Anime Explosion!

by Drazen, Patrick

  2003 saw one season of live television: Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon. This live series was an adaptation of the Queen Beryl story, with a number of changes, including prequel and sequel episodes. Minako Aino (Sailor Venus) is an idol singer in this version,4 who has competition from an evil idol, Mio Kuroki. One of the most interesting variations is the “turning” of Sailor Mercury to work for Queen Beryl. Of all the Sailor Senshi, Mercury is the smartest, and a “Dark Mercury” would be a formidable foe.

  On top of all of this is a string of video games, released almost entirely in Japan. Some are puzzles and some are fighting games; the most recent game was released in 2011. Add to this the countless trinkets, pencils, posters, dolls, wands, picture books, plush animals, key chains. . . . It’s no wonder that the anime industry, and all its offshoots, have been called part of Japan’s Gross National Cool.5

  And About Those Sailor Suits . . .

  The Sailor Senshi have uniforms similar to the ones they wear as junior high and high school students, modeled after British midshipman (or “middy”) blouses, with subtle differences in style and color that indicate who goes to which school. When we first see Kino Makoto (soon-to-be Sailor Jupiter), her school uniform is completely different from anything worn in the rest of the school. She’s still wearing the uniform from her old school—one she was expelled from for fighting.

  During the Meiji period, when Japan reformed its educational system along European lines and public school attendance became required, Gakushuin (Peers’ School), the private academy for imperial and other noble families’ sons (school wasn’t coed yet), was the first to institute uniforms. These uniforms (with coats that button all the way up to the collar) were modeled after Prussian military tunics. The rest of the nation’s schools followed the lead of the nobility. In 1885, Gaku-shuin forbade students from coming to school by horse and carriage, which meant that book bags also became a necessity. The country’s elementary schools again copied the style. The educational wardrobe has stayed pretty much the same ever since, but with considerable loosening up in recent years, mostly in subtle details: for example, girls wearing fashionably loose white socks. But the uniforms are still there, and are part of an evolving combination of TPO style and personal expression.6

  1. An excellent account of the details of the manga-anime-merchandise campaign that launched Sailor Moon can be found in Lee Brimmicombe-Wood and Motoko Tamamuro,“Hello Sailor!,” Manga Max 19 (August 2000): 30.

  2. This has given anime in particular, and much of Japanese pop culture in general, a bad reputation in the West. The preference for youthful, virginal females has become known as rorikon, short for “Lolita Complex,” named after Vladimir Nabokov’s infamous novel about an older man pursuing a young girl. Then again, there was a similar theme in the popular American film American Beauty, so the tendency is not exclusively Japanese.

  3. The R season introduced a character from the thirtieth century, Chibiusa (“cute little rabbit”) who seems to have some sort of resonance with Usagi and Mamoru. The fact is, she’s their daughter (rather, the daughter they will conceive when they are reborn in the future). Chibiusa spends most of the R season getting the Sailor Senshi to come to the future to fix what has gone wrong.

  4. This rearrangement of the story allows for one of the series’ happiest puns: one of Minako’s hit songs is “C’est la Vie,” which sounds like “Sailor V.”

  5. Douglas McGray, “Japan’s Gross National Cool,” Foreign Policy 130 (2002): 44–54.

  6. “. . . it is common in Japan to think in terms of the acronym TPO: Time, Place, Occasion. If one’s dress is appropriate to these three things, the chances of embarrassment are significantly lessened. Times are changing and the rules are not as strong as they were, but it is likely that due to a history that values appropriate dress and due to the custom of looking to those of high rank as good examples of TPO, the rules will remain important in Japan” (http://www.marubeni.co.jp/english/shosha/cover68.html).

  The Vision of Escaflowne

  The meeting of two worlds that supposedly never meet: Earth and Gaea. Also, the worlds of teenage boy anime and teenage girl anime. And it works gloriously!

  It took anime awhile to get into the sword-and-sorcery fantasy mode, but (like the Japanese auto industry) it jumped in with both feet and was producing some stellar product in short order. Some was straight (Record of Lodoss War, 1990) and some was played for laughs (Dragon Half, 1993; Slayers, 1995). Tenku no Escaflowne (the full Japanese title, or “Heavenly Escaflowne”) from the year 1996 is a magnificent hybrid of magic and science fiction, not unlike the machine Escaflowne itself. It is also another, more important hybrid. This series was a deliberate attempt to blend elements of boys’ and girls’ anime. Whether or not this was a calculated effort to boost the audience is immaterial—the resulting epic storyline makes it one of the finest television series of the ’90s, anime or not.

  Run for It!

  Hitomi Kanzaki lives in Kamakura, down the coast about thirty miles from Tokyo. She’s a high-school student with two main pastimes: running track and telling the future through Tarot cards. She learned how to read the cards from her grandmother, who also gave her an heirloom necklace. We find out about one of the unusual properties of this pendant right away: if left to swing back and forth, it always takes exactly one second to swing from one side to the other.

  She’s been getting running instructions from, and finds herself attracted to, Amano, an older student and also a track runner. He’s so good that, as the series opens, he’s preparing to leave Japan to continue his training. Hitomi asks him to meet her after school, for a last coaching session and (with luck) a first kiss. But strange things start happening to Hitomi during the coaching session. In the middle of a race, a young man appears directly in front of her on the track, dressed in a quasi-medieval style but with decidedly modern attachments. He appears so suddenly that Hitomi can’t avoid a collision—but there is none; she runs through him as if he were a ghost. Hitomi and Amano decide to have her run again. This time, the young man—named Van Fanel—reappears, and along with him, a dragon. Van Fanel slays the dragon, harvests from it a living gemstone, and takes the stone (and, inadvertently, Hitomi) back to his world, Gaea, a mysterious planet that orbits both the Earth and the moon without being seen. There, Van Fanel, revealed to be a prince, uses the gemstone as the power source for his fighting machine: a combination flying dragon/giant armored warrior named Escaflowne. . . .

  Birth Pains

  Escaflowne was some five years in gestation, and for a time seemed doomed never to get off the ground. However, the time spent and the people involved shaped it into its present unique form.1 The series was first proposed by Shoji Kawamori, who had helped create Macross. A trip to Nepal had inspired him with ideas for a series involving magic and destiny. He worked with Minoru Takanashi, a producer at Bandai Visual (by this time, the toy manufacturer had started an anime production company of its own), developing ideas that included the continent of Atlantis and the Bermuda Triangle. At this stage they also decided that, for a change, the lead character would be a girl. Nobuteru Yuki, who had worked on Record of Lodoss War, designed the characters. The Sunrise studio was also chosen to work on the series, expected to run for thirty-nine episodes.

  Yuki’s designs, however, were challenged in the early stages by the man chosen to direct the series, Yasuhiro Imagawa, fresh off the Giant Robo OAV series. He wasn’t with the project long, leaving it to work on Mobile Fighter G Gundam. Before he left, though, he coined the word “escaflowne,” supposedly based on the Latin word for “escalation.”

  Without a director, Sunrise put Escaflowne on hold. Meanwhile, Kawamori also left for other projects. It would be two years before Sunrise returned to the idea, and their choice of a new director would be the turning point.

  Kazuki Akane made the decision to bring elements of girls’ romance manga into the Escaflowne project. He wanted to broaden the audience for the series, and justifi
ed his choice by pointing to the wild success of Sailor Moon, which was being broadcast at that time. The choice is reflected in the final character designs: the knights look much more like bishonen, while the heroine stopped being long-haired, curvaceous, glasses-wearing, and eternally confused by her adventure. Instead, Hitomi is slim, short-haired and (to the great relief of many fans) runs like an athlete, rather than with the awkward, arms-flailing manner of the girls in Sailor Moon and many other series.

  The last important personnel decisions involved voices and music. Yoko Kanno wrote songs for the series, including the theme, and she shared background music duties with Hajime Mizoguchi. Both had worked on the animated version of Please Save My Earth, but there would be a difference here. Hitomi would be voiced by Maaya Sakamoto, who had just come off of a small role in Mizuiro Jidai and was the voice of the “reborn” Major Kusanagi in Ghost in the Shell. She also sang the Escaflowne theme. Not only was Sakamoto, at age sixteen, the right age to play Hitomi, but in her pure and expressive voice Kanno found the ideal interpreter for her songs. Since then, Sakamoto’s star has steadily risen thanks to a series of albums devoted to songs by Yoko Kanno, not to mention their work on themes for other anime series, including Cardcaptor Sakura, Clamp School Detectives, and Record of Lodoss War: Chronicles of the Heroic Knight. Some of these songs may be mindless pop fluff, but many have a brilliance of craft and interpretation that sets them apart from the run of the mill.

  Finally, with the series ready to begin production, budgetary considerations forced Escaflowne to be shortened from thirty-nine to twenty-six weeks. You’ll recall that something similar happened to Reiji Matsumoto’s groundbreaking 1974 series Uchu Senkan Yamato, when it was compressed from fifty-two weeks to twenty-six. In this case, rather than eliminate characters or plot lines from a story that was already elaborately worked out, the staff forced the longer plot to fit in the shorter space. This accounts for the sense that each episode throws a great deal of information at the viewer, but it also gives the series its feeling of epic scope.

  How Many Gaeas

  Escaflowne would be one of the great anime series of the 1990s even if it stood alone. As it is, however, Japanese audiences had four versions of the story to choose from. While this was a case in which manga and anime were developed simultaneously, it was highly unusual in that two manga were created out of the same project. During the two years that development of the anime was suspended, Kadokawa Shoten (publishers of manga magazine Comic Dragon and anime magazine Newtype and responsible for such popular anime titles as Di Gi Charat, Sakura Wars, and Slayers) wanted to premiere a new manga magazine, Shonen Ace. Without waiting for a resolution of the anime situation, Sunrise gave its production designs to artist Katsu-Aki. What resulted was a manga unabashedly aimed at the boys market, heavy on violent fights. This was before the arrival of Akane as the new director, so Hitomi was still long-haired, glasses-wearing, and very curvaceous.

  The notion of appealing to both the boys and girls markets did not disappear; Kadokawa simply felt that they could do so with two magazines rather than one. Thus, in 1996, at the same time the television series premiered, another manga series, also titled Tenku no Escaflowne, appeared in the magazine Monthly Asuka Fantasy DX. Here, the artwork by Yuzuru Yashiro was solidly in the shojo camp, with fewer battles and more character development. The title mecha, Escaflowne, doesn’t even put in an appearance until the tenth (and final) installment, coinciding with the end of the broadcast series.

  The fourth manifestation of Escaflowne almost didn’t get made. The TV series happened to appear in a Japan already crowded with excellent anime: Evangelion had just ended, Sailor Moon was winding down, and Cardcaptor Sakura and Pokémon were drawing in the younger set. Ironically, what gave Hitomi and company a new lease on life was fan reaction outside of Japan. Fans in the United States, France, Italy, and South Korea were caught up in the unique story and characters.

  A South Korean financing company got together with Bandai and Sunrise to create the feature-length anime Escaflowne: A Girl in Gaea (2000). Akane worked with screenwriter Ryota Yamaguchi in creating a movie with the barest resemblance to its source material. Hitomi is slightly older in this version, and much moodier. Van Fanel is less boyish and more of a warrior—like so many other characters, including the cat-girl Merle and the princess Millerna. Unable in a single feature film to explore the theme of destiny that was such a crucial part of the TV series, this Escaflowne falls back on the Shonen Ace approach and gives us a dark and violent tale of battle after battle.

  It could also be argued that there is a fifth version. Late in 2000, without warning, the Fox network began broadcasting Tenku no Escaflowne in the United States. This version, produced by Haim Saban (who recycled another Japanese television series into the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers), did more than just translate the series; it scrambled it. Footage was dropped, “flashbacks” were added to remind the audience of what had gone before, and the number of commercial breaks was increased, thus leading to further breaks in viewers’ concentration. Worst of all, Hitomi’s role in this new version was downplayed. Conventional wisdom in Hollywood, after all, decrees that a girl simply cannot be the hero of an action cartoon series. This same conventional wisdom saw the conversion of Cardcaptor Sakura into Cardcaptors, forcing the appearance of a boy cardcaptor, Shaoran Li, in the first episode rather than the eighth.

  With so many things going against it, the inevitable happened: Escaflowne was pulled from the Fox broadcast schedule when its run was barely a third over. What could have been America’s exposure to a stunning achievement in Japanese pop culture became just another example of the short shrift given to animation in the United States.

  Hearts and Minds

  But the moral of this story is about more than running and Tarot and mecha and cat-girls; it’s about destiny. It turns out that Hitomi wasn’t the first member of her family to travel to Gaea; her grandmother preceded her years before, and that heirloom pendant of her grandmother’s is of Gaean origin. It caused Hitomi to go to Gaea with Van, and it ties Hitomi to the real McGuffin of this piece: the Atlantis machine.

  Escaflowne describes the machine in terms very similar to the Krel machine in the classic American science fiction film Forbidden Planet. The ideal of every mad scientist, these machines do not need controls: they can link with the mind of the operator and be guided by pure thought. The Krel, however, forgot their pre-civilized lives. Once their machine was built, it tapped into every impulse, including the baser instincts. (In the movie, the machine creates a monster that is nothing less than Dr. Morbeus’s incestuous attachment to his daughter Alta.) Once the machine became operational, the Krel lasted less than a day.

  The Atlantis machine accomplishes the same broad changes through thought alone, and Elder Dornkirk, seeking to put his Zaibach kingdom in charge of all of Gaea and preserve the status quo from Hi-tomi’s clairvoyant interference, tries to juggle destiny with the machine by making Hitomi fall in love with Prince Allen Chezar (who happens to look a lot like Amano) rather than Van Fanel. And for a while there, it looks as if he may succeed; Hitomi fudges a critical Tarot reading and starts neglecting her duty. Still, because destiny is bigger than any one Gaean elder, she is able to defy the machine with little more than the kind-hearted beliefs of a Japanese teenage girl.

  Manga and anime, like most pop culture, are social control mechanisms. Not unlike the Krel or Atlantean machinery, they are capable of turning the thoughts and wishes and dreams of the audience into reality, for better or worse. However, the reality cannot be too far outside of the mainstream (or it would betray the other meaning of popular: of the people). Ultimately, no matter how outrageous the situation, the hero or heroine has to promote a socially acceptable conclusion to the story.

  Hitomi does exactly that. Her voice is the voice of the audience, saying that there must be a way to settle disputes between peoples other than war, believing that the complex of virtues lumped in Japan under the wor
d yasashisa (kindness, gentleness, consideration) can see us through and that love can conquer all. While the collective civilizations of the Atlanteans and the Krel wiped themselves out, one voice of hope was all that was required to put the peoples of Gaea back on the right track. The Krel had no such cultural escape valve and paid the price.

  The cynics would doubtless say, “Don’t try this at home.” How can believing in virtuous behaviors improve the world? Because they can improve the pop-culture world, which is all we really need: a reason to hope.

  Music columnist Glenn McDonald came to a similar conclusion in a column that focused on the Japanese pop duo Puffy:2

  If they can be ecstatic in the moment, I should quit demanding that they explain how they reached it, and thus insinuating that they haven’t. Maybe all they need me to do is to sing along, helping to celebrate that they happened, and to promise that when I find myself in that position, I too will believe in pure love so intently that it will defy whatever it has to defy to exist. And maybe all we need from them, in return, are gentle, cheerful, exhilarating reminders of what it is we’re trying to earn the right to feel, how little it matters whether anybody but us understands exactly why we want it, and how superfluous it is to betray any part of ourselves in the quest.3

  The best of anime have always given viewers places they’d like to go and people they’d like to meet, from Lum and Nausicaä to Captain Tita and Tenchi Masaki. They don’t exist and therefore can never truly win their battles, but their fictional victories give us reason to hope for our own victories in the here and now. Sometime, somewhere in the universe, the simple emotions of a high-school girl may well be sufficient to put things right.

  1. Much of the following information is from Egan Loo, “Vision of Escaflowne,” Animerica 8, no. 8 (September 2000): 6.