going to say MOST anime is good because there's a lot I haven't/can't watch. But what's available just on Netflix and Amazon Prime is ..... pretty fucking solid. Knights, AICO, Part Time Devil, One Punch Man: these are 5-star shows. Even the weaker stuff doesn't make me want to wretch and is pretty enjoyable. The only terrible show I've been subjected to is SwordGai. Even Sword Art is watchable if not incredibly boring.

I cannot point to an exact start to it, but there seemed to be a race to the bottom of sorts in terms of both animation quality as well as writing for shows. I Would say part of it could be linked to the start of "Adventure Time" in 2010 with it's bizarre animation style, shows like it and "Teen Titans" and a host of others grew from this washed out "flash animation" style of low quality animation. As if a symptom of this, writing and stories went to match it. Jokes became equally 2-dimensional, stories as well. And is it goes on it just gets worse....not sure where I am going with all this..but... UNG!

No judgements here, but maybe Bronies happened? Older guys falling in love with a (admittedly well written) little-girls show could lead to "these guys will watch anything cute." This, combined with some popular poorly animated shows that were also well-written, could have pushed this idea.

[Q99]

Oh, no, definitely not MLP. Some of the problems have been a long-term thing. YJ's initial cancellation, and heck, even JLU was often shown just once a week in a not-great timeslot.

And heck, MLP has a share of action in it, and solid animation.


Part of it may also be that it's become harder to sell toys with those shows, or at least companies aren't doing it well. Apparently one additional problem is a good show like Young Justice will have a lot of girl fans too, which is (1) not the boy demographic the toy sellers want, and (2) is viewed as a minus because they also go, 'it's eating girl viewers from our girl shows!'. Which is, completely sexist and horrible (also note the contrast to MLP and Bronies, where it was viewed as "bonus!"), but yea, a show with rich characters having crossover potential is viewed as a negative to studios trying to sell advertising/to toy companies, who'd rather split everyone up.

[Flanker_33]

That's the big problem I find with most American comics/cartoons these days, they're mostly aimed at selling toys. This is quite present in Japanese anime as well (just recently, Toji no Miko and Uma Musume were literally mobage ads) but in the latter, and in European animation as well, at least you can find shows that are just made to entertain and sell only itself to TV channels and online stream sites, and not toys.

Anyways, to come back to the original topic of the thread, finding better anime is possible... it requires you to spend time searching for good stuff though, as the most popular series aren't necessarily the best. What I recently enjoyed were The Pilot's Love Song in the action/military genre, Hakumei to Mikochi in the relaxing slice of life genre, and, even if it's an adaptation of a game, Steins;Gate 0 (don't watch it without watching the original series though. Plus it's a good entry gate into anime, if you're not already into it!). I could have mentioned 91 Days as well, but come on, it's a mafia movie masquerading as an anime.