Dirty Pair. Courtesy of Jerry Beck.

July, 1996: The animated feature films of Hayao Miyazaki are to be distributed by the Walt Disney Company; Blockbuster Video devotes an average of two video cases per store to renting and selling Japanese animation; a store called "Anime Crash," totally devoted to selling Japanese animation and related paraphernalia, opens in New York City. These three random observations are clearly part of a new American awareness and recognition of Japanese animation.

Japanese animation (or anime) is a commercial and artistic reality that can no longer be denied by American business, particularly the Hollywood majors. And while those studios have long ignored the qualities of Japanese animation, American artists and animators have been borrowing their tricks for years--and such stylish productions as MTV's Aeon Flux, Warner's Batman: The Animated Series and Disney features such as Hunchback and Lion King have been significantly influenced by Japanese animators.

American creators have long cornered the market for family films and funny animals in cartoons, but during the last 30 years the Japanese have been perfecting the art of action/adventure storytelling in animation; creating sophisticated science fiction stories and graphics to match. These films have won international acclaim and popularity, with only American audiences unable to accept that animation can go in these directions.

Wicked City. Courtesy of Jerry Beck.

Hungering For More
But that perception is changing. As late as 1988, the only way you could see state-of-the-art Japanese animation in the US was through bootleg video dealers, usually found at comic book conventions. A few fan clubs sprung up, mainly on college campuses, screening TV episodes and feature films. Fans of anime, weaned on US. dubbed imports such as Astro Boy, Gigantor, Speed Racer, Robotech, Star Blazers and Battle Of The Planets, had hungered for more.

Akira was released in Japan in 1988 and Marvel Comics began a serialized translation of the original manga. (comics). As a follower of world animation, I'd often wondered why someone hadn't brought over one of these high-tech features for commercial purposes. They certainly were well made and had many exploitable elements--particularly violence and sexual situations unseen in any American cartoon since Fritz The Cat. My own involvement with this genre began as a child, when I noticed the unique style of shows like Astro Boy and Eighth Man--the shows with the characters with "big eyes."

I still remember being shocked by that statement. Hadn't they seen the same film I did? That was the day I learned a hard truth about Hollywood (if not the whole general public)--to them, a cartoon is a cartoon is a cartoon. Today, I can look back at Space Firebird and see the "Saturday morning" cartoon they turned down, but only in light of the sophistication of current Japanese output.

I remember, as a little boy, seeing a Japanese kid I went to summer day camp with reading a Japanese comic book with Astro Boy on the cover--and from that moment on I realized that those "big eyed" characters were Japanese. Later, when I was able to read the credits to Speed Racer, I confirmed that fact. Flash forward about 10 years: Circumstances led me to a meeting with Osamu Tezuka in 1979 at the New York premiere of Space Firebird 2772. I was working for United Artists Classics, a distributor of niche foreign films. I obtained a 3/4" video cassette of the Tezuka film and had the company take a look. While I thought it was both an artistic success and had commercial possibilities, my bosses returned the tape to me with a terse statement about how, "We don't release Saturday Morning cartoons."