Manga anime has become incredibly popular in more spaces over the last three decades in the West. It has become a much more important piece of the pop-cultural consciousness as anime can be seen all over.
Celebrities have clothing lines tied into "Naruto", Goku's face is on ramen joints across New York City, and Megan Thee Stallion has Yuji's English voice actor introing one of her songs. The world has been taken over by anime in more ways than one, and it shows. It's gotten to the point where the space has grown to encompass animation from more countries.
Animation from China, known as "donghua" has started to take the world by storm, competing in spaces where Japanese animation has dominated. Series like "Heaven Official's Blessing", "Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation", and "Link Click" have come to have a popularity which rivals even that of popular shonen anime series.
The rise of donghua in the West is a fascinating thing to behold as they offer incredibly different yet familiar styles for audiences to enjoy. The success of "To Be Hero X" continues to show that donghua isn't going away any time soon, but it is interesting to see how the medium managed to get so popular.
The rise of donghua in popularity in the West has a lot of factors, but one of the major ones that cannot be overlooked is the popularity of queer romance in the West.
Quite a few of the most popular series began as web novels, a medium which relies on consistent output and long-form stories. These web novels update regularly with 3,000 to 8,000 word updates and hundreds of characters to keep track of.
These web novels are incredibly accessible, and there are currently about 145 million overseas readers of Chinese web novels, according to Chinese analytics firm iResearch.
It has been traditionally understood that "Gundam's popularity was driven by the female fanbase, primarily those who indulged in fandom creations exploring the relationships between the male leads of the series.
From that point, it was relatively obvious that women were the drivers of a series' popularity in the beginning, and donghua often gives the people what they want. The wuxia genre as a whole often leans into intense relationships between men, which is a primary driver for much of this audience.
Beautiful men with longing relationships that go on for long, beautifully written passages, leaving the audience on the edge of their seats, is a recipe for success.
For the layperson, it can seem like there isn't a lot of difference between donghua and anime. However, many major things set them apart. The animation is one of the biggest differences. Anime has definitely informed some of the more "shonen" style donghua, but donghua puts more emphasis on the motions of characters while anime goes for stronger facial expressions.
Donghua also has a lot of interest in taking from its roots in Chinese history and culture, especially in the wuxia genre that tends to be extremely represented. Donghua has more emphasis on realism while anime goes more for deep emotionality that can get trope heavy over time.
Donghua has managed to find a foothold in the anime space because of its varied genres and appeal to female demographics. There is also something very different about its presentation, pushing the limits of its medium with its many different forms of animation, and that has a lot of wide appeal. Donghua has certainly managed to gain a foothold, but this has also coincided with a rise in Chinese settings in anime as well.
No comments:
Post a Comment