Anime Explosion!

by Drazen, Patrick

  Once a ball starts rolling in pop culture, however, there’s no predicting it. No one could have predicted, for example, that Rumiko Takahashi’s manga Ranma ½ would run for ten years, or that her next work, InuYasha, would run for twelve years. The popularity of J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books in Japan was predictable; less predictable was the number of works inspired, directly or indirectly, by Harry, including Witch Hunter Robin, Ojamajo Doremi, Negima! Magister Negi Magi!, Maburaho, Sugar Sugar Rune. . . .

  So any look at pop culture is a snapshot of a moving object. You can catch a look at it at that moment and only at that moment. The problem comes from trying to generalize from one such snapshot. That’s going to affect the conclusions, especially since pop culture can be so temporary. A study of manga and anime in the late 1970s, for instance, might tempt the observer to believe that, thanks to Star Wars, science fiction and outer space were dominant themes; a look at the early twenty-first century preoccupation with magical comedies and vampire romances (from Chibi Vampire to Vampire Knight to Millennium Snow) would be making a similar mistake. Anime, and the manga that gave rise to them, has been home to many genres, from domestic comedies to sports dramas, from history to romance.

  One way to check all this is to remember that Japanese culture goes back about 3,000 years. Religious mythology, regional folktales, histories from one or both sides of various conflicts, modern “urban legends;” these and more feed into a pop culture and get reflected back, and it’s surprising how echoes of the past keep popping up in Japan’s anime present. Stories are linked to the Shinto legend of the sun goddess Amaterasu, to folktales about Urashima the fisherman, to the heroic “Peach Boy” Momotaro, to the despotic sixteenth century warlord Nobunaga Oda who allowed his friend’s mother to die and thus sealed his own fate.

  Finding these stories, and more, salted through Japanese cartoons made me realize that these media were anything but childish and trivial, as comic books and cartoons in the West have the reputation for being. This is storytelling on a very different order from the Brothers Grimm or Shakespeare or Jane Austen—sources that, among others, are also part of anime. Western animators are beginning to recognize these other literary sources. For the time being, they may be trying to stretch the medium to cover the amount of ground anime already covers.

  In examining the state of the anime art for this second edition, I ran into the same dilemma I faced writing the original book: every new avenue of research suggested several others. In expanding the chapter on Masamune Shirow, creator of Appleseed and Ghost in the Shell, I ran into the newer CG versions of the stories, both of which led me through the Uncanny Valley. There was the global popularity of Fullmetal Alchemist, the passing of director Satoshi Kon, and the grand old men of anime replaced by the Grande Dames: Rumiko Takahashi and the CLAMP collective, rolling merrily on into interesting new projects in the twenty-first century.

  The physical media of anime went through major changes in the decade between this book’s two editions. Computer-generated animation requires its own chapter. There was also lots of drama in consumer video media. Home videocassettes were the breakthrough that made exposure to hundreds of anime titles possible, yet by the year 2005 videocassettes were a dying medium, as Digital Video Discs (DVDs) came into their own. The advantages of the new technology, introduced in 1995, were easy to see: the disc was no larger than a music CD, compared to the Laserdisc predecessor, which was the size of an old vinyl long-playing record album; it was easily indexed, so that particular scenes could be located and played as the viewer desired; the content wouldn’t degrade over time (or get eaten by a malfunctioning machine); and, even though DVDs needed a special player at first, by 2005 DVDs could be played back on home PCs and even game platforms, which increasingly came equipped with the proper kind of hardware and software for playback.

  By the time this preface was written, the format war between VHS and Betamax videocassettes was as distant a memory as videocassettes themselves.1 However, not all was quiet on the DVD front. The next war between two incompatible formats may have been shorter, but was no less partisan. DVDs were challenged by so-called Blu-ray technology (a variation of DVDs that uses a blue-light laser to read the disc; since blue light has a shorter wavelength than red light, a Blu-ray disc can store more information, thus enhancing picture quality. By the way, the name is spelled “blu” because “blue” is a commonly used word that therefore can’t be copyrighted.) By 2010 Blu-ray was acknowledged as technically superior, but movies and TV series were still being released in redundant formats—in part because DVDs could still be played on so many platforms.

  Yet even this advance in the media of anime was fated to be eclipsed. As this introduction is being written, the new mountaintop, so to speak, is “streaming.” Consumer demand for video has become extremely demanding; people want to watch what they want, whenever and wherever they want, using any kind of technology from computers to cellular telephones. When the first edition of this book appeared, the Blockbuster video rental franchise still ruled; as of this writing, Blockbuster is in bankruptcy reorganization, the Netflix company which rents out DVDs through mail has taken over the consumer market, but both are also changing their delivery systems to provide streaming video on demand. The wars aren’t over yet.

  Will there be a third edition of this book in another decade? Possibly, since pop culture never stands still. I have no way of predicting what could be added, since it hasn’t happened yet. It’s hard to imagine what technical advances haven’t already happened. Ten years ago computers ran on small floppy disks, which replaced larger floppy disks; now a piece of plastic smaller than my finger, using a USB connection rather than serial or parallel port, holds four gigabytes worth of files, and it costs less than a paperback book. Speaking of which, publishing itself is going through monumental changes, with the introduction of “virtual book” platforms like the Kindle, Blackberry, iPad, Barnes & Noble Nook. . . . Most of these are as big as their paper-and-cardboard ancestors, and (when they work) they come close to the experience of reading an actual book.

  But there’s a problem there. There are many kinds of virtual books, most with proprietary software, and getting people to choose among incompatible formats will look like the VHS/Betamax debate on steroids. This will involve anime and manga in the primary legal debate (I believe) of the twenty-first century: What is information? Can it be owned? Can it be copied, and does a simple but unauthorized copy constitute theft? And will the West follow Japan’s lead and tolerate amateur use of existing characters rather than attack them with an army of lawyers? Perhaps some of the plotlines crafted for the TV series based on Shirow’s Ghost in the Shell will be played out someday in an international court, over anime or manga.

  Meanwhile, the anime skies are crowded: witches are flying on brooms, spaceships are flying from planet to planet, vampires fly in bat shapes through the night sky, the eccentric aircraft designs of Hayao Miyazaki are up there as well, and even Tetsuwan Atom flies by every decade or so to remind us how an industry so large, so complicated, and so globally entertaining could have grown from something so small.

  1. This marketing competition between two Japanese consumer electronics giants, Sony (inventor of Betamax) and Japan Victor Company (inventor of VHS), was once debated as hotly as the most partisan political issues. Yet, in the “Speak Like a Child” episode of the 1999 anime series Cowboy Bebop, the only source of information on this war in the future is a (literally) underground nerd who collects antique videocassette players—a video otaku (obsessed fan).

  Acknowledgments

  Writing this book was a bit like being a manga artist: just me, my thoughts, and my pen (my word processor, actually). But, just as it takes lots of people to turn manga into anime, it took a lot of people to bring this book into being.

  First credit has to go to my wife, Carlos (yes, that’s her name; long story . . .), for her patience, persistence, and encouragement that kept things moving. She passed aw
ay in 2011, and I still miss her.

  Many thanks also to my brother Dan, who mailed me a few random pages of Weekly Shonen King manga magazine back in the ’80s, giving me a hint of the depth and breadth of Japanese popular culture.

  I owe a debt beyond words to the folks at Stone Bridge Press, who decided to take a chance on a novice’s manuscript. All credit is due to publisher Peter Goodman, assistant Alden Harbour Keith, publicists Miki Terasawa and Dulcey Antonucci, and especially editor David Noble. It’s tough enough to get a manuscript from the inbox to the bookstore; it gets harder when the author lives 2,000 miles away, and business has to be conducted by e-mail, FedEx, fax, and occasional phone calls. My hat is off to the whole crew.

  My editor’s job was simplified by having a few friends beta-read the manuscript chapters for mistakes of fact or grammar, or just bad writing that needed to be improved. Thanks go to Daniel Drazen, Donald Dortmund, Anjum Razaq, Jennifer Gedonius, Chris Barr, Lynda Feng, and Claire Peterik.

  There are also many, many anime industry reps I have dealt with while getting permission to use images to illustrate the first edition of this book, on both sides of the Pacific Ocean. Whether these dealings bore fruit or not, it was a valuable lesson, and I got to deal with a lot of very nice people. So, in no particular order, I’d like to thank: Julie Ninomiya of Kodansha Publishing; Kazuko Shiraishi of Gainax; Rena Ikeda and Shigehiko Sato of Fuji Creative Corp.; Ryan Gagerman of D.I.C.; Dallas Middaugh, David Newman, Rika Inouye, and Koichi Sekizaki of Viz Communications; Kenichiro Zaizen of Amuse Pictures; Junko Kusunoki of AIC; John O’Donnell, Luis Perez, and Mike Lackey of Central Park Media; Minoru Kotoku of Tezuka Productions; Chieko Matsumoto of Mushi Production Co.; Stephen M. Alpert of Studio Ghibli; Scott Carlson and Anita Thomas of AnimEigo, Inc.; Kris Kleckner of The Right Stuf, Inc.; Bruce Loeb and David Weinstock of Pokémon USA; Tak Onishi at Japan Video and Media; Fred Patten; Jerry Chu and Jason Alnas from Bandai; Matt Perrier at Manga Entertainment: Anna Bechtol, Corey Henson, and Ken Wiatrek of ADV Films; Meredith Mulroney of Media Blasters; Sara Bush of Nintendo of America; Maki Terashima of Production IG; Danielle Garnier and Matt Perrier of Manga Entertainment; Libby Chase of Harmony Gold USA, Inc.; and Tom Devine of NuTech Digital, Inc. Also thanks to Elizabeth Kirkindall of Big-Big-Truck.com for the great cover.

  This book is dedicated to my nieces—Mica J Powers and Nana Asantewaa Armah—and the upcoming generation of anime fans:

  “It’s gonna be your world!”

  (from the theme to Cardcaptor Sakura)

  P.D.

  Part One:

  Interpreting Anime

  A Page Right Out of History

  American fans of Japanese animation wouldn’t have Pokémon, Akira, or Totoro to enjoy if it weren’t for Walt Disney, cable television, and the VCR. An informal history of anime in the United States, going back to 1963.

  A lot of Japanese anime—not all of it by any means, but certainly more than animation in the West—is aimed at viewers with double-digit ages and triple-digit IQs. As they did with automobiles, the Japanese have taken an American creation and reworked it into something far beyond what its creators considered to be the state of the art. Toontown, like Detroit, has to play some serious catch-up if it wants to stay in the game.

  Hooray for Hollywood

  Ironically, there would be no animation in Japan or anywhere else had it not been pioneered and developed in the United States shortly after movies themselves were invented. Of the two mainstay studios in American animation between the World Wars, one didn’t last very long. Brothers Max and Dave Fleischer had some very popular characters to their credit. These included the animated versions of the Superman comic book and of the newspaper comic Popeye, and especially the cartoon vamp Betty Boop. Max Fleischer also invented the rotoscoping technique of filming live actors, then drawing cartoons based on their movements. This accounted for the realistic look of the title character in the 1939 Fleischer feature Gulliver’s Travels, while the little people of Lilliput and Blefuscu were blatantly cartoony.

  The top of the animation mountain, of course, was Walt Disney. He pioneered sound and color, as well as avant-garde techniques that would hardly ever be used again. If people anywhere in the world saw animation at all before 1941, it was probably Disney animation. Disney broke new ground with the 1937 feature-length Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. For the next four decades Hollywood animated features followed the lead of Walt Disney in treating animation as a “family” medium: targeted at children, but with the occasional bit of in-joking dialogue or eye candy for the grownups who brought the children into the theater in the first place. (And singing; don’t forget singing. That deserves its own chapter, especially in light of Japan’s take on pop music and anime. For now, suffice it to say that, because Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was structured along the lines of European operetta, with songs aplenty, some animated features in the West still feel obliged—sixty years later—to break into song every five minutes, even if there’s no particular reason.)

  However, cartoons in the West were often just a sideshow. Animation before television, after all, usually meant theatrical short subjects, and the only place to see animation was at the movies.

  The Doctor Is In

  At first the Japanese took their cues on animation from the same medium American television animation did: Disney’s animated theatrical short subjects and feature films. But Disney’s early animation—both the artistic technique and the humanist philosophy—became the subjects of study as well as entertainment for a medical student named Osamu Tezuka (1925–89). His nickname—manga no kamisama (“God of Comics”)—is no exaggeration. His forty years as a cartoonist saw massive changes in the form and content of Japanese comic books, changes usually traced back to innovations by Dr. Tezuka himself. His manga (an estimated career total of 150,000 pages) used storytelling devices influenced not only by Disney but also by French New Wave cinema. In fact, “cinema” is the key word; with their use of panning shots, extreme close-ups, time-lapse, flashbacks, and other cinematic devices, Japanese comics literally exploded off of the paper they were printed on.1

  The transition to television animation was thus a short and simple one. It was helped along when Dr. Tezuka created Japan’s first animated TV superstar. While Mickey Mouse, Tom and Jerry, and Bugs Bunny were created for the movies and then found life on American television, a robot that looked like a young boy moved from the comic-book pages directly to the small screen, and promptly became one of the most memorable characters of all time, on both sides of the Pacific. Published in Japan for years as Tetsuwan Atomu (The Mighty Atom) and animated by Tezuka’s own Mushi Productions studio, he’s still remembered outside Japan as Astro Boy. With spiky hair, eyes as big as fists, rockets in his feet, and machine-guns in his butt, Atomu was a new kind of robot for a post-Occupation Japan. His enemies aren’t just bug-eyed monsters from outer space—he has the ability to tell if people are good or evil just by looking at them, so he spends time with law enforcement as well as his family. (He was originally created by a mad scientist to replace the scientist’s son, killed in a traffic accident, but by the end of the series Atomu acquired two robot parents and two younger siblings.)

  Watching Astro Boy here and now, and especially Astro Boy’s initial episode, first broadcast in 1963, is something that will stay with you even in the wake of high-tech marvels such as Akira and Ghost in the Shell.

  At times the black-and-white pictures are as primitive as an old Popeye short; at times the graphic quality rises to the level of Dumbo. But there is also the overall difference from typical Western storytelling, whose joys cannot be overstated. Watch Atomu rise up from the laboratory table. This isn’t a parody of Frankenstein movies; this is the creation of a life—tentative, inquisitive, singular. Something in the way he moves and gestures tells us that, at some level, this really is a wide-eyed child taking his first steps. Look at the castoff performers at the Robot Circus, consigned to the junk heap only because
cute is boring. Consider the ringmaster as a low-rent Stromboli from Pinocchio; then watch as the Robot Circus burns down, and as Atomu rescues the ringmaster. From his hospital bed, the ringmaster finds out who saves him—a scene that would lead immediately to repentance in the West—but then the sonovabitch still claims he owns Atomu, in spite of robots having been granted civil rights. (Unlike Disney features, which didn’t try to be topical except for a few pop culture references, Tetsuwan Atomu consciously and deliberately mirrored the American civil rights struggles of the day. It’s hard to think of an American television series—live or animated—that did the same, and it’s equally hard to think of a twentieth-century Disney movie that could be called “topical.”)2

  They’re Coming to America

  Not long after its premiere on Japanese TV on the first day of 1963, Atomu made the jump to American television. Back in the early 1960s, most TV stations in the United States were not even on the air twenty-four hours a day, and the notion of cable TV with hundreds of channels was the stuff of science fiction. This was a time of growth and expansion, however, with color broadcasting just around the corner. The growing need for programming coincided with the experimental approach in those days of broadcasters who were willing to try just about anything. Anime were especially welcome because of their lack of ethnic specificity. One of the conventions of anime (to be discussed later) was to draw characters as if they were American, or at least white. Even if the characters were supposed to be Japanese, they seldom looked Japanese. Thus, translation was no trouble at all; characters could be renamed, relationships and motivations juggled, and plots rewritten with relative ease. This became a major consideration later, when Japanese plots and pictures went far beyond what was permitted by American broadcast standards.3 Astro Boy flew across the American tube from 1963 to 1964, and his cartoon countrymen grabbed their passports, changed their names and followed in short order.4 The giant robot Tetsujin 28-go, based on a manga by Mitsuteru Yokoyama, hit the West in 1965 as Gigantor. He was not, however, the star of the show—this robot, unlike Atomu, was not a sentient being but a huge (forty-foot-tall) machine controlled by a small boy, the son of the inventor. This created an archetype for several “a boy and his robot” series to follow, from Johnny Socko to Evangelion.