I’m gonna say it. Anime today is a trash medium, the perfect mirror of everything broken in modern culture. It’s shallow, overdramatic, pornographic, and utterly unimaginative. The same generic artstyle with the same boring plots. Worst of all, it’s openly life-denying. Look at the endless parade of isekai stories. Where the hero dies in our world only to be reborn into a “better” one. If that isn’t a rejection of real life, I don’t know what is. And now we have native isekais like Frieren, which tweaks the formula slightly, this time the hero doesn’t die at the start, and somehow this is hailed as a masterpiece? I read the first few comics and found nothing but clichés. Bland character designs distinguished only by neon hair? Check. Mythological creatures copied from Tolkien? Check. Morality dumbed down to good guys versus bad guys? Check. Female characters reduced to large bouncing tits for comic relief and fan service? Check. I could keep going, but you get the idea. Another dogshit anime, except this time the Demon King has already been killed in the beginning and Frieren needs to find a new objective. And yet this is celebrated as peak anime. Only a declining culture could mistake such mediocrity for art.
Now compare that to Ghibli, which came from a time when anime was actually good. These films weren’t shallow life-denying escapism, they were celebrations of life itself. The characters felt human, with distinct faces, natural hair colours, and emotions that actually mattered. They didn’t flee into some Tolkien-ripoff world and beat everything with magic. They faced challenges in our own world, solving it through their own wits and relationships. The stories weren’t simple good guys vs bad guys, but explorations of complexity, contradiction, and ambiguity. Women weren’t treated as disposable sex objects. They were given dignity, strength, and depth, without sacrificing femininity. And most importantly, the stories weren’t made with profit or fame in mind. They were made with creating something human and timeless, which shows as even after success as Ghibli’s movies never get sequels or large merchandise. That’s the difference. Ghibli created art that affirmed the beauty and challenges of life, while modern anime numbs people who want to forget it.
Miyazaki understood what made art matter. Anime originally once tried to send a message we could apply to our own lives. But over time it collapsed into escapism and power fantasy. Another consumer product of our modern alienating world. Miyazaki saw it happening and called it out. “If you don’t spend time watching real people, you can’t do this, because you’ve never seen it… Almost all Japanese animation is produced with hardly any basis taken from observing real people… It’s produced by humans who can’t stand looking at other humans. And that’s why the industry is full of otaku.” That rejection of reality is what defines anime today. Miyazaki’s answer was simple. Turn back to life. Watch people. Study them. Draw from reality. That’s how you make art. Not just anime, any art. That’s the difference between another disposable product like Frieren and an enduring classical like Princess Mononoke.
This article is a bonus from this artpiece.