Anime Explosion!

by Drazen, Patrick

  This was about the time of the virtual pet. These computer games were pet rocks with a twist; the owner had to feed them, clean them, clean up after them, and play with them—all of which only involved pushing a few buttons. These animals were simulations, LCD computer displays that lived in plastic cases about the size of an egg. In fact, one brand of virtual pet, Tamagotchi, was named after the Japanese word tamago, or egg.

  It made for a rather odd kind of video solitaire, a combination of Tetris and babysitting. At odd intervals your virtual pet would beep, and you’d push the required buttons to satisfy it. Failure to do so meant that the pet would sicken and die. This certainly added a level of poignancy to the game, but it was still a game. And, if it was to stay at all popular, it would have to grow and evolve.

  When Nintendo introduced a cable in 1991 that could link two Game Boy units into one, that was the key for Tajiri. He developed his Pocket Monsters (Pokémon for short) and used a prototype of the game to land a job with Nintendo. It took until 1996 to put the finishing touches on it, but the work paid off. The technology of being a ten-year-old Japanese boy may have changed, but the basics were still there. The Pokémon game single-handedly revived the popularity of the Game Boy, which was dying out because of interest in CD-ROM-driven video games. Pokémon swept Japan, and would later score a similar success in the United States.

  The players start out with two Pokémon-loaded Game Boys and a connecting cable. This gives them a hand-held version of a large two-player arcade console game. The object is simple: make the pokémon fight each other. With experience, pokémon that survived enough battles evolved into different pokémon. Even though there were 150 possible pokémon when the game was released, some gamers played through them all fairly quickly—and discovered Tajiri’s secret payoff: the existence of an unannounced 151st pokémon for those who stayed the course. This was just the sort of gimmick calculated to attract game fans and generate word-of-mouth publicity.

  Out of this video-gaming concept was born the television series Pokémon. Animated by Shogakukan and aimed at grade-school students, the story centers on a group of children, one of whom (called Satoshi in Japan and Ash in America) has an almost fanatical desire to develop a stable of fighting pocket monsters. There are obstacles along the way, of course, including the comic Rocket Gang. All the monsters are different, and most become even more so, evolving into heightened creatures at some point based on their fighting experience.

  Very few of Satoshi’s pokémon evolve, because doing so would miss the point. This Pokémon master is only about ten years old, and the pokémon he coaches into battle are themselves very childlike—smaller and seemingly weaker than their opponents. This serves two purposes. It reassures the audience (made up of children as young as Satoshi, if not younger) that size doesn’t really matter, and that even the youngest can make a positive contribution. This is also, however, a message for their parents. Japan has long been aware of its status in the world: a chain of volcanic islands, dwarfed by most of its neighbors, both near (China, Russia) and far (the United States). This awareness existed during the Meiji Restoration, when Japan decided that it had to rush to catch up with European civilization; during a half-century (1895–1945) of rampant militarism and war; and during the industrial and trade growth of the 1970s and 1980s. Japan still sees itself as a David among global Goliaths, and any story that shows the victory of a smaller adversary over a greater one (whether that large enemy is Godzilla, a thug in a high school gang, or one of the gigantic Angels of Evangelion) enjoys a special resonance.

  Few of the pokémon can be said to have any kind of personality, but first among equals is definitely Pikachu. A chubby little yellow electric rodent, Pikachu is clearly the star of this show, and of the merchandising.

  The show did wonderfully in the ratings because it managed to cross over to both boys and girls. Part of this was due to the addition of a girl character as a friend of the hero (Kasumi in Japan, Misty in the United States), and partly because the episodes also incorporated the kind of sentimentality common to shojo manga. It isn’t all about battles; progress toward the tournament is made by being good to your friends and neighbors as well as to your pokémon. It was a deft mix of ganbaru and yasashisa. Nothing, it seemed, could go wrong.

  The Incident

  So when things went wrong, they went in a big way. The episode broadcast December 16, 1997 included, among other scenes, someone throwing a bomb at Pikachu. Pikachu responds with his ability to shoot out lightning bolts. Both had happened often enough on television with no ill effects. However, this time the combination of the two was at just the wrong rate of strobing. It induced an epileptic seizure in about seven hundred Japanese children. Most recovered quickly, but a few had to be hospitalized overnight.

  They were better off than the anime series—Shogakukan shut down production for four months to find out exactly what had happened. In the meantime, negotiations were underway to bring Pokémon (the Game Boy cartridge) to the United States. The seizure episode could have been a major stumbling block.

  The Name Game

  Another was the game’s “Japan-ness,” as one Shogakukan executive put it. In the end, the anime series’ move to the United States involved changing names—a lot of names. Most of the pokémon had specifically Japanese handles. The pika in Pikachu, for instance, is the “sound” of a lightning flash. The toad-like pokémon with a plant on his back is called Bulbasaur in the West, but its real name is Fushigidane, a Japanese phrase meaning “weird, isn’t it.” The dragon Charmander is really Hitokage (Japanese for “shadow”); another human companion, named Brock in the West, is named Takeshi in the East; the Rocket Gang (aka Team Rocket) went from being Musashi2 and Kojiro to Jessie and James; their feline pokémon Nyase became Meowth; and so on.

  Not all the names were changed: Pikachu is still Pikachu, and the cobra Arbok is still Arbok. Other in-jokes and cultural references are simply left unexplained, such as the episode in which our heroes arrive in Dark City, where two pokémon gyms are battling in the streets. They are the Yas Gym and the Kaz Gym. The Japanese viewer would recognize the joke: Yaskaz is a nickname for percussionist Yasukazu Sato.

  Another such specific reference is tied to the cycle of twelve animals in the Chinese calendar, which many Westerners are familiar with.

  What most of them may not realize is that a cycle of the five elements is traditionally overlaid on the twelve-year animal cycle. Of the sixty possible resulting combinations, the matching of fire with the Year of the Horse is still regarded as having special significance. Japanese women born in the Year of the Fire Horse were (and in some cases still are) believed to be talented but too hot-tempered to get along in society. This resonance is in the Japanese audience when the anime series shows a white unicorn with a flaming mane and tail: a “fire-horse” pokémon.

  Some elements were so Japanese that they could neither be removed nor explained. So the cartoon simply proceeds as if, in a fantastic realm full of fantastic creatures, there should be nothing odd about a group of turtles wearing identical jackets. However, they’re more than just turtles; they’re a traditional Japanese fire brigade, and Japanese children watching this get the joke.

  The firefighters of Edo (present-day Tokyo), known as tobi, were first organized at the beginning of the Tokugawa period (early 1600s), when Edo was being set up as the new capital of Japan. Housing got shoved closer and closer together as government officials, their families, and their servants crowded into the growing city. This meant that the danger of fire took on a new meaning. In the country, houses could be widely scattered, and one house burning down did not automatically threaten its neighbor. In Edo, however, people were running out of room and running out of options for dealing with fire.

  The solution was to create groups of specially appointed firefighters to watch for fires, fight them, and tear down adjacent buildings to keep the fire from spreading. Obviously it was a risky business, and the government of Edo turned to
gaen, gangs of unemployed men—occasionally criminal gangs, but definitely ruffians—who couldn’t be hired for anything else.

  In time, these gangs of firefighters proliferated, adopting uniforms consisting of the short jackets called happi emblazoned with the mon (crest) of the particular group, so that one gang could be distinguished from another.3

  All of this is implicit in a couple of episodes of the Pokémon TV series. Satoshi and friends come across a group of turtle-like aquatic pokémon (called Zenigame in the original, Squirtle in the dub). You can tell these are toughs because they wear sunglasses. Satoshi’s Squirtle asserts himself as the alpha male by putting on an even more outrageous pair of sunglasses. He organizes the others into a fire brigade, and we next see them wearing identical happi coats, posing in front of a red-striped background meant to evoke the Japanese “rising sun” battle flag of the 1940s.

  The Pokémon Movies: Lights! Camera! Angst!

  Director Kunihiko Yuyama has directed all of the (so far) sixteen theatrically released Pokemon movies, plus accompanying short subjects. These appear in Japanese theaters regularly, with a new movie every July. Yuyama uses Shogakukan’s happy palette of primary colors to tell some very dark stories.

  First was the movie known in the West as Pokémon: The First Movie. Mewtwo is a one-of-a-kind pokémon, cloned from the remains of a mysterious breed called a Mew (in the video game, this was Tajiri’s secret 151st pokémon) and enhanced with ultimate weapon capabilities.4 You can probably guess what happens next, especially if you’ve seen anime such as M.D. Geist or Nausicaä or Akira or any similar story in which humankind’s ability to develop the ultimate weapon gets ahead of its ability to control it. Mewtwo is born with a colossal chip on its psychically powered shoulders; knowing it was cloned to serve a human pokémon master, it rebels and starts creating his own poké-clones. His aim is to destroy both humans and the pokémon who (from his point of view) allow themselves to be enslaved. The reality, of course, is not so simple, but it isn’t until Pikachu refuses to fight its opposite number and Satoshi/Ash is turned to stone (and than revived by the tears of the pokémon) that Mewtwo catches on. In the end, he realizes that “the circumstances of one’s birth are irrelevant” and what’s important is what one does with one’s life. Nobody in this movie uses the word karma, but this Buddhist principle underlies the resolution of the plot.

  One noticeable difference between Pokémon: The First Movie and Pokémon: The Movie 2000, the second feature, is the increased use of computer graphics. The increase is most obvious in the flying machine (in a mix of old and new technologies that has come to be called “steampunk”) used by the villain of the piece, a character that would be familiar to some of the grown-ups in the audience: an obsessed collector. Having collected one of almost every pokémon, this evil genius has reached the top of the pyramid. He’s now after the legendary guardians of fire, ice, and lightning, but not for their own sake. He wants to use the three to capture the largest and most powerful pokémon of all: the ruler of the sea. Each time he captures one of the three guardians, the planet’s climate goes more and more out of kilter. In true storytelling tradition, things get a lot worse before they get better.

  However, there is one bit of business that would mean something more to a Japanese audience. Satoshi and friends arrive at the island chain where the plot reaches its climax. One island is having its annual festival, including colorful native garb. However, the role of Festival Maiden is to be played by a girl who, when first we see her, is wearing casual urban clothes, including sunglasses. She dismisses the centuries-old tradition as something for tourists to gawk at. Nevertheless, when the Earth itself is threatened by the ruler of the sea, her ritual performance is instrumental in calming things down.

  Japan has any number of festivals at various times of the year, depending on the locale. And in this age of cellular phones and Game Boys, surely Japanese parents have heard their children complain—more than once—that obon dances for dead relatives and fertility rites rooted in the agrarian past are meaningless in the modern age. The implicit message in this film: “those rituals had a purpose in the past, they have a purpose in the present, and we may cease to be if the rituals are abandoned.” Certainly Japan would not cease to exist if it suddenly gave up all traditional ritual, but it would be a lot less Japanese.

  The third movie, Pokémon 3: Spell of the Unown, gives the audience a classically dreaded scenario: a child with one parent gone and the remaining parent threatened. Specifically, a young girl’s father is spirited away by an unknown race of pokémon. The girl is given a surrogate father: a large furry pokémon with the psychic ability to cloud people’s minds. It also provides a new mother for the girl, who happens to be Satoshi’s mom under hypnotic suggestion. In the end, of course, the girl recovers not only her father but her mother as well (although this is only suggested under the final credits).

  “We all live in a Pokémon world”

  In popular culture, imitation isn’t just a form of flattery; it’s an inevitability. When something scores a huge popular success, others try to cash in on the formula (or what others think is the formula). In the case of Pokémon, several anime series were “inspired” by the success of the TV series, as well as the fact that the series was essentially a long-running commercial for a Nintendo video game. Most of these other series started out in manga rather than as games. These include Digimon (little kids with friendly evolving monsters), Cardcaptor Sakura (little girl with a friendly monster and collectible cards), and Yu-Gi-Oh (young boy with collectible cards and magical opponents).

  One of the few similar anime series also spun off from a video game is Monster Farm (1999; brought to the West as Monster Rancher). Here we have a young boy, a girl companion, and magical beings that live in an alternate universe. This game’s gimmick, however, involved CDs. Any old CD will do—pop it into the game console and it “generates” the monster you’re supposed to battle. In this case the anime traveled more easily than the game.

  It’s been years since the Game Boy version of Pokémon appeared. Since then, Game Boy itself has evolved several times, growing in memory strength and gaining a full-color display. The collectible card mania seems to have slowed down and some of the web pages have gone to seed, but the television series is still in global syndication, telling its stories of courage, compassion, and camaraderie.

  Leave it to a few Western fans, though, to try to pour gasoline on a fire. Some actually tried to find an air-check of that infamous episode of Pokémon to get copies of the toxic material. Some justified it by making it sound like a thrill ride (ignoring that such rides spend millions of dollars to create the illusion of peril, not actual peril); others likened it to the Japanese stunt of eating fugu without eating that fish’s lethal toxins. These foolhardy thrill-seekers should treat the footage for what it was: an accident waiting to happen. Shogakukan recognized it, snipped the damaging footage and went about its business. And so should the rest of us.

  1. Some of the following information is from Howard Chua-Eoan and Tim Larimer, “Poke-Mania,” Time 154, no. 21 (November 22, 1999): 80.

  2. True to the gender-bending in anime, the female member of the gang is apparently named after Miyamoto Musashi (1584–1645), author of a volume still in print as The Book of Five Rings and arguably the greatest samurai in history. The other member of the Rocket Gang is named Kojiro, after a rival of Miyamoto’s: Sasaki Kojiro.

  3. This happi has nothing to do with happiness. It’s derived from the Japanese han, meaning half, since it’s half as long as a full-length kimono.

  4. Its enhancement is accomplished by body armor that looks suspiciously like similar armor from other anime, notably Bubblegum Crisis and The Guyver.

  Plastic Little: Not What You Think

  She’s young, tough, a demon on a motorcycle and shoots to kill. She catches whales for pets. It’s an action story, and a love story, with some of the best-looking nudes in anime.

  You may think
that you have the 1994 OAV Plastic Little figured out just by hearing a few details. The main characters are two girls, sixteen and seventeen years old. Once they meet, they spend the rest of the story together: cavorting in a bathhouse in the nude, sleeping in the same bed, going up to the hills to watch the sunrise (almost always a prelude to romance in Japanese pop culture), followed by breakfast at a seaside cafe. One even tells the other “suki desu,” which can be translated “I love you.” So it’s at least partly a lesbian romance, right? More than a few Western watchers seem to think so.

  The problem with this view is that, in Japanese, suki desu can mean “I love you,” but that doesn’t mean it must mean it. In fact, since this form of speech is a more casual way of expressing one’s love (as opposed to ai shite imasu), it would be more properly translated “I like you.” And in fact, Elysse says “Tita no mono ga suki desho” (“Tita, I guess I like you”). When you get right down to it, Plastic Little is not about lesbians; in fact, it’s not about sex at all.

  There is, however, nudity and quite a bit of it. This OAV was created by Satoshi Urushibara, who has built his manga career on lovingly detailed female nudes (as compared to the generic nudes in some anime, which are about as anatomically detailed as a Barbie™ doll). He previously produced a work titled Chirality, and has worked before with director Kinji Yoshimoto, notably on a rather boring, by-the-numbers sword and sorcery anime called Legend of Lemnear. By contrast, Plastic Little can hardly be said to be boring.

  Ship Shape

  After a prologue in an underground laboratory, in which a scientist (you can tell by the white lab coat) places his daughter into an escape pod to the surface just before he is killed by the evil general (you can tell by his outrageously huge shoulder-pads; this parody of Darth Vader’s costume in Star Wars has become another part of anime shorthand), we cut to a resort hotel. We hear a whiny voice with a request all too familiar to Japanese parents in the summer: “Umi ni detai yo!” Its meaning is simply “I wanna go to the beach!” but it has a slightly different literal translation: “I want to go to sea.” In this case, the latter is more appropriate.