F

F

1988. TV series. dir: Koichi Mashimo, Katsuyoshi Yatabe, Kunihisa Sugishima, Nobuyasu Furukawa. scr: Hideo Takayashiki. des: Masamitsu Kudo, Tomohiko Sato. ani: Masamitsu Kudo, Ryunosuke Otonashi. mus: Wataru Yahagi, Masaru Hoshi. prd: Kitty, Fuji TV. 25 mins. x 31 eps.

After the death of his mother, Gunma Akagi discovers his real father is a professional racer. After befriending pit boss Tamotsu, Gunma is inspired to join his father’s world and becomes a driver himself, staying at his grandmother’s place in Tokyo. The “F” stands for “formula,” and with a fish out of water, a surrogate family, and a sporting quest, formula is exactly what you get.

F3: Frantic, Frustrated and Female *

1994. jpn: Nageki no Kenko Yuryoji. aka: The Lament of an Otherwise Perfectly Healthy Girl, Ménage à Trois. Video. dir: Masakazu Akan. scr: N/C. des: Koji Hamaguchi. ani: Koji Hama­guchi. mus: Bang Heads. prd: Pink Pineapple, KSS. 30 mins. x 3 eps.

A sapphic satire about Hiroe, who is unable to achieve orgasm with her boyfriend and seeks a remedy for her teenage frustrations. Her sister, Mayaka, helps with Chinese medicine, scientific inventions, and even a lesbian biker orgy. The trilogy ends with a haunted-house spoof in which demonic possession allows Mayaka to grow a penis for a replay of the hermaphroditic sex of La Blue Girl. The script backtracks on the incestuous characters of episode one, later claiming that they only look as if they are related. Based on the manga by Wan Yan A Gu Da, published in Penguin Club. NL

Fabled Underground People, The

1989. jpn: Kore ga Uwasa no Chiteijin. Video. dir: Kazuyoshi Hirose. scr: Hisaichi Ishii. des: Hisaichi Ishii. ani: Kazumi Nonaka. mus: Yukadan. prd: Balk. 30 mins. x 2 eps.

In this spin-off from the Action Comics manga by My Neighbors the Yamadas–creator Hisaichi Ishii’s serial, the Underground People desire to leave their overcrowded cavern and seize control of the surface world, but they never quite succeed. A second episode, Christmas Aid, soon followed, in which the brainless Undergrounders’ second futile escape attempt is set to music by the popular group Yukadan. The first volume also included two unrelated stories by Ishii: 101 Ninja and Ken-chan’s Space Exploration Adventure.

Fafner *

2004 jpn: Sokyu no Fafner. aka: Fafner of the Blue Sky, Dead Aggressor. TV series. dir: Nobuyoshi Habara, Junki Honma. scr: Kazuki Yamanobe. des: Hisashi Hirai, Naohiro Washio. ani: Akio Takami, Akira Takahashi, Akitoshi Maeda, Atsushi Hasebe, Genichiro Kondo, Hideyuki Motohashi, Satotake Kikuchi, Shinichi Yamaoka, Sunao Shiomi, Taeko Hori, Takuya Matsumura, Toru Kitago. mus: Tsuneyoshi Saito. prd: King Records, Xebec, TV Tokyo. 25 mins. x 26 eps. (TV).

The peaceful lives of the people of Tatsumiya Island are shattered when they hear a voice echoing from the sky and a mysterious ray of light opens the sky, allowing an invading Festum alien to arrive. A subterranean command center springs into action and the citizens take shelter as fighter planes and missile defense systems deploy on the apparently sleepy island. A giant robot weapon, Fafner, has been concealed on the island and could be deployed to fight the Festum forces, but its schoolgirl pilot, Karin Kurumae, is missing. Doctor Makabe wants his son, standoff-ish high school boy Kazuki, to take her place. Kazuki’s childhood friend Soshi Minashiro, son of the island’s chief citizen, is also drawn into the war, which has been raging for some time in the outside world and has decimated the population. Japan is already gone, and Tatsumiya Island is a rogue nation, continually under threat from attack, since the “new” UN wants the Fafner for itself at any cost. The result is a show that takes the transforming city of Gerry Anderson’s Stingray (1964) and asks what life would be like for the inhabitants, particularly if they discovered that the outside world was a lie in the style of The Animatrix or Megazone 23 and that they had been bred specifically for saving the world from alien attack. There are also shades here of John Wyndham’s Midwich Cuckoos, later filmed as Village of the Damned. Meanwhile, a ragtag band of impromptu defenders of the Earth is forced to jury-rig a battle plan à la Macross, while the combatants wonder if there are other defensive islands out there shrouded in equal secrecy, and if there are, whether they plan on helping out any time soon. The Fafner, named after a giant who transformed into a dragon in Richard Wagner’s Das Rheingold (1862), is dark and neutral-colored, while the aliens are golden and gorgeous, hammering home the message that “not everything beautiful is a friend to man.” You’ve seen Evangelion, right?

A prequel, Fafner: Single Program—Right of Left, was announced in 2005. V

Fairground in the Stars

1989. jpn: Hoshi no Yuenchi. Video. dir: Nobuhiro Aihara. scr: Nobuhiro Aihara. des: Ryutaro Nakamura. ani: Junichi Tokaibayashi. mus: Koichi Hirai. prd: Gakken. 18 mins.

A kindly teacher demonstrates origami to his elementary class, but when he gives a paper crane to a child, it is stolen from him by Takeshi, the class bully. Takeshi discovers that the crane is really a talking spaceship that takes him and his friends to visit a fairground in the stars. A girl falls through a hole into Space Hell, and the children cooperate to rescue her. Takeshi wakes up, wondering if it was all a dream. The next day, he returns the magic crane to its rightful owner. This tale is from Rainbow Across the Pacific’s Daisaku Ikeda, the leader of the Buddhist Soka Gakkai organization, although it lacks a particularly religious or moral message, playing like a sanitized version of Night Train to the Stars. Note the presence of future Serial Experiments Lain–director Nakamura as a character designer. Ikeda also wrote Prince of Snow Country.

Fairy King

1988. jpn: Yosei O. Video. dir: Ka­tsuhisa Yamada. scr: Tomoko Konparu. des: Atsuo Noda. ani: Atsuo Noda. mus: Yuriko Nakamura. prd: Madhouse. 60 mins.

Sickly high school student Taka journeys to Hokkaido in search of a magical cure and falls in with Khoo Fu-Ling, the king of the fairies. Ninfidia, the land of the fairies, is under attack from the evil Queen Mab, and Taka must save it. Based on the 1978 girls’ manga by Ryoko Yamagishi, which incorporated elements of legends of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, as well as scraps of Celtic, Greek, and Ainu myth.

Fairytale Warrior Little Red Riding Hood

2005. jpn: Otogi Jushi Akazukin. TV series, video. dir: Tetsuro Araki. scr: Shoji Yonemura. des: Satoshi Tazaki. ani: N/C. mus: Toshio Masuda. prd: Konami, Madhouse. 30 mins. x 3 eps. (v), 24 mins. x ?? eps. (TV).

After a sleep of a thousand years, Cendrillon the evil witch wakes once more and embarks on a quest for power that leads her to Sota Suzukaze, an otherwise normal Japanese boy who “holds the power to the seal”—whatever it means, it’s catnip for evil sorceresses. In order to thwart Cendrillon’s schemes, Little Red Riding Hood and Val the silver wolf are sent from the world of fairy tales to our own time. CardCaptors–like high jinks soon ensue. The name of the antagonist also reflects fairy tales, using antiquated terms for the characters better known today as Cinderella and also Hansel, from Hansel and Gretel, the Pied Piper of Hamelin, and others from Grimm’s Fairy Tales.

Fake *

1996. Video. dir: Akira Suzuki. scr: Akinori Endo. des: Nagisa Miyazaki. ani: Nagisa Miyazaki, Tomo Omota. mus: Kix-S. prd: Nippon Columbia. 60 mins.

Sanami Mato’s original manga is a Lethal Weapon pastiche about fey New York cop Ryo being forced to partner up with Dee, a streetwise macho detective who wants to bed him. For this anime teaser to drag in new readers, Dee and Ryo are packed off to a British country hotel where guests are being murdered, and the supporting cast of the original manga drop by when they’re least needed. While Dee’s trying to seduce Ryo and idly mulling over the details of unsolved local killings, their teenage sidekicks serve little purpose except to play happy families with Ryo and Dee as mommy and daddy. The children turn what could have been a queer case of Agatha Christie into a pointless holiday farce, with much swapping of rooms and indoor roller-blading—because it’s raining outside.

Ryo and Dee are the world’s worst detectives, for whom solving a case involves gossiping for a while and waiting for the criminals to reveal themselves. Faced with a murder case that the real police would solve in roughly ten seconds, Fake throws in more cameos from the manga to pad out its running time, including the detectives’ future boss, Berkley Rose, and Dee’s unrequited admirer, JJ, who waste a few more minutes with comedy business before the script reluctantly returns to the murders at hand.

Fake often walks an uneasy line between comedy and tragedy. A bit of cop-on-cop banter fits fine with mayhem and chaos, but not when people are watching their friends die from multiple stab wounds. As one might expect from a story with its pedigree, it ultimately has too many characters and too little time, making the murder mystery unengaging and turning an original romantic farce into humdrum formula. Far from breaking new ground in gay characterization, Ryo is simply a man playing a stereotypical female role; he gets to be an intuitive sidekick, a maternal figure, an unattainable romantic prize, and, as the show rushes to an insane conclusion, even a damsel in distress.

FALSE FRIENDS

False Friends (French: faux amis) are translation problems where words in two different languages appear to be alike, but have different meanings. We use the term in reference to the growing number of animated works that look like anime, but aren’t.

Our definition of anime is culturally inspired. We count a work as anime if it can reasonably be described as animation from Japan, with a high number of Japanese creatives working in the upper echelons of production: director, writer, designers, key animators, and music. That this is even an issue is not recognized among the general Japanese public, where anime refers to all animation. It is only within the industry itself that creators distinguish between animation from Japan and animation that is not. Some unscrupulous distributors choose to ignore the distinction, hoping instead that fans are stupid enough to buy literally anything if it has the word anime daubed on it.

Outside Japan, the ethnic origin of anime creators has been an issue of some importance. In the first waves of anime abroad between the 1950s and 1970s, anime’s Japanese origins were often deliberately occluded—Japanese credit listings were replaced with the names of “writers” and “directors” who had merely adapted preexisting Japanese material. Tokyo landmarks regularly appeared in Gigantor, but were renamed—a Japanese origin in the early days of TV often seems like something to be ashamed of, with evidence that should be removed as carefully and completely as possible. It is for this reason that one still meets French people who do not realize that Ulysses 31 was made in Japan and Koreans who think that Doraemon is a Seoul native.

However, the rise of anime on video in the 1980s brought a radical change to this perception. In the science fiction of William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, Japanesquerie became the new cool, and in the wake of the subsequent anime video boom, a Japanese origin became an actual selling point. It is at this juncture that false friends become an issue—the authors recall a dozen different meetings over the last decade with companies keen to get involved in “anime,” which inevitably lead to the big question: “Does it have to be Japanese?” The rationale being, among the world’s shallower producers, that if they can persuade a local artist to draw them a picture of a girl with big eyes who carries a gun, this will make something immediately “anime,” and save them the messy business of having to deal with the Japanese.

Japanese companies, of course, have long farmed out their work to foreign companies in Korea, China, Thailand, and the Philippines—countries that not only have animation industries of their own, but also hope to profit from the sudden popularity of Asian animation abroad. So it is that several Korean cartoons have been released in the West by anime labels hoping that their ethnic origin would pass the average consumer by. Lee Hyun-se’s Armageddon (Amagaedun Uzu, 1996) seemed deliberately designed to fool rights buyers at film festivals—presenting what was for the time an impressive CG opening, that fast collapsed into a dull sci-fi battle. Similarly, Sang Il-sim’s Red Hawk: Weapon of Death (1995) was a crass and derivative Fist of the North Star pastiche. Other False Friends are built on connections and resources established by people in anime, such as Andy Orjuela’s Lady Death (2004), written by Carl Macek, or Andy Chan and Tsui Hark’s A Chinese Ghost Story: The Animation (Xiao Qian, 1997), which featured a lead animator poached from the bona fide anime business: Tetsuya Endo, director of Mojacko.

It is, of course, only natural that an art form as commercially successful as anime should inspire others. When hired to direct Grandma and Her Ghosts (Mofa Ama, 1998), Taiwanese director Wang Shaudi went shopping for inspiration, and did so at a time when several Studio Ghibli works had been released into the Taiwanese market, resulting not only in story elements but also a mood and an elegiac quality seemingly lifted from My Neighbor Totoro and Kiki’s Delivery Service. A similar aspiration toward a Studio Ghibli style can be discerned in Lee Syong-kang’s Korean movie, My Beautiful Marie (Mari Iyagi, 2002), particularly in its depiction of a modern world ignorant of nearby numinous nature.

Mainland China has its own strong animation tradition, particularly stemming from the Shanghai Animation Studio, the foundation of which can be at least partly accredited to the Japanese expat Tadahito Mochinaga. Recent years have seen Chinese attempts to learn from the commercial success not only of anime, but also of Disney cartoons, as demonstrated by such experiments as Chang Guang-xi’s Lotus Lantern (Baolian deng, 1999). The acquisition of Hong Kong in 1997 also brought the vast labor market of the Mainland into more direct contact with the advanced technology of the former colony, leading to such hybrids as Toe Yuen’s My Life as McDull (McDull Gushi, 2001), an avowedly Cantonese movie that still managed to recall Hello Kitty and My Neighbors the Yamadas. Meanwhile, Korean animation continues to aspire toward anime’s status abroad, with movies such as Kim Moon-saeng’s extended CGI pastiche of Akira, Sky Blue (aka Wonderful Days, 2003).

False Friendship can also extend both ways. Serials such as The Powerpuff Girls (1998), Hi Hi Puffy AmiYumi (2004), and Kappa Mikey (2006) were conceived in imitation of anime, but then exported back to Japan. Nowhere is this more apparent than in The Animatrix, in which the work of genuine anime creators rubs shoulders with high quality works in an anime style, by creators such as Peter Chung, whose earlier Aeon Flux (1995) was itself a homage to Japanese animation.

Ultimately, a good film is a good film, regardless of where it came from. We hope that English-language distributors will accord non-Japanese creators the respect they are due, and hype them for what they are, and not for what they aren’t—a “Korean anime” is an oxymoron. The debate over False Friends is likely to continue, as skill levels rise in non-Japanese countries, and increasingly larger amounts of animation work on supposedly “Japanese” films is farmed out abroad: even acknowledged “Japanese” classics like Ghost in the Shell feature extensive contributions from non-Japanese animators.

Family of Debauchery *

2002. jpn: Haitoku no Shojo. aka: Corruption of a Girl. Video. dir: Mikan Furukawa. scr: N/C. des: N/C. ani: N/C. mus: N/C. prd: Five Ways. 29 mins. x 2 eps.

Hiroko is going to work for a rich family as tutor to a young girl named Yuki—compare to Blue Experience. When Hiroko reaches their beautiful mansion, Yuki’s elder sister Shizuka drugs her tea, causing her to lose consciousness. When she wakes, she is naked and tied to a bed, and Yuki and Shizuka are trying out various sex toys on her. Just as Hiroko starts to enjoy this, it’s revealed that Yuki is not, in fact, a girl, but a very pretty young boy. Only the second of the two episodes was released, as the first featured a sequence in which a bound mother was raped in a steel cage by a dog, which was considered too risky even for the jaded audience of Japanese animated erotica. LNV

Fancy Lala

1998. jpn: Maho no Stage Fancy Lala. aka: Magical Stage Fancy Lala. TV series. dir: Masahiro Omori, Takeshi Yamazaki, Miko Shima. scr: Tomomi Mochizuki. des: Akemi Takada. ani: Masako Onishi, Kazuhiro Sasaki. mus: Michiru Oshima. prd: Studio Pierrot, TV Tokyo. 25 mins. x 26 eps.

Miho is an eight-year-old girl with a secret: using her two magical pets, Pig and Mog, and her magical sketchpad, she can turn into the beautiful teenage fashion model known as Fancy Lala. As might be expected in a rehash of Creamy Mami, she attracts the attention of 19-year-old local wiseguy Hiroya, who falls in love with her adult version, not realizing she is only a child underneath.

Fantastic Children *

2005. TV series. dir: Takashi Nakamura. scr: Hideki Mitsui, Takashi Nakamura. des: Takashi Nakamura. ani: Miyuki Nakamura, Koichi Maruyama, Shingo Ishikawa et al. mus: Koji Ueno. prd: Nippon Animation. 25 mins. x 26 eps.

For 500 years, there have been legends all over Europe about sightings of mysterious white-haired children, often alleged to have a maturity beyond their years as well as magical powers. They are the “children of Vefoele,” for whom a pallid look like mutants from Akira is the price of immortality, since they are reborn time and again until one, a boy named Palza, grows tired of the cosmic circle of life and decides he just wants one rebirth as a human. Meanwhile, on Papan Island, orphans Chito and Helga are on a quest to find a mysterious crystal that they need in order to regain their fading memories. Helga has drawn a place she doesn’t know; the pair leave their orphanage to look for it, but they are hunted and Helga is captured. They are rescued by another boy called Thoma, who takes the pair to a secret island only he knows of. Helga is beginning to fall for Thoma, but she is confused by feelings for a fantasy man. She doesn’t know she is really the incarnation of Princess Tina of planet Girishia, 200 million light years from Earth. The fantasy man is her lover from an earlier life. When Tarlant, one of the Vefoele, comes to the island, she begins to remember. A story created by writer/director Nakamura in search of “an old-fashioned adventure,” with more than a few nods to the reincarnation romance of Sailor Moon, and publicity materials that push its parent studio’s earlier involvement with Future Boy Conan.

FANTASY AND FAIRY TALES

As early cartoons were regarded solely as a children’s medium, fairy tales have formed a natural part of their repertoire—often with a discernable tension between local stories that have domestic sales potential and “international” ones that offer better profit, but also higher risks. All information about animation development before the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake is necessarily vague, but the best contender for the “first” folktale anime is Seitaro Kitayama’s early version of Monkey and the Crab (1917). The following year saw anime’s first use of ancient folklore for commercial ends, with the Tortoise and the Hare (one of Aesop’s Fables) adapted into a one-reel children’s entertainment by Ikuo Oishi, and sponsored by Morinaga Chocolate.

Anime has often fought its childish reputation with choices of worthy adaptations, such as the Chinese Journey to the West, first appearing as Noburo Ofuji’s Songoku Monogatari (1926), and the Arabian Nights, from which the tale of Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves (Yonjunin no Tozoku, 1928) became a 17-minute epic in the hands of Takeo Ueno. The film’s producer, one Toshio Suzuki, is no relation to the man of the same name who produced so many Ghibli films half a century later.

During the rise of Japanese nationalism in the pre-war years, there was an increased concentration on Japanese Folk Tales, along with tales of piracy and anthropomorphic animals. In the midst of post-war deprivation, a notable early fantasy is Masao Kumagawa’s Magic Pen (Maho no Pen, 1946), in which Su-chan, an impoverished boy in the ruins of Tokyo, dreams that the blue-eyed doll he finds (it is a black-and-white film, but the synopsis is keen to stress that the doll has blue eyes) comes to life and draws him an apple with a magic pen. The pen’s magic causes the apple to become real, prompting the pair to take the pen and draw a new building amid the post-war desolation, in a touching allegory of hope and reconstruction.

As Japan rebuilt, anime suffered an infestation of cute animals, including Kenzo Masaoka’s Tora the Stray Cat (Suteneko Tora-chan, 1947) and its sequel Tora’s Bride (Tora-chan to Hanayome, 1948), the Kindai Company’s Fox Circus (Kitsune no Circus, 1948) and Hideo Furusawa’s Sports Tanuki (Sports Kotanuki, 1949). Anime’s first major post-war works drew on Asian inspirations, with Princess of Baghdad (Baghdad-hime, 1948), followed by Panda and the Magic Serpent (1958). With a return to relative prosperity, the anime movie world continued to avoid non-Asian fairy tales, presumably preferring to supply local demand rather than compete with more lavish Disney imports. This period saw another Journey to the West (1960), alongside The Littlest Warrior (1961), Woof Woof 47 Ronin (1963), and Little Prince and the Eight-Headed Dragon (1963).

It was only with the coming of TV, and the realization that foreign subjects could lead to foreign sales, that anime turned once more to European sources, including movies of the Tales of Hans Christian Andersen (1968) and Puss in Boots (1969). The sheer amount of material generated for television ensured that fairy tale anime enjoyed much greater variety. “Mundane” fiction was given a more fantastic look with anthropomorphic animals, as in Treasure Island (1965), while Japanese fairy tales, now dismissed as old hat, were given a new lease on life through their use as inspirations in shows such as Little Goblin (1968) and Spooky Kitaro (1968). But fantasy remained a difficult genre to spot in the 1970s, as anime fought against the eternal onslaught of sci-fi toy tie-ins. Only the “magical girl shows,” such as Little Witch Sally (1966) and Marvelous Melmo (1971), might reasonably be regarded as “fantasy,” although fantastic elements formed part of almost all anime by this point.

Despite being often regarded as a fairy tale franchise, surprisingly few of the stories in the World Masterpiece Theater (1975) actually are. Genuine fairy tales of Japanese origin made it to the screen in Heart of the Red Bird (1979). But in a period in which Disney animation was widely regarded to be in a creative slump, anime began to make bold forays back into Western material, with Grimm’s Fairy Tales (1987).

By the time Disney had reclaimed the fairy tale high ground with Beauty and the Beast (1991), Japanese animators were confident enough to compete with full-length serials of Snow White (1994) and Cinderella (1996). Meanwhile, new fantasy anime developed a narrative style inspired not by myths or novels, but by the setups of role-playing games, as seen in Record of Lodoss War (1990) and Slayers (1995).

Hayao Miyazaki’s My Neighbor Totoro (1988) and Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989) reestablished a modernized fairy tale style in cinema theaters, while elsewhere the subtexts of fantasy were exploited for different ends in Urotsukidoji (1987) and its imitators. In the last 15 years movie theaters have continued to offer genuine family entertainment, with the most noteworthy works of recent times being Studio Ghibli’s Princess Mononoke (1997) and Spirited Away (2001), both revisiting and refashioning old stories with a personal touch that is pure Miyazaki. Fantasy on television often includes liminal dramas that transport youthful protagonists to new worlds, such as Escaflowne (1996) or Haibane Renmei (2002). Shows such as Petite Princess Yucie (2002) combine the “magical girl” setups of recent times with the sumptuousness of old-school fairy tales, while Loveless (2005) cleverly uses anthropomorphic characteristics, or rather their disappearance, as an allegory of the loss of childhood innocence. Meanwhile, fantasy on video comprises rereleases of both the TV and movie media discussed above, but also a predictable concentration on private titillation. The sexual subtexts of fairy tales, with their allegories of taboos and fears, are often presented as physical plot elements in straight-to-video anime—it is only a short step from dungeons-and-dragons to tits-and-tentacles.

Far East of Eden

1990. jpn: Tengai Makyo. aka: Evil World beyond Heaven. Video. dir: Oji Hiroi, Toshio Takeuchi. scr: Toshio Takeuchi. des: Kotaro Tsujino. ani: Yasuo Otsuka. mus: Kohei Tanaka. prd: TMS. 50 mins. x 2 eps.

In the alternate world of Xipangu, hero Jiraiya defeats local pirates and heads off in search of the fabled treasure of the death god, Hiruko, but Jiraiya is opposed by an equally evil sorcerer. Joining forces with the beautiful princess, Yuki (who has the power to seal Hiruko away), Jiraiya must confront a gang of renegades, led by a female impersonator, that intends to conquer the entire kingdom. Based on a game for the PC Engine console, designed by Red Company, who would eventually make Sakura Wars with director Hiroi. Though the vampiric Hiruko is defeated at the climax, in the original, the end-of-game boss was Masakado—see Doomed Megalopolis. Note the presence of Castle of Cagliostro’s Yasuo Otsuka as animation director and a crew roster that brought a great look to an otherwise forgettable cash-in.

Fatal Fury *

1992. jpn: Battle Fighters: Garo Densetsu. aka: Battle Fighters: Legend of the Hungry Wolf; Mark of the Wolf. Movie, TV special. dir: Kazuhiro Furuhashi, Masami Obari, Hiroshi Fukutomi. scr: Takashi Yamada. des: Masami Obari. ani: Masami Obari. mus: Toshihiko Sato, Toshiro Masuda. prd: Asahi International, Pony Canyon, Fuji TV, NAS. 45 mins. (TVm) 73 mins. (TVm), 90 mins. (m).

As with its contemporary Street Fighter II, this adaptation of a beat-’em-up console game struggles and ultimately fails to make the jump to non-interactive media, though not without some incidental pleasures on the way. Viz’s dub is perfectly serviceable, albeit with some unplaceably alien accents from the supporting cast that only add to the fun as one tries to guess whether someone is supposed to come from Oirlend or Scutlund. With overmuscled men meeting, greeting, indulging in strange acts, and then parting, it has a strangely homoerotic charge, peppered with sanctimonious moral messages about the nobility of fighting for what is right but without questioning whether anyone should be fighting at all.

FF: Legend of the Hungry Wolf (1992) sets up the original back story to the game, in which Terry and Andy Bogard witness their father’s murder and become bare-knuckle fighters, in a tournament plot not unlike Tekken, eventually avenging him by defeating his murderer Geese Howard. Mere months later in FF: The New Battle (1993), Howard’s half-brother, Wolfgang Krauser, returns to challenge Terry. With time out to reunite a street urchin with his mother in a halfhearted subplot, Terry soon hunts Krauser down to a showdown in a German castle, while other characters pop out of the woodwork for a few rounds to please their fans. The franchise reached theaters at its peak with FF: The Motion Picture (1994), which dumped at least part of the “you killed my father” plotting in favor of an Indiana Jones rip-off. Laocoön Gaudeamus is searching for the legendary Armor of Mars (compare to Jackie Chan’s Armor of God, 1987), lost by his ancestors during the Crusades. His estranged sister, Sulia, hires Terry to stop him before he can use the armor’s magical powers, in a plot that presages Spriggan, though it was too late to save the tired and formulaic FF franchise. V

Feather Stares at the Dark, A *

2003. jpn: Yami wo Mitsumeru Hane. Movie dir: Naoyuki Tsuji. scr: N/C. des: Naoyuki Tsuji. ani: Naoyuki Tsuji. mus: N/C. prd: N/C. 17 mins.

Screened in Cannes in 2004 and at several North American festivals, this independent short film is made by Tsuji’s “charcoal anime process”—a single charcoal drawing is photographed, partly erased, and reworked for the next frame. It took the director eight years to make 17 minutes of black and white film by erasing and reworking his first image over 13,500 times. He started making his own films in 1992, at age 20. Other works include 1994’s For The Lost Legend (9 mins) 1995’s Law of Dream (6 mins), and 2005’s 13-minute Trilogy About Clouds (Mittsu no Kumo), screened in London and out on DVD with four of his other short films.

Fencer of Minerva *

1995. jpn: Minerva no Kenshi. aka: Knight of Minerva. Video. dir: Takahiro Okao, Tadayoshi Kusaka. scr: Sukehiro Tomita, Yuji Kishino. des: Takashi Wada. ani: Tadashi Hirota, Nobuaki Shirai. mus: Kanae Wada. prd: All Products, Beam Entertainment. 45 mins. x 5 eps.

The beautiful, willful Princess Diana is betrothed to a handsome prince but is captured by nomads, who refuse to believe her royal protestations because out of her clothes she looks just like any other wench. After a brief initiation in the amatory arts, she is rescued from a gang bang by a masked man, her childhood sweetheart Prince Sho, who is returning to claim his rightful kingdom from the man who usurped it, Princess Diana’s evil father.

Believe it or not, from the tacky designs that replace original ideas with two-legged horses and flying piranhas (sorry, water lizards) to USMC’s faithfully camp translation of some of the world’s worst dialogue, Fencer of Minerva genuinely is so bad that it’s good. But what do you expect when the Cream Lemon team try to imitate B-movie sword-and-sandal fantasy, complete with lost kingdoms, lovably chauvinist heroes, and breathless slave-girls in diaphanous veils? A guilty pleasure, as if John Norman had written an episode of Record of Lodoss War. Compare to the similarly risible Erotic Torture Chamber. NV

F-Force *

2001. jpn: Asgaldh: Waikyoku no Testament. aka: Asgard: The Torture Testament. Video. dir: Yusaku Aoi. scr: Hajime Yamaguchi. des: Naoki Yamauchi. ani: Motokazu Murakami, Naoki Yamauchi. mus: Hiroaki Sano. prd: Discovery. 30 mins. x 3 eps.

Wandering knight Ash saves a young damsel from violation at the hands/tentacles of some evil monsters. Accompanying her back to her home village of Tylling, he discovers that she is the chief’s daughter, and the last fair maiden left after successive attacks and kidnappings by the creatures of Demon Mountain—who not only steal local girls, but also local girls’ underwear. Hearing that similar creatures have already caused a distant continent to sink beneath the waves (presumably not through the weight of panties alone), Ash calls in favors from fellow adventurers to defend the village. When they arrive, they unsurprisingly turn out to be a bunch of girls, differentiated and attired with all the stereotypical predictability of a computer game, including one in a school uniform, another dolled up as a Chinese waitress, and a potty-mouthed cowgirl with an inappropriate New Jersey accent in the English dub. Any resemblance to Seven Samurai soon passes. Based on the computer game Asgaldh, by Zone, and one of the Discovery Series. LNV

Fifth Ice Age

1967. jpn: Subarashii Sekai Ryoko: Alaska no Tabi: Daigo Hyogaki. aka: Wonderful World Travel: Alaskan Journey: Fifth Ice Age. TV special. dir: Masahiro Mori. scr: Mamoru Sasaki. des: Hiroshi Manabe. ani: N/C. mus: Kiyoshi Iwami. prd: Mushi Pro. 30 mins. x 2 eps.

In the near future, Earth is engulfed in a new ice age as snow falls ceaselessly in summer and glaciers advance with uncharacteristic speed. In this SF spin-off of the live-action Wonderful World Travel series, humanity must decide whether to use science to fight the ice or to adapt to it. The same team also peers into the future in Computopia.

Fight! Ospa

1965. jpn: Tatakae! Ospa. TV series. dir: Masami Aragura, Nobuhiro Okaseko, Yoshiyuki Tomino. scr: Koichi Yamano, Teru Nagashima. des: N/C. ani: Mami Murano, Nobuhiro Okaseko. mus: Isao Tomita. prd: NTV. 25 mins. x 52 eps.

The inhabitants of the sunken Pacific continent of Mu (see Super Atragon) yearn to leave their undersea dome and return to the surface world. After many centuries beneath the waves, they are threatened with destruction by the power-hungry Dorome. The good people of Mu send Ospa, their finest man, to find help on the surface world, where he assembles an international team to fight for justice. Based on an idea by Take the X Train–author Koichi Yamano, this series is a combination of the Dolphin Prince (see Marine Boy) and Prince Planet.

Fight! Puter

1968. jpn: Fight Da!! Pyu-ta. TV series. dir: Hiroe Mitsunobu, Jun Nagasawa, Kunitoshi Shiraishi. scr: Yoshitake Suzuki, Kenichi Ogawa, Kuniaki Hata-naka. des: Tsunezo Murotani. ani: Tameo Ogawa. mus: Tetsuaki Hagiwara. prd: MBS. 25 mins. x 26 eps.

Pyuta Imano helps his grandfather, Professor Tsulury, with his experiments. The evil Walther VII and his sidekick, Glocky, try to seize control of the world. While trying to stop them, an accident gives Pyuta a supercomputer for a brain. Airing the day after the first episode of Cyborg 009, this younger version was based on a manga in Shonen Sunday by Tsunezo Murotani, whose Piccory Bee (the tales of a “Thunder Child” who falls from the sky) had also been animated in 1967.

Fight: Spirit of the Sword *

1993. jpn: Fight!! Video. dir: Akira Koson. scr: Akira Koson. des: Kenichi Onuki. ani: Masanori Nishii. mus: Taikai Hayakawa. prd: Pony Canyon. 45 mins.

High school student Yonosuke Hikura is the latest in his family to protect the harmony between Heaven and Earth. With the help of the magical sword Chitentai, and Tsukinojo Inbe, a Protector sent to him by the High Priests of Earth, he courageously battles the demons, sending them back to the Earth World from which they have escaped. Another tale in the tradition of Devil Hunter Yohko, but it’s played disappointingly straight.

Fighter

1990. jpn: Kentoshi. Video. dir:
Yoichiro Shimatani. scr: Ranko Ono. des: Kuniaki Tsuji. ani: Kuniaki Tsuji. mus: Takahiko Kanemaru. prd: Apple, Miyuki Pro. 45 mins. x 3 eps.

Kenji is a heavyweight boxer who wants to learn from the legendary Tokyo trainer Eddie Williams and win the American championships. In New York, he takes on the heavyweight Joe Roman, before fighting another American, George MacGregor, for the title at Madison Square Garden. In this predictable adaptation of Takashi Tsukasa’s series from Manga Club, it is needless to say that, in the tradition of innumerable sports anime from Tomorrow’s Joe to Aim for the Ace, by the time of the big fight, coach Eddie is on his deathbed. V

Fighting Foodons *

2001. jpn: Kakuto Ryori Densetsu Bistro Recipe. aka: Legend of Grappling Cook Bistro Recipe; Bistro Recipe. TV series. dir: Tetsuo Yasumi. scr: Taku Kadoya. des: Naoko Shimada. ani: Group TAC. mus: Daisuke Asakura. prd: NHK, Kodansha, Group Tac, Red Entertainment. 25 mins. x 26 eps.

Aspiring Chinese chef Chase (Zen)’s master chef father Jack (Tsukuji) is kidnapped by evil chef King Gorge (Don Cook) and his minions, the Gluttons (Four Big Gourmets). Chase, sister Karin, and their associates use the “strength” in food to fight magical combats by producing powerful creatures known as Foodons from the recipes they create. In a Pokémon scenario, aspiring chefs cook a meal, stick it on a magical Recipe Card, and providing the cook has enough “heart” to power the transformation, his creation turns into a monster and goes into battle. A series of food fights follow, which are not as much fun as you might think. From the manga by Naoto Tsushima which first appeared, appropriately enough, in Comic BonBon. Compare to China Number One.

FIGHTING SPIRIT

2000. jpn: Hajime no Ippo, Hajime no Ippo: The Fighting!. aka: First for Ippo. TV series. dir: Satoshi Nishimura, Nanako Shimazaki. scr: Tatsuhiko Urahata, Shoji Sugiwara, Hiroshi Mori. des: Koji Sugiura. ani: Noriyuki Fukuda. mus: Tsuneo Imahori. prd: Madhouse, TV Tokyo. 25 mins. x 76 eps. (TV), 92 mins. (special), 60 mins. (v).

High school student Ippo Marunouchi is alienated from his classmates due to his need to help his widowed mother with the family business after school, and is furthermore the target of the school bullies. When a passing boxer, Mamoru Takamura, saves him from a beating, Ippo is inspired to take up boxing, begins a tough training regime, and eventually convinces the dubious Takamura to help him join Takamura’s gym. From there Ippo’s nascent talent begins to shine through, as he starts up the ranks of professional boxing, along the way earning the respect of not only his gym-mates but also his opponents—by his humility, dedication to the sport, and drive to succeed—and inspiring them to be both better boxers and better men. Based on the ongoing 1989 manga by Joji Morikawa, this is a lighter-hearted take on the sports drama genre that stretches right back to Tomorrow’s Joe. V

Figure 17: Tsubasa and Hikaru *

2001. TV series. dir: Naohito Takahashi. scr: Yasuhiro Imagawa, Masashi Komemura. des: Yuriko Chiba. ani: Yuriko Chiba. mus: Toshihiko Takamisawa. prd: OLM, Anime Theater X. 46 mins. x 13 eps.

Interstellar traveler “DD” is transporting the Magua energy source when he crash-lands on Earth. He enlists the help of Hokkaido ten-year-old Tsubasa in getting it back, giving her a mysterious capsule containing the doll-like superheroine Figure 17. A predictable rerun of the transforming superhero of Ultraman and Birdy the Mighty, pretentiously billed in Japan as “smashing the broadcast paradigm” just because the episodes were twice as long as usual.

Final Approach

2005. TV series. dir: Takashi Yamamoto. scr: Katsumi Hasegawa. des: Aoi Nishimata, Noriko Shimazawa. ani: N/C. mus: N/C. prd: Trinet Entertainment, ZEXCS. 13 mins. x 13 eps.

Japan’s falling birthrate forces the government to consider drastic steps, institutionalizing dating services to ensure that all healthy young men get the fertile woman they so richly deserve. Consequently, ordinary teen Ryo Mizuhara, who lives with his younger sister Akane and works in cousin Harumi’s café, is surprised one day when the strangely pushy Shizuka barges into his apartment, complete with government bodyguard, and claims to be his fiancée. She is part of the pilot scheme to test the new policy, and Ryo is the lucky recipient. Before you can say Rizelmine, she has moved in with him and transfers to his school, although Ryo is suddenly also very popular among his school friends, and a harem of Tenchi Muyo! proportions soon ensues. Based on the so-called “original” creation from Princess Soft, and screened on TV Kanagawa as part of “Princess Hour,” along with Double Wish, FA is hobbled by its origins: it is as leadenly predictable as a computer game, while any erotic potential is killed off by the need to keep it tame for television. Our anime crystal ball predicts that before long there will be an anime porn show about a fascist breeding program with none of Final Approach’s attempt to play for laughs. The series’ title in Japan used the Greek letter “phi” for its opening syllable, just to make things difficult for encyclopedists unsure where to file it.

Final Fantasy *

1993. aka: Legend of the Crystals: Based on Final Fantasy. Video. dir: Rintaro, Naoto Kanda. scr: Satoru Akahori, Mayori Sekijima. des: Yoshinori Kanemori, Kunihiko Sakurai. ani: Naoto Kanda, et al. mus: Masahiko Sato. prd: Madhouse. 30 mins. x 4 eps., 106 mins. (m1), 25 mins. x 25 eps. (Unlimited), 25 mins. (Last Order), 101 mins. (Advent Children).

Two hundred years after the elimination of the evil Exdeath, reckless swordsman Prettz and the summoner Linaly are the youngsters who must save their world from Ra Devil, a bio-mechanical being from the dark moon. Set several centuries after the end of the game, this series is a distant spin-off from Final Fantasy V, whose character Batts is supposedly Linaly’s ancestor.

The plot is similar to a computer game—after a few random encounters with wandering monsters, the leads must unite two warring parties to create a suitably mismatched party of fearless heroes. Pirate queen Rouge, the whip-wielding mistress of an airship crewed by leather-clad fat girls, falls in love with her sworn enemy, Valcus, leader of the Iron Wing squadron. After some mild tortures (Prettz is tickled and Linaly has to drink prune juice), the former enemies unite to fight Ra Devil, destroying both him and his Bond-villain hideout.

FF’s hackneyed quest to save four elemental crystals is upstaged by its backgrounds. As in the games, a good image wins out over the practicalities of physics or geography. With a large number of Chinese and Korean staffers, FF lifts design ideas from all over the Orient, with the tall, thin mountains of Guilin forming a backdrop for klong canals from Thailand, and old-world Chinese houses from Canton providing hangars for pseudo-Miyazaki giant airplanes.

As later FF games achieved fame abroad, this anime was dusted off and released in English with undue prominence given to the words Final and Fantasy and rather less to its origins as a spin-off from an untranslated prequel.

Hironobu Sakaguchi’s fully computer animated Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001) features a quest to obtain eight organic specimens, whose “spirit signatures” will cancel out the energies of alien ghosts. Made in Hawaii, it boasts an all-star cast and the anime version’s voice director, Jack Fletcher.

Presumably intended as an attempt to make a truly international FF movie, The Spirits Within boasted so many foreign staff members that it does not strictly qualify as “anime” within our own criteria. It was also a box office flop, although Hollywood accountancy excels at making anything look like a box office flop—the fact remains that the code and development used on Spirits Within was paid for out of the movie budget, and could be reinvested in the next game.

Mahiro Maeda’s TV Tokyo series FF: Unlimited (2001) was a return to old-fashioned anime stylings, brashly announced as a 52-episode series, but cut back to a cheaper 25, supposedly after low ratings, but largely because Square had lost its taste for investment after the failure of Spirits Within was plain on the balance sheets. It featured two children Ai and Yu, whose search for a lost parent draws them into an “Inner World” where they become the latest champions to fight against the onset of chaos, utilizing many items and references to earlier games in the FF series.

As with Street Fighter II, numerals on the titles of films in the franchise do not refer to chapter numbers in a story, but to the incarnation of the game from which the anime is adapted. Hence Tetsuya Nomura’s FF VII: Advent Children (2004) is a movie whose title refers to the FF VII game. Set two years after the events of the game, the CG Advent Children features Cloud Strife and Tifa, who have set up a delivery service after their heroic activities in the game, drawn into a new conflict to prevent their enemy Sephiroth from returning, aspiring to a messianic climax that has elements of Nausicaä of the Valley of Wind, at least in terms of its inspiration.

A further release, Morio Asaka and Tetsuya Nomura’s video FF VII: Last Order (2005), serves as a prequel to the game, revisiting several incidents only remembered in flashbacks in the original, but also ties in to later game spin-offs for the PSP and mobile phones.

Fire Emblem *

1995. jpn: Fire Emblem: Aritia no Oji. aka: Fire Emblem: Prince of Aritia. Video. dir: Shin Misawa. scr: Yosuke Kuroda. des: Yuji Moriyama. ani: Yuji Moriyama. mus: N/C. prd: KSS, Studio Fantasia. 30 mins. x 2 eps.

Pacifist prince Mars reluctantly tools up when his homeland, Aritia, is conquered by the evil Druans. On the run with his faithful knights and a reformed mercenary in the neighboring kingdom of Taris, he enlists the aid of the king’s only daughter, the Pegasus-riding Princess Cedar. Originating in a “Fantasy Simulation Game” for the Nintendo Famicom (NES) console, this is a predictable spin-off—just enough episodes to drag back hard-core game fans then rerelease as a one-shot for rental and the export market, which cannot be expected to be as forgiving.

Fire Fighter Daigo

2000. jpn: Megumi no Daigo. Video. dir: Akira Nishizawa. scr: Akihiko Inari. des: Hideyuki Motohashi. ani: Hideyuki Motohashi. mus: Shiro Hamaguchi. prd: Sunrise. 45 mins.

Maverick fireman Daigo Asahina risks disciplinary action by bodily throwing civilians from a high window, but he’s exonerated when the building blows up seconds later. Running a gauntlet of girlfriend trouble, he is caught in a fire at a local concert hall and is forced to leave people behind. Outside, he steals a fire engine and rams through a wall, carrying the victims out to public acclaim.

Despite a five-minute closing credit sequence with only three minutes of credits and under-animated moments pretending to be dramatic slow-mo, FFD overcomes its low budget thanks to a stirring orchestral score and clever design. Fire and water surround Daigo, even in humdrum scenes of everyday life, with the camera zooming in on a hose at a car wash or a scarlet sunset that looks as if the sky itself is aflame. The fire-fighting scenes themselves are similarly well observed, with incongruous pillars of water falling down through an inferno, and a no-win scenario that finds Daigo knee-deep in water inside a burning building, dodging falling debris and sparking electric cables. Based on the 1995 Shonen Sunday manga by Masahito Soda that was itself doubtlessly inspired by Naoto Takenaka’s 1994 live-action fire-fighting film 119, this video traces a thematic line back to the 1991 Hollywood movie Backdraft.

Fire Tripper *

1985. jpn: Rumic World: Fire Tripper. Video. dir: Motosuke Takahashi. scr: Tomoko Konparu. des: Katsumi Aoshima. ani: Junko Yamamoto, Mami Endo. mus: Keiichi Oku. prd: Production Ai, OB. 47 mins.

Modern Japanese girl Suzuko and a neighbor’s child are thrown back in time by a gas explosion. Meeting the handsome Shukumaru, Suzuko searches for the lost neighbor boy, not realizing that Shukumaru is the adult version of the 20th-century child who accompanied her, and that she herself is an exile from the 15th century. This adaptation of one of Rumiko Takahashi’s Rumic World manga shorts (which also include Mermaid’s Forest, Maris the Chojo, and Laughing Target) cleverly exploits the conventions of time-travel stories as well as the shifting age boundaries put to more lascivious effect in Cream Lemon. Released on a theatrical double bill with The Humanoid. Takahashi would return to medieval time travel in her later Inu Yasha.

Firestorm

2003. aka: Gerry Anderson’s Firestorm. TV series. dir: Kenji Terada. scr: Kenji Terada. des: Kenichi Onuki. ani: Transarts. mus: Fumitaka Anzai. prd: Madhouse, TV Tokyo, Itochu Fashion Systems, AT-X. 25 mins. x 26 eps.

In the year 2104, Carlo Morelli’s international crime organization Black Orchid is building a network of weapons and bases as strong as any government’s. Nations band together to create an answer to the new threat: Storm Force. Sam Scott is the leader of Storm Force 9, a team tasked specifically with “Operation Firestorm,” to unmask Black Orchid’s motives. Scott is a clean-cut U.S. military hero, leading an international crew. African-American Wesley Grant, sarcastic blond Brit James Brady, green-haired Australian explosives expert Laura Hope, and feisty Japanese pilot ace Nagisa Kisaragi are based with Scott on the mighty submarine base Ocean Storm (a distant cousin of Captain Scarlet’s Cloudbase), commanded by the stern but heroic Drew McAllister. The team learns that Black Orchid is more dangerous than anyone ever imagined—they are in league with the Zolion, aliens who use advanced technology to mimic any living being. The fight is not just against crime, but for the survival of humanity, since a 5,000-vessel invasion fleet is just weeks away from Earth. Hence a multi-arc story structure that begins as a simple tale of fighting crime, before escalating into an operation to prevent the distribution of alien technology, and a seven-episode climax as the cast oppose the Zolion fleet.

Firestorm tries to cover too many conventional bases, and its best elements are underplayed—the evil masterminds aren’t quite evil enough, the heroes are just too gung-ho and not undercut with irony. British creator Gerry Anderson enjoys immense popularity in Japan; shows such as his Thunderbirds, Captain Scarlet, and UFO were heavy influences on the generations that made both Ultraman and Evangelion, and he was an uncredited catalyst for the show that would become Mospeada. Firestorm, however, is a failure engendered by lack of communication between its coproducers—something of a sore point, considering Anderson’s treatment a generation earlier on Thunderbirds 2086. Anderson and his Space Precinct collaborator John Needham came up with the storyline, but the series was put together in Tokyo by people who seemed to value Anderson’s name on their logo more than his actual contribution. Tellingly, a show originally billed as Gerry Anderson’s Firestorm appeared after a delay of many months, as just plain Firestorm, while production details were removed at Anderson’s own request from a contemporary chronicle of his work. Also absent, even during production, were the names of the British designers who had actually worked on the concept—compare to similar shenanigans on Dracula: Sovereign of the Damned. Although acknowledged in the U.K., machine designer Steven Begg was nowhere to be seen on the promotional materials published in the Japanese Newtype, a fact of which Anderson and his U.K. cohorts may not have been aware. Similar obstruction hid the contribution of Steve Kyte, whose character concepts were specifically commissioned to look as realistic as possible in order to meet the parameters of the original production plans to use 3DCG. In fact, the only CG animation to be found in the final version is on the machines after budgetary issues led other aspects to be more cheaply rendered as conventional 2D animation, although many of Kyte’s designs for uniforms, equipment, and logos, as well as the chilling alien mask transformation sequence he storyboarded, are unchanged in the finished series. V

First Kiss Story

2000. jpn: First Kiss Monogatari. Video. dir: Kan Fukumoto. scr: Gaku Hoshino. des: Hiroki Mizugami, Tatsuo Yanagino. ani: Tatsuo Yanagino. mus: N/C. prd: Yaryu, Broccoli. 30 mins.

Yoshihiko is in his busy sophomore year at college while love-interest Kana is stuck back in high school. Her life takes a turn for the surreal when a new teacher at her school turns out to be the spitting image of her dead father. Set two years after the end of its PlayStation origins, Gaku Hoshino’s screen adaptation of his game was released on Valentine’s Day in a futile attempt to drum up business. The presence of La Blue Girl’s Fukumoto as director invites the question: Is he trying to disentangle himself from tentacle porn or is the name an “Alan Smithee” credit used by others on titles of questionable value? Although four episodes were planned, only one seems to have seen the light of day.

First Loves *

1995. jpn: Kakyusei, Kakyusei: My Petty Class Student, elf ban Kakyusei Anata-dake wo Mitsumete. aka: First Loves, Underclassmates. Video. dir: Koichi Yoshida, Kan Fukumoto. scr: Masaru Yamamoto. des: Yuji Takahashi. ani: Yuji Takahashi. mus: N/C. prd: Pink Pineapple, KSS. 30 mins. x 4 eps. (First Loves), 30 mins. x 4 eps. (elf), 25 mins. x 13 eps. (TV1), c.30 mins. x 1 eps. (Special), 30 min. (Music Graffiti), 25 mins. x 13 eps. (TV2), 30 mins. x 1+ eps. (Kakyusei 2 v4).

The protagonists in this quasi-sequel (originally titled Kakyusei: My Pretty Class Student) to End of Summer (unrelated except for themes and atmosphere) are younger teenagers, though of course the U.S. version is at pains to assure us that they’re not legally minors. Kakeru follows Wataru’s lead, trying to make it with his dream girl, Urara, but getting distracted here and there, through no fault of his own of course, when love blooms at a tennis club and another student reveals that she has a sideline as a nude model. Only the first two episodes were released in America, under the title First Loves. These teen titillations were followed in 1997 by a four-part sequel, the special “elf” edition (elf ban Kakyusei Anata-dake wo Mitsumete, or elf-Edition Kakyusei: I Only Have Eyes For You), named for the Dragon Knight creator involved in the original game; this because, unlike First Loves, the plot follows the game. Set once again in the high school dreamtime of a final summer vacation, it depicts new-boy Toru’s attempts to bed girl-next-door Miho and featured an alternate ending for the final episode. First Loves also gained a 13-part TV remake with a spin-off video episode (Kakyusei Bangaihen; Classmates Special), and a TV sequel Kakyusei 2: Girls in My Eyes (2004, Hitomi no Naka no Shojotachi), directed by Yosei Morino. There was also a Music Graffiti spin-off featuring music from the series with both recycled footage and live-action performances. The latest addition is the erotic Kakyusei 2: Kika Shishu (Anthology) video series (2006).

The Classmates series is also distantly related to the Transfer Student series (1996, Tenkosei), which revisits many of the themes with a story of love between two childhood friends who are reunited when the girl moves back into town—the girl, Aoi, being played by the same voice actress who played Ai in the original. N

Fist of the North Star *

1984. jpn: Hokuto no Ken. aka: Ken the Great Bear Fist—Legend of a Karate Warrior. TV series, movie. dir: Toyoo Ashida, Hiromichi Matano, Hideo Watanabe, Masahisa Ishida. scr: Susumu Takaku. des: Masami Suda. ani: Masami Suda. mus: Katsuhisa Hattori, Nozomu Aoki. prd: Toei, Fuji TV. 25 mins. x 109 eps., 25 mins. x 43 eps., 110 mins. (m).

Rival gangs fight for supremacy in a postholocaust wasteland. Out of the dust walks Kenshiro, a young martial artist in search of his fiancée, Julia, who has been kidnapped by his brother Shin. In the opening story arc (complete in the U.S., truncated in the U.K.), Ken must hunt down the disparate members of his estranged martial-arts family before he defeats Shin and finds, and then loses, the love of his life.

Thrilling a teen audience with its hyper-violence and repetitive menace-of-the-week, the 1983 Shonen Jump manga by Tetsu Hara and Buronson was a timely retread of Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior. Continuing long after the initial “Julia” story was resolved, the series became a staple of 1980s Japanese pop culture, with Ken lampooned as the hulking Mari in Project A-Ko, and his booming voice actor Akira Kamiya becoming a star in his own right. But as the series wore on, drastic budget cuts forced the animators to improvise, sometimes with mind-boggling results. The crew constantly found creative new ways to dispatch villains, such as smearing wet paint on a cel between two pieces of glass, or shooting in real-time through the churning waters of a half-empty fish-tank. The show similarly exploited surreal perspectives— everyone seems giant and impossibly muscled seen through the eyes of children Bart and Lynn but appear smaller from Ken’s point of view. The show’s star waned even in Japan, and though the second series ended sooner than expected, the franchise was kept alive by foreign sales. A movie-length remake of series one encompasses Ken’s search for and defeat of Shin, Shin’s admission that the more powerful Raoh has already kidnapped Julia to be his bride, a battle between Ken and Raoh, and the revelation that Julia has disappeared once more. Though Julia had committed suicide by this point in the original series, the movie edition leaves it open-ended, with Ken wandering into the desert in search of her again, believing her to be still alive. The movie version of series one, dubbed in the U.S. by Streamline, was Manga Entertainment’s first U.K. release and became the cornerstone of their martial-arts-fueled “beer-and-curry” marketing plan. Riding the coat-tails of Akira, it became one of the U.K.’s best-selling anime videos, though more through its length of tenure in stores than its overt quality.

In 1998, the company tried to capitalize on the anime’s “success” by releasing the full 15-year-old TV series. This version featured a good actor as Ken, but it was clumsily cut together with no appreciation of story breaks and mixed so shoddily that Bart ends up playing a silent harmonica. The series was also “augmented” with a drum & bass music track, which, to be fair, couldn’t have made it any worse. After predictably disappointing sales, the distributor pulled the TV edit only partway into the schedule, though by this time its “foreign popularity” had inspired a Japanese satellite network to rerun it every day. Like its hero, Fist of the North Star simply refuses to die. The series is more likely to be known in the mainstream for its 1995 live-action remake, directed by Tony Randall and starring Gary Daniels. A manga prequel, Fist of the Blue Sky (2001), features the adventures of Ken’s namesake uncle in 1930s Asia.

Takashi Watanabe’s three-part “new” Fist of the North Star video series (2003) claimed to be based on a 1996 novel by the original creators, thereby avoiding ownership conflict with the copyright holders of the original TV series and the Hollywood remake. Motorcycles and backgrounds were much more impressive, occasionally evoking the draftsman-like architecture and vehicle representations of Otomo’s Akira, but the foreground cast were still the same tired 1980s musclemen.LV

Five Card *

2003. Video. dir: Akebi Haruno. scr: Akebi Haruno. des: Yukiho. ani: Shigeru Kino, Hiroshi Sakagami. mus: N/C. prd: Five Ways. 29 mins. x 4 eps.

Young English teacher Nariyuki Daina is popular with his students and plans to get four of the hottest—Lisa, Fumiko, Naoki, and Mimiko—into bed. So does school principal, sorry, college dean Onikuma, though his tastes are rather more perverted and include chains, vibrators, and such. Daina also has a pretty assistant, Mayu, a former college buddy of his, who attempts to police his lecherous behavior. The girls have a few tricks of their own, including aphrodisiac-laced lunchboxes for Teacher, although before long they are co-opted into the dean’s satanic rituals, for a change. Based on a computer game by Crossnet. LNV

Five Star Stories *

1989. jpn: Five Star Monogatari. Video. dir: Kazuo Yamazaki. scr: Akinori Endo. des: Mamoru Nagano, Nobuteru Yuki, Mika Akitaka. ani: Nobuteru Yuki. mus: Tomoyuki Asagawa. prd: Sunrise. 60 mins.

The Joker Cluster consists of five star systems in close proximity, where human pilots (headliners) are bonded with sentient androids (fatimas) to control giant robots (mortar heads). Dr. Chrome Ballanche, the greatest of the genetic engineers, completes his two most perfect creations, the fatimas Lachesis and Clotho. Their sister, Atropos, has vanished. The fatimas go to the castle of the local lord Uber to be “impressed,” a ceremony at which they select their future partners from among the ranks of headliners. Most pilots have to make do with “etrimls,” low-grade subhuman versions, so the beautiful fatimas are highly prized, not only by the assembled pilots, but also by several notables who are attending the ceremony in disguise.

Condensed from just one segment of Mamoru Nagano’s sprawling 1986 manga that’s still occasionally serialized in Newtype, FSS duplicates the original’s baroque feel, as well as its near impenetrability. With mount-rider relationships that presage Brain Powered and sumptuous science-fantasy conceits, the look of the characters and machinery is as marvelous as one might expect from a fashion-designer-turned-rock-musician such as Nagano. N

Five Ways

Erotic anime company whose subsidiaries include Wide Road and Blue Moon. Notable for its generally low budget productions, and for abruptly declaring bankruptcy in mid-2003, causing the release of the (already completed) second and third episodes of Handmaid Mai (for which it was producer and distributor; sequel to Handmaid May) to be put on hold until the subsequent litigation could be settled.

Flag!

1994. jpn: Sakidama Hassai Saizen Sen Flag. aka: Sakidama Racing Pole Position Flag. Video. dir: Tetsu Dezaki. scr: Machiko Kondo. des: Mutsumi Inomata. ani: Hideki Takahashi. mus: N/C. prd: Vap, Magic Bus. 45 mins.

Sixteen-year-old Noboru Yamazaki and Akira Maruyama join the Moonlight bike gang at the Sakidama Biker Meet, although they don’t actually own any motorcycles. A rival gang, the Asian Tigers, uses its gangster connections to take out a hit on the Moonlight gang’s leader. Noboru inherits his leader’s motorcycle, and also the attentions of biker chick Hisami. Based on Akio Hotta’s manga in Young King, this is a latecomer to the anime subgenre established by Bomber Bikers of Shonan. V

Flame of Recca

1997. jpn: Recca no En. TV series. dir: Noriyuki Abe, Kazunori Mizuno. scr: Hiroshi Hashimoto, Satoru Nishizono. des: Mari Kitayama, Atsushi Waka­bayashi. ani: Yoshiyuki Kobe, Minoru Yamazawa. mus: Yusaku Honma. prd: Studio Pierrot, Fuji TV. 25 mins. x
42 eps.

Contemporary teenage ninja fan Recca Hanabishi becomes embroiled in the activities of real-life ninja. The beautiful Yanagi is targeted by an evil industrialist who wants to use the girl’s power to become immortal, and Recca must team up with his school friends to learn the secrets of the martial arts before it is too late. Adapting Nobuyuki Anzai’s 1995 manga from Shonen Sunday, this series owes a great debt to Poltergeist Report, with plenty of fighting, some off-color humor, and acrobatics to rival Ninja Scroll’s. However, despite early promise, a low animation budget takes its toll, as does the series’ disappointing decline into endless martial-arts bouts. NV

Flashback *

2002. jpn: Flashback Game. Video. dir: Shinsuke Terasawa. scr: Bankyu Mizoguchi. des: Shinsuke Terasawa. ani: Go Yasumoto. mus: N/C. prd: Blue Cat, Five Ways. 30 mins. x 3 eps.

Yuri Honjo wins a beauty spa vacation, and arrives with her friends Mizuho and Noriko excitedly expecting a fun-packed experience rather than a vicious psychological trap. All three girls, it transpires, have repressed memories of sexual trauma, which the nefarious staff at the spa is determined to get them to admit. In the spa’s isolation pod Mizuho relives her gang rape by schoolmates, while Yuri recalls the sexual abuse she suffered from friends. Then Mizuho goes to the beach and has lesbian sex with Ayame and heads back to the hotel to try it out with Noriko. Meanwhile, Noriko recalls what it was like to come home from school one day to find her mother sexually servicing two strangers. Eventually, the girls are molested in her room by masked figures, and their fate is then determined by a vote from the previously unseen audience. LNV

FLCL *

2000. jpn: Furi Kuri. Video. dir: Kazuya Tsurumaki. scr: Yoji Enokido. des: Yoshiyuki Sadamoto. ani: Tadashi Hiramatsu, Hiroyuki Imaishi. mus: The Pillows. prd: Gainax, Production IG. 25 mins. x 6 eps.

Left alone in the house with his older brother’s 17-year-old girlfriend, Mamimi, Naota Nandaba is concerned that her flirting ways will place him in a difficult situation. The arrival of the scooter-riding, guitar-swinging tomboy Haruko Haruhara swaps one set of problems for another, as Naota is forced to share his life with an alien, a grumpy robot, and the uncontrollable Mamimi. Mixing a narrative inspired by the same studio’s His and Her Circumstances with characterization and designs influenced by their earlier Evangelion, FLCL represents a determined effort by Gainax to both supersede its successes of the late 1990s and incorporate elements of the one title that competed with them in fans’ polls as the show of the moment. Utena-writer Enokido brings a surreal tinge to the whole operation. All but episode one were released in Japan with English subtitles on DVD.

Flight of the White Wolf

1990. jpn: Hashire Shiroi Okami. aka: Run White Wolf. Movie. dir: Tsuneo Maeda, Masuji Harada. scr: Wataru Kenmochi. des: Isao Kumata, Marisuke Eguchi, Satoshi Matsuoka. ani: Marisuke Eguchi. mus: Antonín Dvoˇràk. prd: Tac, Toho. 84 mins.

Lasset has grown up with a wolf called Gray since they were both babies. Lasset’s father found the cub and reared it, but, as he grows, the neighbors become understandably concerned. Gray kills a local dog that belongs to the sheriff, and his days seem numbered. Lasset sets out with Gray, determined to get him to a wolf sanctuary where he can live in peace. Unfortunately, it’s several hundred miles away, so the pair face a long road and many adventures in the tradition of Belle and Sebastian. Based on the novel by Mel Ellis. Just to confuse matters, this movie appears to have later been released in the U.S. under the title White Fang.

Flint the Time Detective *

1998. jpn: Jiku Tantei Genshi Kun. aka: Time Detective Genshi. TV series. dir: Hiroshi Fukutomi, Koichi Takada, Shinji Okuda. scr: Hideki Sonoda. des: Yoshiko Ohashi. ani: Takashi Yamazaki, Munekatsu Fujita. mus: Tadashi Nanba. prd: Pioneer, Tac, TV Tokyo. 25 mins. x 43 eps.

Petrafina Dagmar (accompanied by her two stooges, Might and Dyno) wants to loot the past so that the Dark Lord can destroy the Land of Time. Each period contains a special critter called a time-shifter, each of which possesses a magical power. To coin a phrase, Petra wants to “catch ’em all.” Time-shifters keep the very fabric of time together, and their theft is policed by the Bureau of Time & Space Investigations. In one million b.c., Petra demands that caveboy triceratops-herder Flint Hammerhead (Genshi) and his father hand over Getalong (a penguin-like time-shifter whose power is to ensure that everyone gets along). When they refuse, she turns her fossilizer ray on them then returns to the 25th century to dig them up. Using her modern-day disguise as schoolteacher Miss Aino (pronounced and spelled “Iknow”), she encourages her class to go out and find fossils for her. However, twins Sarah and Tony take their fossil to their uncle, Bernie Goodman, at the Bureau. Bernie, with a little behind-the-scenes help from the Dark Lord’s adversary the Old-Timer, defossilizes Flint with one of his gizmos. The process has given Flint superhuman strength, so he is enlisted in the Bureau. Flint’s father remains a talking rock, so Bernie carves him into a stone axe for Flint and installs a fossilizer/defossilizer ray in the haft. Each week, Flint is called upon to foil Petra’s latest scheme in a different time period. Some of her temporal interferences include imprisoning and taking the place of Japan’s ancient queen Himiko (see Dark Myth) and instilling a lust for gold into the Conquistadors. A rehash of the successful Time Bokan series but with a monster-collecting angle bolted on for the 1990s, Flint was snatched up in the tidal wave of post-Pokémon anime interest and brought to the U.S. in record time by Digimon-producers Saban Entertainment.

Flower Angel *

1979. jpn: Hana no Ko Lunlun. aka: Lunlun the Flowergirl. TV series/special, movie. dir: Yuji Endo. scr: Noboru Shiroyama. des: Michi Himeno. ani: Tatsu­hiro Nagaki. mus: Hiroshi Tsutsui. prd: Toei, TV Asahi. 25 mins. x 50 eps., ca. 15 mins. (m).

Lunlun is the 12-year-old daughter of a flower seller in the French countryside. Nouveau, her talking dog, and a cat called Cateau are emissaries from the king of the floral planet Flowern. The bad queen, Toginicia, has seized control of the kingdom and sent her servant Yaboki (a disguised tanuki, see Pompoko) to seize the seven colors of magical flowers found on Earth. Lunlun, who can transform into a girl with special powers with her flower key, must travel the world with Nouveau and Cateau to collect the plants before Yaboki. Flower lore, a magical girl à la Creamy Mami, and an early collector’s quest that presaged CardCaptors, all dressed up in a European setting variously described by distributors as Switzerland or France, depending on their mood. There was also a short 15-minute movie version screened in Japanese theaters in 1980, Flower Angel: Hello Kingdom of Cherries (Konnichi wa Sakura no Kuni).

Flower Witch Marybell

1992. jpn: Hana no Maho Tsukai Marybell. aka: Floral Magician Mary Bell. TV series, movie. dir: Tetsu­ya Endo. scr: Yasunori Yamada. des: Kenichi Onuki, Shigenori Kanatsu. ani: Tadashi Hirota, Yuriko Chiba. mus: Takako Ishiguro. prd: Ashi Pro, TV Tokyo. 25 mins. x 39 eps., ca. 40 mins. (m).

The adventures of a girl with a magical tambourine who works in her parents’ flower shop but rights wrongs in her superheroine disguise, often with the help of her friends, Julia and Ribbon. Magic and music in the everytown of Sunnybell, this was also released as a 40-minute theatrical short, Marybell: The Movie (1992), in which Marybell is transported to a fantasy world after reading the story of the phoenix in her aunt’s book.

Fly Isami!

1995. jpn: Tobe Isami. TV series. dir: Gisaburo Sugii, Tatsuo Sato. scr: Hideo Takayashiki, Tomoko Konparu. des: Kazuaki Mori. ani: Kazuaki Mori, Yoshiko Sakurai. mus: Hiroaki Serizawa. prd: Tac, NHK. 25 mins. x 50 eps.

Isami, a 12-year-old girl with a newscaster mother and research-scientist father, fights against a secret organization, the “Black Tengu,” that is trying to take control of the world. Eventually, the Black Tengu joins forces with the Seri­zawa industrial conglomerate, and Isami must recruit her friends and her father’s inventions to fight back.

Fly! Machine Hiryu

1977. jpn: Tobidase! Machine Hiryu. TV series. dir: Seitaro Hara, Mizuho Nishikubo, Yuji Fukawa, Hidehito Ueda. scr: Jiro Yoshino, Akiyoshi Sakai, Yu Yamamoto. des: Yoshitaka Amano, Kunio Okawara. ani: Tetsu Honda, Norio Hirayama, Masatoshi Fukuyama. mus: Hiroshi Tsutsui. prd: Tatsunoko, Tokyo 12 Channel (TV Tokyo). 25 mins. x 21 eps.

The bosses of rival car companies decide to fight each other in the sporting arena by backing different race car teams. Chairman Gapporin hires Okkanabichi the supreme racer, while Chairman Misaki hires Riki Kazama, a relatively untried driver for the flying car known as Machine Hiryu. Mixing elements of Speed Racer with Time Bokan, this Tatsunoko production ticks the same boxes, with Riki’s cute girlfriend Nana, mini-mechanic Chuta, the cute ape and pooch, and the comic and glamorous villains lurking in the background. Early work from many big names, including Yoshitaka Amano and Kunio Okawara, is strictly in the studio mould. Manga versions of the story ran in several magazines, such as Terebi Magazine and Terebi Land. Racing fever seemed to have struck the Japanese animation business at this time: compare to the same year’s Arrow Emblem.

Fly On, Dreamers!

1994. jpn: Kattobase! Dreamers! Movie. dir: Yoshinori Kanemori, Morio Asaka. scr: Hideo Takayashiki. des: Yuzo Sato. ani: Yuzo Sato. mus: N/C. prd: Hiroshima Film Center, Madhouse. 86 mins.

In an original story by Barefoot Gen–creator Keiji Nakazawa, a group of children orphaned by the bombing of Hiroshima fulfill their dream of playing with the professional baseball players of the Hiroshima Carp.

Fly Peek! *

1992. jpn: Tobe! Kujira no Peek. aka: Fly! Peek the Whale; Peek the Baby Whale; The Boy and the White Whale Calf. Movie. dir: Koji Morimoto. scr: Keiko Nobumoto, Koji Morimoto. des: Satoru Utsunomiya. ani: Satoru Utsunomiya, Hideo Okazaki. mus: Yoshihisa Tomabechi. prd: Toho. 80 mins.

After a storm, two young brothers find a baby white whale, the titular Peek, trapped by a rock in a shallow inlet in the Spanish coast. The boys decide to help it return to its mother on the open sea, but one of the boys, Kei, is tormented by older children until he lets the secret out. The whale is taken away by circus owner Odeon, and Kei journeys to the big city to set Peek free. Based on an original story by Hidehito Hara and predating the 1993 Hollywood movie Free Willy, beautiful settings and charmingly retro-styled character designs combined in a high-quality children’s film that was badly served in the U.K. market, where distributors Kiseki only released a subtitled print.

Fly Pegasus!

1995. jpn: Tobe! Pegasus: Kokoro ni Goal ni Shoot. aka: Fly! Pegasus: Shoot for the Goal of the Heart. Movie. dir: Shinji Okuda. scr: Hideki Sonoda. des: N/C. ani: Junji Aoki. mus: Masahito Suzuki. prd: EG, Victor. 74 mins.

A high school for blind children fields a soccer team using a ball that emits a noise so it can be located. The potential for accidental fouls is mind-boggling, but only in anime could you find such a bizarre combination of Helen Keller and Captain Tsubasa.

Flying Ghost Ship

1969. jpn: Soratobi Yurei Kan. Movie. dir: Hiroshi Ikeda. scr: Masaki Tsuji, Hiroshi Ikeda. des: Shotaro Ishi(no)mori. ani: Yoichi Otabe, Hayao Miyazaki, Hideki Hayashi. mus: Takasuke Onosaki. prd: Toei. 60 mins.

A ship carrying a load of the prized “Boar Juice” soft drink is attacked by restless spirits. At the same time, the teenage Atsuhito saves the Kuroshaku drinks company president and his wife from a cycling accident and experiences a vision of the ship’s skeletal captain. Atsuhito soon discovers that Kuroshaku is concealing secrets in the basement, and, as a giant robot lays waste to the city center, Atsuhito confronts the company about the truth behind its popular drink. Another cautionary tale from the creator of Cyborg 009, with animation and design work on the “golem” giant robot by Hayao Miyazaki.

Flying Shadow

1985. jpn: Ninja Senshi Tobikage. aka: Ninja Warrior Flying Shadow; Tobikage. TV series. dir: Masami Annai, Hiroyuki Yokoyama, Takashi Akimoto, Kazuyoshi Katayama. scr: Sukehiro Tomita, Hideki Sonoda, Hideo Takayashiki. des: Shigeru Kato, Toshihiro Hirano, Yasushi Moriki, Koichi Ohata. ani: Takeshi Osaka. mus: Koji Kawamura. prd: Studio Pierrot, Magic Bus, Nippon TV. 35 mins. x 43 eps.

Soldiers from the evil planet Zaboom invade the peace-loving world of Radorio, forcing princess Romina to flee on the starship Elshank in search of the fabled “ninja” warrior who can save her people. Arriving in the solar system, she recruits several Earthlings to become the ninja warriors of old—the Black Lion, Fiery Dragon, and Thunder Phoenix. They return to pilot the Flying Shadow giant robot against the minions of Zaboom, in spite of the distinctly ungrateful population of Radorio, who refuse to believe they can do it. A mix of a team show and giant-robot combat, with an alien starship whose interior is modeled on samurai-period Japan.

Fobia *

1995. jpn: Mirai Choju Fobia. aka: Future Superbeast Fobia. Video. dir: Shigenori Awai. scr: Narihiko Tatsu­miya. des: Yoshinobu Yamakawa. ani: Yoshinobu Yamakawa. mus: Arcadia Studio. prd: Tec, Gaga. 45 mins. x 2 eps.

Replinoids, creatures who thrive on human blood and have a preference for young girls, exhaust the supply in 2112 and come back to 1990s Japan to harvest more female flesh. They are pursued by Megumi, a time-traveling agent instructed to find a hero who can wield a magic sword of justice to destroy them. Replinoids murder several members of Enoshima College’s drama group, and Megumi teams up with class geek Mutsumi, who inevitably turns out to be the Chosen One.

With a heroine resembling a younger version of Urara from his Sakura Diaries and a school background redolent of Angel, manga creator U-Jin makes a rare foray into SF for a tits-and-tentacles storyline that combines the story of Terminator with the face-huggers and adult beasts of Aliens. However, the attempts at both murder-mystery and questing subplots are somewhat stillborn. Time and cast are so limited that there is only one suspect for the murders and only one candidate for hero, while the contemporary setting is underused in favor of a school that is conveniently deserted by all but the central cast every time something interesting happens. The overuse of flashbacks cleverly, but also obviously, recycles footage to save money. Compare to Demon Beast Invasion. NLV

For Real

1990. jpn: Maji. Video. dir: Kazuya Miyazaki. scr: Shigeo Nakakura. des: Ayumi Tachihara. ani: Chuji Nakajima. mus: Hideo Shimazu. prd: Creative Bridge, Transarts, Nippon Animation. 50 mins. x 2 eps.

Maji is a young punk in the Nagisa criminal organization whose name is synonymous with loyalty and truth. He falls for a local high school girl, Kumiko, but their affair is as doomed as any meeting of different worlds—when the tattooed boy and his moll go out on the town, they run into the rival Kikuchi gang looking for trouble. A gangster story based on the first two volumes of the 50-part 1986 Shonen Champion manga by Justice-creator Ayumi Tachihara. The first episode was screened theatrically. NV

Forbidden Love *

2003. jpn: Imoto de Iko. aka: Let’s Go with Sister. Video. dir: Hiroaki Nakajima. scr: Makoto Nakamura. des: Nishi Eta, Yuji Yoshimoto. ani: Yuji Yoshimoto. mus: N/C. prd: Green Bunny. 30 mins. x 2 eps.

Mayuka is a princess from a faraway planet who comes to Earth on a good-hearted quest to save her mother’s life. However, there any resemblance to Little Witch Sally ends, since Mayuka is so distracted by the sight of the human couple Yoshizumi and Iori copulating that she crashes into their apartment. For reasons not all that clear, Yoshizumi uses Mayuka’s perceptual alteration gun to convince the new arrival that he is her elder brother, thereby helping to set up another not-quite-incest story, as Mayuka joins a predictable gaggle of adoring alien girls trying to get into Yoshizumi’s bed. The U.S. release includes a bonus 20-minute audio drama that runs while still images play on screen—compare to Girl’s Locker Room Lust. Presumably, this bonus was a planned third episode that was canceled before animation production began in earnest. Based on a 2002 computer game by Overflow. N

Force Five *

1980. TV series. dir: Kenneth Feuerman. scr: Mike Haller. des: N/C. ani: N/C. mus: N/C. prd: Toei, Jim Terry Productions. 25 mins. x 74 eps. (Grandizer), 44 eps. (Gaiking), 39 eps. (Starvengers), 56 eps. (Dangard Ace), 64 eps. (Spaceketeers).

Five separate anime serials bought and repackaged for U.S. syndication by Jim Terry so that each could be shown on a different day of the week, every week. The separate series have their own entries in this book as Dangard Ace (Mondays), Starvengers (i.e., Getter Robo, Tuesdays), Spaceketeers (Wednesday), Grandizer (Thursday), and Gaiking (Friday). Though many of the FF serials had figures that were included in the Shogun Warriors line, Mattel had lost its license for the toys by the time FF was broadcast. Jim Terry Productions also tried to sell a feature-length edit of each series, some of which made their way to U.K. video as the Krypton Force line.

FOREIGN INFLUENCES

Early Anime often bears a resemblance to Felix the Cat, both in its use of animals and in the animation techniques employed. Ikuo Oishi’s Moving Picture Fight of the Fox and Possum (Ugoki-e Kori no Tatehiki, 1931) drew on the comical deformation of reality in Felix to create a style we would now define as “cartoonish”—in particular the caricatured and exaggerated facial expressions that would eventually lead to the large-eyed figures of Osamu Tezuka.

The influence of the Fleischer brothers’ Betty Boop, who was redesigned in Stopping the Show (1932) into a submissive, dark-haired, big-eyed heroine with a little girl voice, can be seen in Kenzo Masaoka’s The Gang and the Dancing Girl (Gang to Odoriko, 1933) and the kidnapped geisha (really a tanuki in disguise) who bats her eyelashes at the hero of Yoshitaro Kataoka’s Bandanemon the Monster Exterminator (Bandanemon: Bakemono Taiji no Maki, 1935). Although Betty’s guest star Popeye stole the show in Popeye the Sailor (1933), sailors in anime remained behind the scenes, with the Japanese Navy exerting greater influence on production budgets. Both Popeye and his nemesis Bluto made appearances in Wartime Anime, fighting for the Allied enemy.

It was a Chinese film, however, the Wan brothers’ Princess Iron Fan (1943), a Chinese adaptation of Journey to the West, that shook up the wartime anime industry. A remarkable achievement using heavy amounts of rotoscoping, it appears to have literally shamed the Japanese Navy into commissioning a feature film of equivalent length, Momotaro’s Divine Sea Warriors (1945). Either MDSW, or Princess Iron Fan, or both (depending on which source one believes) can also be credited with inspiring a young Osamu Tezuka to become an artist—possibly the most important influence of all! It is also noteworthy that stop-motion animation in Japan was pioneered by MDSW’s producer, Tadahito Mochinaga, who left Japan for a decade after 1945 and learned the techniques during his years at the Shanghai Animation Studio.

Funding for lavish animated movies was in short supply after World War II, with Japan laid low by military defeat and bombarded by messages of consumerism and scientific progress. Consequently, with little local competition, Disney films unavailable to the Japanese in wartime descended en masse, including the all-important Pinocchio (1940), while newer releases also arrived with little delay. Peter Pan (1953), Lady and the Tramp (as Woof-Woof Story/Wanwan Monogatari, 1955), and Sleeping Beauty (as Beauty of the Sleeping Forest/Nemureru Mori no Bijo, 1959) packed theaters, while the burgeoning world of television had no hesitation in shoving American cartoons onto the airwaves. The first cartoon to be seen on Japanese TV was the Fleischer brothers’ Superman, also airing in 1955—it was joined the same year by both Betty Boop (as Betty-chan) and Popeye, his wartime collaboration forgiven. Conspicuously, the guest stars of the Fleischers’ Popeye Color Specials, Ali Baba, Sindbad the Sailor, and Aladdin, all became the subjects of early color anime productions.

During the rise of television, anime aspired to imitate foreign live-action shows, not foreign cartoons. It was the George Reeves Adventures of Superman, not the Fleischer version, that was one of the highest-rated TV shows ever in Japan, inspiring broadcasters to attempt both live and animated reworkings. One of the most successful was Osamu Tezuka’s Astro Boy, which combined the power and duty of Superman with the yearning and pathos of Pinocchio. But an equal effect was felt in the girls’ market, where the hidden heroic identity of Clark Kent was reworked for Princess Knight (1967).

Bewitched (as My Wife is a Witch/Okusan wa Majo) and I Dream of Jeannie (as Cute Witch Jeannie/Kawaii Majo Jeannie) both inspired imitations, including the landmark Little Witch Sally (1966) and the live/anime mixture of the first Comet-san (1967). Later seasons saw refinements to these ideas, in which plucky Japanese modern girls would transform, not necessarily into superheroines like Cutey Honey (1973), but into older, more sophisticated versions of themselves, such as Marvelous Melmo (1971). As the cute-but-maternal, houseproud-but-ditzy Samantha in Bewitched, Elizabeth Montgomery enjoyed unprecedented fame in Japan, becoming one of the first foreigners to grace Japanese commercials (for Lotte Mother biscuits). Her onscreen husband’s name, “Darrin,” would eventually transform into the prolonged “Daaah-ling!” that became a catchphrase for another magical wife, Lum in Urusei Yatsura (1981); successive generations have come to associate the word with approaching spousal trouble. Meanwhile, the allure of I Dream of Jeannie, a Tinkerbell figure who becomes a boy’s secret companion, can be seen to this day in shows such as Bottle Fairy (2003) and Midori Days (2004).

Other influences have yet to be proved. It is our belief that the American TV show The Gallery of Madame Liu Tsong (1951), featuring early screen star Anna May Wong as a Chinese sleuth and antiques dealer, may also have been a major influence. So obscure that it is no longer even extant in America, Wong’s contemporary fame and ethnic origin would have made the show a sure-fire purchase for early Japanese TV, ultimately leading to the art-related action of Cat’s Eye, Petshop of Horrors, and Gallery Fake. To date, however, we can find no evidence of its Japanese broadcast.

It became customary for many import shows to proclaim their origins with a large foreign name in Japan’s katakana syllabary, qualified with a much smaller Japanese-language explanation to help bewildered viewers. This led to strange mouthfuls such as Famous Dog LASSIE, Undersea King NELSON (i.e. Sea Hunt), and SAINT Heaven Guy (i.e. The Saint), a style later parodied for its exoticism to create terms such as Mobile Suit Gundam and Neon Genesis Evangelion.

The cheaper, more limited animation style of Hanna-Barbera cartoons was a blessed relief to the Japanese, who no longer faced expensive movie animation on TV, but cheaper productions that they could emulate more easily. Deputy Dawg (as Woof-Woof Sheriff/Wanwan Hoankan), but most notably The Flintstones (as Prehistoric Family/Genshi Kazoku), made it clear that cartoons should not be kept in a children’s ghetto and encouraged the Japanese to offer their own alternatives. Felix the Cat returned as a TV character in 1960 with The Adventures of Felix/Felix no Boken, notably in a redesign by Joe Oriolo in which the titular feline had a “magic bag of tricks”—compare to Doraemon.

The year of the Tokyo Olympics, 1964, saw the culmination of many local and national initiatives in technology and infrastructure. By the time of the Olympics opening ceremony, Japan had become a nation of color TV set owners, a fact not lost on Osamu Tezuka, whose Kimba the White Lion (1965) was partly funded by the American NBC network, enabling color production. In the late 1960s, both the Japanese and the Americans were claiming to be the “makers” of co-productions like The King Kong Show and Tom of T.H.U.M.B., but tastes were diverging. Anime were made in reaction to, not in imitation of, foreign works. While entertainment for boys was often so universal that shows like Marine Boy and Speed Racer were readily exported, anime sought other niches not taken up by foreign broadcasters, most notably in the sector of the “magical girl shows.”

The late 1960s and early 1970s saw Japanese TV influenced in turn by Cold War paranoia and spy capers, particularly the James Bond movies, and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (1964). Anime heroes fought increasing numbers of evil empires and shadowy organizations, until the 1970s when, whatever the motive for a conflict, sponsorship deals ensured that a toy tie-in was mandatory—“my father gave me a robot” becoming not merely a plot point, but a slogan for children to internalize, ready to use to full effect on harassed parents.

The greatest foreign influence in this spirit was kept hidden for many years, but came in the form of direct investment. Many supposedly “American” cartoons in this period were largely made in Japan where the Rankin/Bass company was subcontracting much of its work. In particular, stop-motion from Tadahito Mochinaga’s MOM Films and cel animation from Toru Hara’s Topcraft made a major contribution to foreign works in this period, including ’Twas the Night Before Christmas (1974), The Hobbit (1977), and The Last Unicorn (1981). Meanwhile, a more obvious foreign influence came in the form of the World Masterpiece Theater (1975), a highly regarded domestic franchise that relied solely on foreign stories for its inspiration.

Japanese animators remained a popular choice as laborers on supposedly “foreign” cartoons in the 1980s, sometimes comprising most or all of the actual creative staff. Shows such as Ulysses 31 (1981), Dogtanian and the Three Muskehounds (1981), and The Mysterious Cities of Gold (1982) were made with foreign money, while others, such as Robin Hood (1990), relied on markets abroad for their success. However, this success was short-lived, chiefly through the rising costs of Japanese labor. As Japanese studios increasingly subcontracted their work abroad in the 1990s, it was just as likely for their foreign clients to do the same—later seasons of The Simpsons (1989), which would probably have been farmed out to Japan if the show had been made a decade earlier, were instead animated in Korea.

The home video market, which many in the anime business seem to have regarded as a wholly domestic, bargain-basement operation, was to prove anime’s savior. However, many foreign buyers developed false expectations based on their first experience of the medium. Although anime were sold abroad in the 1990s as a video medium, many of the video buyers were comparing their purchases with Akira (1988)—a feature film. Its success abroad, greeted with elation and bewilderment by its own over-stretched producers, ushered in the age of Japanese video exports—the beginning of “anime” as we know it. Japanese sources, unable to use the word “anime” as distinct from any other cartoon in preceding periods, often call the modern period the age of “Japanimation,” deliberately using a foreign word to demonstrate that anime has come to be defined by foreign consumers, based on a criterion that largely rests on its place of origin.

As increasing numbers of foreign distributors fought over the rights to anime, foreigners began investing directly in Japanese productions in order to snatch the rights early. Ghost in the Shell (1995) featured investment from Manga Entertainment, while many modern productions often involve foreign coproducers as benefactors. Indeed, some anime companies refuse to even commence production without foreign backing. Many modern productions are now touted at rights fairs in the hope of attracting foreign investment, while ever-increasing numbers of both anime and False Friends are put into production at the instigation of Western producers. In Kaleido Star (2003), the lavish performance sequences were only possible with investment from ADV Films, while Kill Bill: The Origin of O-Ren (2003), was made by the Japanese in imitation of what foreign producers thought Japanese animation ought to be.

Fortune Quest

1994. Video, TV series. dir: Takeshi Yamaguchi, Takashi Watanabe. scr: Keiko Maruo, Yumi Kageyama, Reiko Yoshida. des: Yumi Nakayama. ani: Kazuhiro Okaseko, Susumu Ishizaki. mus: N/C. prd: Victor, Beam Entertainment, MBS. 30 mins. x 4 eps. (v), 25 mins. x 26 eps. (TV).

A group of adventurers on a parallel world seek their fortunes in a story whose debt to role-playing games is so great that the press notes even describe the characters as “low-level.” Teenage “mapper” Pastel leads a party comprising young swordsman Clay, bandit chieftain’s son Trapp, blue-blood “walking dictionary” Kitton, gentle giant Knoll, baby dragon Shiro, and infant elf sorceress Rumy. After their latest quest, they call in at the Adventurers Support Group, which stamps their ID cards and evaluates their experience, both pastiching and predicting the inevitable console game version of the story.

Originally based on a best-selling 1991 novel by Michio Fukuzawa, who also wrote the Duan Surk prequel set in the same universe, the story was also adapted into a manga by Natsu-mi Mukai, in turn adapted into the sequel anime TV series Fortune Quest L by Eiichi Sato and Slayers-director Takeshi Watanabe. The series added the gaming experience by featuring hidden items and monsters, as well as unexpected dialogue from certain characters. Though hardly anything new, it prepared the ground for the success of Pokémon, for which exploiting the game tie-in was the sole raison d’être.

Forza! Hidemaru

2002. TV series. dir: Nobuhiro Takamoto. scr: Hideo Takayashiki. des: Masami Esaka. ani: N/C. mus: Yuko Fujishima. prd: TV Tokyo, NAS, Gallop. 25 mins. x 26 eps.

A soccer anime with a cast of wacky animals in sports getup seems far out of its time in the early 21st century, but it was the year of the World Cup in Japan and South Korea, and the very young audience sees these tropes with fresh eyes. Hidemaru is a feisty fox; his friends include bunnies, dogs, horses, and a couple of hefty hippo girls. Based on a manga by “Sunny Side Up,” in Corocoro Comic.

Foxes of Chironup

1987. jpn: Chironup no Kitsune. Movie. dir: Tetsuo Imazawa. scr: Fukuo Matsu-yama. des: Yoshinao Yamamoto. ani: Noriko Imazawa. mus: Etsujiro Sato. prd: Tac, Herald. 72 mins.

Foxes Ken and Chin become the proud parents of cubs, Koro and Kan, who enjoy a carefree life on the northern Japanese island of Chironup. They befriend a fisherman and his wife but are forced to run for their lives when soldiers on a military exercise decide to take home some fox pelts as souvenirs. A sweet little film that obliquely symbolizes the plight of Japan’s aboriginal Ainu people and the northern islands that have been contested with Russia since they were occupied by Stalin’s soldiers in 1945. Based on a book by Yoshiyuki Takahashi.

Foxwood Tales

1991. Video. dir: Seiji Endo. scr: Seiji Endo. des: Brian Paterson. ani: Maya Matsuyama. mus: Osamu Tezuka (not the Osamu). prd: Grouper Productions. 25 mins. x 3 eps.

Harvey, Rue, and Willie are a hedgehog, rabbit, and mouse who live in a windmill in the peaceful town of Foxwood, where they have several adventures in this short-lived series based on the children’s picture books by the British creators Cynthia and Brian Paterson.

Frankenstein *

1981. jpn: Kyofu Densetsu Kaibutsu: Frankenstein. aka: Mystery! Frankenstein Legend of Terror. TV special. dir: Yugo Serikawa. scr: Akiyoshi Sakai. des: Toyoo Ashida. ani: Toyoo Ashida. mus: Kentaro Haneda. prd: Aoi Productions, Toei Animation, TV Asahi. 111 mins.

After the success of Dracula: Sovereign of the Damned, the same team made this bewildering version of Mary Shelley’s novel. For reasons unknown, the setting was moved to North Wales, where Frankenstein conducts his experiments amid the mountainous splendor of Snowdonia. His creature, Franken, is brought to life by a lightning bolt and runs for Switzerland, where he is pursued by police inspector Belbeau. Franken befriends a little girl called Emily and her blind father, saving Emily from a wild bear before succumbing to his fate and committing suicide.

Freckles Pooch

1969. jpn: Sobakasu Putchi. aka: Freckled Butch. TV series. dir: Fumio Ikeno. scr: Noboru Ishiguro, Tomohiro Ando. des: Shozo Kubota. ani: Tadao Wakabayashi. mus: Asao Kasai. prd: Shinsei, Fuji. TV 5 mins. x 162 eps.

Short comedy films about a cheeky little dog, Pooch, who is unable to let any evil deed go unchallenged. He flies in a vehicle shaped like a milk jug, powered by milk itself, and fights against the evil genius Walgie, using a yo-yo as a weapon, accompanied by his associates the lumbering monster Netaro and Ganko the impetuous parrot. FP was made by the remaining staff members of TV Doga, the company behind Marine Boy, which lost much of its anime staff after it was rebranded Fuji TV Enterprises. With more emphasis on live-action television, many of the staff left, and the few animators remaining worked on this, farming out the actual animation to Shinsei Sekai Eigasha. The show was eventually replaced by Pinch and Punch, with which it shares a large number of crewmembers.

Free Kick for Tomorrow

1992. jpn: Ashita e no Free Kick. TV series. dir: Tetsuro Amino, Toshiaki Suzuki. scr: Masaru Yamamoto, Nobuaki Kishima, Akira Oketani. des: Noboyushi Habara. ani: Takahiro Omori, Masami Suda. mus: Satoshi Tozuka. prd: Ashi Pro, Nippon TV, Shizuoka TV. 25 mins. x 50 eps.

Shun arrives in Italy with his disabled friend, Roberto, to live with his rich grandfather who also emigrated from Japan many years ago. He becomes passionate about soccer, but Grandfather wants him to take over the family business and resents the time he devotes to sports. Eventually, though, he has to accept that Shun will become a professional player. Roberto, meanwhile, succeeds as an architect and wants to build a great stadium in their town, a project that Shun’s grandfather very much opposes. The series has an open ending—a big competition with top teams comes to the town, but we never know if Shun’s team wins. A series that reflects the reality of a modern sports business, where few players were born anywhere near the town they represent, and corporate interests can make or break a team.

Fried Octopus Man

1998. jpn: Takoyaki Manto Man. aka: Fried Octopus Cloak Man. TV series. dir: Masami Annai. scr: Yoshio Urasawa. des: Midori Nagaoka. ani: Tsugenobu Kuma. mus: N/C. prd: Studio Pierrot, TV Tokyo. 25 mins. x 12 eps.

Evil priest Baobao is intent on ruling Earth, and a lone woman in a takoyaki (fried octopus dumplings) diner prays for a savior to protect the planet. In a series that owes a lot of its comedy and inspiration to the earlier Anpanman, the woman’s request is answered, sort of, when a hero arrives draped in an edible cloak.

Frightful News

1991. jpn: Kyofu Shinbun. Video. dir: Takashi Anno. scr: Masaaki Sakurai. des: Koji Uemura. ani: Koji Uemura. mus: Takashi Tsunoda. prd: Pierrot Project. 50 mins. x 3 eps.

Junior high school student Rei Onigata finds a newspaper, The Frightful News, that cuts one’s life short by a hundred days whenever it is read. It also, however, contains much interesting information about the spirit world and future events, and Rei is the only one who can read it. Realizing he has been tricked by an evil spirit, he offers his services to psychic Jo-un Hoshi. Rei, his love interest, Midoriko, and her sister are stalked by the ghost of an old man in a dark cloak. This short series is based on the 1973 Shonen Champion manga by Jiro Tsunoda, who also drew Hyakutaro and Karate-Crazy Life. In 1996, the story was remade as a live-action movie, directed by Teruyoshi Ishii. Perhaps in the wake of the not-dissimilar live-action film Ring (1998), it was brought back in 2000 for a one-shot “manga video,” in which voice actors narrated the story over still images from the manga onscreen.

Friten-kun

1981. Movie. dir: Taku Sugiyama, Kazuyuki Okaseko. scr: Noboru Shiroyama, Tsunehisa Ito, Haruya Yamazaki. des: Takamitsu Mitsunori. ani: Takamitsu Mitsunori, Haruo Takahashi, Keiji Morishita. mus: Haruo Matsushita. prd: Knack. 75 mins.

Gambling japes from Friten, a Tokyo gangster whose sense of humor was screened on a double bill with the diametrically opposed Osaka-based comedy of Jarinko Chie. Based on the manga by Masashi Ueda, serialized in both Modern Mahjong and Gamble Punch magazines, the seven vignettes here include Friten demonstrating his winning gambling tactic and the wrong way to play mahjong. Among the stories are more far-fetched incidents such as his trip back in time to Edo-period Japan, his attempts to get involved in real sports, and his hapless tries at seducing the pretty Ikue-chan.

From the Apennines to the Andes

1976. jpn: Haha o Tazunete Sanzan Ri. aka: 3,000 Leagues in Search of Mother. TV series, Movie. dir: Isao Takahata, Hajime Okayasu. scr: Kazuo Fukuzawa. des: Yoichi Otabe. ani: Yoichi Otabe. mus: Koichi Sakata. prd: Nippon Animation, Fuji TV. 21 mins. x 51 eps.

Italian boy Marco lives in the town of Genoa, which has been hard hit by heavy taxes and recession. His mother leaves for Argentina, where her husband runs a clinic for the poor, but Marco cannot bear to be parted from her and pursues her ship. So begins a long quest that will ultimately take him to Bolivia, in the company of the Peppino puppet theater, and Fiorina, the daughter of a local chieftain. The story was reedited into a 107-minute movie version in 1980 by Hajime Okayasu and completely remade by director Kozo Kusuba as Marco (1999). Based on part of the novel Cuore by Edmondo de Amicis, which was also adapted in its entirety as Heart: An Italian Schoolboy’s Journal. The moving story was also mercilessly lampooned in the 1991 Genius Idiot Bakabon–movie 3,000 Leagues in Search of Osomatsu’s Curry (1991), directed by Akira Saito, in which the quest for Mother was replaced by a zany search for a decent meal.

From Today On, This is Me

1992. jpn: Kyo kara, Ore wa! Video. dir: Takeshi Mori. scr: Shikichi Ohashi. des: Masaya Onishi. ani: Masaya Onishi. mus: Kimio Morihari. prd: Studio Pierrot. 61 mins.

Teenagers Takashi Mitsubashi and Shinji Ito move to a new high school in “C” Prefecture near Tokyo and resolve to pretend to be the toughest kids around, dyeing their hair into threatening tough-guy blond hairdos. Forced to cooperate simply because each could rat out the other, they outwit genuine tough guys with elaborate bluffs and deceits. This movie is based on a comedy in the 1988 manga in Shonen Sunday by Hiroyuki Nishimori. Compare to Bite Me! Chameleon.

Fruits Baskets *

2001. TV series. dir: Akitaro Daichi. scr: Rika Nakase. des: Akimi Hayashi. ani: N/C. mus: N/C. prd: Studio Deen, Fuji TV. 25 mins. x 26 eps.

Happy-go-lucky orphan Toru Honda has to move in with the family of Yuki, the high school boy she secretly adores. However, she is not expecting to discover that they are a family of sorcerers and shape-shifters. Fluffy animals, magic, and schoolgirl crushes, based on the manga by Natsuki Takaya in Hana to Yume magazine.

Fruits Cup *

2004. jpn: Yugu Setsuai. Video. dir: Yoshio Usuda. scr: Tsunekazu Murakami. des: Waffle. ani: Yoshio Usuda. mus: Beeline. prd: Waffle, Milky. 30 mins. x 2 eps.

After saving the life of his friend in a car accident, Riku temporarily inherits the convalescing man’s job as a caretaker for a girls’ dormitory on one of Japan’s southern islands. He arrives to discover that they are a family of shape-shifters, cursed by the animals of the Chinese zodiac. Riku secretly films the girls in various lesbian couplings and then uses the footage to blackmail Yoshino, the most demure, into giving up her virginity. But Riku wants to seduce the other girls at the boarding house he runs, and so forces Yoshino to help him get what he wants. “The worst sexual humiliation” is assured by the press release, which in Japanese notes that there are 30 minutes per episode, although the American edition barely reaches a 45-minute running time for the combined two parts. So either something was cut, or, as we suspect, the original Japanese running time was more like 22 minutes per episode. LNV

Fuji TV (Fuji Telecasting)

Founded in 1959 by a consortium of radio companies, movie companies, and the Sankei Shinbun newspaper, Fuji was an early adopter of the anime medium and the channel that screened both Astro Boy and Kimba the White Lion. The channel’s flagship anime is Sazae-san, the longest-running cartoon series in the world, now nearing its fortieth birthday. The broadcast company acquired the studio TV Doga in the 1960s, renaming it Fuji TV Enterprises. The station enjoys a particularly strong relationship with the magazine Shonen Jump, whose Dragonball and One Piece manga have both been adapted for its schedules.

Fujiko F. Fujio’s Little Weirdness Theater

1990. jpn: Fujiko F. Fujio no Sukoshi Fushigi (SF) Tanben Theatre. Video. dir: Tetsu Dezaki, Tomomi Mochizuki. scr: Toshiaki Imaizumi. des: Keizo Shimizu. ani: Keizo Shimizu. mus: N/C. prd: Studio Gallop. 50 mins. x 5 eps.

A series of SF short stories by the cocreator of Doraemon made for adults but in the spirit of fondly remembered shows from childhood. The punchy one-shots include Tomorrow in the Letterbox, in which a man receives a message from the future warning of impending danger for his friends; A Dish for the Minotaur, about a crash-landed astronaut who finds himself on a planet where the roles of men and cows are reversed, and finds that he is to be eaten at a royal banquet; Green Guardian, a pastiche of Day of the Triffids in which Tokyo is overrun by man-eating plants; Island of Extinction, about the population of Earth being all but wiped out by invading aliens; and the lighthearted superhero pastiche, Ultra Super Deluxe Man.

Fuku-chan

1982. jpn: Fuku-chan: Yokoyama Ryuichi no Kessaku Anime. aka: Fuku-chan: Ryuichi Yokoyama’s Anime Masterpiece. TV series. dir: Mineo Fuji. scr: Masaki Tsuji, Toshiyuki Kashiwakura, Noboru Shiroyama, Hiroko Naka. des: Ryuichi Yokoyama. ani: Michishiro Yamada. mus: Hiroshi Tsu­tsui. prd: Shinei, TV Asahi. 25 mins. x 71 eps.

Childish goings-on for Fukuo Fuchida (also known as Fuku-chan), a small boy who attends nursery school with his “girlfriend,” Kumi, and hangs out with his playmates Namiko (whose parents own a china shop), her younger brother, Kiyo, naughty twins Doshako and Garako, and school bully Ganchan.

Fukutomi, Hiroshi

1950– . Born in Kochi, he studied animation at the Tokyo Design Academy before joining A Productions (now Shin’ei) and the company’s subsidiary Animaru-ya. After early storyboarding duties, became a director on Ikkyu and Little Goblin.

Fukuyama Theater: Summer Secrets

1990. jpn: Fukuyama Gekijo: Natsu no Himitsu. Video. dir: Michiyo Sakurai. scr: Michiyo Sakurai. des: Keiko Fukuyama. ani: N/C. mus: N/C. prd: Urban Project. 60 mins.

Several short animated films based on the short stories and four-panel manga of Keiko Fukuyama, including My Father the Mouse, The Rabbit Brothers, Summer Secret, The Mysterious Fairy, How Very Strange, and Kuro.

Full Metal Panic *

2001. TV series. dir: Koichi Chigira, Akihiro Nishiyama, Yasuhiro Takemoto. scr: Koichi Chigira, Fumihiko Shimo, Yasuhiro Takemoto. des: Osamu Horiuchi, Kanetake Ebikawa, Toshiaki Ihara, Koji Ito, Masayuki Takano. ani: Osamu Horiuchi. mus: Toshihiko Sahashi. prd: Gonzo, Mithril. 23 mins. x 24 eps. (TV1) 24 mins. x 12 eps. (Fumoffu) 24 mins. x 13 eps. (Second Raid).

In a world where the Cold War continues into the 21st century, Russian scientists are gathering “the Whispered”—people with unique and special powers. The international troubleshooting agency Mithril is employed to prevent such acquisitions, a task it usually performs with military-grade giant robots called Arm Slaves, but which occasionally involves undercover assignments. Hence the arrival of Mithril agent Sosuke Sagara at a Japanese high school, where he is charged with maintaining undercover surveillance and protection for Kaname Chidori, a beautiful and intelligent sixteen-year-old girl, from enemies of Mithril and, regrettably, high school panty thieves. Kaname has been born with Black Technology, an innate and latent knowledge that makes her capable of producing formidable weaponry.

Transported swiftly from a world like Gasaraki to a world like Sukeban Deka, Sosuke is written off as a weapons-obsessed geek by many of the other students. He “befriends” Kaname, wreaking appalling havoc on anyone he thinks may threaten her—teachers, friends, classmates—but when she is kidnapped by the forces of evil, he shows more than just professional concern and risks everything to save her.

Despite a bunch of predictable stereotypes, FMP somehow manages to retain a sense of fun lacking from so many other anime—as if Spriggan were not all about global conspiracies, but focused instead on what its hero did on his days off. The “romantic” lead has a dark past and is so tied up in his work that he takes a long while to realize the full range of his story functions. The villains are really nasty and the robots are simply stunning, ensuring FMP a place as one of the best offerings of its year.

Based on a series of novels by Shoji Gato, FMP was originally slated for release in the fall season of 2001, but kept off-air by the terrorist attacks of 9/11—which found nobody in the mood for a wacky tale of anti-terrorist high jinks. Similar issues delayed the American release of Metropolis and caused re-thinks in content for several U.S. TV shows, including the first season of 24. When it did finally reach Japanese networks in early 2002, it was successful enough to get a second series right away, animated by Kyoto Animation instead of Gonzo. Screened from January 2002, sequel FMP: Fumoffu is based on several spin-off stories from the original and has a more comedic and/or lecherous outlook. It concentrates solely on life at the school, while Sosuke continues to cause mayhem, and his commanding officer Testarossa decides to try high school life for a few weeks. A third series FMP: The Second Raid (2005) is based on the two Owaru Day by Day novels that followed and takes a much grimmer tone. This time a secret organization wants to eliminate Mithril and the teenagers have to stop them. There is also a spin-off manga by Shikidoji in Comic Dragon monthly, released under the unwieldy title Full Metal Panic! The Anime Mission (Resource Book Manga). V

Full Moon

2002. jpn: Full Moon o Sagashite. aka: Searching for the Full Moon; Furumyu; Until the Full Moon. TV series, TV special. dir: Toshiyuki Kato, Bob Shirahata. scr: Genki Yoshimura. Hiro Masaki, Mayu Sugiura, Mushi Hirohira, Rika Nakase, Ryu Tamura, Shizuma Aozora. des: Yuka Kudo. ani: Studio Deen. mus: Yoshiaki Muto, Keita Shiina. prd: NAS, Studio Deen. 25 mins. x 52 eps. (TV), 10 mins. (special).

Mitsuki Koyama is twelve, in love with her childhood friend Eichi, and dreams of becoming a singer. Then she finds she has throat cancer—a malignant tumor that prevents her from singing above a whisper. Two strange beings show up and inform her that they are angels of death and she has one year to live. But Takuto and Meroko are moved by her passionate desire to become a famous singer before her time runs out and decide to help her. Disguising themselves as a bunny and a cat in the best tradition of magical girl shows, they enable her to transform into a 16-year-old idol singer so that she can try for stardom before her last year elapses.

This is by no means the first show in which a pretty girl comes with a time limit attached, nor the first in which an idol singer’s desperation for attention gains a life or death element—consider Limit the Miracle Girl and Key the Metal Idol. Nor is its gloomy premise unfamiliar on Japanese television, since every TV season sees at least one youthful protagonist staring death in the face, particularly in imitation of another combination of death and pop music, 1998’s Please God! Just A Little More Time (*DE). This could have been another thoroughly depressing show, since it never tries to fudge the fact that its perky heroine is going to die, but the bickering between hunky Takuto and besotted Meroko provide comic relief and Mitsuki’s determination to make the most of what she has keeps the tone upbeat. The series is based on the manga by Arina Tanemura, creator of Kamikaze Thief Jeanne, and spun off a “special” Cute Cute Adventure (2002), a gift to Ribon magazine readers. This comic snippet shows Takuto and Meroko getting left behind as Mitsuki rushes to a photo shoot and the obstacles they have to overcome to catch up with her.

Fullmetal Alchemist *

2003. jpn: Hagane no Renkin Jutsushi; Hagaren. TV series, movie. dir: Seiji Mizushima. scr: Seiji Mizushima, Sho Aikawa. des: Yoshiyuki Ito, Shinji Aramaki, Junya Ishigaki. ani: Koji Sugiura. mus: Michiru Oshima. prd: Aniplex, BONES, MBS, Square-Enix, Aniplex, Mainichi, Square-Enix, Shochiku Film. (m) 24 mins. x 51 eps. (TV), ca. 80 mins. (m).

Alchemy is a process by which ordinary, non-living material can be transmuted into other forms. The Elric brothers, Edward and Alphonse, live with their mother in the quiet little town of Resembool while their father, famous alchemist Hohenheim Elric, is helping the military in a war. Edward, the older brother by a year, is a precocious alchemist, and when their mother falls ill and dies, he and Alphonse break every law to perform a forbidden ritual to resurrect her. The attempt goes horribly wrong, and Alphonse’s body is destroyed, but Edward manages to save his soul by transferring it to a suit of armor—although it literally costs him an arm and a leg. The only way to return themselves to their former state and have a chance of bringing back their mother, is to find the alchemical MacGuffin, the Philosopher’s Stone.

Three years later, the 15-year-old Edward is a bad-tempered alchemist working for the military. Alphonse is still trapped in his armor, and Edward has gained mechanical limbs, fitted by the grandmother of their childhood friend Winry Rockbell. Winry is a tomboy who has inherited her grandmother’s mechanical and technical skills. Colonel Mustang, also known as the “Flame Alchemist” because of his skill with fire magic, is their commanding officer. Most alchemists are in the army because the general public distrusts and fears them, even though their skills are needed to fight fearsome enemies. The brothers and their friends battle foes based on the seven deadly sins, using symbols from the works of real-life medieval alchemist Nicholas Flamel. In a surprise twist, they are reunited with their father but become embroiled in the rise of Nazism, and Edward himself is transported to a terrifying other world—our own.

Uniting the quest narrative of Dororo with the militarized European sorcery of Howl’s Moving Castle, FMA rode the wave of Harry Potter’s success to become one of the fan-favorite anime of the early 21st century. In a way, it takes the robot buddy sci-fi of Heat Guy J and simply places it into a magical world. Edward is like a magical girl whose transformation has gotten seriously out of hand; without the help of a guiding angel or animal, he’s overreached himself and now has to try and retrieve normal life. Necromancy and forbidden powers are drawn into the context of galloping scientific progress in the 19th century in the style of Frankenstein; the age of steam was a time of dark and wonderful magic for those driving it, and this adaptation of Hiromu Arakawa’s manga catches that atmosphere, before turning in its later chapters to chills that foreshadow Monster. The Japanese screening saw multiple promo tie-ins including many video games and a theme song by rock group L’Arc-en-Ciel.

The movie, FMA: The Conqueror of Shambhala (HNR: Shanbara wo iku mono, 2005), is set in our world in 1923, with a powerless Edward living in Munich with Alphonse Heiderich, a doppelganger of his missing brother. The pair are researching rocketry and trying to find a way to send Edward home when Edward encounters an old enemy who may offer a clue to the way back, but at a terrible price to both worlds. V

Fumoon

1980. TV special. dir: Hisashi Sakaguchi. scr: Hisashi Sakaguchi. des: Hitoshi Nishimura, Hisashi Sakaguchi. ani: Hitoshi Nishimura. mus: Yuji Ono. prd: Tezuka Pro, Nippon TV. 91 mins.

Nuclear-bomb tests near Horseshoe Island have mutated the locals, creating a new breed of psychic humans called the Fumoon. Dr. Yamadono reports on the new species at an international conference attended by representatives from the nuclear superpowers, Star and Uran (a thinly disguised U.S. and USSR), but nobody listens to his dire warnings. Star and Uran go to war, while the Fumoons constitute a third front, attacking all humans while a cloud of dark gas closes in around Earth. By the end, as the Fumoons flee into space, the warring nations join forces to save the planet and discover that the dark gas is a benign phenomenon that turns into harmless oxygen—though who is to say that next time the human race will be so lucky? A cautionary tale from Astro Boy–creator Osamu Tezuka based on his 1951 manga Next World, itself inspired in equal parts by the Korean War and nuclear testing in the Pacific. As with other TV specials from Tezuka, many characters from his other stories appear in cameo roles. See also Metropolis, to which Fumoon is a distant sequel. The original manga was itself a sequel of sorts to Tezuka’s Metropolis.

Furuhashi, Kazuhiro

1960– . A prime figure at Studio Deen, Furuhashi studied at an animation college before finding work as a key animator on Urusei Yatsura. Storyboarding and directing jobs soon followed on a wide range of work, including Ruro ni Kenshin, Virgin Mary Is Watching and Zipang. He was “series” director on Hunter x Hunter—a “show runner” in American terms.

Furuse, Noboru

?– ?. Key animator and character designer on Urusei Yatsura, Confucius, and many of the later Lupin III TV specials.

Fushigi Yugi: The Mysterious Play *

1995. jpn: Fushigi Yugi. aka: Mysterious Game. TV series/special, video. dir: Hajime Kamegaki, Nanako Shimazaki, Akira Shigeno. scr: Yoshio Urasawa, Kazuhisa Sakaguchi. des: Hideyuki Motohashi. ani: Hideyuki Motohashi, Hisatoshi Motoki, Mayumi Hiroda. mus: Tatsumi Yano. prd: Studio Pierrot, TV Tokyo. 25 mins. x 52 eps., 56 mins. x 2 eps. (TVm), 30 mins. x 3 eps. (v), 45 mins. x 6 eps. (v), 30 mins. x 4 eps. (Eikoden).

Fifteen-year-old Miaka accompanies her friend Yui to Tokyo’s national library, where the girls find an ancient Chinese book called The Universe of the Four Gods. They are transported to the world of the book, though Yui is soon thrown back to Earth, leaving Miaka temporarily stranded. Miaka finds herself in a fantasy version of ancient China, where she is rescued from slavers by the handsome Tamahome and becomes a ward of the emperor. The land of Konan (“Southern Scarlet,” as it is called) is threatened by invaders from Kotuo, and Miaka volunteers to be the long-awaited priestess of Suzaku (“Vermilion Sparrow”), who will assemble the legendary heroes known as the Seven Stars of Suzaku and save the world.

Though Yu Watase’s original manga in Flower magazine dated back to 1992, Fushigi Yugi was swamped by the later success of the superior Escaflowne, making FY look like a lackluster copy. This anime’s problems include an intensely irritating heroine, Miaka, with all the charm of a spoiled child, conspicuously cheap animation that often has to resort to static pans, and a forgettable plot assembled from off-the-peg clichés. The Emperor Hotohori falls in love with Miaka, but she loves Tamahome, a predictable love triangle which causes a falling-out with her friend Yui. Nevertheless, FY clearly struck a chord with an audience too young to remember The Neverending Story or the Wizard of Oz, and the series gained an enthusiastic fan following in both Japan and the U.S. The second season (episodes 27–52) changes slightly, with the death of one of Miaka’s guardians, the removal of some of the risqué humor that occasionally lightened the first season, and an endless succession of arbitrary magical obstacles to stretch out Miaka’s journey.

Two TV specials were little more than clip shows of the highlights of the first 33 episodes, but a true sequel soon continued the series on video. The first video series was set a month after the close of the TV version, with the events in Konan returning to haunt the cast back on Earth in both serious and parody versions on the same tapes. Looking suspiciously like a third TV season consigned to video after falling ratings, 1997’s second “video” series plunged the cast into a new conflict over the mystic Jewel of Memory. A later Yu Watase work, Ceres: Celestial Legend, soon followed in both Japan and the U.S.

A four-part video sequel, FY: Universe of the Four Gods (FY: Eikoden, 2001), was directed by Nanako Shimazaki, which threatens the happily-ever-after of the original by introducing a love-rival for Miaka, who enters the fantasy world determined to overthrow her and win her man for herself.

Future Boy Conan

1978. jpn: Mirai Shonen Conan. aka: Conan the Boy in Future. TV series, movie. dir: Hayao Miyazaki, Isao Takahata, Keiji Hayakawa. scr: Takaaki Nakano, Soji Yoshikawa. des: Hayao Miyazaki, Yasuo Otsuka. ani: Yoshiaki Kawajiri, Hideo Kawauchi. mus: Ken-ichiro Ikehama. prd: Nippon Animation, NHK. 25 mins. x 26 eps. (TV), 123 mins. (m).

Twenty years after a devastating nuclear war in 2008, only scattered communities of humans are left living on the small islands that were once mountaintops. Conan grows up on his island with his grandfather, believing themselves to be the last survivors of their race until a young girl, Lana, is washed up on their shore. She is a refugee from the evil military kingdom of Industria, which is trying to revive the use of dangerous energy sources. A first-time directing job for Hayao Miyazaki that incorporated elements he would later reuse in his Nausicaä and Castle in the Sky (though the original genesis of FBC lay in the novel The Incredible Tide [1970], by Alexander Key). The series was also edited into FBC: The Movie, which was released three months before Castle of Cagliostro and, hence, could be argued on a technicality to be Miyazaki’s first “movie.”

The franchise was revived as FBC 2: Taiga Adventure (1999), directed by Miyazaki’s former assistant Keiji Hayakawa, though its relationship to the original is extremely tenuous. The eponymous Taiga and his archaeologist father, Professor Dyno, are searching for ancient artifacts in South America, where there was supposedly a mysterious culture that could build great metallic birds 20 thousand years before. As he fights with treasure hunters for control of the ancient power-stones, Taiga discovers that the ancient O-Parts devices can power land, sea, and air machines that are each designed to look like a giant animal. In other words, it’s a rehash of Babel II and Mysterious Cities of Gold with a name designed to promise more than it actually delivers.

Future Cop Urashiman

1983. jpn: Mirai Keisatsu Urashiman. aka: Rock ’n’ Cop. TV series. dir: Koichi Mashimo, Shinya Sadamitsu, Takaaki Ishiyama. scr: Hirohisa Soda, Haruya Yamazaki, Kenji Terada. des: Takashi Nakamura, Shigeru Kato, Chuichi Iguchi. ani: Takashi Nakamura, Kunihiko Yuyama. mus: Shinsuke Kazato. prd: Tatsunoko Pro. 25 mins. x 50 eps.

An SF adaptation of Urashima Taro (see Japanese Folk Tales) about Ryo Urashima, a young private investigator from 1983 Tokyo who is whisked to the year 2050 by Professor Q, a mad scientist working for the evil, blue-skinned Führer. The trip into the future subjects Ryo to the “Urashima Effect”—he loses his memory and develops superhuman powers. Führer plans to use Ryo for his own ends, but Ryo is found by the police, who enlist him in their robot police unit, Magnapolice 88, along with a handsome wiseguy, Claude Mizusawa, and token girl Sophia Nina Rose. A witty sci-fi spectacle, it begins with comedy business (as Ryo insists on using his 1983 Volkswagen Beetle instead of a 2050 police car) that soon takes a more serious turn as Ryu tracks down Führer’s Necrime group and becomes involved in the power struggle between Führer and his assistant, Adolph von Ludovich.

Future War 198X *

1982. Movie. dir: Toshio Masuda, Tomohiro Katsumata. scr: Yuji Takada. des: Masami Suda. ani: Masami Suda. mus: Seiji Yokoyama. prd: Tokkyu Agency, Toei. 125 mins.

American scientist Bart, a specialist in Star Wars orbital antimissile lasers, defects on a Russian submarine, which is sunk by the U.S. Navy. His best friend, Mikumo, is ordered to come out of mourning to finish Bart’s work, while U.S. president Gibson tries to calm the volatile diplomatic situation. His efforts fail, and border troubles between East and West Germany escalate into full-scale war. When American Secretary of Defense Bugarlin murders Chief Secretary Orlof of the Soviet Union, all negotiations break down, and atomic war breaks out.

A controversial anime production inspired in part by the best-selling The Third World War, August 1985 by General Sir John Hackett, FW198X was based on actual projections from contemporary government reports and statistics. During production, there were protests about the “aggressive content” of the story, creating something of a media stir in Japan. Future War 198X was released on video in Australia, not in a “full” dub but in an original language version with occasional explicatory English narration.

F-ZERO Falcon Legend *

2003. jpn: F-Zero Falcon Densetsu. aka: F-0, F-Zero GP Legend. TV series. dir: Ayumi Tomobuki. scr: Akiyoshi Sakai. des: Toyoo Ashida, Shohei Kohara. ani: Daisuke Yoshida. mus: Takayuki Negishi. prd: Ashi Pro, Dentsu, TV Tokyo, Nintendo. 23 mins. x 51 eps.

Set in 2201, this racing game tie-in tips its hat to Demolition Man, but owes more to Japanese live-action hero shows, whose madly named supervillains and heroes have gifts handed down through time by magical mentors. An evil overlord, Emperor Black Shadow, leads the Dark Million organization and plans to use the Dark Matter Reactor, which grants the wishes of anyone who activates it, to take over the universe and devote it to evil. Ryu Suzaku (Rick Wheeler) is awakened from a 150-year cryogenic sleep to oppose him and fulfill the ancient Legend of the Falcon. He has become a member of the Elite Mobile Taskforce of the Galactic Space Federation, a group of pilots who compete in the F-Zero grand prix races popular throughout the Galaxy. He is not alone—his old girlfriend Haruka (Jody) was also in cryosleep and has also been awakened, but she is part of Dark Million, and now goes under the name of Miss Killer. Ryu’s nemesis, arch-criminal Zoda, has also been resurrected from his cryo-prison by Black Shadow. The stage is set for a final confrontation, but not before various other characters, like fighting cyborg Mighty Gazelle and 97-year-old race pilot Ironman Neelson, have their cameos. A spin-off from Nintendo’s 1990 video game of the same name, screened on Fox’s 4Kids channel, whose audience was too young to remember Cyberformula GPX.