here it is, the village voice article
Jeff Yang
Voice, for all of you out there not conveniently near a VV-carrying
newsstand. I'd like to thank again all those who helped me out on this
article by providing me with source or interviews or both, including MIke
Tatsugawa, Samuel Chuang, Trish Ledoux, John O'Donnell, Rob Woodhead, Carl
Macek, Rob Napton, Rick Sternbach, Neil Nadelman, Chet Jasinsky, Walter
Amos, Stanley Lew, and many others who I missed speaking with but who did
their best--including Albert Wong, Matthew Sweet, Jim Thompson, Claude
Pelletier,& many c.
I hope and expect to get a lot of feedback about this piece; in
researching it, I did what it seems that many other people who've written
about anime in the news didn't: I watched it. A lot of it. In the process,
I became a fan, to the point where I think it's started to worry my
coworkers. :-)
The TV editor is very happy with this. He's not the true test, though: you
guys are, and I know you'll be a lot harder. If you like the piece, tell
me. If you don't, tell me why. If you REALLY like it, please by all means
tell the good people at the Voice (36 Cooper Square, New York, NY
10003)--maybe they'll take the genre and its fans more seriously. I also
urge any of you who can to actually buy this issue, not because I feel any
particular need to pad the Voice's corporate pockets, but because this
piece is just part of an entire animation supplement which is quite good.
And by all means, keep me informed of new developments, because followups
are always possible, and I really enjoyed doing this piece. Last words:
see any or all of you at Anime Expo and/or Chibicon.
The article follows.
ANIME RISING
The Third Wave of Animation Isn't Just a Flash in Japan
by Jeff Yang
Jesus, it is said, loves the little children, and if that's the case,
there's a special ringlet of hell reserved for the accountant who
convinced Disney that making Creamsicle pap like The Little Mermaid is a
license to print money. As a result, in the wonderful world of Disney
animation, no one dies, bleeds, or copulates. (Except for Bambi's mother,
of course, who gets shot by a hunter, bleeds, and dies. Presumably, she
and the other animals copulate offscreen.)
Here in America, once kids begin worrying about puberty and mortality,
cartoons become irrelevant. In Japan, animation--what they call
anime--isn't a genre but a mass medium, a way of telling stories; there
are animated films for people of all ages. Even the ones for young
audiences confront themes like death, divorce, and coming of age, while
those for adults range from anodyne realities to subversive fantasies. The
world of anime is large, it contains multitudes; it's a psychotronic
paradise of fluorescent nightmares and wet fantasies, honeydew kisses and
technophilic kicks. For early fans in America, anime was available only
through a vast pirate network, a cobbled-together cybermarket of computer
bulletin boards, screeching hi-baud modems, and bootleg video exchanges.
New fans are luckier: anime is surging into the overculture in neatly
dubbed or subtitled versions. And available at a video store near you.
In the late '60s and early '70s, anime first stretched its chubby fingers
out to American audiences with programs aimed at children: Astro Boy,
Speed Racer, Kimba the White Lion, Gigantor. The kids ate it up, but there
was little that distinguished them from Hanna-Barbera and Warner toons.
Still, they set the stage for the flamboyant entry of Carl Macek--called
"Uncle Carl" by fans, with greatly varying degrees of affection--and Robotech.
Macek was a veteran film and video producer who had thrown in the towel to
run a gallery in Los Angeles, selling animation cels and movie artwork
long before they gained Sotheby's imprimatur. When he acquired a selection
of anime at the request of one of his customers in the mid '80s, he became
intrighed by the works' uniqueness and sophistication. Recognizing
opportunity when it knocked with mallet-sized robot fists, he struck a
deal with distributor Harmony Gold to bring anime to American audiences,
and produced the transgenerational space opera Robotech.
Robotech does not exist in Japan. To create the series, Macek wove
together three entirely unconnected stories--Macross, Southern Cross, and
Genesis Climber Mospeada--rescripting and dubbing them into an epic few
Japanese fans would recognize.
"The three series had not been geared to be put together; we basically
used the animation as fodder," says Macek. "The reason was that I had to
find a minimum of 65 episodes of programming. By going through these
series I was aboe to find 64 episodes, then I made an episode from scratch
by piecing together material to come up with 65. And that was Robotech."
Robotech's superior art and complex storyline had American kids watching
weekday after weekday with rapt absorption. In addition to Star
Blazers--the English dubbed version of Space Cruiser Yamato--it created a
generation of anime fans.
"My brother and I used to race home every day from school to watch Star
Blazers--it was just the most important thing going on in our lives then,"
says Trish Ledoux, 29, editor of Animag, America's top anime fanzine, and
the new monthly magazine Animerica. "I mean, it was so interesting: there
were people actually DYING in it. I still consider it my favorite show ever."
"Robotech was always the talk of the classroom," says Mike Tatsugawa, 24,
cofounder of Anime Expo (the nation's largest anime fan convention) and
president of the Society for the Promotion of Japanese Animation. "It
didn't have a kiddie storyline, it covered relationships, it had drinking
and violence; it was like an animated soap opera. I remember Robotech was
at 4:30, The Smurfs at 3:30. The dichotomy was really frightening."
Star Blazers and Robotech were carriers for a disease--anime fever--that
led fans to seek out the undubbed originals. Tatsugawa even remembers
taking road trips from LA to San Diego just to rent tapes. Some fans who
caught the bug worst took the only cure available: they went professional.
More than any other, anime is an industry run by fans. Of the "Big Four"
American anime companies, only Macek's Streamline distances itself from
fandom. ("If the fans embrace it, great," grouses Macek. "If they don't,
I'm not going to cry, because I'm not making it for them.") Of the others,
U.S. Renditions's Robert Napton admits to having been hooked into fandom
early on by Star Blazers. And while U.S. Manga Corps's John O'Donnell is,
like Macek, a video veteran, he agrees that the real clout in the industry
is in the hands of the fans. AnimEigo may be the most fannish of the four:
it was cofounded by megafans Roe Adams and Robert Woodhead, who'd made a
tidy sum designing software such as Virex and the computer game Wizardry.
"The fan market is not small, and it's growing quickly," says Woodhead.
"They say that stuff like Urusei Yatsura, which we have, only has 'fan
appeal'; well, even if that's true, which I firmly disbelieve, that would
be fine. We're going to be releasing a couple of films next year, which
are definitely 'fan'--and we're doing it because they're good films and
because we want to. And you know what? We're doing quite well. AnimEigo
has doubled in size every year."
Fans kept the faith through a decade where product was inaccessible of
inordinately expensive, building an incredible gray market for bootlegs.
It's still the prime source for new product. Chet Jasinsky, coordinator of
ChibiCon, the East Coast's first anime fan conference, notes that it took
less than a month for Silent Mobius, a long-anticipated movie, to go from
video release in Japan to circulation as a fan-subtitled bootleg in
America. Luckily, the very enthusiasm that drives fans is a
self-regulating force. As soon as better legit product is available for a
reasonable price, the underground bootleg projects voluntarily grind to a
halt. The fans aren't out for pride or profit, unlike the hackers whose
tools and methods they've adopted. To fans, access is all.
"In 1985, an import tape of Macross: the Movie cost you $150," says
Tatsugawa. "In 1992, the U.S. Renditions English version of Macross II
costs you $25. People, especially on the East Coast, who had fuzzy,
fourth-generation Yamato series used to be considered big shots. But the
stuff being released by the companies is crystal-clear. If you're a fan,
there's no question what you're going to choose."
Still, via the gray market, some of the best series have acquired huge
followings WITHOUT official U.S. release. Rumiko Takahashi's megahit
series Ranma 1/2 has been ignored so far by the Big Four, possibly becuase
of its cultural idioms and a storyline rife with subversive tendencies:
the character is a young man who transforms into a girl when splashed with
cold water and reverts to male when soaked with hot. A West Coast team of
guerrilla subtitlers, calling themselves the Ranma Project, took Amigas in
hand and translated the first 15 episodes. Since then, AnimEigo has
obtained the rights to one of Takahashi's earlier fan favorites, Urusei
Yatsura (otherwise known as Lum); with the possibility that Ranma could
follow, the Ranma Project has shut down.
Of course, some fans are more enthusiastic than others. If you're a
full-fledged fan, you have a VCR, natch, a laserdisc player if you're
lucky, a terminal node on the net for sure. You sling anime slang in a
neo-Japanese creole: hentai to describe a pervert, baka for fool, sukebe
for pornographic. You scan e-mail and electronic bulletin board postings
for hot data or hot product. You sit up long nights translating a script,
cast it out upon the net. Obtain a hard to find new release, post an offer
of free dubs. Your reward is that thousands like you are doing just the same.
When this sort of activity begins taking up most of your time--and when
you find yourself arguing for hours on end about just what would happen if
the ambi-gendered star of Ranma 1/2 got PREGNANT--you've entered the realm
of the otaku, the hardcore anime fan. The habit can become very expensive.
In addition to the technology, monthly purchases in the hundreds of
dollars (laserdiscs, tapes, soundtrack CDs) are not uncommon. "I've spent
so much money on this stuff," says Samuel Chuang, 22, a UC-Berkeley
student. "Maybe I should switch to cocaine. It'd be cheapter."
"The way that American fans use the term otaku, embracing it as a kind of
banner they can all rally around, isn't the way it's used in Japan," says
Ledoux. "It's not a positive thing. An otaku is an OBSESSED fan--the first
thing that comes to mind is Tsutomo Miyazaki, the serial killer who was
found with thousands of pornographic anime tapes in his apartment. And I'm
so aware of the implications of that term that I'd never call myself that
in Japan--it's worse than being outed. It can ruin your career, literally,
if someone thinks you're an otaku. But in the American sense of the word,
I'd call myself an otaku. I have a deep and abiding interst in animation
that's not going to go away. And I've done all those things--I had a car
whose license plate was ARCADYA"--a reference toa a character from Captain
Harlock.
In Japan, in addition to anime otaku, there are those who follow pop
singers, monster movies, military gear; there are probably WEATHER otaku.
Anime otaku have even begun to fight for their rights--in September 1991,
the animation house Gainax (founded and run by otaku who wanted to ensure
the purity of their product) released the first episode of Otaku no Video,
a short live-action/animation feature that follows a young man's
initiation into the world of otaku. He gives up tennis, his old friends,
his girlfriend--who can't understand why a college student would be so
obsessed with CARTOONS--and finally exclaims:
"Why is it that you can be a sports fan and people won't mind, but like
animation and EVERYONE HATES YOU?"
It's a question asked by many American anime fans--otaku and non-otaku
alike. In America, the media has slammed anime by concentrating its
attention on the genre's most erotic and violent segments--soft-porn like
Cream Lemon and I Give My All, or grotesque sex horror like Wandering Kid.
"The cognitive dissonance that goes on in America goes like this," says
O'Donnell. "If it's a cartoon, it must be for children. But: if it's for
children, it must not have sex or violence. So if it does, it must be
porn. American cartoons--Walt Disney, Hanna-Barbera--are aimed at little
children. And if there's anything that's not acceptable for six-year-olds,
then it must be that Ralph Bakshi Fritz the Cat shit. There's a general
misperception that there's nothing in the middle. But WE'RE smack dab in
the middle."
Fans also note that there isn't any more sex and violence in anime than in
any other pop medium, or, for that matter, in life. Whatever people may
say, it is, after all, just entertainment: giant robots don't kill people;
people kill people.
A more viable attack against anime is sexism: critics charge that,
oriented as it is toward a largely male audience, anime encourages
objectification of women, most easily typified in its high "bounce
factor," as Manga Corps's Neil Nadelman puts it.
"There are aspects of anime that I find offensive, and a lot of it hits
home because it's about violence towards women," says Ledoux. "When I was
in Japan, I was working for the manager of a very famous manga artist,
who's INFAMOUS for the way he portrays women--there's this one character
he's got who has motorcycle handles stuck into her back, so you could just
rev her up and ride her around. But it depends on the artist. There are
those who make a point to make strong woman characters....Rumiko
Takahashi, for isntance. Her women are great, and Ranma has got to be the
most brilliant invention in comics. That just doesn't happen in
America--that kind of subverison of gender roles."
It was, of course, inevitable that anime would begin marching through pop
culture like a Bambi-eyed Energizer bunny. George Lucas is a giant fan,
renting reels to show to private audiences at the Skywalker Ranch; many
American comic artists give tips of the hat to Japanese counterparts in
their work, while publishers have begun bringing manga--the paper
equivalent of anime--over in translation. One manga, Mai the Psychic Girl,
is slated to be adapted into a live-action film directed by Tim Burton and
rumored to star Winona Ryder. That weather vane of hipcult, MTV, has been
broadcasting Carl macek's English dub of The Running Man on its Liquid
Television series, while rocker Matthew Sweet has made two videos
"starring" anime characters from Boichi Terasawa's Cobra and Takahashi's
Lum. Sweet is known to fans as the highest-profile otaku in the world,
making no secret of his obsession: he's got a TATTOO of Lum on his arm,
and his next album has a track on it called "Super-Deformed"--a term that
only true anime fans will grok.
Anime has infiltrated the future as well. Via the canny hand of designer
Rick Sternbach, an avowed fan with a former $2000 to $3000 per year habit,
Star Trek: The Next Generation has been riddled with anime-related puns
and Easter eggs. On one episode, a computer screen showed a pair of
planets labeled Kei and Yuri--the names of Haruko Takachiho's infamous
girl-commandos, the Dirty Pair. Ke-i-yur-i was also used as a code
password on another episode, while yet another involved a mineral called
"sonodinite"--a tribute to animator Kenichi Sonoda. Other winks have been
invisibly subtle-"there are always graphics we have to fill in on the
control screens, and along with 'Subspace Decompression Factor 5' there'll
be things like 'Totoro Valve 161' [a tip to the anime classic My Neighbor
Totoro]."
Sternbach isn't done yet. On a recent episode of ST:TNG entitled "Quality
of Life," he notes that a major gag is present, again involving the Dirty
Pair. "I won't say what it is," he smirks. "It involves one of the major
characters. And if you're a fan, as soon as you see it, you'll know."
END
SIDEBAR:
ANIME OF THE PEOPLE
VIDEOS
Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (import)
My Neighbor Totoro (import)
Kiki's Delivery Service (import)
Akira (Streamline)
Gunbuster (U.S. Renditions)
Bubblegum Crisis/Bubblegum Crash (AnimEigo)
Project A-Ko (U.S. Manga Corps)
Urusei Yatsura (AnimEigo)
Ranma 1/2 (import)
Video Girl Ai (import)
PUBLICATIONS
Animag, 5321 Sterling Center Dr., Westlake Village, CA 91361
Animenominous, PO Box 549, Bricktown, NJ 08723-0549.
Animerica/Viz Communications, PO Box 77010 San Francisco, CA 94107
V.MAX, PO Box 3292, Santa Clara CA 95055
ELECTRONIC BULLETIN BOARDS
ABCB Cafe 916-363-1424
Anime Archive 602-863-6599
Anime Fanatics 718-966-9860
Valley of the Wind (the Animag BBS) 415-341-5986
All of the major online services have anime forums; Compuserve has a
Sunday, 9 p.m. anime discussion group, and many other anime "pros" are on
GEnie. The biggest online group is, of course, on Internet/Usenet:
rec.arts.anime. To get into Internet, a gateway is necessary: in New York,
one local public access gateway is PANIX. Dial in as a new user on their
modem line (212-718-3100) to sign up for basic service, which is $10 per
month.-J.Y.
END
That's it, guys. Feel free to repost it to other BBS's and groups, but
remember that it IS copyrighted and cannot be printed in a newsletter,
magazine, fanzine, book, or other material without the express permission
of the author and of the Village Voice (who gave me permission to post
it). Please do NOT flout this rule, or I'll be strung up by my toes and be
in a lot of legal hot water.
If this is reposted, this warning should be included in any repost.
CMH...@psuvm.psu.edu
Whadda ya all think?
Hunh, what kind of circulation does the Village Voice
have? I've heard of it, but I've never seen a copy. I guess Ben & Jerry's
downtown gets it, I'll go raid them.
I'll say this, he surely did get some good quotes out of his interviews.
Even managed to get "Uncle Carl"(snigger) to hang hisself by 's own petard!
Hee, hee, heee.
Mitch Hagmaier One Moment in Annilihation's Waste,
Quest Laboratories One Monent, of the Well of Life to taste-
Terraforming Division The Stars are setting and the Caravan
State College, Pa Starts for the Dawn of Nothing - Oh, make haste!
cmh...@psuvm.psu.edu
Jamal Hassan - KOR Addict
>I hope and expect to get a lot of feedback about this piece; in
>researching it, I did what it seems that many other people who've written
>about anime in the news didn't: I watched it. A lot of it. In the process,
>I became a fan, to the point where I think it's started to worry my
>coworkers. :-)
The reader brings out his new and improved Otakunizer and zaps the
entire newsroom! Now your coworkers are worried that you aren't watching
enough! 8-)
[...deleted text..]
>"Why is it that you can be a sports fan and people won't mind, but like
>animation and EVERYONE HATES YOU?"
I like this so much I think I'll make this my new .sig 'cause it voices
the question I've always had in my mind, except that HATE YOU becomes
THINKS YOUR WEIRD.
All in all, I have to say that this has been the most compelete
article that shows what anime fandom really is that I've seen in my 2
years of becoming an anime fan.
Kudos to you Yang for a very good article. And at last we see the true
face of Carl Macek.
--
hass...@dekalb.dc.peachnet.edu (Jamal Hassan) -- member of Anime-X of Atlanta
!akaB !akaB !akaB...!akab on amnaR -- uodneT enakA