Andrew Osmond wonders why so many anime characters are teenagers or younger, and whether that’s holding back the medium.
Anime can be many things. There are fantasy anime, sports anime, romance anime, crime anime, samurai anime, slice-of-life anime. Plus a million mecha and magic girls. But this week, I’m highlighting a big limitation of anime, something so obvious that it’s easily overlooked.
The limitation is this: how an overwhelming majority of anime have young protagonists, generally under 18 and certainly under 25.
Okay, 25 may be setting the bar too high. By that age, most popular media insist you’re at peak maturity and it’s downhill from there. Let’s be looser and talk about characters who are plainly past growing up, their student days or their fantasy equivalents. Ninja training is school, oh orange one, while the bikers in Akira are very much teen rebels.
It’d be tough to estimate how many mature anime protagonists there are with any precision, given the thousands of anime out there. But try writing down, say, the first five anime that come into your head, or 10 or 20 if you’re more of a fan. I’d be impressed if even a fifth of them have “mature” lead characters.
They do exist, of course. In my survey of the new anime which debuted this month, I highlighted one that’s got buzz, Kowloon Generic Romance, streaming on Crunchyroll.
I’ve previously banged the drum for the excellent Wave, Listen to Me, also on Crunchyroll, about a manic woman radio personality. And yet such titles still seem like the minority.
Adult heroes
But in the first part of this article, I want to point out the noble exceptions, the anime protagonists who are grown-ups. Some loom large, like Motoko Kusanagi in most versions of Ghost in the Shell (omitting Arise), who’ll return next year in a new series by Science Saru, as pictured at the top of this article. Then there’s Lupin the Third in most incarnations (barring Lupin Zero); Spike Spiegel in Cowboy Bebop; and Himura Kenshin in Rurouni Kenshin.
There are also characters less familiar in Anglophone territories, but who still are giants in anime. One is Ryo Saeba, the eccentric Tokyo private detective in the City Hunter franchise (he’s called Nicky Larson in France). Then there’s Ryo-san, the hapless downtown neighborhood cop in the comedy KochiKame. The source strip ran for 40 years in Shonen Jump; the anime ran nearly 400 episodes.
Staying with superstars, some of the more fantastical Shonen Jump heroes blur lines between child and adult. Goku of Dragon Ball grew from an infant to a dad through decades of adventures, though he was a child again recently in much of Dragon Ball Daima. Luffy in One Piece hasn’t aged much, but he still seems to be a boy and a grown-up rolled into one. (He’s voiced by a female actor, Mayumi Tanaka, who turned 70 this January).
Moving beyond superstars to merely great grown-ups, there are examples like the criminal crew of Black Lagoon, the space team in Planetes, and the questing Doctor Tenma in Monster. There are film heroes like Ninja Scroll’s swordsman Jubei and Miyazaki’s aviator Porco Rosso. There’s everyone’s favorite middle-aged superhero, Tiger in Tiger & Bunny, and the sword-swinging Guts in Berserk. You can add retro-heroes like Guts’ spiritual dad, Kenshiro in Fist of the North Star, and Osamu Tezuka’s super-doctor Black Jack.
Then there are characters where you forget how young they’re meant to be, who’ve become adults early, because of the harsh times they live in. Thorfinn is in his teens for much of Vinland Saga, but his brutal world ages him fast. The same goes for Guts in Berserk. Amuro Ray is only school-aged in the first Gundam, but he still fights space duels to the death.
Female examples include Mamao in The Apothecary Diaries and Fuu in Samurai Champloo, both teenagers. Lady Oscar is 14 at the start of Rose of Versailles, but doesn’t seem it (she’s in her 30s by the end).
Some directors specialize in adult leads, such as the late Satoshi Kon (Perfect Blue, Tokyo Godfathers, Paprika). Perfect Blue is specifically about a woman struggling against a pop-culture that infantilizes her. Mamoru Oshii excels in grown-up procedurals about cops or military, like Ghost in the Shell, Patlabor and Jin-roh (which Oshii wrote but didn’t direct). Shinichiro Watanabe is fine with teen stories, but his adult characters are best, and not just Spike Spiegel. His director debut Macross Plus is an exceptional story of grown-ups regretting their youth.
Finally, while I’m mostly focusing on lead characters, it would be remiss of me not to acknowledge many of the best grown-ups in anime are those in the supporting casts. Among the innumerable cases, you might start with Masato in Evangelion, or Roy Mustang in Fullmetal Alchemist, or the indomitable great-granny in Summer Wars. Or Erwin, Hange and Pyxis in Attack on Titan. Or Shanks in One Piece. Or Satoru Gojo in Jujutsu Kaisen. Or… and so on and on.
High-school prison
But these anime still seem dwarfed in number by anime where the characters are kids, or teens, or college-aged at most. Let’s face it, that’s embedded in the image of anime. Vast though the medium is, it seems imprisoned by high-school desks, chiming school bells, and shy teens melting into emotional goo.
That’s unfair, of course. There are anime teen badasses from Light Yagami (Death Note) to Yuji Itadori (Jujutsu Kaisen), Mikasa Ackerman (Attack on Titan) to Kagome Higurashi (Inuyasha). There are superb classroom dramas from A Silent Voice to Beastars, and teen romances from Your Lie in April to Fruits Basket. And yet… isn’t it still limiting?
The obvious comparison is with American animation. Of course, many of its leads are kids and teens too, but it’s notable how readily American animation studios can go for older lead characters, even in titles for child or family audiences. Shrek and his gang aren’t teenagers, for example. Nor are Buzz and Woody in Toy Story, or Mr. Incredible, or Scrooge McDuck, or Princess Elsa. Or, to add a British icon, Aardman’s inventor Wallace.
Youngsters are even less necessary in the sassier cartoon sitcoms, shading off into Western adult animation. When The Simpsons first began in 1989, the star was meant to be Bart. But only a few years later, he was replaced in the limelight by Homer, who’s stayed there ever since.
Interviewed by the New York Post, The Simpsons writer David Mirkin argued Bart could only have so much depth at his age. “With Homer, we try to explore all levels of adulthood – or arrested childhood. There are just more places to go.” Indeed, The Simpsons was only following the lead of its sitcom ancestor, The Flintstones from the 1960s. Its stars were always Fred and Wilma, never their kids.
The Simpsons’ sibling Futurama dispensed with youngsters in the lead cast entirely. So have other Western adult animation hits, from BoJack Horseman to Castlevania. Anime fans often boast that anime has serious, mature themes. So why can’t more anime feature adult lead characters, as Western animation does?
Manga is different
As well as comparing Japanese animation against Western animation, you could also compare anime against manga. Again, these things are hard to quantify, but manga is much readier to feature adult protagonists than anime. For example, I looked at an article by Jonathan Clements, discussing one issue of the 57-year-old manga magazine Big Comic.
That has characters like Professor Munkata, a grizzled archaeologist who’s been going since the 1990s, and Nagase, an estate agent cursed to tell the truth (!). Those characters may well never be animated, no matter how well they’ve done in manga. As for the hardboiled assassin Golgo 13, he has been in a few anime, including a 50-part TV series in 2008 (above). But that’s not much for a manga legend who’s been around since 1969, in more than 200 tankobon (collected books).
Strips marketed to women in Japan are just as diverse. There are office romances, family or workplace dramas, slices of life as a housewife – all with adult leads. Most of these strips are never translated into English, partly because the Anglophone manga market is driven by what’s big in anime.
So why is anime so top-heavy with youngsters? One suggestion is demographics, and how they factor into marketing. Until the 1990s, anime was widely considered something for kids and teenagers in Japan. Oh, there were some adult fans, and the best artists could slip in challenging and weighty material, unthinkable in Western animation, but still… Producers and marketers mostly deemed it kids’ stuff.
That changed with the rise of late-night TV anime, which accounts for most titles streamed to the West now. They’re aimed at adult anime fans, though that’s a young demographic in Japan, mostly under 25. Still, even if you’re part of that age bracket, consider this. Can’t you sometimes get invested in a story about someone 10 or 20 years older than you, or more? Wouldn’t it make an interesting change?
Continuing the speculation… Would anime fans be interested in anime that weren’t so focused on adolescents? For example, might they try anime answers to Breaking Bad, or Succession, or Desperate Housewives, or Emily in Paris? Or equivalents of films like Oppenheimer, Shawshank Redemption, Jaws or When Harry Met Sally?
One reply is that such stories can be made in live-action, so anime should do other things. However, a huge number of well-loved teen anime dramas could be made in live-action just as easily, from A Silent Voice to Toradora!
Indeed, many manga are adapted in both live-action and anime versions, including Your Lie in April, Tokyo Revengers and the current hit Oshi no Ko. Is it only “appropriate” to make stories in anime that are about childhood or adolescence?
It’s Japan, stupid.
It’s also been suggested that everything comes down to It’s Japan. Maybe it just reflects how the country’s media and pop-culture obsess with adolescence. Or how many Japanese kids work so hard through school that afterwards they see it as the time they lost, that they long to live properly in anime.
Or instead of generalizing about Japan as a whole, you could argue it’s down to the otaku, that small but vital minority audience which doesn’t just watch anime but buys the Blu-rays and figurines too. If they want anime full of cute teens, girls especially, then the rest of us may just have to go with that.
And yet, I mentioned that some directors, like Kon and Oshii, pushed heroically against the “classroom” stereotype of anime. Once in a while, there’s a hit anime film by a popular director who drops the youngsters and frames a film from an adult perspective. Mamoru Hosoda’s 2012 film The Wolf Children is one case (the wolf kids are very cute, but the film’s mainly about the mother). Hayao Miyazaki had an even greater box-office hit the next year with The Wind Rises.
And a couple of years ago, I brought up the subject to a blockbuster director who’s closely identified with angsty teen anime. Actually, he’s perhaps number one in the field. But, he says, he’s now thinking of moving in another direction.
I interviewed Makoto Shinkai when he came to Britain to promote his new film Suzume. (The bolded questions in the link are mine.) I asked if he would consider making a film for older viewers, one that showed characters in a more grown-up relationship.
“That’s something I think about a lot,” Shinkai answered. “Because my protagonists are always teenagers, but I’m moving further and further away from being a teenager myself.” Shinkai had just turned 50.
“I’ve always thought that animation was for young people,” he continued, “which is why I have these teen protagonists. But I feel like my role is changing, and there are more and more young directors coming up now, and maybe I can leave the teen protagonists to them… I ask myself what I should do next, and I think it would be quite possible to depict love in your 50s, 60s, and 70s. There's a lot of that in manga in Japan, because people of all ages read manga and watch animation in Japan. So, I could do something featuring people closer to my own age.”
If a director of Shinkai’s commercial standing risks it… then maybe anime can be anything.
