Analysis of Animes Released in 2000-2003

I will briefly take a break from all the anime of the decade analysis and dive into a new topic that I have been working on. Having worked on all the anime people love enough to mention as the best of the decade, it left me wondering, how many shows are there really out there?

This led me to start compiling data of all the animes basing it on the the wikipedia page that list all the animes produced by year. It also has all the data so far that I find useful for other analysis like demographic, year released, director. It is a rather time-consuming exercise so I have only managed to cover 2000-2003 so far. The rest will follow. Also, do let me know if there is any other website which may offer a more comprehensive animes that were released by year. I still have to browse around Anime News network to cross-check the wiki list but so I may have to update this number later in case wikipedia is not as all-knowing as I hope it is… As for the date, I have categorized each one based on their release date in Japan, which is consistent with how I treat the top anime list.

First, let’s look at the total number of productions during these four years

Year	Movie	OAV	Series	Total
2000	11	19	40	71
2001	18	42	71	131
2002	23	37	69	129
2003	14	36	76	126
Total	66	134	256	456

A few observations from this:

1). Number of shows: total number of shows in 2000 is over 50% lower than the next three years. I may come around to do this for 1999 and earlier to see whether 2001 is just a year that the number of shows really pick up. This uptick in show also seems very consistent over 2001-3

2). Type: In these four years, strictly by the number of shows, it follows the pattern: Series>OAV>Movie. It makes a lot of sense that there are consistently less movies being produced since they tend to be more high-budget than the other two formats. This trend is 14% – 39% – 56%

3).Length: Next is to look at the breakdown of the non-movie releases into different length bucket. I group the series according to their lengths (’13-episode’ are all those series around 10-20eps; ’26-episode’ are 21-30eps; ‘long series’ are 31+).  The pie chart below shows the average number of series of each bucket over the four-year period. OAV (the shortest format typically) has the most count, followed by 13-ep, 26-ep and long series in that order. It’s interesting to see that there really are essentially as many 13 episode series as 26 episodes.

4).Animation production studio: Another interesting aspect to look at is the count of anime for each animation production studio. Below are the list of the 10 studios with the most releases during 2000-3. Although there are 110 studios that produced anime in these 4 years, the top 10 actually account for nearly half of all the releases (some economy of scale effect at work here). Madhouse and Sunrise led by quite a bit, producing about 7 releases per year. Toei has a lot of releases but only 1 is in any of the top anime list I compiled (Saint Seiya: Hades OAV). 6 off its 17 releases came from Digimon franchise though. Another mild surprise is how many releases Studio Pierrot, Studio DEEN or Xebec pushed out. I just have not had much exposure to them prior to doing all these articles.

Animation Studio	Movie	OAV	Series	Total	Per year
Madhouse	3	4	20	27	7
Sunrise	4	5	17	26	7
Studio Pierrot	1	5	14	20	5
Studio DEEN	–	4	16	20	5
Toei Animation	6	2	11	19	5
J.C. Staff	–	4	15	19	5
Gonzo	–	3	15	18	5
Xebec	1	4	7	12	3
Production I.G	2	3	5	10	3
Pink Pineapple	–	10	–	10	3
% of total	46%	37%	49%	45%

6). Demographic: I don’t think this will come as a surprise to anyone. Out of all the anime that I can categorize, The market is dominated by shounen (young male) which makes up 50% while about 30% comes from seinen (older male). Shoujo (young female) is third and kodomo (kid) and josei (older female) round off the remaining 5%

[terminologies refer to the target audience the said animes are aiming at]

7). Hentai: Other interesting thing to look at is the number of hentais (animation porn essentially) being produced in each year. Hentais are in all cases I have come across so far released as OAVs (makes sense considering that even in Japan they probably won’t release such materials on air at night!). This makes up consistently around 20% of all OAVs produced during the four years. Basically, one in 17 titles being released during those periods are hentais. Is that a lot?

Here it is for now. There are a few more things I want to write about (directors, genre, original source, prevelence of sequel/franchise) and also the comparison of this universe with the best of the decade list, but it will have to be for another post. Furthermore, once I have gotten around to inputting the data for the remaining years, I will update all these charts, tables and analysis accordingly. I am pretty interested to see whether these trends we see above will change substantially when the remaining 6 years are added in. Please bear with me:)

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