Danny Choo, that most famous of bloggers who has managed to turn wacky articles about Japan and PVC figures into a stable career, has announced the formation of his own animation studio, “Mirai Studios.” Their first planned work is an explicitly moe show drawn from the same vein as K-On! or Ichigo Mashimaro or So Ra No Wo To, about a squad of cute female firefighters called Chinka. There’s even a preview trailer out for your convenience.
Potentially this could be a good thing. Danny Choo has money, the anime industry needs money, maybe he can pump some much-needed capital into the system.
On the other hand, I see a big problem with the whole Chinka thing: the whole production seems practically insulting to moe fans. When you take in the basic concept, the character designs, the presentation, it all leads to the idea that moe fans are easy to manipulate, that all you have to do is push the right buttons and they’ll come flocking to you, ready to buy whatever merchandise you throw out. And I’m not saying that merchandising a popular show or having a show built on merchandising is wrong either, but with Chinka you can almost see the piano wires and checklists that are the backbone of this whole concept. They have merchandise available for the show before it even begins, and the trailer is actually rubbing your face in the fact that it has some kind of tsundere or yandere-type. It doesn’t even need to say anything else about the character, as if all you need is the switch and fans will step right up. It knows you want more, and is glad to give it, for the right price.
With shows like Hidamari Sketch, K-On!, and Lucky Star, even if they are designed to appeal to a moe audience and have shameless promotion sewn directly into their very souls, the initial impression these shows gave even before episode 1 hit was that people who worked on these series were trying to entertain and not just fall exactly into what moe fans think of as “moe anime” and doing so on the most shallow of levels.
That all said, I of course have yet to actually see Chinka beyond the aforementioned preview. If it turns out to be a good show, I’ll be glad to be proven wrong. Please prove me wrong, Danny Choo, for everyone’s sake.
OGIUE MANIAX 
A fun game to play would be what if I were Danny Chu. If you had crazy “I’m Danny Chu and have my uber popular blog and daddy’s shoe empire” money what anime would you make?
Other than financing the the Fate/Zero anime I would have a few ideas. I could dig up my old note on my idea for a mecha show in an alternative history where magic grew up along side technology to a techno-magic today.
I also had a decent idea for a mecha show where people developed mecha from the debris that fell off an abandoned space ship that warped into orbit.
– Hisui
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I like this. Think of what anime certain bloggers would make. Heck, if you were to make a guess at what Danny Choo would make, your guess probably wouldn’t be too far off what Chinka is
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I actually have a few ideas up my sleeve.
*Witch In Africa
*GaoGaiGo
*That one idea I have about Magical Girls being used like tanks rather than flying units
*and it’s super robot spin-off.
*More G Gundam
*More Shin Mazinger Z
Then again… … …
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Well, for my part I kinda avoided Dannychoo.com for a while. I don’t know why I stopped visiting the site, I just felt uncomfortable reading about the latest idol photoshoot. But this weird little Chinka title has me intrigued. I mean, Danny lives the life we all want. Lives and works in Japan, hangs out in the Otaku Mecca, has his own toy, web and now anime line. Whether you agree with how he conducts himself, the fact remains that he has made it and he now can pretty much do whatever the hell he wants. We all have, as anime fans, our dream project that we’d like to make, myself included.
Danny just got there first. Now he’s going to make the show he wants to make. Whether we watch or not is of no concern of his. But it will be interesting to see what he does with the power. He might the first person in a while to make an anime just for the hell of it rather than a committee wanting to sell fishsticks. Wow, now there’s a mindblowing idea.
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Would you have thought this if you didn’t know this show was being produced by Danny Choo?
Looking at the trailer… yes, probably. It feels a bit like someone thought, “Well, what angle hasn’t been used yet?”
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Oh! And I love your post title. :)
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You admit yourself that a show built on merchandising is not necessarily wrong, and indeed you’d be in a bind otherwise, since I know many giant robot and magical girl anime are just as blatantly tied to their toy lines.
The operative difference which makes this case seem outrageous, if I had to guess, would be that those former toys were ostensibly targeted to children. Even though enticing children to want goods isn’t virtuous, it’s not (at least no longer) a scandalous thing. But announcing that you can manipulate grown men out of their money is less comfortable, especially to those men. They’re treating their audience like children.
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Hamsel: Most anime ARE glorified advert for toys. Also, you just summed up the entire anime industry in a nutshell.
Of course, if this is true, then the Magical Mirai eroge from Nitro+ has to come out. And that was an April’s Fools joke.
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“With shows like Hidamari Sketch, K-On!, and Lucky Star, even if they are designed to appeal to a moe audience and have shameless promotion sewn directly into their very souls, the initial impression these shows gave even before episode 1 hit was that people who worked on these series were trying to entertain and not just fall exactly into what moe fans think of as “moe anime” and doing so on the most shallow of levels.”
… we must have been watching very different PVs, that’s all I gotta say. This looks exactly as calculated and controlled and pre-fapped as those shows did and do, and about as sincere.
(By which I mean, I don’t doubt Danny Choo’s very sincere desire to make a show he can be proud to fap to, much like I don’t doubt KyoAni’s very sincere desire to make shows they would be honored to hump dry.)
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For how extremely excited I am to hear about this, how big of a fan of Danny Choo’s blog I am, and how cute I think most of the characters are, I cannot erase from my mind the ominous feeling that this could be the show that truly marks the decline of moe. It may also be the show that finally destroys the trust moe fans have in their favorite production companies; that they are at least (at some point in the production process), “fans making anime for fans,” and not “marketing departments making brands disguised as anime for fans”; a trust that has been tested time after time, yet endured even the “Endless Eight” arc, or exploitative production companies like Master of Entertainment (m.o.e.). This show seems like merchandising in it’s purest, most unadulterated form, and does absolutely nothing to hide it. While shows like K-ON! have proven to us that moe fans can be highly susceptible to even the most thinly veiled marketing campaigns, at least KyoAni chose to maintain a sense of integrity, and with respect to the source material (the 4-koma manga), chose to walk the very fine line between art form and advertisement (or at least made us believe that they did).
This particular anime seems to be more of a brand than an actual anime. The ideas for this show were most likely borne not of a manga, or a collection of sketches, but of a database. Like the opening article states, it seems almost (as much as I hate to say this about Danny Choo) insulting, a flagrant exploitation of moe fans (albeit a beautifully executed one). It seems like it was created from the ground up to push the inevitable character merchandise that will follow, which moe fans (me included), will probably buy, and afterwords will feel buyer’s remorse about, after realizing in hindsight, that we have been played in a marketing ploy that we should have seen coming a mile away.
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I’d just like to say that I’m incredibly pumped that a foreign blogger has the ability and the funds to create an anime that’ll be seen by so many people.
For years, we’ve been told that only Japanese people can make anime & manga, and that if anyone who’s not Japanese tries to make something, it’ll be anime-based or manga-based. Of course, the majority of American cartoons today that try to cop the look and feel of anime don’t exactly help things either.
But now, somebody who’s deeply involved with the industry has finally released something that can be legitimately called an anime instead of an anime-based cartoon. Yes, it’s blatantly moe. Yes, it’s blatantly trying to sell you merch. But what everyone seems to be forgetting is the simple fact that Danny finally broke the anime ethnic barrier. I for one can’t cheer loud enough for the guy!
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i think I ranted at 21stcenturydigital boy about how in terms of foreigners doing interesting things in japan, azrael of gaijin smash/outpost nine ranks higher than choo in my book
i tried to read choo’s site years ago but either got bored or disinterested with the subject matter. i’ve read all of azrael’s stuff (some of it twice).
choo is a big anime maker now, azrael shows up on live action shows and used to teach japanese kids and had interesting and heart-moving anecdotes.
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I say let’s give it an opportunity. A show can have moe characters and have a good, entertaining story too. Besides unlike K-On! or Hidamari Sketch it doesn’t seem to be a slice of life title.
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Is it just me, or dose this whole scenario seem like something the manga club president from Genshiken would do.
That being said, I’ll give it my 3 ep. trial period and then make my judgement.
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What moé shows, or major franchise for that matter, haven’t already exploited fans like you explain how DC is doing here? I feel like this show stands out just because it’s being constructed as an “outlier” in the anime industry superstructure, as well as in and for a primarily English-language social space (ie., DC’s website).
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The exploitation of course is a part of the beast, and to some extent I don’t mind the idea that companies want to profit off of otaku.
The issue isn’t so much exploiting the fans as it is their method of doing so, in the sense that it feels like it’s all exploitation instead of exploitation plus other stuff of merit. Where most moe shows are kind of two-dimensional, this one seems one-dimensional.
But again, this is just my feeling based on the preview. It could very well change once I see the real thing. And it may set a good precedent for someone with as much money but a little more sense to throw his or her hat into production.
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