How China Broke the Anime Figure Industry
In recent years there’s been a spike in content about/from China. We look into how China’s expanse into the anime and game industries has affect its presence in the figure industry.
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Who like donghua 😮
(analog vs digital)🎉
China is growing rapidly and is voracious in any market, doing so with electronics, technology, and cars. Now, it's going for entertainment. Japan is at a clear disadvantage because they depend on Chinese manufacturing. China competes on three fronts, two of them unfairly: 1) China manufactures Japanese designs, creating dependency to maintain costs. 2) They copy their style and launch their own products. 3) They make illegal copies of Japanese designs and flood the international market with pirated figures. China is replacing the old world powers in various areas. In the long term, in anime figures and Japanese-style video games, Japan is going to lose. I think it is cultural appropriation from China towards Japan.
Both China and Korea, Japan have a glut of story telling, I can feel this that after 2015 story Japanese story telling drop considerably. Mostly because they cant build meaningful conflict.
Will Chinese growth in the industry eventually reduce the price of figures overall? Prices of scale figures in particular seem to have risen significantly over the past decade, maybe this will make them more affordable for the average employed person.
I don't like china voice
what figure displayed in 1:05 ?
Getting really tired of everything catering to the chinese market only. Cars, video games, anime, etc. It's alienating and frankly, boring.
China has the speed and the will to innovate, the consumer market in china is just much bigger than japan. It won't be long china will take over japan. Too bad most of japan is still sticking with their old ways of doing things.
Wouldn't be the first time. In ancient history, blacksmiths from both Japan and China would make a pilgrimage to each country to learn new techniques and refine their own craftsmanship. You can see the evidence of this in the swords of both countries when comparing their older double-edged straight blades (tsurugi vs jian) in the bronze and iron-age, and again later when early single-edged Dao swords more resembled the Katana because they were more narrow and less broad than later versions, and occasionally even used the same materials like sting-ray skin, and similar twisting techniques in the handle-wraps. Bottom line: there was a lot of cross-pollination throughout the ages.
If these figurines wouldn't cost more than my graphics card, I would buy them. But they cost more than my graphics card.
I could be wrong, but I don't see China as being anywhere near as edgy as Japan when it comes to content in anime. To be sure, nothing that will PO those in power or in any way upset cultural norms.
Worst thing to happen to the hobby in a long time.
ancient china used to be morw frequent in anime for awhile its a cycle
It's just a matter of time before someone in the industry will branch out and create their own company because they want to put their own spin — happens all the time in tech. It's also probably easier to license Chinese games/anime as a Chinese company.
Kingdom is not a chinese production
Anime Figurines in Chinese dresses are so Gorgeous and Majestic to look at. 😍😏👌🏾 i love it ❤
As a fan of art and soties as well manga and figures. I do not care if something isnt from japan. As long as I like the series I dont care about the origin of the author or country.
It's really amazing every time i see photo of third party limited-premium figure from china in timeline
Most of them shared in socmed is kinda lewd LOL
Miku having a lot of chinese themed stuff makes sense since she does have a chinese voicebank
cool!
I see two main reasons:
– after decades of supressing their traditional stuff they realized that centuries of culture could be their equivalent to manga or KPop as a main export to the West, thus revamping their negative image
– the qipao figures are slowly fitting a niche that is dying out: the school swimsuit, they have all the pros of “skintight fitting without showing skin” appeal without none of the controversies of school uniform in a sexy context
I usually buy anime figure from japanese company (GSC, Alter, Kotobukiya) but now I tend towards china(Myethos especially) because the quality are superb and more cheaper.
To quote the China construction dozer, "China will grow larger."
As a collector who happens to love the china dress (cheongsam) aesthetic, I see this as a win considering that pre 2015 there were little to no high quality figures of characters in the cheongsam or hanfu. Plenty of kimino figs though!
China, and Korean animation studios were trained by being the "B" teams or outsource for Japanese studios for many years. It is only natural they would have eventually gotten really good at the craft and thus having the desire to build their own industry. Now, having said that I don't believe that China will overtake Japan in the anime industry in the near future as long as Japan maintains their incredibly high standards which will allow them to remain competitive.
I remember older animes use a lot of China/HK settings and references from 70's and 80's before moving to Western. Definitely appeasing to inceasing market share but also gotta bring in "fresh" and "new".
Pokemon recently officially moved into China, and their figures are some of the highest quality I've seen for so cheap.
Damn, these videos are always super high quality! Shocked there’s less than 1000 views
There's not going to be a "takeover", so much as what's happening today is just a return to norm. What the world doesn't realize (…or tries to realize, as… well anything out of China is bad, right? The evil dictator that hates freedom and democracy, right? Nevermind our American planes and military blockades and proxy wars while leaving the homeless in the cold, children with lousy education, and health care as a joke…), is that the geek culture has been within the Chinese general population going back at least the Song Dynasty (10th Century, especially with the rise of urban cities and tremendous productivity just short of start of an early "Industrial Revolution"), but literally exploded during the Ming (14th Century) and the Ching Dynasty (17th Century). For centuries, both the educated elites as well as non-educated have been discussing their heroes and villains, extrapolating side stories, even entertained conspiracy theories from the pages of Chinese martial/gangster literature, monster fantasies, and historical fiction in a very "commercial" way. (Think Water Margin, Journey to the West, FengShen Bang, Romance of 3 Kingdoms, even old travel log with full "Monster Manual" descriptions in Shanhai Jing, which is over 2000 years old. Heck, there were three other copy cat "Journey" novels when the Monkey King story caught fire back in the Ming/Ching Dynasties… though not by the same author: one to the East, and South, and North). This is not unlike Penny Operas and serialized stories of Dumas in Europe, except it'd started a lot earlier. From these literature came the creative teahouse story tellers, the big and small theaters for both operas and puppet plays, tons of low brow "dime" stories for the mass, folk stories added to the mix, trinkets, toys, snacks, even fashion… not unlike what we see today. In fact, I dare say you can trace a direct line of all the anime and manga and modern pop culture throughout Asia to these early "geekdom". It was only because of the decline in China around 1800s, followed by 150 years of political chaos, civil wars, and insane poverty, coupled with incursion of the Western Colonialism ushering in the Century of Humiliation, that literally destroyed any sense of confidence the Chinese had in their own culture… except martial arts novels especially in Shanghai and Hong Kong, which literally held down the fort for over a hundred years while the rest went into decline. All it is are the Chinese today are finding their footing again and rediscovering what had come before.
Not the figure since they already done with the bootlegs but what they takeover is the anime and game industry itself. They have japanese as the employee with the promise of freedom of creativity and make sense working hour for better quality live that the japan industry never have.
0:34 is it just me or has this been happening for a LONG time in this case? (give corrections if needed not into figures as much as a lot of people here might be.)
didnt a majority of Japanese figure companies pull out on the order of JPs gov because of not only covid but its deteriorating relationship with china for a few years now which resulted in the spike in permanent price change for figures since they are products made within Japan now? Chinese brand quality still doesnt stack up to the current major brands even with popular characters from Azur Lane and such.
Is there any Chinese manga or anime? Korea has manwa, I haven’t read any though.
Oh wow, I didn’t even know Azur Lane & Genshin were Chinese.
It was bound to happen since China has cheap labor, less regulations, and as you said the outsourcing to China awakened them to just making their own or copying it.
Love the editing in your videos! Keep it up!
Certainly taking over the Godzilla figure market. But tbh I think it's mostly because Bandai is slipping.
Don't think the 'takeover' will come to fruition. We still much prefer the OG when coming to appreciate this sub-culture.
Simple, figurine market and anime market in particular has been booming recently and so does the rise of more consumers and thus more competitors rushing to get a share of the cake.
figures have been wearing shinese dresses for YEARS. its not new. and china mimicking Japanese art people who play genshin…dont know its chinese.
Love the produciton quality on these videos. Keep it up!