Ask John: Why Are There So Few Shoujo Mecha Anime?

Question:
Are there any shoujo mecha anime other than Magic Knight Rayearth? If no, why? Do girls hate robots or something?

Answer:
Due to certain circumstances, definitively answering this question is impossible for me. I’m not employed or involved in Japan’s anime creation industry, so I don’t know for certain why Rayearth seems to be a singularly exceptional title. And contrary to what some of my critics would like to believe, I’m not a girl, so I can’t judge with certainty the genres of anime that female viewers do and don’t prefer. Instead of providing immutable answers, I’ll have to resort to speculation.

The 1994 Magic Knight Rayearth television series may be a unique entry in the history of anime because it is a shoujo anime about girls who pilot giant robots. While Rayearth may appeal to male viewers, its advertising and merchandising clearly distinguish that the show’s primary intended audience was pre-teen and adolsescent girls. There have been other anime that feature girls piloting giant robots, including Gunbuster, Dangaizer-3, Iczer-One, and Sailor Victory, along with titles like Simoun and Skygirls which aren’t strictly about girls piloting giant robots, but do involve girls piloting mecha. But none of these programs have been primarily shoujo anime targeted at adolescent girl viewers.

I honestly don’t know if adolescent Japanese girls are stridently opposed to watching anime involving mecha or robots. I doubt that they’re totally uninterested, because Rayearth was quite successful, and I can’t imagine that viewing tastes in Japan have changed so drastically in a little over a decade. The lack of a receptive audience would be a significantly motivating reason for Japanese production studios to avoid creating shoujo mecha anime. But I don’t think that’s the case. Rather, I can think of two other possible reasons to explain the absence of shoujo mecha anime: lack of support from corporate sponsors, and the simple difficulty of creating an effective shoujo anime involving mecha.

Most anime production studios may have countless ideas for anime they’d like to create, but animation studios can only produce the anime that their financial sponsors are willing to back. Mecha anime are often co-produced by toy companies that are eager to produce and sell model and toy replicas of the robots that appear in an anime. Robot toys from a girls’ anime may be difficult to sell. As an example of this fact, Rayearth spawned a flood of merchandise and toys for girls, including role-playing accessories and fashion dolls, but no robot toys. Corporate sponsors may be unwilling to invest in the production of a robot anime if the show doesn’t have a strong potential for marketing and merchandising its robots.

Furthermore, in order to be successful, a shoujo mecha anime has to include effective shoujo and mecha characteristics. CLAMP has a talent for creating stories that straddle the line between shoujo and shonen, appealing to both male and female viewers. But many creators working in the shoujo genre may not be comfortable, adept, or even interested in adding shonen elements into their work. After all, virtually by definition, the shoujo genre concentrates on human relationships and feelings, not physical conflicts and technology. Corporate sponsors may have been willing to invest in the production of the Rayearth anime because it was based on a proven successful story, created by established and reliable authors. To the best of my knowledge, no new shoujo mecha title fulfilling these prerequisites has appeared since Rayearth.

I don’t think that the absence of shoujo mecha anime is to be blamed on lacking audience interest. If a program comes along that’s good, I suspect that viewers will watch it. Rather, I suspect that there’s been no new shoujo mecha anime since Rayearth because no one is interested in creating stories within this particular theme, and corporate sponsors are hesitant to invest in the production of a show with such a drastically mixed audience appeal. From an investor’s perspective, financially backing a straightforward shoujo anime or a straightforward mecha anime is probably a much less risky investment than backing an untested title that tries to address two disparate audiences, and may not successfully appeal to either.