Anime Assumes: Intelligence and Attention Span!
Mar 09 '01 (Updated Mar 12 '01)
The Bottom Line This is what animation should be. Believe it or not, American kids CAN follow a 26 part plotline, and enjoy it.
"HarryJr" has described and defined anime well enough that I don't think I need to expand on that here. My purpose is to compare it to what passes for animation here in the U.S.
I love animated series and movies. When I had my first child, I started watching "Rugrats" and "Hey Arnold".Then it was "Batman" and "X-men", "The New Adventures of Jonny Quest" and "The Tick". Some of these shows even had a story line arcing over 3 episodes! Wow! Right. None of these shows can compare to the anime I started watching on Cartoon Network last year. I know, I know. It's not complete. Dialog is changed, and some episodes aren't even aired because they're "too racy" for American audiences. That's because Americans regard animation as "child's play", so to speak. The animation they put out is almost exclusively for children, which translates to plotlines of 15 to 30 minutes, with the artificially fast conflict resolution of a sitcom and toned down or non-existent sex (but not violence, go figure). Even the superior series, like Batman, just have a few three episode story lines. It's just assumed that kids don't have the attention span required for a story longer than that. They are so wrong.
My initiation into the realm of Anime (like many parents I imagine), was Dragonball Z and Sailor Moon. My nephew started us watching Dragonball Z, and Sailor Moon just happened to be on around the same time. My first reaction was "What the heck is going on??" So used to 15 and 30 minute, self-contained, storylines, at first I was impatient. "Who's That? What's going on? Why are those guys fighting, anyway?" Being a house full of men (besides me), it was DragonBall Z that captured the household attention rather than the more plot oriented Sailor Moon. I could never really get a handle on the Dragonball Z plot. I hadn't yet realized that missing an episode of an Anime show is like skipping a chapter in a book. Watching an episode or two a week is the equivalent of randomly reading chapters of a book, then expecting to know what the book is about.
I got hooked by "Ronin Warriors" because I was able to start from the beginning. More amazing is that my 7 year old son, the kind of kid American animators are supposedly writing for, watches several of these shows religiously, knows the plots, characters, and even makes guesses on what will happen next. He is not thrown by the involved plots, character development, sexual innuendo, or "adult" comedy. (Even toned down as it is for us puritanical American types)
American animation writers talk down to kids and adults alike, assume no one has an attention span longer than the ten minutes between commercials, and that children can't handle complicated plot lines or developed characters. Anime assumes none of these things, and has rich plotlines with interesting characters that develop and change according to their experiences and interactions. Contrast that with a series like Rugrats where the characters remain exactly the same, regardless of the passage of time. (Somehow, Tommy is still 18 mos. even after the birth of his brother!) I admit I'm a new fan, and so don't know as much about anime as I'd like -- yet. But since what I've seen so far doesn't even show up on "the best" lists, I know I have many treats in store!
UPDATE: I was watching "Tenchi In Love" last night and realized that I had forgotten something important in this opinion. Anime also tends to have fully realized, powerful and interesting Female characters, even when the main character is male. This is especially interesting because the characters are often "warriors" of some sort. (Because of that, I can ignore the outrageous bustiness of them.) Though American animation has some interesting female characters , they are almost always subordinate in some way to the men, or constantly being saved by them. (Think "Lois Lane") Anime has women saving men, and I mean in a physical "beat the crap out of 'em" sort of way, all the time. In American animation,
they'd need a Cape.
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Kandih
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Member: Kandi
Location: Columbus, Ohio
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