"Anime Was a Mistake"

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About

"Anime Was a Mistake" is a troll quote misattributed to Hayao Miyazaki, one of the most popular and influential Japanese artists and film directors in anime history, that conveys a strong sense of disdain towards the art of anime and its fanbase at large, including those who identify themselves with weeaboo and otaku subcultures.

Origin

The troll quote stems from the transcript of Miyazaki's interview with the Japanese news site Golden Times^[2], published on January 27th, 2014. During the interview, Miyazaki expressed skepticism regarding the current state of anime as an art form and a cultural industry, particularly how little the new generation of animators are seeking inspiration from actually observing human behaviors and interactions in real life. On January 30th, a translation of the original interview was provided by English-language Japanese news site RocketNews24.^[1]

You see, whether you can draw like this or not, being able to think up this kind of design, it depends on whether or not you can say to yourself, ‘Oh, yeah, girls like this exist in real life. If you don’t spend time watching real people, you can’t do this, because you’ve never seen it. Some people spend their lives interested only in themselves. Almost all Japanese animation is produced with hardly any basis taken from observing real people, you know. It’s produced by humans who can’t stand looking at other humans. And that’s why the industry is full of otaku!.

Spread

On January 25th 2015, Tumblr blog old-japanese-men posted two animated GIFs containing images of Miyazaki from 2013 documentary The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness. They are captioned with made-up quotes expressing extreme dissatisfaction with the state of anime and otaku culture. As of March 11th 2016 the post has 271,725 notes.^[9]

The next day, Imgur user Ondaheightsofdespair submitted the two GIFs of Miyazaki in a post titled "Old sage drops some wisdom." It quickly reached the front page of Imgur, receiving over 8,800 points.^[3]