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While taken for granted now, the availability and widespread appeal of anime in the 2000s was still approaching international mainstream status. This is despite the era birthing some of the medium's most iconic evergreen franchises alongside niche favorites. However, despite this continued rise even following the growth from the '70s, '80s, and '90s, 2000s anime fans still saw common struggles.
Anime now has its own dedicated streaming services, hundreds of thousands flock to massive conventions like Anime Expo in Los Angeles, and it's even more dominant in the box office than when Spirited Away captured Oscar gold. While the new era comes with new challenges and frustrations such as the use of AI, the nostalgic 2000s weren't all roses, either.
Anime Ending Too Soon or Getting Cancelled
While the new era is seeing this rectified, such as with a remade Spice and Wolf series finally venturing into unadapted territory, many series did not get the same grace. Everybody has a favorite series that was cancelled or ended too soon, like Ouran High School Host Club, or other classics like Zatch Bell. It's a sore subject for fans.
Everybody has a favorite series that was cancelled or ended too soon, like Ouran High School Host Club, or other classics like Zatch Bell.
A primary cause of this issue was a rush to adapt the source material and having to stop due to the manga simply not having enough content for a subsequent season. Some anime ended organically, like Hikaru no Go, despite then being followed by an OVA adapting more of the manga yet still not catching up to the last chapter.
Physical Media Was a Different Struggle in the 2000s
Before the era of streaming, if one was interested in finding anime that wasn't broadcast locally, they often had to buy corresponding DVDs. While Blu-rays for anime are still quite expensive, with Berserk 2016 costing arguably $70 too much on the Crunchyroll store, one often had to shell out ~$20-30+ USD per individual disc containing only a couple of episodes.
While this practice is still common in Japan, there has been something of a consolidation of prominent distributors for international consumers. AnimEigo, Crunchyroll, Discotek Media, Sentai Filmworks, and VIZ Media often offer more consolidated, albeit still pricey, collections. But don't get the older fans started on collecting VHS copies. That's a story for another day.
Censorship Ranged from Haphazard to Creative
Anime censorship in the 2000s was frankly hilarious when it came to Western audiences. This included infamous edits such as by 4Kids Entertainment which, while hilariously editing guns into angrily pointed fingers like for Bandit Keith, also created the iconic Shadow Realm. This was done to extend anime's appeal to kids, but this method arguably only sterilized it.
With examples like swapping Sanji's cigarettes for lollipops, and blood heavily cut down in Naruto, this was never a new phenomenon; just more pronounced with anime's increasing popularity. From Dragon Ball Z's editing of Hell to HFIL or "Home for Infinite Losers", to Cardcaptor Sakura's erasure of a same-sex relationship, censorship in localized anime has a long history.
Bad Dubs Were Common
While horrendous dubs existed plentifully decades before, with infamously, painfully bad examples like 1989's Cipher OVA, 2000s anime commodified bad dubs in some cases. Perhaps the most widely recognized 2000s-era example of this was the 4Kids dub phenomenon. While it's fun to reminisce about the One Piece opening rap, it butchered the anime early on in 2004.
Others, like Sonic X and Tokyo Mew Mew, were prominent examples of 4Kids trying too hard to make shows accessible for wider audiences. Japanese characters were inexplicably given implausible "Americanized" names like Shaman King's Manta being renamed Morty. While there were fun, even legendary examples of intentionally poor dubs like Ghost Stories, 2000s English dubs were inconsistent at best.
Modern Streaming Availability Is Dicey
Despite anime accounting for a massive amount of major streaming service traffic such as for Netflix, and driving the continuous success of Crunchyroll, older series can often fall to the wayside. Licensing is doubtlessly a big component to why some anime aren't widely available, or indeed available at all internationally to stream on demand, and for nostalgic fans, this hurts.
This results in series like the aforementioned Tokyo Mew Mew being difficult to track down.Fox Box-era shows, questionable quality or otherwise, are archived by intrepid fans in Fighting Foodons' case. Others, like Ayakashi: Samurai Horror Tales and famous seinen adaptations like 2008's iteration of Golgo 13 are unavailable. Even cyberpunk all-timers like Texhnolyze have to be purchased to stream.
Falling Behind on Weekly Shows Was Tricky
Depending on how available a TV with cable or network access was in a given home, younger audiences had greater difficulty catching up on the latest anime episodes. This can include extreme examples like Digimon Frontier's pre-dawn hours airtimes for UPN audiences, but even a 50-episode series wasn't as brutal as it could get.
Falling behind on a hit 2000s-era anime like Bleach or Naruto meant missing crucial episodes in many cases, with few to no options to watch said episodes without the right resources or DVD funds. While incredible fansubs emerged online, they were not strictly legal, no matter how elite their treatments of anime like, say, Hikaru no Go truly were.
Collecting Long Series Can Be Cumbersome
Beyond the financial cost and overall availability of physical media, they also simply take up a lot of space. The longer the series, the more media cabinet real estate they occupy, and this has never quite changed, with Boruto: Naruto Next Generations and One Piece carrying those torches into recent years.
Additionally, if one wanted to get into any corresponding manga, they'd have to hope it was available at their local book stores, or if lucky, their school library. In One Piece's case, some series are so comically long that collecting is an ambitious undertaking. Those curious about Kingdom would only find sketchy illegal prints before its English localization decades later.
Some 2000s Anime Don't Age Well
Despite prominent advertisements in contemporary magazines like VIZ's (now sadly defunct) Shonen Jump Magazine, anime like Love Hina don't hold up well to scrutiny. It comes off as a dated harem rom-com with questionably young female love interests with problematic tropes, while looking distinctly more modern than most anime of its time as an upside.
Others, like DinoZaurs from Sunrise, were clearly made to promote a line of Bandai toys which never really took off despite the anime releasing in 2000 on Fox Kids. Featuring the Gundam anime studio, and featuring robots that could transform into dinosaurs, it felt perfect for Western Transformers-loving audiences. However, its infusion of CGI into traditional 2D anime was horrible.
Manga Source Material Was Sometimes Rushed
Keeping up with the demands of an increasingly eager consumer base is a never-ending problem for anime fans beyond the 2000s. But for Tite Kubo, who needed to conclude the series in the face of declining health, this meant ending Bleach prematurely. With the anime also halting production in 2012, it felt ostensibly cancelled.
While everybody knows now that Bleach's anime is getting a far more gorgeous anime sendoff, mangaka crunch a persistent pain point for 2000s anime fans and beyond.
While everybody knows now that Bleach's anime is getting a far more gorgeous anime sendoff, mangaka crunch a persistent pain point for 2000s anime fans and beyond. Black Clover's creator, Yuki Tabata, managed to get out of that cycle by moving to Jump GIGA, but its anime had caught up to the manga too, its anime taking a noteworthy hiatus.
Of course, anime production in the 2000s had an even more infamous solution to this issue: filler.
The 2000s Featured Anime Filler at Its Worst
While the 2000s introduced One Piece fans to a beloved filler arc with G-8, it's also a controversial content substitute to allow the creators time to add more source material. A seasonal model was just not on the table for many of these top series at the time, and much of the decade's worst anime filler felt like banal time-wasters.
This includes inexplicable mecha side quests in Naruto: Shippuden, and loathed interludes like the Bount Arc in Bleach, not coincidentally the two most infamous anime franchises ever in terms of filler. At one point a pervasive issue for tentpole weekly anime, prominent filler is fading, especially as One Piece shifts to a seasonal model. It lasted far too long, though.
