The Dark Age of Anime

If Anime had a Dark Age it's the very late 90s and very early 2000s.  At first glance there is a stark contrast between the aesthetics and sensibilities of 90s Anime and 2000s Anime.  But that change didn't happen over night, there was a transitional period.

This is true of any area of Popular Culture, like it's sometimes weird to me that Eminem and Britney Spears are considered 90s stars when they became stars in the very last year of that decade, they don't particularly represent the decade as a whole and 90% of what they're now known for happened later.

But with Anime the visual distinction is particularly striking because of the rise of digital animation.  With most Anime critics even who are nostalgic for this very era thinking of it as mostly Anime that hasn't aged well because of the awkwardness of that transition.  The early to mid 90s and mid to late 00s are both Golden Ages of Anime for segments of Otakudom, yet this time in-between is never given such an honor.

Which kind of shows how Pokemon is uniquely compartmentalized from how we think of Anime in general.  For Pokemon this time period is the Golden Age, the Kanto, Orange Islands and Johto sagas as well as the first 5 movies and for me personally Mewtwo Returns.  And remember Americans didn't get Pokemon till September of 98, so yeah, classic Pokemon is kind of the Eminem and Britney Spears of Anime. However Cardcaptor Sakura was also from this time, so maybe the Saturday morning kids shows were transitioned with more finesse.

Agent Aika and Najica Blitx Tactics are two very fansercivy anime from the same director, the former is late 90s and the latter is a 2001 anime.  On the one hand it's not surprising how similar they are in-spite of a technical change in Decade/Century/Millennium on the Gregorian calendar.  And yet on the other hand that some time however small had passed between them is still kind of apparent, though having radically different approaches to how they were dubbed might be a factor in how I perceive them.

Of course a lot of this observation about this era of Anime is for Western fans at least a product of looking back with new information.  When these shows were airing in Japan we Americans were mostly getting stuff from 3-10 years before.

2004 is the year where I'm unsure if it's too late to still count as this period.   The first Pretty Cure series is the only PreCure series that can be potentially confused with a 90s Magical Girl show.  Meanwhile Lyrical Nanoha and Kannizuki No Miko very much feel like the beginning of what 2000s Anime would become, for better and for worse.

Almost any pre Pretty Cure Magical Girl Show looks like it could've been the 90s whether it was or not.  But one exception is Ojamajo Doremi which Zeria just did a video on, it looks almost late 2000s or 20tweens in it's aesthetic.

This post has mostly been about the visual differences, art style and character designs.  As far as the kinds of stories told go, a lot of what we think of as inherently 21st Century Otakudom was already in 90s Anime, just mostly not on Television but rather relegated to OVAs, and that's maybe true even before this transition really starts.  Just going back to Agent Aika and Najica Blitx Tactics for example, the 90s one was an OVA but the 2001 series was on TV.  Galaxy Fraulein Yuna when watched now looks like someone threw Nanoha, Prisma Illya and Symphogear into a blender, yet it predates all of those.  Devil Hunter Yohko looks like one of those male audience oriented appropriations of the Magical Girl Warrior formula, yet it actually started at the exact same time as Codename Sailor V, too soon for either to have influenced the other.  Of course the real birth of the Otaku oriented semi-pardoy Magical Girl show was Pretty Sammy in 95.

And in many ways Western Audience perceptions of the history of Anime is still clouded by how often we didn't get these shows in the same order Japan did.  We can debate endlessly how much the claim that Evangelion "changed Anime eternally" is a massive overstatement.  But it's particularly the claim that Eva was the first "Waifu War" that is dependent on how many Western fans still don't seem to know that Tenchi Muyo actually came before Eva in Japan.  Yes, there was a full blown Harem that came before Eva, the first TV Tenchi Series ended a week before Eva debuted, and it was preceded by OVAs.

But let's get back to the main topic.

The main reason I wanted to discus this particular neglected period of Anime history is because it produced my absolute favorite Anime, Noir.  Noir is truly unique, it doesn't seem like a 90s Anime that came too late or a 2000s show that came too early, it stands on it's own as the best manifestation of what TV Anime in 2001 was capable of.  So perhaps I can call this masterpiece the King Arthur of Anime's Dark Age.

Witch Hunter Robin is another show from this era I'm a huge fan of.  Yeah it doesn't seem as polished as what a show with this same story and style would look like a decade later, but it has a charm to it that makes me glad it was a product of 2002.

Madlax was a sister series of Noir that came out in 2004.  It is perhaps the best show to label the end of the Dark Age.

I just decided to look at 2004 on MAL and Wow, there is a lot of stuff I need to check out.  How did I not hear of the Isekai show with Magical Girl in the title till now?