Patrick Drazen explains how Japanese anime came bursting onto the scene in Anime Explosion!.
For fans, culture watchers, and perplexed outsiders, this expanded edition offers an engaging tour of the anime megaverse, from older artistic traditions to the works of modern creators like Hayao Miyazaki, Katsuhiro Otomo, Satoshi Kon, and CLAMP.
Examined are all of anime's major themes, styles, and conventions, plus the familiar tropes of giant robots, samurai, furry beasts, high school heroines, and gay/girl/fanboy love. Concluding are fifteen essays on favorite anime, including Evangelion, Escaflowne, Sailor Moon, Patlabor, and Fullmetal Alchemist.
Anime Explosion! The What? Why? and Wow! of Japanese Animation by Patrick Drazen is available in both print and digital everywhere now. Order your copy here.
Read a sample of Anime Explosion! below.
A Page Right Out of History
American fans of Japanese animation wouldn’t have Pokémon, Akira, or Totoro to enjoy if it weren’t for Walt Disney, cable television, and the VCR. An informal history of anime in the United States, going back to 1963.
A lot of Japanese anime—not all of it by any means, but certainly more than animation in the West—is aimed at viewers with double-digit ages and triple-digit IQs. As they did with automobiles, the Japanese have taken an American creation and reworked it into something far beyond what its creators considered to be the state of the art. Toontown, like Detroit, has to play some serious catch-up if it wants to stay in the game.
Hooray for Hollywood
Ironically, there would be no animation in Japan or anywhere else had it not been pioneered and developed in the United States shortly after movies themselves were invented. Of the two mainstay studios in American animation between the World Wars, one didn’t last very long. Brothers Max and Dave Fleischer had some very popular characters to their credit. These included the animated versions of the Superman comic book and of the newspaper comic Popeye, and especially the cartoon vamp Betty Boop. Max Fleischer also invented the rotoscoping technique of filming live actors, then drawing cartoons based on their movements. This accounted for the realistic look of the title character in the 1939 Fleischer feature Gulliver’s Travels, while the little people of Lilliput and Blefuscu were blatantly cartoony.
The top of the animation mountain, of course, was Walt Disney. He pioneered sound and color, as well as avant-garde techniques that would hardly ever be used again. If people anywhere in the world saw animation at all before 1941, it was probably Disney animation. Disney broke new ground with the 1937 feature-length Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. For the next four decades Hollywood animated features followed the lead of Walt Disney in treating animation as a “family” medium: targeted at children, but with the occasional bit of in-joking dialogue or eye candy for the grownups who brought the children into the theater in the first place. (And singing; don’t forget singing. That deserves its own chapter, especially in light of Japan’s take on pop music and anime. For now, suffice it to say that, because Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was structured along the lines of European operetta, with songs aplenty, some animated features in the West still feel obliged—sixty years later—to break into song every five minutes, even if there’s no particular reason.)
However, cartoons in the West were often just a sideshow. Animation before television, after all, usually meant theatrical short subjects, and the only place to see animation was at the movies.
The Doctor Is In
At first the Japanese took their cues on animation from the same medium American television animation did: Disney’s animated theatrical short subjects and feature films. But Disney’s early animation—both the artistic technique and the humanist philosophy—became the subjects of study as well as entertainment for a medical student named Osamu Tezuka (1925–89). His nickname—manga no kamisama (“God of Comics”)—is no exaggeration. His forty years as a cartoonist saw massive changes in the form and content of Japanese comic books, changes usually traced back to innovations by Dr. Tezuka himself. His manga (an estimated career total of 150,000 pages) used storytelling devices influenced not only by Disney but also by French New Wave cinema. In fact, “cinema” is the key word; with their use of panning shots, extreme close-ups, time-lapse, flashbacks, and other cinematic devices, Japanese comics literally exploded off of the paper they were printed on.
The transition to television animation was thus a short and simple one. It was helped along when Dr. Tezuka created Japan’s first animated TV superstar. While Mickey Mouse, Tom and Jerry, and Bugs Bunny were created for the movies and then found life on American television, a robot that looked like a young boy moved from the comic-book pages directly to the small screen, and promptly became one of the most memorable characters of all time, on both sides of the Pacific. Published in Japan for years as Tetsuwan Atomu (The Mighty Atom) and animated by Tezuka’s own Mushi Productions studio, he’s still remembered outside Japan as Astro Boy. With spiky hair, eyes as big as fists, rockets in his feet, and machine-guns in his butt, Atomu was a new kind of robot for a post-Occupation Japan. His enemies aren’t just bug-eyed monsters from outer space—he has the ability to tell if people are good or evil just by looking at them, so he spends time with law enforcement as well as his family. (He was originally created by a mad scientist to replace the scientist’s son, killed in a traffic accident, but by the end of the series Atomu acquired two robot parents and two younger siblings.)
Watching Astro Boy here and now, and especially Astro Boy’s initial episode, first broadcast in 1963, is something that will stay with you even in the wake of high-tech marvels such as Akira and Ghost in the Shell.
At times the black-and-white pictures are as primitive as an old Popeye short; at times the graphic quality rises to the level of Dumbo. But there is also the overall difference from typical Western storytelling, whose joys cannot be overstated. Watch Atomu rise up from the laboratory table. This isn’t a parody of Frankenstein movies; this is the creation of a life—tentative, inquisitive, singular. Something in the way he moves and gestures tells us that, at some level, this really is a wide-eyed child taking his first steps. Look at the castoff performers at the Robot Circus, consigned to the junk heap only because cute is boring. Consider the ringmaster as a low-rent Stromboli from Pinocchio; then watch as the Robot Circus burns down, and as Atomu rescues the ringmaster. From his hospital bed, the ringmaster finds out who saves him—a scene that would lead immediately to repentance in the West—but then the sonovabitch still claims he owns Atomu, in spite of robots having been granted civil rights. (Unlike Disney features, which didn’t try to be topical except for a few pop culture references, Tetsuwan Atomu consciously and deliberately mirrored the American civil rights struggles of the day. It’s hard to think of an American television series—live or animated—that did the same, and it’s equally hard to think of a twentieth-century Disney movie that could be called “topical.”)
They’re Coming to America
Not long after its premiere on Japanese TV on the first day of 1963, Atomu made the jump to American television. Back in the early 1960s, most TV stations in the United States were not even on the air twenty-four hours a day, and the notion of cable TV with hundreds of channels was the stuff of science fiction. This was a time of growth and expansion, however, with color broadcasting just around the corner. The growing need for programming coincided with the experimental approach in those days of broadcasters who were willing to try just about anything. Anime were especially welcome because of their lack of ethnic specificity. One of the conventions of anime (to be discussed later) was to draw characters as if they were American, or at least white. Even if the characters were supposed to be Japanese, they seldom looked Japanese. Thus, translation was no trouble at all; characters could be renamed, relationships and motivations juggled, and plots rewritten with relative ease. This became a major consideration later, when Japanese plots and pictures went far beyond what was permitted by American broadcast standards. Astro Boy flew across the American tube from 1963 to 1964, and his cartoon countrymen grabbed their passports, changed their names and followed in short order. The giant robot Tetsujin 28-go, based on a manga by Mitsuteru Yokoyama, hit the West in 1965 as Gigantor. He was not, however, the star of the show—this robot, unlike Atomu, was not a sentient being but a huge (forty-foot-tall) machine controlled by a small boy, the son of the inventor. This created an archetype for several “a boy and his robot” series to follow, from Johnny Socko to Evangelion.
Dr. Tezuka followed up Astro Boy with several series based on his manga. The year 1965 alone saw Wonder Three and Kimba the White Lion (based on his manga series Jungle Emperor), as well as an animated special based on Shin Takarajima (New Treasure Island), the groundbreaking 1947 comic by Dr. Tezuka that literally changed the entire medium. In 1967 both the cross-dressing Princess Sapphire of Dr. Tezuka’s Ribon no Kishi (Princess Knight) and the Mifune family arrived on Japanese and American television. Teenager Go Mifune circled the globe driving the Mach 5, a highly advanced racecar, accompanied by his father, little brother, and girlfriend. If this seems familiar, it’s because reruns of Mach Go Go Go can still be seen on cable television under its American name, Speed Racer. By the late ’60s, though, American interest in Japanese animation had declined to almost zero.
Anime: The Second Wave
It wasn’t until 1979, in the wake of the popularity of George Lucas’s Star Wars, that another anime series hit American television, but its impact was considerable. Star Blazers, the animated version of Reiji Matsumoto’s Uchu Senkan Yamato (Space Cruiser Yamato), was a revelation, since it had a twenty-six-week story-arc, dwarfing its predecessors the way its namesake dwarfed other battleships. Whether or not television executives in the West anticipated it, some of the older kids in the audience were watching as much for the personal interaction (some characters die, others fall in love) as for the space battles against the Gamilon forces.
The 1980s brought about two revolutions in American broadcasting: the explosive growth of cable, and consumer videotape recorders. The proliferation of cable channels—some of which specialized in showing cartoons—meant that large blocks of airtime were suddenly opening up on America’s vast wasteland, and something unique, or at least different, had to be plugged into the space. More than a few Japanese anime series moved in to fill the void.
Among them was Go Lion (Five Lions, 1981), renamed Voltron, which mixed two anime genres to create an intriguing new hybrid. It started with the formula for the “science team” first established in the Gatchaman series and revived (with occasional minor variations) in dozens of other Japanese series. (The team almost always consisted of: hero, woman, child, big beefy guy, lone wolf. The latter may seem odd, since loners usually aren’t part of a team, but such teams usually include a wild card to spice things up, since he’s capable of anything from criminal behavior to borderline psychosis.) Then it put the team inside five lion-shaped robots that combine to form one giant human robot. This notion of recombinant robots traces back to Getter Robo, the 1974 brainchild of Go Nagai. By the time the Transformers started gaining popularity in the West, the ground was well prepared.
Robotech went American television one better—or rather three better, since three different Japanese TV series were collected and edited together to produce this 1985 series that is still hailed as a major leap forward in science-fiction broadcasting, live or animated. In this wild and woolly space opera, the Earthlings do not build the giant superdimensional fortress Macross, it crashes into the Earth years before the battle against the Zentraedi aliens. It then becomes a city-cum–aircraft carrier for launching attacks against the Zentraedi. Unfortunately, the Earth forces are still trying to figure out how the ship works. At one point, a portion of the ship collapses on itself, trapping fighter pilot Hikaru Ichijo (aka Rick Hunter) with . . . a pop singing idol, Lynn Minmay. This sets up a romantic triangle, since First Officer Misa Hayase has also had her eye on Hikaru.
Some watched for the space battles. Some watched for the romance, including love affairs both interracial and interplanetary (although the nude shower scenes were cut for American broadcast). Some watched for the sheer chutzpah of the ultimate weapon against the Zentraedi turning out to be—the pop singing idol, Lynn Minmay. But it was the top of the line in anime to appear in the West, and Western viewers clearly wanted more.
So did the Japanese. Dr. Tezuka’s sophisticated stories and complex characters had spawned a wave of groundbreaking manga, and this in turn inspired generations of cartoonists and animators who would never have considered these media otherwise. As he observed in 1987, “many talented people who would normally go into the literary field or the movie industry came into this field one after the other, and they bore much fruit. . . . Now, Japanese cartoons have the expanse and technology unparalleled in the world.”
Anime Explosion! The What? Why? and Wow! of Japanese Animation by Patrick Drazen is available in both print and digital everywhere now. Order your copy here.