Anime vs. Hollywood: The Last Refuge of Human Creativity

For years now, Western audiences have sensed trouble lurking beneath the glitzy veneer of Hollywood. The lights are still on, the studios still churn out billion-dollar blockbusters, and the press still insists the industry is healthy. But the soul has long since fled the undead revenant.

Where once, artists made stories that illuminated the human condition, we now have gray goo content generated by committee—or worse, machine.

That’s the crisis It’s a Gundam captures in his recent video “Anime: The Last Bastion of Creativity and the Western Problem.”

His premise is simple: Japanese creators are still making art that entertains, and even moves, audiences. Meanwhile, the West recycles product for a moribund culture.

The comparison has become unavoidable. When Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle outgrosses Superman and Fantastic Four combined, you know that forces beyond market dynamics are at work. We’re watching a civilizational inversion wherein the old cultural center has rotted, and life flourishes only at the periphery.

Nor is Hollywood’s decline an accident. It’s the logical endpoint of a spiritual bankruptcy that has infected every layer of Western cultural production. Corporate art follows the pattern of corporate man: unable to believe in anything transcendent, he fills the void with technical spectacle and empty moral signaling.

We can’t even call the result bad art. It’s anti-art spawned from a spreading strain of aesthetic entropy.

Art in the Christian West was once an act of participation in divine creation. From the cathedrals to the great novels, artists sought to reveal the order, beauty, and moral structure revealed in the world.

That metaphysical foundation made creativity possible. A cosmos with telos invites exploration; a meaningless universe can only be copied, not unveiled.

Hollywood severed itself from this wellspring long ago. When you reduce man to a bundle of appetites and the world to an airport terminal duty-free store, your art becomes propaganda or parody. “Representation” replaces revelation. Empty spectacle substitutes for vision.

In contrast, the best of Japan’s creators still see the world as enchanted. Even when they aren’t consciously religious, their works are infused with moral tension between duty and desire, body and spirit, mundanity and transcendence.

Image: Kentaro Miura

A show like Demon Slayer strikes a chord in the West because it assumes there is good and evil; that courage and purity aren’t just abstrctions. Western entertainment, enslaved to irony and ideology, has forgotten how to portray those timeless themes.

It’s a Gundam’s video also highlights a telling symbol of this decay: A.I.-generated subtitles are rife on Crunchyroll. The same corporate mindset that turned Western movies into algorithmic mush now infects the anime industry as it’s absorbed by global megacorps.

The A.I. subtitle debacle is a microcosm of art’s ongoing mechanization. The algorithm can produce coherent sentences, but it cannot know their meaning. In short, it can’t love what it imitates. That’s why corporate attempts to automate storytelling always end in absurdity.

When Japanese fans revolt against Western censorship and localization, they may think they’re just defending authenticity, but what they’re also doing is insisting that art retain meaning. Translation used to be a sacred duty to bridge cultures. Now, it’s a tool for ideological filtration.

As It’s a Gundam points out, Western companies rewrite dialogue, invert morals, and sanitize themes to align with our dying elite’s neuroses. It’s no coincidence that this cultural imperialism parallels the political decay now running rampant in the West.

But anime’s success isn’t some arcane secret. It’s simply due to Japan still knowing how to tell stories.

Screen cap: Sunrise

The key difference is moral seriousness. My Hero Academia might feature superpowered teens, but it grapples with courage in the face of adversity and dealing with the burden of legacy. Compare that thematic maturity to Disney’s endless output of ironic, self-deconstructing parodies where no one believes in anything.

When the West rejects beauty, order, and truth, it rejects the conditions that allow art to begin with. Prince Myshkin’s line from The Idiot “Beauty will save the world” is proving prophetic. Because beauty is a manifestation of divine order. To make a work of beauty is to cooperate, however imperfectly, with the Creator of all.

Current Year Hollywood cannot make beauty because it no longer believes in the sacred.

Anime, by contrast, often moves the viewer toward the sort of wonder that echoes the transcendent. Even its violence and sorrow point upward. The wonder is that, for all its secularization, Japan’s main art form insists there is something higher than self-gratification, and that truth and virtue are worth dying for.

Even Western elites now sense that anime is the only corner of mass culture that still attracts loyalty. Their first impulse, as always, is to consume what they cannot create. That’s why Sony and Netflix are buying anime studios and planning live-action adaptations nobody asked for.

But the pattern is already written: Whatever the big studios touch dies. They cannot comprehend that anime’s appeal lies in its difference from Western media. In chasing an ephemeral aesthetic or format, Hollywood is missing the essential moral coherence and craftsmanship. Strip those elements away, and you’re left with the same empty skinsuit IP they’ve made of every other global franchise.

If you want to predict the future, watch what the captured institutions of the West try to assimilate. Then, look elsewhere for new life. The artists who will carry the torch aren’t in Burbank or Soho. They’re drawing storyboards in Tokyo, coding visual novels in Krakow, and publishing serialized fiction on Substack.

When Western audiences flock to Demon Slayer, they are not escaping reality but seeking it. They’re drawn to worlds where virtue matters, where beauty redeems, and where the human soul still stands in relation, however distant, to the divine. That’s why anime feels alive: It remembers what art is for.

So do not mourn Hollywood’s collapse. We are witnessing the death of a culture that destroyed meaning in a foolish attempt to manufacture its own. But the creative flame hasn’t gone out, it’s just migrated eastward for now.

What It’s a Gundam calls the “last bastion of creativity” serves as a reminder: You cannot automate subcreation. When the West rediscovers that truth; when we again make art that points toward transcendence, then beauty may indeed save the world.

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Brian Niemeier is a best-selling novelist, editor, and Dragon Award winner with over a decade in newpub. For direct, in-person writing and editing insights, join his Patreon.