Anime Explosion!

by Drazen, Patrick

  Akio tries to forestall the rescue, maneuvering people into duels to try to defeat Utena, or at one point hoping to replace Anthy as the Rose Bride. Akio even seduces Utena, trying to convince her through sex that she is a princess and not a prince. Utena, however, stays true to her desire to emulate the prince she met as a little girl. This means rescuing the princess named Anthy, even if doing so means paying the ultimate price.

  And so it is that, in a story more outrageous than most in terms of gender confusion, we see that the old-line definition has been working all along. Plain and simple: a girl cannot be a prince. An old Japanese proverb puts it this way: “Otoko wa matsu, onna wa fuji” (Man is the pine tree, woman is the clinging vine [wisteria, actually]) If she tries to be what she’s not, there’ll be a price to pay.

  And yet, by the end of the story, Anthy is indeed redeemed. She is freed from her imprisonment at Otori Academy. How does she use that freedom? By immediately leaving the campus to search for Utena. And this is one of those cases in which the original Japanese dialogue is critical. Throughout the series, Anthy has declared her subservience to Utena by referring to her with the honorific -sama. As she leaves in the final scene, Anthy lets us know simply that she’s looking for Utena. No more honorific, since Utena is no longer a prince.

  But isn’t Utena dead? So it would seem, but Otori was, as I mentioned, a topsy-turvy version of the world, and maybe death wasn’t an ending (appropriately for a place named after the phoenix). Certainly someone as powerful as Anthy would know the truth of it, so her quest for Utena should be accepted as exactly that: not a quest for an ideal, like Miki’s search for his sister or Juri longing for the time before she was betrayed by her “friend” Shiori. Anthy goes off to search for a not-truly-dead Utena Tenjo. In Utena’s end is Utena’s beginning, and the Rose Bride knows that, too.

  1. Primarily, animator Kunihiko Ikuhara and artist Chiho Saito.

  2. Otori means “phoenix”; in the context of a story about people struggling against themselves and each other “to bring the world revolution,” it’s a very loaded name.

  3. It may be a coincidence, but the central story-arc involves the breeding of a Black Rose with which to destroy the Rose Bride; it’s being bred in the basement of a building that looks suspiciously like the Bates house in Psycho.

  4. For one of the better Juri pages on the web, see http://www.geocities.com/hollow_rose/main.html.

  Giant Robo: Anime as Wagnerian Opera

  It takes seven giant episodes to answer Daisaku’s question: “Can happiness be achieved without sacrifice?” And it takes a really giant robot to tell this epic tale.

  Of all of the adjectives that could be applied to an anime, “Wagnerian” may seem the oddest. It is a word derived from one of the most un-Japanese characters of all time: a sybaritic self-indulgent artist, capable of making free with other folks’ money and other men’s wives; a hypocritical, sycophantic, nationalistic anti-Semite who held himself above his contemporaries and had a theater built to the precise specifications of the dozen or so operas that he completed. Had Richard Wagner been born in Japan, where “the nail that sticks up gets pounded down,” he might not have made it out of his teen years. As it is, the only patron he could ever rely on was “Mad King” Ludwig II of Bavaria.1 But Wagner the man is not quite the lens through which to watch Giant Robo. I mean Wagnerian as in Wagnerian opera: a singular mélange of mythology and emotionalism. Wagner’s works using Norse mythology (the four Ring of the Niebelung operas) and Arthurian legend (Parsifal) as a backdrop for intense passion remain unique in the opera literature, and very few works in other media can lay claim to the adjective Wagnerian.

  Probably none of this was on the mind of Giant Robo creator Mitsu teru Yokoyama. Born in 1934, Yokoyama was among the first to walk through the door opened by Dr. Osamu Tezuka into the newly expanded medium of manga. His first comic, Sword of Otonashi, was published in 1955, and from there he produced over two hundred titles, a number of them quite influential. Some of these were in genres already established, such as ninja action stories (Red Shadow, The Masked Ninja), esper action stories (Babel the Second, Its Name Is 101), and even the first “magical girl” shojo manga, Mahotsukai Sally (Sally the Witch).2 But there were two specific genres that made Yokoyama’s reputation.

  First was the Chinese epic romance. Two lengthy, detailed Chinese novels found their way into manga through his pen: The Water Margin and the Sangokushi (Romance of Three Kingdoms). These multi-volume manga have remained popular decades after their first appearance.

  The other is the mecha genre. World literature has dealt with artificial men, in one way or another, for centuries; witness the legend of the Golem of Prague and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The word “robot” dates to the 1920s and Czech playwright Karel Capek’s R.U.R. (an acronym for Rossum’s Universal Robots). One wartime manga story from 1943 featured a giant robot stomping Godzilla-like through New York City.3 This giant robot, more than Dr. Tezuka’s human-scale and human-emotional robot Tetsuwan Atomu, may have been on Yokoyama’s mind when he sketched out his Tetsujin 28-go (Iron Man No. 28) in 1958. It was animated (in black and white) for Japanese television in a series of 96 episodes that ran from 1963 to 1965 (the same time that Tetsuwan Atomu was first broadcast). In 1966, the series came to America under the name Gigantor. It thus became one of the first of a long line of “giant robot” shows. Yokoyama also created a different giant robot manga, Giant Robo, which became the point of departure for the 1992 Giant Robo OAV series.

  One of the many elements that makes the series unique, however, is that it is not based on Tetsujin 28-go or the Giant Robo manga as such. Rather, it was based on a screenplay by Yokoyama and director Yasuhiro Imagawa, with characters pulled together from much of Yokoyama’s collected works, but especially the Chinese epics.

  Experts Fighting Fire

  In a future Earth, problems of energy and pollution have been solved. Both fossil fuels and nuclear energy have been rendered obsolete by the Shizuma Drive. Dr. Shizuma was one of five scientists who developed the efficient, non-polluting power source a decade earlier, but only after a disastrous explosion leveled the laboratory at Bashtarlle and killed one of the inventors, Franken von Volger. The story’s beginning is appropriately dramatic and starts with an elaborate chase scene in a very Art-Deco future Nanking. The object of the chase is Dr. Shizuma, scared out of his wits and trying to hang onto an attaché case. Coming to his rescue are a variety of characters, including a sharpshooting woman named Ginrei and a twelve-year-old boy piloting a forty-foot robot. The woman and boy are both members of the Experts of Justice, a band of superpowered crimefighters. They try to protect Dr. Shizuma from the evil organization Big Fire, but as the story gradually unfolds, good guys are revealed to be bad guys, villains become heroic, and the boy, Daisaku Kusama, wrestles with existential problems of human happiness. Evangelion may have totally rewritten the mecha genre, but before that change, Giant Robo certainly stretched it to the limits. And it is in that stretching, that pushing the envelope in terms of graphics and action and plot and intense emotion, that Giant Robo earns the adjective Wagnerian.

  Who’s Who

  Giant Robo is populated by numerous figures straight out of Chinese mythology and legend, primarily by way of Yokoyama’s manga version of The Water Margin, as shown in the chart here.4 The ominously named Franken von Volger, by the way, is a complex homage on the part of Yasuhiro Imagawa. The resonance of Dr. Frankenstein in the name is obvious, but the name also evokes Albert Emanuel Vogler, a character in the 1958 Swedish film The Magician by Ingmar Bergman. This becomes especially apparent when Big Fire agent Genya is revealed to be the doctor’s son, Emanuel Von Volger. There’s yet another layer, though: Franken von Volger also conjures up the image of Dr. Frank N. Furter of The Rocky Horror Picture Show (this isn’t a stretch; Imagawa has admitted the connection, since he’s a fan of the parody rock musical).5

  Name Team Source

  Taiso Experts of Ju
stice Water Margin

  Tetsugyu Experts of Justice Water Margin

  Dojin Issei Experts of Justice Water Margin

  Yoshi Experts of Justice Water Margin

  Professor Go Experts of Justice Water Margin

  Ginrei Experts of Justice Wolf Constellation

  Kenji Murasame Experts of Justice Tetsujin 28-go

  Daisaku Kusama Experts of Justice Giant Robo

  Chief “Silent” Chujo Experts of Justice Babel II

  the Gen Brothers Experts of Justice Water Margin

  Hanzui Big Fire Water Margin

  Jujoji Big Fire Romance of the Three Kingdoms

  Zangetsu Big Fire Water Margin

  Shokatsu Komei Big Fire Romance of the Three Kingdoms

  Ko Enshaku Big Fire Water Margin

  Shockwave Albert Big Fire Mars

  Sunny Big Fire Sally the Witch

  Fitzcarraldo Big Fire Babel II

  Cervantes Big Fire Babel II

  Concussion Kawarazaki Big Fire Mars

  Ivan Big Fire Mars

  Genya Big Fire Seven Shadows of Kagemaru

  “Dedicated to All Fathers and Their Children”

  These are the final words on the screen as the final episode ends, and they’re no accident. The emotionalism in this OAV series seems consistently to revolve around family. We start with Daisaku, who we see in a flashback inheriting Giant Robo, his father’s invention, after Big Fire agent Cervantes killed his father. Yet Daisaku spends the latter half of the series trying to puzzle out the answer to the obsessive question posed by his dying father: Can happiness be achieved without sacrifice?

  A Japanese audience, by the way, would already know the answer. For years, Japanese households have consistently saved a larger percentage of earnings than American households. (This need to “save for a rainy day” has surely gotten Japan through a decade-long recession in better shape than most other world nations would have been.) As a society with a belief system that favors giri over ninjo, duty over personal desires, Japan has had considerable experience with delayed gratification and sacrificing to achieve happiness. But this is a lesson that the twelve-year-old Daisaku has to learn the hard way, as he watches his friends fall in battle with Big Fire.

  Then there is the agent Ginrei, who first has to deal with the apparent return from the dead of (and this is a dire secret kept hidden for years) her father, Franken von Volger. Later, she has to confront her brother Emanuel (Genya) and his alliance with Big Fire. Emanuel’s personal goal, in pursuit of which he is willing to double-cross Big Fire, is nothing less than global destruction in the name of clearing his father’s reputation.

  Even Tetsugyu, another member of the Experts of Justice, sounds the theme as he reminisces while searching the Himalayas for Daisaku. The boy and his robot were lost after their airship, the enigmatically named Greta Garbo, crashed in the Himalayas after battling Big Fire in Shanghai. (We’ll ignore the fact that Shanghai is on China’s east coast, while the Himalayas are a thousand miles to the west.) Tetsugyu recalls the first man he ever killed: his father, who had gone over to Big Fire.

  Twilight of the Robots

  The action is non-stop, much of it preceded or accompanied by valorous speeches shouted at the top of a character’s lungs. The Experts and Big Fire never attack: they ATTACK!! Chief Chujo, in the final battle, decides to punch out the Orb, a giant spherical spaceship. It may sound strange or even stupid on paper, but it works within the context of the magical world of this anime.

  Shockwave Alberto has similar magic going for him, but a magic that is at least explainable in an Asian martial-arts context. His ability to project a wave of energy from the palms of his hands is part of the legendary Chinese “Red Sand Palm” technique.6 Closer to home, Alberto can also send out shock waves with his voice—another esoteric martial-arts technique known in old Japan as kiai.

  There are not only themes in this anime that are Wagnerian in mood—there are also a few motifs that directly recall Wagner. For example, the plan by Emanuel to avenge his father recalls the relationship of Alberich and Hagen in the last of the Ring operas, Twilight of the Gods. Back in the first of the four operas, the dwarf Alberich stole enchanted gold from the river Rhine and forged it into a ring of power, with which he intended to control the world. The gods of Valhalla stole the ring from Alberich, however, and it then traveled through various hands until it came to the hero Siegfried. In his travels, Siegfried encounters Hagen, spawn of a human mother and the dwarf Alberich. To avenge his father, Hagen manipulates the other characters into a war that ultimately destroys the Earth.

  In this parallel, Franken von Volger is seen at first as Alberich, mysteriously returned from the dead, although what everyone thinks is Franken is actually his son Emanuel. Like Hagen, Emanuel is willing to do anything, even destroy the world, to avenge the shame of having his father blamed for the early disastrous failure of the Shizuma Drive. By the end of the series, however, Emanuel realizes that in fact his father did not want to destroy anything. The Earth is spared and the potentially hazardous Shizuma Drive is repaired (parallel to the ring of power being returned to the bottom of the Rhine at the end of Wagner’s opera cycle). Emanuel, however, has paid the terrible price of killing his sister Ginrei.

  In the end, Ginrei tries to teleport into the Orb to confront her brother, but her powers are weakening and the teleport isn’t successful. When she gets there, she doesn’t even exist from the waist down. As such, she invokes Erde, the Earth-spirit of Wagner’s Ring cycle who is no more than a torso herself.

  The last two installments have the elite of Big Fire watching the battle unfold around the former Bashtarlle. But they don’t merely watch. Each person stands on his own pillar, suspended in space, watching a gigantic vision of the Earth from the inside, seeing the battle unfold from what can safely be called a Valhalla perspective.

  The parallels between Ring and Robo don’t stretch much farther than that (although it might be worth mentioning that Shockwave Alberto, like Wotan, the ruler of the gods in Valhalla, lost an eye in past battles). Further Wagner/anime couplings would have to wait until 1999, when Harlock Saga appeared: an animated version of a Reiji Matsumoto attempt to mix elements of the Ring cycle into the story of his beloved space pirate Captain Harlock.7 But that, as they say, is another story . . .

  1. Ironically, Ludwig became the subject of a yaoi manga by Yo Higuri, Ludwig II. The story of the Bavarian monarch (1845–86) is in the tradition of Ryoko Ikeda’s Rose of Versailles: a romanticized mix of fact and fiction, dealing with the monarch’s rocky marriage, his homo-sexual affairs, his hereditary madness, his extravagant life, the conspiracies to remove him from power, and his abrupt suicide. There hasn’t been an animated version of Higuri’s manga yet; however, with the legendary grandeur of Ludwig’s palaces for the eye and the music of Wagner blasting on the soundtrack for the ear—what an anime that would make!

  2. Yokoyama had originally wanted to call his witch “Sunny” but found that the Sony Corporation had copyrighted the name. In the 1992 OAV series, when she appears as the daughter of Big Fire’s Shockwave Alberto, her name is once again Sunny.

  3. Frederik L. Schodt, Manga! Manga!: The World of Japanese Comics (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1983), 56.

  4. Much of this information is thanks to the very comprehensive Giant Robo website “Behind the Night’s Illusions” at http://www.animejump.com/giantrobo/index2.html.

  5. This information came from “Tetsugyu’s Giant Robo Site” at http://www.angelfire.com/anime2/GR/FF.html.

  6. Kenneth Li, “Five Ways to Kill a Person with a Single Unarmed Blow,” in Yang et al., Eastern Standard Time: A Guide to Asian Influence on American Culture from Astro Boy to Zen Buddhism (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), 191.

  7. See Patrick Macias, “Harlock Saga” in Animerica 9, no. 3 (March 2001): 6.

  Flying with Ghibli: The Animation of Hayao Miyazaki and Company

  Bring together a labor union organizer, an Ital
ian airplane, a medieval scroll painting, some French detective novels, a John Denver song, and tanuki—a partial recipe for Japan’s best-loved animation studio.

  Comparisons are always imperfect. Any time you say something is like something else, it implies that there are areas where the fit is not exact. Case in point: trying to describe anime masters in Western terms. Two Japanese animators have been compared to American artist, studio boss, and showman Walt Disney, but the two are as different from each other as they are from Uncle Walt.

  The main difference is temporal. Walt Disney (1901–66) was born at exactly the right moment. He could explore the uses and potential first of movies, then of television, just as these media were coming into being. He essentially laid the groundwork for all his comrades, imitators, and competitors who followed, including the two biggest names in Japanese animation.

  The first has popped up in this book many times already: Dr. Osamu Tezuka (1928–89). He revolutionized the medium of comics in Japan, and created icons as enduring and endearing as Disney’s best-known characters. He also tried to animate his two-dimensional creations, first for movie theaters and then for television, by starting a studio called Mushi Productions, which lasted about a dozen years before going out of business and being reborn as Tezuka Productions. The doctor lacked Walt’s business acumen: he welcomed colleagues, competitors, and successors to join in and expand the form and content of his chosen medium. Disney, on the other hand, consistently worked to suppress competition.

  The second candidate for “the Japanese Disney” is, ironically, a corporate candidate; not so much a person as a group of up to four creative artists who have helped redefine feature animation. They have worked primarily for one self-created studio whose name is permanently associated with one of these artists. But it is both deceptive and unfair to speak of Hayao Miyazaki as the only creative force at Studio Ghibli.