By Brian Camp
There are three major formats in which animated works are produced in Japan: movies, television series, and Original Animation Videos (OAV, sometimes also written as OVA). All three formats provide opportunities for notable work and each has advantages and limitations. Movies tend to have the biggest budgets, more fluid animation (i.e., a higher frame count), and more attention to detail, utilizing the greater resolution of the 35 mm photographic film stock for theater screens. Movies usually have a running time of ninety minutes to two hours, although some are considerably longer (the 163-minute Final Yamato) or shorter (various half-hour Digimon movies). Hayao Miyazaki’s work is made for theaters, as were most of the high-profile anime films of the last twenty years that have gained followings in the West, including Vampire Hunter D, Robot Carnival, Wicked City, Grave of the Fireflies, Akira, Ninja Scroll, Ghost in the Shell, X: The Movie, Perfect Blue, Metropolis, Millennium Actress, Tokyo Godfathers, Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, and Steamboy. The majority of anime movies released to theaters in Japan in the last two decades, however, tended not to be original movies, but spin-offs of such TV series as Doraemon, Dragon Ball Z, Sailor Moon, Pokémon, Digimon, Detective Conan, Inuyasha, and Naruto, to name just a few. Many of these movie spin-offs, in fact, are strong enough to be included in this book.
Original Animation Videos are sold directly to the home consumer or to video rental stores instead of being shown in theaters or on television. Individual OAV episodes are usually between thirty minutes to an hour and are sometimes stand-alone episodes and sometimes part of a series that can range from two episodes (Midnight Eye Goku) to thirteen (Tenchi Muyo!). The budgets are often higher per episode than that of the average TV episode, but much lower per minute of running time than that of a movie. In addition to Dallos (1983), the first OAV, other important titles in the development of this format were Megazone 23, Gunbuster, Bubblegum Crisis, Crying Freeman, Vampire Princess Miyu, Black Jack, and the original Patlabor episodes. The value of the OAV format is the flexibility it gives filmmakers to tell movie-length stories without spending the budget of a theatrical feature, and the freedom to experiment with different styles, since the production company calls the shots rather than the TV network or the movie distributor. For example, Blood: The Last Vampire (2000) was designed by Production I.G. (Ghost in the Shell) as a showcase for its new digital animation capability. The Hakkenden was a thirteen-part OAV series that took years to complete and tried out different styles within the body of the series, a tactic that infuriated fans who wanted more consistency, but intrigued those who cherish experimentation. OAV spin-offs of Tenchi Muyo!—itself an OAV series that spawned a TV series, and then movies and more OAVs—gave the characters alternate histories, and shifted the relationships around to great comic effect.
Another reason why OAV series originally flourished was because they could offer more adult elements without the oversight of a TV network or a movie studio. Sexual activity, nudity, violence, and gore were unleashed in many 1980s OAVs in ways that suggested a nation’s id bursting out of the chains of its superego. Crying Freeman offers an artful example of the kind of R-rated bloody violence, nudity, and graphic sexual activity that permeated a number of OAV series. Urotsukidoji (Legend of the Overfiend, 1987) took it even further, as the first of a genre that came to be known as “tentacle porn,” in which creatures used multiple phallic-shaped appendages to violate female victims. Urotsukidoji actually offered a compelling tale of a sprawling cosmic battle between humans and different levels of demons, but later examples of hentai, the term for sexually explicit anime, de-emphasized the storytelling and simply piled on the tentacle rape. Fortunately, this dark corner of the anime industry catered only to a small niche market within (and partly without) the larger market for anime in general.
A television series is the format of choice for a long story and can go on indefinitely, as long as there is an audience for it. The comic series Doraemon, about a robot cat from the future whose endless supply of gadgets makes life alternately pleasant and miserable for a hapless middle-class family, has been on the air at 8:30 a.m. every Sunday morning in Japan since 1979. Such long-running anime series tend to be based on continuing manga, or Japanese comics. Dragon Ball, from Akira Toriyama’s manga, debuted as a TV series in 1986 and, combined with its follow-up, Dragon Ball Z, was on the air for a total run of ten years. Comedy series based on manga by Rumiko Takahashi (Urusei Yatsura, Ranma 1⁄2) have run over one hundred episodes. Pokémon, a children’s series based on a video game, has managed to stay on the air since 1997, with its episode total nearing five hundred as of this writing.
However, many modern TV series are designed for a shorter length, thirteen or twenty-six episodes. The advantage to this format is tighter plotting, with no stipulation for open-ended conclusions to allow for continuation. Late-night time slots and satellite networks like WOWOW TV emerged in Japan in the late 1990s to offer shorter form series such as Boogiepop Phantom, Serial Experiments Lain, and Paranoia Agent. Longer stories, of course, can be coaxed out of the right material, and some of the most important and influential anime series began with the goal of one designated length, only to be cut short before their final episodes because of poor ratings. These include Space Battleship Yamato, which ended after twenty-six episodes in its first season instead of a planned fifty-two, and Mobile Suit Gundam, which closed out after forty-three episodes instead of fifty-two. (TV series are typically planned out in thirteen-week blocks, so fifty-two episodes is a full year’s run.) In each case, subsequent compilation movies released to theaters built up a new audience for the TV series and spurred production of sequel series.
Television anime in Japan sees a wide range of genres. There are multiple sports series devoted to baseball, volleyball, judo, tennis, soccer, auto racing, and boxing; romantic dramas about the emotional turbulence of young love; sagas of young people following their dreams despite great obstacles; and adaptations of great literature from around the world, all series that don’t feature a single giant robot, spaceship, cyborg, or Sailor Scout among them. Granted, a high proportion of the titles included in this book contain combat action or futuristic sci-fi thrills, largely because these genres tend to be the most popular and easily funded—and are most likely to be exported to the U.S.—but truth to tell, they also tend to attract the biggest talents in the industry. From anime’s inception, the science fiction genre has offered anime filmmakers the best opportunity to explore contemporary themes (including veiled critiques of Japanese social customs and mores) and to utilize innovative animation techniques. Mamoru Oshii’s films, Patlabor: The Movie, Patlabor 2, Ghost in the Shell, and Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, as well as their related TV series, are not just examples of great animation; they are great science fiction that encourage viewers to question exactly where our technological advances are taking us and how humanity will be affected.
TV series constitute the bulk of the most interesting creative and technical work in the anime industry in recent years, beginning with an astounding burst of innovative series led by Hideaki Anno’s Neon Genesis Evangelion in 1995 and followed, in a golden five-year period, by Cowboy Bebop, Rurouni Kenshin, Initial D, Master Keaton, His and Her Circumstances, Serial Experiments Lain, Bubblegum Crisis: Tokyo 2040, Blue Gender, and Boogiepop Phantom, not to mention the popular children’s series, Pokémon and Digimon. Each of these series carved out their own stylistic design strategies, from the mix of pop culture references and slacker noir in outer space in Cowboy Bebop to the free-spirited reinterpretation of Meiji-era Japan in Rurouni Kenshin to the blending of 2D and 3D animation in the auto-racing drama, Initial D, to the boundary-breaking use of nonstop visual metaphors and onscreen text in His and Her Circumstances. There were the surreal, high-tech intrusions of the Web into “real” life in Lain and the horror-noir motifs of Boogiepop. Even this small sampling suggests the sheer range of visual imagination at large in the animation industry in those years, a crucial period when hand-drawn cel animation was gradually replaced by 2D digital animation as the primary means of creating animation.
Successful entries in one format often spun off worthy sequels in another. Street Fighter II: The Movie spawned the arguably superior TV series, Street Fighter II-V and Rintaro’s X: The Movie led to Yoshiaki Kawajiri’s X: The TV Series, which allowed Clamp’s original manga story to breathe more fully and play out to a logical end. Fans who dismiss the stiff animation and simple designs in Pokémon should sample some of the Pokémon movies—nine, so far—to experience some of the finest storytelling, action animation, and quality design in children’s entertainment. A number of the movies singled out in this book were spun off from TV and OAV releases, including Tenchi Muyo in Love and Tenchi Forever; Kimagure Orange Road: I Want to Return to That Day and Summer’s Beginning; Arcadia of My Youth, the Captain Harlock origin story; Macross: Do You Remember Love?, a big-screen retelling of events from the Macross TV series; the two Patlabor movies; various Gundam movies; the five Yamato movies; and the first two Urusei Yatsura movies.
Filmmakers assigned to these movies often felt free enough to break away from the established designs of the series and try out different looks and uncharacteristic behaviors for the characters. Oshii’s Beautiful Dreamer put the characters of Urusei Yatsura into an eerie limbo foreshadowing the later Hollywood movie, Groundhog Day, and drew upon traditional Japanese myths and folklore. Tenchi Forever is a serious romantic drama done in a realistic style that veered sharply away from the comic antics of the Tenchi Muyo! OAV and TV series, providing a deeply moving treatment of unrequited love and selfish possession of another’s affections. The Rurouni Kenshin OAV, Reflection, adopted a whole new design strategy, aging the characters and showing what their final years were like, resulting in an emotionally wrenching spectacle that enhances the entire series.
All such artistic choices highlight the key element of style. How does a piece of animation look? What is the aesthetic sensibility behind the design? Is it meant to be realistic or stylized? How well do the designs reflect the characters, the tone of the story, and the mood of the setting? The right style goes a long way to enhancing a good story and turning it into a work of art. Manga creator Leiji Matsumoto lent a baroque quality to the designs of his late ’70s space sagas, Galaxy Express 999 and Space Pirate Captain Harlock, and the animated adaptations boasted a dreamlike mood that matched the timeless themes and sense of eternal longing of his stories that, in the case of Galaxy Express, turned what could have been a laughable cartoon about a passenger train that chugs through space into a glorious sci-fi parable about humanity’s hopes and flaws. Yet around the same time, Yoshiyuki Tomino was fashioning a very different kind of space saga in Mobile Suit Gundam, set firmly in a plausible real-world fabric of politics, rebellion, and civil strife, and focusing on realistic young characters who reacted quite believably to the sudden disruption of their comfortable world by a new cycle of warfare and bloodshed. The giant robotic suits the characters used for combat are designed to move and function like machines observing the laws of physics and gravity.
All facets of design come into play when creating anime, from the way the characters’ faces and bodies are shaped to the quality of color, from the different types of lighting to the way backgrounds are crafted. Back in 1963, Astro Boy offered extremely cartoonish characters set against an imaginative, streamlined futuristic background full of sci-fi concepts that would go on to become staples of anime. Kimba the White Lion used garish colors and jagged expressionistic shapes to craft a vivid jungle backdrop for a story that used a mix of comical animal characters with more realistic ones. Space Battleship Yamato, also designed by Matsumoto, employed a serious style based on postwar American comic books like the ones Matsumoto read as a child for its interplanetary saga, with the title craft, a sunken World War II ship rebuilt for space flight, painstakingly executed in exquisite detail in hand-drawn cel animation.
Later, nightmarish sci-fi noir like Yoshiaki Kawajiri’s Wicked City used bold lines, darker colors and a nighttime cityscape cloaked in clouds and haze. Toshihiro Hirano’s Vampire Princess Miyu told a haunting, eerily beautiful tale of a modern-day vampire using design motifs and sounds from traditional Japanese art and culture, including Kabuki theatre. In the Golgo 13 films, Osamu Dezaki broke up dramatic scenes into close-ups of telling details and oblique cutaways. In Evangelion, Hideaki Anno frequently bracketed his characters with shots of the urban signposts of their immediate environment—skylines, streetlights, power lines, escalators, parking lots, traffic stops—along with accompanying sounds, including the persistent buzz of insects, before sending them miles beneath the surface to NERV HQ. Shinichiro Watanabe’s Samurai Champloo was set two hundred years in the past but sought to make its clever flights of historical fancy more relevant to a modern audience by employing all sorts of playful design touches and contemporary visual and audio tricks with assorted deejay and hiphop references, none of which detracted from the series’ genuine respect for its historical subjects or its encouragement of viewers to further research the numerous real-life figures and incidents cited.
So whether it’s the slow, graceful showers of flower petals in Rintaro’s works; Katsuhiro Otomo’s obsession with out-of-control technology; the artfully crafted ultraviolence of Kawajiri; the lanky slacker heroes in outer space or distant past in Shinichiro Watanabe’s shows; the computer-enhanced “vision” of the cyborgs in Mamoru Oshii’s films; or the seamless cutaways to birds in flight or water coursing in practically every other scene by Osamu Dezaki, creators of anime use the full palette of their art to create the most distinct body of animated work the world has ever seen.
The end result of all this effort is something that animation doesn’t often achieve outside of Japan: capturing the experience of the characters in a manner usually accomplished only by the best live-action filmmakers. We feel what the characters are going through and how their mental and emotional states are affected by what’s going on around them. In Mobile Suit Gundam, fifteen-year-old Amuro Ray cracks under the pressure of being thrust into the role of Gundam pilot in battle after battle without a break and we feel every bit of his anguish in a set of realistically staged peer encounters inserted into the middle of a giant robot combat spectacle. An extensive bag of avant-garde visual tricks is brought to bear in His and Her Circumstances to show the private, often comic turmoil that lies beneath the surface of the carefully crafted façades of two top students struggling to maintain a public image. In series as diverse as Space Battleship Yamato, Kimagure Orange Road, Tenchi Universe, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Rurouni Kenshin, and Pokémon, scenes are devoted to the characters’ downtime, to moments spent just basking quietly in each other’s company and not having to engage in constant banter or action.
Initial D may have boasted a series of exciting mountain auto races charting the unexpected victories of a young driver named Takumi, yet the drama is not about the suspense of whether he wins, but rather his experience of the race and what’s happening inside his head during the course of it. How does he win? How does he put the knowledge gained from past races to good use? How does he incorporate the subtle advice of his father, a former downhill champ? How does the racing affect his character and his relationships? The sequences with his father, friends, and girlfriend are just as engrossing as the races. We’re witnessing the spectacle of Takumi coming into his own. There may be plenty of edge-of-the-seat moments along the way, but the creators are less interested in making a racing series than in a coming-of-age story with appeal far beyond a specific subculture and regional setting.
One doesn’t have to watch a series solely for what “happens,” in the strict narrative sense of the word. The characters’ comic and dramatic exchanges or their movements through colorful and interesting environments can provide distinct pleasures apart from any role they may or may not have in the advancement of the plot. Many of the series in the book offer story arcs or individual episodes that can be enjoyed out of context, even if they’re part of a continuing narrative. In Rurouni Kenshin, the cast has wide-ranging adventures in Tokyo, Kyoto, and various other parts of Meiji-era Japan. Samurai Champloo boasts a picaresque “road trip” approach to 18th-century Japan, with lots of unpredictable side stories. Street Fighter II-V features several self-contained arcs devoted to the young martial artists’ adventures in different countries. The second half of Tenchi Universe is a compelling space saga packed with suspense, but the first half is all fun and games. Even in the children’s series Digimon, one can ignore the digital world entirely and pull out delightful individual episodes devoted to the characters’ adventures in the streets of Tokyo with their Digimon.
One needn’t watch a series solely for its ending, either. If a series conclusion proves disappointing, one can still revel in all the great episodes leading up to it. The original Yamato and Gundam series had rushed endings because of the TV network’s decision to cut back the number of episodes, but they remain groundbreaking series. Many fans were put off by the last two episodes of Neon Genesis Evangelion and their sudden shift into abstract visuals and intimate, often grueling soul-searching. One is free to take issue with director Hideaki Anno’s decision to end the series in this manner, but it would be a mistake to dismiss the entire work as a result and give up on one of the most sophisticated and heartfelt treatments of adolescent angst in any medium. To cite another series by Anno, His and Her Circumstances also comes with a controversial conclusion, but not one created by Anno, because he walked off the series after eighteen episodes, much to its detriment. The last six episodes are truly disappointing, but the fact remains that the first eighteen constitute one of the very best filmed treatments of high school life—ever! The action in these episodes wasn’t designed to build up to a particular, much-anticipated resolution, it was about the experience of the characters within the unique situations they encountered and their interactions with each other. It was about the journey, not the destination.
Not all great anime is meant to be understood on first viewing. Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence resists full comprehension even after multiple viewings. It’s still a great movie, a work of beautiful art and intricate design, and a powerful treatise on humanity’s persistent compulsion to re-create and replicate itself, but there are scenes and concepts that not everyone is going to grasp right away. Anno’s conclusion to Evangelion puzzled many fans, as did the refashioned ending found in the subsequent movie, End of Evangelion, even though it was made specifically in response to fan outcry. Even so, these endings are both great works and take the medium in new directions beyond the scope of anything that came before them. You don’t always have to understand something to enjoy it. A work of great art in a museum or gallery is not always easily understood but one can still be gripped by it. It would be useful to consider some of the works featured here that way.
Now go watch Akira again. You just might get it this time. And even if you don’t, it’s still a masterpiece. Trust us.