[I know exactly how it (anime industry) works, and how it works is that it doesn't work. This whole super-pandering model that has become the norm over the past several years has absolutely no long-term, or even medium-term, viability. For everything but big family-friendly hits like One Piece and Shin-chan, the entire business model is based around milking the hell out of a very small number of people, the hardest of the hardcore, people who are off in the head enough to pay hundreds of dollars for a single short television series. I can't express how fundamentally flawed it is to hang all your hopes on a series turning a profit on a handful of people dumping money in your laps. What happens when those people finally run out of money, when demographic shifts mean that your super-otaku population starts to dry up? What then? There's no foresight here, no sense of the necessity to expand the market and find an actually functional system of financing and producing series. The production companies have put on blinders to the fact that this thing is eventually going to collapse...and when it does, the volume of anime that Japan puts out every year will plummet. Charred Knight has it right here. The vast majority of people in the US who have become anime fans to any degree didn't do so because of some super-niche otaku-pandering mess of a series...they did so because anime represented something cool, something different, something far beyond what the US animation industry has produced. DBZ became the juggernaut it was because millions of kids in the 90s came home from school and tuned into the cool over-the-top planet-wrecking violence. Cowboy Bebop was a huge success story for \[as\] because viewers were drawn to its fantastic style; hell, there are thousands of people out there who don't even know the word "anime" and yet loved the hell out of it. Ghost in the Shell, Outlaw Star, Akira, even all the way back to the likes of Robotech and Star Blazers...they all represented that sense of broadening one's horizons, of watching something cool and new and different. We don't want the entire anime industry reduced to churning out otaku bullshit. Anime means far more to us than that...it can be far more than that, and has been for a very long time. And for it to be so again, the Japanese executives need to pull their heads out of the sand and realize that their industry is headed for ruin if they don't do something about its long-term viability.](http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/bbs/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=1893401) [](http://arr-soarin.blogspot.com/2012/01/crayon-shin-chan-movie-2003.html) [TAKE ACTION FOR JAPAN!](http://www.emotopeaceproject.blogspot.com/)