Background Check

God, I don’t understand anime.

Unless you’ve been exposed to enough Japanese geek culture, which either generally comes from being a member of certain Western subcultures or deliberately seeking it out, it likely shouldn’t make sense, in the same way that Bollywood musicals seem largely odd to Western movie sensibilities.

That being said, Japan seems much less affected (but not completely unaffected) by many of the problems with Western pop culture mentioned in this very thread, which is why I find myself defending it.

To explain that particular clip:

1. Japanese creators haven’t forgotten that males and females largely have different tastes, and still make plenty of works largely tailored to specific audiences. Interestingly, the gender of the cast of a show tends to have little bearing on the gender of the target audience.
2. Japan produces a lot of content because it is comparatively cheap to make. My statistics predate the influx of money from American streaming services, but as recently as a decade ago the price given for a season of anime (13 episodes) was comparable to the price for an episode or two of the Simpsons (not known for its high quality).
3. With this large amount of content comes series tailored to niche audiences. Creators would rather make a good focused series for a target audience and hope it catches on with a wider audience than try to make a series for everyone and end up with lowest common denominator garbage.
4. As the audience on both sides of the Pacific tends toward the geeky, you get a number of geeky interests represented, such as military history. The challenge for the creators is to talk about World War Elev… Two without getting into the downer parts. In this case, someone with an interest in tanks made a series looking at tanks.
5. The closing credits (which this clip is), especially of lighter series, are prone to mixing a catchy tune with animation not representative of the series as a whole. Overly deformed cutesy characters are common in places where ‘realism’ isn’t an issue, such as in-series imagine spots, credits, and fourth-wall breaking episode previews.