State of Anime in Europe

honru

Anyone every been over to France, Spain or any other European country to find generally more anime on terrestial TV and in shops?

When I was living in Italy during the summer, for example, Fist of the North Star was on every weekday at 6, and Ranma 1/2 was regular on MTV (yes, it sounds backward). Most anime was also thoroughly available in video stores. And France already have Miyasaki's Howl's Moving Castle in the cinema, not just before Ireland/UK, but the States too.

I have always had this impression that the rest of Europe are just more tolerable to anime in contrast to Ireland/UK and, to a lesser extent, the US (generally speaking). Even though Spirited Away did spur some interest into the general public (two years after it was orginally released in Japan I might add), there are still no decent anime stockists in Ireland. In comparison, in Italy I could walk into any old video store and pick up some anime, then arrive home and watch some more anime on the TV.

It just seems odd how it has become so common and normal in mainland Europe while still fairly niche here. Where did we go wrong?

Kain

It wouldn't be surpriseing that France has a lot of anime, its supposed to be the third biggest supplier of anime outside Japan. The only other two that are ahead of it are America (duh!) and Australia, and i've also heard that France is qicukly becoming a bigger supplier of anime then Australia.
It's kind of a pain, but since theres only a small community of anime fans in Ireland i don't think that many shops really see the point in having a large anime collection, since it will more then likely not sell to anyone who isn't a fan of the genre.

CuLT

Germany has Bebop etc on tv.

Don't worry, we're starting to attract quite a bit of attention with EirtaKon apparently. Anything you can do to spread the word on this can only help the overall situation

eoin5

Its true we are behind but theres loads of crap anime like pokemon, yu-gi-oh stc on telly here, in a couple of years time thatll expand out because fans of that stuff will have grown up a little.

honru

eoin5 wrote:

Its true we are behind but theres loads of crap anime like pokemon, yu-gi-oh stc on telly here, in a couple of years time thatll expand out because fans of that stuff will have grown up a little.

That's a valid point, never thought of that before.

Art_Wolf

I you look back a few years Pokemon was all you would get but there are now dozens of children's animes being played. We are slowly catching up...

EirtaKon is certianly bringing alot of interest - MVM are really behind us!

pingoo

France is big into anime because the phenomena started in 1980 with Captain Harlock and Mazinger Z, then all channels started to buy big animes coming from Japan such as Saint Seiya, Dragon Ball (it started really not long after Japan in France), Captain Tsubasa etc. We even had all sort of Japanese Sentai (Japanese name for Power Rangers Style show ) ... Anime is so big in France than even my dad is a huge fan and he is 56!!!! His reference are Saint Seiya and Hokuto No Ken so I must have taken over probably