Anime... Why it isn't just another cartoon! Part 1 of 2May 14 '01 Write an essay on this topic.
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The Bottom Line Preconceptions associated with the terms cartoon and anime should be discarded. We are looking at animation as a medium of expression.
To be honest, what is the difference between anime (japanimation) versus cartoons... in reality, nothing, it's our preconceptions associated with these two terms. Both terms stand for a media called animation. In most people's minds, a cartoon is animation seen on TV usually meant for children... a few "cartoons" break this mold to some degree like the Simpsons since it has penetrated into adult and family audiences. Cartoons are often considered shows like the X-Men, Batman, Superman, Transformers, Winnie the Pooh, etc... Notice that Disney movies and South Park are often called animations and not cartoons by most people (for what reason, I don't know... advertising?). Anime has several preconceptions associated with it as well... mostly due to the anime that was imported into the US during the 1980s. Anime tended to be far more broad ranged in Europe and especially Asia. In the US by the early 1980s, most people wouldn't have recognized early anime/japanimation... Star Blazers, Robotech, Voltron, Speed Racer, and a few other series. The term japanimation and anime were used to describe a rather small range of imported japanese animation that happened to make it's way to US shores. Unfortunately, the VHS releases that became popular in the US tended to be the highly erotic animation and likely gave anime a poor reputation. Some quality anime could be found in small quantities on a few store shelves although they were edited and poorly translated into English. Often you could find subtitled versions by anime fans at comic book conventions. If you were well connected, you may have known a few friends into anime or if you were in college, there may have been an anime club. Companies like AnimEigo flourished quite a bit during the early and mid-80s where anime was basically unheard of. AnimEigo scored a big hit with BubbleGum Crisis at that time. I don't care... Anime is still a cartoon! Right?!? If you take the most basic description of these terms... anime, cartoon, animation are at heart the same thing. What they are is a medium of expression and converying ideas. We have to forget the preconceptions we have placed with these terms. Anime/Japanimation takes on the role of how live TV developed here. Where TV and movies in the US developed rapidly due to resources available, anime developed and branched out to the wide variety of genres seen in American TV and movies. This is not to say that Japanese live TV and movies did not develop (let's not forget directors like Akira Kurosawa!) but the resources, culture, and limited space in Japanese encouraged manga (closest to thick japanese comic book) and anime development. Various animations have run their course through Japan over the past 40-50 years. Why didn't we see any of this in the US? I am not entirely sure of the reasons... but I suspect that since anime were still seen as cartoons (especially with the success of Star Blazers, Robotech, Voltron, Speed Racer, etc.) although series like Star Blazers were a bit more advanced than the adolescent and teenage crowds were willing to read into it. Importers of Anime VHS tapes wanted to differentiate their product from "kiddy" cartoons and imported the hentai (i.e. perverted) material... the highly sexually erotic and even sexually disturbing. Urotsukidoji is one example of this... this anime was shown its very worse side especially with the editing job done to it. Divisions like SoftCel and Anime18 started cropping up headed up by respectable companies like ADV and the such. Another example would be La Blue Girl. After watching these, there was no doubt that this anime was not for kids. Some even considered it the viewings of deviants of society. Sadly enough, since many animes contained a small scene where you might find female nudity, many attacks the whole animation on those small portions. Some of these scenes lasted less than a few seconds. What ever the case was... it only showed a smart part of the power of animation as a expressive and storytelling medium and the diversity of japanimation to multiple genres. Why did anime become more prominent? This is mostly due to hard core fans and fansubbers (people who took the time to translate and put subtitles on the tapes). Various genres of animation were slowly made available to small population. Companies like AnimEigo still produced subtitled titles of quality anime short series that garnered quite a bit of popularity at the time. These companies were able to sell enough to keep afloat and even make a profit. Orion, US Manga Corp, ADV, and Streamline were some of the biggest in the late 80s and early 90s. Companies like Pioneer and Viz Video joined into the subtitling and dubbing of tapes as well. I think there were two major breakthroughs in anime... the first one occurred with Neon Genesis Evangelion. This made ADV the top anime distributor in the US without doubt in the mid 1990s. Neon Genesis Evangelion was not a simple robot battle... it had characters and a storyline that slowly developed... it was not all that easy to follow. Complex concepts were introduced yet didn't interfere younger people from just enjoying the series. Neon Genesis Evangelion became a beacon for others to show what animation was capable of in the US (since the rest of the world already knew how powerful a medium animation was). This series helped ADV purchase the rights to dozens of other popular anime series with no difficulty. It marked a substantial rise in anime viewership although there was still alot of ground to made here. Even though other acceptable anime series and just as deep and richly created anime was released in the US... Neon Genesis Evangelion stuck a cord with most of the public and wouldn't let go. At least we saw more diversified anime being released... However, the cost for anime was still rather prohibitive compared to motion picture on VHS. The second major breakthrough is the adoption of Sailor Moon and DragonBall Z by Cartoon Network after their failures on networked TV. On network TV, they were shown at either a ridiculously early or late hour where their primary audience wouldn't care the show. On Cartoon Network, they were shown at the prime viewing hours for the adolscent age group. These two shows trounced all other shows for their age demographic and increased the popularity of Cartoon Network by multiples! Both shows were acceptable to parents and had generated some interest in older audiences. This is what probably lead to the current anime explosion seen in the US today. This moves us into the mid 1990s... As this is starting to get long winded... I'll separate this into two parts. Part 2 will contain genres of current anime and the current state of anime that I feel exists today.  |
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