‘So how did you spend the weekend?’
‘Oh, you know, I dressed up as a futuristic military robot and hung around a convention centre.’
So didn’t run my conversation last Monday morning, but it might have done had I eschewed my usual twenty Regal and a four pack and attended Anime Japan 2016 at Tokyo Big Site.
I admit, not everyone in attendance was dressed as a robot.
One guy was Zelda.
Ok, no, most were in their civvies, the three day event received huge media coverage, and was attended by animation studios, performers and fans in their thousands from all around the world, which might lead you to ask- how did we get to this post-supernova stage of unshakable global anime fandom?
Well, a good starting point- not an absolute starting point – but a logical place to begin is…
Tezuka Osamu
A man named Tezuka Osamu is regarded by most as the father of modern anime. His most famous creation is Astro Boy- a nuclear powered robot boy who first appeared in the 1950s.
Tezuka was inspired and influenced by Disney, but didn’t have the resources to operate in the same way as the freeze-dried, rodent scribbling Third Reich enthusiast, so he looked for a way to do Disney on the cheap. His method of converting manga to animation, on a budget, was to concentrate on individual frames rather than on movement. The quality of the frame became more important than the kind of motion which was expensively rendered in Disney features and so, for reasons of thrift, anime’s dominant aesthetic was forged.
To give you an idea of how highly regarded Tezuka is, go to Takadanobaba station, a bustling student district on Tokyo’s centrally looping Yamanote line, and listen to the music they play over the tannoy to announce the approach of a train. It’s the Astro Boy theme music, the title character having been, in the series, ‘born’ in the area.
Mobile Suit Gundam
Giant, mechanized killing machines. Flying around. In space.
It’s an irresistible pitch, right? Just put the squillion dollars in my bank account and order some ink.
But actually Gundam, which today is an indestructible, omnipresent power-franchise, didn’t go down all that well when it first filtered hazily through the mist around Sunrise animation studio in 1979. Later, when the episodes of the first TV series were streamlined into a set of films, was when it really took off, stratospherically, while securing a fortune from merchandising sales.
Where previously anime had been child and family oriented, Gundam, with it focus on hard sci-fi military realism and grinding wars, had an adult audience, and created a turning point for anime as it expanded exponentially throughout the following decade.
Sometimes I like the titles of anime more than the actual shows, which isn’t to say the shows are bad, but here are the names attached to some of Gundam’s labyrinth of offshoots and expansions-
After War Gundam X.
Gundam Wing: Endless Waltz.
Mobile Suit Gundam MS IGLOO 2: The Gravity Front.
I mean, come on- it just can’t be possible to make a show as good as that title.
The 1980s
A golden era in which anime culture exploded, embedded and expanded, in synchronicity with the excesses of Japan’s deliriously cash-rich economic mega-boom. This is also the decade in which anime became the property of the otaku. This term denotes a nerd or a geek, particularly someone into manga, anime and gaming, and was originally derogatory, but has now become something to be celebrated, revelled in and exhibited.
Throughout the 1980s anime culture soared in quality, budget and quantity, producing shows aimed not at kids and families like before, but at the nerdy adult otaku, who were broiling into a potent, square-eyed subculture, presaging by a couple of decades the global mainstream embrace of screen fixated, tech-complusive behaviour.
The 1980s saw expanded production of experimental, high budget movie releases, and the most expensive at its time was Akira- an tumultuos dystopia of post-apocalyptic, urban tech-mysticism which was hugely important for its success around the world, and perhaps the film that began to open an international audience’s eyes to what anime was and what it could achieve.
Ghost in the Shell
After the inevitable, post-bubble economic crash, anime, like a lot else in Japan, went into traumatic, aftershock hampered decline, but picked up creatively in the mid-90s. A landmark TV and movie series to come from this era is the iconic, endlessly regenerating Neon Genesis Evangelion. Homing in surgically on the incubated mores of the Akihabara hordes, this product of the deeply otaku Gainax studio delivers a transforming mecha-platter of berserk robots, Christian symbolism, and blue-haired teenage girls. Not to mention quite possibly kick-starting a second industrial revolution to keep on top of blue haired, plastic merchandise production.
In 1995, Ghost in the Shell was released. This was a stunning, philosophical, cyberpunk adventure which explored prescient issues of humanity and technology, the melding of biology and computers, and questioned what it means to be alive and sentient, all done through beautiful visuals and effusive storytelling. It took anime up another notch, reverberated around the world, and as it’s set in 2029, looks set to actually be prophetical. Now where do I plug these wires into my head to look at Grindr?
Global Distribution
After the 1990s, up to the present day, anime’s popularity has increased further still, to the point of making inroads into mainstream western entertainment culture. This is partly due to changes in distribution models and ways of viewing, through which shows are no longer produced only to be shown on Japanese TV, but are internationally available on services like Netflix and Crunchyroll.
From 2001 in the US, Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim section screened anime, boosting its exposure and audience.
Additionally, torrents became available and a lot of material was uploaded to Youtube and other sites.
Creatively, around the mid-00s a vague concept called, in Japanese, moe, became prevalent. Moe means a kind of ambiguous affection, particlularly towards anime and manga characters, and translates in anime itself to a proliferation of sugary, hyper-kawaii characters and aesthetics. Maybe the most famous moe show was The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, which began in 2006, and played a major role in exporting and bringing to the world’s attention this particular candy infused, pepped up sub-category of otaku culture.
More recently Attack on Titan has been the overwhelmingly popular TV show, while the world renowned Studio Ghibli released its final ever film before closing down forever, a historical drama called The Wind Rises.
Which leaves us… attending cosplay events in a robot suit and wondering where it all went wrong, right? Or where it all went right, and what comes next?
Anime is chaotic and enticing, intensely colourful, oppressively dark; cute, adorable, sinister and weird. It can be thoughtful, ridiculous, sophisticated, and gauche, sometimes all within a single series. Choose an adjective and there’ll be an anime to which it can be applied- perhaps an unloved 70s curiosity, or maybe a studio defining international award winner, or perhaps you’ll find what you were looking for down one of the endless, flickering neon lit sub-channels in between, transmitting intermittently like a distorted sonic ping.
