Anime Explosion!

by Drazen, Patrick

  In a hotel room littered with pizza boxes and a Monopoly game, we see the speaker of the last sentence: a teenage tangle of bedclothes and brown hair. She yawns, and that gives the audience its next clue. All we can see in her mouth are two little fangs. This doesn’t mean that she’s a vampire or a demon or one of the many cat-girls in anime. In the shorthand of anime, fangs can also denote an alien. So not only are we not in Kansas, Toto, we aren’t even on planet Earth—no matter how much it looks like Earth.

  She calls for her companions—Mei, Nichol, Mikhail, Balboa, Roger—but they seem to have abandoned her. As she dresses, a voice-mail starts to explain things for us. The girl’s name is Tita, and, while the others are the crew of a ship, she’s the captain! However, the voice-mail message from Nichol, the teenage navigator, tells Tita that, having overslept, she may as well bring lunch to the ship. One more detail: on the elevator, we find that her pockets are stuffed with candy, which she shares with some children. This establishes her yasashii credentials and also reminds the viewer that this planet, named Yietta, definitely isn’t the United States, where children are warned from the cradle not to take candy from strangers. Japan, however, is different: just as hitchhiking is not perceived as dangerous—in anime or in real life—the general notion of doing deliberate harm to children is so aberrant as to seem almost impossible.1 While Tita is still packing the groceries into her scooter, the scientist’s daughter runs into her—literally. She’s being chased by huge, heavily armed police, so Tita decides to even the odds by pulling the girl onto her cycle, barely making an escape.

  They’re considerably the worse for wear when they get back to Tita’s ship, the ChaCha Maru.2 A hot bath is in order, so we get to see the two disrobed girls in a fantasia of an onsen that would put most Japanese hot springs (or American water-slide parks) to shame. As they frolic in the slides and waterfalls, Nichol and Roger try to sneak a peek at them; this little bit of voyeurism is, believe it or not, as close to sex as Plastic Little gets.

  More important to the audience is that the scene establishes their ages. In the Confucian-based society of Japan, age sometimes makes all the difference in a relationship. Anyone who’s seen the American broadcasts of the Japanese TV series Iron Chef knows that it’s one of those genre-blasting hybrid entertainments common in Japan: in this case, a mix of haute cuisine and TV wrestling. The challengers are all presented to the audience with filmed biographies establishing their credentials. For some reason, the subtitled American broadcasts never include one detail in the spoken Japanese introduction: the age of the challenger.

  It’s important in Japanese society to establish relative age in a relationship in order to establish relative position. Yes, it matters that Tita, at seventeen, is a year older than her companion (whose name is Elysse). This makes Tita a “big sister type.” “The big-sister type,” writes Cherry, “leads and looks after her underlings on the job, at school or anywhere else. . . . She will be kind to those younger or weaker than herself. . . . [O]lder sisters are authority figures in Japan, where age always confers privileges and responsibilities.”3 And, although these two girls may act like equals and call each other by name throughout the anime (instead of Elysse referring to Tita as oneesan, or elder sister), the plot reflects their difference, from Tita’s taking the initiative to rescue Elysse to the fact that Tita, in effect, owns the water-park—in fact, she owns the whole ship.

  How does a teenage girl end up as a ship’s captain, and how does any ship rate this kind of pleasure facility? We find out that Captain Tita is the daughter of the original captain of the ChaCha Maru, who was lost at sea six years earlier. Like her father, she’s a Pet Shop Hunter, capturing wild sea-dwelling animals for sale as pets. Of course, when your ship has to sail the seas of the planet Yietta (seas which are made of clouds instead of water!) chasing whales, sharks, eels and other large marine life, it has to be pretty large. The bath was built in a seldom-used holding tank, which could easily have held a whale. Meanwhile, as the girls finally get to know each other, the three adults on board (Mei, Mikhail, and Balboa—Roger, who is black, seems to be an older adolescent, or perhaps a younger adult) read in the local newspaper that Elysse was supposed to have been killed with her father in a laboratory explosion. They realize that they may be caught in a political situation too hot to handle. . . .

  For the remainder of the OAV, Tita plays Luke Skywalker to Elysse’s Princess Leia. In the final scene, having dispatched the villain, neutralized the doomsday device (a perversion of the beneficial machine that was the life work of Elysse’s father) and destroyed the entire Yiettan navy (don’t ask, it’s too technical), Tita asks Elysse to stay on board. Elysse declines, saying that she wants to continue her father’s work. Tita understands; after all, she’s continuing her father’s work as a Pet Shop Hunter. She understands something else about Elysse, and admits to why she stopped to help her in the first place: she recognized in Elysse “the look of a girl who’d lost her father and [not] gotten over it.”

  This contextualizes the Tita/Elysse friendship not in terms of sex, but in terms of group membership. Even if they belong to a group of two, it’s still a group, and such affiliations are a vital part of living life Japanese. The relationship is neither titillating nor threatening; it’s not even sexual. (Sleeping in the same bed? That’s all it was: sleeping. They established a link even though they’d just met that day, and even if they couldn’t verbalize it as such: that they had both lost their fathers. They slept together not for sex but for skinship.) They’re just doing what their Japanese audience does. Even if they do it on a planet where whales swim through gaseous seas, to be caught for pets by teenage girls. . . .

  1. “The Japanese must be the kindest people in the world to thumbing foreigners, and the main difficulty is to avoid taking unfair advantage of them” (Ian McQueen, Japan: A Travel Survival Kit [South Yarra, Victoria, Australia: Lonely Planet Publications, 1981], 35).

  2. Another indication that Yietta is like Japan: virtually every Japanese boat has a name ending in maru. In 2001 we heard of the Ehime Maru, a fishing boat run by a vocational high school, which sank when it was rammed by a U.S. Navy submarine. In Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, James Kirk became notorious at Starfleet Academy for solving the insoluble problem of the Kobayashi Maru. Even a rowboat, in an early manga episode of Maison Ikkoku, is named Isoya Maru. (Speaking of Maison Ikkoku, one boarding-house resident is a hostess at a bar that is also called ChaCha Maru. I have no idea of the connection, if any, between that bar and Captain Tita’s ship.)

  3. Kittredge Cherry, Womansword: What Japanese Words Say About Women (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1987), 16–17.

  The Old and New Testaments of Masamune Shirow

  Artificial organs, cloning, robotics—the science fiction of yesterday is filler in today’s newspaper. What will it be tomorrow? Consult a pair of anime by Masamune Shirow.

  The Anime Movie Guide, by British pop-culture analyst Helen McCarthy, starts in 1983. There were anime produced before then, but that was the year that direct-to-consumer videos (OAVs) were introduced. That was also the year a student at Osaka University of Art self-published the first volume of a manga series titled Black Magic.

  The name of that student was not Masamune Shirow. Like Monkey Punch or Fujio Fujiko, that is a pen name under which he creates his manga. It also gives him a persona to hide behind; unlike many artists who revel in the publicity that comes with success, Shirow prefers to stay out of the spotlight. In an inversion of the way the game is sometimes played, he has never allowed himself to appear in public in that identity. He knew, after all, that Shirow would be the center of attention, while the “real” artist would be below the radar of fandom.

  One other aspect of his life is a bit out of the ordinary: Masamune Shirow came to manga relatively late. He focused on sports in his youth and didn’t discover comics until he was in college. His choice of Osaka University of Art wasn’t because he wanted to further his cartooning skills but
because he wanted to study oil painting. However, his manga Black Magic caught the eye of the president of the Osaka-based Seishinsha publishing company, who invited Shirow to turn professional. His first work as a pro was Appleseed, which was animated in 1988. He’s perhaps best known, however, as the creator of Ghost in the Shell, animated as a groundbreaking feature film in 1995. Viewing the two anime back-to-back is instructive regarding both works as well as the manga artist who created them.

  The Old Testament: Appleseed

  In the beginning was the apple. For Masamune Shirow, the new beginning of life on post-apocalyptic Earth was Appleseed. The use of the Old Testament symbol of the apple was conscious and deliberate on the artist’s part, as he created a future metropolis where all do not live happily ever after.

  In 1988, when it was adapted to an OAV and directed by Kazuyoshi Katayama,1 a lot of philosophical subtleties in the manga were tossed by the wayside in order to boil the multivolume story down to seventy minutes. What’s left, unfortunately, is like quintessential ’80s Hollywood: a lot of explosions and guns and chase scenes. Even the music is ’80s Hollywood synthesizer chase music. There’s still a story, to be sure—more of a story than most of the Sylvester Stallone or Eddie Murphy films of the same period—but the action is too Hollywood to be believed. One all too clear example: a SWAT team barges into a room where terrorists are holding hostages. There are four terrorists; four shots are fired at them; they all hit the mark; and they’re all head shots to the brain. That’s entertainment.

  Our first look at the terrorists is through a dream. A man searches for his wife through their high-rise luxury apartment, and finds her in the studio, sitting next to an open window. The room looks like it has been ransacked. The birdcage is open, and the bird has just been set free. Then—as her husband watches—she lets herself fall through the open window. Before she gets halfway to the ground, the dreamer awakes in a cold sweat, but in those few seconds we feel something of his terror, and we later understand what drives this terrorist (also a policeman) named Calon. It wasn’t a dream; it was a memory.

  The story focuses on the efforts of two policemen to stop the terror: a young woman named Deunan Knute and her partner Briareos, who’s mostly robot and whose design makes him look like a giant metallic rabbit. As an aide to Athena Areios, the inspector general of Olympus, describes them, “as police they’re excellent; as people, they’re eccentric.” They’re also two among many rescued from the non-Olympian wasteland by Hitomi, a government “caseworker” conducting an unspecified “experiment” in bringing people from the wilderness to live and work in Olympus.

  Olympus is to be the flagship city built out of the rubble of World War III, its every detail coordinated by a supercomputer called Gaia.2 Some of the wartime rubble, including tanks and the rotting corpses within them, is still visible. The inspector general is concerned about keeping order in Olympus, and worries—rightly, as it turns out—about “immigration of unstable elements” from the wilderness disrupting the peace.

  Post-apocalyptic scenarios have become standard in manga and anime. Think of Neo-Tokyo rising from the ashes of war in Akira, or of Tokyo rebuilt after a disastrous earthquake in Bubblegum Crisis Tokyo 2040, or of Tokyo just picking up and moving to the Izu Peninsula after the melting of the polar caps in Evangelion. In these cases and so many more, while officialdom and industry put the capital back together, they also have hidden agendas that do not bode well for the common people.

  These doomsday stories all contrast with less cynical stories in the same post-apocalyptic genre, for example, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, in which global war destroyed all of civilization and required thousands of years for humankind to rise back to even a simple agrarian life. Appleseed’s scenario owes more to early twentieth-century science fiction, especially films such as William Cameron Menzies’s Things to Come and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, both of which inspired early manga by Dr. Osamu Tezuka.

  Terrorists attack a pyramid-like structure called Tartarus. The choice of name reveals a neo-Greek theme. Tartarus in Greek mythology was a sub-level of Hades. In some accounts, after the Titans were defeated by the gods, Zeus imprisoned them in Tartarus. The name Tartarus was later employed for the place of damnation where the wicked were punished after death. There are classical statues all over this modern city, inspector general Athena’s secretary is called Nike, and even the name Briareos has Greek roots as a fifty-headed giant.

  There’s something else happening, however; a literary allusion, deliberate on Masamune Shirow’s part. When Hitomi shouts that she was “born” in Tartarus, she’s speaking figuratively. She’s a bioroid, a living machine, and Tartarus was where the bioroids were created. This humanoid race, “born” in a laboratory and raised in a utopia where no one needed to struggle for anything, looks back to another dystopian classic, Aldous Huxley’s 1932 novel Brave New World.

  Brave New World, like George Orwell’s 1984, commented on the present by putting a mask on it and calling it the future. Both books critiqued the micro-managed life of the Soviet Union under Josef Stalin. Huxley, however, took matters farther, by painting a society that bio-engineered its offspring (thus freeing its inhabitants to indulge in casual sex) and believed religiously in buying things and in soma, a drug that wasn’t much more than a low-level opiate (this was before Huxley himself began experimenting with LSD). Ultimately, the heroes of the book break away from the society, having been inspired by someone (known in Huxley’s book as the Savage) from the outside.

  In Appleseed, as in Brave New World, society has decided to commit to a structured peace after a disastrous war. In Olympus, however, the battle isn’t over yet. Terrorists try to disrupt the well-ordered society from within and without. The police try to cope with the terrorism, serving the state without knowing the entire picture. In the end, a partnership is formed between Deunan, Briareos, and Calon, not just because they were fellow police but because they understand the larger drama unfolding around them.

  Of all the anime in this book, this one has probably gone through more changes between the first and second editions than any other. Where there had been one film based on Masamune Shirow’s manga Appleseed, there are now three—and the two newer films are not only very different from each other, but are landmark CG anime as far removed from the original two-dimensional cel animated Appleseed as Appleseed was from Mary Poppins. Ghost in the Shell, meanwhile, gave rise to a remix, a theatrical sequel, a made-for-cable film, and a two-season TV series. In short, it became a franchise. Along the way, it too made new use of computer animation, acting out Shirow’s search for answers on the nature of society, humanity, and life itself.

  Beginning again at the beginning, we’ll walk again through the manga of Shirow and the anime of Mamoru Oshii, with new contributions from Prada, the Yellow Magic Orchestra, and the Cyborg Manifesto, and a side-trip to the Uncanny Valley—all new locations to this edition. A lot can happen in a decade.

  Though I Walk through the Valley

  Anime was still in its postwar infancy in 1970, and computer-generated (CG) animation was non-existent when robotics scientist Masahiro Mori published his thesis on the Uncanny Valley. At a glance, it seemed that anime and robotics might never meet except at an Astro Boy film festival, but by the twenty-first century the two would be permanently linked.

  Mori had his subjects look at a continuum, from human-looking dolls, including toys and bunraku puppets, to actual human beings. He noted a paradox: the more realistic a doll looked, the more it was acceptable to humans—up to a point. Ultimately the design reached a point where the resemblance of machine to man stopped being amusing or interesting and could only be described as “creepy”; in Mori’s model, the gradually ascending line of human acceptance of humanoid robots took a sudden dive when the robot resembled an animated corpse: very human looking but lifeless, bringing about a sense of uneasiness. This sudden plunge in attitude was what Mori called the Uncanny Valley (Bukimi no Tani), and, even
though in 1970 Mori arrived at this conclusion by showing pictures to monkeys and then noted whether they looked at the picture or looked away, the years since Mori, and especially the past decade, have verified the Valley’s reality.

  It’s hard to locate the precise boundaries of the Valley, but one knows it when one sees it. Early examples of computer animation stayed true to the cartoon roots and didn’t try to get too realistic. The few human characters in such Pixar films as Toy Story and Finding Nemo were not intended to be any more realistic than the toys, insects, or other non-human characters. One film that conspicuously failed when it tried to cross the Valley was The Polar Express; its entire cast of human characters seemed off-putting, with reviews referring to the CG animation as “cold” and “lifeless.”

  Japanese animators also tried to bring out computer-animated humans who looked real, also with mixed success. The 2001 release, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, received mixed critical reaction but failed to make back the cost of production. There were still too many variables in the design and animation of CG characters, from skin and hair to gestures and facial expressions. The best that studios could do still couldn’t get across the Valley. This latter problem solved itself by 2003 as both the hardware and software of computer animation evolved.

  It took a different but related art form—computer games—to work across the barrier. Games such as Final Fantasy X-2, released in 2003 for the PlayStation 2, created by Square Enix Studio, and directed by Motomu Toriyama, were able to go the distance and create human-looking images that didn’t put off viewers.