If you like Pokémon, Dragon Ball Z or Yu-Gi-Oh! then Shaman King may be your bag of tricks. © FUNimation Prods.

Shaman King. V.1, A Boy Who Dances With Ghosts. V.2, Perfect Possession. V.3, Pai-Long Attacks! V.4, Ryu is Possessed. V.5, The Shaman Fight. V.6-21, titles to come.
TV series (64 episodes), 2001-2002. Director: Seiji Mizushima. V.1-21, three episodes/75 minutes (one, probably the finale, will be four episodes/100 minutes). Price & format: DVD bilingual $19.98. Distributor: FUNimation Productions.

Do you enjoy game-oriented TV anime with constant battles like Pokémon, Dragon Ball Z and Yu-Gi-Oh!, but would you prefer more imagination and variety in the formula? Then try Shaman King. The manga serial by Hiroyuki Takei began in 1997, and was animated by the XEBEC studio for 64 TV episodes from July 4, 2001 through September 26, 2002. The American version began on the Fox Box channel on August 30, 2003 and is still running (episodes 37 through 40 during December 2004). It is scheduled to end around September 2005, but there are rumors that it is so popular that Fox may commission new episodes from the Japanese producers to continue the series.

Fox's Saturday-morning TV version (produced by 4Kids Entertainment, using many of the same voice actors who play characters in Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh!) has been considerably Americanized. There are many name-changes: Manta becomes Morty, Tao Len becomes Lenny and Horo-Horo (the Japanese nickname of Horokeu Usui) becomes Trey Racer, to name three. Relationships are similarly Americanized: 13-year-olds Yoh Asakura and Anna Kyoyama in the American version are "good friends,” and she orders him around because she feels protective towards him. In the Japanese version they are engaged; their old-fashioned parents formally agreed upon their arranged marriage when they were infants. Yoh, a modern boy who listens to rock music on his headphones, is too young to be interested in girls at all, much less the bossy Anna; but she is determined to hold him to his family's promise. Many jokes in the Japanese dialogue are therefore missing from the American version.

The popularity of manga and anime has risen to the level that more and more American youths want to know what the characters are "really saying.” An accurate translation of the manga has been published in Viz's monthly Shonen Jump magazine since February 2003. Now FUNimation is releasing the "Original Uncut Edition" of the TV episodes on DVD with a choice between the English dub and the Japanese dialogue with English subtitles.

Japan has a millennia-old tradition of belief in nature spirits, ghosts and demons -- but what culture doesn't? Yoh is the latest descendant in a dynasty of shamans; people who can sense, communicate with, and sometimes control the supernatural world. Every 500 years there is a contest among shamans from all over the world to determine who is the most powerful; the next Shaman King. Yoh has come to Tokyo to look for a really powerful ghost to become his familiar. He chooses Amidamaru, a samurai who was killed 600 years ago, but first he must free Amidamaru from the spiritual bond that chains him to his grave. They have barely done this when they must face a Chinese zombie herder who controls corpses by talismans stuck to their foreheads (an ancient Taoist belief becoming well-known to American fans of Chinese horror movies).

The abovementioned Horo-Horo is a teen shaman from the Ainu people of Japan's northernmost island, culturally distinct from the rest of Japan. As Yoh and his increasing supporting cast of allies and adversaries travel around the world, there are Native American medicine men with their animal spirit totems (hawk, buffalo, coyote), Central Europeans (Faust VIII, a descendant of Dr. Faust who is a necromancer; and the vampire Boris Tepes Dracula III), Mexican shamen posing as a mariachi band who use bone magic to control skeletons, and so on.

Shaman King is a very superficial introduction to international folklore, but it covers the exotic highlights from Africa to Australia. Viewers will get a crash course in mystic vocabulary (in Japan the onmyoji, a Shinto diviner or fortuneteller; the itako, one who can summon and talk with the dead; the miko, a shrine priestess; in China the doshi, the Taoist zombie herder) and comparative animal spirits (in Japan the tanuki and fox, in North America the coyote, in Australia the kangaroo).

Yoh stands out from the other battling shamen because he treats his ghostly familiar Amidamaru as a friend and equal partner instead of a tool to be ignored when it is not being used. How the others react to this concept of friendship and cooperation rather than dominance generally defines whether they line up among Yoh's friends or among those determined to defeat him at all costs.

Fred Patten has written on anime for fan and professional magazines since the late 1970s. He wrote the liner notes for Rhino Entertainment’s The Best of Anime music CD (1998), and was a contributor to The World Encyclopedia of Cartoons, 2nd Edition, ed. by Maurice Horn (1999) and Animation in Asia and the Pacific, ed. by John A. Lent (2001).