Ask John: Do Anime TV Series Have to Get Movies to be Considered Successful?

Question:
Is an anime T.V. series in Japan always considered successful if it does have a corresponding motion picture? Taking those T.V. series out of the equation whose stories are finished and need no further animation, are the rest of the T.V. series that don’t have motion pictures still considered by the majority as successes?

Answer:
Probably the only people who can say for certain whether an anime TV series is successful are the Japanese sponsors and producers who can compare the revenue generated by the completed show to its production costs. Or, in a different sense, the animators who worked on a show can compare the finished animation to their hopes and expectations for the work. Outside observers like American anime fans usually can only gauge the success of an anime series based on observation of its profile in the Japanese market. Whether or not an anime television series gets a theatrical movie is not a reliable determination of how successful the show is because there are low profile television series that get motion pictures while other seemingly far more successful series don’t get movie releases.

To provide some examples, anime television series such as Galaxy Angel, Hare Nochi Guu, and Hunter x Hunter have been popular enough in Japan to get multiple sequel series, yet none of them has a single theatrical motion picture. However, series like Kino no Tabi and Maze Bakunetsu Jiku, which seem to be minor successes in Japan, do have theatrical movies. The relative success of anime television series should be determined by how popular and respected the series are among viewers because no other relative scale can be adequately applied to all television anime. Anime series broadcast late at night and targeted at a small demographic, like Noein, To Heart 2, and My Otome, will earn only a fraction of the viewer ratings of anime TV series broadcast during the early evenings and targeted at family audiences, like One Piece and Naruto. Yet it’s not fair to say that My Otome and To Heart 2 aren’t successful because their ratings aren’t as high as Naruto, and they don’t have theatrical films while Naruto does. The amount of coverage programs like To Heart 2 and My Otome get in Japanese “otaku” magazines, the amount of subsidiary merchandising they get, the amount of fan support they get all define these shows as “successful” despite not having high TV ratings nor theatrical feature film releases.

An anime series that is tremendously successful within its intended target audience must be considered successful. But that target audience may not be big enough to make a theatrical feature film release profitable. If an anime TV series is made for a few thousand Japanese fans and all of those fans praise the show; they show has succeeded in its goal of pleasing its fans. But a few thousand fans willing to pay to see an anime movie in a theater won’t generate enough revenue to recover the cost of producing and distributing a feature film.