Anime Explosion!

by Drazen, Patrick

  Dr. Tezuka followed up Astro Boy with several series based on his manga. The year 1965 alone saw Wonder Three and Kimba the White Lion (based on his manga series Jungle Emperor), as well as an animated special based on Shin Takarajima (New Treasure Island), the groundbreaking 1947 comic by Dr. Tezuka that literally changed the entire medium. In 1967 both the cross-dressing Princess Sapphire of Dr. Tezuka’s Ribon no Kishi (Princess Knight) and the Mifune family arrived on Japanese and American television. Teenager Go Mifune circled the globe driving the Mach 5, a highly advanced racecar, accompanied by his father, little brother, and girlfriend. If this seems familiar, it’s because reruns of Mach Go Go Go can still be seen on cable television under its American name, Speed Racer.5 By the late ’60s, though, American interest in Japanese animation had declined to almost zero.

  Anime: The Second Wave

  It wasn’t until 1979, in the wake of the popularity of George Lucas’s Star Wars, that another anime series hit American television, but its impact was considerable. Star Blazers, the animated version of Reiji Matsumoto’s Uchu Senkan Yamato (Space Cruiser Yamato), was a revelation, since it had a twenty-six-week story-arc, dwarfing its predecessors the way its namesake dwarfed other battleships.6 Whether or not television executives in the West anticipated it, some of the older kids in the audience were watching as much for the personal interaction (some characters die, others fall in love) as for the space battles against the Gamilon forces.

  The 1980s brought about two revolutions in American broadcasting: the explosive growth of cable, and consumer videotape recorders. The proliferation of cable channels—some of which specialized in showing cartoons—meant that large blocks of airtime were suddenly opening up on America’s vast wasteland, and something unique, or at least different, had to be plugged into the space. More than a few Japanese anime series moved in to fill the void.

  Among them was Go Lion (Five Lions, 1981), renamed Voltron, which mixed two anime genres to create an intriguing new hybrid. It started with the formula for the “science team” first established in the Gatchaman series7 and revived (with occasional minor variations) in dozens of other Japanese series. (The team almost always consisted of: hero, woman, child, big beefy guy, lone wolf. The latter may seem odd, since loners usually aren’t part of a team, but such teams usually include a wild card to spice things up, since he’s capable of anything from criminal behavior to borderline psychosis.)8 Then it put the team inside five lion-shaped robots that combine to form one giant human robot. This notion of recombinant robots traces back to Getter Robo, the 1974 brainchild of Go Nagai. By the time the Transformers started gaining popularity in the West, the ground was well prepared.

  Robotech went American television one better—or rather three better, since three different Japanese TV series were collected and edited together to produce this 1985 series that is still hailed as a major leap forward in science-fiction broadcasting, live or animated.9 In this wild and woolly space opera, the Earthlings do not build the giant super-dimensional fortress Macross, it crashes into the Earth years before the battle against the Zentraedi aliens. It then becomes a city-cum–aircraft carrier for launching attacks against the Zentraedi. Unfortunately, the Earth forces are still trying to figure out how the ship works. At one point, a portion of the ship collapses on itself, trapping fighter pilot Hikaru Ichijo (aka Rick Hunter) with . . . a pop singing idol, Lynn Minmay. This sets up a romantic triangle, since First Officer Misa Hayase has also had her eye on Hikaru.

  Some watched for the space battles. Some watched for the romance, including love affairs both interracial and interplanetary (although the nude shower scenes were cut for American broadcast). Some watched for the sheer chutzpah of the ultimate weapon against the Zentraedi turning out to be—the pop singing idol, Lynn Minmay. But it was the top of the line in anime to appear in the West, and Western viewers clearly wanted more.

  So did the Japanese. Dr. Tezuka’s sophisticated stories and complex characters had spawned a wave of groundbreaking manga, and this in turn inspired generations of cartoonists and animators who would never have considered these media otherwise. As he observed in 1987, “many talented people who would normally go into the literary field or the movie industry came into this field one after the other, and they bore much fruit. . . . Now, Japanese cartoons have the expanse and technology unparalleled in the world.”10

  Just Push Play

  Part of that ’80s technology was the videocassette recorder. It revived some old favorites, and relieved some studios from the burden of having to think in terms of shaping their animation for broadcast. Direct-to-cassette animation (known as “original animation videos” or OAVs) started in Japan in 1983 with a space opera called Dallos. The ability to create direct-to-viewer animation not only stretched the content envelope, but stretched the fan base literally around the world. As soon as unedited, unadulterated Japanese animation became just another offering on the American video-store shelf, word began to spread.

  Fast-forward to 1995, and the biggest breakthrough up to that time: Sailor Moon. The brainchild of shojo manga (girls’ comics) artist Naoko Takeuchi, this series is part magical fantasy, part romantic comedy, and part science fiction. The show’s been a hit in Japan, in the U.S. and Canada, in Poland, in the Philippines, in Brazil, and especially on the Internet. Literally hundreds of Web pages sprang up overnight praising one or all of the Sailor Scouts. Even Tsukino Usagi, Sailor Moon herself, the whiny, klutzy crybaby who manages to get it together each episode just in time to save the world, has legions of devoted fans.11 After that, two even bigger blockbusters hit the American small screen.12 Dragon Ball Z evolved out of a long-running (weekly from 1984 to 1995) manga series by Akira Toriyama. Its animated version has been no less long-lived.13 Based loosely—very loosely—on a classic Chinese novel involving the exploits of a monkey who accompanies a Buddhist priest on a pilgrimage from China to India, the Dragon Ball epic is about Goku, a naïve child with considerable martial arts prowess and a heart of gold.14 He also has a golden sphere, one of seven Dragon Balls used to summon the Dragon God. The series, consisting of over five hundred episodes, follows Goku as he fights, grows up, fights, marries, fights, has children, fights, dies, and passes on the Dragon Ball to his son Gohan (a name that in Japanese literally means “rice,” or, generically, “a meal”).

  Couldn’t get any bigger than that? Consider Pokémon. This 1997 offshoot of a video game has become wildly successful on both sides of the Pacific. It finds dramatic potential in the clash of oddly shaped and oddly powered fantasy critters, whose victories or defeats are the key to a boy’s ambition. Along the way villains (both sinister and humorous) are overcome and lessons are learned about teamwork, persistence against overwhelming odds, and the gentle, compassionate spirit known in Japan as yasashisa.

  From Manga to Marketing

  Not that anime or manga have always had such high-minded and pure motives. They’re just as much in it for the money as their Western counterparts. (Pokémon, after all, is based on a Nintendo toy.) The major difference is in the structure, the ways that the deals are interrelated.

  The genesis of most American cartoons used to be the printed page. From newspaper comic strips such as Popeye and comic books like Superman to books for young people such as Winnie-the-Pooh and the stories of the Brothers Grimm, the emphasis was on finding something tried-and-true, with a guaranteed audience. (Disney moved in two directions at once in this regard, basing some of its feature films on literary sources, while also creating comic-book versions of original characters such as Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck.)

  Things started to loosen up in America in the ’60s in terms of source material; it’s safe to say that Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids was the first cartoon whose genesis was a stand-up comic. The Care Bears were an established line of toys before they were animated; other merchandise was developed in tandem with the animation as a way of financing the project in the first place. In the post-modern era, American cartoons have b
een based on feature films (e.g., Beetlejuice, Men in Black, Teen Wolf, and—in a strange twist of fate—the live Batman films, which were themselves based on new versions of the comic book, now grandly referred to as “graphic novels,” some of which showed the influence of Japanese manga!). Other cartoons refer back to older animated series. Most modern American animated series, however, are based on original ideas.

  Many Japanese anime begin life as comic books (the phrase “based on the manga by” is used a lot in this book). This has several advantages, including the good will and familiarity of an audience that already knows and cares about the characters. It also enables the viewer who is familiar with the manga story to fill in blanks; the animator can glide over some story details, confident that the intended audience will make sense of it. Anime can also be based on literary classics: from historical Japan and China (the courtly romance of The Tale of Genji, the Edo-period epic The Hakkenden, and especially the Ming-dynasty novel Journey to the West), modern Japan (the postwar novel Hotaru no Haka), and other nations (ranging from India’s scriptural Rig Veda to the nineteenth-century European tearjerker A Dog of Flanders). Of course, original ideas have been animated as well. But market forces also affect the creative process in Japan. Large toy companies like Bandai not only market everything that can be marketed out of a popular weekly series; they sometimes suggest the addition or modification of a character to make it more bottom-line friendly. The artist/director can also expect input from the animation studios, publishing houses, and anyone else with a piece of the action.

  There is one significant marketing difference when it comes to anime: Japan has the road show. Whether it is a weekly TV series, a feature film, or a collection of OAVs, the producers will often bring out a sample of the release at an event that is less than a “sneak preview” but far more than an expanded trailer. Fans who come to such a “road show,” usually about four months in advance of the premiere, will likely hear an idol singer performing the theme to the new anime, and see and hear the principal voice actors, as well as the manga artist, novelist, or whoever created the work in the first place, as well as a sample of the work.15

  Anime: The Next Wave

  The success of Pokémon in the West, scoring the kinds of numbers that the monied interests of television dream about, opened the door for other similar Japanese series. Titles such as Digimon, Monster Rancher (in Japan, Monster Farm), Yugi-Oh, and Cardcaptors (originally titled Cardcaptor Sakura) might never have made it onto the American tube, regardless of their intrinsic merit, without the success of Pokémon. And these are just the series in the same “little kids, strange monsters, and collectible trinkets” genre; other broadcasters gambled on other Japanese anime such as Tenchi Muyo!, Blue Submarine No. 6, Gundam Wing, and Escaflowne.16 This book will touch on major anime television series, feature films, and OAVs. Some of these will be long-runners—episodic series with a twenty-six-week story-arc, or even longer. Some anime are aimed at the kind of person for whom Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings is a quick read. For others, the long-story form is an extension of the way some kinds of television are broadcast: instead of a series of self-contained scripts that barely relate to each other except through continuing characters, there is one colossal story-arc, from beginning to end. This is hardly a new convention to those who were devoted fans of Dallas, Dynasty, or any of the “prime-time soaps,” wherein the plot of episode B was directly dependent on what happened in episode A. Few other genres of American television, however, have tried to write so expansively. The discipline of a continuing story is something that Western television animation has chosen for the most part not to explore until the early twenty-first century, when anime proved it was possible. The major recent exception in the West has been the three-year run of Avatar: The Last Airbender.

  This is not to say that there isn’t a certain predictability in some anime script conventions, as there is in television programs in the West. Some of these conventions are in fact comforting to their audiences. In any case, we need to think in terms of conventions, and of the cultural shorthand used in the scripts and on the screen, to understand more fully what’s being communicated.

  1. Reiji Matsumoto, another master of manga, was an avid collector in his youth of American comics, which were plentiful in Japan during the Allied Occupation. His verdict: the full-color printing was “wonderfully meticulous and has a polishedness based on proper drawing skills,” but Western storytelling was “too simple. Each story’s exposition-development-twist-conclusion were so short and lacked complexity. So I was more drawn toward the Japanese manga methods that were more like American movies and sophisticated French movies.” From “Riding the Rails with the Legendary Leiji,” an interview with Takayuki Karahashi in Animerica 4, no. 7: 9.

  2. The notable exception is Pixar’s Monsters, Inc., which is in large part a disguised commentary on the misdeeds of the Enron company.

  3. Anime has been translated into French, Italian, German, Tagalog, Mandarin Chinese, and various Spanish dialects for various Latin American countries, including some series that have yet to be translated into English, such as Chibi Maruko-chan, Nobody’s Boy: Remi, Slayers, Saint Seiya, and Yokohama Kaidashi Kikko.

  4. The first run of Tetsuwan Atomu on Japanese TV was from the first day of 1963 to the last day of 1966.

  5. Because the number five is pronounced go in Japanese, the title can also mean “Mach 5, Go (the verb), Go (the driver’s first name).” And the puns are just beginning. . . .

  6. The spaceship in this series was built inside the wrecked hull of the World War II battleship Yamato. For more on the Yamato, see the sidebar on pages 200–201.

  7. This series, whose full Japanese title is Kagaku Ninjatai Gatchaman (Science Ninja Team Gatchaman) has also appeared on American TV under titles like Battle of the Planets and G-Force. It’s the one with people whose costumes look like bird suits.

  8. In the 1987 TV series Zillion, for example, a story based on a toy laser pistol, whose plot was inspired in equal parts by Star Wars and the Gundam series, the team (as renamed in the English dub) consists of J. J. (hero), Apple (woman), Addy (child), Dave (big beefy guy), and Champ (lone wolf). So perfect was this formula that it was even used in the parody anime-within-an-anime Gekiganger Three. This fictitious series is part of the plot of the 1996 series Martian Successor Nadesico. The clips, characters, and plots “quoted” in Gekiganger Three all evoke ’70s “giant robot” and “science team” series, and in this case the team of heroes is made up of Ken Tenku (hero), Miss Nanako (woman), the adopted Junpei (child), Akira (big beefy guy), and Joe Umitsubame (lone wolf).

  9. The science-fiction saga known in the West as Robotech was a collage of Macross, Southern Cross, and Mospeada.

  10. Catalogue of the Osamu Tezuka Exhibition (Tokyo: Asahi Shimbunsha, 1990), 286.

  11. In a show of devotion almost unique in Western television, the fans of Sailor Moon have actually brought enough pressure to bear on producers and distributors to force a continuation of the series. In Japan, Sailor Moon ran for five years (200 episodes), plus three hour-long features and a twenty-minute special. The fan group S.O.S. (Save Our Sailors) launched an extended petition drive after English dubs were only produced midway through the second season. As of this writing, the first four seasons have been broadcast in English, and dubs of the three features are commercially available on videocassette.

  12. As for the big screen, the vote is still out, but then that road has always been a bit rocky. These days, Japanese feature animation—absent from American theaters since 1981—is returning. Ghost in the Shell, Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade, X: The Movie (based on a girls’ comic by the CLAMP collective, and not to be confused with Spike Lee’s biography of Malcolm X), Metropolis, Escaflowne: A Girl in Gaea, and Perfect Blue have received art-house showings, as have most of the recent films of Hayao Miyazaki, from Princess Mononoke to Spirited Away to Howl’s Moving Castle. The popularity of the first Pokémon feature is an inaccurate ba
rometer, as is any faddish juggernaut.

  13. Actually three linked series, Dragon Ball, Dragon Ball Z, and Dragon Ball GT.

  14. Dr. Tezuka’s first animated feature, the 1961 Saiyuki (Journey to the West), was based on the same Chinese legend, although it was chopped and rewritten before it appeared in America as Alakazam the Great. Ironically, in 1941, a young Tezuka watched a now-rarely-seen Chinese animated film, Princess Iron Fan, that was based on part of the same legend. Even more ironically, Princess Iron Fan was also cut—by Japan’s military government, which didn’t approve of the monkey’s anarchistic antics in the middle of a war—especially a war with China.

  15. Sometimes the theme song has absolutely nothing to do with the anime to which it is attached. It serves as much as a vehicle for the singer as for the production. Sometimes there is a direct connection, and sometimes the connection is more tenuous. However, unlike the United States, where television theme songs have been pretty much phased out (in order, one suspects, to sell more ad time), the theme song is alive and well on Japanese television—even if it’s only a ninety-second edit of a full-length song.

  16. While Tenchi and Gundam were quite successful (and Blue Submarine No. 6, a four-part OAV, was a one-time special), such was not the case with Escaflowne, perhaps the greatest artistic achievement of the group. One is inclined to blame Fox Network producer Haim Saban for treating it as just another Saturday morning filler and canceling the series after a handful of episodes. However, given the mythos and morality of this series (discussed later in this book), perhaps no amount of preparation could have made Escaflowne a mainstream success in America. It was, however, broadcast in full in Canada, where it found an appreciative fan base.