Japanese traditional ethnicity clashes with Western values in Magical Shopping Arcade Abenobashi. ©GAINAX/ABENOBASHIPROJECT.

Magical Shopping Arcade Abenobashi. V.1, Sasshi, I Don’t Think We’re In Osaka Anymore! V.2, It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad Alternate World! V.3, Impractical Magic. V.4, There’s No Place Like Home.
TV series (13 episodes), 2002. Director: Hiroyuki Yamaga. V.1, 4 episodes/100 minutes; v.2-4, 3 episodes/75 minutes. Price & format: DVD bilingual $29.98. Distributor: A.D.V. Films.

Magical Shopping Arcade Abenobashi (Abenobashi Maho Shotengai) is a 13-episode TV (April 4 - June 29, 2002; a co-production by the Gainax and Madhouse studios) kids-go-into-magical-worlds fantasy that is a fascinating clash between Japanese traditional ethnicity and Western modern influences. The Abenobashi Shopping Arcade is a decrepit small, neighborhood shopping-district in Osaka. The shops have been family-run for three generations, with kids, parents and grandparents living behind or above the stores. Arumi and Sasshi, two 12-year-olds who have grown up as neighbors, are despondent that the arcade is being torn down. When it was built 50 years earlier, it had been designed in cooperation with a Shinto shrine with statues of the four Heavenly protectors: a turtle at the northern end, a tiger at the east, a bird at the south and a dragon at the west. These have come to be thought of as merely decorative, and as the last of them is demolished, the arcade is whisked into a series of fantasy-world-of-the-week episodes.

Each is a parody of an entertainment genre: a European Medieval marketplace (sword-&-sorcery movies and role-playing games) where Arumi and Sasshi must defeat an Evil Demon Lord to escape; a futuristic space-station mall (a combination of more sci-fi movie/TV references than you would think could be packed into one episode) where the kids must defeat an Evil Space Lord to escape; and so on. But just when you think that Abenobashi is no more than a collection of zany stand-alone parodies (kung-fu movies, 1920s Chicago-gangster movies, Pokémon-esque cute dinosaur/monster TV series), a hidden overall plot emerges -- and a very somber one (Episode 7 goes for poignancy rather than humor), tied to ancient mystic beliefs. Any scene, whether Sasshi and Arumi are trapped in a parody-world of Japanese magical little girls, grim military-action movies or American slasher-horror movies, contain clues related to certain mystical rites that were common at the 10th-century Japanese royal court that can help them escape, making the kids wish they had paid more attention in history classes.

It gets wilder! Abenobashi implies that Japan must be where American humor was in the 1920s to ‘50s regarding ethnic stereotypes that would be extremely politically incorrect today. The Osaka locale is emphasized in a manner similar to America’s stereotypes of illiterate Ozark hillbillies. The 12-year-old protagonists indicate the probable age-level of this TV series in Japan, but it is age-rated 17+ for America due to the kids’ foul-mouthed dialogue and excessive toilet and sexual humor. The American anime producer did the best it could to match the Osaka dialect by taking advantage of its own location in Houston to substitute an exaggerated Texan/redneck accent in the English dub, and adding DVD extras and booklets with lots of in-group explanatory footnotes for viewers who do not mind extending the half-hour episodes by an extra 15 minutes or more by stopping to read them all. There is also in-group technical humor for animators; look for all the different animation-style mixes and shifts, sometimes within the same scene. Ah sweah, it’s liak too f***ing weird even foah anime, man!