By Brian Camp
In the early 1990s, anime fans in America were a small but hearty bunch. Some were veteran TV watchers who recalled how Japanese imports like Astro Boy, Gigantor, and Tobor, the 8th Man so enthralled them as kids because they looked so different from every other cartoon. Some were younger fans who’d watched Star Blazers and Robotech religiously and wondered why American television couldn’t come up with serious animated science fiction shows with continuing story lines like that. There were those who discovered Hayao Miyazaki’s epic spectacles through big-screen festival showings of Laputa: Castle in the Sky or Castle of Cagliostro, and anime’s futuristic cyberpunk bent through Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira. Of all of these, Akira was perhaps the most influential, a film that almost single-handedly directed the world’s attention to anime as an innovative art form capable of entrancing adult audiences with complex stories and breathtaking visual detail. Most Western audiences, though, still didn’t know what anime was, or knew it only as “Japanese cartoons.”
During the first forty or so years of Japan’s animation industry (dating from the establishment of Toei Animation in 1956), no animated Japanese feature got a wide theatrical release from a major studio in the United States. Smaller distributors picked up occasional titles for an English-dubbed national release, such as Alakazam the Great (American International Pictures, 1961) and Gulliver’s Travels Beyond the Moon (Continental, 1966). Alone among Hollywood majors, MGM distributed the ninja classic, Magic Boy (Shonen Sarutobi Sasuke), the second animated feature produced by Toei, but it was rolled out in regional release over a period of years and finally reviewed in the New York Times in December 1963, some two years after it first opened. Only a very small handful of Japanese animated films were shown with English subtitles at animation festivals. Home video would eventually make a difference in the exposure of American audiences to anime, but only gradually, after the success on the art-house and college circuit of Akira in 1989–90 and similarly themed films like Robot Carnival, Vampire Hunter D, and Neo-Tokyo. By then Japanese animation was finally starting to become known as anime and appearing on video and laser disc from small licensing companies like Streamline Pictures, AnimEigo, Central Park Media, and U.S. Renditions. At the same time, VHS and home PC technology also made possible amateur productions of unlicensed “fan-subs,” the term for fan-subtitled video copies of anime made from Japanese-only originals, with English subtitles added by computer.
More Japanese animated features appeared in theaters, although usually in very limited release from small companies. After Akira, features with the most impact were Hayao Miyazaki’s beloved family film, My Neighbor Totoro, and Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell. Totoro appeared on screens in dubbed form in 1993, not the first of Miyazaki’s films to be seen in theaters in the U.S., but the first to get a nationwide release as a family film, albeit from a small distributor who was only able to get it into a few hundred theaters. Ghost in the Shell was a sophisticated, hard-edged science fiction film which enjoyed a brief art-house run in early 1996 before becoming one of the first anime best sellers on home video in the States. While Totoro raised Miyazaki’s profile in the U.S. by a few degrees among film reviewers and family audiences, Ghost in the Shell followed Akira’s lead in identifying anime with high-tech cyberpunk genres and drew more sci-fi fans and Web surfers to anime.
To make a long story short, the fan culture that built up around anime became noticeable enough to signal the American entertainment industry that something was happening in Japan that could be popular overseas as well. Soon TV shows like Sailor Moon and Dragon Ball were imported and dubbed in English for syndication to television. These found enough success to prompt more such acquisitions, culminating in the runaway phenomenon of Pokémon in 1998, followed by Digimon in 1999. (Pokémon: The First Movie, in fact, became the first anime feature to get a wide American release by a major studio, Warner Bros., in 1999.) These series created a new generation of American fans who clamored for more, enabling the growing number of distributors who specialized in the market to capitalize by acquiring more and more titles, old as well as new. By the late 1990s, video stores across the country had whole sections labeled “Anime.” The cable network, Cartoon Network, began showing anime series and soon devoted whole blocks of its schedule to them, achieving considerable ratings success with exclusive showings of previously unaired episodes of Sailor Moon, Dragon Ball, and Dragon Ball Z, as well as premieres of popular series such as Cowboy Bebop, Gundam Wing, Inuyasha, and, later on, Fullmetal Alchemist, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, and Naruto.
While longtime fans preferred their anime in Japanese with English subtitles, newcomers to the field, many of whom had never seen a foreign film, initially preferred the English dubs, forcing distributors to release VHS copies in two editions, one usually higher-priced (the Japanese track) than the other. The breakout of DVD around the year 2000 meant that anime distributors could release bilingual editions in the new format so that both segments of the market would get what they wanted from one release. Over time, the benefit of all this activity was the release of dozens of older titles in newly remastered DVD editions, including bilingual uncut versions of TV shows like Dragon Ball Z and Sailor Moon, previously unreleased series like Lupin the 3rd and Gatchaman, and complete runs of series that had first been introduced on VHS, such as Kimagure Orange Road, Urusei Yatsura, and Ranma 1⁄2.
The most celebrated business deal occurred in 1996 between Tokuma Publishing, owner of the rights to films made by Hayao Miyazaki’s company, Studio Ghibli, and the Walt Disney Company, which would allow Disney to release Ghibli’s films in all territories, including Japan, but excluding the rest of Asia. What this meant for American fans was the eventual release of Hayao Miyazaki’s films in legitimate copies in the U.S. No more need to share fan-subs or untranslated copies made from laser disc. Fans grumbled as Disney dragged its feet, releasing only two titles in the six years after the deal was made, Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989), which went straight to video in 1998, and Princess Mononoke (1997), which had a limited theatrical run in 1999, followed by a home video release the next summer. (Fox Home Video still carried the English dub of My Neighbor Totoro, which remained a steady earner for them this whole period.) Gradually, though, nearly every other major Ghibli production had a DVD release in the U.S., with original Japanese tracks supplemented by newly created English dubs employing such name actors as Patrick Stewart (Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind), Anna Paquin (Castle in the Sky), Michael Keaton (Porco Rosso), Kirsten Dunst (Kiki’s Delivery Service) and Dakota Fanning (the new 2005 dub of My Neighbor Totoro). After Mononoke, Miyazaki’s next two films, Spirited Away and Howl’s Moving Castle, each had a theatrical release in the U.S., with Spirited Away going on to win the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature of 2002.
Despite all this attention, anime remained something of a niche market in the U.S., even with respectable grosses for Spirited Away and high ratings for Pokémon, Digimon, Yu-Gi-Oh!, and a handful of shows on the Cartoon Network. In the 21st century, the market was glutted, and it became possible to say that there was too much of a good thing. Dozens of new but marginal and formulaic series were licensed for distribution in the U.S., joining the increasing number of box sets of old classics that distributors had packaged. It was a great time to be an anime fan in America, but how could one distinguish the wheat from the chaff? How many big-eyed, bouncy schoolgirls or scantily clad demon hunters on DVD could the market bear, and how could emerging anime fans figure out what was good among the new releases or which older classics were indispensable?
That’s where this book comes in. It represents a concerted effort by two longtime anime critics and observers to identify the best works produced by Japanese animators and place them in their proper cinematic and historical context. It’s an attempt to identify and narrow down the one hundred essential titles from the history of anime (at least as seen in the U.S.), those that boast artistic excellence and historical importance, as well as those that quite simply captured an audience’s heart for all time thanks to great storytelling, engrossing characters, and top-drawer animation craftsmanship. Taking an auteur-theory approach, we identified a pantheon of top-ranked directors whose works we could easily identify and choose from. Several of them, such as Gisaburo Sugii (The Tale of Genji), Isao Takahata (Grave of the Fireflies), Rintaro (Dagger of Kamui), and Yoshiyuki Tomino (Mobile Suit Gundam), started out at the very beginnings of the industry and are still thriving in it. Others who’ve come along in their wake include Yoshikazu Yasuhiko (Crusher Joe), Yoshiaki Kawajiri (Ninja Scroll), Katsuhiro Otomo (Akira), Mamoru Oshii (Patlabor), Hideaki Anno (Neon Genesis Evangelion), Satoshi Kon (Tokyo Godfathers), and, of course, Hayao Miyazaki.
The titles chosen for this book meet our standard of inclusion as masterpieces in any number of ways. There are pioneering works like Astro Boy, the first Japanese animated half-hour TV series, and Kimba the White Lion, the first to be filmed in color, which introduced Japanese cartoons to the world and pointed the way for future animators. New directions were signaled every couple of years by groundbreaking series like Gatchaman, which raised the level of realism in a sci-fi series, not only in the look of characters but also in the mechanical design, or mecha (a term commonly used to cover all manner of mechanical creations, from spaceships and jet fighters to giant robots and metal combat suits), and Devilman, which pushed the envelope of provocative content allowed in a cartoon. Space Battleship Yamato, Mobile Suit Gundam, and Macross offered in-depth continuing story lines backed up by dramatic visuals and well-staged action scenes that captivated audiences in Japan and around the world.
There are films of raw emotional power in this book, such as Barefoot Gen and Grave of the Fireflies, which offer wrenching accounts of children caught up in the horrors of war. There are works of sheer artistic beauty such as Vampire Princess Miyu, The Tale of Genji, and Millennium Actress, which draw on a breathtaking array of museum-quality images from traditional Japanese art to tell their tales. There are works that push the envelope of technical innovation, mixing art and high technology with audacity, like Serial Experiments Lain, which shows what happens when the “real world” and the Web start to blend with each other in mind-boggling ways. There are works based in popular genres that upend viewers’ expectations and take them down unforgettable new pathways, as in Boogiepop Phantom, which turns from an X-Files–style conspiracy-mystery into an allegorical critique of Japanese society’s regimentation of its young.
Many an individual film transcends genre and era, expressing an artist’s unique sensibility with courage and superior craftsmanship. Hayao Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke, as close to a Kurosawa-level masterpiece as anime has yet achieved, takes us back in time to an era when humankind sought to free itself from the dominance of nature and waged actual full-scale war on the gods of the natural world. Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell and its sequel, Innocence, pick up the struggle centuries later in eye-popping sci-fi spectacles devoted to the collision of humanity and technology and humankind’s attempt to free itself from the weakness of the flesh via cybernetic enhancement.
There are well-loved series that simply display in the most straightforward, unfiltered manner the persistent, eccentric appeal of anime, such as the lunatic sci-fi comedy Urusei Yatsura, about a girl-crazy high school boy who finds himself “married” to Lum, a delectable alien princess in a tiger-skin bikini who is quite dangerous when jealous. A series like His and Her Circumstances addresses the growing pains of young people with humor and a creative visual fabric while never betraying its core of emotional honesty.
And finally, there are the long-running series that brought anime to the forefront of so many a young impressionable consciousness and emblazoned it there, thanks to their endearing characters, expert storytelling, skilled artwork, and clever design, becoming household names in the process—Dragon Ball Z, Sailor Moon, Pokémon, Digimon, and, most recently, Naruto.
We sought to keep the one hundred titles in this book limited to those officially available in the U.S. Certainly, there are many more anime films and series in Japan that would make this list if we could see them here. It mustn’t be forgotten that what we see in America, even on the underground fan circuit, is only a small fraction of the anime that Japanese viewers have been exposed to in the last few decades. Even so, we couldn’t help but throw in a couple of favorites at the top of our everybody-must-see list of unlicensed anime, including Yoshikazu Yasuhiko’s stunning epic of Greek mythology, Arion, and Tomomi Mochizuki’s Ocean Waves, a highly sensitive and gently wrought high school drama made for TV by Studio Ghibli. In addition, we’ve included Mazinger Z, Devilman, Cutey Honey, Galaxy Express 999, and Captain Harlock, five seminal TV series from the 1970s which remain unlicensed for the American market, although movie and OAV spin-offs or remakes from each of these series have been licensed and distributed and are included in their entries in the book. Since, for instance, we were already doing Arcadia of My Youth, the Captain Harlock origin movie, it made sense to include the two preceding Harlock TV series as well.
As we worked on this book, new anime continued to appear that should have been considered, most notably Satoshi Kon’s Paprika, which premiered at the New York Film Festival in the fall of 2006 during the book’s final stages, and popular series like Bleach, which premiered on the Cartoon Network in October 2006. But any “best of” list is a moving target—it has to be, if the art form being examined is healthy and producing new work—so a cut-off point had to be decided on, and outstanding new anime, of which there will always be more, will no doubt form a list of future anime classics.
As for housekeeping matters: Proper names of Japanese origin are presented in the Western style, with the given name followed by the family name, without diacritical marks unless a specific spelling has been established or requested. Character names and show titles are referred to by the spellings used in their most common U.S.-licensed versions unless otherwise noted. All other Japanese words and author transliterations have been romanized in a modified Hepburn system that does not use macrons (“long signs”) to indicate extended vowels. Each cross-referenced title has been boldfaced in its first appearance within a review. In entries where multiple titles are listed as reviewed, a genre label is applied only if the genre for that title differs from that of the entry’s main title.
Between Panda and the Magic Serpent and Howl’s Moving Castle, this book spans almost fifty years of anime. We explain why the titles in it deserve to be treated as classic, with perhaps a little more reverence than some of the fan favorites and guilty pleasures you might already be attached to. Hopefully, we can also encourage you to discover previously unfamiliar titles or rediscover some you might have initially dismissed. As any list of classics or favorites can’t help but be individual, many worthy titles didn’t make our final cut (Boys Over Flowers and Fist of the North Star, where are you?), but genre gems and lesser-known titles could easily be the focus of subsequent video guides. There’s always more anime to discover, and our top one hundred might not be your top one hundred—but you won’t know that unless you watch, and see for yourself.