Around 1995, Japanese animation (anime) began pouring into North America, Europe and across the globe in video form. Most of these titles were unknown outside of Japan and never covered by animation journals. Whether a title is highly popular or very obscure, a high quality theatrical feature or a cheap and unimaginative direct-to-video release, they all look the same on a store shelf. Therefore, Animation World Magazine will regularly review several new releases (including re-releases not previously covered) that have merit.

American Terrence Walker creates the real thing in Anime: Concept to Reality.

Anime: Concept to Reality
OAV, 2003. Director: Terrence Walker. 105 minutes. Price & format: DVD $14.99. Distributor: TOKYOPOP.

“Is it possible for one person to create anime?”, the blurb asks. Especially if the one person is an American? If it is, then Terrence Walker has done so. This DVD is certainly a graphic demonstration of how close an American anime fan can come to duplicating the Japanese distinctive art style and sci-fi story formulas. It is more specifically a detailed pep talk on how, with today’s digital animation technology, a single beginner can create an animated film. Walker’s personal preference is for the anime look, but obviously any amateur filmmaker can select his own style.

Walker is more than just an anime fan who is a wanna-be animator. He was an amateur comic-strip artist for small local newspapers (in Arizona) in the late 1980s, and has worked in the videogame industry since the ‘90s, picking up professional CGI training. He visited Production I.G in Toyko, one of the best-known anime studios to specialize in computer animation. In 2000, he single-handedly produced Understanding Chaos, a 10-minute anime-style short film and posted it on the Internet, drawing attention from websites devoted to computer graphics, 3D animation and anime. In 2002, he produced Shadowskin, 25 minutes long with much more polished animation.

Anime: Concept to Reality (produced under the name of Walker’s Studio ArtFX) consists of Understanding Chaos, Shadowskin, a six-minute Wired music video that morphs images from Shadowskin back and forth between their CGI wireframe beginnings to their finished fully-rendered states, and about an hour’s worth of Walker enthusiastically explaining how a single person can today create animation with home-based digital editing systems and low-cost 3D software. He shows in step-by-step detail how he created his short films, duplicating the visual style of anime CGI. (He does not name titles, but Ghost in the Shell, Jin-Roh and Blood: The Last Vampire are three clear influences.)

Shadowskin and Understanding Chaos frankly look like very good examples of animation school class projects, less impressive by themselves than for knowing that one person wrote, animated, directed and edited them, as well as composing their music and voice-acting the male lead characters. Shadowskin is a stereotype of the Japanese sci-fi subgenre of reluctant heroes who are unwillingly used as experimental subjects to develop cyborg supermen, and escape to use their new powers against their villainous creators. But it is an excellent condensation of the plot into a single half hour, with intelligent dialogue (wisely making maximum use of static talking heads rather than action) even if the voice-acting quality is amateurish.

Anime: Concept to Reality may not please those purists who insist that only animation made in Japan by Japanese animators is genuine anime. But it definitely shows how the influence of “anime-style” animation is spreading internationally. It should also be useful, even if only as inspiration, to aspiring animation students.