Aeon Flux
8th February 2003, 03:02 PM
An Introduction To Anime
By
David Pascal
{
http://www.geocities.com/~davidpascal/smj/
}
'Anime' is Japanese animation. Unless you are living on the moon, or
are so far over thirty that the grave yawns before you, this you know.
For Japanese animation is spreading through American pop culture like
gene-altered pizza. There is probably not a major university in the
United States that does not have an Anime Club. (Harvard's, Yale's,
and Princeton's are by no means the finest.) Anime is in the theatres
(Pokemon), on television (Sailor Moon), and fills convention halls
from L.A. to Toronto to New York with addicted devotees in the
hundreds of thousands. Ominously, even the academy is beginning to
take notice: Asian cultural scholar Susan Napier's Anime: From Akira
To Princess Mononuke is the latest (but not the only) scholarly bid to
trawl both art form and phenomenom for its implications. In Japan of
course, anime is a multi-billion dollar industry, with serious
academicians, major-league newspaper reviewers, brooding
intellectuals, and innumerable hordes of fans, collectors, and brats
examining its least nuance in sub-microscopic depth.
But what is it? And is it worth watching -- nay, worth contemplation
and serious study?
Yes. But do not be put off. The first thing you have to understand
about anime is that you do not have to understand it to love it. Yes,
insightful critical knowledge of zen aesthetics and freudian/marxist
cultural studies and similar academic rot really can deepen your
appreciation of what you're seeing. But it can also numb it, and you
along with it. Don't let this happen. Anime is delicious, and the way
to appreciate something delicious is to take a bite. To understand
what it's is all about, go sit down and look at some. For the moment,
just remember this: anime addicts abound, literally in the millions,
because they love it; and they love it because it's intrinsically
lovely.
Having said that, the first-time viewer of this fine stuff will
nonetheless find himself in for a surprise -- indeed a continuing set
of surprises. And it may help keep him or her better balanced if they
prepare for a few of those jolts beforehand.
Misunderstanding Anime
I am assuming, Reader, that you are an American, or at least a product
of heavy American influence, with little or no experience of anime. If
that's the case, then your first exposure to anime is going to be very
deceptive. For Japanese animation has an extraordinarily close surface
resemblance to something it is the polar opposite of -- American
cartoons. The first time an American viewer sees a few frames of anime
he is quite likely to go, 'Oh -- this is like The Jetsons or The
Flintstones. Kid stuff. Only subtitled.' Indeed the American viewer
may very rapidly assume that it is not only kid stuff, but
exceptionally bad kid stuff. 'Why, anime characters are all little
waifs with eyes like saucer plates - how cu-ute!' he groans, stifling
his nausea poorly. Indeed the quality of what he sees may strike him
as not just poorer than American animation, but as downright bad.
Works like Disney's Snow White and Fantasia, whatever else one thinks
of them, are obviously painstakingly drawn and technically well
crafted. No small amount of Japanese anime is too, but even its finest
examples -- Marmalade Boy or, notoriously, Crayon Shin-chan -- can
seem wildly sketchy by comparison.
Also, there is the easy tendency to see one anime and to assume that
all others resemble it -- that anime is a genre, like Horror or the
Western: hate one, hate 'em all. Not so. There are anime horror films
(Tokyo Babylon), Westerns (Trigun), detective shows (Steam
Detectives), soup operas (Hana Yori Dango), sci-fi (Nadeshiko),
Hitchcockian thrillers (Perfect Blue), children's shows (Memolu),
geriatrica (Roujin Z), horrific porn (Cool Devices), expose
documentaries (Otaku no Video), swords-and-sorcery (Lodoss War),
religious surrealism (Angel's Egg), historical romance (Rose of
Versailles); there is anime that mixes up some (if not all) of the
above genres; indeed, there is even anime that is bad. Hence it is a
big mistake to assume that any particular anime film you see is
'representative'. It is not.
Of course the newcomer to anime may luck out and sit down to one of
those classics of the genre that speaks exactly to one's heart and be
converted instantly. But he also runs the very great risk of sitting
down reluctantly to something he or she has heard a friend hype to the
skies, only to find himself watching what seems to be ludicrous porn
or grotesque violent occultism or a badly drawn, infantile, saccharine
bit of hyper-kinetic or glacially paced nonsense, diverting perhaps
for the mildly intelligent Kindergartener, but certainly not worth a
glance from a serious-minded grown-up. Such a viewer puts up with it
for a few minutes, then gravely pops in an old Ingmar Bergman movie
instead, to watch Swedish Knights play chess with Death in black and
white, like a grown-up.
A profound error. Which costs the foolish soul who makes it an
incredibly rich source of delight. And insight.
Of course, we all know that apparently poor work in a particular
branch of art doesn't invalidate that entire branch. Merely because
Plan Nine From Outer Space sucks, that doesn't mean film as such is no
good -- that there are no Citizen Kanes or L'Aventuras s out there. In
the realm of American cartoons, however, that is exactly the case:
there are no Citizen Kanes in American animation. But in Japanese
anime, they abound. Along with everything else, an animated cornucopia
encompassing everything from trash to soap opera to music videos to
multi-generational historical sagas to high art to crazed porn.
To understand anime you have to stretch your imagination and realize
that it is the product of a society where cartoons and comics are not
something restricted to five-year-olds. That's not to say that anime
and its print sister 'manga' are (only) an adult art form. In Japan
they are a universal communications medium, nearly equivalent to print
or TV. A simple statistic will suffice- in Japan, over 40 % of all
books and magazines are 'manga': Japanese comic books, the foundation
of anime. Only (as with anime) these manga are nothing like American
comic books, with their twenty-some pages of recycled sci-fi pugilism
between Schwartzeneggar-torso'd protagonists and mutant villains.
Manga are phone-book-thick volumes of drawings containing not just
children's entertainment but also fiction as lengthy and serious and
realistic as formal novels -- not to say autobiography, training
manuals, government-published political documents, the Gospels,
histories, cook books, political rants, college texts. Literally
anything that can be conveyed in print has its manga twin in Japan.
The Japanese are the most literate people on earth, with a population
of 100 million. And when you consider that nearly every other book on
their shelves, every other magazine on their racks, is manga --
comics, from which originals most all anime derives -- and has been
for decades, you begin to get some idea, not just of the social
magnitude of manga and anime in Japan, but of its intellectual and
emotional depth and extent. It's not too much to say that everything
the Japanese people think, hope, fear, feel, and have to say, is
expressed through this medium; and that, as such, it gives a picture
-- often a profound picture -- not just of the Japanese condition, but
the human condition.
In Japan, culture as well as capitalism intertwine in manga and anime.
One can log onto the net and find dialogues between 'Rashomon'
director Akira Kurosawa and anime director Hayao Miyazaki, or an
interview with the same director by the famous novelist Ryu Murakami.
A novelist such as Mishima Yukio was an avid manga buff, and the works
of Japanese literature's contemporary pantheon of Murakami Haruki and
Yoshimoto Banana are linked with manga quite unashamedly. Can one
imagine Jean-Luc Godard discussing the art of film with Bart Simpson?
It's standard practice in Japan. Because though anime has its Homers
and Barts, it has a great deal more.
But that isn't to say that manga (or anime) is something heavy and
Dostoyevskian -- or light and hilarious, or sick and crazy, or
delicate and romantic. It's all these things. It covers so huge a
variety of topics and genres and emotions that virtually anything you
can say about manga or anime is true of some examples of it.
Another uniquely weird aspect of the situation is that in Japan, there
is an extraordinarily broad and easy overlap of forms. If a manga is
successful in a comic magazine serial format, it may then be published
in book form. Or it may be made into an animated film. Or into an
animated television series. Or into a non-animated film or series,
with human actors. Or into a novel, or a play, or a role-playing game,
or a T-shirt, or even a ballet or an opera. This formal transvestitism
isn't unusual. On the contrary, it's unusual for a successful manga
not to be incarnated into a host of other forms. Nor is it uncommon to
have any of these other forms metamorphose into the other. A novel by
an award-winning author may easily be followed with a manga version.
An original anime such as Tenchi Muyo may spawn years of manga.
Nor are other narrative versions all that manga and anime spawn. One
of the things about manga and anime that a newcomer should keep in
mind is that both are part of an extraordinarily large, rich, and
extensive industry. Manga publishing in 1997 alone, in the teeth of
the most profound economic strains facing Japan since the War, took in
an excess of 96 billion dollars. Manga and anime are deeply tied into
merchandising and marketing. When a manga or anime is a hit, dolls,
dresses, posters, boxed sets, DVD's, etc. burst onto store shelves in
force. Manga is to Japan what rock music was to the Sixties:
all-encompassing, virtually equivalent to Japanese pop culture itself,
whose least quiver it records in symbiosis with massive media and
marketing support.
And the product of a culture of such striking insularity and
originality as Japan can be both surprising and disconcerting.
Let me therefore note some of the surprises you may encounter:
Pictures
Anime has a number of idiosyncratic visual characteristics. The
characters in it are nearly always human -- they aren't Disney's
talking animal menagerie, or distorted minimalist shorthand people as
in Peanuts or Dilbert. Nonetheless nearly all anime characters have
(very) large eyes. Why? Who knows. It's just become a visual
convention over there, the way stop lights are all red over here.
(Though, note: the 'eyes as windows of the soul' notion seems to hold
in anime, for the huge-eyed are invariably soulful -- large eyes can
often indicate that characters having them are more caring or empathic
than character with small or narrow eyes.)
Characters in anime seem nearly always Caucasian -- blue-eyed blonds,
green-eyed red-heads, and red-eyed blue-heads abound. Why? Slumming
Freudians like to say it's an indication of Japanese self-abasement
before the West, but a less asinine reason is historical: when anime
began as manga, drawing was generally done quickly and loosely on
(quite cheap) paper. If you sketch characters all of whom have black
or dark brown hair and eyes, those characters will have a visual
sameness that makes them tough to distinguish. It's easier to
distinguish three girls if one's hair is blond and the other is black
and you can color in the third with red. So they did.
The fact remains: when you see blonds and redheads in anime, there's
not intended to be Western white folk unless explicitly defined as
such. Consider every character in anime Japanese unless otherwise
noted. (Admittedly, the racial-mix look does make it easier for
non-Japanese to appreciate anime, and does not hurt its global
marketability either.)
There are a number of other minor visual conventions you should know.
When a character is nervous, a huge teardrop-like bead of sweat can
appear by a character's head. When a character is furious, their heads
are like as not to be drawn twenty times larger, with sawtooth teeth
and flames pouring from their mouth. When a character is near-angry or
irritated, a cross-like thing appears on their forehead -- shorthand
for a 'bulging vein'. When a character (male) is sexually excited, he
experiences a -- sometimes geyser-like -- nose bleed. Tears can also
be Niagara-like, or else flowing white bands rushing down the weeper's
cheeks. When characters act childishly, they're drawn in a manner
called 'super-deformed' -- short scampering bouncing two-year old
bodies. (Yes, when such visual distortion is used, it's nearly always
intended to be funny, and nearly always is.)
Sounds
One of the most powerful, yet subliminal, things in anime is aural --
its use of voices. One of the most instructive things you can do in
anime is compare a dub to a sub - anime dubbed with English-speaking
voices - to one with Japanese voices using English subtitles. Dubs are
without exception worse bordering on awful. The reason being that
American dubbers nearly always use Saturday-morning children's cartoon
voices. The presumed IQ of what you're watching drops 100 points the
first moment you hear it. Japanese vocal parts (in great and moving
contrast) are done by adult voice actors who are precisely that:
adults, in their thirties and forties and beyond: serious actors,
whose intonations come across, even in ostensibly 'children's' dramas,
with a heartfelt emotional range and subtlety that, almost unnoticed,
draws viewers into regarding even the most child-like visual image as
emotionally adult.
Imagine that two versions of Kurosawa's Seven Samurai were dubbed into
English, one dubbed version done by Mel Blanc (ie Bugs Bunny, Porky
Pig, and Elmer Fudd voices) and the other by Laurence Olivier, Sir
John Geilgud, and Vivien Leigh. The emotional distance between dubs
and subs can be that vast. Even if you couldn't speak the language at
all, the sounds of anime alone, particularly in shoujo (women's manga
and anime), give it at times a mature emotional sincerity unlike
anything in Western animation. Japanese voice actors are stars in
Japan, and rightly so, and anime voice acting is no small part of
anime's depth and power -- not least because most viewers aren't
consciously aware of it all. But the effect is there nonetheless. (One
aural curiosity: female voices in anime are often quite high-pitched.
Why? No idea. But female soprano is the rule.)
Narrative
The most striking and important thing defining anime (as author
Fredrik Schodt rightly noted) lies in narrative and character. The two
intertwine so deeply that separating them is no small task. But, let's
look at narrative first:
Narrative in anime (like so much else) derives from manga, and manga
owes everything to 'The God Of Manga', Tezuka Osamu. Tezuka's historic
contribution to the art lay in his opening up the narrative in time.
Prior to Tezuka, 'cartoons' were short: political caricatures, or
four-panel newspaper strips, or at best children's-book-like stories
stretching a few pages. To understand how that could constrict an art,
imagine what the Western novel would be like if limited to one
paragraph or (at best) two or so pages. A handful of poems might
survive, but nothing else. It was Tezuka's great breakthrough to break
that restriction in manga, and write manga stories as though they were
novels -- to run a tale for hundreds if not thousands of pages. With
Tezuka, characters and stories suddenly were able to stretch over
years and decades, like human beings do. And so the stories came more
and more to mirror the growth and development of actual human beings,
to present psychologically real lives.
This would seem not to apply to anime, since after all a movie is a
movie and rarely goes over two hours, if that. But that's only
apparently true. In viewing anime, it often helps to remember that
you're viewing something like a movie based on a long long novel. Deep
characterization and long-unfolding emotional development are often at
the core. Time's realism has touched the lives you're watching, and
marks them. Most anime tales derive from earlier lengthy incarnations
in manga form — Miyazaki's film Nausicaa, for instance, stems from a
multi-volume Tolkienesque manga that he'd worked on and released over
the course of thirteen years. When you live with anyone thirteen years
you get to know them pretty well, and when Miyazaki put his Nausicaa
on the screen, both he and his audience were well aware of hundreds of
unspoken aspects of the lives and personalities of the figures on the
screen.
Like the iceberg, nine-tenths of an anime character and narrative are
unseen; but again like the iceberg, that unseen nine-tenths is not
merely palpable, but there in multiple volumes off-screen.
Non-Japanese viewing anime often get a sense that much of the story
isn't being told, or that almost too much story is being compressed
into a small space. The not-quite-seen story is nonetheless sensed,
and is no small part of anime's attraction — seeing certain animes is
like visiting a foreign city for a day and being vividly aware that
there's far more there to the place and people than you'll ever see.
Sometimes the attempted compression is so futile that, as in manga,
the narrative just extends as far as necessary -- thus you have 61
episodes of Hime-chan, 51 of Hana Yori Dango, 76 of Marmalade Boy,
etc. They aren't discrete collections of stand-alone Honeymooners-like
episodes: they're ongoing dramatic developments in the characters'
lives, a story that simply takes 76 episodes to tell -- and even then
leaves much that is (tantalizingly) untold.
Apart from length, there's the puzzling fact of genre. Bent genre. In
the West, straight genre abounds: the spy story, the detective story,
the New Yorker story, sci-fi. But a kind of emotional genre is the
rule too. Comedies are consistently light, tragedies consistently
heavy, 'art' consistently humorless. Anime mixes up all these elements
like a narrative food processor. And the result is something at once
more realistic, and less, than nearly any equivalent in western
narrative. In Martian Successor Nadeshiko, for instance (anime's Star
Trek), Yurika, a young girl commanding a starship, goes to Mars to
rescue hundreds of people trapped by war in underground catacombs. She
brings her ship over the spot where the refugees are hiding; the enemy
attacks. If she puts her shields up, it will crush the people below
that they came to save. If she doesn't, her ship and crew will be hit
and destroyed. She puts up the shields, and the people die. In the
very next scene, Yurika is being televised in a big bunny suit
explaining to the crew, Sesame-Street-style, how the Nadeshiko's motor
works.
Now Jean-Luc Picard would never put on a bunny suit to explain
anything to anyone. But equally, Picard would never be put by Trek's
writers into a situation where he had to give the command to kill
hundreds of innocent civilians in order to save himself and his ship.
Nadeshiko is at once more realistic than Trek on that very serious
point -- and much less so on the other. But the ease which it leaps
from one to the other is startling and disorienting; and in anime
generally, constant.
It isn't just a matter of hopping from mass killing to slapstick.
Anime continually veers from the comic to the tragic, from horror to
farce, from perversion to innocence, with stupefyng ease. D4 Princess
is a lightning-paced future slapstick comedy about cyborg grade school
girls. Joke follows idiot joke -- till the heroine's friend is crushed
by a falling girder. Blood seeps like blossoming roses through the
blanket covering her mangled legs. She dies. The girl surviving her
shrieks with grief. The next school day, the teachers recite the same
string of facts about math and geography and the dead girl's friend
stands up and screams at the meaningless of it all. This is comedy?
No, but anime directors think nothing of pulling the rug out from
under the viewer's feet.
Anime is many things, but it is never predictable, and (significantly)
it is never emotionally predictable. In Maho Tsukai Tai, an utterly
silly comedy about a high school magicians club that does real magic,
one of its standard laugh-getters is the gay Vice President
Asaburatso's ceaseless attempts to flirt with and seduce the
President, who invariably yelps and shrieks and leaps away. Quite
funny, quite ridiculous. Yet there's a point in one episode where
Nanaka, one of the girl members confesses to Asaburatso that she loves
him. It's absolutely serious: she trembles, she's in tears, and with
profound grace Asaburatso replies that he feels for her because he
feels with her: he knows what it's like to love someone and have
nothing of that affection returned. He responds to her confession
with, not love, but empathy and humanity and pity, and the moment is
deeply humane and full of the hopeless beauty the Japanese treasure —
and American moviegoers puzzle over. 'Hey. Isn't this supposed to be
funny?'
Most of it is very funny. But in anime, a hilarious moment may
instantly be followed the most serious emotional depth, and brutal
piece of tragic realism may be followed by totally absurd
light-as-a-feather slapstick.
And formal -- Western, rather -- genres are mix-mastered as emotional
ones: Saber Marionette J seems to have been put together out of equal
parts Kurosawa's samurai films, Westworld, Second World War
revisionism, Pinocchio, and Terminator 2. Birdy has horror elements,
cop show elements, wrestling tag team elements, schoolboy comedy,
sci-fi, the works. And what in the world is Serial Experiments Lain or
Adolescence of Utena even like, much less about? Anime looks as though
it's absorbed every cliche of American pop culture imaginable, but it
hasn't so much copied it as torn off aspects and stuck them together
into a high-velocity collage. Which stimulates, needless to say, since
every button sooner or later gets pushed.
Anime has a few of its own (invariably weird) sub-genres. 'Mecha' --
metal-suit combat -- is one. For some reason every Japanese animators
feel that future wars will involve guys sitting in massive robot
humanoid body-armor punching other such massive robots, despite the
fact that treads and wheels and rockets are infinitely more effective
than jointed ankles and knees and left hooks. Magical Girl anime is
another. (The heroine is usually a grade school girl, given magical
abilities by some revoltingly cute elfin critter). There is shoujo:
love stories for women - which, curiously, are often about gay male
protagonists; the standard explanation being that Japanese society
frowns on portrayals of women breaking social boundaries for matters
of the heart, so gays serve as metaphorical stand-ins. And of course
the ever-popular 'hentai' (the Japanese word for 'pervert' and the
label for anime pornography of the lowest and vilest stripe). Hentai
is abysmal: the adult connoisseur of anime should sample perhaps ten
minutes of at least one hentai if only to learn by way of shock how
utterly worthless bad anime can be, and so avoid hentai altogether in
the future.
New Horizons In Perversion
Are all female anime characters lesbians and all male ones
cross-dressers, as popular opinion holds? No. But there is a slightly
different attitude to gays and such in anime, which is worth noting.
Regarding homosexuals: they appear rather frequently in anime, and no
one in the story makes a big fuss about it. Generally they are there
for comic relief— to make passes at heterosexual characters, who then
scream, faint, leap up trees to escape, etc. Homosexuality is not
neither condemned nor accorded the formal pat-on-the-head of political
correctness: gays are simply there, and when they approach other anime
characters sexually, the characters either comply or shriek as
inclination moves them. (Indeed, so politically incorrect is anime,
that a number of gay characters actually turn straight: Syaoran of
Card Captor Sakura, and Aburatsubo of Maho Tsukai Tai, falling for
girls with beautifully done plausibility and gradualness.) To be gay,
or to cease to be gay, is (mercifully) not a political statement in
anime: questions of political equality or gender identity don't apply
and aren't explored: they are, after all, typologies, and anime's
depth of characterization preclude stereotypes. Like all other anime
characters, gays are human, and so they run the gamut from the depths
of Saber Marionette J's Hanagata (the most irritating cretin
imaginable), to the heights of Daiundokai's Kris Christopher (nobility
incarnate). There do seem to be more lesbians than male homosexuals in
anime, and homosexuals who are male tend to drawn in what is called
'bishoujo' style: more svelte and liltingly fey than the females.
Incest also seems somewhat more tolerated in anime than in American
narrative generally -- and by narrative I mean fiction. Incest in
American cartoons is non-existent. That it can almost casually surface
in what would otherwise strike the viewer as a ten-year-old kids' show
is just how it is in the land of the rising sun. Apparently Japanese
viewers tolerate it without blinking. Never actually portrayed
positively (as homosexuality sometimes is), the brother-sister variety
nonetheless surfaces in Utena and Marmalade Boy and the Tenchi OVA
rather movingly, with traces of angst but no outright horror. On the
other other hand, fathers' lusts for daughters is given the comic
treatment in major series like KareKano and Nadeshiko. Like
homosexuality, incest surfaces occasionally in anime, but with neither
a bang nor a whimper. A laugh and a yawn rather covers it.
Gender-bending, on the other hand, is close to being an anime motif.
In Ranma and Birdy and Hime-chan no Ribon, the central characters
mutate from boy to girl and back again. Schoolgirl Tenjou Utena
dresses like a schoolboy; schoolboy Shin Kuranagi of Greenwood dresses
like a schoolgirl; and schoolgirl Anna Respighi of the Battle Athletes
OVA is a schoolboy, and doesn't know it!
Nor are age differences between characters a bar to attraction in
anime. In Japan the age of consent is fourteen, and in anime consent
is a country with no borders. Fifteen-year-old Meiko loves Na-chan,
ten years her elder; fourteen-year-old Ayanami Rei deeply loves and is
loved by the highly unlovable forty-year-old (fifty-year-old?) Ikari
Gendou; on the male side, sixteen-year-old Masaki Tenchi is chased
like a hare by seven-hundred-year-olds Ryoko and Aeka (and even the
20,000-year-old Washuu).
You can find more sexually unconventional characters and behavior in
anime than you will at 3AM in an exceptionally slimy bar in the
Pigalle. But -- in anime the characters invariably transcend the
behavior, and the behavior is generally played to benevolent if comic
purposes. Gays, lesbians, cross-dressers, etcetera, are (like the
straight characters) often ridiculous, but never hateful. Anime is
anything but politically correct, but on balance I think it does teach
tolerance -- and teaches it rather better than conventional preaching.
The acts are never quite condemned or condoned because there is the
vivid sense of actual people committing them. The acts are less than
the actors, who may be comic or tragic or ridiculous, but are never
less than human.
(Note: again, that assessment does not apply to 'hentai', the
distinguishing feature of which is not sexual activity so much as
sexual cruelty, bordering on psychosis. If you should happen to see a
hentai video, and you find yourself enjoying it, see a doctor quick:
the essence of hentai is not sex but violence, and in particular,
sadistic violence against the weak. Shun it: its existence demeans not
the characters on the screen but its viewers, and anime generally.)
Character
Perhaps the greatest achievement of anime is characterization. Of this
I have little to say here -- characterization can't be described; only
felt. Suffice it to say that there are characters in anime who have
more psychic reality than most people you know. I once recall saying
of the classic Marmalade Boy that it would be nice to see it done with
real actors. The anime scholar to whom I put this fiercely disagreed
-- rightly so. Human beings aren't that real. Precisely how and why
the Japanese have this unerring sense of subjective reality is a good
question. It made be that a society which places such an emphasis on
'face' and external proprieties develops in its members a deep sense
of hidden interiority to compensate, aiid becomes adept at inferring
it in others; or it may be that the one great formal contribution of
Japanese writers to narrative fiction -- the shosetsu or 'I-novel' —
gave manga authors the critical initial shove in the direction of
discerning and appreciating subjectivity.
Whatever it is, characters in anime are as real and deep, as
pleasurable and moving, as in any other form of narrative art. Is
Koishikawa Miki less of a human being than Emma Bovary? Not to me. I
envy you, Reader, about to make the acquaintance of Ikari Shinji,
Allen Schezar, Porco Rosso, Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind, Naga the
Serpent, Katsuragi Misato, Rem Saverem, Sana-chan, Doumyoji,
Kurusegawa Serika-sempai, Tsubasa Shimahime, Nicholas D. Wolfwood,
Kennou Hibiki, Hoshino Ruri, Ryoko, Rei, Lain. This sense of deep,
intimately known psychology compressed into a tiny space of time in
film gives anime a spiritual density quite unlike anything else in pop
culture.
Japanese Culture
One of the trickiest benefits and pleasures of watching anime lies in
watching the Japanese culture that underlies it. Catching it is tricky
because, ostensibly, not a few anime seem utterly un-Japanese —
Caucasian-looking protagonists set in other worlds, distant futures,
mythic pasts. I doubt that a Scotsman or a German who'd never heard of
anime, presented with a good dub of, say, Slayers or Gundam Wing,
could tell it was Japanese in origin at all. But of course Japanese
attitudes permeate both, just as Fifties sci-fi is as typically
Fifties America as the Edsel. And Japanese attitudes matter. Japan is
significant: quite apart from its other historical and aesthetic
contributions and importance, Japan is the country that has perhaps
gone deepest into the twenty-first century: the world of a
comparatively aging and aged population, of government by and for the
mega-corporation, of vertiginous technologization, of intense
overpopulation. How Japan reacts to those factors is both a source of
information worth exploring, and a model: indeed, that Japan is not
hell is one of the most hopeful indications of a tolerable human
future.
And of course, some aspects of Japanese society itself are simply
worth seeing for their inherent worth and beauty: The easy reverence
for nature, the emphasis on hard work, determined perseverance,
loyalty, the respect for elderly and ancestors and past traditions.
These are good things, and not terribly common in contemporary Western
film or pop.
Japanese cultural attitudes are not of course purely 'good' but have
their less amiable side, and -- to the Western newcomer -- those
attitudes are not merely idiosyncratic but often odd enough to require
a bookshelf of commentary. The new student of anime should at least
know a few things:
First, the Japanese seem to combine, intensely, two sorts of attitudes
that you would not think would combine very easily.
On the one hand, the Japanese have a piercing sense of the beauty and
brevity of things. Ascribe it to Zen if you will, but the Japanese
(and their art) have a deep sense of the pathos of mutability. Things
pass away, and often the most beautiful and the most meaningful of
things. The Japanese like to symbolize this passing in the image of
cherry blossoms, which bloom in extraordinary beauty for three days
and then are blown away on the wind. Such falling petals are as much a
motif of anime as cans of Michelob are of Superbowl TV commercials;
but it's important to remember that the falling cherry blossom was a
cliche of haiku a millennia before it became a cliche of anime; and
that the feeling underneath it is quite real and seriously held -- the
sense of preciousness, and transience; beauty, and fragility.
You would imagine that believing 'all things must pass' would lead to
a certain nihilism; and more than a trace of it is there. (Much more.)
But, paradoxically, to this sense of ultimate doom the Japanese add a
sense of ultimate commitment. Will, effort, 'gambare' -- doing one's
best -- is an unquestioned virtue and imperative. The Japanese seem to
feel that doing one's best, regardless of the circumstances,
regardless of whether you succeed or fail, sometimes even regardless
of whether what you're doing is good or evil -- is absolutely
mandatory for a person. Ivan Morris wrote a most wonderful book on the
topic, The Nobility Of Failure, which describes the most beloved of
historical Japanese heroes -- failures all. The Japanese revere those
who attempt the impossible, even if -- no, especially if -- such
doomed heroes destroy themselves in the process. If an American
character butted his head against a wall, he'd shrug and walk around
it. A Japanese character would keep on butting, till either the wall
gave way, or his head.
Is this stupidity or grandeur? Objectively, it's stupidity. But
subjectively -- ah! Ayn Rand, noted philosopher and crank, once
observed that art communicates what she called 'a sense of life'. In
offering a story, the artist, she claimed, offered a representative
sample of how he or she experiences life, like a slice of cake allows
one to understand the taste of the whole. The Japanese 'sense of life'
is striking not in that it recognizes the beauty of being, and the
destruction and pathos and cost inherent in becoming, but in that it
feels both with great and unique intensity. The Japanese combine a
deep sense of the fragility and transience of life, and an equally
deep sense of the goodness of every small good thing in it. Of course,
ultimately all things are doomed, and goodness guarantees nothing, not
even its own survival to the next moment. And yet, against this tragic
backdrop, the Japanese will to do one's best, make every effort,
strive for one's goal with absolute commitment, is -- exhilarating.
Nobody would want to visit Eliot's Waste Land, but anyone with half a
brain would die for a weekend at Akane's Anything-Goes Martial Arts
Academy or Crystal Tokyo. If someone asks what anime 'feels' like, the
answer is: generally, it feels great. Life in anime is
slapstick-rapid, passionate, young, visually beautiful, humorous,
touching, active, purposeful, deeply empathic — fun! If anime can be
described as 'escapist', the reason is that the lives of most people
are, by contrast, a prison. Who could possibly not want to escape into
an episode of Tenchi? Only a jailer.
Another point. Most of us in the west know what is meant by 'face' --
the high value placed on appearances. But among the Japanese 'face'
has a connotation we easily misunderstand. In the west, the
distinction between inner feelings and surface appearance is nearly
always decided on behalf of the former. Courtesy and hypocrisy seem
synonymous. That is not the case in Japan. The great Japanese
psychologist Takeo Doi has much to say on this distinction between
'honne' and 'tatemae', gut feelings and overt behavior. Suffice it to
say that, among the Japanese, tatemae, surface behavior, is quite as
respected and honorable and sympathetic as honne, or 'true feelings'.
Tatemae has its truth as well — rather than hypocrisy, it can almost
be a kind of optimal persona to which the person aspires. Face is one
aspect of Japanese idealism, and when a Japanese character acts out of
character -- it is not always so. In Japan, masks and face overlap,
and the former can be as real as the latter.
Also, it's a commonplace to describe the Japanese as cultural magpies.
They have a knack for taking things from other cultures, adapting what
they like and rejecting what they don't, and yet coming out in the end
with something uniquely 'Japanese'. Thus Japanese Zen Buddhism is
'like' Indian Chan Buddhism -- but isn't. Japanese capitalism is
'like' American capitalism -- but isn't; and so on. Something uniquely
and irreducibly Japanese remains, pristine and untouched. In some ways
this is true; but I think it is less true now that at any point in
Japanese history. Suffice it to say that the American influence on
Japan, from Perry to Hiroshima to Elvis, has been so massive,
unremitting, and all-permeating, that that generalization may no
longer hold. Japanese culture has swallowed so much Western culture in
the past half century that the American viewer of anime shouldn't feel
out of place in the least. It is not that Japan is a Western nation
now, but that it has digested enough of the West to speak in the
accents of the West. Japan still has its mysteries, but it is no
longer 'The Mysterious Orient'. It is not quite American, any more
than Britain is, but the viewer of a Hammer film knows instantly that
he is in a western culture; and I think it is the same for the viewer
of anime. He will be at home in Shin Seiki Evangelion, in a way that
he would not have been at home in Kabuki.
That does not mean that the highly American surface of Japanese
culture (and art) can't still touch or express Japanese depths. But it
does mean that the alert Western viewer of anime will be continually
struck by the sense of an edited American culture: a sort of concrete
near-parallel world in which, not merely is Japanese culture
presented, but a critical and in some ways improved American culture
is presented as well. Anime can be read (profitably) as an expression
of Japanese culture, but it can be read even more profitably as a
critique and revision of American culture as well. In some respects
anime presents as Utopian a vision of Americanism as Oneida or Walden
or Walden Two, and one of the strangest outcomes of watching this
Eastern art is a renewed sense of the wealth of possibilities in
Western culture.
(One final note on anime and Japanese culture: while Japanese
attitudes permeate anime, it would be a huge error to think of any
given piece of anime as an accurate picture of Japanese society.
Judging by anime, women would be in the forefront of everything,
vital, dominant, aggressive, passionately emotional. In fact Japan is
one of the most male-dominated nations of the first world, and
politeness if not subservience from women remains the rule. Anime
seems multicultural: Japan is not. Anime seems awash in children and
teenagers: Japan is, on average, the oldest population in the
industrial world. If you watch anime to pick up some language for a
visit, fine. But do not assume that every Japanese woman wears a
sailor suit and kendo sword and cries 'Gambare!' or that you should
greet everyone you meet with a flying dropkick and a cry of
'Baka-baka!' Art is not life.)
Aesthetics
You can't fully appreciate Japanese art, or its anime, unless you have
some grasp of its aesthetics. Sorry. Some basic terms:
Aware -- literally, pathos, sorrow, grief -- is perhaps the most
famous. Volumes are devoted to it. Originally, what a western critic
translated as the 'ah-ness' of things. Gradually it took the form of
mono no aware, which, translated, means 'the sadness of things', but
more coloquially it refers to the artist's (or viewer's) sensitivity
to beauty and its perishability, or rather to its implied pathos --
the force of an unwept tear or an unstated recognition or passion.
Currently it seems to mean 'wretched', but overall it refers to the
(somewhat aristocratic) ability to grasp both the possibilities and
the limitations of things in a single incident or gesture, often of a
trivial nature
Miyabi -- from the Heian period: 'courtly refinement', but a
refinement including (or rather striving to refine) love and social
relations -- a shunning of the crude and the rustic, and (ergo) much
of actual life. Not terribly applicable to urban Japan today, miyabi
nonetheless miyabi lives.
Yugen -- the profound, remote, mysterious; the inexpressible-in-words;
symbolism: but not crude symbolism (ie flag=nation), but symbols
implying metaphysical vastnesses too large to grasp. Aware is
particular; yugen is cosmic. Eliot's 'moment in and out of time' comes
close: yugen is not the presence of, but the hint, the glow, of the
eternal, the incorruptible. Its roots are apropos: the term Yu meant
dim, dark, hard to see; and gen refers to the Taoist notion of Truth.
Kamo no Chomei described it thus: 'The limitless vista created in
imagination far surpasses anything one can see more clearly.' 'Being,
they are not. Not being, they are.' Speaking of the art of acting in
No, he said, 'Whether the character one portrays be of high or low
birth, man or woman, priest, peasant, rustic, beggar, or outcast, one
should think of them as crowned with a wreath of flowers. Although
their positions in society differ, the fact that thy can all
appreciate the beauty of flowers makes flowers of all of them'. 'The
ability to appear beautiful is the seed of yugen'. Another of his
axioms: 'Beauty is the color of truth.' More practically, said Zeami
of yugen as applied to art: 'a simple softening of form is yugen'.
Sabi -- 'old'. But also pleasure in that which is old, faded, lonely;
stripped of distracting externals; a love of imperfection. Sabi
differs from aware in that one does not lament for the fallen blossom,
but loves it, and from yugen in that the flower does not (or rather
need not) suggest greater eternities. Tranquility, spiritual peace,
are associated with sabi. A liking for the aged, the faded, the
under-decorated. It has been called 'tranquility in the context of
loneliness'.
Closely related: wabi -- lack, frustration, disappointment, poverty,
but in a unique sense. 'Wabi' means to transform material
insufficiency so that one discovers in it a world of spiritual freedom
unbounded by material things. To complain of insufficiency is the
(contemptible) polar opposite of wabi. Interior richness of spirit
within a rough (but not crude) exterior, is wabi. Age, yes; dirt, no.
Wabi locates more beauty -- history, character, individuality -- in
the blemished than the unblemished, but it also refers to a curiously
tranquil, severe beauty: the 'cool stark beauty of original non-being,
muichibutsu,' the 'merest tinge of yang at the extremity of yin.' Wabi
is the beauty of not-quite-Spring, embodied in the first few blades of
grass in a vista of snow: the exterior is cold; but the interior is
bursting with potential life and beauty -- the beauty not of being or
non-being, but of vital possibility.
The emotional perspectives of wabi are well describe by Yoshida Kenko:
'The man who grieves over a love affair broken off before it was
fulfilled, who bewails empty vows, who spends long autumn nights
alone, who lets his thoughts wander to distant skies, who yearns for
the past in a dilapidated house - such a man truly knows what love
means.' By tasting unrequited or frustrated love one truly knows what
love means, just as by starving one gains a fuller appreciation of
food.
Wabi in anime is lightly illustrated by the great lesbian love scene
in 'The Last Dance' segment of Daiundokai -- great because nothing
occurs. Kris Christopher has abandoned her faith and ruined her future
out of love for young Kanzaki Akari, and now is leaving. Akari's
friendship and admiration and affection for the perfectly noble Kris
has spilled over into genuine love -- but not desire, and in any case
she is unable to help or stop Kris. Genuine mutual affection has come
into being between two people, and it is genuinely pointless and
doomed, and that is that. There is no nudity, no sex, no eroticism,
and that is the point. The impossibility of fulfillment creates a
sense of bittersweetness that simple fulfillment could only have
rendered pornographic.
Wabi has structural as well as emotional consequences too:
Murata Shuko (a student of Ikkyu): 'The moon is not pleasing unless
partly obscured by a cloud.' -- ie, the incomplete or fragmentary
thing is more evocative -- more beautiful -- than the perfect.
Shinkei: 'One should set one's heart only on the indistinct.' 'The
heart requires few words. Excellence is to be found in verses that are
cold and spare.' Beauty is housed in the 'elevated, aloof, cold and
frozen,' the 'aged and worn'.
Chen shih-tao: 'Be awkward rather than skillful. Be plain rather than
florid. Be rough rather than delicate. Be eccentric rather than
conform to the popular norm. Poetry is all like this.'
The yuan-yu school: 'simple aged austerity is to be prized, skillfully
wrought elaboration is to be despised.'
What has all this got to do with anime, you say (slightly agog):
simply that while Japanese art and narrative is invariably built with
suki -- taste or refinement -- , willfully deliberate eccentricity is
amply tossed in. The asymmetrical, the unbalanced, the ambiguous, the
fragmentary, 'space', art that hints rather than states: that is
Japanese art, and it permeates the Japanese art of anime.
Western aesthetics has traditionally championed art which renders
things explicitly clear and painstakingly outlined. Japan is very
different. Where old Zen ink drawings barely imply the outline of a
leaf, Dutch drawings of the same period reflect a nearly photographic
horticultural accuracy. Entire world-views are contained in that
distinction. Japanese artists love to imply, rather than state. The
Japanese like their art loose and free, sketched rather than definite,
mysterious rather than clear -- 'broken rather than whole' And so the
viewer of manga or anime will see faces half-sketched, backgrounds
half-done, and things critical to the story never explained. Like the
viewer of the Rorschach Blot, he is expected to supply his own
interpretation.
For some this is bad art. For others, it is the most involving sort of
art possible. Japanese artists make room for the viewer to complete
the work himself -- and perhaps discover something of himself in the
process. In Evangelion, for example, one of the characters is shot by
someone not shown by the camera. Subsequently a security officer long
in love with the character is shown weeping wretchedly. Is the officer
the one that pulled the trigger? We don't know; and we never find out.
We have to connect the dots ourselves. This occurs in ways small as
well as large. In Birdy, a schoolgirl perhaps beginning to fall in
love with a troubled schoolboy leans close to him during a light
rainfall. We see the top of her umbrella, obscuring what happens
between them when she does so. Does she kiss him? Do they speak? Does
she only take his arm and say nothing? We aren't shown. Some western
viewers find this sort of thing infuriating - they want to know, not
to think! Anime is different: in anime some of the power of what we
see stems from the fact that we have to decide for ourselves just what
it is.
This tendency to imply, while evocative and poetic when done
sparingly, is unfortunately often taken to extremes. Thus, not a few
of the more ambitious animes end up like Kubrick's 2001 or Patrick
McGoohan's The Prisoner, fascinating but incomprehensible mystic
metaphors. Just what is The End Of Evangelion all about? Or Angel's
Egg? Or even Revolutionary Girl Utena? When anime directors want to be
profound, they become incoherent. And sometimes it seems that they
become so because they equate the incoherent with the profound. Those
who make anime artist do not feel under an obligation to make sense.
And sometimes they do not make sense.
Is it nonetheless possible for a piece of anime to have shiori -- to
be 'a poem ambiguous enough to sustain several varying
interpretations' (high praise, this, to a Japanese) 'yet altogether
yielding the mood of loneliness' - when the plot line often as nor
involves two pre-teens inside giant robot armor beating the shit out
of each other? Incredibly, yes.
(Oh, and incidentally: no discussion of Japanese aesthetics as it
relates to anime would be complete with mention of the great,
inevitable, all-permeating -- 'kawaii'. Kawaii means 'cute'. And rare
is the anime in which 'cute' is not larded on by the shovel-load, if
not the avalanche. Huge-eyed infants, vomitously endearing little
animals, sniffling toddlers, lilting faux-naive girlish voices — the
Japanese have a capacity for indulging in the cute to a degree that
would make a nation of diabetics out of any other people. This
cuteness is generally juxtaposed with enough savage gore, tragic
dramatic action, psychological realism, and/or just plain
cross-cultural weirdness that the viewer is never sufficiently
revolted to dash away screaming, as he would be by a Donny & Marie
re-run, say. But it is always there, often in luxuriant abundance, and
is a genuine aesthetic goal that anime creators strive for and (alas?)
invariably achieve. I follow that 'alas' with a question mark because
'kawaii' too can prove addictive: if beauty is the color of truth, it
must be states that 'kawaii' is at least one shade of beauty, and that
Japanese animators employ it to great effect. Be prepared for it; and
be prepared - to your astonishment - to enjoy it.)
The Cross And The Lotus
Anime and theology? One of the things sure to puzzle the western
student of anime is the fact that Japanese animation seems to feature
more crosses than the 700 Club. Works like Angel's Egg, Shin Seiki
Evangelion, Lain -- you get the impression the people creating these
things are not Shinto animators half a world away but Alabama
fundamentalists undergoing a nervous breakdown. Aren't Japanese all
Zen Buddhists, and hasn't it been called the Asian nation most
resistant to Christianity? Hasn't its population of Christians never
been greater than 1 %? Why in the world are Western religious symbols
all over the place? The answer is complicated, but it goes a long way
towards explaining the odd power of anime.
First: Christianity there ain't like Christianity here. Though small
in number, Japanese Christians are extremely prominent in Japan. They
occupy a wildly disproportionate number of high offices: three of its
postwar Presidents, several of the Presidents of Japan's top
universities, literally dozens of its finest novelists and poets are
Christian. Christian influence is as vast as the Christmas that is
universally celebrated in Japan -- but for opposite reasons: Christmas
is popular because cheerfulness and gift-giving always are, and the
Japanese are rarely averse to importing something that works. But
Christianity in Japan was from the first pitched not toward the people
at large but toward the most elite social strata and intellectual
classes. The targets of prostelyzation were scholars and samurai, and
indeed those were and always have been Christianity's strongholds
among the Japanese. Christianity, to the Japanese, is not backwards
and superstitious: it is intellectual and elitist, a religion of
writers and samurai.
When an American thinks of Christianity, like as not he imagines a TV
preacher yowling about Creation Science on Cable. To the Japanese,
Christianity is a religion of intensely philosophical dogmatism,
rigorous self-discipline, relentless and perversely (and attractively)
self-destructive social commitment, and residual aristocracy. It is
also seen as profoundly feminist: virtually the whole of the Japanese
education system for women was founded, built, or influenced by
Christians. I would guess that Japanese regard Japanese Christianity
with an odd mix of shame and pride — shame, because for a full 250
years, Christianity was absolutely repressed with a ferocity even a
Stalin did not manage to undertake, every Japanese claiming adherence
to it being immediately subject to torture and death; pride, because
the kakure -- 'hidden Christians' -- nonetheless held on to it
faithfully all that time, only coming out publicly at the approach of
the twentieth century. In its ability to inspire heroism and
endurance, its exoticism, its equation with the beloved and despised
West, and its sense of being the ideology of the only nation that,
after all, defeated the Japanese, Christianity is a complex of symbols
for the Japanese that strikes any number of moving chords. And since
the function of the artist is after all to strike chords, and strike
hard and often, anime is awash in Christian symbolism.
But why so much, and why there? There seems to be more Christian
imagery in some anime than in anything the West has seen in art since
the pre-Raphaelites. In Kamikaze Kaitou Jeanne, for instance, the
heroine (yet another Japanese high school girl) is approached by an
angel called Fin Fish. The angel informs her that the girl is the
reincarnation of Joan of Arc, and that 'the devils have found a way to
weaken God'. Apparently demons have learned how to hide inside
beautiful objects of art, and when people gaze upon such art, their
souls are infected by the latent evil and die. Since 'beautiful souls
are the life of God', the death of enough souls means that 'God will
die too', unless Jeanne can extirpate the demons.
Now Kamikaze Kaitou Jeanne is as close to American Saturday Morning
Cartoons as anime gets; Death of God theology is not what one would
expect to find there. Would Sesame Street have a Bodhisattva appear
and proclaim Big Bird a reincarnation of Lao Tsu, assigned to foil
Shiva? I think not. But Christian imagery seems to be such common coin
nowadays that even kids' shows accept it without blinking.
That isn't to say that Japan's anime fans and creators are all
seminary students in embryo. (Though Mamoru Oshii of Ghost In The
Shell, no small influence, nearly was.) But it's a serious option for
many Japanese, not unlike Marxism was for Europeans in the Thirties.
Japan isn't a Christian nation, exactly: Christianity does not
(deeply) permeate it, nor (really) haunt it, nor (quite) tempt it, but
it does touch it and surprisingly deeply. John Paul II may have been
right when he forecast that the coming millenium would be the one
where Christianity permeates the East. And indeed if Japan ever chose
to excel the West in Christianity as well as consumer technology, the
results would be interesting to see.
Nor do I use the word 'see' lightly: one could plausibly say of the
Japanese that their religious affinities are not conceptual so much as
aesthetic; the Zen garden touches them, not the Thomist axiom. Their
spiritual life seems more open to symbols than to dogmas. And if anime
is any indication, it certainly is open to visual Christian symbolism,
which permeates anime like Brut. Christianity may not be explicitly
accepted by the Japanese, but going by pop culture anime, there is
considerably more interest and ease and casual respect for it than in
many supposedly Christian countries. In fact, one on the interesting
things about the cross-cultural situation is that anime commercial
distributed in the States will likely as not have Christian elements
censored. Sailor Moon's quest for the Holy Grail and the Messiah in
Sailor Moon Super is fine in Japan but deliberately mis-translated for
the American market, lest the offense that is Christian religious
terminology be seen. (Kamikaze Kaitou Jeanne has not even been picked
up -- no doubt the ACLU would bring suit. There is so much Christian
symbolism in several examples of anime that it's downright politically
incorrect -- yet another of anime's delights.)
Suffice it to say: Christians viewers will probably feel more at home
watching most anime than they would be watching American programming.
A practicing Catholic, nay, a priest or theologian, would feel
entirely satisfied watching Angel's Egg. Only the Damned could endure
Baywatch.
What To See and Where To Start
So. Having said all that, where are we? In suitably Buddhist form:
back at the beginning. Why watch anime? That's like asking, why eat
chocolate ice cream? Or go sailing, or play racquetball, or listen to
Bach or Brahms or the Beatles? Because it's intrinsically pleasurable
-- because it's fun. And the way to enjoy it and learn about is to go
out and get some and look at it. For beginners I particularly
recommend:
Birdy (Short - four episodes - but I consider this perhaps the best
single introduction to anime, for simple though it is it contains
nearly every characteristic anime tic, from gender-bending to sci-fi
to past Japanese history to beautiful characterization to dangling
plot points and high school romance to comedy to horror, all done
superbly. And the fight scene at a theme park in episode three between
two android girls is worthy of Hitchcock.)
Ranma 1/2 (Light romantic comedy - not art, but perhaps the most
genial, kind-hearted, pleasant show in existence. Impossible not to
like, even in the lamentably bad English-dubbed versions.)
Kodomo no Omacha (Absolutely frantic kids' comedy: Leave It To Beaver
on LSD and methedrine. No anime touched it in terms of velocity till
the even more hyper-genki Excel Saga exploded across the screen.)
Marmalade Boy (76 episodes of the most introspective soap opera in
existence; if Dostoyevsky wrote a year's episodes of Love Of Life, it
would look like Marmalade Boy.)
Ghost In The Shell (Terminator 3, with a deeply reflective female
lead. State of the art then; still art now.)
The Wings Of Honneamise (with which, 'anime officially became art' --
at least in the words of Time magazine, 1989)
Shin Seiki Evangelion (post-apocalyptic X-Files-conspiracy plus
Oedipal tragedy via the Qaballah and Revelations. Not very clear? It
won't be any clearer after seeing it either, but see it you must. Is
it art? I'm not sure, but it will provoke more thought than Heidegger
and Wittgenstein combined. Incredibly, the director skipped from this
to a live-action porn film to the lightning-like anime soap Kareshi
Kanoji no Jijou, probably the visual high-water mark of current
technical experimentation, and itself well worth viewing.)
Angel's Egg (Brooding, surreal, cryptic, lyrical, and short. More
Christian symbolism than the Sistine Chapel)
Serial Experiments Lain. (In the beginning was the Web, and the Web
was with God, and the Web was God. Indescribable. The anime to see.
Buy it. Rent it. Kneel before it.)
(And lastly a manga -- and you really should read at least one manga —
available in the US in a four-volume translation: Nausicaa of the
Valley of Wind.)
Where to get them? There you are in luck. One of the happy corollaries
of anime the art is anime the cult. Armies of drooling addicts abound,
not merely with regard to anime as such but with regard to nearly
every show, character, genre, etc. They infest the Web like army ants,
seeking nothing more than to get you hooked too. Click onto the Anime
Turnpike and you will crushed under an Everest of distributors,
fansubbers, stores, clubs, commentary, free graphics, reviews, fan
fiction, shrines, web sites, mailing lists, and so on.
And as you settle down, popcorn at hand, remember to approach this
Zen-touched animation the Zen way: leave your preconceptions at the
door, and let pure experience be your guide. Just try it. You'll like
it.
The End
By
David Pascal
{
http://www.geocities.com/~davidpascal/smj/
}
'Anime' is Japanese animation. Unless you are living on the moon, or
are so far over thirty that the grave yawns before you, this you know.
For Japanese animation is spreading through American pop culture like
gene-altered pizza. There is probably not a major university in the
United States that does not have an Anime Club. (Harvard's, Yale's,
and Princeton's are by no means the finest.) Anime is in the theatres
(Pokemon), on television (Sailor Moon), and fills convention halls
from L.A. to Toronto to New York with addicted devotees in the
hundreds of thousands. Ominously, even the academy is beginning to
take notice: Asian cultural scholar Susan Napier's Anime: From Akira
To Princess Mononuke is the latest (but not the only) scholarly bid to
trawl both art form and phenomenom for its implications. In Japan of
course, anime is a multi-billion dollar industry, with serious
academicians, major-league newspaper reviewers, brooding
intellectuals, and innumerable hordes of fans, collectors, and brats
examining its least nuance in sub-microscopic depth.
But what is it? And is it worth watching -- nay, worth contemplation
and serious study?
Yes. But do not be put off. The first thing you have to understand
about anime is that you do not have to understand it to love it. Yes,
insightful critical knowledge of zen aesthetics and freudian/marxist
cultural studies and similar academic rot really can deepen your
appreciation of what you're seeing. But it can also numb it, and you
along with it. Don't let this happen. Anime is delicious, and the way
to appreciate something delicious is to take a bite. To understand
what it's is all about, go sit down and look at some. For the moment,
just remember this: anime addicts abound, literally in the millions,
because they love it; and they love it because it's intrinsically
lovely.
Having said that, the first-time viewer of this fine stuff will
nonetheless find himself in for a surprise -- indeed a continuing set
of surprises. And it may help keep him or her better balanced if they
prepare for a few of those jolts beforehand.
Misunderstanding Anime
I am assuming, Reader, that you are an American, or at least a product
of heavy American influence, with little or no experience of anime. If
that's the case, then your first exposure to anime is going to be very
deceptive. For Japanese animation has an extraordinarily close surface
resemblance to something it is the polar opposite of -- American
cartoons. The first time an American viewer sees a few frames of anime
he is quite likely to go, 'Oh -- this is like The Jetsons or The
Flintstones. Kid stuff. Only subtitled.' Indeed the American viewer
may very rapidly assume that it is not only kid stuff, but
exceptionally bad kid stuff. 'Why, anime characters are all little
waifs with eyes like saucer plates - how cu-ute!' he groans, stifling
his nausea poorly. Indeed the quality of what he sees may strike him
as not just poorer than American animation, but as downright bad.
Works like Disney's Snow White and Fantasia, whatever else one thinks
of them, are obviously painstakingly drawn and technically well
crafted. No small amount of Japanese anime is too, but even its finest
examples -- Marmalade Boy or, notoriously, Crayon Shin-chan -- can
seem wildly sketchy by comparison.
Also, there is the easy tendency to see one anime and to assume that
all others resemble it -- that anime is a genre, like Horror or the
Western: hate one, hate 'em all. Not so. There are anime horror films
(Tokyo Babylon), Westerns (Trigun), detective shows (Steam
Detectives), soup operas (Hana Yori Dango), sci-fi (Nadeshiko),
Hitchcockian thrillers (Perfect Blue), children's shows (Memolu),
geriatrica (Roujin Z), horrific porn (Cool Devices), expose
documentaries (Otaku no Video), swords-and-sorcery (Lodoss War),
religious surrealism (Angel's Egg), historical romance (Rose of
Versailles); there is anime that mixes up some (if not all) of the
above genres; indeed, there is even anime that is bad. Hence it is a
big mistake to assume that any particular anime film you see is
'representative'. It is not.
Of course the newcomer to anime may luck out and sit down to one of
those classics of the genre that speaks exactly to one's heart and be
converted instantly. But he also runs the very great risk of sitting
down reluctantly to something he or she has heard a friend hype to the
skies, only to find himself watching what seems to be ludicrous porn
or grotesque violent occultism or a badly drawn, infantile, saccharine
bit of hyper-kinetic or glacially paced nonsense, diverting perhaps
for the mildly intelligent Kindergartener, but certainly not worth a
glance from a serious-minded grown-up. Such a viewer puts up with it
for a few minutes, then gravely pops in an old Ingmar Bergman movie
instead, to watch Swedish Knights play chess with Death in black and
white, like a grown-up.
A profound error. Which costs the foolish soul who makes it an
incredibly rich source of delight. And insight.
Of course, we all know that apparently poor work in a particular
branch of art doesn't invalidate that entire branch. Merely because
Plan Nine From Outer Space sucks, that doesn't mean film as such is no
good -- that there are no Citizen Kanes or L'Aventuras s out there. In
the realm of American cartoons, however, that is exactly the case:
there are no Citizen Kanes in American animation. But in Japanese
anime, they abound. Along with everything else, an animated cornucopia
encompassing everything from trash to soap opera to music videos to
multi-generational historical sagas to high art to crazed porn.
To understand anime you have to stretch your imagination and realize
that it is the product of a society where cartoons and comics are not
something restricted to five-year-olds. That's not to say that anime
and its print sister 'manga' are (only) an adult art form. In Japan
they are a universal communications medium, nearly equivalent to print
or TV. A simple statistic will suffice- in Japan, over 40 % of all
books and magazines are 'manga': Japanese comic books, the foundation
of anime. Only (as with anime) these manga are nothing like American
comic books, with their twenty-some pages of recycled sci-fi pugilism
between Schwartzeneggar-torso'd protagonists and mutant villains.
Manga are phone-book-thick volumes of drawings containing not just
children's entertainment but also fiction as lengthy and serious and
realistic as formal novels -- not to say autobiography, training
manuals, government-published political documents, the Gospels,
histories, cook books, political rants, college texts. Literally
anything that can be conveyed in print has its manga twin in Japan.
The Japanese are the most literate people on earth, with a population
of 100 million. And when you consider that nearly every other book on
their shelves, every other magazine on their racks, is manga --
comics, from which originals most all anime derives -- and has been
for decades, you begin to get some idea, not just of the social
magnitude of manga and anime in Japan, but of its intellectual and
emotional depth and extent. It's not too much to say that everything
the Japanese people think, hope, fear, feel, and have to say, is
expressed through this medium; and that, as such, it gives a picture
-- often a profound picture -- not just of the Japanese condition, but
the human condition.
In Japan, culture as well as capitalism intertwine in manga and anime.
One can log onto the net and find dialogues between 'Rashomon'
director Akira Kurosawa and anime director Hayao Miyazaki, or an
interview with the same director by the famous novelist Ryu Murakami.
A novelist such as Mishima Yukio was an avid manga buff, and the works
of Japanese literature's contemporary pantheon of Murakami Haruki and
Yoshimoto Banana are linked with manga quite unashamedly. Can one
imagine Jean-Luc Godard discussing the art of film with Bart Simpson?
It's standard practice in Japan. Because though anime has its Homers
and Barts, it has a great deal more.
But that isn't to say that manga (or anime) is something heavy and
Dostoyevskian -- or light and hilarious, or sick and crazy, or
delicate and romantic. It's all these things. It covers so huge a
variety of topics and genres and emotions that virtually anything you
can say about manga or anime is true of some examples of it.
Another uniquely weird aspect of the situation is that in Japan, there
is an extraordinarily broad and easy overlap of forms. If a manga is
successful in a comic magazine serial format, it may then be published
in book form. Or it may be made into an animated film. Or into an
animated television series. Or into a non-animated film or series,
with human actors. Or into a novel, or a play, or a role-playing game,
or a T-shirt, or even a ballet or an opera. This formal transvestitism
isn't unusual. On the contrary, it's unusual for a successful manga
not to be incarnated into a host of other forms. Nor is it uncommon to
have any of these other forms metamorphose into the other. A novel by
an award-winning author may easily be followed with a manga version.
An original anime such as Tenchi Muyo may spawn years of manga.
Nor are other narrative versions all that manga and anime spawn. One
of the things about manga and anime that a newcomer should keep in
mind is that both are part of an extraordinarily large, rich, and
extensive industry. Manga publishing in 1997 alone, in the teeth of
the most profound economic strains facing Japan since the War, took in
an excess of 96 billion dollars. Manga and anime are deeply tied into
merchandising and marketing. When a manga or anime is a hit, dolls,
dresses, posters, boxed sets, DVD's, etc. burst onto store shelves in
force. Manga is to Japan what rock music was to the Sixties:
all-encompassing, virtually equivalent to Japanese pop culture itself,
whose least quiver it records in symbiosis with massive media and
marketing support.
And the product of a culture of such striking insularity and
originality as Japan can be both surprising and disconcerting.
Let me therefore note some of the surprises you may encounter:
Pictures
Anime has a number of idiosyncratic visual characteristics. The
characters in it are nearly always human -- they aren't Disney's
talking animal menagerie, or distorted minimalist shorthand people as
in Peanuts or Dilbert. Nonetheless nearly all anime characters have
(very) large eyes. Why? Who knows. It's just become a visual
convention over there, the way stop lights are all red over here.
(Though, note: the 'eyes as windows of the soul' notion seems to hold
in anime, for the huge-eyed are invariably soulful -- large eyes can
often indicate that characters having them are more caring or empathic
than character with small or narrow eyes.)
Characters in anime seem nearly always Caucasian -- blue-eyed blonds,
green-eyed red-heads, and red-eyed blue-heads abound. Why? Slumming
Freudians like to say it's an indication of Japanese self-abasement
before the West, but a less asinine reason is historical: when anime
began as manga, drawing was generally done quickly and loosely on
(quite cheap) paper. If you sketch characters all of whom have black
or dark brown hair and eyes, those characters will have a visual
sameness that makes them tough to distinguish. It's easier to
distinguish three girls if one's hair is blond and the other is black
and you can color in the third with red. So they did.
The fact remains: when you see blonds and redheads in anime, there's
not intended to be Western white folk unless explicitly defined as
such. Consider every character in anime Japanese unless otherwise
noted. (Admittedly, the racial-mix look does make it easier for
non-Japanese to appreciate anime, and does not hurt its global
marketability either.)
There are a number of other minor visual conventions you should know.
When a character is nervous, a huge teardrop-like bead of sweat can
appear by a character's head. When a character is furious, their heads
are like as not to be drawn twenty times larger, with sawtooth teeth
and flames pouring from their mouth. When a character is near-angry or
irritated, a cross-like thing appears on their forehead -- shorthand
for a 'bulging vein'. When a character (male) is sexually excited, he
experiences a -- sometimes geyser-like -- nose bleed. Tears can also
be Niagara-like, or else flowing white bands rushing down the weeper's
cheeks. When characters act childishly, they're drawn in a manner
called 'super-deformed' -- short scampering bouncing two-year old
bodies. (Yes, when such visual distortion is used, it's nearly always
intended to be funny, and nearly always is.)
Sounds
One of the most powerful, yet subliminal, things in anime is aural --
its use of voices. One of the most instructive things you can do in
anime is compare a dub to a sub - anime dubbed with English-speaking
voices - to one with Japanese voices using English subtitles. Dubs are
without exception worse bordering on awful. The reason being that
American dubbers nearly always use Saturday-morning children's cartoon
voices. The presumed IQ of what you're watching drops 100 points the
first moment you hear it. Japanese vocal parts (in great and moving
contrast) are done by adult voice actors who are precisely that:
adults, in their thirties and forties and beyond: serious actors,
whose intonations come across, even in ostensibly 'children's' dramas,
with a heartfelt emotional range and subtlety that, almost unnoticed,
draws viewers into regarding even the most child-like visual image as
emotionally adult.
Imagine that two versions of Kurosawa's Seven Samurai were dubbed into
English, one dubbed version done by Mel Blanc (ie Bugs Bunny, Porky
Pig, and Elmer Fudd voices) and the other by Laurence Olivier, Sir
John Geilgud, and Vivien Leigh. The emotional distance between dubs
and subs can be that vast. Even if you couldn't speak the language at
all, the sounds of anime alone, particularly in shoujo (women's manga
and anime), give it at times a mature emotional sincerity unlike
anything in Western animation. Japanese voice actors are stars in
Japan, and rightly so, and anime voice acting is no small part of
anime's depth and power -- not least because most viewers aren't
consciously aware of it all. But the effect is there nonetheless. (One
aural curiosity: female voices in anime are often quite high-pitched.
Why? No idea. But female soprano is the rule.)
Narrative
The most striking and important thing defining anime (as author
Fredrik Schodt rightly noted) lies in narrative and character. The two
intertwine so deeply that separating them is no small task. But, let's
look at narrative first:
Narrative in anime (like so much else) derives from manga, and manga
owes everything to 'The God Of Manga', Tezuka Osamu. Tezuka's historic
contribution to the art lay in his opening up the narrative in time.
Prior to Tezuka, 'cartoons' were short: political caricatures, or
four-panel newspaper strips, or at best children's-book-like stories
stretching a few pages. To understand how that could constrict an art,
imagine what the Western novel would be like if limited to one
paragraph or (at best) two or so pages. A handful of poems might
survive, but nothing else. It was Tezuka's great breakthrough to break
that restriction in manga, and write manga stories as though they were
novels -- to run a tale for hundreds if not thousands of pages. With
Tezuka, characters and stories suddenly were able to stretch over
years and decades, like human beings do. And so the stories came more
and more to mirror the growth and development of actual human beings,
to present psychologically real lives.
This would seem not to apply to anime, since after all a movie is a
movie and rarely goes over two hours, if that. But that's only
apparently true. In viewing anime, it often helps to remember that
you're viewing something like a movie based on a long long novel. Deep
characterization and long-unfolding emotional development are often at
the core. Time's realism has touched the lives you're watching, and
marks them. Most anime tales derive from earlier lengthy incarnations
in manga form — Miyazaki's film Nausicaa, for instance, stems from a
multi-volume Tolkienesque manga that he'd worked on and released over
the course of thirteen years. When you live with anyone thirteen years
you get to know them pretty well, and when Miyazaki put his Nausicaa
on the screen, both he and his audience were well aware of hundreds of
unspoken aspects of the lives and personalities of the figures on the
screen.
Like the iceberg, nine-tenths of an anime character and narrative are
unseen; but again like the iceberg, that unseen nine-tenths is not
merely palpable, but there in multiple volumes off-screen.
Non-Japanese viewing anime often get a sense that much of the story
isn't being told, or that almost too much story is being compressed
into a small space. The not-quite-seen story is nonetheless sensed,
and is no small part of anime's attraction — seeing certain animes is
like visiting a foreign city for a day and being vividly aware that
there's far more there to the place and people than you'll ever see.
Sometimes the attempted compression is so futile that, as in manga,
the narrative just extends as far as necessary -- thus you have 61
episodes of Hime-chan, 51 of Hana Yori Dango, 76 of Marmalade Boy,
etc. They aren't discrete collections of stand-alone Honeymooners-like
episodes: they're ongoing dramatic developments in the characters'
lives, a story that simply takes 76 episodes to tell -- and even then
leaves much that is (tantalizingly) untold.
Apart from length, there's the puzzling fact of genre. Bent genre. In
the West, straight genre abounds: the spy story, the detective story,
the New Yorker story, sci-fi. But a kind of emotional genre is the
rule too. Comedies are consistently light, tragedies consistently
heavy, 'art' consistently humorless. Anime mixes up all these elements
like a narrative food processor. And the result is something at once
more realistic, and less, than nearly any equivalent in western
narrative. In Martian Successor Nadeshiko, for instance (anime's Star
Trek), Yurika, a young girl commanding a starship, goes to Mars to
rescue hundreds of people trapped by war in underground catacombs. She
brings her ship over the spot where the refugees are hiding; the enemy
attacks. If she puts her shields up, it will crush the people below
that they came to save. If she doesn't, her ship and crew will be hit
and destroyed. She puts up the shields, and the people die. In the
very next scene, Yurika is being televised in a big bunny suit
explaining to the crew, Sesame-Street-style, how the Nadeshiko's motor
works.
Now Jean-Luc Picard would never put on a bunny suit to explain
anything to anyone. But equally, Picard would never be put by Trek's
writers into a situation where he had to give the command to kill
hundreds of innocent civilians in order to save himself and his ship.
Nadeshiko is at once more realistic than Trek on that very serious
point -- and much less so on the other. But the ease which it leaps
from one to the other is startling and disorienting; and in anime
generally, constant.
It isn't just a matter of hopping from mass killing to slapstick.
Anime continually veers from the comic to the tragic, from horror to
farce, from perversion to innocence, with stupefyng ease. D4 Princess
is a lightning-paced future slapstick comedy about cyborg grade school
girls. Joke follows idiot joke -- till the heroine's friend is crushed
by a falling girder. Blood seeps like blossoming roses through the
blanket covering her mangled legs. She dies. The girl surviving her
shrieks with grief. The next school day, the teachers recite the same
string of facts about math and geography and the dead girl's friend
stands up and screams at the meaningless of it all. This is comedy?
No, but anime directors think nothing of pulling the rug out from
under the viewer's feet.
Anime is many things, but it is never predictable, and (significantly)
it is never emotionally predictable. In Maho Tsukai Tai, an utterly
silly comedy about a high school magicians club that does real magic,
one of its standard laugh-getters is the gay Vice President
Asaburatso's ceaseless attempts to flirt with and seduce the
President, who invariably yelps and shrieks and leaps away. Quite
funny, quite ridiculous. Yet there's a point in one episode where
Nanaka, one of the girl members confesses to Asaburatso that she loves
him. It's absolutely serious: she trembles, she's in tears, and with
profound grace Asaburatso replies that he feels for her because he
feels with her: he knows what it's like to love someone and have
nothing of that affection returned. He responds to her confession
with, not love, but empathy and humanity and pity, and the moment is
deeply humane and full of the hopeless beauty the Japanese treasure —
and American moviegoers puzzle over. 'Hey. Isn't this supposed to be
funny?'
Most of it is very funny. But in anime, a hilarious moment may
instantly be followed the most serious emotional depth, and brutal
piece of tragic realism may be followed by totally absurd
light-as-a-feather slapstick.
And formal -- Western, rather -- genres are mix-mastered as emotional
ones: Saber Marionette J seems to have been put together out of equal
parts Kurosawa's samurai films, Westworld, Second World War
revisionism, Pinocchio, and Terminator 2. Birdy has horror elements,
cop show elements, wrestling tag team elements, schoolboy comedy,
sci-fi, the works. And what in the world is Serial Experiments Lain or
Adolescence of Utena even like, much less about? Anime looks as though
it's absorbed every cliche of American pop culture imaginable, but it
hasn't so much copied it as torn off aspects and stuck them together
into a high-velocity collage. Which stimulates, needless to say, since
every button sooner or later gets pushed.
Anime has a few of its own (invariably weird) sub-genres. 'Mecha' --
metal-suit combat -- is one. For some reason every Japanese animators
feel that future wars will involve guys sitting in massive robot
humanoid body-armor punching other such massive robots, despite the
fact that treads and wheels and rockets are infinitely more effective
than jointed ankles and knees and left hooks. Magical Girl anime is
another. (The heroine is usually a grade school girl, given magical
abilities by some revoltingly cute elfin critter). There is shoujo:
love stories for women - which, curiously, are often about gay male
protagonists; the standard explanation being that Japanese society
frowns on portrayals of women breaking social boundaries for matters
of the heart, so gays serve as metaphorical stand-ins. And of course
the ever-popular 'hentai' (the Japanese word for 'pervert' and the
label for anime pornography of the lowest and vilest stripe). Hentai
is abysmal: the adult connoisseur of anime should sample perhaps ten
minutes of at least one hentai if only to learn by way of shock how
utterly worthless bad anime can be, and so avoid hentai altogether in
the future.
New Horizons In Perversion
Are all female anime characters lesbians and all male ones
cross-dressers, as popular opinion holds? No. But there is a slightly
different attitude to gays and such in anime, which is worth noting.
Regarding homosexuals: they appear rather frequently in anime, and no
one in the story makes a big fuss about it. Generally they are there
for comic relief— to make passes at heterosexual characters, who then
scream, faint, leap up trees to escape, etc. Homosexuality is not
neither condemned nor accorded the formal pat-on-the-head of political
correctness: gays are simply there, and when they approach other anime
characters sexually, the characters either comply or shriek as
inclination moves them. (Indeed, so politically incorrect is anime,
that a number of gay characters actually turn straight: Syaoran of
Card Captor Sakura, and Aburatsubo of Maho Tsukai Tai, falling for
girls with beautifully done plausibility and gradualness.) To be gay,
or to cease to be gay, is (mercifully) not a political statement in
anime: questions of political equality or gender identity don't apply
and aren't explored: they are, after all, typologies, and anime's
depth of characterization preclude stereotypes. Like all other anime
characters, gays are human, and so they run the gamut from the depths
of Saber Marionette J's Hanagata (the most irritating cretin
imaginable), to the heights of Daiundokai's Kris Christopher (nobility
incarnate). There do seem to be more lesbians than male homosexuals in
anime, and homosexuals who are male tend to drawn in what is called
'bishoujo' style: more svelte and liltingly fey than the females.
Incest also seems somewhat more tolerated in anime than in American
narrative generally -- and by narrative I mean fiction. Incest in
American cartoons is non-existent. That it can almost casually surface
in what would otherwise strike the viewer as a ten-year-old kids' show
is just how it is in the land of the rising sun. Apparently Japanese
viewers tolerate it without blinking. Never actually portrayed
positively (as homosexuality sometimes is), the brother-sister variety
nonetheless surfaces in Utena and Marmalade Boy and the Tenchi OVA
rather movingly, with traces of angst but no outright horror. On the
other other hand, fathers' lusts for daughters is given the comic
treatment in major series like KareKano and Nadeshiko. Like
homosexuality, incest surfaces occasionally in anime, but with neither
a bang nor a whimper. A laugh and a yawn rather covers it.
Gender-bending, on the other hand, is close to being an anime motif.
In Ranma and Birdy and Hime-chan no Ribon, the central characters
mutate from boy to girl and back again. Schoolgirl Tenjou Utena
dresses like a schoolboy; schoolboy Shin Kuranagi of Greenwood dresses
like a schoolgirl; and schoolgirl Anna Respighi of the Battle Athletes
OVA is a schoolboy, and doesn't know it!
Nor are age differences between characters a bar to attraction in
anime. In Japan the age of consent is fourteen, and in anime consent
is a country with no borders. Fifteen-year-old Meiko loves Na-chan,
ten years her elder; fourteen-year-old Ayanami Rei deeply loves and is
loved by the highly unlovable forty-year-old (fifty-year-old?) Ikari
Gendou; on the male side, sixteen-year-old Masaki Tenchi is chased
like a hare by seven-hundred-year-olds Ryoko and Aeka (and even the
20,000-year-old Washuu).
You can find more sexually unconventional characters and behavior in
anime than you will at 3AM in an exceptionally slimy bar in the
Pigalle. But -- in anime the characters invariably transcend the
behavior, and the behavior is generally played to benevolent if comic
purposes. Gays, lesbians, cross-dressers, etcetera, are (like the
straight characters) often ridiculous, but never hateful. Anime is
anything but politically correct, but on balance I think it does teach
tolerance -- and teaches it rather better than conventional preaching.
The acts are never quite condemned or condoned because there is the
vivid sense of actual people committing them. The acts are less than
the actors, who may be comic or tragic or ridiculous, but are never
less than human.
(Note: again, that assessment does not apply to 'hentai', the
distinguishing feature of which is not sexual activity so much as
sexual cruelty, bordering on psychosis. If you should happen to see a
hentai video, and you find yourself enjoying it, see a doctor quick:
the essence of hentai is not sex but violence, and in particular,
sadistic violence against the weak. Shun it: its existence demeans not
the characters on the screen but its viewers, and anime generally.)
Character
Perhaps the greatest achievement of anime is characterization. Of this
I have little to say here -- characterization can't be described; only
felt. Suffice it to say that there are characters in anime who have
more psychic reality than most people you know. I once recall saying
of the classic Marmalade Boy that it would be nice to see it done with
real actors. The anime scholar to whom I put this fiercely disagreed
-- rightly so. Human beings aren't that real. Precisely how and why
the Japanese have this unerring sense of subjective reality is a good
question. It made be that a society which places such an emphasis on
'face' and external proprieties develops in its members a deep sense
of hidden interiority to compensate, aiid becomes adept at inferring
it in others; or it may be that the one great formal contribution of
Japanese writers to narrative fiction -- the shosetsu or 'I-novel' —
gave manga authors the critical initial shove in the direction of
discerning and appreciating subjectivity.
Whatever it is, characters in anime are as real and deep, as
pleasurable and moving, as in any other form of narrative art. Is
Koishikawa Miki less of a human being than Emma Bovary? Not to me. I
envy you, Reader, about to make the acquaintance of Ikari Shinji,
Allen Schezar, Porco Rosso, Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind, Naga the
Serpent, Katsuragi Misato, Rem Saverem, Sana-chan, Doumyoji,
Kurusegawa Serika-sempai, Tsubasa Shimahime, Nicholas D. Wolfwood,
Kennou Hibiki, Hoshino Ruri, Ryoko, Rei, Lain. This sense of deep,
intimately known psychology compressed into a tiny space of time in
film gives anime a spiritual density quite unlike anything else in pop
culture.
Japanese Culture
One of the trickiest benefits and pleasures of watching anime lies in
watching the Japanese culture that underlies it. Catching it is tricky
because, ostensibly, not a few anime seem utterly un-Japanese —
Caucasian-looking protagonists set in other worlds, distant futures,
mythic pasts. I doubt that a Scotsman or a German who'd never heard of
anime, presented with a good dub of, say, Slayers or Gundam Wing,
could tell it was Japanese in origin at all. But of course Japanese
attitudes permeate both, just as Fifties sci-fi is as typically
Fifties America as the Edsel. And Japanese attitudes matter. Japan is
significant: quite apart from its other historical and aesthetic
contributions and importance, Japan is the country that has perhaps
gone deepest into the twenty-first century: the world of a
comparatively aging and aged population, of government by and for the
mega-corporation, of vertiginous technologization, of intense
overpopulation. How Japan reacts to those factors is both a source of
information worth exploring, and a model: indeed, that Japan is not
hell is one of the most hopeful indications of a tolerable human
future.
And of course, some aspects of Japanese society itself are simply
worth seeing for their inherent worth and beauty: The easy reverence
for nature, the emphasis on hard work, determined perseverance,
loyalty, the respect for elderly and ancestors and past traditions.
These are good things, and not terribly common in contemporary Western
film or pop.
Japanese cultural attitudes are not of course purely 'good' but have
their less amiable side, and -- to the Western newcomer -- those
attitudes are not merely idiosyncratic but often odd enough to require
a bookshelf of commentary. The new student of anime should at least
know a few things:
First, the Japanese seem to combine, intensely, two sorts of attitudes
that you would not think would combine very easily.
On the one hand, the Japanese have a piercing sense of the beauty and
brevity of things. Ascribe it to Zen if you will, but the Japanese
(and their art) have a deep sense of the pathos of mutability. Things
pass away, and often the most beautiful and the most meaningful of
things. The Japanese like to symbolize this passing in the image of
cherry blossoms, which bloom in extraordinary beauty for three days
and then are blown away on the wind. Such falling petals are as much a
motif of anime as cans of Michelob are of Superbowl TV commercials;
but it's important to remember that the falling cherry blossom was a
cliche of haiku a millennia before it became a cliche of anime; and
that the feeling underneath it is quite real and seriously held -- the
sense of preciousness, and transience; beauty, and fragility.
You would imagine that believing 'all things must pass' would lead to
a certain nihilism; and more than a trace of it is there. (Much more.)
But, paradoxically, to this sense of ultimate doom the Japanese add a
sense of ultimate commitment. Will, effort, 'gambare' -- doing one's
best -- is an unquestioned virtue and imperative. The Japanese seem to
feel that doing one's best, regardless of the circumstances,
regardless of whether you succeed or fail, sometimes even regardless
of whether what you're doing is good or evil -- is absolutely
mandatory for a person. Ivan Morris wrote a most wonderful book on the
topic, The Nobility Of Failure, which describes the most beloved of
historical Japanese heroes -- failures all. The Japanese revere those
who attempt the impossible, even if -- no, especially if -- such
doomed heroes destroy themselves in the process. If an American
character butted his head against a wall, he'd shrug and walk around
it. A Japanese character would keep on butting, till either the wall
gave way, or his head.
Is this stupidity or grandeur? Objectively, it's stupidity. But
subjectively -- ah! Ayn Rand, noted philosopher and crank, once
observed that art communicates what she called 'a sense of life'. In
offering a story, the artist, she claimed, offered a representative
sample of how he or she experiences life, like a slice of cake allows
one to understand the taste of the whole. The Japanese 'sense of life'
is striking not in that it recognizes the beauty of being, and the
destruction and pathos and cost inherent in becoming, but in that it
feels both with great and unique intensity. The Japanese combine a
deep sense of the fragility and transience of life, and an equally
deep sense of the goodness of every small good thing in it. Of course,
ultimately all things are doomed, and goodness guarantees nothing, not
even its own survival to the next moment. And yet, against this tragic
backdrop, the Japanese will to do one's best, make every effort,
strive for one's goal with absolute commitment, is -- exhilarating.
Nobody would want to visit Eliot's Waste Land, but anyone with half a
brain would die for a weekend at Akane's Anything-Goes Martial Arts
Academy or Crystal Tokyo. If someone asks what anime 'feels' like, the
answer is: generally, it feels great. Life in anime is
slapstick-rapid, passionate, young, visually beautiful, humorous,
touching, active, purposeful, deeply empathic — fun! If anime can be
described as 'escapist', the reason is that the lives of most people
are, by contrast, a prison. Who could possibly not want to escape into
an episode of Tenchi? Only a jailer.
Another point. Most of us in the west know what is meant by 'face' --
the high value placed on appearances. But among the Japanese 'face'
has a connotation we easily misunderstand. In the west, the
distinction between inner feelings and surface appearance is nearly
always decided on behalf of the former. Courtesy and hypocrisy seem
synonymous. That is not the case in Japan. The great Japanese
psychologist Takeo Doi has much to say on this distinction between
'honne' and 'tatemae', gut feelings and overt behavior. Suffice it to
say that, among the Japanese, tatemae, surface behavior, is quite as
respected and honorable and sympathetic as honne, or 'true feelings'.
Tatemae has its truth as well — rather than hypocrisy, it can almost
be a kind of optimal persona to which the person aspires. Face is one
aspect of Japanese idealism, and when a Japanese character acts out of
character -- it is not always so. In Japan, masks and face overlap,
and the former can be as real as the latter.
Also, it's a commonplace to describe the Japanese as cultural magpies.
They have a knack for taking things from other cultures, adapting what
they like and rejecting what they don't, and yet coming out in the end
with something uniquely 'Japanese'. Thus Japanese Zen Buddhism is
'like' Indian Chan Buddhism -- but isn't. Japanese capitalism is
'like' American capitalism -- but isn't; and so on. Something uniquely
and irreducibly Japanese remains, pristine and untouched. In some ways
this is true; but I think it is less true now that at any point in
Japanese history. Suffice it to say that the American influence on
Japan, from Perry to Hiroshima to Elvis, has been so massive,
unremitting, and all-permeating, that that generalization may no
longer hold. Japanese culture has swallowed so much Western culture in
the past half century that the American viewer of anime shouldn't feel
out of place in the least. It is not that Japan is a Western nation
now, but that it has digested enough of the West to speak in the
accents of the West. Japan still has its mysteries, but it is no
longer 'The Mysterious Orient'. It is not quite American, any more
than Britain is, but the viewer of a Hammer film knows instantly that
he is in a western culture; and I think it is the same for the viewer
of anime. He will be at home in Shin Seiki Evangelion, in a way that
he would not have been at home in Kabuki.
That does not mean that the highly American surface of Japanese
culture (and art) can't still touch or express Japanese depths. But it
does mean that the alert Western viewer of anime will be continually
struck by the sense of an edited American culture: a sort of concrete
near-parallel world in which, not merely is Japanese culture
presented, but a critical and in some ways improved American culture
is presented as well. Anime can be read (profitably) as an expression
of Japanese culture, but it can be read even more profitably as a
critique and revision of American culture as well. In some respects
anime presents as Utopian a vision of Americanism as Oneida or Walden
or Walden Two, and one of the strangest outcomes of watching this
Eastern art is a renewed sense of the wealth of possibilities in
Western culture.
(One final note on anime and Japanese culture: while Japanese
attitudes permeate anime, it would be a huge error to think of any
given piece of anime as an accurate picture of Japanese society.
Judging by anime, women would be in the forefront of everything,
vital, dominant, aggressive, passionately emotional. In fact Japan is
one of the most male-dominated nations of the first world, and
politeness if not subservience from women remains the rule. Anime
seems multicultural: Japan is not. Anime seems awash in children and
teenagers: Japan is, on average, the oldest population in the
industrial world. If you watch anime to pick up some language for a
visit, fine. But do not assume that every Japanese woman wears a
sailor suit and kendo sword and cries 'Gambare!' or that you should
greet everyone you meet with a flying dropkick and a cry of
'Baka-baka!' Art is not life.)
Aesthetics
You can't fully appreciate Japanese art, or its anime, unless you have
some grasp of its aesthetics. Sorry. Some basic terms:
Aware -- literally, pathos, sorrow, grief -- is perhaps the most
famous. Volumes are devoted to it. Originally, what a western critic
translated as the 'ah-ness' of things. Gradually it took the form of
mono no aware, which, translated, means 'the sadness of things', but
more coloquially it refers to the artist's (or viewer's) sensitivity
to beauty and its perishability, or rather to its implied pathos --
the force of an unwept tear or an unstated recognition or passion.
Currently it seems to mean 'wretched', but overall it refers to the
(somewhat aristocratic) ability to grasp both the possibilities and
the limitations of things in a single incident or gesture, often of a
trivial nature
Miyabi -- from the Heian period: 'courtly refinement', but a
refinement including (or rather striving to refine) love and social
relations -- a shunning of the crude and the rustic, and (ergo) much
of actual life. Not terribly applicable to urban Japan today, miyabi
nonetheless miyabi lives.
Yugen -- the profound, remote, mysterious; the inexpressible-in-words;
symbolism: but not crude symbolism (ie flag=nation), but symbols
implying metaphysical vastnesses too large to grasp. Aware is
particular; yugen is cosmic. Eliot's 'moment in and out of time' comes
close: yugen is not the presence of, but the hint, the glow, of the
eternal, the incorruptible. Its roots are apropos: the term Yu meant
dim, dark, hard to see; and gen refers to the Taoist notion of Truth.
Kamo no Chomei described it thus: 'The limitless vista created in
imagination far surpasses anything one can see more clearly.' 'Being,
they are not. Not being, they are.' Speaking of the art of acting in
No, he said, 'Whether the character one portrays be of high or low
birth, man or woman, priest, peasant, rustic, beggar, or outcast, one
should think of them as crowned with a wreath of flowers. Although
their positions in society differ, the fact that thy can all
appreciate the beauty of flowers makes flowers of all of them'. 'The
ability to appear beautiful is the seed of yugen'. Another of his
axioms: 'Beauty is the color of truth.' More practically, said Zeami
of yugen as applied to art: 'a simple softening of form is yugen'.
Sabi -- 'old'. But also pleasure in that which is old, faded, lonely;
stripped of distracting externals; a love of imperfection. Sabi
differs from aware in that one does not lament for the fallen blossom,
but loves it, and from yugen in that the flower does not (or rather
need not) suggest greater eternities. Tranquility, spiritual peace,
are associated with sabi. A liking for the aged, the faded, the
under-decorated. It has been called 'tranquility in the context of
loneliness'.
Closely related: wabi -- lack, frustration, disappointment, poverty,
but in a unique sense. 'Wabi' means to transform material
insufficiency so that one discovers in it a world of spiritual freedom
unbounded by material things. To complain of insufficiency is the
(contemptible) polar opposite of wabi. Interior richness of spirit
within a rough (but not crude) exterior, is wabi. Age, yes; dirt, no.
Wabi locates more beauty -- history, character, individuality -- in
the blemished than the unblemished, but it also refers to a curiously
tranquil, severe beauty: the 'cool stark beauty of original non-being,
muichibutsu,' the 'merest tinge of yang at the extremity of yin.' Wabi
is the beauty of not-quite-Spring, embodied in the first few blades of
grass in a vista of snow: the exterior is cold; but the interior is
bursting with potential life and beauty -- the beauty not of being or
non-being, but of vital possibility.
The emotional perspectives of wabi are well describe by Yoshida Kenko:
'The man who grieves over a love affair broken off before it was
fulfilled, who bewails empty vows, who spends long autumn nights
alone, who lets his thoughts wander to distant skies, who yearns for
the past in a dilapidated house - such a man truly knows what love
means.' By tasting unrequited or frustrated love one truly knows what
love means, just as by starving one gains a fuller appreciation of
food.
Wabi in anime is lightly illustrated by the great lesbian love scene
in 'The Last Dance' segment of Daiundokai -- great because nothing
occurs. Kris Christopher has abandoned her faith and ruined her future
out of love for young Kanzaki Akari, and now is leaving. Akari's
friendship and admiration and affection for the perfectly noble Kris
has spilled over into genuine love -- but not desire, and in any case
she is unable to help or stop Kris. Genuine mutual affection has come
into being between two people, and it is genuinely pointless and
doomed, and that is that. There is no nudity, no sex, no eroticism,
and that is the point. The impossibility of fulfillment creates a
sense of bittersweetness that simple fulfillment could only have
rendered pornographic.
Wabi has structural as well as emotional consequences too:
Murata Shuko (a student of Ikkyu): 'The moon is not pleasing unless
partly obscured by a cloud.' -- ie, the incomplete or fragmentary
thing is more evocative -- more beautiful -- than the perfect.
Shinkei: 'One should set one's heart only on the indistinct.' 'The
heart requires few words. Excellence is to be found in verses that are
cold and spare.' Beauty is housed in the 'elevated, aloof, cold and
frozen,' the 'aged and worn'.
Chen shih-tao: 'Be awkward rather than skillful. Be plain rather than
florid. Be rough rather than delicate. Be eccentric rather than
conform to the popular norm. Poetry is all like this.'
The yuan-yu school: 'simple aged austerity is to be prized, skillfully
wrought elaboration is to be despised.'
What has all this got to do with anime, you say (slightly agog):
simply that while Japanese art and narrative is invariably built with
suki -- taste or refinement -- , willfully deliberate eccentricity is
amply tossed in. The asymmetrical, the unbalanced, the ambiguous, the
fragmentary, 'space', art that hints rather than states: that is
Japanese art, and it permeates the Japanese art of anime.
Western aesthetics has traditionally championed art which renders
things explicitly clear and painstakingly outlined. Japan is very
different. Where old Zen ink drawings barely imply the outline of a
leaf, Dutch drawings of the same period reflect a nearly photographic
horticultural accuracy. Entire world-views are contained in that
distinction. Japanese artists love to imply, rather than state. The
Japanese like their art loose and free, sketched rather than definite,
mysterious rather than clear -- 'broken rather than whole' And so the
viewer of manga or anime will see faces half-sketched, backgrounds
half-done, and things critical to the story never explained. Like the
viewer of the Rorschach Blot, he is expected to supply his own
interpretation.
For some this is bad art. For others, it is the most involving sort of
art possible. Japanese artists make room for the viewer to complete
the work himself -- and perhaps discover something of himself in the
process. In Evangelion, for example, one of the characters is shot by
someone not shown by the camera. Subsequently a security officer long
in love with the character is shown weeping wretchedly. Is the officer
the one that pulled the trigger? We don't know; and we never find out.
We have to connect the dots ourselves. This occurs in ways small as
well as large. In Birdy, a schoolgirl perhaps beginning to fall in
love with a troubled schoolboy leans close to him during a light
rainfall. We see the top of her umbrella, obscuring what happens
between them when she does so. Does she kiss him? Do they speak? Does
she only take his arm and say nothing? We aren't shown. Some western
viewers find this sort of thing infuriating - they want to know, not
to think! Anime is different: in anime some of the power of what we
see stems from the fact that we have to decide for ourselves just what
it is.
This tendency to imply, while evocative and poetic when done
sparingly, is unfortunately often taken to extremes. Thus, not a few
of the more ambitious animes end up like Kubrick's 2001 or Patrick
McGoohan's The Prisoner, fascinating but incomprehensible mystic
metaphors. Just what is The End Of Evangelion all about? Or Angel's
Egg? Or even Revolutionary Girl Utena? When anime directors want to be
profound, they become incoherent. And sometimes it seems that they
become so because they equate the incoherent with the profound. Those
who make anime artist do not feel under an obligation to make sense.
And sometimes they do not make sense.
Is it nonetheless possible for a piece of anime to have shiori -- to
be 'a poem ambiguous enough to sustain several varying
interpretations' (high praise, this, to a Japanese) 'yet altogether
yielding the mood of loneliness' - when the plot line often as nor
involves two pre-teens inside giant robot armor beating the shit out
of each other? Incredibly, yes.
(Oh, and incidentally: no discussion of Japanese aesthetics as it
relates to anime would be complete with mention of the great,
inevitable, all-permeating -- 'kawaii'. Kawaii means 'cute'. And rare
is the anime in which 'cute' is not larded on by the shovel-load, if
not the avalanche. Huge-eyed infants, vomitously endearing little
animals, sniffling toddlers, lilting faux-naive girlish voices — the
Japanese have a capacity for indulging in the cute to a degree that
would make a nation of diabetics out of any other people. This
cuteness is generally juxtaposed with enough savage gore, tragic
dramatic action, psychological realism, and/or just plain
cross-cultural weirdness that the viewer is never sufficiently
revolted to dash away screaming, as he would be by a Donny & Marie
re-run, say. But it is always there, often in luxuriant abundance, and
is a genuine aesthetic goal that anime creators strive for and (alas?)
invariably achieve. I follow that 'alas' with a question mark because
'kawaii' too can prove addictive: if beauty is the color of truth, it
must be states that 'kawaii' is at least one shade of beauty, and that
Japanese animators employ it to great effect. Be prepared for it; and
be prepared - to your astonishment - to enjoy it.)
The Cross And The Lotus
Anime and theology? One of the things sure to puzzle the western
student of anime is the fact that Japanese animation seems to feature
more crosses than the 700 Club. Works like Angel's Egg, Shin Seiki
Evangelion, Lain -- you get the impression the people creating these
things are not Shinto animators half a world away but Alabama
fundamentalists undergoing a nervous breakdown. Aren't Japanese all
Zen Buddhists, and hasn't it been called the Asian nation most
resistant to Christianity? Hasn't its population of Christians never
been greater than 1 %? Why in the world are Western religious symbols
all over the place? The answer is complicated, but it goes a long way
towards explaining the odd power of anime.
First: Christianity there ain't like Christianity here. Though small
in number, Japanese Christians are extremely prominent in Japan. They
occupy a wildly disproportionate number of high offices: three of its
postwar Presidents, several of the Presidents of Japan's top
universities, literally dozens of its finest novelists and poets are
Christian. Christian influence is as vast as the Christmas that is
universally celebrated in Japan -- but for opposite reasons: Christmas
is popular because cheerfulness and gift-giving always are, and the
Japanese are rarely averse to importing something that works. But
Christianity in Japan was from the first pitched not toward the people
at large but toward the most elite social strata and intellectual
classes. The targets of prostelyzation were scholars and samurai, and
indeed those were and always have been Christianity's strongholds
among the Japanese. Christianity, to the Japanese, is not backwards
and superstitious: it is intellectual and elitist, a religion of
writers and samurai.
When an American thinks of Christianity, like as not he imagines a TV
preacher yowling about Creation Science on Cable. To the Japanese,
Christianity is a religion of intensely philosophical dogmatism,
rigorous self-discipline, relentless and perversely (and attractively)
self-destructive social commitment, and residual aristocracy. It is
also seen as profoundly feminist: virtually the whole of the Japanese
education system for women was founded, built, or influenced by
Christians. I would guess that Japanese regard Japanese Christianity
with an odd mix of shame and pride — shame, because for a full 250
years, Christianity was absolutely repressed with a ferocity even a
Stalin did not manage to undertake, every Japanese claiming adherence
to it being immediately subject to torture and death; pride, because
the kakure -- 'hidden Christians' -- nonetheless held on to it
faithfully all that time, only coming out publicly at the approach of
the twentieth century. In its ability to inspire heroism and
endurance, its exoticism, its equation with the beloved and despised
West, and its sense of being the ideology of the only nation that,
after all, defeated the Japanese, Christianity is a complex of symbols
for the Japanese that strikes any number of moving chords. And since
the function of the artist is after all to strike chords, and strike
hard and often, anime is awash in Christian symbolism.
But why so much, and why there? There seems to be more Christian
imagery in some anime than in anything the West has seen in art since
the pre-Raphaelites. In Kamikaze Kaitou Jeanne, for instance, the
heroine (yet another Japanese high school girl) is approached by an
angel called Fin Fish. The angel informs her that the girl is the
reincarnation of Joan of Arc, and that 'the devils have found a way to
weaken God'. Apparently demons have learned how to hide inside
beautiful objects of art, and when people gaze upon such art, their
souls are infected by the latent evil and die. Since 'beautiful souls
are the life of God', the death of enough souls means that 'God will
die too', unless Jeanne can extirpate the demons.
Now Kamikaze Kaitou Jeanne is as close to American Saturday Morning
Cartoons as anime gets; Death of God theology is not what one would
expect to find there. Would Sesame Street have a Bodhisattva appear
and proclaim Big Bird a reincarnation of Lao Tsu, assigned to foil
Shiva? I think not. But Christian imagery seems to be such common coin
nowadays that even kids' shows accept it without blinking.
That isn't to say that Japan's anime fans and creators are all
seminary students in embryo. (Though Mamoru Oshii of Ghost In The
Shell, no small influence, nearly was.) But it's a serious option for
many Japanese, not unlike Marxism was for Europeans in the Thirties.
Japan isn't a Christian nation, exactly: Christianity does not
(deeply) permeate it, nor (really) haunt it, nor (quite) tempt it, but
it does touch it and surprisingly deeply. John Paul II may have been
right when he forecast that the coming millenium would be the one
where Christianity permeates the East. And indeed if Japan ever chose
to excel the West in Christianity as well as consumer technology, the
results would be interesting to see.
Nor do I use the word 'see' lightly: one could plausibly say of the
Japanese that their religious affinities are not conceptual so much as
aesthetic; the Zen garden touches them, not the Thomist axiom. Their
spiritual life seems more open to symbols than to dogmas. And if anime
is any indication, it certainly is open to visual Christian symbolism,
which permeates anime like Brut. Christianity may not be explicitly
accepted by the Japanese, but going by pop culture anime, there is
considerably more interest and ease and casual respect for it than in
many supposedly Christian countries. In fact, one on the interesting
things about the cross-cultural situation is that anime commercial
distributed in the States will likely as not have Christian elements
censored. Sailor Moon's quest for the Holy Grail and the Messiah in
Sailor Moon Super is fine in Japan but deliberately mis-translated for
the American market, lest the offense that is Christian religious
terminology be seen. (Kamikaze Kaitou Jeanne has not even been picked
up -- no doubt the ACLU would bring suit. There is so much Christian
symbolism in several examples of anime that it's downright politically
incorrect -- yet another of anime's delights.)
Suffice it to say: Christians viewers will probably feel more at home
watching most anime than they would be watching American programming.
A practicing Catholic, nay, a priest or theologian, would feel
entirely satisfied watching Angel's Egg. Only the Damned could endure
Baywatch.
What To See and Where To Start
So. Having said all that, where are we? In suitably Buddhist form:
back at the beginning. Why watch anime? That's like asking, why eat
chocolate ice cream? Or go sailing, or play racquetball, or listen to
Bach or Brahms or the Beatles? Because it's intrinsically pleasurable
-- because it's fun. And the way to enjoy it and learn about is to go
out and get some and look at it. For beginners I particularly
recommend:
Birdy (Short - four episodes - but I consider this perhaps the best
single introduction to anime, for simple though it is it contains
nearly every characteristic anime tic, from gender-bending to sci-fi
to past Japanese history to beautiful characterization to dangling
plot points and high school romance to comedy to horror, all done
superbly. And the fight scene at a theme park in episode three between
two android girls is worthy of Hitchcock.)
Ranma 1/2 (Light romantic comedy - not art, but perhaps the most
genial, kind-hearted, pleasant show in existence. Impossible not to
like, even in the lamentably bad English-dubbed versions.)
Kodomo no Omacha (Absolutely frantic kids' comedy: Leave It To Beaver
on LSD and methedrine. No anime touched it in terms of velocity till
the even more hyper-genki Excel Saga exploded across the screen.)
Marmalade Boy (76 episodes of the most introspective soap opera in
existence; if Dostoyevsky wrote a year's episodes of Love Of Life, it
would look like Marmalade Boy.)
Ghost In The Shell (Terminator 3, with a deeply reflective female
lead. State of the art then; still art now.)
The Wings Of Honneamise (with which, 'anime officially became art' --
at least in the words of Time magazine, 1989)
Shin Seiki Evangelion (post-apocalyptic X-Files-conspiracy plus
Oedipal tragedy via the Qaballah and Revelations. Not very clear? It
won't be any clearer after seeing it either, but see it you must. Is
it art? I'm not sure, but it will provoke more thought than Heidegger
and Wittgenstein combined. Incredibly, the director skipped from this
to a live-action porn film to the lightning-like anime soap Kareshi
Kanoji no Jijou, probably the visual high-water mark of current
technical experimentation, and itself well worth viewing.)
Angel's Egg (Brooding, surreal, cryptic, lyrical, and short. More
Christian symbolism than the Sistine Chapel)
Serial Experiments Lain. (In the beginning was the Web, and the Web
was with God, and the Web was God. Indescribable. The anime to see.
Buy it. Rent it. Kneel before it.)
(And lastly a manga -- and you really should read at least one manga —
available in the US in a four-volume translation: Nausicaa of the
Valley of Wind.)
Where to get them? There you are in luck. One of the happy corollaries
of anime the art is anime the cult. Armies of drooling addicts abound,
not merely with regard to anime as such but with regard to nearly
every show, character, genre, etc. They infest the Web like army ants,
seeking nothing more than to get you hooked too. Click onto the Anime
Turnpike and you will crushed under an Everest of distributors,
fansubbers, stores, clubs, commentary, free graphics, reviews, fan
fiction, shrines, web sites, mailing lists, and so on.
And as you settle down, popcorn at hand, remember to approach this
Zen-touched animation the Zen way: leave your preconceptions at the
door, and let pure experience be your guide. Just try it. You'll like
it.
The End