Anime Explosion!

by Drazen, Patrick

  3. Say it fast; it’s a delightful pen name based on Edgar Allan Poe.

  4. http://www.nausicaa.net/miyazaki/interviews/t_corbeil.html.

  5. “NASA declares shuttle safe for return,” CNN, July 31, 2005, http://edition.cnn.com/2005/TECH/space/07/30/space.shuttle/index.html (accessed July 12, 2010).

  6. This is shown more clearly in the book Majo no Takkyubin (Witch’s Delivery Service, 1985). Witches, it seems, have gradually been losing their witchcraft over the years. Kiki’s mother, Kokiri, knew only flying and medicinal plants, while Kiki was too impatient to bother learning about plants. There’s a note of nostalgia early in the book that something valuable is being lost, perhaps forever. And in fact Kadono wrote a second book, Kiki to Atarashii Maho (Kiki and Her New Magic), where the “new” turns out to be old: Kiki went back home to study her mother’s herbal medicine.

  7. As Kiki flies through the night sky during the opening credits, she passes a very large passenger plane that looks nothing like a twentieth-century aircraft—but bears a resemblance to the Torumekian transport that crashes into the Valley of the Wind at the beginning of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind.

  8. In one scene, Fio is half-asleep and sees Pagot’s face as human. This scene establishes that Pagot was not the victim of a magic curse but of his self-loathing. And since Fio is (until the end) the only one who sees him as such, the scene establishes the value of her innocent and yasashii character.

  9. When an emperor dies, he takes the name of the period in which he reigned. Thus, Hirohito (1926–89) is now referred to as the Showa Emperor.

  10. The following is based on information from http://www.kyohaku.go.jp/mus_dict/hd08e.htm, the Kyoto National Museum site. It was written by Junji Wakasugi and translated by Melissa M. Rinne.

  11. The Kansai dialect, spoken in the Osaka (aka Kansai) area, tends to be a bit rougher and has a more defined lilt than standard Japanese, which is what is heard on national TV and throughout the Tokyo area.

  12. This word is the source of the American phrase “head honcho.” American soldiers in Japan during the Korean War picked up the word and brought it home.

  13. This is a rather grim children’s story about a farmer who adopted a rabbit, a marauding tanuki who kills the farmer’s wife, and the revenge carried out by the rabbit (in the spirit of filial devotion, one assumes). A web version of this story can be found at http://jin.jcic.or.jp/kidsweb/folk/kachi/kachi.html. In one of the OAVs based on Kosuke Fujishima’s manga about Tokyo policewomen, You’re Under Arrest, the policewomen visit a kindergarten class about to put on its own version of “Kachikachi Yama.”

  14. From an interview with Miyazaki printed at http://www.nausicaa.net/miyazaki/sen/proposal.html. With all due respect to Mr. Miyazaki, it might be more accurate for him to have said that Momotaro et al. have lost their powers of persuasion as such. The premise of this book is that the figures of folklore and legend have changed from year to year in order to retain their power . . . and Miyazaki’s movies have proven his ability to adapt the past to serve the needs of the present.

  15. Ice Age would thus be the second animated feature that year to, in essence, remake John Ford’s 3 Godfathers (1948); the other was Tokyo Godfathers, written and directed by Satoshi Kon—see part 2, chapter 13.

  16. “Comic-Con: Miyazaki breaks his silent protest of America’s actions in Iraq with visit to the U.S.” Los Angeles Times, July 24, 2009, http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/herocom-plex/2009/07/comiccon-miyazaki-breaks-his-boycott-of-us-.html (accessed July 5, 2010).

  17. Both versions, for example, avoid Andersen’s original plot: the mute mermaid catches the prince’s interest, but he betrays her by marrying the princess of a neighboring kingdom. She has the hope of returning to the sea if she kills the prince before sunrise. Unable to do this, she throws herself into the sea, where she turns into a spirit of air. When Ponyo’s parents discuss the problem of what to do if Sosuke ever proves unfaithful, her mother sees nothing wrong with Ponyo turning into sea foam, since that’s where all life started.

  The Sailor Moon Phenomenon: Love! Valor! Compassion! Middie Blouses!

  Ever wonder why a cartoon aimed at teenage Japanese girls would literally circle the globe, embraced by fans from Boston to Brussels to Brazil? Wonder no more.

  Until 1992, Naoko Takeuchi was one shojo manga cartoonist among hundreds, trying to break out of the pack with something unique. She had done several successful series for Nakayoshi magazine between 1986 and 1991, when she got a nibble on her line with a schoolgirl superhero comic titled Code Name Sailor V. This superhero had a few flaws, certainly nothing uncommon for a fourteen-year-old. However, Takeuchi took her next heroine even further out of the heroic mold, playing up the flaws. Enter the oversleeping, overeating, whiny, klutzy crybaby who has to save the world, keep up with her homework, and chase after a boyfriend: Sailor Moon.

  Why did Sailor Moon became as big an international hit as it did? Certainly the animated version accounts for some of its popularity, since even the more pedestrian scenes (pedestrian to those who already know anime) have something interesting, while the stand-out sequences are stunning. But great visuals have been around for a long time. That’s not enough of a reason.

  The fact that the animated and print versions appeared at the same time was a daring marketing move—daring, but not unprecedented.1 This, however, is not a sufficient reason.

  It’s no coincidence that the rise of Sailor Moon occurred along with the rise of the Internet. Fans of anime in general, and of the series in particular, had a new and expansive venue in which to compare notes. But this in itself is not the answer.

  Sailor Moon has been compared with another television series aimed at roughly the same demographic—Buffy the Vampire Slayer—as a prime example of a female empowerment fantasy. But the same argument could be made for other American television series, as far back as the situation comedy Bewitched, which was very popular in Japan and helped give rise to the entire “magical girl” genre, of which Sailor Moon is a prime example. There’s more to it than that.

  To give the series its full title, Bishojo Senshi Sailor Moon (Beautiful Young Girl Warrior Sailor Moon) was essentially the first shojo anime broadcast in the West. There were other series broadcast in the ’80s that were meant to balance out the more macho anime like Mach Go Go Go (known in the West as Speed Racer), Go Lion (translated as Voltron), and the Macross/Robotech episodes. The Nickelodeon cable network showed such kinder, gentler fare as Belle and Sebastian, Maya the Bee, and an anime series based on Saint-Exupéry’s classic book Le Petit Prince. Still, these were targeted more at a grade-school audience, not aimed at teenage girls.

  Sailor Moon for all practical purposes perfected the formula Dr. Tezuka developed in Princess Knight. It strikes a balance between romance and action, often relying on humor as the glue to hold the two very different halves together. (For comparison’s sake, Please Save My Earth has lots of action and lots of romance, but in its animated version is almost entirely humorless. And the humor in Fushigi Yugi is more disorienting to a Western audience, since it isn’t driven by the inherent flaws of the characters but by “super-deformed” caricatures.) The humor element also takes much of the edge off of the proceedings, so that this series empowers without threatening to take anything away from anyone. Its international popularity is due, I believe, to this ability to be the best of several possible genres.

  The Rising of the Moon

  The story takes place in Azabu Juban, a real, present-day Tokyo neighborhood. It’s home to the Tsukino family, including their teenage daughter Usagi. Usagi is hardly a role model: perennially late to school, too lazy to study and subsequently always in trouble for bad grades, constantly snacking and arguing with her little brother. In anime’s long and rich tradition of “magical girl” heroines, Usagi would definitely seem to be an unlikely candidate—until the day she encounters a black cat with a crescent-shaped mark on its forehead. The cat tells her to defend her friend Nar
u against an attack by a monster. True to the tradition, she’s told to say a few magic words, which transform her into . . . a superpowered klutzy crybaby. All of Usagi’s flaws stay with her, but somehow she saves the day. Then she learns that this was no accident, and that the whole story started a thousand years ago on the moon. . . .

  This chapter borrows its title from a play by Terrence McNally, and although there’s absolutely nothing in common between the story of Sailor Moon and AIDS (the subject of McNally’s play), the titular virtues of the play sum up Takeuchi’s work as well as can be done in three words.

  Love

  The world of a pubescent girl is a magical country in and of itself: little wonder that this demographic seems to take pride of place in Hayao Miyazaki’s films. Whatever else happens, a girl’s sexual/romantic awakening is waiting in the wings, and this has been featured for years in numerous manga and anime, sometimes innocently, sometimes pornographically, and occasionally in a gray zone between the two.2 In fact, in 1995, during the fourth season of Sailor Moon’s anime broadcast, a fifteen-minute theatrical special touched on the romantic awakening of one of the Sailor Senshi, the bookish and very unromantic Mizuno Ami.

  Usagi’s awakening is taking place when the series begins; in fact, she has something of an embarrassment of riches, being drawn first to the owner of a video game parlor, then to the older and somewhat mysterious Chiba Mamoru. Although at first he seldom has a kind word for her, criticizing everything from her grades to her hairdo, they become more than just crime-fighting allies (he joins the long line of masked heroes as Tuxedo Kamen). Just as Usagi is the rebirth of Moon Princess Serenity, Mamoru is the rebirth of Earth Prince Endymion. They were in love a thousand years ago, when Queen Beryl’s forces interrupted their happiness, and their meeting in twentieth-century Tokyo is the fulfillment of destiny. As the theme song says, “Onaji kuni ni umareta no /Miracle Romance” (Being born in the same country / Is a Miracle Romance).

  Valor

  Valor and Usagi hardly belong in the same sentence. This girl panics if she forgets her lunch. She would hardly seem to be a match for the procession of absurd, downright surreal monsters she has to fight.

  And yet that seems to be the point. Usagi can’t help having been the Moon Princess in a previous life, and now that she’s stuck with it, she has to find the courage to do what needs to be done (which is, after all, just another way of saying giri). This is a more realistic object lesson for the audience anyway—very few of us will inherit superpowers, but all of us find ourselves in predicaments that we’re not entirely sure we can get out of.

  Compassion

  Some anime hero shows (notably The Guyver) have villains with no real personality, and sometimes not even a real name. Hence, they’re lined up and cut down in quick order. This doesn’t make for much exercise of a yasashii spirit. Sailor Moon has two classes of villains: the absurd monsters and the thinking, feeling humans. They may not be of this Earth, and they may do incredibly evil things, but they’re still human. Along the way, not all of them get destroyed; some are even redeemed. Giving the villains scope to exercise their feelings is very common for anime and manga, just as it’s almost unheard of in the West.

  Take, for example, a memorable subplot from the first season. In a bad case of crossed wires, a minion of Queen Beryl named Nephrite assumes that Usagi’s friend Naru (aka Molly) is, if not Sailor Moon herself, somehow connected to Sailor Moon. Cultivating her friendship (in the dub, under the ridiculously soap-opera name Maxfield Stanton), Nephrite is amazed by her self-sacrificing spirit; she deliberately steps into the path of the Moon Tiara that would have vaporized Nephrite.

  Naru’s compassionate gesture has its effect on Nephrite; later on Naru makes a joke and he laughs. This would have been beyond him in the past, but love is turning him human. Beryl has to dispatch other minions to kill Nephrite, out of fear he’ll go over to the enemy. The death is a clean and pretty one, in the shojo manga tradition, with Neph-rite dissolving into starlight and drifting into the night sky. However, Naru’s anguished scream on the soundtrack had to be a new and unexpected development for viewers who were fed nothing but happy endings year after year. This may not be classic tragedy in the Western literary tradition—it’s not Oedipus Rex or Hamlet—but through this story-arc the viewer is taken one (by many accounts) unforgettable step closer to that wider world.

  Sailor Moon

  What’s in a name? A lot, when it comes to Naoko Takeuchi’s Bishojo Senshi Sailor Moon. The name of virtually every character has multiple meanings.

  Take the title character, whose name, in the Japanese manner, with the family name first, is Tsukino Usagi. The phrase tsuki no usagi literally means “the rabbit in the moon.” This alludes to the Sino-Japanese perception of the full moon’s craters not as the face of a person (the Man in the Moon) but as the silhouette of a rabbit. Some say that the rabbit holds a vial of the Elixir of Immortality, long sought after by Chinese Taoists. On a more secular note, the rabbit is supposed by others to be pounding rice to make mochi, rice cakes with a taffy-like consistency. In any event, rabbit imagery abounds around Usagi, especially in the manga. The same applies to Usagi’s four friends. Their names correspond to the powers they call upon and the planets with which these powers are associated:

  Mizuno Ami

  mizu = water / Sailor Mercury

  Hino Rei

  hi= fire / Sailor Mars

  Kino Makoto

  ki = wood / Sailor Jupiter

  Aino Minako

  ai =love / Sailor Venus

  Why Jupiter and wood? Before they adopted Western astronomy, Japanese stargazers identified Jupiter as Mokusei, the Wood Star. In Japan, giving Sailor Jupiter the Oak Evolution attack makes perfect sense. In the same vein, Mercury is Suisei, the Water Star, and Mars is Kasei, or the Fire Star.

  The odd woman out is Sailor Venus, who was transplanted into Sailor Moon from Code Name Sailor V and has a planet with Western mythological overtones: the association of Venus the planet with the Roman goddess of love was inevitable, as is her rope of linked hearts called the Venus Love-Me Chain.

  The name game continues with the villains, almost all of whom are named after minerals, gems, or other earthly elements. Thus, the Sailor Senshi battle Queen Beryl, Rubeus, Emeraldas, Kaolinite, etc. Among the minerals are Zoicite, Jadeite, Kunzite (aka Malachite), and Nephrite. The English dubbed version changes the latter’s name to Nephlite, but that’s clearly a mistake.

  Death does not even have to be part of the picture for fate to take a hand in matters, as demonstrated in the first Sailor Moon theatrical feature. Known in the West simply as “the R movie” until a dubbed version was commercially released, it begins with a flashback reminiscent of François Truffaut. What seems to be a seven-year-old pajama-clad Mamoru is shown on a rooftop, giving a flower to another boy, who vanishes into thin air.

  We are suddenly in a botanical garden. Usagi and Mamoru are out for a holiday (and looking for a little romantic privacy), and the other Senshi and Chibiusa3 are trying to spy on them. They’re interrupted by the return of Fioret, Mamoru’s friend from the flashback, older now and looking very much the bishonen, or “beautiful boy.” (In fact, this gives rise to some gentle humor suggesting that Mamoru is gay.) We later learn the truth: that Fioret is an alien. He had wandered through space, all alone, dropped in on Earth, and found someone as lonely as he was: the hospitalized Chiba Mamoru, who had just lost both parents in an auto accident. Mamoru had given Fioret a flower as a token of their friendship, but when Fioret returned to space (because he couldn’t stay on Earth indefinitely), he promised to bring back a flower for Mamoru.

  Unfortunately, Fioret became possessed by, and has brought to Earth, the Xenian flower. This sentient bloom turned Fioret’s mind, making him think (among other things) that Usagi was coming between Mamoru and him. When Fioret tries to kill Sailor Moon, however, we are treated to the most amazing plot twist. Remember the flower Mamoru gave Fioret at the very beg
inning of the movie? Where did that come from? From the four-year-old girl who wandered into Mamoru’s room, giving him a flower because her mother had just had a baby boy. It was Tsukino Usagi who supplied the flower Mamoru gave to Fioret; therefore, Fioret had an obligation to Sailor Moon. The belief in on meant that he would have to change his plans about killing Sailor Moon.

  The symmetry of the story-arc gets even better. At the beginning, Mamoru tries to kiss Usagi, who’s puckered and waiting. However, knowing he’s being watched by the others, Mamoru backs off. At the end, Usagi is near death, drained of her life-energy while trying to get herself and her friends back to Earth. Fioret’s final gesture, demonstrating his own compassion by atoning for the business with the Xenian flowers and fulfilling his obligation, is to save Sailor Moon’s life. He presents the flower of his own life; Mamoru sucks the life-restoring dew from its petals and feeds it to Usagi, bringing everything full circle with a kiss. It’s classic shojo.

  Beyond the five seasons of television episodes, the three films, and the eighteen manga volumes (not counting Sailor V), Sailor Moon stayed alive in several forms. Between 1993 and 2005 no fewer than twenty-nine stage musicals featured the Sailor Senshi. The number is actually deceptive, since musicals were reworked from one season to another: the fates of some villains were left unclear in earlier versions and cleared up later, and actresses completing a run as a particular Sailor (described as “graduating”) might be given additional dialogue or musical numbers as a going-away present.

  The stage musicals were, as can be imagined, influenced by the Takarazuka theatrical conventions. There was some gender bending of roles, especially with the Three Lights. The musicals had very little kissing: only between Sailor Moon and Tuxedo Mask (as expected), and between the lesbian couple Sailors Uranus and Neptune (but usually only on the final night of the run).