Anime Explosion! Read online

  “Any anime fan will be hard-pressed to stop reading until reaching the end.”

  Animefringe Online Anime Magazine

  “Mr. Drazen, like others of the Stone Bridge Press club, does his homework in spades.”

  Akadot.com

  “An excellent reference work on the subject. . . . Recommended for Japanese pop culture collections as well as public and academic library film collections.”

  Library Journal (starred review)

  “I strongly recommend [this book] to fans who wish to deepen their knowledge of Japanese culture in anime.”

  Gilles Poitras, author of The Anime Companion and Anime Essentials

  “The ideal gift for the fan who thinks he knows it all, or perhaps the parent who knows nothing. The world of Japanese animation is laden with so-called beginner’s guides, but in my opinion, this is the first that has been truly worth picking up.”

  SciFi Channel Website, UK

  “Highly recommended for fans of anime, and likely to send the uninitiated off . . . in search of many of the titles discussed.”

  Kansai Time Out

  “We heartily recommend this book.”

  Anime-Tourist.com

  “This book is useful not only as a reference to Anime, but also as a rewarding guide to some aspects of contemporary Japanese culture.”

  University Library: Monthly Book Spotlight, June 2003

  “An essential reference for understanding the landmarks, themes, and history contained in this intriguing form of popular culture.”

  John F. Barber, School of Arts and Humanities, The University of Texas at Dallas, Leonardo Journal

  “A good resource and guide to the foundation, historical development, and overall themes in Japanese animation . . . serves as an excellent reference source whether you are an established fan or a person who wants to learn about the cultural aspects of this specific and increasingly popular genre.”

  Active Anime

  REVISED AND EXPANDED EDITION

  ANIME EXPLOSION !

  The What? Why? & Wow!

  of Japanese Animation

  Patrick Drazen

  Stone Bridge Press • Berkeley, California

  PUBLISHED BY

  Stone Bridge Press, P.O, Box 8208, Berkeley, CA 94707

  tel 510-524-8732 • [email protected] • www.stonebridge.com

  Front cover design incorporating background artwork by Elizabeth Kirkindall of Big-Big-Truck.com.

  Text © 2003, 2014 by Patrick Drazen.

  Images and texts on websites accessed from links in this publication belong to their respective creators and copyright holders.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher.

  ANIME EXPLOSION! The What? Why? & Wow! of Japanese Animation

  p-ISBN: 9781611720136

  e-ISBN: 9781611725506

  Printed in the United States of America.

  Contents

  Preface

  Introduction to the 2nd Edition

  Acknowledgments

  PART ONE: INTERPRETING ANIME

  1. A Page Right Out of History

  2. Conventions versus Clichés

  3. The Social Web and the Lone Wolf

  4. Mukashi Mukashi: From Folktales to Anime

  5. The Naked Truth

  6. Rated H: Hardcore Anime

  7. “A Very Pure Thing”: Gay and Pseudo-Gay Themes in Anime

  8. Bushido: The Way of the Warrior

  9. Shojodo: The Way of the Teenage Girl

  10. Enter the Mamagon: The Japanese Mother

  11. Faith-Based: Christianity, Shinto, and Other Religions in Anime

  12. Who Ya Gonna Call?: The Spirit World in Anime

  13. The Starmaker Machinery: Anime and Idol

  14. It’s Not Easy Being Green: Nature in Anime

  15. War Is Stupid: War and Anti-War Themes in Anime

  16. Birth and Death and Rebirth: Reincarnation in Anime

  PART TWO: FILMS AND DIRECTORS

  1. Windaria

  2. The Wings of Honnêamise: Tora-san in Space

  3. Utena: Giri/Ninjo and the Triumph of Conservatism in Pop Culture

  4. Giant Robo: Anime as Wagnerian Opera

  5. Flying with Ghibli: The Animation of Hayao Miyazaki and Company

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

  7. The Vision of Escaflowne

  8. Neon Genesis Evangelion

  9. Please Save My Earth

  10. The Big Pokémon Scare

  11. Plastic Little: Not What You Think

  12. The Old and New Testaments of Masamune Shirow

  13. The Man in the Mirror: Satoshi Kon

  14. CLAMP: Women Unexpected

  15. The Fullmetal Alchemist Phenomenon

  16. Key the Metal Idol

  Afterword: The Future of Anime 2.0

  Websites of Anime Mentioned in This Book

  Bibliography

  Preface

  They can be seen on Japanese television morning, noon, or night, as well as on the movie screen and in video stores. Their viewers are male and female, grade schooler and graduate student, housewife and businessman. The content can include raucous humor or theological speculation or horrifying pornography—or all three at once. Their visual quality can be as amateurish as South Park or on the cutting edge of computer-generated imagery. Thanks to cable TV and videocassettes and especially the Internet, the number of their fans around the world has grown in recent years, and is still growing. You’ve probably watched them all your life and may not have realized it.

  They are Japanese cartoons (more properly, anime, which simply means “animation”) and for most gaijin (non-Japanese), an introductory volume like this one is an absolute necessity. This is because anime bear almost no resemblance to their Western cousins like Road Runner or Rocky and Bullwinkle. The lack of resemblance is ironic, since the two media evolved roughly from the same sources. They diverged for several reasons.

  For one, the Japanese don’t regard animation as a “children only” playground. Certainly there are cartoons aimed at a juvenile audience, and these are often brought to Western television with only minor adaptations. Japanese animators, however, have also used animation to explore broader themes: love and death, war and peace, the historical past and the far future. Once these animators took the first giant leap away from the age and subject-matter limitations of the West, they kept exploring, kept pushing the envelope to see what would happen next.

  Another big difference between Japanese and Western animation is that, like manga (Japanese comic books), anime were never intended for the export market. Hollywood often develops its products with an eye toward overseas sales. Cop shows and westerns, for example, are careful never to give their lawmen a six-pointed star for a badge, since even a casual resemblance to the Star of David would affect sales in Arab countries.

  Artists in Japanese pop culture, however, usually haven’t had to worry about such concerns. Some anime may find their way overseas, but until recently it was safe to assume that most such productions would not—and could not—travel very well. Anime are, after all, Japan talking directly to itself, reinforcing its cultural myths and preferred modes of behavior. Whether there is any dissonance between anime and reality, such as the comparatively limited but still evolving role of women in Japanese society versus their cartoon status, is a question to be dealt with separately. For now, we need only note that most of the anime you are about to meet were not intended to be seen by non-Japanese eyes. Some sort of guide is necessary for the uninitiated, to explain the cultural landmarks and in-jokes.

  Why does it matter? Cartoons ar
e kid stuff, right? Actually, no pop culture medium should be taken lightly, since it contains the capacity to guide viewers along the path of socially acceptable thought and action. Film critic Peter Biskind reminds us, for example, that:

  movies influence manners, attitudes and behavior. In the fifties, they told us how to dress for a rumble or a board meeting, how far to go on the first date, what to think about . . . Jews, blacks and homosexuals. They taught girls whether they should have husbands or careers, boys whether to pursue work or pleasure. They told us what was right and what was wrong, what was good and what was bad; they defined our problems and suggested solutions. And they still do.1

  Biskind looked at Hollywood movies and the way that they both reflected and influenced American life. The content of Japanese animation is the topic under consideration here, but the mechanism is the same. Yes, there are cutesy animals, but there are also dating tips for the lovelorn from a girl who lives in a videocassette, and there are history lessons from a former samurai. Students are encouraged to keep up their studies; the young are reminded to respect the elderly. Slapstick and sorcery, humor and horror, sports and sex, machines that rule the sky and gods that rule the forest all coexist in anime. There seems to be a mind-numbing variety of messages in this medium, until one realizes that all these stories tell pretty much the same story, one that has been told and retold in Japan for hundreds of years. The trick is to separate the message from the glitzy, hi-tech messenger.

  This isn’t a problem specific to the Japanese culture. Anywhere in the world, pop culture is essentially a balancing act. To sociologist Todd Gitlin, popular culture is successful to the extent that it combines the old and the new:

  Capitalism as a culture has always insisted on the new, the fashionable, the novel. . . . The genius of consumer society is its ability to convert the desire for change into a desire for novel goods. . . . Popular culture above all is transitory; this guarantees not only turnover for the cultural marketers but currency for the customers. But curiously, the inseparable economic and cultural pressures for novelty must co-exist with a pressure toward constancy. Nostalgia for “classics”—old movies, “oldie” songs, antiques—is consumer society’s tribute to our hunger for a stable world. Consumers want novelty but take only so many chances; manufacturers . . . want to deploy their repertory of the tried-and-true in such a way as to generate novelty without risk.2

  Gitlin was speaking specifically of American network television. He probably didn’t have in mind a culture where the spirits of one’s dead ancestors drop by every year for the summer festival, where the latest hit on the pop charts might have an explosion of traditional taiko drums as well as a dozen layers of synthesized techno, and where mythology thousands of years old is still being told and retold in new and striking ways. Unlike the culture of the United States, a mere infant at just over two hundred years old, Japanese culture has for centuries lived out Gitlin’s balance of the old and the new. It has mastered ground rules that most outsiders can only guess at—hence, this guide.

  This book is divided into two parts. Part I deals with major themes of Japanese culture sounded in anime—themes that don’t always appear in the most obvious form. Part II takes a closer look at some of the feature films, television series, and direct-to-video animation known as Original Animation Videos (OAVs—or sometimes as OVAs) that have become “classics” of their genre. Many anime, if not most, are based on manga, so there will also be examples from that medium, as well as looks back to the various heroes and monsters of Japanese folklore and legend, some of whom still live in anime. The choice of anime in Part II is not based on popularity in Japan or the West, but on the extent to which they reflect Japanese life and attitudes.

  Still, why have such a guide at all? Shouldn’t art be allowed to stand or fall on its own ability to speak cross-culturally? The problem with this view is that, while a culture may be a living entity, the manifestations of that culture are not. It is a mistake to confuse Japanese culture with any one of its offshoots. Manga and anime, like sumo wrestling and Kabuki, are not the totality of the culture but point to certain aspects of it. The birth or death of a communications medium or art form does not necessarily forecast a massive change within the larger culture. The pre-television kami-shibai storyteller, for example, who illustrated the tales he told on the spot, gave way to manga, but an analysis of the content of the stories in both media may show more continuity than difference.

  Then, too, cultural changes do not always occur from within. The United States has been accused of waging cultural war against the rest of the world, and there’s some truth to that. American movies account for a major share of the Japanese box office, and styles in clothing and music are carried from California across both oceans. Studying the Americanized aspect of Japan could lead us to the mistaken assumption that the Japanese culture is exactly like ours. They dress in suits, they listen to rock bands, and they eat Kentucky Fried Chicken—how different can they be?

  The pop culture examples in this volume illustrate the ways in which our cultures are different—and yet, in spite of the differences, capable of communicating essential truths from one culture to the next. Just because this material wasn’t intended for export doesn’t mean that we in the West can’t learn from it. And among the things we can learn from it is that we can learn from it.

  What else can we learn from it? Let’s take a look. But first a word about . . .

  Spoilers, Puns, Names—and Sex

  This book will give away the endings of classic (or soon-to-be-classic) anime. Since the goal is to examine the society that anime comes from, it would be self-defeating not to discuss all the relevant plot events. Some of the stories are archetypes whose endings can be guessed at anyway. Some of the endings will also become common knowledge in time precisely because the work is a popular example of its genre. To speak of spoilers in the case of classic literature, mythology, or even history, is absurd.

  By the way, here are some spoilers: Jane Eyre marries Mr. Rochester, Tom Sawyer and Becky get out of the cave, Dracula gets a stake through his heart, and the Titanic sinks.

  Oh, you already knew? See what I mean?

  Japanese has puns galore. Because the language has so many Chinese characters that can be pronounced in two or more ways, and because there are so many different words that can be pronounced the same way (for instance, the characters for “flower” and “nose” are both pronounced hana, albeit with different stresses), the potential for humor is always there. I first ran into this wordplay at an Asian foods store. A package of pickled garlic cloves had a picture of a popular manga character: a burly, masked, pro wrestler. Why did they use this wrestler to promote garlic? Because the wrestler was the title character of the long-running Japanese comic Kinnikuman (“Muscle Man”). And the Japanese word for garlic is ninniku. So, if you sold garlic and were looking for a spokescartoon . . . The blessing is that these gags just get funnier and funnier the more of them you encounter (such as Ranma Saotome’s Chinese fiancée, whose name is transliterated “Xian Pu” and pronounced “Shampoo”). The curse is having to explain some of the more opaque gags, since a simple translation often isn’t enough. I’ll try to keep the explanations brief.

  Since for some readers this guide may be an introduction to both an art form and the culture that created it, most of the Japanese names have been westernized by putting the family name last. For example, the given name of the great cartoonist and animator Dr. Tezuka—Osamu—is placed first here: Osamu Tezuka. Only in the case of Sailor Moon characters will there be an exception, since the order has to begin with the family name to properly convey a point the artist is trying to make. Note, too, that Japanese words in this book do not use the macrons, or long signs, to indicate extended vowel sounds; these are often left off names and titles in English-language releases or are presented in variant forms, such as Rurouni Kenshin or Fushigi Yugi. And there is also variation in film titles, depending on the date and origin of the
foreign release. We have tried to keep everything consistent and in order, but there are inevitably problem areas. . . .

  While aspects of Christianity abound in Japanese pop culture, that’s as far as it goes. Christianity has a peripheral influence at best in Japan’s daily life and historical culture. One group of Christians that would have totally baffled the Japanese was the Protestant sect that made the word “Puritan” a synonym for “sexually repressed and uptight.” The Japanese, in contrast, have a long history of racy, bawdy humor, allowing examples in their pop culture of full-frontal nudity, sex, scatology, and ultraviolence that would have never got past the Comics Code or the Federal Communications Commission of the United States. In Japan it’s on full display even in anime not thought of as being hentai, or sexually oriented, and it might be a bit more than the average Westerner is used to. One need look no further for a hint of what’s to come than a line from the theme song of the 1973 television anime series (and subsequent revivals and reworkings) inspired by the “bad boy” of manga Go Nagai and his “love warrior,” Cutey Honey. The line: Oshiri no chiisana onna no ko, “She’s the girl with the cute little ass.”

  You have been warned.

  1. Peter Biskind, Seeing is Believing: How Hollywood Taught Us to Stop Worrying and Love the Fifties (New York: Pantheon, 1983), 2.

  2. Todd Gitlin, Inside Prime Time (New York: Pantheon, 1983), 77–78.

  Introduction to the 2nd edition (and why there probably won’t be a 3rd edition)

  Any history of popular culture carries a built-in problem with it: popular culture doesn’t stop. History looks at events that have happened, that have a beginning and an end. Even if those events sometimes can’t be nailed down precisely, there’s a limited time line. America’s Civil War could date from the secession of the Confederate states, or John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry, or the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision, or the Kansas-Nebraska Act, but the first actual battle was the South’s attack on Fort Sumter, South Carolina. Similarly, the war officially ended when the Confederates surrendered at Appomattox; unofficially, there was the assassination of President Lincoln, or the killing of the assassin.