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.

The Boy and the Tsunami, a simple story for a 4-year-old [illustrations by ChatGPT]

I’ve appended a conversation I just had with ChatGPT. What’s going on should be self-evident from the dialog. Now imagine what you could do. You could, for example, expand the story to six panels by adding one at the beginning to show the tsunami developing and one just before the end when the tsunami is in retreat, but the sun hasn’t yet come out. Why not make it eight panels? Or you could add other incidents, the boy confronts a volcano, a raging bull, and so forth. Or you can make it about a little girl instead. A different race.

Or a different visual style. When you read the dialog you’ll see that I said nothing about visual style. I could have specified anime style, in the manner of Cardcaptor Sakura, or Warner Brothers, Wylie Coyote. Whatever you want. I have no idea how accurately ChatGPT would mimic those styles, or whether it would balk at such imitation because it guidelines don’t permit it. But it wouldn’t hurt to ask.

Come to think of it, if I knew that the story was being created for a specific child, I’d upload a photo of the child to ChatGPT and as it to model the protagonist on that child. Cartoons being what they are, regardless of the particular style, much detail will be lost. But general body type, facial shape, and coloring – complexion, eyes, hair, not to mention clothing – should survive. There’s a reasonable chance that the child would recognize themselves in the resulting comic.

I wouldn’t say that anything is possible. But, yes, a lot certainly is.

* * * * *

Some years ago I was invited to a birthday party for a four-year-old girl, whom I knew. What was I going to get her? I knew that she’d been talking a lot about monsters recently, so I decided to write a little book for her, “Valerie and the Monsters.”

In this story a little girl named “Valerie” – the four-year-old’s name – was given a magic pencil. Whenever she came across a monster all she had to do was draw a picture of it with the magic pencil and she’d tame the monster. So, in the book I drew pictures of the monsters, wacky semi-funny monsters. I left the facing pages blank so that Valerie could use her pencil to draw a picture of the monster.

When her mother read the story to her at the birthday party she wanted to draw the pictures. But of course her mother didn’t let her. Still, when the story was over, Valerie went around and hugged everyone in the room.

I’m thinking of something similar. I want to make a comic book with a series of four panel episodes. In the first panel a little boy is confronted with a large and frightening “monster,” broadly understood. In the second panel the monster tells the boy, “Guess my name or I will harm you, or your friends and relatives.” In the third panel the boy stands tall and says, “You name is...” And he says the name. In the final panel the monster is chastened and the boy is triumphant.

Let’s try one. In this one the monster is a tsunami. In the first panel we see a little boy standing on the beach in the center of the panel. There’s a rocky hillside behind him. In front of him there’s a large tsunami wave looming high over him, as high as the hillside behind him. He’s cowering down and looking up the way. The sky is cloudy and overcast, maybe with a lightning bolt in the distance.

Now let’s draw the second panel. We see a word balloon at the top of the wave. It’s saying, “Guess my name or I’ll drown you.”

OK, the third panel. The boy is standing tall, a look of defiance on his face. He says, “tsu...tsu...tsu, tsunami!”

In the forth panel the sun has come out, the sky is bright, and the boy is standing tall on a surfboard atop the tsunami wave.

R Crumb was just too weird

YouTube:

“It was just too disturbing for most people, too weird.” | Robert Crumb | Louisiana Channel

From Fritz the Cat to Mr. Natural – meet the cult cartoonist Robert Crumb, whose artistic world is full of anti-heroes and demons from modern America and his subconscious. In this rare interview, Crumb talks frankly about refusing to adhere to political correctness, and about his never-ending urge to unravel the layers of delusion in the world – as he says: “I’m still digging.”

“I was so alienated when I was young, that drawing was like my only connection to society. That was the only thing that I could see was going to save me from a really dismal fate of God knows what.” Crumb describes his social skills as a young man as being “completely nil.” At the same time, he was driven by his “fucked-up ego,” and he had to balance those two sides. Drawing became a way for him to deal with reality, and in the 1950s, where “being a comic-book artist was the lowest level of commercial art,” he pushed toward more personal use of the medium: “At a certain point I decided I don’t want to be America’s best-loved hippie cartoonist. I don’t want that role. So I’ll just be honest about who I am, and the weirdness, and take my chances.” Consequently, Crumb alienated a lot of people with his often provocative content: “It was just too disturbing for most people, too weird.”

Crumb has an urge to question things and is acutely aware that he’s going to get hell for what he’s doing – even lose friends – but he is willing to take the heat for it. He feels that he plays with images, emphasising the word “play.” Nowadays, he argues, there’s a tendency to take everything at face value – including his artwork: “The artwork I did that used those images and expressed those kinds of feelings, I stand by it… I still think that that’s something that needed to be said and needed to be done… It probably hurts some people’s feelings to see those images, but still, I had to put it out there.” Putting down anything that stands in the way of political correctness, he feels, becomes extreme and suppressive: “I can even lead to censorial policies in the government and stuff like that. They don’t realise that they’re playing into the hands of some very bad people.”

Robert Crumb (b. 1943) is an American cartoonist. Crumb, a counterculture comic book artist and social satirist, has enjoyed cult status for his underground comic strips, full of anti-heroes. Among these is a wide range of popular characters including Fritz the Cat and Mr. Natural. Much of his work has also appeared in Weirdo magazine (1981-1993), which he founded himself, and which was one of the most prominent publications of the alternative comics era. Crumb has received several accolades for his work, including his induction into the comic book industry’s Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame in 1991 and the Angoulême Grand Prix in 1999. Crumb was also among the artists honoured in the exhibition ‘Masters of American Comics’ at the Jewish Museum in New York (2006-2007). In 2012 a retrospective of Crumb’s work was exhibited at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. He has frequently collaborated with cartoonist Aline Kominsky-Crumb, with whom he is married, and the couple has made a joint comic strip based on their life together through four decades. A collection of comics, ‘Drawn Together’, was published in 2012.

Robert Crumb was interviewed by Christian Monggaard in connection with the Louisiana Literature festival at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, Denmark in August 2019.

Camera: Anders Lindved
Produced by Kasper Bech Dyg and Christian Lund
Edited by Kasper Bech Dyg
Cover photo: Cropped version of Crumb signing (Rejected poster for Angoulême 1999) © Robert Crumb
Copyright: Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2019
Supported by Nordea-fonden

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.

Interview with R. Crumb, 2011

From the YouTube page: "Associated Press journalists Ted Shaffrey, Richard Drew and Matt Moore meet with illustrator Robert Crumb and his wife and collaborator, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, at the Society of Illustrators in New York on March 24, 2011. Crumb has an exhibit on display through April 30, 2011."

I talk Loony Tunes with John McWhorter @3QD

I’ve got a new piece at 3 Quarks Daily:

John McWhorter and I Talk About Cartoons

That went up yesterday. 

Today Brooks Riley followed up with this:

There's a lesson there: Cartoons play the court jester to the dominant view of reality.

I ended the article with a scene from Who Framed Roger Rabbit, one where Daffy Duck and Donald Duck battle one another at the piano. Such battles were common in cartoons. Here’s another one:

Here's a variation on the theme:

 

 

 Have fun!

"Inside Out" provides a language for therapy

Melena Ryzik, How ‘Inside Out’ and Its Sequel Changed Therapy, NYTimes, Aug. 7, 2024. Opening paragraphs of the article:

In 2012, when Olivia Carter was just starting out as a school counselor, she employed all sorts of strategies to help her elementary-age students understand and communicate their feelings — drawing, charades, color association, role playing. After 2015, though, starting those conversations became a lot easier, she said. It took just one question: “Who has seen the movie ‘Inside Out’?”

That Pixar hit, about core emotions like joy and sadness, and this summer’s blockbuster sequel, which focuses on anxiety, have been embraced by educators, counselors, therapists and caregivers as an unparalleled tool to help people understand themselves. The story of the moods steering the “control panel” in the head of a girl named Riley has been transformational, many experts said, in day-to-day treatment, in schools and even at home, where the films have given parents a new perspective on how to manage the turmoil of growing up.

“As therapeutic practice, it has become a go-to,” said David A. Langer, president of the American Board of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology. In his household, too: “I have 9-year-old twins — we speak about it regularly,” said Langer, who’s also a professor of psychology at Suffolk University. “Inside Out” finger puppets were in frequent rotation when his children were younger, a playful way to examine the family dynamic. “The art of ‘Inside Out’ is explicitly helping us understand our internal worlds,” Langer said.

And it’s not just schoolchildren that it applies to. “I’ve been stealing lines from the movie and quoting them to adults, not telling them that I’m quoting,” said Regine Galanti, a psychologist and author in private practice on Long Island, speaking of the new film.

Anxiety:

And the new movie’s focus on anxiety, which has reached crisis proportions among adolescents, normalizes experiences that for young people could seem isolating or overwhelming, and makes them relatable.

“Almost every day there’s a student who’s struggling or having a panic attack,” Carter said. “I could see this being something that I lean on pretty heavily for a long time.”

Later:

“INSIDE OUT” ARRIVED at a moment when educators and caregivers were paying more attention to what’s known as social-emotional learning, prioritizing connection and communication skills, and recognizing, not tamping down, children’s sensibilities as part of their self-regulation. [...]

Acknowledging feelings “is like a magical thing,” Damour said. “If a person says, ‘I feel sad,’ they suddenly feel less sad.”

That “Inside Out” helps families have those conversations together amplifies one of its messages, to embrace our personalities in all their shades and shadows.

There's much more at the link.

Jurassic World Camp Cretaceous [Media Notes 128]

Jurassic World Camp Cretaceous is the prequel series to Jurassic World: Chaos Theory, which I’ve already blogged about. It consists of 49 episodes over five seasons (22-24 minutes each), which ran from 2020 to 2022. Thus it centers on the same six characters and has the same showrunners, Scott Kreamer and Aaron Hammersley, thus insuring continuity among the characters.

At the beginning of the series I found all of the characters annoying at times, some more than others. But those annoyances had mostly disappeared by, say, the fourth season. Is that simply because I’d gotten used to them, or because they had in fact changed. For the purposes of argument, let’s say it’s the latter. That’s why I’m writing this note.

Come to think of it, this show is a variation on the “gang of misfits” premise we find in such movies as Seven Samurai, the American re-make, The Magnificent Seven, and The Dirty Dozen. During the early scenes of those movies, misfit fighters are recruited on an impossible mission. They succeed, of course, and during the process become a well-functioning team. The six teens in Camp Cretaceous are not fighters, and they aren’t exactly recruited, but really, they’ve been chosen because they make for good PR. The dinosaurs somehow escape from their cages, things fall apart, the adults flee the island, and the kids are left to fend for themselves.

Which they do, and quite ingeniously. They also have to figure out what’s going on. Some bad people are doing bad things and they have to get to the bottom of it. Actually, there’s more than one bad actor at work. During the course of all this, two young women discover they are gay and attracted to one another, or, perhaps more likely, Sammy knew she was gay all along, but Yasmina had to discover it about herself. And Kenji and Brooklyn fell for one another.

Kenji’s story is the one that most interests me. His father is rich, and has a penthouse apartment on Isla Nubar. He’s entitled and domineering, but manages to get over it by the fourth season or so. Then, at the very end of the fourth season Kenji learns that his father, Daniel Kon, now owns the island. During the fifth season we learn that Daniel Kon is not a good guy. But Kenji, who desperately wants his father’s approval, cannot see that, not initially, while the others see it right off. That disparity puts Kinji at odds with the others, though it all works out in the end, sorta’.

So, did these characters really change over the course of the five seasons? That question is entirely an aesthetic one, for these, after all, are purely imagined characters. Did we see character change, or simply different behavior from the same characters? I think it’s the former, but the question requires more investigation.

Jurassic World: Chaos Theory [Media Notes 126]

More or less on impulse I decided to watch Jurassic World: Chaos Theory, which premiered on May 24, 2024. I had no particular expectations beyond being a bit dubious about the quality of the 3D computer animation. I was pleasantly surprised. I found it rather compelling, at least some something aimed at tweens and teens.

It's the second animated series in the sprawling Jurassic Park franchise. I haven’t seen the first nor, for that matter, have I seen anything beyond the first three films, much less read any of the books (including Crichton’s original), or played the games. So I’m not going to attempt to situate this in that whole mess. Suffice it to say that the protagonists are five of the six teenaged members of a group known as “The Nublar Six” (apparently from the previous animated series). We’re in a world where dinosaurs are now all over the place and there’s a Department of Prehistorical Wildlife (DPW – a pun?) charged with looking after them, protecting them and chasing them down as the situation may warrant.

Actually, all of the Nublar Six are present in the movie, but one of them, Brooklyn, is present only in flashback, of which there are many. She was murdered and that’s what the series is about: Who did it and are they after us?

Yes, they’re after us, and I suppose we more or less figure out who did it, but not really. Someone is capturing and selling dinosaurs on the black market. A related someone high up in the DPW is in on the scheme, and they get chased down, or at least one of them does. But we don’t find out who’s really behind it. That, presumably, will be the subject of the next series.

Anyhow, in the first episode, Darius, one of the six, is feeling guilty about Brooklyn’s death and he reunites with Ben, another of the six, who believes that Brooklyn had in fact been murdered. Darius is dubious, but they’re suspiciously attacked by some raptors. Darius is convinced. The first episode ends on a cliffhanger – I haven’t used that term in a long time – forcing me to watch the next episode to discover whether or not they escape the raptors.

I mean, of course I know they escape, because there’s no series if they don’t – that’s how cliffhanger’s work, but I went on to the next episode anyhow because I just HAD to find out. In the old days you had to wait at least week to get to the next episode. And on I went through the first four episodes in my first session (each episode runs 23-24 minutes). By that time four of the five remaining members of the six have been recruited to the hunt: Darius, Ben, Sammy (female), and Kenji. The fifth, Yaz, is recruited to the cause in the sixth episode, leaving four more to go.

During the action we learn about the complicated relationships within the six – Brooklyn and Kenji had broken up, Kenji’s dad was under house arrest, Sammy and Yaz are lovers, temporarily estranged – and see a lot of battles between humans and dinosaurs, and dino on dino action as well. Sammy has a pet dinosaur, who gets stolen, etc.

Our trio is racially and stylistically mixed, but all have the utterly smooth skin characteristic of computer graphics, though Kenji’s dad has a few facial wrinkles. FWIW, the dinosaurs seemed a bit more realistic to me, but that no doubt reflects the fact that I have no experience with living dinosaurs (nor does anyone else for that matter). There’s lots of big dinosaur teeth, stubby little dinosaur forelimbs, and close-ups of dinosaur eyes. In contrast, I don’t recall any close-ups of human eyes. I wonder what that’s about.

Anyhow, if you’ve got some popcorn sitting around just waiting to be munched, Jurassic World: Chaos Theory would be an excuse to munch it. BTW, Wikipedia notes that while cliffhangers date back to the Middle Ages, current practice dates back to the Victorian era, when novels were often published in serial form. I wonder how serial publication affects plot structure?

South Park: The End of Obesity + Unfrosted [Media Notes 122]

I’ve just watched South Park: The End of Obesity, more or less on general principle and out of curiosity. I’ve known about South Park more or less since it showed up in the late 1990s, but have only watched an episode or three plus bits and pieces. So I figured this would be a time to get acquainted, AND, it’s about those (semiglutide-based) weight loss drugs that have been making such a fuss lately. But I didn’t expect to see so much visual material that overlapped with Unfrosted. They are, after all, very different beasts.

Both are comedies, but Unfrosted is live-action and an hour-and-a-half long with Obesity is animated and only an hour. Obesity flat-out satire, and pretty gross at times, while Unfrosted doesn’t quite know what it wants to be aside from funny, along with being cheery and friendly. What do they have in common? Breakfast. And big business. In one case it’s the cereal business, in the other, it’s health insurance.

Eric Cartman, one of the munchkins at the center of the South Park universe, is overweight, but can’t get a prescription for Ozempic because his family’s insurance won’t cover it for weight loss purposes. His friends decide to help him. First they try to navigate the American health care system, to no avail (and accompanied by a sprightly song). So they decided to go into business manufacturing the drug themselves. Meanwhile a women’s group is scoring black-market drugs for themselves, and are joined by one man, Randy, a prominent recurring character in this world. Before you know it these two enterprises collide in comic mayhem.

And that mayhem involves a gang of very angry cereal mascots, including Tony the Tiger, the Trix rabbit but, more prominently, Cap’n Crunch, and Sonny the Cuckoo Bird (Cocoa Puffs). What's their motivation? Obesity drugs are cutting into the cereal market, just like Pop-Tarts! That’s one (unexpected) conjunction between these two movies. They go to war on behalf of Big Cereal and Big Sugar. Another conjunction. Meanwhile we have Cartman’s affection for something called breakfast bombs, which seems to involve a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken that also includes cereal and milk. He resorts to these in panic when he can’t get more of the black-market drug his friends have made for him (the lab was destroyed and the shipment hijacked). And then there’s the super bomb called the Oppenheimer, which involves Twinkies and gravy. There’s one beyond that, the Stormy Daniels.

There you have it, breakfast, cereal mascots, big business, and violence, the American way.

Mickey Mouse, Free at Last! – And not only Mickey and Minnie

Happy new year ! And happy public domain day with a major new entry: the original design of Mickey Mouse!

For the occasion I’m releasing Mickey-1928 a model on @HuggingFace that can generate pictures of Mickey, Minnie and Pete from 1928. https://t.co/Cy8am3Ra5w pic.twitter.com/XiWR837hmE

— Alexander Doria (@Dorialexander) December 31, 2023

Sopan Deb, These Classic Characters Are Losing Copyright Protection. They May Never Be the Same. NYTimes, Jan. 1, 2024. The opening paragraphs:

If you’re the creative type and you’re struggling to come up with your next idea, do not fear: some big works, including the original version of Mickey Mouse, are entering the public domain on Jan. 1 in the United States.

And if, on the other hand, you prefer your Disney characters to be cute, cuddly and never-changing, well … you might want to stop reading.

In 2024, thousands of copyrighted works published in 1928 are entering the public domain, after their 95-year term expires.

This means that those characters and stories can be remade — on the page, stage or screen — without permission. (Finally, I can make that Peter Pan musical where a middle-aged Peter laments unexplained back pains at the end of Act I.)

“It’s important for the preservation of our cultural record, for meaningful access to older works for inspiring future creativity,” Jennifer Jenkins, the director for the Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke Law School, said.

The crème de la crème of this year’s public domain class are Mickey Mouse and, of course, Minnie, or at least black-and-white versions of our favorite squeaky rodents that appeared in “Steamboat Willie.” Disney is famously litigious, and this copyright only covers the original versions of the character.

Near the end, some possibilities:

The playwright Lindsey Ferrentino proposed a mash-up of titles.

“Maybe a production of ‘Threepenny Opera’ with the character of Mackie Messer recast as Mickey Mouse. Very Brechtian,” Ferrentino said. “Don’t ask me to write it though.”

The steamy “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” sparked a lot of interest. Neil Meron, a producer of the Broadway musical “Some Like It Hot,” suggested “a gender fluid immersive” musical adaptation with a score from Sam Smith.

Karen Chee, a writer for “Late Night With Seth Meyers,” pitched “Lady Chatterley’s Millions of Cats.” Ah, but let’s flesh this out! Chee added: “A lonely wife who forgoes sexy times to instead adopt millions of cats.” (Of course.)

From Bob Gale, co-writer of both the film and musical versions of “Back To The Future”: “Is Mickey the new lover of Lady Chatterley, or is he only a voyeur?”

There's more at the link

Reaping profits before the end of the world

21 years ahead of its time. By @BobMankoff @NewYorker pic.twitter.com/CZEuLqpGNy

— Gary Marcus (@GaryMarcus) November 24, 2023

Disney's Fantasia as Masterpiece

This is currently the fifth most popular post at New Savanna.  I originally published it in The Valve in August, 2006; I then republished it here in November, 2010. It's about why Fantasia is one of the great works of 20th Century art. The first time I formulated that thought to myself — that Fantasia is one of the great works of 20th Century art — it took my breath away. But in time I got used to the idea. Almost.

The argument in the post, however, is at most only half the argument. It's about what happens in Fantasia, what phenomena Disney chose to represent. The other half of the argument is, it seems to me, rather more difficult to state, for it is about how things look on the screen. If the film doesn't look good, well, the representational content is not in itself enough to make compelling art. I believe, of course, that it does look good. This post on The Nutcracker Suite is part of that argument, as is this post on Dance of the Hours.

April 27, 2014: It's now the 4th most popular post. Another Fantasia post, Two Rings in Fantasia, is 3rd.

June 14, 2021: It's now the 6th most popular post. Two Rings in Fantasia is now 4th.

November 13, 2023: My sister, Sally, has just informed me that Fantasia premiered on this day back in 1940. So I'm bumping this post to the top of the queue. I've published a working paper on the film: Walt Disney’s Fantasia: The Cosmos and the Mind in Two Hours.

In 1938 Walt Disney decided to bet the farm on an extravaganza originally entitled The Concert Feature. Disney's intention was twofold. On the one hand he would use the power of animation to present Classical Music to the Masses. Get it out of the concert hall, into the movie palace, and dress it up to make it more approachable. But also, showcase the powers of this new medium - one in which Disney had a considerable investment, both in time and imaginative effort and in money - in a way that had never been done before.

Disney secured the collaboration of Leopold Stokowski, the best-known conductor of the day (who had already been parodied in a cartoon or two) and devoted the full resources of his studio to the effort. The film premiered in late 1940 under a new name, Fantasia, and received mixed critical notices. Music critics were offended, film critics didn't quite know what to think, though some liked it. The public, for the most part, did not. The film was a financial failure, though it finally managed to break-even in the late 1960s, after Disney had died.

Fantasia is highly regarded among students of animation and has sold well in videotape and DVD. I have little sense of where it stands among more general arbiters of culture. I'm convinced it is a masterpiece. But a masterpiece of what?

Encyclopedic Forms

In 1976 Edward Mendelson published an article on “Encyclopedic Narrative: From Dante to Pynchon” (MLN 91, 1267-1275). It was an attempt to define a genre whose members include Dante's Divine Comedy, Rablais', Gargantua and Pantagruel, Cervantes' Don Quixote, Goethe's Faust, Melville's Moby Dick, Joyce's Ulysses, and Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. Somewhat later Franco Moretti was thinking about “monuments,” “sacred texts,” “world texts,” texts he wrote about in Modern Epic (Verso 1996). He came upon Mendelson's article, saw a kinship with his project, and so added Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung's (note, a musical as well as a narrative work), Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, and a few others to the list. It is in this company that I propose to place Fantasia.

On the face of it, the idea is absurd. For one thing, the works Mendelson and Moretti discuss are securely ensconced in the Western Canon of High Art, Fantasia is a cartoon. Perhaps it occupies a significant place in popular art of the 20th century, but how could it possibly be anything more?

I'm not sure what kind of consideration this is. But I'm just going to ignore it.

The fact that Fantasia is not even a narrative - it tells no connected story from beginning to end - is a more serious matter. If genres are to be defined by intrinsic characteristics, then Fantasia fails. In a footnote Mendelson indicates that Frye discusses various encyclopedic forms in his Anatomy of Criticism, namely Menippean satire and anatomy. But Fantasia doesn't fit there either. Perhaps it is sui generis.

What is important to me is simply the encyclopedic scope of these various works. All of them seek to encompass the entire world as it was known at the time.

So does Fantasia. In the brief compass of two hours Fantasia traverses an astonishing range of . . . of what? “Human experience” would be a good phrase here, but one major segment, The Rite of Spring, concerns things which no human being could possibly have experienced. Human experience, yes. But more generally, the world.

Quickie: Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse [Media Notes 98a]

I don’t know what to say. I saw Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse in a theater and liked it. Maya Phillips has a positive review of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse in the NYTimes. Here’s as trailer:

WOW! The color, patterns, texture, action. WOW!

And that’s about it for me. I like the visual style, but...in three sessions I’ve been unable to finish watching it. I figure that’s on me, but on the film as well. Distinguishing between the two, that’s difficult.

On me, I’m preoccupied by intellectual projects at the moment, mostly my ChatGPT round-up, but also an expansion of my Out of Control piece. I’m afraid it would be difficult for any movie, at least when viewed on the small screen at home (Netflix) – the big screen with big sound and an audience, that’s another kettle of fish – to capture my attention. A half-hour (the remake of the Odd Couple, for example) or an hour is about as far as I can go (Miami Vice anyone?).

But, this adolescent hero, Miles Morales, is grating on my last nerve. Why’s he so damn whiny? Why doesn’t he grow up? But then, that’s what the film is (supposed to be) about, no? So, I’m really not the target audience for this film.

OTOH, there’s too damn much action, too quick. Maybe that also means that I’m not the audience for this film, but I don’t care. Slow down, breathe, reflect a bit. It won’t kill you. THAT’s a problem with the film. & maybe Miles would be less bothersome if his makers gave him more room to chill out.

But, damn! I do like the style. All the colors and textures, even the inclusion of live-action clips, and snippets from other Spidey films, the references to canon. It’s all good, or would be if there weren’t so damn much crammed into too little time. This style has room to grow, definitely.

I will, somehow, manage to watch the whole thing.

Kristin Thompson on Best Film Oscars in recent years

Kristen Thompson, “Best Picture” ≠ “Live Action,”Observations on film art, July 8, 2023.

Opening paragraphs:

Way back in 2006, I posted a long piece on the increasing prominence of animated features being released each year. This was in the infancy of the blog, and the entry shows it–few photos, inserted as thumbnails. We only gradually worked up to our format of posting plenty of illustrations. By contrast this current contribution offers plenty of visual pleasure.

Basically I argued three points. First, that by their nature animated films would tend to be among the highest-quality films in any given year, despite their relatively small number in those days.

My argument laid out some reasons for this high quality. First, the fact that animated films were perforce thoroughly planned in pre-production, meaning that every detail was carefully considered. This means that relatively few inadequate scenes are reworked in production. Live-action films these days tend to be heavily dependent on shooting lots of coverage and making many decisions in the editing stage. Not true of animated films. Similarly, the soundtrack is recorded in advance and the images animated to sync with it. Hence the sound is meticulously planned. The voice actors record their voices and leave, usually not hanging around to try and change their scenes during shooting or fluffing lines and thus requiring multiple retakes of scenes.

My second point addressed the opinion, widely circulating in the trade press, that the spread of animation, and particularly digital animation, was a mistake. I quoted a recent Screen International article: “Much has been made this year of the seeming over-saturation of studios’ computer-generated titles, with critics and analysts pointing to growing movie-goer apathy.” I pointed out that such a claim didn’t fit the facts: “As a proportion among the total number of films made, CGI’s box-office successes seem fairly high compared to live-action films.”

My third point was that American distributors did not know how to market films from abroad, so that Ghibli and Aardman titles did not get nearly the audiences they deserved. Since then the distributor GKIDS has shown that it’s possible, at least for a relatively small company, successfully to release such films. They currently offer films with eleven best-animated feature Oscar nominations (with one win, Spirited Away), having gained distribution rights to Ghibli films, previously controlled by Disney.

Since I wrote that entry, the number of animated films, mostly digital, released yearly has sharply increased. And the disproportionate number of those animated films that appear among the top hits of the year continues to demonstrate that people are not apathetic. The spread of streaming services, combined with the decline of theatrical attendance during the pandemic, make it difficult to judge the success of films. Going back to 2019, where it’s a bit easier to judge, the top ten films included two animated successes, Toy Story 4 and Frozen II. An additional two were in the top twenty, How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World and The Secret Life of Pets 2. Animated films did not make up 20% of all films released, but that’s the portion of the top twenty they occupied.

I followed up that entry with one that found additional evidence that animated features were doing well, including the fact that Ice Age: The Meltdown was, though not the top box-office film of 2006, the most profitable film of that year.

So many developments have occurred in the world of feature animation since that first post that I decided to write an update.

Thompson then goes on to make a head-to-head comparison of Oscar-nominated live-action and animated films between 2002 and 2022. Her conclusion:

Totting up the live-action vs. animation winners in this face-off, we find one recusal, one draw, five decisions in favor of the live-action winners and fourteen for the animated winner or one or more of the animated nominees. As I mentioned at the start, the figures would be quite different if I had compared all the Oscar-worthy animation awards with all the Oscar-worthy Best Picture nominees. Still, in general this comparison may suggest that animated films are unfairly treated as one of the minor categories that people don’t pay much attention to.

I’m not suggesting that the Academy change their categories or rules. There’s probably no way to boost the prestige of the Animated Feature nominees.

The point here has simply been to add some evidence to my claim that a higher percentage of animated films tend to be excellent in a way that compares favorably with the live-action films nominated in the more prestigious category. Despite this, animated films are simply not taken seriously by most people, inclined cinephiles. They are still viewed as children’s fare, despite the successful appeal to adults built into many of the titles I’ve singled out here. They are also mostly comic to some extent and often involve fantasy, while Oscar bait leans toward drama and, with rare exceptions, away from fantasy/science fiction.

The conclusion is that if you think, for whatever reason, that live-action Oscar winners and films in general have declined in the past few decades, check out some ‘toons.

Color me sympathetic. You should read the whole thing. 

 While you're absorbing this information, take a re-read on my post about Robert De Vany's Hollywood Economics,  quantitative studies developing models that show we don't know how to predict the eventually box-office success of films. Do makers of animated films know something the rest of Hollywood does not?

AI pause, Chuck Jones style: Whoops! [aka AI Winter, we've been there before]

Back in August of 2020 I issued a working paper, GPT-3: Waterloo or Rubicon? Here be Dragons. On the first page, after the cover, but before the abstract and table of contents, I said this:

GPT-3 is a significant achievement.

But I fear the community that has created it may, like other communities have done before – machine translation in the mid-1960s, symbolic computing in the mid-1980s, triumphantly walk over the edge of a cliff and find itself standing proudly in mid-air.

This is not necessary and certainly not inevitable.

But, alas, that seems to be what is going on. And it's not merely that all those resources will have been wasted through, who knows, maybe some folks will wise and fly right, there's the opportunity cost, the good work that could have been done if some of those resources had gone to other word, any other work, just to sample the space of possibilities more widely.

Are we there yet?

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.

Top Posts at New Savanna 19 Mar 23 [& notes about why]

Every once in a while I make a post about what’s going on here at New Savanna, though I tend to include action at my Academia page under that tag as well. Back in August of 2019 I took a look at top posts. Back in August of 2013 I took a look at the all-time most popular posts, as of that time. I gave counts for the top 35 posts.

It's time for another look, though I’m not going to survey the top 35. I have something different in mind.

This shows the action from the beginning, in April 2010, to the present:

Notice that big spike there around 2017. I have no idea what’s going on there. Here’s a short post about it.

This is Blogger’s list of the top ten all-time posts:

The counts are off, moreover, when you take a closer look, those really aren’t the top ten. I’ll look at the in a minute.

But let’s take a look at the list as it stands. The top post is about Ninja Scroll. That’s one of the earliest posts I ever did and it has been the top post as long as I’ve been checking. Five more of the top posts are about animation, either Disney or Miyazaki. While I’ve done many posts featuring photos of irises, that particular post has only one photo. It’s a nice photo, but I do not know why it has proven so popular. I assume the popularity of Joe Rogan post is a function of Rogan’s popularity plus Bruce Lee and Chuck Norris (it’s about a well-known fight scene). The Hilary Hahn post is nice, and I believe benefited from being listed over at Marginal Revolution. Finally, we have that old post about what’s popular here. Why’s it so popular?

This table gives more accurate counts for those posts, along with direct links to them. Thus, whereas the Bogger states had Ninja scroll at 138K, the true figure seems to be 142K. Going to the bottom, we have 3.08K for Hilary Hahn vs. 3.59K. But look at the disparity for Pigs in Spirited Away, 3.67K vs. 14.2K. Something’s messed up. I have no idea what, but I decided to do some looking around.

Top Ten Posts at New Savanna Listed in order according to Blogger’s order and not by “true” count March 19, 2023
Sex, Power, and Purity in Kawajiri’s Ninja Scroll [Rape]	142,091
Secrets of Pink Elephants Revealed	94,000
Horikoshi’s Wife: Affective Binding and Grief in The Wind Rises	54,877
Irises	10,082
Two Rings in Fantasia: Nutcracker and Apprentice	9,435
Joe Rogan and Joey Diaz call “Bruce Lee vs. Chuck Norris”	6,338
Disney’s Fantasia as Masterpiece	8,236
What’s Popular and Why (April 2011)	5,961
Pigs in Spirited Away	14,212
Hilary Hahn on daydreaming as a mode of practicing music, of priming yourself to go with the flow in performance	3,590

Since animation is by far the post popular topic, I looked at animation posts. I’ve created tables for Miyazaki posts, Disney posts, and other animation.

Most Popular Miyazaki Posts March 19, 2023
Horikoshi’s Wife: Affective Binding and Grief in The Wind Rises	54,877
Pigs in Spirited Away	14,212
Follow the Acorns: Revealing Totoro	9,326
Miyazaki Notes 2: Castle in the Sky	6,193
Real Dreams: From Seeds to Trees in Totoro	6,876
Miyazaki Notes 2: Castle in the Sky	6,193
Porco Rosso 3: In the Minds of Women	5,626

 

Most Popular Disney Posts March 19, 2023
Secrets of Pink Elephants Revealed	94,000
Two Rings in Fantasia: Nutcracker and Apprentice	9,435
Disney’s Fantasia as Masterpiece	8,236
Domestic Tranquility, NOT: Disney’s Pastoral	6,682
American Mythology in Disney’s Dumbo	5,040
Roustabouts, Trains, Elephants, and Crows	4,373

Other Popular Animation Posts March 19, 2023
Sex, Power, and Purity in Kawajiri’s Ninja Scroll [Rape]	142,091
Sakaki Rides a Dolphin	7,256
Samurai Champloo: Graffiti and Baseball in Old Japan	4,745
Porky in Wackyland	4,140
Intimate Enemies: What’s Opera, Doc?	3,739
The Hottest Man in Siam	2,304

I’m particularly pleased that The Hottest Man in Siam has done so well. It’s about a Walter Lantz cartoon, “The Greatest Man in Siam,” which features an amazing dance sequence, two people doing the Lindy to a really hot trumpet solo. The post is mostly screen shots of that dance sequence. It’s hard to find online. The last time I looked I couldn’t find it. But maybe someone’s put it up again.