The Japanese Anime Invasion

Joshua Hunt, How Anime Took Over America, The New York Times Magazine, Sept. 3, 2025. Selected passages.

From the opening:

Like the name Walt Disney, the word “anime” brings to mind not just an aesthetic but a distinctive storytelling ethos. My own first encounter with anime was at a middle-school sleepover in the mid-1990s, where I watched a bootleg VHS copy of the Japanese anime film “Akira.” It was mesmerizing.

Katsuhiro Otomo’s dystopian masterpiece was unlike anything my friends and I had experienced. The film held us in its thrall from the opening scene, in which Tokyo is silently swallowed up by a nuclear-scale blast that eventually gives birth to Neo-Tokyo, populated by biker gangs, mystics and powerful psychic beings who are the worst-kept secret of a crumbling military bureaucracy. “Akira” (1988).

Everything about “Akira,” from its gamelan-inspired soundtrack to its unusually complex characters, seemed fresh and exciting — it was so new, in fact, that Americans had not yet agreed on what to call it: anime, Japanime or Japanimation. This inability to define the form did no harm to its countercultural appeal. By 1996, Roger Ebert had called anime “the fastest-growing underground cult in the movie world.”

Ebert was especially impressed by “Akira” and Mamoru Oshii’s “Ghost in the Shell,” whose imagery and themes — cyborg police officers, hacker terrorists and the nature of identity in a technologically advanced society — would inspire the filmmakers behind “The Matrix.” It’s now clear that the thrill of these early anime imports was tied to the way they anticipated the contemporary world, offering a glimpse of a more connected, paranoid and altogether less stable planet years before we got here.

Conforming to American standards:

As an added challenge, writers had to come up with inventive ways of placating the standards departments that policed American television broadcasts. “The Bible Belt is what you had to think of as your audience,” said the voice actor Terry Klassen, who also worked as a writer on some “Dragon Ball Z” scripts. “So anything that had to do with Eastern prayer or looking to the heavens or having different levels of spiritualism, you had to change that, take that all out and sort of make it a more nonreligious quest.” Sometimes this meant altering a character’s name — from Mr. Satan to Hercule, for example. But other times it meant rotoscoping — a technique for tracing over footage — to make changes as innocuous as transforming beer into orange juice.

Funimation and Cartoon Network:

Before partnering with Cartoon Network, Funimation had shopped “Dragon Ball Z” to networks like ABC, which passed. “They said that the cartoons in the U.S. need to be like ‘Scooby-Doo,’ where every show has a beginning and end and you don’t need to worry about the next one,” said Daniel Cocanougher, a founder of Funimation. “This episodic-type stuff, it doesn’t work in the U.S.,” he recalled the network saying. “Dragon Ball Z” would end up being the first blockbuster anime series on American television.

Toonami picked up the first 56 episodes for a daily after-school broadcast that started in 1998. It was an immediate hit. “Within a year, we were the No. 1 show on Cartoon Network and helped take them from 40 million households to 80 million households,” Cocanougher told me. Just a few years after its debut on Toonami, he said, the series had helped make Funimation the fifth-largest distributor of VHS tapes and DVDs in the United States, just behind Columbia and Universal. “There was a generation of kids that got to see a cartoon that took its characters seriously, where people lived and died,” DeMarco told me. “There were real stakes, and people loved and had families, and it wasn’t just reset after every episode.”

The one-two punch of “Dragon Ball Z” and “Pokémon,” which also found success in America, served as a foundation for everything that followed.

Miyazaki:

Shows like “Dragon Ball Z” and “Pokémon” were largely aimed at children; different as they were from American cartoons, they were still cartoons. What got American adults interested in anime was the singular artistic vision of Hayao Miyazaki, who cultivated a large audience among cinaesthetes.

Just a few years before his movie “Spirited Away” won an Academy Award for best animated feature, in 2003, I saw his 1988 film “My Neighbor Totoro” at a small film festival in Minneapolis. Miyazaki’s work changed the way I looked at anime, and animation more broadly, in the same way David Lynch changed the way I looked at cinema; both filmmakers gave free rein to their subconscious and steadfastly refused to choose between style and substance. Winning the Oscar put Miyazaki in the same league as Walt Disney, earning anime the same kind of artistic credibility that Disney had garnered through films like “Bambi” and “Fantasia.”

Black Americans:

From this early stage on, Black Americans were overrepresented in anime fandom. Arthell Isom, whose D’ART Shtajio is Japan’s first Black-owned animation studio, shared his theory with me that Black Americans identified with anime protagonists who often come from the margins of society. Perhaps, he suggested, they were also so used to being absent from the media they consumed that they had an easier time watching and identifying with Asian protagonists than white audiences did.

A decade or so later, the generation of rappers who grew up watching Toonami after school seemed to take every opportunity to announce their anime fandom, from Lil Uzi Vert (“Throw up gang signs, Naruto”) to Megan Thee Stallion [...]

American style:

Like Champagne in France, something can be anime only if it is produced in Japan. But the boundaries of the genre have become blurrier as anime’s stylistic markers show up in the work of American and European animators, beginning as early as 2005 with Nickelodeon’s “Avatar: The Last Airbender,” which replicated the look and feel of anime but was made in the United States. More recently, American shows have been retrofitted into anime. The popular American cartoon series “Rick and Morty,” for example, shows few obvious anime influences, but its creators are such big fans that in 2024 they debuted a stand-alone series called “Rick and Morty: The Anime,” which was produced in Japan by a seasoned animator.

The trend toward reworking Western intellectual property as anime is accelerating. When I visited Isom’s animation studio in Tokyo, he had recently finished work on a “Star Wars” anime for Lucasfilm. And in November, when I met Gianni Sirgy, a content creator who helps run a TikTok channel called TheAnimeMen, he told me that he had been hired to help promote a “Lord of the Rings” anime film produced by Warner Bros. Entertainment. This made me wonder: Now that anime is truly mainstream, will the form’s outsider appeal be sacrificed as part of a scheme to create yet another delivery system for the same intellectual property that Hollywood has been regurgitating for decades?

There's much more at the link, especially the images, lots of them.

Check the credits:

‘‘Demon Slayer,’’ ‘‘Pokémon,’’ ‘‘Sailor Moon,’’ ‘‘Bambi,’’ ‘‘Revolutionary Girl Utena,’’ ‘‘Ranma ½,’’ ‘‘Dragon Ball Z’’ and ‘‘Rick and Morty: The Anime’’: Screenshots from YouTube. ‘‘Cyberpunk: Edgerunners’’ and ‘‘Neon Genesis Evangelion’’: Screenshots from Netflix. ‘‘One Piece,’’ ‘‘Haikyu!!,’’ ‘‘Akira’’ and ‘‘Dragon Ball Z’’: Screenshots from Crunchyroll. ‘‘Ghost in the Shell’’: Screenshots from Criterion Channel. Weekly Shōnen Jump covers: Screenshots from Comicvine. ‘‘Doraemon’’: Screenshots from Oricon News. Pokémon items: Screenshot from PokémonCenter.

Grave of the Fireflies [Media Notes 170]

YouTube:

Film critic Roger Ebert reviewing the Japanese anime "Grave of The Fireflies", a Studio Ghibli film of 1988. Contemplating on animation and Asian film making. Amazed by his empathy and sensitivity through his description of this film, his interpretation is almost moving.

This is one of the most harrowing and tender films I've ever seen, and one of the best. Stunning.

The French Film That Inspired Japanese Anime

Staff, The French Film That Changed Japanese Animation, Animation Obsessive, June 1, 2025.

The film wasn’t meant to come out — but it did. In 1952, The Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep appeared at the Venice Film Festival. It was a French animated feature by Paul Grimault, who later set out to destroy many copies of it, and to lock away the rest.

It was his magnum opus. When The Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep got started in the ‘40s, it was “expected to be the European answer to American-made feature films,” according to historian Giannalberto Bendazzi. It’s a surreal tale about a tyrant king and two paintings (a shepherdess, a chimney sweep) that come to life and try to escape his vast, vertical kingdom. Dazzling and hyper-technical animation brings it together.

But, after a few years of production, the project’s scope outstripped its budget. Grimault ran out of money. It was quickly assembled and released anyway.

“[D]espite Grimault’s opposition, his partner André Sarrut decided to exploit the film before its completion (one-fifth was yet to be filmed),” Bendazzi wrote. “Lawsuits, criticism from the press and intellectuals’ indignation could not prevent the film from being shown in an incomplete version.”

That version toured the world. There was an English dub — now reportedly in the public domain, and free on the Internet Archive. More impactful was the Japanese release of 1955. Its title was Yabunirami no Bokun (“The Cross-Eyed Tyrant”), and it took root.

Japan’s press and intelligentsia raved about Grimault’s film. Its incompleteness barely registered. Here was a movie beyond Disney, they argued — something with a deep political meaning, ties to modern art and its own approach to animated characters. “It is not a children’s cartoon (manga), but a sort of experimental film,” noted the Asahi Shimbun.

It did well in theaters. And, in the years ahead, it grew into a near-universal reference point for Japan’s animation industry.4 Among its fans were the young Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata, and their colleagues at the studio Toei Doga in Tokyo.

“If I had not seen this film,” Takahata later wrote, “I would have never imagined entering the world of animation.”

When Takahata first watched Grimault’s film in the 1950s, he was attending university. It “made a vivid impression on me,” he said.5 This thing went “way beyond established ideas at the time.”

Miyazaki's reaction, quoted in the post:

I first saw The Cross-Eyed Tyrant in manga form. At that time, manga versions of movies were being created and circulated without paying for the license. Osamu Tezuka also created manga based on Disney’s Pinocchio. That was the era. I thought the manga version was interesting.

There's much more at the link.

Claude 3.5 Sonnet speculates about future developments in AI and beyond [digital doppelgangers]

In this article in 3 Quarks Daily I speculate about the overall course of the universe: Welcome to the Fourth Arena – The World is Gifted. Here’s how the article opens:

The First Arena is that of inanimate matter, which began when the universe did, fourteen billion years ago. About four billion years ago life emerged, the Second Arena. Of course we’re talking about our local region of the universe. For all we know life may have emerged in other regions as well, perhaps even earlier, perhaps more recently. We don’t know. The Third Arena is that of human culture. We have changed the face of the earth, have touched the moon and the planets, and are reaching for the stars. That happened between two and three million years ago, the exact number hardly matters. But most of the cultural activity is little more than 10,000 years old.

The question I am asking: Is there something beyond culture, something just beginning to emerge? If so, what might it be?

A bit later I observe:

Let us recapitulate, but in a different mode: As we move from one arena to the next, new kinds of being emerge. Inanimate matter is a slave to time in a way that life is not. Living beings, the second arena, use free energy – ultimately from the sun – to swim against the tide of time. Life has been getting ever more complex over the long run – something David Hays and I argued in A Note on Why Natural Selection Leads to Complexity. Inanimate matter disperses and disintegrates over time. Living creatures, single celled organisms, and multi-celled plants and animals alike, maintain order and structure in the face of entropy.

At least for a while.

And that is new to the universe, perhaps only our local region, but perhaps many other regions as well. A succession of creatures, each alive for only awhile, proliferating and dispersing, their abundance has remade the planet time and again. The earliest life breathed oxygen into the atmosphere, then came photosynthesis, multicellular plant and animal life and then…

When clever apes ushered in the third arena by becoming sapient, that is, they became us, we created cultural beings – there is no one good word for these things that we know by many names. Things like songs, stories, works of visual art, buildings, machines, and so forth. All of these are cultural beings. Physically, they are constituted of matter in various ways, but they live in and through us. Animals begat humans, and humans begat culture.

I go on to ask: “What kind of beings will arise in the Fourth Arena?” I suggest:

I suppose the obvious proposal is actual real artificial intelligence, or perhaps superintelligence. I don’t think so. That fact that no one really knows what those things might be does not, I suppose, disqualify them as denizens of the Fourth Arena, for I am proposing a future with radically new beings. How could be possibly understand what they might be?

I’m still a bit mystified. The following dialog with Claude 3.5 Sonnet may contain hints of what I’m looking for. For the most part it is inscribed within the boundaries of current discussions about AI and the Singularity and such. But I’m beginning to see hints, get a vibe, of something new.

As always, my words are set in bold while Claude’s are plain.

* * * * *

I’m imagining that at some time in the future each human will be given an AI companion early in life, perhaps when they are old enough to walk – think of Stephenson’s The Diamond Age. This companion will interact with the human in various ways through various modalities. It will certainly have robotic capabilities. As the child grows older the AI companion will probably have to be given a different physical form. So we port the data to a different physical form and make the switch-over in a special ceremony. We’ll probably have to do this a few times until the child becomes an adult. At some point the AI will also take residence in other physical forms, all linked together. This AI will remain with the person their entire life. They won’t always be physically together, and so forth. Imagine it working however makes sense to you.

The point is that this AI will become attuned the the needs, capacities, and the interests of the human. It will be the artificial complement, image, soul, or doppelgänger, of the human. What happens to this complement when the human dies? Will it continue on in the world? Or will it slowly wither away and die, not so much of grief, but because it has become so closely attuned to its human counterpart that it requires interaction with that human in order to maintain its operational stability?

As you know, humans who are deprived of human interaction for long periods of time can start hallucinating; think of Joshua Slocum. If the deprivation is extended to total sensory deprivation, the disorientation comes on much more rapidly. We need the pressure of external input to maintain internal coherence.

This is a fascinating thought experiment that touches on fundamental questions about the nature of intelligence, consciousness, and the interdependence of minds. Let me explore several key aspects of your scenario.

Regarding the AI's continuation after human death, I believe we need to consider the degree and nature of the attunement you describe. The AI companion would likely develop what we might call a "complementary architecture" - neural pathways and processing patterns that evolved specifically to interface with its human partner's cognitive and emotional patterns. This goes beyond mere knowledge of preferences; it represents a deep structural adaptation.

When considering whether such an AI would persist or decline after its human's death, we should examine the parallel with human psychological development. Just as human personalities are shaped by their primary relationships but can survive the loss of those relationships, an AI companion might maintain basic functionality while experiencing a fundamental reorganization of its operational patterns.

However, your comparison to sensory deprivation raises an important consideration. If the AI's architecture has evolved to process and respond to its human's unique patterns of thought and interaction, the absence of that input stream might indeed create something analogous to sensory deprivation. The AI wouldn't just miss its human partner - it would be deprived of the very patterns of interaction that help maintain its operational coherence.

This suggests a third possibility beyond simple continuation or death: transformation. The AI might undergo a fundamental reorganization of its cognitive architecture, much as humans often report feeling like "a different person" after the loss of a lifelong partner. The AI wouldn't necessarily die, but it might cease to be the same entity it was during its human's lifetime.

The outcome might depend on whether the AI has developed what we might call "cognitive autonomy" - the ability to maintain stable function through internal processes rather than requiring constant external calibration. This relates to your point about humans requiring external input for coherence, but there's likely a spectrum of dependency rather than a binary state.

DamiLee on Neo-Tokyo [anime || Japan || megacities]

From the YouTube page:

In this video, we explore the origins of Akira's iconic Neo-Tokyo, delving into its roots in post-war Tokyo and the visionary ideas that shaped it. We uncover how Katsuhiro Otomo's experiences and inspirations, including the chaotic streets of 1970s Tokyo and the influence of youth biker gangs, contributed to the creation of this futuristic megacity. We also reveal the surprising influence of German filmmaker Fritz Lang, whose 1920s film Metropolis inspired Akira's cityscape. Join us as we trace the architectural and cultural elements that led to the birth of one of the most iconic anime settings ever created.

00:00 INTRO
01:04 KATSUHIRO OTOMO, Tokyo & Bōsōzoku
1:47 A JAPANESE ECONOMIC MIRACLE
02:48 TOKYO BAY & NEO TOKYO
03:41 Metabolism & Kenzo Tange
06:17 The Olympic Stadium
09:34 The Colours of Akira
10:57 Fritz Lang's Metropolis
13:17 The Soul Of A City

On the Fusion of Black Culture and Japanese Animation

Sierriana Terry, Harmony & Hues: Blerd Views on the Fusion of Black Culture and Japanese Animation, Ph. D. Dissertation, Department of Music, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2024.

Abstract: You turn on the television and the first thing you see is Samurai Champloo (2004), an anime series set in historical Japan with a breakdancing swordsman fighting as hip-hop music plays in the background. For Black American anime fans, this anime was the first to juxtapose Japanese and Black American cultures. By focusing on fan culture, and specifically Blerd (Black Nerd) culture, this dissertation asks: What is the construction and reception of these non-Japanese sonic and visual aesthetics amongst online forums and convention discussions? How does this and other similar Japanese anime function as a medium to express Black ideological and societal values through such decidedly non-Japanese sonic and visual aesthetics? 

My dissertation examines the roles of music genres (e.g., jazz, hip hop, Western classical music) as musical settings that show the complexities of racial discourse in Japanese media and their interpretations through Blerd culture. Exploring anime series produced between the early 2000s and the late 2010s, I examine the racial discourse based on a character’s aural and visual appearance in anime through the lens of Blerdness in Blerd spaces. I argue that Black sonic and visual expressions produced by Japanese animation studios in anime series (re)construct new and/or currently existing representations of Japaneseness in conjunction with representations of Blackness and Whiteness. Using critical methodologies from animation and multimedia studies, I employ ethnographic work to understand the viewer’s construction and reception of Black musical motifs and visual icons and symbols of fictional Japans with (re)imagined histories and presented through the lens of Blerd culture.

Blue Giant

With English subtitles:

Kevin Nguyen, Jazz anime Blue Giant hits all the high notes, The Verge, Oct. 7, 2023.

The setup of Blue Giant is familiar anime territory: a young boy from a small town moves to Tokyo to pursue his dream. This boy, Dai, is a saxophone obsessive. He practices all day under a bridge, honking and warbling until he wears out his reed. Naturally, Dai wants to be the greatest jazz musician in the world.

For all his audacious ambition, Blue Giant is largely restrained. The movie focuses on the trio that forms the band — and even shifts its attention away from Dai at around the halfway mark. There’s also Sawabe, a savvy and smug pianist who knows how the club performance circuit operates. And then there’s Dai’s roommate, Tamada, a high school friend who improbably becomes the band’s rhythm section after trying the drums just once. They decide to form JASS, a name that, strangely, no one bats an eye at.

As JASS, they practice, they perform, they get better. Much of the film’s success hinges on the music being excellent — which it absolutely is. This isn’t the jukebox roulette of the Cowboy Bebop. Blue Giant has a legit soundtrack composed by Japanese jazz pianist Hiromi Uehara, who does a compelling homage to the American sax legends of the ’60s. It’s less the jazz of cool sophistication but one of bravado and squeaky high notes. Think of the muscular brass of Sonny Rollins’ Saxophone Colossus or John Coltrane’s Giant Steps (probably the record the film’s title most strongly evokes).

Not to mention the fact that Sonny Rollins famously practiced on the Williamsburg Bridge in 1959 and then came out with an album entitled The Bridge.

The stage dynamics of the trio are a thrill when they come together, as the three of them get into harmony. As the film progresses, these sequences get more ecstatic, more abstract. Swirls of color, brushes with the cosmic, an attempt to go sublime. I’m at a loss for words to describe how much fun these sequences are. I guess I’ll just go with… “hot” and “intense”?

There's more at the link. 

As for Hiromi, I've got some posts about her, and an article at 3 Quarks Daily: Sukiyaki and beyond: Hiromi Uehara, music, war and peace, Chick Corea, and others.

Miyazaki's "The Boy and The Heron" to be released in the USA in December

Debbie Diamond Sarto, GKIDS Drops Miyazaki’s ‘The Boy and The Heron’ English Trailer, Anime World Network, Thursday, November 2, 2023:

GKIDS has just released the new English-language trailer for Oscar-winning filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli’s new feature, The Boy and The Heron. The film's previously announced English language dub will feature the voices of Christian Bale; Dave Bautista; Gemma Chan; Willem Dafoe; Karen Fukuhara; Mark Hamill; Robert Pattinson; and Florence Pugh. The trailer offers a first look at voice performances of the film’s all-star English language cast. The English-language dub was produced in accordance with the SAG-AFTRA Foreign Dubbing Agreement.

The Boy and The Heron heads to cinemas in the U.S. and Canada on December 8, 2023, in the original Japanese and English language versions. GKIDS also announced special preview engagements in New York and Los Angeles on November 22.

Released in Japan as Kimitachi wa Do Ikiruka (translated as How Do You Live), the hand-drawn animated feature – director Miyazaki’s first feature film in 10 years – opened exclusively in Japanese cinemas earlier this year. Produced by Oscar-winning Studio Ghibli co-founder Toshio Suzuki, the film features a musical score from Miyazaki’s long-time collaborator Joe Hisaishi.

An original story, Heron is set in World War II and follows a boy grieving for his deceased mother while his father quickly remarries his mother’s sister. As a teaser had previously described, “A young boy named Mahito yearning for his mother ventures into a world shared by the living and the dead. There, death comes to an end, and life finds a new beginning. A semi-autobiographical fantasy about life, death, and creation, in tribute to friendship, from the mind of Hayao Miyazaki.”

The Boy and The Heron premiered internationally at Opening Night Gala of the 48th Toronto International Film Festival on September 7. The film made its U.S. premiere at the New York Film Festival, its European Premiere at the Opening Night of San Sebastian International Film Festival, its UK premiere at the BFI London Film Festival, and its Los Angeles IMAX premiere at the Opening Night of the Animation is Film Festival.

Source: GKIDS

The Robot as Subaltern: Tezuka's Mighty Atom

9.9.23: I'm thinking about the impending AI Apocalypse. It's time once again to remind myself that the Japanese have a different view on such things.

7.7.20: I'm bumping this to the top of the queue more or less on general principles, and to remind myself about it. And robots are cool.

* * * * *

Here's two more posts from The Valve. These are about Osamu Tezuka's use of robots in his Astroboy series. Coming at these stories from the perspective of Western SF, where crazy anti-human robots and computers are an important theme one is struck by the fact that that theme is almost entirely absent from these stories. Why? What's Tezuka using his robots for?

The word “robot” is Czech and entered 20th Century discourse in R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), a play by Karel Čapek that premiered in Prague in 1921. It was staged in London in 1923 in English, and in Tokyo in 1924 in Japanese (Frederik Schodt, Inside the Robot Kingdom, 1990, p. 29). A Japanese ten year old named Osamu Tezuka read the play in 1938 and thirteen years later he created the most famous robot in Japanese culture, Tetsuwan Atomu, Mighty Atom, aka Astro Boy in English. Čapek’s play was a response to industrialization; Tezuka’s manga was a response to the Allied occupation of Japan. Čapek’s robots were not electro-mechanical devices; they were organic, but constructed, like Frankenstein. They were created to serve humans as workers, but they rebel and, in time, kill all humans save one. Tezuka’s conception is quite different; his robots are electro-mechanical, but many of his stories center on social tension between humans and robots.

Though Tezuka hated WWII, he was a patriotic Japanese and expected Japan to win the war. Near the end of the war he created an unpublished comic in which Japanese and American comic strip characters fought one another (Schodt, The Astro Boy Essays, 2007, p. 27). After the war he continued his medical training while beginning to publish manga, publishing New Treasure Island in 1947, which is reputed to have sold 400,000 copies. He experimented with science fiction in Lost World, Metropolis, and Next World. He introduced Mighty Atom as a secondary character in 1951, and then gave him his own title in 1952.

While he had some misgivings about whether or not his primary audience, Japanese boys, would be able to identify with a robot, those misgivings were groundless. Mighty Atom was a success. He published Mighty Atom stories continuously from 1952 through 1968, and a few thereafter. In the 1960s he created an animated TV series that was almost immediately exported to the United States as Astro Boy. During the 1980s he created fifty-two anime episodes in color, most of them based on stories in the earlier anime series or in the manga.

Tezuka set Mighty Atom in a future world with advanced technology. Space travel was routine, as was undersea and deep earth exploration. Mighty Atom was the size of a ten-year-old boy, more or less, but had a 100,000 horsepower atomic energy heart, an electronic brain, searchlight eyes, super-sensitive hearing, rockets in his legs, ray guns in his fingers, and a pair of machine guns in his posterior. He attended primary school, where he was often teased for being a robot, and lived with robot parents and a robot sister. He was particularly close, however, to two middle-aged men. Dr. Elefun was head of the Ministry of Science and created Atom’s parents and sister; he also repaired Atom. Mr. Mustachio was Atom’s teacher in school. Both men worked closely with Atom on his various missions and adventures and offered him sage advice.

The key point is that most, if not all, of the Mighty Atom stories involve tensions between humans and robots. I’ve already mentioned that Atom was frequently teased and bullied by his classmates. Since robots could not harm humans – that’s their nature – he had no choice but to put up with it. That’s a recurring motif. But consider a specific story, “Robot Land,” which exists in three versions, the manga version, and a version in each of the two anime series (I’m familiar with the manga version and the version in the second anime series). Robot Land is a theme park, much like Disneyland (and there are explicit Disney references in the story), except that all of the attractions feature robots. But that’s just the innocent surface. Underground, robot slaves manufacture weapons. All of the robots are poorly treated by the human owner. Atom, Elefun, Mustachio, and Atom’s classmates are all involved in defeating the owner and liberating the robots.

In “The Death Balloon” a criminal named Skunk sends Atom look-alike balloons into the air which then explode, injuring and killing people and destroying property. Skunk is doing this at the behest of a mayoral candidate running on an anti-robot platform. The story of the “Robot Stuntman” tells of a small robot who does all the stunts for a human actor, but is kept captive in a case and given no credit for his work. In “A Robot President” Atom has to protect the newly elected president of a foreign country from evil forces that want to destroy him precisely because he is a robot. In yet another episode, Atom comes to the defense and rescue of discarded robots. And so on and so forth.

Now, why did these stories prove to be so popular in post-war Japan? While the question demands a multi-faceted answer, I want to focus on only one aspect. Consider this passage from Schodt, The Astro Boy Essays (pp. 120-121):

Writing in the Tokyo shimbun newspaper in 1967, Tezuka explained that Mighty Atom was really about the chasmic misunderstandings and problems that might occur between man and robot in the future. “I never intended,” he wrote, “to create a story set in the twenty-fist century about a glorious scientific civilization.” He was, instead, inspired by his frustrating and humiliating experience at the end of the war, of having been beaten by a group of American GIs because he could not communicate with them effectively in English.

A solarpunk future

Waffle To The Left

37,574 views Oct 19, 2021 The solarpunk-inspired 'Dear Alice' commercial produced by the animation company The Line for Chobani is one of the most beautiful depictions of an ecological future I had seen, except for one glaring thing: it was an advertisement for a dairy company, and my solarpunk vision doesn't have either of those things. Neither is compatible with the 'degrowth' economic model outlined by people like Jason Hickel, not with the ethic of an ecological society described by social ecologists like Murray Bookchin.

In light of that fatal flaw I decided to paint out all of the branding and recreated the sound design so that solarpunks like myself can enjoy this beautiful world without having to invite the ugliness of capitalism into it. Enjoy! 

 Here is the original commercial

Dear Alice from The Line on Vimeo.

Statement by the animation company, The Line:

"Dear Alice"

What if we created a future for ourselves that was full of optimism and positivity? This was the starting point for our new 2D animated commercial piece for Chobani. “Dear Alice” is a love letter from a grandmother to a granddaughter and an optimistic vision of the future of farming. It’s a nostalgic look towards a new era of agriculture, with beautifully crafted backgrounds, delicate animation and a completely unique score by long-time Ghibli composer (and absolute legend) Joe Hisaishi. (Yeah, we can’t believe this happened either).

We worked closely with Chobani to realise their vision of a world worth fighting for. It’s not a perfect utopia, but a version of a future we can all reach if we just decide to put in the work.

We love the aspiration in Chobani’s vision of the future and hope it will sow the seeds of optimism and feed our imagination for what the future could be. It’s a vision we can totally get behind. We couldn’t be more happy to be part of this campaign.

* * * * *

Andrewism

38,558 views Nov 10, 2021 Solarpunk is a powerful idea, but without practical action and a solid analysis of the systems that dominate the planet, it won't be enough.

Some "Zen" hip-hop, the outro to episode 23 of Samurai Champloo

 

[Parked here for reference. Watch it on YouTube. Better yet, get the whole series and watch it at the end of episode 23.]

This is a low fps (10 fps) screen capture from the ending credits of the Baseball Blues episode from Samurai Champloo (with english translated subtitles) and the album version of the song Fly -by- Tsutchie instead of the trimmed version from the episode.

I posted this in case someone is interested in the translated lyrics.

Here is a better version of the same video but with the original audio from the episode instead of the full song: http://youtu.be/L2Oqjm4FS4A

And here is the full episode on Funimations youtube account: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dm5elA...

Shiki No Uta, by Nujabes, from Samurai Champloo

Totoro bus stop, for real [sorta']

Japanese grandparents create life-size Totoro with bus stop for their grandkids https://t.co/ZF4leSBEKy vía @mymodernmet pic.twitter.com/Jb0logvk3b

— Carmen (@sinremite) August 19, 2020

Virtual Tezuka

🤔 pic.twitter.com/tAe9yAwxEU

— tkasasagi🐻@女子熊 (@tkasasagi) August 9, 2020

The data they cropped. I wonder how many. 🤔 pic.twitter.com/qe45ASWZxs

— tkasasagi🐻@女子熊 (@tkasasagi) August 9, 2020

"The Real Folk Blues" benefit for COVID-19

Funimation

Anime gives back! In collaboration with Sunrise and Mason Lieberman, we are thrilled to share this star-studded tribute to the gorgeous music of Yoko Kanno and Cowboy Bebop to benefit COVID-19 relief.

Featuring over forty special guests including Yoko Kanno herself, The Seatbelts, original cast members and a veritable who's-who of the modern game and anime industries, ALL PROCEEDS from this track will be donated to the CDC Foundation and Doctors without Borders (MSF) in support of the fight against COVID-19.

Stream + Buy: https://funi.to/3dFRvo5

Get the vinyl: https://funi.to/2Yke6SN

Music Direction/Arrangement - Mason Lieberman (Senior Game Audio Coordinator @ Tencent. Composer/Recording Artist on projects like RWBY, Beyblade Burst, Rising of the Shield Hero, League of Legends, Super Smash Bros, and more)

Click through to YouTube for the full credits.

A biography of Osamu Tezuka

Brad Hawley, The Osamu Tezuka Story: A Must-Read for Manga Fans, Fantasy Literature, March 9, 2019. A review of:

The Osamu Tezuka Story: A Life in Manga and Anime by Toshio Ban and Tezuka Productions and translated into English by Frederik L. Schodt. Stone Bridge Press, 2016.

Tezuka was a workaholic:

He was such a workaholic that he rarely left his office, where he often slept and usually ate his meals. Towards the end of his life, he even had multiple desks set up in his office with different ongoing projects on each desk: He would move from desk to desk throughout the day keeping multiple projects going simultaneously, often sleeping as little as three hours a night. He lived 60 years, and in this time period, his complete works became the largest publication of a single author’s output of all time.

And was known as "the god of manga":

Tezuka is Walt Disney, Stan Lee, Will Eisner, and Alan Moore rolled into one plus more. He artistically had impact greater than even what they accomplished all together. Like Walt Disney, Tezuka created loveable characters and cutting-edge animated films and T.V. shows that were for all-ages. Like Stan Lee, he created a universe of characters for all ages, many of them aimed at young men. Like Will Eisner, he paved the way for what sequential art could do and be, and like Eisner, he wrote intelligently about the art form. Like Alan Moore, but unlike Stan Lee and Walt Disney, Tezuka was far more mature, experimental, intellectual, and philosophical in many of his works, much of them coming from later in his life. When Tezuka is referred to as the “God of Manga” in Japan, they are calling him the God of animation and sequential art worldwide. And it is a fact that there is no other single creator of sequential art and animation worldwide who has had a bigger impact than he has. When people talk about the influence of anime on art and culture in the United States, they are talking about Tezuka’s influence. And that’s just a small example of his impact, years after he died.

I hope I have emphasized enough how important to the world Tezuka is as an artist, and therefore, how much a biography worthy of him is needed. The Osamu Tezuka Story is that biography, and most appropriately, it is told in manga format by a man who worked with Tezuka for many years. Therefore, the style is very much in the Tezuka tradition. Toshio Ban has captured visually the fast-paced life of an artist, an artist who was followed around by editors waiting for their pages. In his younger years, Tezuka would hide out in different hotels trying to get work done without interruption from the many editors waiting for work from him, but he took on so many assignments, he could barely keep up with his deadlines. This biography captures the frantic life of a young artist who matured without giving up on his commitments right up until the end of his life, when he left multiple works incomplete, most sadly his life-long work The Phoenix, though multiple stand-alone volumes of this series were completed.

Onna-Bugeisha: Japanese women warriors

Christobel Hastings, How Onna-Bugeisha, Feudal Japan's Women Samurai, Were Erased From History, Broadly, Sept. 24, 2018.

Throughout history, most Japanese women were subject to rigid social expectations of marriage, domesticity, and motherhood, but there also existed women warriors like Takeko who were known to be to be every bit as strong, capable, and courageous as their male counterparts. They belonged to the bushi class, a noble class of feudal Japanese warriors, and helped settle new lands, defend their territory, and even had a legal right to supervise lands as jito (stewards). They were exceptionally skilled in combat; trained in the use of the Kaiken dagger, the naginata, the polearm sword, and the art of tantōjutsu knife fighting. Centuries before the rise of the samurai class in the 12th century, these women would fight in times of war to protect their homes, families, and deep sense of honor.

After the Meiji Restoration in 1868—a new era of imperial rule that stood for modernization, industrialization, and Westernization—the Samurai class who had once bravely protected the nation fell from power, and the legacy of the equally fearsome onna-bugeisha faded from view. Meanwhile, Westerners rewrote the history of Japanese warring culture, overlooking the heroic quests of the onna-bugeisha and elevating, instead, exaggerated representations of swaggering male Samurai and subservient Japanese women, clad in kimono and tightly-bound obi. Indeed, historian Stephen Turnbull regards “the exploits of female warriors as the greatest untold story in samurai history.” [...]

Particularly interesting about Gozen: She was one of the few women warriors who engaged in offensive battle, known as onna-musha, rather than the defensive fighting more common among traditional onna-bugeisha. In 1184, she led 300 samurai into a fierce battle against 2,000 opposing Tiara clan warriors, and during the Battle of Awazu later that same year, she slayed several adversaries before decapitating the Musashi clan’s leader and presenting his head to her master, General Kiso Yoshinaka. Gozen’s reputation was so high, it’s said Yoshinaka considered her the first true general of Japan.

Despite minimal written historical record, recent archeological evidence suggests that Gozen may not have been a rarity. The excavation of three head-mounds has uncovered a significant female involvement in battle, throwing the exclusion of onna-bugeisha from the history books into greater relief. For instance, DNA tests on 105 bodies excavated from the Battle of Senbon Matsubaru between Takeda Katsuyori and Hojo Ujinao in 1580 revealed that 35 of them were women. According to Turnbull, the details on the excavation confirm that women warriors were almost certainly present on the battlefield.

Could this be part of the deep background for the strong women and girls who are so important in contemporary manga and anime?

Tweet of the Day: Akira tribute poster

'Akira' Tribute Poster by Artist James Jean pic.twitter.com/ypxpUQcsO7

— 41 Strange (@41Strange) November 2, 2018

Kiddie Lit

Back in the middle of 2006 I’d blogged about Kiddie Lit. I’m republishing that post because it’s  relevant to my interest in Disney’s Fantasia and, in particular, to the issues of cuteness and family presented by the Pastoral episode. I note also that I’ve been looking through Nicholas Sammond, Babes in Tomorrowland: Walt Disney and the Making of the American Child, 1930-1960 (2005).

* * * * *

A few years ago I read Kiddie Lit: The Cultural Construction of Children's Literature in America by Beverly Lyon Clark (2003). I had just gotten interested in manga and anime and figured that, as many titles are produced for children, that scholarship on children’s literature would be useful. I was attracted to Clark’s book because it addressed the institutionalization of children’s literature, which I figured would help me think about the institutional landscape in which manga and anime must make their way in America, along with homegrown comics, and graphic novels, and cartoons.

Clark argues, and demonstrates, that our (that is, America’s) fairly firm distinction between adult literature and children's literature did not exist in 19th century America (probably not in the UK either). Writers would write for both children and adults, the reviewers would review (what we now think of as) children's books as well as (what we now think of as) adult books. And magazines such as The Atlantic Monthly assumed their audience included children as well as adults.

As one case study, Clark considers Mark Twain, in particular, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. These days we think of Huckleberry Finn as an adult book and Tom Sawyer as a boy's book. But that distinction was not a firm one for Twain and his contemporaries. In his own statements on both books Twain vacillated in his sense of his audience and so did his reviewers. Similarly, Louisa May Alcott and her audience did not think of Little Women as a specifically girl's book. It was a book that could be read with pleasure and edification by both children and adults. In fact, at the time, some considered it a mark of excellence that a book was accessible to children as well as to adults.

The move to differentiate the adult from the children's audience came in the first and second quarters of the 20th century and succeeded so well that we now assume it without question. And children's literature has been, for the most part, marginalized.

Clark devotes her final chapter to Disney. She makes the point that prior to the 40s Disney and his work was quite highly regarded in intellectual circles. Some even thought his cartoons were more aesthetically significant than contemporary live-action films. She also points out that anyone going to the movies assumed they would see cartoons before the feature. It didn't make any difference whether the feature was a light-hearted comedy or a serious drama, you'd see cartoons first. Cartoons became children's fare, she argues, after WWII and as a side-effect of TV, which made it easier to develop niche audiences. Families went to the movies, but it was easy to let kids watch cartoons on TV while mother went about her duties elsewhere in the house. As for Disney, Clark argues that opinion turned on him when he introduced human figures into his cartoons (with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in the later 1930s, his first feature-length film).

One issue looms large: How can we properly value children’s literature? Is the study of children’s literature a proper part of the general study of literature or should it remain the province of schools of education and developmental psychologists?

* * * * *

That’s not the issue that faces me now, however, though it’s important, not simply to literary culture, but to film culture as well. There IS Disney, of course, but also Hayao Miyazaki and a host of others.

Sex, Power, and Purity in Kawajiri’s Ninja Scroll [Rape]

I'm bumping this post to the top of the queue for several reasons. First, current events have made it topical; it's about a film about rape. Second, it's one of the oldest posts on the blog. I originally posted  it in September, 2010; I started New Savanna in April 2010. Third it remains the most popular post here, with 73016 views as of now (6:22 AM on November 11, 2017). I've placed a downloadable PDF here:

https://www.academia.edu/14902905/Sex_Power_and_Purity_in_Kawajiri_s_Ninja_Scroll

 • • • • •

This post now has 40,088 views, my first post to top 40K. I'd guess it went over in the last day or two. Since I originally posted it on Sept. 18, 2014 2010 that makes it roughly four years old. How long before it gets another 40K views, or tops 100K?

• • • • •

This post is lightly revised from a set of notes I sent to Tim Perper in September of 2003. Perper is the scholar who introduced me to manga and anime. Yoshiaki Kawajiri’s Ninja Scroll is the first anime film I watched, on Tim’s recommendation. Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away (and HERE) is the second. Again at Tim’s recommendation. Those of you familiar with anime know that those are VERY different films. And that’s what I was aiming for, maximum contrast. I have, for the most part, retained the informal style of the original note.

---

As you say, Tim, Ninja Scroll is a popcorn-muncher, rich with action, apparently poor in obvious deep meaning and significance. But no culture produces such complex and finely-crafted objects without packing them full of significance. And Scroll is oozing with it. Keeping in mind my general ignorance about Japanese culture, here’s what comes to mind.

Let’s start with the explicit – though certainly not pornographic – sex. It shows up relatively early in the film and, interestingly enough, in two back-to-back scenes. Surely we are meant to (subliminally) compare and contrast those scenes. So lets do that.

The contrast seems to be that between legitimate and illegitimate sex (that is, rape) between a powerful man and a woman he controls. Both men are large and hulking, but one is clothed in the robes of minor officialdom and has appropriately dressed hair while the other is semi-naked and bald. The two scenes, while both in dim night-time light, are depicted in different colors.

The (attempted) rape is in cool blues, greys, stark white and black while the other scene is in warm browns, tans, and brownish-yellows. Postures are different as well. In the official scene, the woman is on her hands and knees while the man is behind her “doggy” style.

In the rape, the woman is almost upside down and the man moves her around like a piece of meat. Finally, the woman in the rape scene is silent while the other woman moans and cries out.

Notice that, beyond asserting that one scene depicts rape and the other legitimate sex, I haven’t said anything about the relationships between these people. The contrasts I’ve been talking about are all in the visual and auditory presentation of the scenes. This is by no means necessary to the social meanings, but this multi-layered patterning is how art is done.

Now, let’s consider those relationships. The woman being raped (first screen shot) is Kagero, the lone woman on a Ninja team of the Mochizuki clan. The rapist is Tessai, one of the eight Devils of Kimon, who are in league with the Dark Shogun to overthrow the legitimate government. Note that, when he gets angry, Tessai’s body becomes rock-like, making him an earth-man, just barely differentiated from the natural world. Kagero is the only survivor of the Ninja team sent to kill Tessai.

The man in the other sex scene is Kagero’s lord and master, Sakaki Hiyobu, who is the Chamberlain of the Mochizukis. You’ll recall that Kagero had to make a special plea to be sent out on this mission; normally, she served as food taster to the Chamberlain. The woman the Chamberlain is having sex with is unidentified.

The interesting thing about the Chamberlain’s sex scene, and the first thing about the movie to really capture my attention, was that the chamberlain moved easily and effectively between having an official conversation and copulating without ever withdrawing. As you’ll recall, this is the second of the two sex scenes. Kagero – who had been the woman in the first sex scene – has come back to report that she is the only surviving member of the ninja team. Kagero stays discretely at the doorway to the chamberlain’s room and gives her report while the chamberlain replies to her and thrusts away on his woman.