Because that's what Japan looks like, duh! Any place in Japan has basically power lines all over the place, even in cities like Tokyo.
And also because it's easy to draw and show for 5 seconds in every anime to save on the precious animation budget because it's super static and goes everywhere. Added bonus it can be added into any decor and you would not notice it's the same pattern imported all over again in between animes.
It is true that it is what Japan looks like but it is still interesting to see how detailed the depiction is.
Compare to the Simpsons for instance. It is set in present day American suburbs, but it doesn't look at all like a photograph. All the small details are missing unless they are relevant to the story.
In the west, even if real life photographs, power lines are commonly seen as a nuisance and avoided, or even edited out.
It is clearly a different approach to animation. I think we can make the parallel the way hands are drawn. 4 fingers for western animation (simplified), 5 for anime (realistic).
The animation budget argument makes sense, and it certainly a good explanation for pylon or railway crossing shots. But I don't think it explains everything, both obscure series and big-budget animation films have their fair share of power lines.
>4 fingers for western animation (simplified), 5 for anime (realistic).
Anime is all about cutting costs, time and work... much of the anime aesthetic evolved from the same cost cutting methods as Disney employed by cutting a few fingers off of Mickey Mouse. The (in)famous elevator scene in Evangelion[0], for instance, was as much about Gainax saving money as it was minimalist storytelling. There's even a word for the rare times anime isn't lazy (sakuga.)
And apparently, Japanese media (anime and games) avoids 4 fingered hands because it implies a connection with the Yakuza or Burakumin. Some Western properties have had to redesign their character models and artwork to add an extra digit when exporting to Japan because of that.
I remember watching Full Metal Panic! ( Which after 10 years is finally getting its ending series this Summer ), there were lots of scene in Hong Kong where, it was exactly the same as in real life, so much that even small details like stairs and windows cover were exactly the same.
Turns out the crew went to Hong Kong for a week and actually filmed everything out as well as taking lots of Photos, before sitting down and draft out the action and anime.
> It is clearly a different approach to animation. I think we can make the parallel the way hands are drawn. 4 fingers for western animation (simplified), 5 for anime (realistic).
According to this video, a large reason for not using 4 fingers is related to a caste system in Japan.
That's exactly their point. The average-to-low-budget (as well as unpopular) anime still has power line shots all over because that's just what they do. On average, our establishing shots in our (Western) cartoons just aren't as detailed. Obviously popularity and quality are not hand in hand, and The Simpsons is one of, if not the most popular cartoon show of all time.
The Simpson has massively better animation than The regular tv anime in Japan. Most animes have very few animated frames and instead revolve on fixed backgrounds, scrolling, voice over and only lips moving now and then. Good animation is expensive to produce and most animes are made with very few resources and time. When a good one makes it, its nothing short of a miracle.
Let me introduce you to a concept called "pencil mileage".
Simply put, for a budget of $x, your crew can draw $y miles of lines. How do you use these to fill out the huge number of images you need to produce?
In the West, the solution has historically been to simplify your drawings as much as humanly possible so that you can have a lot of them; we tend to want to have everything constantly moving and changing. Our characters tend to be the barest collection of broad details to distinguish one from another; we are loathe to drop below shooting "on twos"^1.
In the East, they took a different path: They want complicated drawings. So one drawing will linger on the screen a lot longer, pushing up against the moment where a drawing "goes dead"^2 a lot harder. Often you'll build up to a small handful of lavishly animated scenes, where most of the episode's budget is blown at the climax of the episode.
I was raised in the Western tradition^3, and it took a long time to learn to see the craftsmanship and love in Eastern animation. I'm glad I did; I've seen some really powerful and compelling stories that I wouldn't have seen in Western work.
(There are of course broad generalizations, you can find increasing amounts of Western work that's heavily influenced by Eastern animation, and probably vice-versa as well. You can also find expensive shows and cheap shows all over the world.)
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1: exposing every drawing twice, for an effective frame rate of 12 (animators still like to think in film's 24fps)
2: If a character is moving, then goes perfectly still, there is this weird moment when your brain stops registering it as "something alive that has stopped moving for a moment" and starts registering it as "a static drawing". It's really creepy to see happen.
3: and even spent most of a decade working in it
I couldn't quickly find a link/reference, but I remember reading a couple years ago that, when shown images/photographs, in the West we spend most of our time looking at the foreground objects, while in the East (might have been Chinese specifically who were tested?), they look at the background more than westerners (which is not to say that they look at the background more than the foreground)
> Any place in Japan has basically power lines all over the place, even in cities
For the record, there is an ongoing debate in Japanese urban centres on whether these lines should be placed underground for good.
They are a function of the astonishingly rapid development Japan underwent in previous decades, when nobody really cared about details like the urban landscape because they had "more important things to worry about". There is an argument that, now that wild development is over, it's time to move on and improve regulations for stuff like this.
The counter-argument is that anything underground in Japan will suffer from continuous earthquake activity; that it has become a distinct characteristic of modern Japanese life (precisely thanks to depictions in all sorts of media); and that it would be extremely expensive and hard to scale, since Japanese density in urban centres is so massive. The current system can look ugly, but it works, it's very flexible and cheap, and it's pretty easy to repair.
Eh, there's a certain argument to be made and considered.
Manhattan only started mandating buried lines back in the telegraph era, because every time it snowed a bunch of lines went down and electrocuted people. Eventually you've got to say enough is enough and cut that shit out.
I assume if Tokyo had the problem to the same degree as Manhattan it would already be fixed. If it doesn't, then you're evaluating a more complicated set of trade-offs.
It's kinda different though. Worst that can happen if a pipe bursts is a lot of water here and there, maybe some subsuming after a long time. Power lines could start fires, or create electrical hazards.
Sewer lines underground can be a complete nightmare and post earthquake Christchurch had an hell of a time with liquefaction.
Having sewage come out the ground with every aftershock is nasty, and the aftershocks lasted well over a year with 10,000+ and hundreds of thousands of tons of silt produced.
Japan has a lot of reclaimed land too and this ground is vastly more prone to the problem.
This is a reasonable hypothesis but it just doesn't hold water. If true you'd expect to see power lines in anime across all generations which we don't. The suddenly become ubiquitous after the Evangelion franchise popped into existence.
I only went to Japan once, but I was struck by the power grid in a way that has made me notice it everywhere ever since. We went out to a ski resort in the summer (Fuji Rock) and even out in the mountains there were giant, modern pylons all over the place. A huge contrast to rural New Jersey.
This - my brother lives in Tokyo and for a time lived on a street that had pylons running down the middle with a little park running underneath them - it was considered a pretty nice place to live due to the park and green space that it had - even though you were bang next to a pylon.
It is not just Japan but also South Korea with power lines everywhere. Yet they mask some of their cell towers to look like trees, mostly saw them closer to the DMZ.
That, plus attention to detail is just part of the Japanese culture. There's a higher density, very little wasted space, and a slightly smaller scale of the built environment there that always strikes me as having a "storybook" feel, for lack of better words. Manga and anime communicate it quite well visually.
[edit] Not directly related but I find it encouraging that the number of houses and carports there with solar panels on the roof is remarkably high and seems to be increasing all the time.
I happens the same with cicadas. People abroad think that they are a kind of anime thing, but the reality is that anywhere you go in Japan in summer you will hear cicadas.
One thing is true however for cicadas (semi in Japan) is that there's a LOT of them in every single tree during summer, which makes them really, really noisy. I have seen cicadas in Provence in France but it was nowhere as noisy as in Japan.
I'm not sure it is. First, that forces you to put a serious effort in perspective. And then you just can't draw black lines, you need to draw the technical devices that they connect to (transformers or whatever). This requires either technical knowledge or ground research.
I assume they are talking animation-wise. While it may be a complicated picture to draw, most of the power line shots are still shots, which means they only have to draw the power lines once. Static pans across a background are a classic way to save the precious precious animation budget.
And also because it's easy to draw and show for 5 seconds in every anime to save on the precious animation budget because it's super static and goes everywhere. Added bonus it can be added into any decor and you would not notice it's the same pattern imported all over again in between animes.