Second, audiences have grown tired and suspicious of Hollywood’s neat resolutions.
第二个因素,观众已经对好莱坞的完美结局感到厌倦和怀疑。
As Susan Napier, a professor at Tufts University and expert on anime, explains, “Technology hasn’t brought us the utopia we thought it would, and the post-cold-war world has become more dangerous than we imagined,” which makes happily-ever-after endings implausible.
正如塔夫茨大学教授、动漫专家苏珊·内皮尔所解释的,“技术并没有给我们带来想象中的乌托邦,冷战后的世界变得比我们想象的更加危险”,这使得从此幸福快乐的结局变得无法令人相信。
Anime is willing to have heroes killed off and characters suffer huge loss.
动漫愿意让英雄死去,让角色遭受巨大损失。
At the same time, the protagonists are often cute and relatable.
同时,主角们通常是可爱的,可以让人产生共鸣。
“It’s a dark world out there,” Ms Napier says, so audiences “want that fluffy cuteness”.
“外面的世界很黑暗,”内皮尔说,所以观众“想要那种毛茸茸的可爱”。
Anime’s global growth has been made possible by its own evolution.
动漫在全球范围内的发展也得益于其自身的演变。
Japanese comic books and graphic novels, collectively known as “manga”, have long provided the source material for anime.
日本漫画书和图像小说被统称为“漫画”,长期以来一直为动漫提供素材。
Unlike comic books in Britain and America, manga are not primarily or even mostly for children.
与英国和美国的漫画书不同,漫画主要,甚至大部分漫画,都不是为儿童创作的。
Thousands of new manga are published every year, on virtually every subject imaginable, from pornography to reflections on war, which gives anime an inexhaustible range of sources.
每年都有成千上万部新漫画出版,内容几乎涵盖了所有能想象到的主题,从色情到对战争的反思,这为动漫提供了取之不尽的素材来源。
About 30 years ago, studios started producing more anime aimed at girls, such as “Sailor Moon”, which was less focused on fighting and robots and more on storylines and magic.
大约30年前,工作室开始制作更多针对女孩的动漫,例如《美少女战士》,这部动漫较少关注战斗和机器人,而更多地关注故事情节和魔法。
And as the fan base got older, creators began making more sophisticated works, often with more adult themes.
随着粉丝群体年龄的增长,创作者开始制作更复杂的作品,通常带有更多的成人主题。
Mr Miyazaki won an Oscar in 2003 for “Spirited Away”, a baroque, fantastical story about a girl who rescues her parents.
宫崎骏于2003年凭借《千与千寻》获得奥斯卡奖,讲述了一个女孩拯救父母的巴洛克式奇幻故事。
Around that time “Dragon Ball” and “Pokémon” were engaging a new generation of fans.
大约在那个时候,《龙珠》和《宝可梦》吸引了新一代的粉丝。
Japan’s government noticed and eventually took action: in 2013 it launched an initiative called “Cool Japan”, in which it invested some ?90bn to propel Japan’s creative industries abroad.
日本政府注意到了,并最终采取了行动:2013年,日本政府发起了一项名为“酷日本”的倡议,投资约900亿日元,以推动日本创意产业走向海外。
It was a flop, because of poorly chosen investments, but that has not stopped the government from trying again: it wants to quadruple the value of Japan’s content industry overseas by 2033.
当时失败了,因为投资选择不当,但这并没有阻止政府再次尝试:政府希望到2033年将日本内容产业在海外的价值翻两番。
The painstaking nature of hand-drawn, two-dimensional animation is providing inspiration for creators outside Japan.
手绘二维动画制作起来很辛苦,这正在为日本以外的创作者提供灵感。
Earlier this year, Usman Riaz, a Pakistani director, released a 2D feature film with an anime-inspired aesthetic called “The Glassworker”, animated entirely in Pakistan and originally voiced in Urdu.
今年早些时候,巴基斯坦导演乌斯曼·里亚兹发布了一部具有动漫美学风格的2D故事片《玻璃工人》,完全在巴基斯坦制作,最初使用乌尔都语配音。
And the forthcoming “Lord of the Rings” film, “The War of the Rohirrim”, to be released in December, is in that same style.
即将在12月上映的《指环王》电影《洛汗之战》也有类似的风格。
It is directed by Kamiyama Kenji, who has spent his career working on anime.
这部电影由神山健治执导,他的职业生涯一直致力于动漫制作。
Other creators are taking that aesthetic in new directions.
其他创作者正在将这种美学带向新的方向。
Netflix’s superb “Blue Eye Samurai”, about a revenge-seeking young woman in Edo-period Japan, won an Emmy for animation and was among the service’s ten most popular shows in 50 countries following its premiere last year.
网飞的精彩剧集《蓝眼武士》讲述了江户时代一位年轻女子复仇的故事,该剧获得了艾美奖动画奖,并在去年首播后成为网飞在50个国家中最受欢迎的十大影视剧之一。
Created by a Japanese-American woman and her white American husband, its lavish aesthetic and gore pay homage to directors such as Quentin Tarantino.
这部动漫由一位日裔美国女性和她的白人美国丈夫创作,其华丽的美学和血腥场面致敬了昆汀·塔伦蒂诺等导演。
Yet appealing to anime fans need not entail animation: last year Netflix launched a live-action show, “One Piece”, based on the popular manga of the same name (the original show, launched in 1999, was one of anime’s most popular brands ever, with over 1,100 episodes and 500m copies of the manga books sold).
然而,吸引动漫迷并不一定需要动画:去年,网飞推出了真人版《海贼王》,该剧改编自同名热门漫画(原版动漫于1999年推出,是有史以来最受欢迎的动漫品牌之一,集数超过1100集,漫画书销量超过5亿册)。
But for all the experimentation, traditional anime shows no signs of flagging.
尽管进行了所有这些实验,传统动漫仍未显示出衰落的迹象。
“People are aware of a world that’s more amorphous and more dangerous, [and have] less ability to believe in the happily ever after,” Ms Napier of Tufts suggests.
“人们意识到世界更加变动不居、更加危险,(并且)越来越难以相信从此幸福美好的结局。”塔夫茨大学的内皮尔表示。
Bad news for the world, but good for Japanese animators.
这对世界来说是坏消息,但对日本动漫创作者来说是好事。