OK, I didn't even watch this video beyond the intro, I'll admit, but this guy explains that he is as tired as I am of every promising new anime director being called "the next Miyazaki." He then mentions that studio Ghibli has been desperately looking for "the next Miyazaki" because their existence as a studio is in question if they can't find a successor. They've been looking for two decades and so far the answer seems to be "no one is the next Miyazaki."
Anyway, what I really wanted to yap about is this tendency to make these "X is the next Y" comparisons every time someone iconic retires or dies or (or in the case of Miyazaki and Michael Jordan, retires multiple times).
For a while there, every promising young basketball player was called "the next Michael Jordan."
I'm pretty sure that every young African-American electric guitar player in rock 'n roll was called "the next Jimi Hendrix" at least once. Heck, I'm old enough to remember when people said that about Prince.
Surely everyone knows this is tiresome, and yet people do it anyway. Why do you suppose that is?
People like what is familiar, and if they can keep what is familiar by convincing a person to model themselves as a successor of sorts then they can continue to enjoy whatever aspects of that thing they loved around for longer. Plus, they rather stupidly think no one can be unique all the while complaining when they are often grouped up with others of similar skills/standards/whatever else.
They also have great trouble with accepting non-normative or abnormal anything, even if it is not intrinsically harmful to anyone or anything, so anytime they can have a rather superficial comparison so they can feel calm in the knowledge nothing's
really going to change just because the next promising animator is now working for some studio, because that persons
got to have some similarity to the ones we love before, then maybe we'll have the same quality or quantity or something else we once prized.
People either never bothered to know or have forgotten that making such assumptions, as positive as they may
seem to the one holding the assumption can be even more damaging than negative assumptions due to the positive assumption being protected longer and harder at times than other assumptions, because what's the harm?
All Chinese people are good at math, all Japanese people have extreme work and health ethics, all quiet people are god listeners, and other bullshit has also lead to harm but because they meant it in a positive way they stick to it somewhat more than other ideas because they can stay calm and quiet without critical response since other people around them aren't thinking, first of the idea even has a basis, then if its true, and then whether or not there's any moral attachment to the conclusion.
Humans never liked doing things in order, I don't think, an maybe that's it, that when out of sequence they can start with their conclusion without bothering to form/look at their foundations.
Also . . . maybe this is all horseshit and they just really, really, want Miyazaki to defy logic and life and continue to exist perpetually whilst permanently churning out animated films for all eternity.
