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Taboo Charming Mother *

2003. jpn: Enbo. aka: Captivating/Charming Mother; Erotic Heart Mother. Video. dir: Kan Fukumoto. scr: Chiho Hananoki. des: Tsuzuru Miyabi. ani: Yuji Uchida, Kan Fukumoto, Shigenori Imoto. mus: N/C. prd: Big Wing, Milky, Museum Pictures. 30 mins. x 6 eps.

Only a year after marrying a significantly older man, Misako already feels that she is in a rut. Her stepson Kazuhiko treats her with distant disdain, and she hasn’t had sex with husband Yosuke for two whole months. Initially, she is insulted and appalled by nuisance phone calls, although as time goes by, her frustrations in her private life cause her almost to welcome them. Over the course of several calls, her stalker talks her into using a sex toy he has left by her front gate in exchange for stopping the calls. Despite his telephonic absence, she begins using it obsessively—and even acquires another—unable to control her lust. When he telephones again, he persuades her to confess her fantasies. As time passes, it almost seems as if her life is improved by her illicit interludes of semi-forced onanism and phone sex—even her stepson seems to warm to her and addresses her at one point as “Mom.” The identity of her caller is initially unclear, although considering the Scooby Doo size of the list of potential suspects, it shouldn’t take anyone long to work out who it is. Later episodes introduce Misako’s sister, Emiko, who is drawn into the maelstrom. Within the limited demands of anime porn, TCM is an intriguing title, much longer than the norm, and consequently able to stretch its suspense and sex scenes over several episodes. This is probably due at least in part to the size of the adult manga by Tsuzuru Miyabi that inspired it; compare to U-jin’s Sakura Diaries. LN

Ta-chan King of the Jungle

1994. jpn: Jungle no Osama Ta-chan. TV series. dir: Hitoshi Nanba, Akitaro Daichi, Shigeru Ueda, Teppei Matsu­ura, Takaaki Ishiyama. scr: Jinzo Toriumi, Akihiro Arashima, Satoshi Fujimoto, Toshiyuki Otaki, Takeshi Ito. des: Hiroka Kudo. ani: Shigeru Kato, Chuji Nakajima, Kiyoshi Matsumoto, Masahiko Murata. mus: Masatake Yamada. prd: Amuse, TV Tokyo. 25 mins. x 50 eps.

A muscle-bound man in a loincloth fights evil kung-fu masters and vampires in darkest Africa. Though distantly inspired by Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan of the Apes (1912), this series was filtered through a popular Shonen Jump manga by Masaya Tokuhiro.

Tactical Roar

2006. TV series. dir: Yoshitaka: Fujimoto. scr: Kazuho Hyodo. des: Takeshi Ito. ani: Takeshi Ito. mus: Hikaru Nanase. prd: Actas, TV Kanagawa. 25 mins. x 13 eps.

In the aftermath of a catastrophic rise in global sea levels, a token boy heads out pirate hunting in the company of a group of girls, on a Pacific Ocean dominated by a massive, mystery storm.

Tactics *

2004. TV series dir: Hiroshi Watanabe, Kazuhiko Inoue, Chiaki Ima, Shigeru Ueda. scr: Kenichi Kanemaki, Hiroyuki Kawasaki, Katsuhiko Takayama, Masashi Kubota. des: Tomomi Kimura. ani: Yukiko Ban. mus: Kei Haneoka. prd: Medianet, MAG Garden, Studio Deen, TV Tokyo. 24 mins. x 25 eps.

Scholar Kantaro Ichinomiya researches folklore by day and goes ghostbusting by night in the manner of Mushishi. Hunting for an ogre-eating goblin, he releases a different kind of man-eater—hunky goblin Haruka, sealed inside a shrine and now out to form a very unusual monster-busting partnership with Kantaro. Kantaro’s cute fox-spirit housekeeper Yoko doesn’t approve of Haruka and Kantaro’s partnership at first; nor does green blob Mu-chan, married to white goblin Sugino but carrying a torch for Kantaro. Based on the manga in Comic Blade by Sakura Kinoshita and Kazuko Higashiyama, this anime adaption adds a new character created specifically for TV—schoolgirl Suzu Edogawa falls for Haruka on sight. An old-time harem of spirits is a twist on the familiar theme geek-gets-girls, and this has more charm than the usual.

Tail of two Sisters *

1999. jpn: Sister’s Rondo: Charm Point 1. Video. dir: Yoshimaro Otsubo. scr: Tedokoro Imaike. des: Maron Kurase. ani: N/C. mus: N/C. prd: Beam Entertainment, Akatonbo. 30 mins.

In this typical tale of anime abuse replaying the vengeful student/teacher setup from Adventure Kid, new teacher Serina Kawano strikes up a very strange relationship with her pupil Masaya, submitting to his sadistic demands. Meanwhile, Serina’s little sister, Yumi, is having boyfriend “troubles” of her own and doesn’t understand how to keep her man. Needless to say, Serina has some advice for her. Not to be confused with the Korean horror movie, Tale [sic] of Two Sisters (2003). N

Taiman Blues

1987. Video. dir: Tetsu Dezaki. scr: Machiko Kondo. des: Yukari Kobayashi. ani: Yukari Kobayashi. mus: N/C. prd: Magic Bus. 30 mins. x 5 eps.

A series grouping together two different stories linked by the biker theme. The three-part Naoto Shimizu Chapter is a tale of rivalry between two gangs, MND and Laku, and the personal vendetta between MND’s Naoto and Laku’s Yota, which lands Naoto in prison in the second (1988) episode. The third part of his story, his life after prison, was released in 1989. Lady’s Chapter (1990) is devoted to a different set of characters, this time focusing on biker girls. Fifteen-year-old Mayumi has to move to the rough end of Osaka when her parents split and remarry. She meets Noriko, who helps her settle into her new life, and eventually moves in with her. Through Noriko’s job at a petrol station, they get to know regular customer Big Bear and his biker gang, and eventually get into their own gang of girl racers. Based on a manga by Yu Furusawa.

Taito Road

1996. jpn: Shinken Densetsu Taito Road. aka: True Fighting Legend Taito Road. TV series. dir: Tatsuo Misawa. scr: Kenichi Kanemaki, Kazuhiko Kobe, Yoshihiko Tomizawa. des: Michio Fukuda. ani: Masahiro Masai. mus: Koji Tsunoda. prd: Toei, TV Tokyo. 25 mins. x 13 eps.

In a lackluster picaresque that tries to cash in on the successful Street Fighter II franchise, a young man sets out to fight lots of people. V

Takada, Akemi

?– . Born in Tokyo, Takada graduated from Tama Art University, and in the same year gained employment at Tatsunoko, where she worked for four years as a character designer on shows such as Urusei Yatsura, before going freelance. An accomplished illustrator, her anime work includes a soft touch on Kimagure Orange Road and Creamy Mami, although she is perhaps best known for her membership in the Headgear collective and the key role she played with husband Kazunori Ito in the creation of Patlabor.

Takahashi, Katsuo

1932– . Born in Nagasaki, Takahashi grew up in Korea, which was a Japanese colony at the time. He was repatriated in 1945, and studied drama, film, and puppetry for four years before founding Chuo Productions (now Tokyo Chuo Productions) in 1958, specializing in children’s entertainment and puppetry. He also wrote Children’s Education in the Age of Television, an influential book in early Japanese broadcast media.

Takahashi, Rumiko

1957– . Born in Niigata Prefecture, Takahashi graduated from the history department of Japan Women’s University. She had already been attending a manga workshop and found work as an assistant to Kazuo Umezu. She won a Shogakukan new writers prize in 1977 and went on to create the original manga for Urusei Yatsura, Maison Ikkoku, and Ranma 1⁄2, three of the defining manga works of the 1980s. She also appears as a “guest” designer on the credits for a few anime, as a design assistant on Adrift in the Pacific, and as the designer of a single character in Crusher Joe. Subsequently, her role in anime has been limited to that of the author of the manga on which many shows are based, notably the long-running Inu Yasha, but also One-Pound Gospel and Mermaid’s Forest. Her design credit on Moeyo Ken is for work on the original game on which the anime is based.

Takahashi, Ryosuke

1943– . Born in Tokyo, Takahashi dropped out of the literature department at Meiji University in order to begin full-time employment at Mushi Production, where he had already been working part-time. He went freelance in 1969, and became supervising director on Zero Tester. As a writer and director on Votoms, he was a key figure in the move toward the depiction of “realistic robots” (see Okawara, Kunio). He was also a supervising director on the 1979 remake of Cyborg 009, Mama is a Fourth Grader, and the Knight of the Iron Dragon segment in The Cockpit.

Takahata, Isao

1935– . Sometimes credited with the pseudonym Tetsu Takemoto. Born in Mie Prefecture, Takahata graduated from the French literature department of Tokyo University in 1959. Inspired by viewing Paul Grimault’s cartoons in his student days, he joined Toei Animation in 1961 and worked on The Littlest Warrior and The Little Prince and the Eight-Headed Dragon. His directorial debut came with Little Norse Prince, a financial flop despite critical acclaim, which led to his temporary retreat into television animation. Directorial posts followed at A Production (now Shin’ei Doga) and Zuiyo (now Nippon Animation), where he worked with his protégé and long-time collaborator Hayao Miyazaki on the landmark Heidi and Anne of Green Gables. Moving on to Tokyo Movie Shinsha and then freelance, he entered independent production with Miyazaki on Nausicaä of the Valley of Wind and had a pivotal role in Studio Ghibli, not only directing his own movies, such as the groundbreaking Grave of the Fireflies and Pompoko, but serving as producer on many of “Miyazaki’s” masterpieces. In any other country, Takahata would be regarded as a national treasure—in an anime industry fixated on the successes of Miyazaki, the quiet achievements of this master filmmaker are often overlooked, despite a career rivaled only in length and achievement by that of Rintaro (q.v.).

Takamaru

1991. jpn: Cho-Bakumatsu Shonen Seiki Takamaru. aka: Super 19th-
Century Boy Takamaru. Video. dir: Toyoo Ashida, Satoshi Nishimura. scr: Toyoo Ashida, “Mindanao,” Yuichiro Takeda. des: Toyoo Ashida. ani: Takahiro Yoshimatsu. mus: Kohei Tanaka. prd: JC Staff, Studio Live. 25 mins. x 6 eps.

Set in the world of the Champion Kingdom, an imaginary island whose inhabitants follow a traditional samurai lifestyle, this is a tale of friendship and courage aimed at preteens. Based on director Ashida’s manga in Animedia magazine. Compare to Shinsengumi Farce.

Takayashiki, Hideo

1947– . Born in Iwate Prefecture, Takayashiki dropped out of Toyo University to pursue a career in scriptwriting, including work on Lupin III, Tomorrow’s Joe, and the screenplay for the Urusei Yatsura movie Always My Darling. He has also written many novelizations, including ones for the anime of Dragon Quest and Sukeban Deka.

Take the X Train

1987. jpn: X Densha de Iko. aka: Let’s Take the X Train. Video. dir: Rintaro, Tatsuhiko Urahata. scr: Rintaro, Yoshio Urasawa. des: Yoshinori Kanemori. ani: Yoshinori Kanemori. mus: Yosuke Yamashita. prd: Madhouse. 50 mins.

Public-relations man Toru Nishihara is waiting on an underground station platform when he sees a phantom train. Ghosts are about to invade the human world, and Toru is co-opted by a secret military unit that has gathered the world’s psychics to hold them off. Toru is threatened and cajoled into taking part, though the phantom train lays waste to the armed forces in a cataclysmic battle. The jazz number “Take the A-Train,” whose title inspired Koichi Yamano’s original short story, appears at several points in this elegant little chiller and is sung over the closing credits by Akiko Yano.

Takegami *

1990. jpn: Ankoku Shinden Takegami. aka: Guardian of Darkness Takegami. Video. dir: Osamu Yamazaki. scr: Osamu Yamazaki. des: Masami Obari. ani: Masanori Nishii. mus: Seiko Naga­oka. prd: JC Staff. 45 mins. x 3 eps.

The lonely, homely Terumi has a crush on Koichi and sells her soul for beauty, agreeing to be possessed by an ancient dragon lord, who in return will make her more popular at school. Now everywhere she goes she is greeted by hissing cats and wilting flowers. And next time the school bullies come calling, she tears their souls apart. But Koichi has also been possessed, by a “kindly” spirit called Susano, although he (and anyone else who knows their Japanese Folk Tales) has his doubts about who the good guys are, as the powerful beings fight an age-old war in modern Tokyo.

Despite a U.S. dub that adds to the suspense by not scrimping on the demonic voice effects, Takegami is a derivative tale of violent transformations that sits somewhere between Guyver and Shutendoji, with a dose of misogyny and lackluster fight scenes. Compare to Legend of the Four Kings and Dark Myth, which similarly retell ancient myth in a modern setting, but not as an excuse for getting into fights with girls. NV

Takizawa, Toshifumi

1953– . Born in Nagano Prefecture, Takizawa joined Tokyo Animation Film as an animator, soon moving on to Shin’ei Doga. He worked on Cyborg 009 and had his directorial debut working for Yoshiyuki Tomino on Space Runaway Ideon. He subsequently went freelance.

Tale of Genji *

1987. jpn: Murasaki Shikibu Genji Monogatari. aka: Murasaki Shikibu’s Tale of Genji. Movie. dir: Gisaburo Sugii, Kimiharu Ono, Naoto Hashimoto. scr: Tomomi Tsutsui. des: Yasuhiro Nakura. ani: Yasuo Maeda, Masahiko Murata, Masayuki, Yoshiyuki Sadamoto, Minoru Maeda, Mahiro Maeda. mus: Haruomi Hosono. prd: Tac, Herald. 110 mins.

Hikaru Genji, son of Japan’s Kiritsubo Emperor, is a brilliant and gifted young man stifled by the conventions of Heian court life, which offers no real outlet for his talent and energy except the arts and illicit love affairs. He is also haunted by memories of his mother, Lady Kiritsubo, who died when he was very young. He falls in love with his father’s consort, Fujitsubo, but his own wife, Lady Aoi, and another lover, Lady Rokujo, will not give him up. The battle for sole possession of his heart is at the core of this film; despite being fought with courtly grace, it’s a vicious and ultimately fatal contest, observed by the child Murasaki Shikibu, an orphan in Genji’s care who will later become one of his loves.

Facetiously advertised as a “faithful adaptation” of Murasaki Shikibu’s 11th-century novel, ToG was commissioned to mark the centenary of the Asahi Shinbun newspaper and the minor anniversaries for some of its affiliates. It unsurprisingly ditches most of the 1,000-page original, concentrating on a love triangle that formed just chapters 4–10 out of a total of 54. Though highly compromised by a recognizably modern script featuring several anachronisms of manner and etiquette, it is nevertheless a brave representation of the spirit of the original, and it is as stylistically rich as The Sensualist. Sometimes, however, its attempt to be faithful can backfire—most notably in the confusingly “real” predominance of black hair, demonstrating all too well why so many anime prefer to differentiate characters with brighter colors and styles. Director Sugii takes enormous risks with pacing, composition, and narrative flow; he utilizes early computer graphics and live-action footage of flames and cherry blossoms. Many scenes are composed of static shots, and the exquisite delicacy of the imagery is given plenty of time to sink in—this film is slow. Heavy with the beauty and mood of a vanished age, the hothouse emotions of the court reflect Genji’s own emotional turmoil, somewhat ill-served by a translation and U.S. release that plays up the original’s classical credentials but shies from offering any notes on the surviving poetic allusions. However, the true value of ToG does not lie in its relation to the original book at all but in its position as one of the small number of available anime that demonstrate the true diversity of the medium. Composer Hosono was one-third of the Yellow Magic Orchestra with Ryuichi Sakamoto and Yukihiro Takahashi. An erotic pastiche, “Bareskin Gen-chan,” appeared as one of the stories in the historical porn series Classical Sex-Zone (1988).

Tale of Hikari

1986. jpn: Hikari no Densetsu. TV series. dir: Tomomi Mochizuki, Shinya Sadamitsu, Toriyasu Furusawa, Tetsu­ya Komori, Hirotsugu Hamazaki. scr: Hideki Sonoda, Mayori Sekijima, Asami Watanabe, Yasushi Hirano. des: Toyoko Hashimoto, Ammonite. ani: Chuichi Iguchi. mus: Koji Kawamura. prd: Tatsu­noko, TV Asahi. 30 mins. x 19 eps.

Teenage gymnast Hikari struggles to succeed in bitter rivalry with school supergymnast Diana Groichiva. A typical sports anime in the tradition of Aim for the Ace, the series was taken off the air before finishing the standard 26-episode run despite injecting a contrived romance with a young rock star. Based on the 1985 manga in Comic Margaret by Izumi Aso.

Tale of the Ninja Ryuken

1991. jpn: Ninja Ryuken Den. Video. dir: Mamoru Kobe, Minoru Okazaki. scr: Katsuhiko Nobe. des: Satoshi Horiuchi. ani: Satoshi Horiuchi. mus: Toshiya Okuda. prd: Studio Juno. 50 mins.

The scene is New York, where bioresearcher Ned Freidman announces a cure for cancer, although there are rumors of strange goings-on—screams are heard from his house, and large crates are transported from there to his laboratory. Modern-day ninja Ryu, along with CIA operative Robert and his team, go to investigate. But Ryu is really the avatar of ancient dragon gods, and this is only another stage in the eternal battle between good and evil.

Based on the video game known in the U.S. as Ninja Gaiden, TNR’s action is its biggest selling point. The beginning of the story, a running midnight brawl, is fluid and well depicted, with no dialogue, just the sound of footsteps and blade on blade. The characterization can be strange—if presenting feisty game character Irene as quiet and shy seems a contradiction in terms, making her a CIA operative scared to fire a gun is downright silly. There’s an underdeveloped romantic subplot, and Robert gets more emphasis than game stars Ryu and Irene, as well as the video’s best line, “Men love three things. We love fighting, we love alcohol, and we love women.” V

Tales for Sleepless Nights

1992. jpn: Nemurenu no Chiisana Ohanashi. aka: Small Stories for Sleepless Nights. Video. dir: Kimiharu Ono. scr: Eto Mori. des: Shinji Nomura. ani: Shinji Nomura. mus: Yuko Hara. prd: Group Tac, Victor Music Production. 33 mins. x 3 eps.

Three videos about cats—Cat’s Best Friend, Cat’s Adventure, and Cat’s Christmas—each containing three smaller stories of feline fun. Based on a 1989 column in Monthly Kadokawa magazine by Yuko Hara, better known as the keyboard player/vocalist with the Southern All-Stars.

Tales of . . . *

1990. jpn: Konai Shasei. aka: Pictures from High School. Video. dir: Toshiyuki Sakurai, Takamasa Ikegami. scr: Toshiyuki Sakurai. des: Yuji Moriyama, Kinji Yoshimoto, Satoshi Urushihara. ani: Yuji Moriyama, Kinji Yoshimoto, Satoshi Urushihara, Satoshi Hirayama. Masamune Ochiai. mus: Takeshi Yasuda. prd: Studio Fantasia. 40 mins. x 3 eps.

Barefaced and bawdy anime porn based on short manga from Sakura Diaries–creator U-Jin. Broken into several short tableaux, it includes the infamous spoof Ultraman episode where a giant businessman humps skyscrapers until a giant schoolgirl helps him out. It’s the one with the naughty nurse looking for a soft spot in a bodybuilder, the college girls who will do absolutely anything for a free pizza, and the little match-girl who turns out to be the Ghost of Christmas Porn. Humor is the order of the day, with pastiches of Aim for the Ace and Astro Boy—U-Jin is not afraid to laugh at himself, and at other dirty old men. His male characters are pathetic, hormonal losers in thrall to capricious little minxes. Everybody is desperate for sex, although, in a refreshing change from the rape fantasies that characterize so much anime porn, everybody has a good time. Strangely, the U.S. distributors have switched the running order, so that the second Japanese release is actually the first in the translated version. This means that the salaryman we see growing into a giant monster and being destroyed in “Sailor Warrior Akko” is inexplicably brought back from the dead for his cameo role on the train in “Lusty Long-Distance Commute.” But since this anime is still on sale in Japan 11 years after its original release, whereas lesser erotica are swiftly deleted, such minor continuity bloopers are unlikely to put off the U.S. audience. Released in America as Tales of Misbehavior, Tales of Titillation, and Tales of Sintillation. The unrelated Tales of Seduction was a 2004 retitling of the anime filed in this book as U-jin Brand. N

Tales of Earthsea *

2006. jpn: Gedo Senki. aka: Ged’s Chronicle; Wizard of Earthsea. Movie. dir: Goro Miyazaki. scr: Goro Miyazaki, Keiko Tanba. des: N/C. ani: N/C. mus: Tamiya Terashima. prd: Studio Ghibli. ca. 80 mins.

An adaptation of Ursula K. LeGuin’s Earthsea books, in particular the third volume, The Farthest Shore, controversially directed by a man whose former qualifications in the anime world had extended only as far as being the director of the Studio Ghibli museum, and, perhaps more handily, being the son of Hayao Miyazaki. Forthcoming at the time we went to press.

Tales of Eternia *

2001. TV series. dir: Shigeru Ueda, Takeshi Nagasawa, Satoshi Sato. scr: Hiroyuki Kawasaki, Satoru Nishizono, Katshuiko Takayama. des: Akihisa Maeda, Mutsumi Inomata. ani: Akihisa Maeda, Miko Nakajima. mus: N/C. prd: Xebec, Production IG, WOWOW. 25 mins. x 13 eps.

Inferia and Celestia are in the midst of a religious war, which the locals (with the arrogance of religious fanatics everywhere) call the Extreme Light War. As diplomacy breaks down and things get nasty, a young girl meets three teenagers near the borders of Inferia. She is Meldy, a Celestian, and according to her, both countries face a disaster called Grand Fall if they don’t stop fighting. 18-year-old Lid Harshel and his 17-year-old friends, Keal Zaibel and Fara Elstead, agree to help her, and together they set off for Belcarnu, legendary isle of everlasting summer, in search of a solution. Based on the PlayStation RPG of the same name, a follow-up to Tales of Fantasia and Tales of Destiny, the series credits Toshinori Otsuki as “Exclusive Production Director.” No, we don’t know what that means either.

Tales of Hans Christian Andersen *

1968. jpn: Andersen Monogatari. aka: Andersen Tales; The World of Hans Christian Andersen. Movie, TV series. dir: Kimio Yabuki (m), Masami Hata, Ichiro Fujita, Taku Sugiyama, Noboru Ishiguro, Makura Saki (pseudonym for Osamu Dezaki), Tetsu Dezaki (TV). scr: Hisashi Inoue, Morihisa Yamamoto (m), Yoshiaki Yoshida, Shunichi Yukimuro, Eiichi Tachi, Koji Ito, Haruya Yamazaki, Seiji Matsuoka, Takeyuki Kanda, Keisuke Fujikawa. des: Reiji Koyama (m), Toshihide Takeuchi, Shuichi Seki, Keiichi Makino (TV). ani: Akira Daikuhara (m), Masami Hata. Shuichi Seki (TV). mus: Seiichiro Uno (both). prd: Toei (m), Zuiyo (Nippon Animation), Fuji TV. 80 mins. (m), 25 mins. x 52 eps. (TV).

Toei’s 1968 movie interweaves the most famous of Andersen’s stories into a Disneyesque musical around the tale of young Hans trying to get a ticket for the opera and gradually discovering his talent for telling stories. It focuses particularly on The Red Shoes and The Little Match Girl. A 73-minute version was dubbed for U.S. release as The World of Hans Christian Andersen (1971). Toei would mine Andersen’s works for two further movies, Little Mermaid and a version of Thumbelina in 1978.

The 1971 TV series, also entitled Andersen Monogatari, retold many of the best-loved fairy tales collected by the Danish author, some in a single episode and some as an extended tale over several episodes. It employs the framing device of Candy, a girl who wishes to enter the Magic University and must collect 100 cards to do so by performing 100 good deeds—one shudders to think at the uses to which such a concept would be put post-Pokémon. The large number of different staff members were encouraged to vary their styles (see Japanese History). This led to a wide range of looks and moods (some episodes are lighthearted, some darker) and some interesting stylistic experimentation. Compare to Grimms’ Fairy Tales.

Tales of Phantasia

2005. jpn: Tales of Phantasia: The Animation. Video. dir: Takuo Tominaga, Shinjiro Shigeki. scr: Ryunosuke Kingetsu. des: Kosuke Fujishima. ani: Noriyuki Matsutake. mus: N/C. prd: Namco, Geneon, Actus, Frontier Works. 30 mins. x 4 eps.

Warrior Cless Alvein is sent back in time to confront Dhaos, an evil sorcerer imprisoned by his parents. He is accompanied by Mint Adnade, a girl who has mastered the arts of healing, and a number of other companions forming an archetypal (dare we suggest, stereotypical) party of adventurers. As the character roster suggests, this is based on a role-playing game, in this case the long-running Tales… series that began in 1995 with the Super Famicom (SNES) game of the same name. Tales of Eternia is based on a later game in the same series.

Tales of Yajikita College

1991. jpn: Yajikita Gakuen Dochuki. Video. dir: Osamu Yamazaki, Yoshihisa Matsumoto. scr: Ayumu Watanabe. des: Minoru Yamazawa. ani: Minoru Yamazawa. mus: Nobuhiko Kajiwara. prd: JC Staff. 40 mins. x 2 eps.

Forbidden love triangles at Mura’ame College, as Junko and Reiko become involved with boys they shouldn’t, then discover that they are the last inheritors of the secrets of the ninja. Your average, everyday mix of romance and assassins, based on the 1982 girls’ manga in Bonita magazine by Ryoko Shito.

Tama and Friends *

1994. jpn: Uchi no Tama Shirimasen ka. aka: Have You Seen/Do You Know My Tama?. TV series. dir: Hiroshi Takefuji, Kiyoko Sayama (TV), Hitoshi Nanba (m). scr: Masumi Hirayanagi, Shige Sotoyama. des: N/C. ani: N/C. mus: Michiko Yamakawa. prd: Sony, TBS. 12 mins. x 36 eps. (TV), 40 mins. (m).

Puppies and kittens hang out together in an infants’ playground, where they get involved in numerous saccharine adventures. Tama, Doozle, Tiggle, and Momo then “share in fun-filled adventures that impart important social values.” The anime was aimed at the very young and marketed in Japan as a kind of “Where’s Waldo?”—its posters demanding “Have You Seen My Tama?” That it was optioned and “re-imagined” for broadcast in the U.S. by 4Kids almost makes one wish for the days of tentacle porn once more.

Tama Pro

An animation house set up by Eiji Tanaka, a former employee of Mushi Production, Tama Pro became a limited company in 1970. It subsequently relocated much of its animation work to studios in China, particularly Shanghai in 1996. The studio also did minor work on foreign productions, such as the straight-to-video American Tail: Mystery of the Night Monster (1999).

Tamagotchi Video Adventures *

1997. jpn: Eiga Tamagotchi Honto no Hanashi. aka: True Tamagotchi Tales. TV series. dir: Masami Hata, Mitsuo Hashimoto. scr: Hideki Mitsui, Narimi Narita. des: Kenji Watanabe, Hideki Inoue. ani: Kenji Watanabe. mus: N/C. prd: Bandai, Fuji TV. 9 mins. x 2 mins.

The Tamagotchi Museum doesn’t have a display from Earth, so a group of Tamagotchi friends decide to go and collect appliances and artifacts from our world to make a display before the Great Gotchi realizes there isn’t one. A blatant cash-in broadcast on Japanese TV in the wake of the Tamagotchi “virtual pet” boom, which combined the get-a-life-factor of pet rocks with the sonic irritation of other people’s mobile phones. They were a brief fad in the mid-1990s, soon superseded by their “third generation” fighting versions, the Digimon. Both, however, were trounced in the marketplace by the multimedia phenomenon of Nintendo’s Pokémon.

Tamala 2010 *

2003. aka: A Punk Cat in Space. Movie. dir: Tol (“Tree of Life”). scr: Tol. des: Kentaro Nemoto, Tol. ani: Kentaro Nomoto (2D), Michiro Tsutsumoto (3D CG). mus: Homei Tanabe, prd: Tol. 92 mins.

Orphan kitty Tamala heads off to Orion, much to the annoyance of her snake-charming human foster parent. En route, she finds herself in the city of Hate on Planet Q, where she befriends a cat called Michelangelo. Michelangelo later believes that Tamala has been murdered by Kentauros, an evil stalker who we also see sexually tormenting his pet mouse Penelope. Tamala, however, has a secret of her own, which is eventually revealed to Michelangelo by a maggot-infested zombie.

Loaded with ambient music, aimless vignettes, super-retro animation in a 1960s style, and highbrow bricolage, Tamala 2010 has very little to do with punks, and much more to do with the art-house notion that audiences will be too afraid to say that something makes no sense. A well-known Japanese shipping company, whose logo is a cute little cat, once reputedly complained about the exploitation of their brand identity in Kiki’s Delivery Service. Back then, their grievances were supposedly curtailed by making them coproducers. But the same company is liable to be less than happy with Tamala 2010, which dares to suggest that a feline-themed postal service is really the modern-day front for an ancient cult of human sacrifice, which now lays waste in a different way, by encouraging the pointless consumption of worthless trash goods.

But Tamala 2010 isn’t quite as smart as it thinks it is. Like Hello Kitty scripted by Samuel Beckett, with all the futile pretension that implies, it bolts together a series of random scenes, united only by grasping attempts to gain gravity by association. Visual and textual allusions abound, to everything from Querelle to Metropolis, The Happy Prince to 2001: A Space Odyssey, but beneath its knowing surfaces, Tamala 2010 has little to say. Ultimately, it’s a brilliant five-minute feline conspiracy thriller, ludicrously and counterproductively stretched to feature-length.

Shot primarily in a faux-monochrome that recalls Felix the Cat, its black and white frames are cunningly augmented with subtle spots of earth tones—browns, blues, and greens that give the film a surreal edge. There are also moments of computer graphics, color animation, and even a prolonged sequence of a real-life highway. Tamala 2010 plays like the combined graduation shorts of a fine arts college, stuck in a blender and randomly reassembled. But if you want to put on a beret, stroke your goatee, sip espresso and tell the freshman semiotics class that it’s all incredibly meaningful, then you’ll help perpetuate the latest outing for the Emperor’s new clothes.

One gets the impression that Tamala 2010’s makers realized this themselves, as much of what passes for “plot” is delivered in a rambling voice-over at the end of the movie, as if their tutor had told them they weren’t going to get a grade at all unless they talked some sense. Until then, it comprises little more than self-conscious wackiness and an irritating feline ingenue, wandering through cheap animation that polite reviewers would call a triumph of irony. Since Tamala 2010 soon gained its own merchandising line in the style of Hello Kitty, it is tempting to add that whatever worthy point its creators thought they were making has been well and truly blunted.

Tansa 5

1979. jpn: Kagaku Boken Tai Tansa 5. aka: Science Adventure Command Tansa 5. TV series. dir: Shigeru Suzuki, Tameo Ogawa, Akira Suzuki, Kunihiko Okazaki, Osamu Sekita, Toshifumi Takizawa. scr: Yoshihisa Araki, Sukehiro Tomita, Hiroyuki Hoshiyama, Tsunehisa Ito, Kenichi Matsuzaki, Takao Yotsuji, Jiyu Watanabe. des: Michiru Suzuki, DM Design. ani: Michiru Suzuki. mus: Goro Omi. prd: Sunrise, TV Tokyo. 25 mins. x 33 eps.

Tansa 5 is a five-member patrol team comprising Ryu, Daichi, Rui, Yumeto, and Hajime, whose Land, Aqua, and Sky Tansa vehicles can combine to form the predictably giant robot, Big Tansa. They also have the Time Tansa, a vehicle that allows them to travel an hour into the past, though they must return within their time limit or risk creating a paradox and leaving them lost forever. Their opponents are relics of the past—the forgotten civilization of Lemuria (see Super Atragon), found to be responsible for the statues on Easter Island—a handy ad for sister-company Bandai, which use the statues as the logo for its Emotion video range. In the tradition of team shows dating back to Battle of the Planets, one of the team members was doomed, in this case Yumeto, who was replaced halfway through the run by new team member Johnny.

Taotao the Panda

1981. jpn: Shunmao (Xiong Mao) Monogatari Taotao. aka: Panda Story Taotao. Movie, TV series. dir: Tatsuo Shimamura (m), Shuichi Nakahara, Kazuhiko Ikegami, Taku Sugiyama. scr: Takeshi Takahashi (m), Keiji Kubota, Takeshi Shudo, Nobuko Morita, Osamu Kagami. des: Shuichi Nakahara. ani: Yusaku Sakamoto (m), Masao Kumagawa (TV). mus: Masaru Sato (m), Yasuo Tsuchida (TV). prd: Shunmao; Shunmao, TV Osaka. 90 mins. (m), 25 mins. x 50 eps. (TV).

Chinese panda Taotao and his mate, Ang, are forced to flee when humans encroach on their natural habitat in Sichuan. Trapped and taken to a zoo in Europe, he becomes popular with the visitors, though animal psychologist Marie realizes that he is pining for his homeland. The first ever Sino-Japanese coproduction, this harks back to the panda boom of the 1970s (see Panda Go Panda) and was shown on a double bill with the live-action film Tora-san’s Promise (see Tora-san: The Anime). Many of the same team went on to make the German coproduction Taotao’s Library—World Animal Stories (1983, Taotao Ehonkan Sekai Dobutsu Banashi), in which a baby panda, coincidentally called Taotao, hears a number of stories at his mother’s knee.

Tare Panda

2000. aka: Lazy Panda; Papa Panda. Video, TV series dir: Yui Takashi (aka Takashi Ui). scr: N/C. des: Hikaru Suemasa. ani: Keitaro Mochizuki. mus: N/C. prd: Bandai Visual, San-X, Green Camel. 30 mins. (v), ca. 3 mins. x ca. 5 eps. (TV).

Tare Panda is a flat, lifeless panda, who excels at doing almost nothing. The slothful bear appears here in his own one-shot video, in which he is seen rescuing a Rapunzel bear, playing panda sumo, and racing in a very slow grand prix. The joke wears thin, however, when you realize you’ve just paid to watch a panda roll with tortuous slowness for several minutes, and that the “animation” ends all too soon to be replaced with an interview with the creature’s creator and a live-action “Making Of” that shamelessly recycles much of the animation you’ve just seen. An obvious attempt by Bandai to seize some of the merchandising-led Hello Kitty market—compare to the same company’s Afro Ken.

Designed in 1995 by Hikaru Suemasa for a range of character goods, Tare Panda was voted most popular toy in Japan in a 1999 magazine poll, and competitions to see how tall a stack could be built from his soft fabric body resulted in a record of 9.5 metres. In other words, to the delight of copyright owners San-X, a huge number of floppy little stuffed pandas were sold, and this animated video was made, with a later TV series shown on Sony’s Animax channel—although we believe that TV series to have comprised much of the footage already contained here, in short bursts.

Taro Maegami

1979. jpn: Maegami Taro. TV special. dir: Hiroshi Saito. scr: Akira Miyazaki. des: Yoshiyuki Momose. ani: Yoshiyuki Momose. mus: Shinichi Tanabe. prd: Nippon Animation, Fuji TV. 70 mins.

An elderly couple, childless through many years of love and sacrifice, is finally rewarded by the birth of a son whom they name Taro. Determined to help his impoverished home village, young Taro travels the world in search of the Water of Life, which legend says brings both peace and wealth. However, the water is guarded by an evil serpent which uses its powers as a weapon.

Based on the book by Miyoko Matsutani considered a children’s masterpiece, this story was also adapted into another anime—Taro the Dragon Boy.

Taro the Dragon Boy *

1979. jpn: Ryu no Ko Taro. aka: Taro the Dragon’s Son. Movie. dir: Kirio Urayama. scr: Kirio Urayama, Takashi Mitsui. des: Yoichi Otabe, Reiko Okuyama. ani: Yoichi Otabe, Yuji Endo, Osamu Kasai. mus: Riichiro Manabe. prd: Toei. 75 mins.

A young mountain boy named Taro searches for his mother who has been changed into a dragon. During his dangerous quest, he risks his own life to save others and fulfill his mission. Finally, Taro engages in a ferocious battle with the enchanted dragon. A beautifully animated film featuring animation from Otabe, who also worked on the Miyazaki/Takahata Heidi. Released on video in the U.S. in 1985, it was based on the same Miyoko Matsutani book adapted into Taro Maegami, a TV special screened the following month. For another suspicious case of “simultaneous creation,” see The Wizard of Oz.

Tatsunoko Production, also Tatsunoko Pro

Founded in 1964 by manga artist Ta-tsuo Yoshida with his brothers Kenji and Toyoharu (who used the pseudonym Ippei Kuri), Tatsunoko soon established a reputation in influential television shows, including Speed Racer and Battle of the Planets. The studio has also established many sister companies and spin-off subsidiaries, including IG Tatsunoko, now better known as Production IG. Notable staffers include Hiroshi Sasagawa, Hidehito Ueda, and Tetsuya Kobayashi. Many famous creators had their first break working for Tatsunoko, including illustrators such as Yoshitaka Amano and Akemi Takada. The studio celebrated its 40th anniversary with the Madhouse-influenced Karas. The company’s products are easily identified by its seahorse logo, a tatsunoko in Japanese being a “dragon’s child,” the word for a seahorse/seadragon, but also a reflection that the founding father of the company was “Tatsuo” Yoshida. Tatsunoko was bought in 2005 by the toy company Takara. See also Bee Train and Xebec.

Tattoon Master *

1996. Video. dir: Kazuyuki Hirokawa. scr: Yosuke Kuroda. des: Hiroyoshi Iida. ani: Hideki Araki. mus: Harukichi Yamamoto. prd: AIC, KSS. 30 mins. x 2 eps.

While his anthropologist mother is off studying the remote Tattoon tribe, Hibio (Eric) sulkily does the housework for his inept father, a pornographic filmmaker. He believes his mother to be dead, and she very nearly was, since she angered the Tattoons, who were ready to kill her. Unbeknownst to Hibio, his mother has bought her life by offering his hand in marriage to the Tattoon chieftainess Nima (Bala), who arrives in Tokyo weapons in hand, magical powers at the ready, and all set to marry him. This is not a welcome thought to the misogynist Hibio, whose sole experience of women has been his father’s models, his feckless mother, and his militant feminist class president Fujimatsu (Lisa), a keen archer who carries her bow everywhere, and, for reasons utterly incomprehensible, wants Hibio for herself. Yet another alien-girl-adores-geek scenario, it traces a long line back to Urusei Yatsura but is sadly lacking any of its predecessor’s virtues—a failed attempt to take the well-worn clichés in a new direction resulting in a uniformly unlikable cast. Based on a manga in Ultra Jump by Masahisa Tadanari.

TBS, or Tokyo Broadcasting System

TV channel originally established as “KRT” in 1955, and the original home of the Adventures of Superman, a foreign import that may have inspired rival channel Fuji TV to commission Astro Boy in competition. In more recent times it continues to fight Fuji TV for market share, often scheduling its own anime in direct opposition to its competitor. TBS screens anime in all three major blocks, early morning for the kids, prime time for an older audience, and in the graveyard shift for fans. The Mainichi Broadcasting System (MBS) is an affiliate of TBS, as is the Mainichi Shinbun newspaper.

Teacher Tank Engine

1996. jpn: Kikan Kuruma Sensei. Movie. dir: Kozo Kusuba. scr: Takuro Fukuda. des: Shuichi Seki. ani: Shunji Saita. mus: N/C. prd: Nippon Animation. 100 mins.

A modern spin on Botchan, as a clueless city boy becomes a supply teacher on a remote Japanese island, slowly gaining the trust of the canny locals. Based on a novel by Shizuka Ijuin, the anime features live-action stars as many of the voices, including Yumi Adachi, Kin Sugai, and Shigeru Muroi.

Teacher’s Pet *

2000. jpn: Natural. Video. dir: Kan Fukumoto. scr: Fairy Tale. des: Mizuki Sakisaka. ani: Tadaji Tamori. mus: N/C. prd: Beam Entertainment, Green Bunny. 30 mins. x 2 eps.

New teacher Haruhiko Shimotsuki comes home to find pretty student Chitose Misawa in his apartment, offering herself and her undying love to him. Naturally he takes her up on her proposal, though matters are complicated by the fact that she is the younger sister of his ex-girlfriend Mariko, by the covert nature of their relationship, and his insistence on training her as his sex slave in time-honored S/M fashion.

In Natural Another, the direct sequel (issued in America with Natural under the title Teacher’s Pet), Haruhiko further complicates matters by sleeping with another student and by accepting his colleague “Professor” Takagi’s (this taking place per the English translation at a “college”) advances, only to abuse her in the same fashion as Chitose, all in the name of breaking their wills to comply with his. Still, this is one of the better instances of the “training” genre of erotic anime, if only because the participants are (mostly) willing, the training mostly refrains from physical violence (emotional violence is another matter) and bodily fluids, and the production values are relatively high (as is to be expected from Green Bunny). These episodes were followed by Natural2 Duo and were based on the games by F&C. Not to be confused with Izumi Aso’s 1989 romantic manga of the same name. N

TECHNOLOGY AND FORMATS

We cover several anime “firsts” in our section on Early Anime, and reiterate here that the development of anime remains directly tied to new developments and applications of media technology—film from 1917, television from 1961, and video from 1983. When the only resource available was a film camera, anime remained beholden to the film medium, with Oten Shimokawa drawing his Mukuzo Imokawa the Doorman (Imokawa Mukuzo Genkanban no Maki, 1917) in chalk.

Animators all over the world soon realized that while foreground figures would need to move on a frame-by-frame basis, background images could often remain unchanged from shot to shot. Paper-cut animators began to experiment with translucent paper in order to create multiple layers of action on a screen. The animation “cel,” a clear piece of celluloid (nitro-cellulose), presented the ideal solution, allowing animators to draw partial images on uniformly shaped, identically sized squares of transparent film. These could be layered one on top of the other on a rostrum and then photographed by an overhead camera in order to create a multilayered image. This “rostrum camera” setup was already in use outside Japan, and first reached Japan in 1941, when Tadahito Mochinaga built one for Mitsuyo Seo’s Ant Boy (Ari-chan, 1941).

Cels and rostrum cameras became the basic tools of the anime world for the next fifty years. Images could be kept in exact “registration” from shot to shot by the use of sprocket holes at their edges. These are not seen in the finished film, since they occur beyond “TV Safety”—that is, beyond the area of the image that will actually be photographed. Jimmy T. Murakami reported his frustration at Toei in the late 1950s, where animators still insisted on holding cels together by the less exacting means of paperclips.

The ability to reuse elements also led to certain choices in filmmaking, such Osamu Tezuka’s decision to have a spartan, barely furnished future in Astro Boy, and a robot protagonist whose limb positions, once drawn on cels, could be reused from episode to episode. Although cels are transparent, too many of them stacked one on top of another can cause lower levels to appear murky, generally limiting the number of cels in use to three—a foreground, a background, and some kind of change onscreen, be it a hand gesture or a moving mouth. Five levels of cel are usually considered to be the maximum, although the need to pour in extra light can cause a leeched, bleached quality reducing the vivacity of any colors. This, however, was exploited by Mamoru Oshii, who adopted a “bled” color scheme for his Patlabor movies. The need for light in order to ensure good photography also makes it time-consuming to realistically depict night sequences in cel animation, as it requires animators to use murkier, grayer grades of standard colors. Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira, which contains many night sequences, is a particularly good example of the painstaking efforts required.

The opportunity to reuse backgrounds also led to an understandable craftsmanship—anime can have wonderful skies, sunsets, and lush backgrounds, since the painters can afford to concentrate their efforts on an image that will be used for more than a single 24th of a second. Animators can also treat the image through the use of camera filters or effects placed on the rostrum camera itself, often using improvised methods, such as those employed in some episodes of Fist of the North Star. Not all cels are the regulation screen shape. Long panning shots, for example, might be drawn onto elongated cels, in order to keep a single unbroken image onscreen. Horizontal movement is thereby achieved by moving the cel. Vertical movement, such as zooms, can be achieved by moving the camera, which is attached to a fixed rail.

Anime were shot on 16mm and then transferred to video for broadcast using a standard telecine process. However, some anime were shot on other forms of film—Magic Boy (1959) was the first anime to be shot using the Cinescope process, a deliberate attempt to match the same methods used on Disney’s Lady and the Tramp (1955). Disney’s Sleeping Beauty (1959) was the first feature cartoon to be shot on 70mm film, although this achievement largely passed the Japanese by, since prints of the film in Japan were in 35mm. Consequently, Japanese sources in search of the opportunity to discuss Japan’s “first” 70mm film tend to fall back on Metamorphoses/Winds of Change (1978), which was an American-Japanese coproduction, but did contain a 70mm sequence directed by Sadao Miyamoto. Other technological breakthroughs in anime include 3D, first used for the final episode of Nobody’s Boy (1977) and occasionally wheeled out for children’s movies, and stereo sound, first used in the Battle of the Planets movie (1978).

Anime, particularly in television, tends not to keep to the “full animation” tactics of Disney, in which an image can go through 24 adjustments in a second, once for each frame. Instead, it tends to be “shot on threes,” meaning that a single image may occupy three frames of film. This can give Japanese animation a jerky quality when compared to more expensive animation techniques. There is nothing physically preventing the Japanese from doing “full” animation—nothing, that is, except the financial restrictions born of the relatively low returns that the Japanese animation industry usually expects—see Ratings and Box Office.

The arrival of video anime with Dallos (1983) changed anime’s method of distribution, not the technology that actually made it. The lower overheads required to put video cassettes and laser discs, then DVDs, into stores allowed producers to try more experimental works. Video also allowed for private viewing, and hence the return of Erotica and Pornography.

In addition, video permitted the ready export of anime abroad, where original formats were sometimes confused. Ai City, made as a movie for screening in cinemas, went straight to video outside Japan, whereas the original Appleseed, released straight-to-video in Japan, was released in cinemas in Britain, blowing up artwork originally intended for the small screen to the work’s arguable detriment. The mixture of original formats often led to false expectations among rights-buyers and audiences abroad. Anime’s initial boom in the English-speaking world was spearheaded by movies—Akira, Urotsukidoji, and Castle of Cagliostro—but largely comprised videos, with a predictable drop in quality. Nor were many of the videos stand-alone titles, leading to increased confusion, particularly in cases such as Rg Veda, where a Japanese release was left open-ended, with the expectation that audiences would follow the rest of the story in a manga version simply unavailable to the American mainstream at the time.

In the mid-1990s, the expansion of television networks and the reduction in video budgets led to a new form of distribution. Instead of releasing niche programming onto video, some producers sold it at a cheap rate to television networks, who would then broadcast it during the late-night “graveyard shift.” What once might have been released in the 1980s as a video series of six one-hour episodes would now be broken into 12 or 13 half-hour episodes, with the concomitant budgetary savings of more recyclable opening and ending credit sequences. Essentially, the idea was to have a video release in which the fan was expected to bring his own tape—Japanese magazines even published guides on how to get the best from home taping. The rise of the late-night anime led to a different type of content, with the late-night anime largely unsuitable for primetime. Although not a problem in Japan, this has led to more confused expectations abroad, as anime distributors buy “TV serials” that they find to be almost impossible to sell for broadcast without cuts.

The ability to store and manipulate images digitally is the most crucial innovation in the anime business since the adoption of the cel, and its repercussions are still playing out. The cel animation industry has now been replaced by new methods of production since the 1990s, which we cover in greater detail in our entry on Gaming and Digital Animation. But the new technology has also exerted a strong influence on the type of anime that gets made. Just as anime once favored TV serials or videos, it now favors increasingly smaller episodes, easier to stream online, download, and view on personal devices such as a PSP or iPod. This also allows many anime producers to invent a new excuse for what they have always done—cutting their budgets.

Technopolice 21C *

1982. jpn: Technopolis 21C. aka: Techno Police. Movie. dir: Masashi Matsu­moto, Shoji Kawamori. scr: Mamoru Sasaki, Kenichi Matsuzaki, Masaru Yamamoto, Hiroyuki Hoshiyama. des: Yoshitaka Amano, Kazumasa Miyabe. ani: Norio Hirayama, Kogi Okawa. mus: Joe Hisaishi. prd: Studio Nue, Artmic, Toho, Dragon Production. 79 mins.

In the year 2001 (which still seemed quite a long way off in 1982), the police force uses robots to minimize risk to human personnel in fighting crime. The Technopolice is the special squad of cops and robots set up to use the new technology to its best effect. But a crime wave is sweeping Centinel City, and the police have almost lost control. When a powerful experimental tank is hijacked, hotheaded rookie cop Kyosuke (Ken) is thrown in at the deep end. In a high-tech Road Ranger car (a step up from his own beloved Lotus Seven, which he proudly describes as a “collector’s item”), he sets out on a death-defying chase through the streets. Luckily he’s got the best Techroid (Technoid) backup on the force, three superb robots: his own Blader (Blade), who throws a pair of cuffs to catch villains as they flee; pretty Scanny, the computer hacker partner of token girl Eleanor; and Vigoras (Vigorish), a big, strong robot to partner his big, strong sidekick Kosuga. With their help, he may just manage to stay alive long enough to capture the crooks, disarm the tank, and save Eleanor; but not even his instinct for outguessing the criminals can help him outwit the political machinations behind the hijack and bring the culprits to justice. Based on an idea by Toshimitsu Suzuki, who would return in Bubblegum Crisis with hard-suits bearing a certain resemblance to the Techroids. Also note the cameo appearance of two cute girl traffic cops in a small car, distantly foreshadowing You’re under Arrest!

Tekkaman *

1975. jpn: Uchu Kishi Tekkaman. aka: Tekkaman the Space Knight; Space Knight Tekkaman. TV series, video. dir: Hiroshi Sasagawa, Hideo Nishimaki, Eiko Toriumi, Seitaro Hara (TV1), Hiroshi Negishi, Akihiko Nishiyama, Kazuya Yamazaki, Hideki Tonokatsu (TV2), Hideki Tonokatsu (v). scr: Jinzo Toriumi, Akiyoshi Sakai, Hiroshi Sakamoto (TV1), Mayori Sekijima, Hiroyuki Kawasaki, Satoru Akahori, Tetsu­ko Watanabe, Katsuhiko Chiba (TV2), Hiroyuki Kawasaki (v). des: Yoshitaka Amano, Kunio Okawara (TV1), Yoshinori Sayama Hirotoshi Sano, TO III O [sic] (TV2), Hirotoshi Sano, Yoshinori Sayama, Rei Nakahara (v). ani: Masami Suda, Tsuneo Ninomiya (TV1), Shigeru Kato (TV2), Akira Kano (v). mus: Bob Sakuma (TV1), Kaoru Wada (TV2), Shigeki Kuwara (v). prd: Tatsunoko, NET (now TV Asahi) (TV1), Tatsunoko, TV Tokyo (TV2). 25 mins. x 26 eps. (TV1), 25 mins. x 49 eps. (TV2), 30 mins. x 6 eps. (v).

A space-borne version of Battle of the Planets, as the invading Waldstar aliens (Waldarians in the U.S. dub) are opposed by Joji Minami (Barry Gallagher), a young man who can wear the powerful Tekkaman battle armor designed by Professor Amachi (Dr. Edward Richardson). The professor’s daughter, Hiromi (Patricia), the teleporting alien Andro Umeda, and space furball Mutan support him in his fight on the starship Terra Azzura. Not unlike Vega in Harmagedon, Andro is a survivor from another world ravaged by the enemy, helping humans avert a similar disaster on their own world. In the Japanese version, the situation was considerably more desperate, since Earth is on the verge of ecological collapse, and the human race will perish without a new home. Conversely, in the U.S. version, the human ships that first encounter the Waldarians are simply looking for new worlds to colonize. Created by Jinzo Toriumi and Akira Toyama from an idea by Ippei Kuri, the original TV series ends with Earth saved, but at the price of the hero’s life—though it is highly likely that his “death” was only a cliffhanger that would have been revealed as a red herring in episode 27, had the unpopular series not been pulled off the air only halfway through its original planned run of 52 episodes.

The concept was revived for a new series, SK Tekkaman Blade (1992), screened in the U.S. as Teknoman. This time, the alien Radamu kidnap humans to use them as living weapons, almost invincible once they conjure up the alien Tekkaman armor. One such human, known only as D-Boy, escapes from their control and makes his way to Earth, whose defenders, undecided as to how far to trust him, still need his armor and its power to have a chance of saving the planet. The classic team-show jealousies, misunderstandings, and romantic love tangles back up a plot with plenty of fighting action, and D-Boy’s past tragedy is gradually revealed. In the video series SK Tekkaman Blade 2 (1994), ten years have elapsed since the events of the second TV series, and D-Boy returns to save Earth again. The marketing-led emphasis on starlets in the 1990s means that this time the Tekkaman Support Team consists of several beautiful young girls, each of whose voice actresses made a tie-in single. V

Tekken *

1998. aka: Iron Fist. Video. dir: Kunihisa Sugishima. scr: Ryota Yamaguchi. des: Masaaki Kawabata. ani: Masaaki Kawabata. mus: Kazuhiko Sotoyama. prd: Foursome. 30 mins. x 2 eps., 58 mins.

Sometime in the near future, cloning has been outlawed by the Darwin Treaty, but an international crime-fighting organization suspects that super-rich weapons magnate Heihachi Mishima is planning something nasty. Meanwhile Kazuya, Mishima’s son, is out to kill him. Mishima thought the best way to train his gentle, good-hearted son was by throwing him into a ravine. The boy survived only thanks to his raging thirst for revenge and has now become a superb martial artist in his own right. A prestigious martial arts tournament on Mishima’s private island off Hong Kong, attended by the best fighters from all over the world, offers Kazuya the chance to achieve his aims. His childhood friend Jun wants to bring him back from his chosen path of hatred, but his father aims to Turn Him To The Dark Side.

This game-based anime incorporates characters from all three Tekken versions then available. Tekken pays lip service to the police thriller angle exploited in the past by Street Fighter II, casting Jun Kazama as a lady investigator with an international crime-busting syndicate. Both in anticipation of the large Chinese market and in recognition of the ideal way to engineer as many fight scenes as possible, it also pastiches Bruce Lee movies—hence the martial arts tournament on a millionaire’s private island, the promised fight through the floors of a central tower, and the Hong Kong setting. Though the plot meanders toward a massive fight at Mishima’s lair, which would, of course, be the tournament featured in the game itself, the events of the game only take place off-screen for a few fleeting seconds. The script takes the macho posturing of games to mind-boggling extremes, and as a rundown of all the available clichés, Tekken has the lot, including a childhood flashback, bad dreams, sibling rivalry, a shower scene, an evil corporation, a female assassin, a psychic girl agent, graphic breaking bones, a gentle giant, a girl in a sailor suit, a broken punching bag, incompetent minions, Russian androids, a self-destruct sequence, and a baddie who lives to fight another day. As a small bonus, it also includes stealth dinosaurs and a boxing kangaroo. As well as adding the pretentious subtitle “the motion picture,” the English-language release replaced the original soundtrack with music from popular beat combos, including Offspring and Corrosion of Conformity. V

Temple the Balloonist

1977. jpn: Fusen Shojo Temple-chan. aka: Hot Air Balloon Girl Temple; Tiffany’s Traveling Band; Sabrina’s Journey. TV series dir: Seitaro Hara. scr: Jinzo Toriumi, Shigeru Yanagawa. des: Akiko Shimamoto. ani: Kazuhiko Udagawa. mus: Nobuyoshi Koshibe. prd: Tatsunoko, Fuji TV. 25 mins. x
26 eps.

Deep in the Alps lies the tiny village of Green Grass, the home of Temple, a pretty, curly-haired girl who wears a drum majorette’s outfit and dreams of becoming a musician. On a stormy night, she meets Puffy the cloud, who whisks her away to a magical hot-air balloon. Riding in the balloon, Temple and Puffy see several musicians fleeing from robbers. Rescuing them in the nick of time, they discover that their new traveling companions are animal musicians—Tommy the cat, who plays his whiskers like a mouth harp, Quincy the horn-playing duck, Nicky the flutist mouse, along with Scrapper the orphan drummer boy. Picaresque adventures ensue, with a halfhearted aim of eventually returning Temple to her home—compare to The Wizard of Oz—in a Tatsuo Yoshida creation whose little leading lady’s bright attitude and golden curls seem designed to recall the Shirley Temple whose name she appears to share. There were several attempts to sell the story to the American TV market in the 1980s, hence the multiple alternate titles employed in advertising flyers by Harmony Gold. However, we have no record of the show’s translation or broadcast in English.

Ten Little Frogs

1998. jpn: 10-piki no Kaeru. Video. dir: Masahiro Hosoda. scr: Miyako Ando. des: Hirokazu Ishiyuki. ani: Hirokazu Ishiyuki. mus: Kenichi Kamio. prd: Toei, Trans Arts. 20 mins. x 2 eps.

Ten frogs set out in search of adventure in their swamp, sailing in a boat made from a running shoe. Based on the children’s book by Hisako Madokoro and Michiko Nakagawa, the story of the frogs returned in a second episode, in which they went to a summer festival.

Ten Tokyo Warriors *

1999. jpn: Tokyo Jushoden. aka: Ten Captains of Tokyo. Video. dir: Hikaru Takanashi, Noboru Ishiguro. scr: Te-tsuya Oishi. des: Sawako Yamamoto. ani: Sawako Yamamoto. mus: N/C. prd: Five Ace, Beam Entertainment. 27 mins. x 6 eps.

Long ago, ten brave warriors defeated the Demon King and his legion of “Kyoma” warriors. But in present day Tokyo, Shindigan, a servant of the Kyoma, is determined to resurrect her master and restore his rule on Earth. You will not be surprised to hear that the warriors are reborn in the manner of Ikki Tousen, since schoolboy Jutto Segu discovers that he is the reincarnation of one of the original heroes, and that the time has come for him to fight again. A rehash of Doomed Megalopolis, doomed by a repetitive monster-of-the-moment format with formulaic plots and characters, based on a novel by Taku Atsushi that was also adapted into a manga by Satoru Kiga, whose illustrations were used as the basis for the characters in this anime version. A CD drama was also produced in Japan. LV

Ten Top Tips for Pro Baseball

1983. jpn: Proyakyu o 10 Tanoshiku Miru Hoho. aka: How to Make Pro
Baseball Ten Times More Exciting. Movie. dir: Kiyoshi Suzuki. scr: Junichi Ishihara, Toshiharu Iwaida. des: Hisaichi Ishii. ani: Tsutomu Shibayama, Osamu Kobayashi, Tetsu Dezaki, Tsukasa Sunaga. mus: Kazuo Otani. prd: Tokyo Movie Shinsha for Film Link (1), Magic Bus for Film Link (2). 95 mins., 106 mins.

Based on the two books of career reminiscences by real-life Hanshin Tigers baseball star Takenori Emoto. Mixing live action and animation to tell humorous anecdotes from professional baseball (nine short tales in nine “innings”), the film was followed by a sequel in 1984.

Tenamonya Voyagers *

1999. Video. dir: Katsuhito Akiyama, Akiyuki Shinbo. scr: Ryoei Tsukimura. des: Masashi Ishihama, Noriaki Tetsu­ra, Naoyuki Konno. ani: Takashi Azuhara. mus: Masamichi Amano. prd: Studio Pierrot. 30 mins. x 4 eps.

Rookie schoolteacher Ayako Hanabishi volunteers for a posting in the middle of nowhere only to find that the school has closed down before she arrives. Far from home with no money, she meets Wakana Nanamiya, a Japanese girl on a sports scholarship, who is also stranded. The brash, tough girl Paraila has never seen the girls’ homeland, and she inspires the others to pool their resources and head for home. However, their train is attacked en route, and the girls realize too late that Paraila is wanted by the police and using them as cover. So begins a road-movie setup that would make a perfect live-action film of the week, somewhat redundantly transformed into an anime space opera. Compare to AWOL, which similarly augmented a real-world drama with pointless sci-fi trappings. An inferior Japanese fish-out-of-water comedy to Tsukimura’s earlier El Hazard, TV mixes obvious quick fixes (a space-going bullet-train after Galaxy Express 999) with halfhearted visual gags (spaceships like battering rams that deposit a 20th-century police car inside a criminal’s ship). There are regular breaks for cheesy shots of Tatsue Yokoyama, the dogged police officer who never quite catches them—the filmmakers would have you believe that this is an “homage” to pulp detective shows of the 1970s, though it looks suspiciously like a poverty of ideas masquerading as irony. There are some genuinely funny moments born of the onscreen ensemble, and occasionally some tongue-in-cheek observations in the style of a poor man’s Gunbuster, but like so many 1990s anime comedies, TV thinks it’s a lot funnier than it really is (see also Jubei-chan the Ninja Girl), and it stops abruptly with a cynical narration that unhelpfully adds, “And for some reason, this is the end.” It will, however, remain forever in the anime history books as the first to be released in the U.S. straight to DVD without ever gracing the old-fashioned VHS format.

Tenchi Muyo! *

1992. jpn: Tenchi Muyo! Ryo Oh Ki. aka: This Way Up!; No-Good Tenchi; No Need for Tenchi; Heaven and Earth Prince. Video, TV series, movie. dir: Hiroki Hayashi, Kenichi Yatagai, Kazuhiro Ozawa, Yoshiaki Iwasaki, Shinichi Kimura, Koji Masunari, Satoshi Kimura. scr: Naoko Hasegawa, Masaki Kajishima, Hiroki Hayashi, Ryoei Tsukimura, Yosuke Kuroda, Satoru Nishizono. des: Masaki Kajishima, Atsushi Takeuchi, Takeshi Waki. ani: Takehiro Nakayama, Wataru Abe. mus: Seiko Nagaoka, Christopher Franke, Ko Otani, Tsuneyoshi Saito. prd: AIC, Pioneer, TV Tokyo. 30 mins. x 6 eps. (v/Ryo-ohki 1), 45 mins. (v sp./Carnival), 30 mins. x 6 eps. (v/Ryo-ohki 2), 40 mins. (v sp./Mihoshi), 25 mins. x 26 eps. (TV1/Universe), 40 mins. x 3 eps. (v/Sammy), 95 mins. (m1/In Love), 25 mins. x 26 eps. (TV2/Sammy), 25 mins. x 26 eps. (TV3/Tokyo), 60 mins. (m2/Daughter), 95 mins. (m3/Forever), 25 mins. x 26 eps. (TV4/GXP), 30 mins. x 6 eps. (v/Ryo-ohki 3), 30 mins. (v/Ryo-ohki finale), 25 mins. x ?? eps. (TV5/Sasami).

Tenchi Masaki is a quiet, average teenager who lives in the family shrine with his father and grandfather, goes to school, and does nothing much—until the day he accidentally releases a malevolent creature from the family shrine (compare to Ushio and Tora). It transforms into a hot babe, space pirate Ryoko, and her hots are aimed at Tenchi. Then another alien babe, Jurai Princess Ayeka, arrives with her sweet little sister, Sasami. She too fancies Tenchi, but she’s got another reason for hating Ryoko—a past tragedy that robbed her of her intended husband. When ditzy Space Officer Mihoshi falls out of the skies onto the Masaki household and pink-haired alien professor Wasshu shows up, the scene is set for a romantic farce in which the girls fight for Tenchi’s affections while he fights off various galactic threats and gradually uncovers the truth about his family. There’s also a mascot “cabbit” (cat/rabbit), the titular Ryo-Oh-Ki, which likes carrots and will one day grow into a spaceship.

The “unwelcome guest” genre, in which a hapless boy is saddled with a magical babe, is a popular high concept in anime. It’s a genre rich in mind-boggling situation comedies: girlfriend-as-alien (Urusei Yatsura), girlfriend-as-elfin-nymphomaniac (Adventure Kid), girlfriend-as-the-Norse-embodiment-of-the-concept-of-Being (Oh my Goddess!), girlfriend-as-time-traveling-ghost-of-future-dead-wife (Kirara). Tenchi is its 1990s apotheosis; a show about a boy stuck with more girls than he can shake a stick at, every one of them feverishly competing for a chaste peck on the cheek. Originally conceived as a spoof vacation episode of Bubblegum Crisis, Tenchi reached screens in this heavily rewritten form—however, along with the girl-heavy cast, the idea that it was okay to just goof off for an episode or two became ingrained. Sasami’s regular plea that things can always stay the same “forever and ever” is perhaps the most bowel-emptyingly fearsome line in televisual history, striking greater dread into the audience than any horror movie. Though the first video series of Tenchi was witty, funny, and charming, the premise was repeated ad nauseam by a creative team happy to simply coast along. Later incarnations of the series reorder a few plot elements into what some might call alternate universes, and others lazy continuity.

The Pioneer corporation, searching for an easily repeatable franchise to rival Sunrise’s Brave Saga or Tatsu­noko’s Time Bokan, hyped Tenchi to insane extremes, and someone eventually believed it—the series clambered onto TV screens with the new-look Tenchi Universe (Ryoko crashes on Earth while being pursued by Mihoshi; see the subtle difference?), which moves the action into space for its second season. A further TV series, Tenchi in Tokyo, packed our boy off to college—but a dimensional portal let his harem pop up for “unexpected” visits. At the time of its U.S. release, Pioneer’s blurb proclaimed it was the “same old Tenchi,” which was at least honest.

The series proper “ended” with three expensive movies, beginning with Tenchi Muyo in Love (1996), which paid out for music from Babylon 5–composer Christopher Franke. Shamelessly ripping off Back to the Future, Tenchi must travel back in time to unite his courting parents. Despite high production values and an involving plot, the movie is let down by the serial’s vastly overpopulated cast—the number of characters demanding a scene to steal often makes it resemble crowded game-based anime like Street Fighter II. In typical Tenchi style, the movie Daughter of Darkness (1997, aka Midsummer’s Eve) halfheartedly inverts the previous plot, featuring the cast visited by a character from the future, claiming to be Tenchi’s daughter. The final movie, Tenchi Forever (1999), features Tenchi kidnapped by yet another obsessive female and spirited into a parallel world where his adoring harem have to find him. Tenchi Muyo GXP (2002) is yet another retelling, a 26-episode TV series supposedly rooted more in the continuity of the video serials, moving the focus away from Tenchi, who joins the galactic police, and onto his young classmate Seina Yamada, a shy, retiring child who believes that he, like Ataru in Urusei Yatsura, has the worst luck in the world. Amid a main plot about a pirate guild’s plan to seize control of the galaxy, the usual geek-gets-girls “comedy” ensues.

A third video series ran for six episodes, and a bonus finale (the “20th” episode in the cumulative video continuity), ran from 2003 to 2005.

With both the appeal and dogged staying power of a mutant cockroach, the franchise might not necessarily have pleased the crowds (ratings were unremarkable), but it certainly pleased studio executives. Tenchi was a fertile breeding ground for other shows during the 1990s—most notably the superior El Hazard, which was made by bored staffers Hayashi and Tsukimura, and the pornographic pastiches Spaceship Agga Ruter and Masquerade. Two video “specials” also introduced a superheroine, who returned in her own video series Magical Princess Pretty Sammy, which followed the classic magical-girl-show pattern (see Little Witch Sally), and, predictably, ran a string of subplots about the grown-up girls competing for first place in Tenchi’s affections. Little Sasami, however, was safely remodeled as his sister, allowing an 8-year-old girl to adore a 17-year-old guy without a hint of impropriety and simultaneously securing her claim to be big bro’s Number One. The series has some enjoyable moments—one episode is a wholly unsubtle dig at Bill Gates’s Microsoft empire—but ultimately it’s a show about cute little girls for much older boys who really should know better. The video series was itself rehashed for Japanese TV as the jaw-droppingly camp 26-episode Magical Girl Pretty Sammy (Magical Project S). The relationships and premises are completely reworked, but this time, apart from the odd cameo appearance, Tenchi and friends are sidelined. Sammy has a mother and father and a whole bunch of elementary school friends and is more interested in talking to her best friend Misa (who is also her unwitting adversary Pixie Misa) than mooning over boys. Marketed in Japan for the little-girl audience, the series received inexplicably high ratings in Nagoya but has proved unpopular with Western Tenchi fans, perhaps because it abandons most of the series’ established tropes in favor of those of standard magical-girl shows.

Pretty Sammy returned in the TV series Sasami’s Magical Girl Club (2006).N

Tenjho Tenge *

2004. jpn: Tenjo Tenge. aka: Everything Above Heaven; Everything Under Heaven. TV series, video, TV special. dir: Toshifumi Kawase. scr: Toshiki Inoue. des: Takahiro Umehara. ani: Takahiro Umehara, Studio Madhouse. mus: Yasunori Iwasaki. prd: DR Movie, Madhouse, Nagoya Broadcasting Network, TV Asahi. 23 mins. x 24 eps. (TV), 24 mins. x 2 eps. (v), 92 mins. (special).

Young punks Soichiro Nagi and his best friend, Afro-Japanese Bob Makihara, join Todo Academy, a high school with a high delinquent population and a number of martial arts clubs that fight for supremacy under the iron regulation of the student council. They meet up with the stunningly beautiful Natsume twins, Maya and Aya, and are drawn into a closed world of highly advanced skills and unruly emotions. Both sisters see something special in Soichiro; Aya falls for him, and Maya, whose ex-boyfriend allegedly killed his best friend, their brother, sees him as a fighter with huge but as yet untapped potential. The pair find themselves in the twins’ exclusive Juken club, opposed to the student council and its powerful, mysterious leader Mitsuomi, who also happens to be Maya’s ex. The combination of teenagers simultaneously flouting authority and regulating their own anarchy through hierarchies as arcane and restrictive as anything in the adult world is familiar—just compare to Boys Over Flowers or Utena. But don’t come here for philosophy because you’ll get eye candy instead; TT is all about defying the laws of physics and gravity with slam-bang fighting action and enormous breasts. Based on the manga by “Oh! Great,” the TV series led to a two-part video spin-off from the same director, entitled TT: Ultimate Fight, and a prequel “special,” TT: Past Chapter (2005). LNV

Tenmaru the Little Tengu

1983. jpn: Kotengu Tenmaru. TV series. dir: Hiroshi Shidara, Yuji Endo, Atsutoshi Umezawa, Takeshi Shirato, Junichi Sato. scr: Tadaaki Yamazaki, Akiyoshi Sakai, Katsuhiko Taguchi. des: Kiichiro Suzuki. ani: Masami Abe, Takeshi Shirato. mus: Hiroshi Tsutsui. prd: Toei, Fuji TV. 25 mins. x 19 eps.

Prince Tenmaru leaves the land of the tengu (crow-spirits) in pursuit of 108 evil creatures who have invaded the human realm. He hides out at the apartment of pretty Earth girl Yoko. A mixture of the gentle humor of Doraemon with the ghost-busting of Dororon Enma, Tenmaru was the anime debut of future Sailor Moon–director Junichi Sato.

Teppen

1995. aka: Summit. Video. dir: Yota Minagawa, Fumi Shirakawa. scr: Tomohiro Ando, Masashi Reishi. des: Masashi Yusono. ani: Hidemizu Kita. mus: N/C. prd: Toei. 50 mins. x 2 eps.

In an adaptation of Takanori Onari’s manga from Young Jump magazine, teenage tough-guy Satoshi gets into fights at school and has run-ins with the police. V

Texhnolyze *

2003. TV series dir: Hirotsugu Hamazaki, Koujirou Tsuruoka, Sayo Yamamoto, Takayuki Hirao. scr: Chiaki Konaka, Noboru Takagi, Shin Yoshida, Takeshi Konuta. des: Shigeo Akahori, Morifumi Naka, Toshihiro Nakajima. ani: Shigeo Akahori. mus: Hajime Mizoguchi, Keishi Urata. prd: Fuji TV, Madhouse, Pioneer, Rondo Robe. 24 mins. x 22 eps.

Centuries after mankind first burrowed underground to live in “experimental” cities, the descendants of the original colonists are fighting for control of the near-derelict city of Lux. Orphan Ichise is a prizefighter who gets involved with a corrupt promoter and literally loses an arm and a leg. He becomes the guinea pig of a female scientist working on the Texhnolyze project, and receives new limbs and enhanced fighting powers. This in turn makes him the favored protégé of Onishi, leader of an organization with a mysterious power over Lux. Girl prophet Ran offers him the chance to find out who he really is and what his destiny holds. Created by Yoshitoshi Abe, whose fascination for labyrinths and processes of evolution led to the modern anime classics Serial Experiments Lain and Haibane Renmei, this is a beautifully designed dystopia, although built on foundations set by many others—see Robocop, Megazone 23, AD Police, and even the previous year’s Tokyo Underground. LV

Tezuka, Osamu

1928–1989. Born in Osaka Prefecture, Tezuka graduated in medicine from Osaka University, although he was already writing manga in his teens, and never practiced as a doctor—his pursuit of a medical education may have been a form of conscientious objection in wartime Japan. He is often termed the “God of Manga” or “Father of Manga.” He is one of the giants of post-war Japanese comics, and the author of over 500 volumes of comics, although his manga output need not concern us here, save in his youthful associations with other artists, dramatized in We’re Manga Artists: Tokiwa Villa. He was able to be so prolific, at least in part, through his adoption of a “production line” system that institutionalized the practices already present in the comics industry of farming out different work to multiple assistants. Tezuka’s ability to delegate not only set paradigms for other comics artists, but also encouraged him to diversify into animation. Seeing TV as an opportunity to advertise his comics, and vice versa, Tezuka helped create anime as we know it with his groundbreaking Astro Boy, Kimba the White Lion, and Princess Knight. His early successes stumbled in the late 1960s, as Mushi Production began to lose money, causing Tezuka to embark on more “adult” fare such as Arabian Nights and questionable deals which found creations such as his Triton of the Sea ending up in the hands of others. Tezuka left Mushi Pro in 1971 as the company spiraled into chaos, and returned with Tezuka Production, a new company that continued to make meaningful contributions to the anime world, particularly in the often overlooked world of TV specials such as Prime Rose. For details of the lifelong work by which Tezuka would probably have preferred to be remembered, see Space Firebird. Tezuka is one of the founding fathers of Japanese animation, since it was he, along with Shotaro Ishinomori and Mitsuteru Yokoyama, who first created many of the tropes and traditions that are replayed every season in modern anime. He was also active in selling anime to America, visiting the U.S. and encouraging its fledgling fanbase. He was the president of the Japan Animation Association until his death, and was succeeded by Kihachiro Kawamoto. See also Mushi Production, Tezuka Production. Some older sources repeat Tezuka’s claim that he was born in 1926: a deception that he maintained in order to convince his editors that he was an adult manga creator and not a teenage prodigy.

Tezuka Production

Also Tezuka Pro. Founded by Osamu Tezuka in 1968 as a company to produce comics, Tezuka Pro was a separate entity, and therefore shielded from any liability when the anime company Mushi Production collapsed in the early 1970s. It was able to continue operating and diversified into animation production; its first anime, Marvelous Melmo, was released before Mushi even officially closed. Tezuka Pro is hence the company responsible for most of Tezuka’s anime output in the last two decades of his life, such as TV specials like Bandar Book. Since his death, the company has maintained a strong presence in the industry, with an unofficial mission statement to ensure that everything Tezuka ever wrote will eventually be animated. Recent applications of this policy have seen anime of Metropolis, Black Jack, and an Astro Boy remake, all designed to keep Osamu Tezuka’s legacy alive.

That’ll Do Nicely

1991. jpn: Nyuin Bokki Monogatari: O Daiji ni. aka: Hospitalization Surprise Story: That’ll Do Nicely. Video. dir: Sadamune Koyama, Naoko Kuzumi. scr: Sadamune Koyama. des: Koichi Arai. ani: Yoshio Mizumura. mus: Michiya Katakura. prd: Tokyo Kids. 45 mins. x 2 eps.

Ayumu Nerima is hospitalized after a motorcycle accident, but he soon perks up when he discovers that everyone on the ward is desperate for sex, from the nurses to the unwed-teenager mother next door. A predictable farce based on a manga by Maki Otsubo in Manga Action magazine—compare to O-Genki Clinic. N

There Goes Shura

1994. jpn: Shura ga Yuku. Video. dir: Masamune Ochiai. scr: Yu Kawanabe. des: Aiko Kamada. ani: Teruo Kigure. mus: Hideyuki Tanaka. prd: Knack. 50 mins. x 2 eps.

The assassination of a Shinjuku gang boss starts a trail of blood-soaked revenge, ending with a nasty shoot-
out between yakuza in Kyushu. Based on the original manga in Comic Goraku by Yu Kawanabe (who also wrote Emperor of the South Side) and Masato Yama­guchi. V

There Goes Tomoe

1991. jpn: Tomoe ga Yuku. Video. dir: Takaaki Ishiyama. scr: Asami Wata­nabe. des: Matsuri Okuda. ani: Masayuki Goto. mus: Katsuhiro Kunimoto. prd: Beam Entertainment. 45 mins. x 2 eps.

In this adaptation of Yumi Tamura’s manga from Bessatsu Shojo Comic, Tomoe Oshima is a bad-girl biker who cherishes a hidden love for stuntman Tokoro. Since the heroine takes her name from Tomoe Gozen, the famous 12th-century woman-warrior, it might be prudent to file this story with Spectre, another adaptation of Japanese history into a modern setting.

They Were Eleven *

1986. jpn: Juichi-nin Iru. Movie. dir: Tetsu Dezaki, Tsuneo Tominaga. scr: Toshikai Imaizumi, Katsumi Koide. des: Akio Sugino, Keizo Shimizu. ani: Keizo Shimizu, Yukari Kobayashi, Kenichi Maejima. mus: Hirohiko Fukuda. prd: Kitty Film. 91 mins.

An interplanetary group of 10 military academy cadets set out on their end-of-course test. They have to take an elderly spaceship out into space and survive 53 days without outside help. Any one of them can give up, but if so, they all fail. Then they find there are 11 people on board. One of them is an imposter, and they can’t contact the academy to find out who it is or whether it’s all part of the test. A series of incidents and accidents, trivial at first, grow increasingly threatening, and their personal strengths and weaknesses, as well as the social and political agendas of their different races, have a wider impact than on the outcome of this test alone. The anime version of Moto Hagio’s suspenseful 1975 manga is delicate but powerful, a miniature gem.

30,000 Miles Under the Sea

1970. jpn: Kaitei Sanman Mile. Movie. dir: Takeshi Tamiya. scr: Katsumi Okamoto. des: Makoto Yamazaki. ani: Reiko Okayama, Sadao Kikuchi, Torihiro Kaneyama. mus: Takeo Watanabe. prd: Toei. 60 mins.

Returning home from an ocean trip, young Isamu meets the beautiful sea-dweller Angel on a volcanic island. Attacked by a fiery dragon, Isamu and Angel escape on the observation boat See Through (a punning reference to the Sea View in Irwin Allen’s 1961 Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea), and Angel invites Isamu to see her undersea kingdom of Atlas. As Isamu is preparing to return to dry land, Atlas is attacked by the evil king, Magma VII, who reveals that he is planning to use the dragon to seize control of the surface world. The fate of Earth and Ocean is placed in the hands of Isamu and Angel for the final battle against the invading king.

This was the fourth Toei adaptation of a Shotaro Ishinomori story (the previous one was Flying Ghost Ship), but this popular manga artist’s work continue to appear in a variety of different anime for many decades to come, from the SF of Cyborg 009 to the economics education of Japan Inc. Director Tamiya would go on to direct another kids-save-the-world extravaganza in 1973 with Babel II.

This Ugly And Beautiful World

2004. jpn: Kono Minikuku mo Utsukushii Sekai. aka: Konomini; The Ugly & Beautiful World. TV series. dir: Shoji Saeki. scr: Tomoyasu Okubo, Sumio Uetake, Shin Itagaki, Shoji Saeki, des: Kazuhiro Takamura, Yo Yoshinari. ani: Kazuhiro Takamura. mus: Tsuyoshi Watanabe. prd: Gainax, SHAFT, Geneon, Rondo Robe, MOVIC, TBS. 24 mins. x 12 eps.

Bored part-time motorcycle courier Takeru Takemoto has a close encounter of the third kind when he finds two alien girls in the glow of a strange light in the woods. Later, one of his friends encounters a second, similar girl. Based on an original concept by Hiroyuki Yamaga and Shoji Saeki, this science-fiction tale introduces alien entities that are not “living” organisms by our definition, but can mimic human beings. Their function is to help humans experience the beauty of emotion, such as joy or surprise—they often seem to achieve this by jiggling, the true hallmark of a Gainax anime. This is the 20th-anniversary work from the renowned studio, which previously collaborated with the SHAFT production house on Mahoromatic.

Those Who Hunt Elves *

1996. jpn: Elf o Karu Monotachi. aka: Elf Hunters. TV series. dir: Kazuyoshi Katayama, Tatsuo Okazaki, Hiroshi Fukutomi. scr: Masaharu Amiya, Masashi Kubota. des: Keiji Goto, Akira Furuya. ani: Keiji Goto. mus: Susumu Akitagawa. prd: Group Tac, TV Tokyo. 25 mins. x 24 eps.

A trio of adventurers is transported (with their T-74 tank) to a world inhabited by elves. Elven leader Celcia accidentally destroys the spell to send them back. Luckily fragments were copied onto the skin of five elves (and you can bet they aren’t fat, old male elves, either) so fighter Junpei, actress Airi, and schoolgirl tank pilot Ritsuko must find them to get home. Crashing quest into skin-flick, with the emphasis on stripping the elves rather than skinning them, there are a few plot twists designed to amuse Beavis and Butthead viewers (firebrand Celcia transforms herself into an ugly dog and gets stuck, ho ho) and some with wider appeal (all the spell fragments our heroes find are easily visible without removing a stitch of clothing from their hosts.) There are nods to Dominion in Ritsuko’s devotion to her tank, and El Hazard in Junpei’s obsession with finding decent curry in this alien world. Based on an “original” manga by Yutaka Yagami in Dengeki Comic Gao. LN

Three Musketeers, The

1987. jpn: Anime Sanjushi. TV series, TV special, movie. dir: Kunihiko Yuyama, Tetsuro Amino, Takashi Watanabe, Keiji Hayakawa, et al. scr: Yasuo Tanami, Jack Production. des: Mitsuki Nakamura, Shingo Ozaki, Hatsuki Tsuji. ani: Hatsuki Tsuji, Shojuro Yamauchi. mus: Kohei Tanaka. prd: Studio Gallop, Gakken, Toei, NHK. 25 mins. (TVm), 25 mins. x 52 eps. (TV), 45 mins. (m).

In 17th-century France, young D’Artagnan leaves his home village to travel to Paris and find fame and fortune, serving his King as a Musketeer like his father before him. So far, so close to the 1844 novel by Alexandre Dumas père. In Paris, he defeats the plots of evil Cardinal Richelieu and Milady against Louis XIII, aided by his fellow Musketeers and mentors Athos, Porthos, and Aramis, and by the queen’s beautiful maid, Constance. The familiar Dumas tale was popularized in Japan by D’Artagnan’s Story, an 11-volume series of novels by Yoshihiro Suzuki, with accompanying artwork by Lupin III–creator Monkey Punch. The 3M anime adapts the first volume of this version, with two major additions to the Dumas original—D’Artagnan’s orphan boy assistant Jean, and the fact that Aramis is actually a woman, in a cross-dressing homage to Rose of Versailles. The series, which began in October, was piloted the previous May with a 25-minute TV special Chase the Iron Mask (Tekkamen o Oe). For the latter half of the series, the animators would draw on the same events, from Dumas’ Man in the Iron Mask through the tenth book in Suzuki’s series. The series was recut again into the movie Aramis’ Adventure (1989, Aramis no Boken), which rearranged flashbacks with new footage set a year after the final episode. Lune is a 16-year-old girl from the Swiss Alps, who falls in love with François, a young man she meets in the forest. Believing him to have been murdered, she adopts a man’s disguise and changes her name to Aramis, hoping to track down the man who ordered his death. Naturally, this turns out to have been his twin brother, Louis XIII, in a surprise that dovetails beautifully with the original source material. For very different animated versions, see Dogtanian and the Three Muskehounds, Keroppi, and Puss in Boots.

3x3 Eyes *

1991. jpn: Sazan Eyes. Video. dir: Daisuke Nishio, Kazuhisa Takenouchi. scr: Akinori Endo, Yuzo Takada. des: Koichi Arai, Tetsuya Kumagai, Hiroshi Kato. ani: Koichi Arai, Tetsuya Ku-magai. mus: Kaoru Wada. prd: Tabac, Toei. 30 mins. x 4 eps., 45 mins. x 3 eps.

Yakumo Fuji loses his father in an accident in Tibet but gains a new responsibility. He must help a 300-year-old immortal, the last of the race that once ruled Earth, who lives in a symbiotic relationship with a 16-year-old girl called Pai. Yakumo is killed rescuing Pai but is brought back to life as her zombie protector. Now both of them begin a quest to become human.

Creator Yuzo Takada began as an assistant to Judge’s Fujihiko Hosono, and here combines the “walking dead” hero of Ultraman with the ancient immortals of Tezuka’s Three-Eyed Prince. Takada’s 3x3 Eyes manga suggests that all myths are the vestigial race-memory of a great conflict between extradimensional entities. Mixing the treasure-hunting elements of Indiana Jones with a mythopoeic buddy-movie, Pai and Yakumo search the world for artifacts that might help them. The mawkish romance between the two (made frankly irritating in an English dub that gives Pai a grating screech in place of a voice) is nicely contrasted with their magical personae—shy-boy Yakumo is an indestructible zombie, and puppy-fat ingenue Pai disappears completely when her third eye opens, revealing a powerful being with a demonic disregard for human life. In this way, 3x3 Eyes is perhaps the most dramatically interesting spin-off from Cream Lemon’s schizophrenic “Lolita” concept and is mercifully asexual.

A second series followed in 1995 after Takada’s successful Blue Seed, with Pai losing her memory in Hong Kong and living as a schoolgirl in Japan. The new story, featuring input from Takada himself, takes the pair to Mount Kunlun, China’s version of Olympus, where they join forces with some priests and a man with a really bad Australian accent to find the “key” to Pai’s dimension. Covering only the first five volumes of the ongoing original, 3x3 Eyes remains one of those truncated anime series consistently beset with rumors of its imminent return to the screen.

Three-Eyed Prince

1985. jpn: Mitsume ga Toru; Akumajima no Prince Mitsume ga Toru. aka: The Three-eyed Prince on Devil’s Island. TV special, TV series. dir: Yugo Serikawa (TVm), Hidehito Ueda, Yusaku Saotome, Keiichiro Mochizuki, Shichi Matsumi (TV). scr: Haruya Yamazaki (TVm), Mayori Sekijima, Reiko Naka, Tsunehisa Arakawa. des: Osamu Tezuka (TVm), Kazuhiko Udagawa (TV). ani: Shigetaka Kiyoyama, Hiroshi Wagatsuma, Masami Abe (TVm), Kazuhiko Udagawa, Yoshiaki Matsuhira (TV). mus: Kazuo Otani (TVm), Toshiyuki Watanabe (TV). prd: Toei, Tezuka Pro, Nippon TV, Tezuka Pro, TV Tokyo. 85 mins. (TVm), 25 mins. x 47 eps. (TV).

Sharaku is a high school student but his naïve manner, youthful face, and bald head make him look like a kindergarten kid, and he usually has some kind of bandage or dressing on his forehead. If he didn’t, the world would be in trouble, for he is the last descendant of a three-eyed race who once ruled the world with advanced technology and vast intelligence. His mother left him to be raised at Dr. Inumochi’s home shortly before she was killed by a mysterious lightning blast. Sharaku’s friend is the local priest’s daughter, Wato, a tomboy and aikido expert who knows his secret. She loves his “true” self, an arrogant but lonely superbeing, and looks after and protects his childlike human persona. She’s also the one who usually has to take off his third-eye covering so he can save the situation when they get into some kind of trouble with magical phenomena, and she puts it back on again to prevent him taking over the world once the danger is past. Based on a manga by Osamu Tezuka, in which he hoped to combine the look of Elmer Fudd with the adventures of Sherlock Holmes—note an investigative character “Sha-rak,” whose faithful assistant is addressed as “Wat-san.” A heavy influence on the later 3x3 Eyes.

Thumbelina

1978. jpn: Andersen Dowa: Oyayubi-hime. aka: Andersen’s Tale: Thumbelina; Princess Thumb. Movie, TV series. dir: Yugo Serikawa (m), Hiromitsu Morita, et al. (TV2). scr: Yuko Oyabu (m), Akiyoshi Sakai, Shigeru Yanagawa, Yu Mizugi (TV1). des: Osamu Tezuka, Satoshi Fukumoto (m), Usagi Morino (TV). ani: Tatsuji Kino (m), Usagi Morino (TV). mus: Shunsuke Kikuchi (m), N/C (TV). prd: Toei, Tezuka Pro (m), Enoki Film, TV Tokyo (TV). 64 mins. (m), 25 mins. x 26 eps. (TV).

The movie made by Tezuka’s studio for Toei is a straightforward adaptation of the classic fairy tale. A tiny girl, only as long as a man’s thumb, is born to a childless woman, abducted by frogs who want her to marry their son, but escaping instead (with the help of a kindly bumblebee, a Tezuka addition) to find a real prince without having to kiss the frog first. It’s utterly charming. One of the ever-popular Tales of Hans Christian Andersen, the story was adapted again by Megumi Nagata (see Prism Season), and again as a TV series, The Story of Princess Thumbelina (1994, Oyayubi-hime Monogatari). A feature-length edit of this series was apparently released on home video in the U.S. as Thumbelina. The series was also shown in Spanish on Puerto Rican TV.

Thunderbirds 2086 *

1982. jpn: Kagaku Kyujotai Technovoyager. aka: Scientific Rescue Team Technovoyager. TV series. dir: Noboru Ishiguro, Yasuo Hasegawa, Katsuhito Akiyama, Hiromichi Matano, Shigeo Koshi. scr: Hideki Sonoda, Noboru Ishiguro, Kazuo Yoshioka, Takayuki Kase, Shiro Ishimori, Keiji Kubota. des: Kenzo Koizumi, Kunio Aoii, Kazuto Ishikawa. ani: Katsu Amamizu, Mitsuru Ishii, Yasushi Nakamura. mus: Kentaro Haneda, Koji Makaino. prd: Jin, Green Box, AIC, Tohoku Shinsha, Fuji TV. 25 mins. x 24 eps.

In 2066, the World Federation Supreme Council appoints former astronaut Dr. Gerard Simpson (pointlessly renamed Warren Simpson in the U.S. dub) to run the International Rescue Organization. Based on a remote Pacific island, he leads a group of kids who pilot the “Techno Voyager” vehicles to save people in danger—Captains Raiji Hidaka (Dylan Beyda) in One, Sammy Edkins Jr. (Johnathan Jordan Jr.) and Eric Jones (Jesse Rigel) in Two, Gran Hanson (Gran Hansen) in Three, Catherine Heywood (Kallan James) in Four, and token brat Paul Simpson (“Skipper” Simpson) getting under everyone’s feet.

The concept of the five-strong team had already been popularized in anime by Battle of the Planets, but the other similarities between Technovoyager and the British cult puppet show Thunderbirds (1966) might be considered actionably obvious. Luckily for him, producer Banjiro Uemura was head of Tohoku Shinsha and also of ITC Japan, part of the international corporation that owned the Thunderbirds copyright—if he found the resemblance too close for comfort, he would have had to sue himself. Uemura had already made Zero Tester, which by his own cautious admission “learned from” Thunderbirds. In 1977, he had held extensive talks with Thunderbirds-creator Gerry Anderson about a new animated series to be called first Thunderhawks, then Terrahawks: Order to Recapture Earth. During the outlining process, much of Anderson’s original idea was discarded in favor of new plot elements from Sukehiro Tomita and designs from Yoshikazu Yasuhiko. Set in the year 2085, it was to be the story of second-generation immigrants from the rest of the solar system, returning to reconquer their homeworld, which has been overrun by aliens led by the evil “Queen Mother.” The show stalled in the early stages, because the Japanese network MBS claimed there was no call for sci-fi. Star Wars opened in Japan just a few months later, by which time the project was already canceled.

However, several parties reused elements of the proposal in later shows—writer Tomita with Mospeada, Anderson with his puppet show Terrahawks (1983), and Uemura with Technovoyager.

Technovoyager flopped in Japan (only 18 episodes were screened on its initial run), but in his capacity as head of ITC Japan, Uemura was able to sell it to ITC’s American arm, and, in 1983, the full run was broadcast in America as “Thunderbirds 2086, an ITC Entertainment Production”—transformed into a bona fide ITC production after the fact. The new title recognized the show’s debt to Thunderbirds, but where the British only allowed for a handful of rescue craft, the Japanese team could call on no less than 17, enabling them to investigate crime and save lives on land, under the sea, in the air, and in space. The coincidental and remarkably convenient confusion of the letters B and V in Japanese allowed for the “Techno Voyager” vehicles to have the letters “TB” on their sides. The extensive vehicle lineup and stock hero team characters were close to the Japanese Terrahawks outline, while the Terrahawks puppet series released in Britain reputedly had many elements of the British outline—with the Queen Mother renamed Zelda. In another moment of chance cross-cultural pollination, both Terrahawks’ Zeroids and Gundam’s Haro were spherical robots.

The confusion continued when the six unbroadcast episodes of Technovoyager were exported back to Japan as part of Thunderbirds 2086, two 90-minute videos with the U.S. dub (by Speed Racer’s Peter Fernandez) left intact for added exoticism. Meanwhile, in a final irony, an “anime” version of Terrahawks did eventually reach Japanese screens; when the puppet show was broadcast in Japan, its opening sequence was replaced with new Japanese-made animated footage, directed by Tetsu Dezaki. Hideaki Anno, a big enough fan of the original TB to produce the Japanese-made documentary The Complete Thunderbirds, would acknowledge his own debt to Gerry Anderson with numerous homages in Evangelion.

Thunderboys

1995. jpn: Itsuka no Main. aka: Forever Main. Video. dir: Hiromichi Matano. scr: Isao Shizudani. des: Shushi Mizuho. ani: Mitsuharu Otani. mus: Teppei Sato. prd: Toei. 45 mins.

Tokyo bikers race and fight, and race, and fight. Based on the manga in Young Jump by Shushi Mizuho. LV

Thundersub *

1979. jpn: Uchu Kubo Blue Noah. aka: Space Carrier Blue Noah. TV series. dir: Kazunori Takahashi, Tomoharo Katsu­mata, Masahiro Sasaki, Kunihiko Okazaki, Shiro Murata, Teppei Matsu-ura. scr: Hideaki Yamamoto, Kiyoshi Matsuoka, Takashi Yamada. des: Akinobu Hane. ani: Kenzo Koizumi. mus: Masaaki Hirao. prd: Westcape Corporation, Yomiuri TV (Nippon TV). 25 mins. x 27 eps.

In the year 2050, Earth is invaded by the alien Godom race, known rather more grandly in the Western version as the Force of Death. Ninety percent of humanity is wiped out, but their last hope lies in the secret Point N1 Base on Minamidori Island. There, the great aircraft carrier Blue Noah is nearing completion. With a young crew led by the inventor’s son Makoto Kusaka (Earth commander’s son Colin Collins in the U.S. version), it launches fighters to save the world, but the project isn’t yet complete, and the ship must get to other secret Points to complete its construction, powered by a pendant passed on to the hero by his dying father.

As if taking a WWII battleship and sending it on a star trek wasn’t ludicrous enough, this Earthbound follow-up to Star Blazers somehow failed to recapture the magic of its predecessor. It wasn’t until episode 21 that the ship justified its “Space Carrier” title, picking up a star drive at Point N9 that finally allowed it to get out of the water. Though 27 episodes were made, the first 4 were not shown in their original form but cut together into a feature-length “TV special” to open the series. Unlike the Yamato, however, the Blue Noah did not return for a sequel. See also Odin, another attempt by producer Yoshinobu Nishizaki to make money out of ships sailing in space.

Tico of the Seven Seas

1994. jpn: Nanatsu no Umi no Tico. aka: Tico and Nanami. TV series. dir: Jun Takagi, Jiro Fujimoto, Shinpei Miyashita, Kozo Kuzuba, et al. scr: Hideki Mitsui, Aya Matsui, Noriyuki Aoyama, Asako Ikeda, Toru Nobuto. des: Satoko Morikawa, Shigeru Mori-moto, Kazue Ito. ani: Yoshiharu Sato, Masaru Oshiro, Koichiro Saotome, Ei Inoue, Azumayami Sugiyama. mus: Hibiki Mikazu. prd: Nippon Animation, Fuji TV. 25 mins. x 39 eps.

Little Nanami travels the world’s oceans with her father, Scott Simpson, an oceanographer, in search of adventure and on the track of a legendary luminous whale said to have played a vital role in the evolution of life on Earth. Their captain is Alphonso, a brave fishermen and the owner of the good ship Peperonchino. Rich, beautiful Cheryl Melville talks her way on board in search of adventure, with her butler, and refuses to leave. Nanami’s special friend, the orca Tico, swims alongside their boat as they search for the whale through the seven seas. When an unscrupulous team of scientists gets to the whale first, Nanami and Tico rescue it in the hope of learning its secrets and sharing them with the rest of the world. This is one of Nippon Animation’s rare series not based on a classic novel; the story was created for the company by Akira Hiroo. Beautiful designs and a plot combining adventure with ecological correctness make a charming children’s series. Episode 31 was not broadcast but included on the laserdisc release.

Tide-Line Blue

2005. TV series. dir: Umanosuke Iida, Dan Odawara, Keiko Oyamada. scr: Yuka Yamada, Megumi Sasano. des: Sadakazu Takiguchi, Kimitoshi Yamane, Akihiko Yamashita. ani: Kazuhide Tomonaga, Mineko Ueda. mus: Tsuneyoshi Saito. prd: Telecom, TV Asahi. 25 mins. x 13 eps.

It has been 14 years since the terrifying Hammer of Eden disaster, in which a meteorite strike on the Earth wiped out six billion lives and caused a massive rise in the sea levels. Aoi, the secretary-general of what’s left of the United Nations, hopes to persuade the remnants of the globe to pull together, while Gould, a maverick submarine captain, stands up to the New United Nations by declaring war on them in the Ulysses, a rogue nuclear submarine. So, Evangelion meets Silent Service, with the unsurprising presence of Satoru Ozawa, creator of Blue Submarine No. Six, among the committee members who came up with the plot. Compare also to Submarine Super 99, which similarly featured two brothers separated by conflict—in this case, a boy called Keel is our teenage point-of-view character in the town of Yabitsu, attacked by Gould, while Keel’s brother Tean is one of the men onboard Gould’s sub.

Ties of Love

1992. jpn: Ai no Kusabi. aka: Ties of Affection, Bonds of Love. Video. dir: Akira Nishimori, Kazuhito Akiyama. scr: Naoko Hasegawa, Reiko Yoshiwara. des: Katsumi Michihara, Naoyuki Onda. ani: Koichi Arai, Takeyoshi Nakayama. mus: Toshio Yabuki. prd: AIC. 60 mins. x 2 eps.

The future city of Tanagra is governed by a computer entity known as Jupiter but administered by the Parthia syndicate, whose members are drawn from the aristocratic group known as Blondys. Social tensions bubble under its serene, ordered surface; disaffected political groups are plotting to kill the most important syndicate member, Jason Mink. But there’s an even more pressing destabilizing factor in Jason’s life: he has fallen deeply and embarrassingly in love with his “pet” Riki, a boy from the wrong side of the tracks who, like many young men and women with no other options, has voluntarily become a sex slave. Neither Jason nor Riki can admit the ties that hold them, even to themselves; leaving aside their pride, both would be outcasts. Jason gives Riki a vacation, a chance to go back to the slums and find his old friends again, but a meeting with his former lover leads to tragedy.

Based on the novel by Reiko Yoshiwara, which was illustrated by Joker’s Katsumi Michihara, ToL’s society is reminiscent of ancient Greece; not only are the institutions of power restricted to a certain class, but women are completely excluded from significant roles. All the key power relationships we see, including sexual ones, are between men. Ironically, the Jupiter computer manifests as feminine: like Kusanagi in Ghost in the Shell, she’s a man-made idea of the female in a world run by masculine elites. There is sexually explicit material but the violence is mostly emotional. Like most anime about homosexual love, this was originally made for a female audience. NV

Tiger Mask

1969. TV series, movie. dir: Takeshi Tamiya, Kimio Yabuki, Tomoharu Katsu­mata, Fusahito Nagaki, Hiroshi Shidara, Yoshio Kuroda, Yasuo Yamaguchi (TV1), Kozo Morishita, Shigenori Yamauchi, Hideki Takayama, Tomoharu Katsumata, Masayuki Akehi, Kazuo Yamazaki, Osamu Sekita (TV2). scr: Masaki Tsuji, Tadashi Kondo, Tomohiro Ando (TV1), Haruya Yamazaki (TV2). des: Naoki Tsuji. ani: Keijiro Kimura, Koichi Murata (TV1), Tsukasa Abe (TV2). mus: Shunsuke Kikuchi (both). prd: Toei, Yomiuri TV (Nippon TV) (TV1), Toei, TV Asahi (TV2). 25 mins. x 105 eps. (TV1), 47 mins., 53 mins., 25 mins. (m), 25 mins. x 33 eps. (TV2).

Naoto Date has a secret identity as masked wrestler Tiger Mask, part of a crude school of fighting that is more violence than art. Overcome by guilt when an opponent’s death puts his little son in an orphanage, the hard man devotes himself to the well-being of the orphans and works to improve their lives in the only way he knows how—by fighting. He also aims to raise the standards of the ring and ensure that fighting is recognized as an honorable art, not mere violence.

Based on a 1968 manga in Bokura magazine by Karate-Crazy Life’s Ikki Kajiwara and Zero Sen Hayato–creator Naoki Tsuji, TM soon made it to theaters, as episodes were edited into seasonal “movies”—TM (1970, #9), TM: War Against the League of Masked Wrestlers (1970, #23, 25 and 26), and TM: The Black Demon (1971, #56).

A 1981 follow-up series is set after Naoto’s death—he was killed saving the life of a child. A new opponent, Outer Space Mask, not endorsed by any of the national wrestling federations, bullies his way into the ring and injures a young wrestler. Tatsuo, a great fan of Tiger Mask who once lived in the orphanage he supported, intervenes wearing his hero’s old mask and is accepted into the fraternity of masked wrestlers, where he becomes a major star. Champion of the op­pressed and weak, he hides his secret wrestling identity under the everyday clothes of a sports journalist, echoing that other champion of the weak, Superman. V

Time Bokan

1975. aka: Time Fighters, Time Ma­chine. TV series. dir: Hiroshi Sasagawa, Takao Koyama, Katsuhisa Yamada, Hideo Nishimaki (TV1), Seitaro Hara (TV2), Takao Yotsuji (TV4). scr: Jinzo Toriumi, Haruya Yamazaki, Keiji Kubota, Tsunehisa Ito, Shigeru Yanagawa (TV1), Akiyoshi Sakai (TV2), Ma­saru Yamamoto (TV4), Satoru Akahori. des: Tatsuo Yoshida, Yoshitaka Amano, Kunio Okawara. ani: Eiji Tanaka, Hidemi Kama, Hitoshi Sakaguchi. mus: Masayuki Yamamoto, Masaaki Jinbo. prd: Tatsunoko, Fuji TV. 25 mins. x 61 eps. (TV1), 25 mins. x 108 eps. (TV2), 25 mins. x 53 eps. (TV3), 25 mins. x 52 eps. (TV4), 25 mins. x 52 eps. (TV5), 25 mins. x 58 eps. (TV6), 25 mins. x 20 eps. (TV7), 30 mins. x 2 eps. (v), 25 mins. x 26 eps. (TV8).

Junko and Tanpei are the grandchildren of a mad inventor who produced a time machine, went off into history, and simply vanished. They’re determined to find him, but they’re not the only ones. The scandalously dressed villain Madame Margot, with her hapless sidekicks, Birba and Sgrinfia, are also on his trail, and on the trail of a massive diamond lost somewhere in time. The ending could be viewed as an anticlimax—the professor returns to the present under his own steam—but in this case the journey, with its slapstick perils, crazy creatures, and interventions by wicked but inept villains, is more than the destination.

Time Bokan was only the first chapter in an epic saga of insanity on every level: design, characterization, and plot. With often-cited similarities to Wacky Races, and machines and performances that went further and further over the top, Ippei Kuri produced the first series based for Tatsunoko Production and remained in charge throughout its increasingly silly but lovable progress to classic status.

Like Sunrise’s Brave Saga, both the crew and central concept of the series remained through successive sequels, with only superficial changes. Only the characters’ looks and the wonderful machines, designed to spin off into toy merchandising, displayed any variation—the robots and vehicles became so lucrative that a new one was introduced every episode.

Its successor, TB Series Yattaman (1977), came only a week later. Ganchan, descendant of a line of inventors, has made his own robot car, Yatta One, and takes his girlfriend and mechanic for a celebratory meal. Unfortunately they go to a restaurant run by sexy Miss Doronjo and her comic sidekicks, Tonzura and Boyakei. They are members of a gang under orders to find a powerful artifact, the Dokurostone (Skullstone), which can locate hidden treasure and is really the head of a mighty extraterrestrial called Dokurobei, who is just using the crooks to retrieve it. Ganchan and his friends must stop the crooks, but the quest takes them all over the world and through time. Though the plot is an obvious respray, art directors Toyo’o Ashida, Kazuhiko Itada, and Takashi Nakamura brought visual freshness and invention.

Once again, as one series ended another began, the following year’s TBS Zendaman (1978). This time young Tetsu and his girlfriend Sakura race through time in their robots, Zendalion and Zendagorilla, to fight the trio of villains headed by sexy Miss Mujo. A short Zendaman movie premiered in spring 1980, but the new series TBS Time Patrol Tai [Team] Otasukeman was already on the air. In an achingly familiar setup, Miss Atasha, Dovalski, and Sekovitch are seeking an artifact that will enable the shadowy Tonmanomanto to dominate the world. Hikaru and Nana spring to the rescue in their increasingly incredible machines, chasing or chased by the villains through time and space. An Otasukeman movie was screened in spring 1981 as once again the new series TBS Yattodetaman had just begun on TV. Princess Domenica’s rule is challenged by the theft of the Cosmopavone, a magical bird whose powers (like Tezuka’s Space Firebird) can bring peace and healing. She calls on two of her ancestors, a boy and a girl from the 1980s, for help against hot-tempered Princess Mirenjo and her henchmen.

The sixth series, TBS Gyakuten Ippa­tsuman (1982, aka Ippatsuman Returns), revolved around Homuran and Harubo, owners of the time delivery company Timelease, who set off to make a delivery to another era and find themselves pursued by Munmun, Kosuinen, and Kyokanchin, representatives of rival firm Sharecowbellies, who are now calling themselves the Clean Aku Trio. Then Ippatsukiman shows up to help Timelease, and they realize that there’s more to this job than they thought. The final series, TBS Itadakiman (1983), moves the starting point for the journey to Oshaka Academy, where the headmaster orders three students, Hoshi, Sagosen, and Hatsuo, to find the pieces of an artifact called the Oshakapuzzle, now scattered throughout the world. Meanwhile three “ronin” (students waiting to retake entrance exams) called Yanyan, Dasainen, and Tonmentan are also looking for the puzzle, which will give the finder strange powers. As before, the titular hero comes to the aid of the good guys.

Falling ratings brought the show to an end after reasonably long innings, though it returned to video once its young audience was old enough to rent. Members of the original crew reunited one last time for the Wacky Races homage Time Bokan Royal Revival (1993), which pits all seven trios of villains from the original series in a race against each other. The prize is supposedly the leading role in the next episode.

However, there was no next episode until Thieving Kiramekiman (2000, Kaito Kiramekiman), an eighth series that reordered the archetypes to make good-natured criminals the protagonists. The handsome Puff is sent back 500 years to our time to rescue his ancestor, Professor Rikkid. Everybody needs the treasure known as the Gold Eye, and Puff teams up with the pretty teenager Lips to form the Kiramekiman cat-burglar team. They are pursued by a trio of bumbling French cops, while Lips’ own father is the chief of police—a combination of elements of Cat’s Eye and Lupin III. This most recent incarnation in the franchise was shown on TV Tokyo. There was also an unrelated Fuji TV series Time Travel Tondekeman (1989), directed by Kunihiko Yuyama.

Time Stranger

1986. jpn: Toki no Tabibito Time Stranger. aka: Time Traveler Time Stranger. Video. dir: Mori Masaki. scr: Atsushi Yamatoya, Mori Masaki, Toshio Takeuchi. des: Moto Hagio, Koji Mori-moto. ani: Takuo Noda, Hiroshi Fukutomi, Toshio Hirata, Yoshiaki Kawajiri, Kunihiko Sakurai, Yasuomi Umezu. mus: Ryoichi Kuniyoshi. prd: Project Team Argos, Madhouse. 91 mins.

A minibusload of modern-day teenagers is hijacked by Jiro Agino, a time-traveler from the future, who drags them back to WWII Tokyo, and then to feudal Japan. They arrive at Azuchi Castle in 1582, just before the surprise attack that will/did/could result in the death of Nobunaga Oda. Jiro has determined that this is a critical moment in history, and that, had Nobunaga survived, Japan would have been spared the seclusion and stagnation of the Tokugawa period—forecasting that when Western powers arrived in the 19th century they would not have been able to treat Japan as a second-class nation. This in turn would have created a better political climate in the Pacific, and averted Japan’s involvement in WWII! The gang is faced with a dilemma—to change history by warning Nobunaga (portrayed with a sympathy rare in his other anime appearances such as Yotoden), or to keep quiet and risk dying in the coming “surprise” attack. Meanwhile, far-future assassin Toshito Kutajima arrives to terminate Jiro’s meddling, while schoolgirl Tetsuko “Teko” Hayasaka unhelpfully falls in love with Nobunaga’s page-boy Ranmaru. Sometimes confused with Goshogun spin-off Etranger, this has more in common with Fire Tripper minus the cute infant. Considering the famous names all over the crew (note They Were Eleven’s Hagio designing alongside future Memories-director Morimoto), it’s a real mystery why this was never picked up for U.S. release. Based on a young adult SF novel by Taku Mayumura. In 2003, the unrelated anime Goshogun was released in the U.S. under the confusing title of Time Stranger, in what we can only assume was a deliberate attempt to annoy the authors of the Anime Encyclopedia.

Time Stranger Kyoko

2001. jpn: Jiku Iho Kyoko Chokora ni Makase. aka: Time Stranger Kyoko: Leave it to Chocola. Video. dir: Masatsugu Arakawa. scr: Fumihiko Shimo. des: Hiroyoshi Iida. ani: Hiroyoshi Iida. mus: Koshu Inaba. prd: Production IG, Transarts. 11 mins.

A number of girls stand watch as guardians for the future of the world, their sub–Sailor Moon ranks including Sakataki the Crystal Stranger, Hizuki the Ice Stranger, and of course, Kyoko Suomi, the Time Stranger. None of that’s important right now, however, because the king’s robot assistant is trying to organize a birthday party for him, in a spin-off tale that only tenuously relates to the 2000 manga in Ribon magazine by Full Moon–creator Arina Tanemura. Although made for video, this short was shown in a few venues as part of a Ribon promotional tour, hence its being filed as a “movie” in some sources. LNV

Time Trio

1988. jpn: Zukkoke Sanningumi Zukkoke Jiku Boken. aka: Bumbling Trio’s Time Travel Adventure. Video. dir: Hidehito Umeda. scr: Takao Koyama. des: Kazuo Maekawa. ani: Takashi Saijo. mus: Masayuki Yamamoto. prd: Tama. 57 mins.

Hachibe, Mochan, and Hakase are three young newshounds for their elementary-school newspaper. While trying to spy on their pretty teacher, Yukiko, they are flung back into the Edo period where they meet another beautiful authority figure, this time a princess struggling to control her domains. Based on a best-selling children’s book by Masayoshi Nasu. Compare to Zeguy.

Timid Venus

1986. jpn: Okubyo Venus. Video. dir: Hiroyuki Kadono. scr: Koichi Arai. des: Hiroyuki Kitakubo, Shingo Araki, Michi Himeno. ani: Michi Himeno. mus: Ami Osaki. prd: Victor. 20 mins.

Young singer Hiromi is packed off to New York shortly after the release of her debut single and told to train hard for her first concert. A short anime made with a semidocumentary feel.

To Heart

2000. TV series. dir: Naohito Takahashi. scr: Hiroshi Yamaguchi. des: Yuriko Chiba. ani: Shichiro Kobayashi. mus: N/C. prd: KSS, Sun TV. 25 mins. x 13 eps.

Akari and her boyfriend, Hiroyuki, walk to high school together every day. In the evenings, Akari chats to her old friend Shiho on the phone, or the two girls hang out at restaurants and karaoke bars. Their classmates include a rich girl who belongs to the school’s Black Magic Club and a robot maid sent to school to collect data on Japanese student behavior. So it’s just another typical Japanese high school, and Hiroyuki is just another typical Japanese high school boy who, despite being a nice quiet guy with no outstanding talents, finds himself surrounded by pretty girls who would do anything for him. But the trouble is, they don’t seem to have much idea of anything to do. Episode one revolves around selecting seating assignments for the class, which involves much making and ripping up of lists. Episode two shows extended footage of Akari getting ready for a date with Hiroyuki, but those anticipating fan service should note she spends most of the time brushing her teeth and their date consists of drinking coffee and talking. Created by a group of artists calling itself AQUAPLUS, this is another anime based on a 1997 “love simulation game” (see also Seraphim Call) for the PlayStation and designed to sell merchandise depicting the cute characters. The anime shifts the original’s focus from Hiroyuki to Akari, presumably to lure in a female audience who wouldn’t take kindly to being regarded as the “prize” in a game. It’s not overtly sexual; rather it creates the fantasy life most lonely Japanese teenagers would apparently like to have, which, on the evidence of this show, is a quiet one.

Tobidaze Batchiri

1966. aka: Jump to It, Batchiri. TV series. dir: Kumi Yamamoto. scr: Hitoshi Narihashi. des: Mitsuteru Okamoto. ani: Batchiri Group. mus: Kunio Miyauchi. prd: Nippon TV. 10 mins. x 132 eps.

The adventures of jug-eared schoolboy detective Batchiri, who can solve cases that baffle the police, thanks to his brilliantly ingenious mind. An early precursor of Conan the Boy Detective.

Tobiwao is Taken Ill

1982. jpn: Tobiwao no Boya wa Byoki Desu. aka: The Boy Tobiwa Is Taken Ill. Movie. dir: Kazuya Miyazaki. scr: Tomiko Inui. des: Renzo Kinoshita. ani: Tatsuhiro Nagaki. mus: Tadashi Kinoshita. prd: Mushi. 19 mins.

Flying fish Tobiwao is happily frolicking in the waters of the Pacific when there is a bright flash in the sky and white ash starts to rain down on him. He dives for cover beneath the sea, but that night, he goes to his mother complaining of feeling very ill indeed. An anthropomorphic parable, set on March 1, 1954—the day of the infamous Bikini Bomb Test. The same event prompted producer Ishiro Honda to wonder if the test could do so much damage to fish, what would it do to other animals? The result of his speculation was released as Godzilla (1954).

TODO, IZUMI

A house pseudonym used by workers at Toei Animation in the creation of some anime serials, including Precure and Tomorrow’s Nadja. Compare to Hajime Yatate, the nonexistent man who invents stories for Sunrise, or Saburo Yade, who has supposedly dreamed up many of the teamshows made by Tsuburaya.

Toei Animation

Founded in 1956 as the animation arm of the film studio Toei, the company’s first and most important acquisition was Nippon Doga, the small studio formed in 1947 by Sanae Yamamoto and Kenzo Masaoka. The company was known as Toei Doga until 1998, when the doga part of its name was translated into English as Toei Animation. For simplicity’s sake, we have referred to the company as Toei Animation throughout this book. As the inheritor of Japan’s prewar Early Anime tradition, and as the instigator of Japan’s postwar feature anime, Toei can be seen as the cradle of the modern Japanese animation business. Its movie releases included early classics of Japanese feature animation, including Little Norse Prince and Puss in Boots, whose leading feline Perrault remains the studio’s mascot character. Despite its successes, it was unable to compete at a local level with the higher-budget releases of Disney, and enjoyed longer term success in television—some of its early work including Ken the Wolf Boy, Little Witch Sally, and Tiger Mask. As a feature of the move into TV and the same general slump in finances that killed off Mushi Production, Toei put many staff on temporary or freelance contracts in the early 1970s. A number of them responded by forming their own limited companies as suppliers to Toei, leading to the foundation of many of the small studios of today. As one of the largest production studios, Toei’s home in north Tokyo’s Nerima Ward attracted other anime specialty companies, both spin-offs and originals (the situation is analogous to Hewlett-Packard and California’s Silicon Valley). Today, Nerima is the site of dozens of other production houses, as well as several of the best-known manga creators. More recent successes for the studio have included Interstella 5555, Pretty Cure, and One Piece, which took the studio’s work to a wide international audience.

Toho

Founded in 1932 as the Tokyo-Takarazuka Theater company (the characters for which contract to “To-Ho” in Japanese, and conveniently also mean “Eastern Treasure”), Toho’s international reputation is largely founded on its production of the movies of Akira Kurosawa and the famous Godzilla series. However, it has also produced or distributed many anime productions, including Lupin III, Touch, and the movies of Studio Ghibli.

Tokaido Ghost Stories

1981. jpn: Tokaido Yotsuya Kaidan. aka: Ghost Stories of Tokaido/Yotsuya. TV special. dir: Hajime Suzuki. scr: Sadatoshi Yasunaga. des: N/C. ani: N/C. mus: N/C. prd: TMS, Telecom, Fuji TV. 54 mins.

Set in 1636, this is the story of Iemon, who plans to kill his wife, Oiwa, hoping to inherit her wealth and marry his new, rich ladylove. Though his slow poisoning scheme pays off, he escapes justice in this world but not in the next, as Oiwa’s shade returns to haunt him at every turn. A TV special based on Japanese ghost stories, for which one segment consisted of an animated tale.

Tokimeki Memorial

1999. aka: Heartbeat Memorial. Video. dir: Hajime Kamegaki, Akira Nishizawa. scr: Yosuke Kuroda. des: Hideyuki Motohashi. ani: Hideyuki Motohashi, Yasunori Tokiya. mus: N/C. prd: Studio Pierrot. 40 mins. x 2 eps.

Kirameki High School has a beautiful romantic legend. If on graduation day a girl confesses her love to a boy under the old tree in the school grounds, the two will have a long and happy life together. Twelve girls are in their last five months before graduation: Shiori Fujisaki, the principal character; her best friend Megumi Mikuhara; the beautiful but vain Mira Kagami; and the others consisting of Saki Nijino, Ayako Katagiri, Nozomi Kiyokawa, Yuko Asahina, Yuina Himoo, Yukari Koshikii, Yumi Saotome, and Miharu Tatebayashi. The first episode is essentially an introduction to all the characters, but in the second, as Rei Ijuin’s Christmas party approaches, Shiori must decide whether to let her beloved know her true feelings.

Based on a 1994 dating game by Konami, which required the player to win one of the girls’ hearts over a game span that was supposed to occupy three years of high school and end at graduation, this video spin-off matches the game story closely and uses the same voice actresses, though the character designs are slightly different. Launched for the PC Engine, the original game spun off ten further titles in PlayStation, Sega Saturn, Game Boy, PC, Mac, and arcade incarnations, plus a radio chat show, radio dramas, and a long list of merchandise.

Tokimeki Tonight

1982. aka: Heartbeat Tonight. TV series. dir: Hiroshi Sasagawa, Akinori Nagaoka, Tsutomu Shibayama, Teruo Kigure, Hideo Yoshisawa, Noboru Ishi­guro, Tomomi Mochizuki. scr: Toshio Okabe, Takao Koyama, Tomomi Tsu­tsui, Fuyunori Gobu, Akiyoshi Sakai. des: Koi Ikeno. ani: Keiichi Takahashi, Keiko Yoshimoto, Gisaburo Sugii. mus: Kazuo Otani. prd: Group Tac, Nippon TV. 25 mins. x 34 eps.

Ranze looks like any other teenage girl, but she’s the daughter of a vampire and a female werewolf. You can imagine how that would cramp your style bringing friends home after school, so she leaves her family to try and live a normal life. But then, just as she’s enjoying falling in love with school hunk Shinpeki, she begins to manifest powers of her own. Strict laws forbid creatures of the night from marrying humans, and it seems that everything’s going to go wrong for her—but in the end, luckily, Shinpeki turns out to be the long-lost son of Satan. Based on the 1982 manga by Nurse Angel Lilika SOS–creator Koi Ikeno.

Tokio Private Police *

1997. jpn: Tokio Kido Police. aka: Tokio Mobile Police. Video. dir: Moriichi Higashi. scr: Yu Yamato. des: Harunaga Kazuki, Satoshi Teraoka. ani: Harunaga Kazuki. mus: An Fu. prd: Beam Entertainment. 30 mins. x 2 eps.

In 2034 Tokyo is beset by a giant-robot crime wave. With personnel numbers slashed on the police force, the government is forced to subcontract to private companies—compare to similar privatizations in Hummingbirds. Hence the Tokio [sic] Private Police, although the subject of this anime is less concerned with fighting future crime and more with erotic diversions. A cast roster that is a thinly disguised reference to Patlabor duly assembles, with section chief Shibata trying to keep his affair with a captain under wraps, and new recruit Noriko arriving at the run-down Ginza branch, and getting laid on her first day.

Episode two features some robot action as well, although that’s not the kind of action that viewers of this short-lived series are likely to be looking for. The authors are not entirely sure why the world needs an erotic parody of Patlabor, but here it is. N

Tokyo Babylon *

1992. Video. dir: Koichi Chiaki, Kumiko Takahashi. scr: Tatsuhiko Urahata, Hiroaki Jinno. des: Kumiko Takahashi. ani: Kumiko Takahashi. mus: Toshiyuki Honda. prd: Animate Film. 50 mins., 55 mins.

Subaru Sumeragi lives in Tokyo with his twin sister, Hokuto. A fey, gentle young man, he’s a psychic by heritage and by trade, often called on by the police to assist on investigations that stump all normal crime-fighting methods. Each of the two videos (the second appeared in 1994) focuses on one case: the first a murder for power and money that is complicated when a bereaved young woman, out for revenge, unleashes psychic forces she can’t control; and the other a genuinely chilling look into the world of a psychopathic serial killer. The stories contrast Subaru’s unworldly gentleness with the cynical and self-seeking city dwellers around him. The religious symbols are leftover 1980s fashion statements rather than deep philosophical references—a superficial quality only emphasized by a truly awful English-language musical interlude. The real importance of TB is its part in the movement of elements from girls’ manga into the commercial mainstream—though the U.K. distributors did hype it by falsely claiming that the tape contained scenes of phone sex! Both videos are enjoyable in their own right but are only fragmentary glimpses of CLAMP’s much larger manga universe, missing many of its facets. Subaru has a part in the earth-shaking events of X: The Movie, in which the genial vet who has been his friend, suitor, and mentor, reveals his darker side, and the ancestral links between their two families are finally resolved.

Tokyo Godfathers *

2004. Movie. dir: Satoshi Kon, Shogo Furuya. scr: Keiko Nobumoto, Satoshi Kon. des: Kenichi Konishi, Satoshi Kon. ani: Kenichi Konishi. mus: Keiichi Suzuki. prd: Madhouse. 92 mins.

Three tramps—alcoholic Gin, transvestite Hana, and teen runaway Miyuki—find an abandoned baby while searching through the trash on Christmas Eve. They decide to return it to its mother, only to plunge into a whirl of scandal, kidnapping, and attempted murder, all on the one day when Tokyo is supposed to be quiet.

Like Satoshi Kon’s earlier Perfect Blue, TG initially seems like a strange choice for animation. With so many real world locations, why not film it with real people? But nobody in the metropolitan government was going to approve a live-action film depicting a shanty town in the shadow of Tokyo’s distinctive twin tower metropolitan government offices, nor were many of today’s TV idols likely to sign up for a tale of grunge and poverty, however happy the ending. The clincher would have been the snow. It is popularly believed that it only falls in Tokyo once every ten years—the presence of snow being the first of this movie’s many Christmas miracles, and far cheaper to achieve with animation.

Satoshi Kon’s choice of subject matter is an act of faith in itself—framing the relentless hope and happiness of a Christmas comedy in the stark, realist tones of his other work. The baby’s arrival sends the tramps scurrying to buy water instead of booze at their local convenience store, much to the shop assistant’s surprise. Hana jokes in the soup line that he is “eating for two,” only to shock the charity worker the following day when he does indeed turn up with a babe in arms. In its comedy and sentimentality, TG is the closest thing we’ll see to an anime pantomime, an end-of-year revel that turns everything on its head—even down to the Japanese voice actors, who are often cast against type, and with some amusing cameos. The opening sequence cunningly inserts production credits into the storefronts and graffiti surrounding the action; the ending is a souped up version of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy—to the Japanese, the ultimate Christmas song.

TG also finds divine inspiration and beauty in everyday events, such as a wounded tramp seeing an angel, who turns out to be a bar girl in fancy dress. It may have three wise men (one and a half of whom are actually female), but its nativity story is not limited to Christian lore. A cemetery becomes a treasure trove as the tramps search for votive offerings of sake, and the film’s stand-in for Santa Claus, white beard and all, can only perform his task properly if he dies doing it. The movie alludes to Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon, which similarly features old men bickering over a foundling child in a storm, but at its heart is a search for kindness and warmth in materialist Japan.

TG shows a side of Tokyo that tourists rarely see, a side that many anime fans will find less believable than the heroic ninja, giant monsters, and transforming robots produced by audience chasers whose talent only extends to riffs on the latest fashion. It is also, like Akira, a love letter to the city. Kon renders its back alleys, shabby corners, and blue-collar areas with the same devotion that Otomo gave to the neon overload of its glittering uptown districts. Kon’s leading characters are mostly confused and hapless but with an inner core of humanity that redeems their weakness. Ultimately, all are attempting to reunite themselves with “families” they have abandoned, believing their crimes to be unpardonable, whereas all their loved ones want for Christmas is for them to walk back in through the door. The story is compassionate but unsentimental—a work of honest emotion on the level of My Neighbor Totoro or Frank Capra’s Christmas masterpiece It’s A Wonderful Life—and we can’t, sadly, say that about very many anime. LV

Tokyo Kids

Studio formed in 1990 by former employees of Studio Gallop and Tokyo Movie Shinsha, and particularly strong in digital compositing. Representative works include Hikarian and Susie and Marvie.

Tokyo Movie Shinsha

Also known as TMS. Founded in 1964 by former puppeteer Yutaka Fujioka as a company to work on Big X, the company originally operated as plain “Tokyo Movie” until 1976, when a refinancing deal led to the appendation of the phrase “New Company,” or Shinsha, to its name. It has also traded variously as Kyoiku Tokyo Shisha (Education Tokyo Office) and Thomas Entertainment. The company has worked on many anime serials and movies, including Akira, Golgo 13, Rose of Versailles, Monster Rancher, and Lupin III. In 2005, the games corporation Sega announced that it had acquired a 50.2% stake in TMS, linking the animation studio to Sega’s products in much the same way as the relationship of the component companies within Namco-Bandai. Just as Toei’s Nerima location has attracted related industries to settle nearby, Tokyo Movie Shinsha shares its neighborhood in Tokyo’s northwestern Suginami district with many other animation companies, including Sunrise and Madhouse.

tokyo pig *

1988. aka: Fairweather Pig; Clear Day with Occasional Pig. Movie, TV series. dir: Toshio Hirata. scr: Toshio Takeuchi, Hideo Takayashiki. des: Kazuo Koma-tsubara. ani: Kazuo Koma­tsubara. mus: N/C. prd: OH! Productions, TV Tokyo. 45 mins. (m), 25 mins. x 61 eps. (TV).

Eight-year-old Noriyasu writes and draws in his diary, discovering later that everything he writes in it comes true, even if it involves talking pigs and strange adventures. This adaptation of the children’s picture book by Shiro Yadakara was revived for a TV series in 1997, directed by Shinichi Watanabe and written by Yoshio Urasawa, with Harebuta’s (“Sunny Pig”’s) ability to “smell” people’s true intentions getting him into many scrapes.

Tokyo Requiem *

2005. jpn: Tokyo Chinkonka. Video. dir: Kazuyuki Honda. scr: Kazuyuki Honda. des: Akira Kano. ani: Kazuyuki Honda. mus: N/C. prd: Milky, Studio Jam. 30 mins. x 2 eps.

A secret society in Tokyo is intent on kidnapping four “priestesses,” each the mistress of a particular element of Fire, Water, Earth, or Wind. Their use in a clandestine, and no doubt unpleasant, ceremony is prophesied to herald the return of an evil god—as one might expect, if one has seen Doomed Megalopolis. Having already captured and ritually ravished the Priestess of Earth, their second target is Homura Kamishiro, an attractive red-haired schoolgirl and part-time prostitute, who is soon infected with a magical feather that causes her to be constantly aroused and in need of satisfaction. Hiroto “The Avenger” Nambu steps in—he is an agent of another society, dedicated to opposing the previous one, and now functioning as the girl’s protector and occasional sexual partner. Based on a manga by Nishiki Nakamura published in 2002, this is supposedly a multipart complete adaptation, although so far only two episodes have appeared. LNV

Tokyo Revelation *

1995. jpn: Shin Megami Tensei: Tokyo Mokushiroku. aka: True Goddess Reborn: Tokyo Revelation. Video. dir: Osamu Yamazaki. scr: Mamiya Fujimura. des: Kenichi Onuki. ani: Minoru Yamazawa. mus: Hiroshi Ikeyori. prd: JC Staff. 29 mins. x 2 eps., (v) 25 mins. x 52 eps. (TV).

Pale loner Akito Kobayashi sells his soul to Satan, and swears to assemble large quantities of the element Magnetite in order to open a gateway to hell. He transfers to a new school, where he swiftly turns all the local girls into vessels of demonic possession and sets his sights on class beauty Saki, whose pliant young body contains massive amounts of Magnetite. Ranged against him are a motley crew of schoolkids, including two ninja in disguise, a teen witch, and handsome occult hobbyist Kojiro. This junior version of Urotsukidoji has sorcerous computer geeks summoning devils through the Internet, necromantic heavy petting, a harpy who’s an obvious rip-off of Devilman’s Silene, a clueless cast who don’t know their Hecate from their athame, and some of the cheesiest dialogue known to man, including, “It’s not every day I meet ninjas who are demon slayers. . . . I wouldn’t be surprised if you were the reincarnation of some great goddess.” Kojiro is the reincarnation of Tokyo’s guardian deity Masakado (see Doomed Megalopolis), his golden retriever has been possessed by the Hound of Hell (see Card Captors), and, if the plot wasn’t trashy enough for you, it’s actually a remake—this is a slightly more faithful adaptation of the novel and computer game already available in anime form as Digital Devil Story. Before you can say “Buffy,” Satan is stalking Tokyo, teen witch Kyoko’s been excommunicated for performing sex magic, and there’s a faint whiff of homoeroticism redolent of the later X: The Movie, as Akito confesses his love for Kojiro, albeit in a doomed, unrequited sort of way. The whole thing is tied up in a fiendishly rushed ending, with the characters yelling plot details at each other while the credits roll over them.

In 2000, the franchise was revived to promote a new version of the game on the Nintendo Gameboy. In Goddess Reborn Devichil (Shin Megami Tensei Devichil), 11-year-old soccer-loving schoolboy Setsuna flees indoors when rocks begin to rain from the sky. He meets token female Mirai Kaname and her scientist father, Kokai, who explains that the raining rocks are a sign that Magical King Lucifer has returned to terrorize the planet and is trying to break out of the parallel “magic” Earth to subdue the everyday world. Mirai, however, is one of the “Devil Children,” a carrier of the “Devil Genome” that will allow her to fight Lucifer in the style of Go Nagai’s Devilman. As demonstrated by the younger age group, the early morning broadcast, and the availability of the game in “Black” and “Red” editions, the new generation of the franchise has more in common with Pokémon than with the story that originally inspired it. Tokyo Revelation 2 (2002), a new version of the game, featured CG animation as part of its gameplay. LV

Tokyo Underground *

2002. TV dir: Hayato Date. scr: Satoru Nishizono. des: Yuji Moriyama. ani: Shim Hyunok. mus: Akifumi Tada. prd: Studio Pierrot, TV Tokyo, Dentsu. 24 mins. x 26 eps.

Based on the manga in Shonen Gangan magazine by Akinobu Uraku, this is the story of a world under the streets and subway tunnels of Tokyo, where a group of powerful children with the ability to control the elements live a secret life. Rumina Asagi meets them after his first day at high school, when he comes home to a big hole in his back yard and two strange girls, fragile Ruri and feisty Chelsea, in his house. When Ruri is dragged back to the netherworld below Tokyo, Rumina joins forces with Chelsea and his schoolfriend Ginnosuke to get her back from the adults who hold her prisoner—he feels obliged to do this, because he has already died once rescuing her, and has now been brought back from the dead with new elemental powers into the bargain—compare to Poltergeist Report.

Director Hayato Date was a key member of the team that made Naruto, a fan favorite of the early 21st century that similarly made light of more serious questing issues. He also made Bubu Chacha, a kid’s show for the very young that subtly revealed the strains of modern life, featuring a protagonist in need of rescue and companionship. TU’s Ruri is not merely a damsel in distress, she is a girl reared in a hermetically sealed world, cut off, as characters observe, from the sun and sky. Japanese comics and animation have seen many such exiles, both in times gone past, and in a recent resurgence since 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq. Like Japan itself, the fantasy realms of anime are often cut off from the rest of the globe. In the hidden worlds of TU, we see a similar distant conflict to that in Howl’s Moving Castle, and a nation under siege like that of Heat Guy J. Tokyo Underground also reflects the iPod generation’s general lack of affect. In a reversal of the twists of The Matrix, our intrepid heroes face a completely new environment, unlike anything they have ever encountered. Their first thought, however, is how much it reminds them of a film set—similar designer apathy for slightly older kids appears in TU’s contemporary, Gantz.

Tokyo University Story

2005. jpn: Tokyo Daigaku Monogatari: Kamen Ronin Ban. aka: Tokyo University Story: Episode of the Masked Ronin. Video. dir: Jiro Fujimoto. scr: Tatsuya Egawa. des: Tadashi Shida. ani: N/C. mus: N/C. prd: Sega, HMP, Shogakukan. 30 mins. x 2 eps.

Handsome, promising student Naoki finds his academic prospects crumbling around him when he is distracted by the pretty Haruka. Despite apparent similarities to Sakura Diaries, this video series is based on a much older manga in Big Comic Spirits from Golden Boy–creator Tatsuya Egawa, which celebrated the tenth anniversary of its first publication in 2003. The story was also adapted into a 1994 live-action TV series (*DE), and a live-action movie, directed by Egawa himself and due for release in 2006. The anime features bonus commentary tracks from the Japanese voice actors—which are relatively rare in Japanese anime releases, although such extras have long been a staple of the English-language anime community.

Tokyo Vice *

1988. Video. dir: Osamu Yamazaki. scr: Minami Machi Bugyosho. des: Kenichi Onuki. ani: Osamu Tsuruyama. mus: Karioka. prd: Minami Machi Bugyosho. 60 mins.

Teenagers Junpei, Akira, and Keiko get involved in corruption on a grand scale when one of them is slipped a computer disk in a Shinjuku club by someone whose life is just about to be terminated. The bad guys are prepared to do anything to recover the disk, including tracking Junpei with a military satellite, kidnapping his sister Kumiko, chasing him in a helicopter gunship, and suppressing all media coverage of the cataclysmic aftermath. As usual, the police (in the form of Inspector Sakamoto and his team) are some way behind the young heroes in getting to the root of the problem, which leads to an explosive showdown with the corrupt corporation’s secret weapon, a heavily armed robot. Like its U.S. inspiration Miami Vice, TV flirts with low life but is basically clean-cut, cute, and earnest. The action (the main point of an action show) is rather patchy; apart from the admittedly good final fight, there’s a motorcycle/helicopter chase and a shootout with some suits, and that’s your lot. We know that real investigators spend most of their time playing with computers and questioning suspects, but we don’t necessarily want to watch the whole process.

Later rereleased in the U.S. by Media Blasters as Tokyo Project.

Tom of T.H.U.M.B. *

1967. jpn: 001/7 Oyayubi Tom. aka: Tom Thumb, 001/7. TV series. dir: Yasuji Mori. scr: Toshio Shino (translator). des: N/C. ani: Yasuji Mori, Takao Kasai. mus: Yasei Kobayashi. prd: Toei, Videocraft, NET. 6 mins. x 26 eps.

Secret agent Tom and his faithful assistant, Swinging Jack, are accidentally zapped by a Miniaturization Ray, and are now small enough to fit into pockets. This actually makes them more, not less, effective as secret agents, and they become employees of the Tiny Humans Underground Military Bureau. From their new secret hideaway inside a desk, they pop out in a tiny sportscar, ready to battle against MAD, an organization hellbent on world conquest.

A diminutive variant on James Bond, with the U.S. title a reference to The Man From U.N.C.L.E., ToT was a coproduction between Toei Animation and the U.S. company Videocraft, made as a companion piece to The King Kong Show. The same companies also produced several other cartoons, including The Mouse on the Mayflower and The Smokey Bear Show. Among the many other “American” shows that technically qualify as anime are Mighty Orbots, the Robotech sequel Sentinels, and The Stingiest Man in Town.

Tom Sawyer *

1980. jpn: Tom Sawyer no Boken. aka: Adventures of Tom Sawyer; Tom and Huck. Movie, video, TV series. dir: Hiroshi Saito, Shigeo Koshi, Takayoshi Suzuki. scr: Akira Miyazaki, Mei Kato, Yoshiaki Tomita, Tadahiko Isogai, Takeshi Shise, Seijiro Kamiyama. des: Shuichi Seki. ani: Yoshishige Kosako, Yoshitaka Gokami, Noboru Takano, Michiyo Sakurai, Akio Sugino. mus: Katsu­hisa Hattori. prd: Nippon Animation, Fuji TV. 25 mins. x 49 eps., 105 mins. (m).

Tom is a boy who lives in a small town on the banks of the Mississippi River in 19th-century America. He and his best friend, orphan Huck, hang out together and make mischief in and out of school. Their shenanigans include a balloon ride, a river trip, and a rescue of an innocent person from the false accusations of Indian Joe. Based on Mark Twain’s 1876 novel, this World Masterpiece Theater series was edited into a feature-length movie entitled Tom and Huck for U.S. video release. An English dub of the series by Saban was shown as part of HBO’s Family Showcase, alternating in the 7:30 a.m. timeslot with Little Women. Twain’s follow-up, Huckle­berry Finn, was also turned into an anime.

Tomato-man

1992. jpn: Sarada Ju Yushi Tomato Man. aka: Tomato-man and the Knights of the Salad Table. TV series. dir: Hiroshi Sasagawa, Teppei Matsuura, Shinichi Watanabe, Hiromichi Matano. scr: Masaaki Sakurai, Shikichi Ohashi. des: Futako Kamikita, Yoshiko Hashimoto. ani: Michio Shindo, Hiroshi Kagawa. mus: N/C. prd: Animation 21, TV Tokyo. 25 mins. x 50 eps.

The Kingdom of Salad is a beautiful dreamland where vegetables, fruits, and insects try, often unsuccessfully, to live together in peace and harmony. When the wicked Bug-Bug gang casts an evil sleep spell on beautiful Princess Peach, King Boo-Melon sends for “the Withered Plum,” an old hermit believed to have magical powers, to awaken the princess from her eternal sleep. To help protect the king, Plum uses his magical powers to create a group of mighty warriors from ordinary food, the Knights of the Salad Table. Tomato-man, the last of the knights created by Plum, is the hero of the show. One of the few TV shows to attribute disruptive political intent to fruit and vegetables.

Tomino, Yoshiyuki

1941– . Born in Kanagawa Prefecture, he graduated in film from the Fine Arts department of Nippon University. He joined Mushi Production in 1964, where he soon became a writer and director on Astro Boy. He went freelance after three years, and studied advertising production at Tokyo Designer Gakuin College, before being tempted back into the anime business as a director on Triton of the Seas, Brave Raideen, and Star of the Seine. His greatest contribution to the anime world came with his involvement in giant-robot shows, adding notes of pathos and tragedy to Daitarn 3, Zambot 3, and his most famous creation, Gundam. For this and the realization that in his anime no major character was safe, he later gained the nickname “Kill ’em All Tomino.” He also wrote the lyrics to many of the songs associated with his shows, using the pseudonym Iogi Rin, and is credited with several novels, including the trilogy released in English as Mobile Suit Gundam: Awakening, Escalation, Confrontation. Tomino has occasionally struck out at the success of Gundam, protesting that it is all he is known for in fandom, despite a varied resumé that stretches all the way back to the earliest days of Japanese television animation.

Tomita, Kuni

?– . A former storyboard artist for Madhouse on productions such as Cyber City Oedo 808 and Wicked City, Tomita relocated to America in 1990. She subsequently brought a Japanese touch to local shows such as Invasion America (1998) and X-Men: Evolution (2000).

Tomita, Sukehiro

1948– . Sometimes miscredited as Yukihiro Tomita; a pseudonym for Hiroshi Tomita. Born in Saitama Prefecture, Tomita worked briefly in the business world before becoming a screenwriter on Spaceketeers. Subsequent work has included Space Runaway Ideon, Macross, and Gall Force, for which he wrote a novel spin-off. He also works as a manga scriptwriter, and hence is often associated with the manga adaptations or precursors of his anime work.

Tomorrow’s Eleven

1979. jpn: Ashita no Yusha Tachi. aka: Heroes of Tomorrow. TV special. dir: Kozo Morishita. scr: Seiji Matsuoka. des: Hiroshi Motomiya. ani: Susumu Shiraume. mus: N/C. prd: Toho, Nippon TV. 85 mins.

In 1978, as the World Under-21 Soccer Championships draw near, amateur Jiro Ipponji is still living on a Hokkaido ranch with his sister Yuki, caring for his beloved horse, Golden Leg, and romancing his girlfriend, Yoko. The withdrawn loner is approached by Shin Mizuki and coach Matsumoto to play for Japan’s national team. He agrees, becoming a formidable attacker. I think they make him leave his horse at home, though. Made as part of the hype for the 1979 championships, which were held in Japan. Compare to Captain Tsubasa.

Tomorrow’s Joe

1970. jpn: Ashita no Joe. aka: Rocky Joe. TV series, movie. dir: Osamu Dezaki, Hideo Makino, Seiji Okuda, Yuki Kobayashi, Toshio Hirata. scr: Shunichi Yukimuro, Tadaaki Yamazaki, Seiji Matsuoka, Haruya Yamazaki, Hiroshi Saito, Tsunehisa Ito. des: Akio Sugino, Hiroaki Kaneyama, Shingo Araki. ani: Akio Sugino, Hiroaki Kaneyama, Shingo Araki. mus: Tadao Yagi (TV1); Ichiro Araki (TV2). prd: Mushi, Fuji TV; TMS, Nippon TV. 25 mins. x 79 eps. (TV1), 153 mins. (m1), 25 mins. x 47 eps., 120 mins. (m2).

One of anime’s great sporting legends, this is the story of Joe Yabuki, a 15-year-old from the wrong side of the tracks living by his wits in Tokyo, who meets Danbei, a once-great boxing coach now seeking refuge from his past in drink. Both see something they need in the other—Joe a source of free meals, Danbei a potentially great fighter and a reason to live. Under the cloak of training with Danbei, Joe carries on a life of petty crime, eventually getting caught and sent to prison. Over a year inside, he finally realizes that Danbei was offering him both friendship and a future, and he carries on with the training regime the two had set up. On his release, he begins a successful boxing career. As he rises through the ranks, his main rival is Toru Rikiishi, a prison acquaintance, who dies tragically in a bout with Joe at the end of the series, leaving the champion devastated.

TJ is the most famous creation of Tetsuya Chiba, also known for Weather Permitting, I’m Teppei, and Notari Matsutaro. His 1968 Shonen Magazine manga was drawn from a script by Karate Crazy Life’s Ikki Kajiwara, who used the pseudonym Asao Takamori since he was also writing Star of the Giants for a rival magazine at the time. The story was also adapted as a 1970 live-action film. It continued to attract readers after the series it inspired had ended, and in 1980, with a second series in production for Nippon TV, the first series was edited to feature length for theatrical release, providing background for new fans and a reminder of the story for older ones. Though many of the old crew returned to work on the sequel, TJ2 also featured new directors, including Mizuho Nishikubo and Toshio Takeuchi. It opens as Joe, having given up boxing after Riki’s death, is brought back to the ring through the encouragement of his friends. This time, as in the manga, the tragic death at the end of the series is Joe’s own, and fans were inconsolable. The second anime movie, premiered in 1981 was an edit of this series. The title Rocky Joe was adopted for Western sale in an attempt to cash in on the popularity of Sylvester Stallone’s live-action film series, obscuring the fact that Joe was there first. V

Tomorrow’s Nadja

2003. jpn: Asu no Nadja. aka: Nadja of Tomorrow. TV series. dir: Takuya Igarashi. scr: K. Y. Green, Tomoko Konparu, Yoshimi Narita, Yumi Kageyama. des: Kazuto Nakazawa. ani: Akira Inagami, Mitsuru Aoyama. mus: Keiichi Oku. prd: Toei Animation, TV Asahi. 25 mins. x 50 eps.

Over a century ago, pretty blonde thirteen-year-old Nadja lives in an orphanage in an unspecified part of Europe, until the arrival of a mysterious package makes her think her mother may still be alive. She joins a traveling circus in an effort to find her origins. Two mysterious men attempt to steal her heart-shaped brooch, but she is rescued by handsome, aristocratic Francis Harcourt. When you learn that the strangers keep chasing after her to try and get her heirloom jewel, you may detect a certain similarity to Secret of Blue Water; this will quite probably be enhanced by the arrival of a perky boy Nadja’s age, a cute red-headed preschool moppet and not one, but two, friendly young lions. Based on the manga in Nakayoshi magazine, written by Izumi Todo and drawn by Yui Ayumi, this mines the long tradition of children in search of their loved ones, like Nobody’s Boy and Nobody’s Girl. A game spin-off duly followed.

Tonde Mon Pe

1982. jpn: TondeMon Pe. aka: Mon-Pe. TV series. dir: Shigetsugu Yoshida, Junzo Aoki, Hideharu Iuchi, Saburo Kawashima, Masaharu Okuwaki. scr: Chifude Asakura, Yoshiaki Yoshida, Masaaki Sakurai, Kenji Terada. des: Kazu Mitsui. ani: Takao Kasai. mus: Yuikihide Takekawa. prd: Tokyo Movie Shinsha, TV Asahi. 25 mins. x 42 eps.

Fifteen-year-old country girl Mon-Mon dreams of being a fashion designer and gets a job as an au pair to a rising star designer, Mrs. Kano, her baby girl PePe, and her silly writer husband. But PePe can make toys and animals do very odd things. Mon’s employers don’t seem to notice anything odd is going on, and she finds her dream job turning into a chaotically cute trial of wits she has no chance of winning. She’s a sweet girl, hardworking and kind, but very unsophisticated and simply not used to walking teddy bears and talking stuffed animals. She eventually decides to leave her job and go home, but psychic baby PePe, who has come to love her, finds a way to make sure she stays.

Topcraft

Animation company formed in 1972 by several former employees of Toei, including Toru Hara, a former producer on Little Norse Prince. Although the studio’s first work was on Mazinger Z for its “parent” company Toei, it was soon lured away by the American Rankin/Bass company to work on foreign animation. Its first job was on episodes of the series Kid Power (1972). Amid the local chaos caused by the collapse of Mushi Production, Topcraft employees worked on TV specials for Rankin/Bass, including 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Tom Sawyer. Later years saw the company working on anime only when times were lean; while Topcraft may have done occasional work on bona fide anime such as Time Bokan, Lupin III, and Little Koala, the company’s efforts were aimed at chasing dollars from Rankin/Bass specials such as The First Easter Rabbit (1976). Topcraft thereby managed to appear on the credits of many supposedly foreign cartoons, including Barbapapa (1973), Doctor Snuggles (1979), and The Hobbit (1977). Topcraft had no connection with Ralph Bakshi’s animated Lord of the Rings, but when Bakshi’s work finished partway, Topcraft and Rankin/Bass cunningly fashioned their own Return of the King (1980) as a sequel of sorts to The Hobbit! However, most of Topcraft’s work in this period was unknown in Japan, with only The Stingiest Man in Town being broadcast in Topcraft’s home country. The high points of Topcraft’s work for the U.S. include The Last Unicorn (1982) and The Flight of Dragons (1982). Subsequently, Topcraft was commissioned to work on Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaä of the Valley of Wind. Those remaining members of Topcraft’s staff who had not left during the high-pressure creation of Nausicaä stayed on and formed the core of the new Studio Ghibli. Their first work as Ghibli was Castle in the Sky. Some members of Topcraft split to form Pacific Animation Corporation (PAC), under which auspices they continued to work for Rankin/Bass on such productions as Thundercats (1985).

Topo Gigio

1988. TV series. dir: Shigeo Koshi, Noboru Ishiguro, Masahito Kitagawa, Shigeru Omachi. scr: Noboru Ishiguro, Chiyu Tadaoki. des: Susumu Shiraume. ani: Tadaichi Iguchi, Hirokazu Ishino. mus: Nobuyoshi Koshibe. prd: Nippon Animation, TV Asahi. 25 mins. x 34 eps.

By the 25th century, mice have evolved into a sentient species, gaining bigger heads, shorter tails, and the power of speech. Topo Gigio is a mouse space pilot sent on an exploration mission who accidentally returns to the 20th century, before the establishment of peaceful diplomatic relations between humans and mice. Landing in Santa Catalina City, he finds that humans still think of mice as either pets or pests, cats are still the enemy, and mouse society is still underground, but a nine-year-old girl, Jean, learns his secret and helps him.

Created by the Italian author Maria Perego, the famous mouse was introduced to Japanese children in a series of adventures getting his friends into and out of trouble (compare to future cat Doraemon). These included rescuing mouse rebel Kurt and his fat friend Per from numerous scrapes, foiling the plots of head cat Megalo, helping mouse inventor Doc with his devices, and even meeting with Dracula. After episode 21, the series was rebranded as Dreaming Topo Gigio (Yume Miru Topo Gigio).

Toppuku Violent Racers

1996. jpn: Toppuku Kyoso Kyoku. aka: Symphony of Violent Racers in Battledress. Video. dir: Yoshimasa Yamazaki. scr: Narihiko Tatsumiya. des: Kenzo Koizumi. ani: Kenzo Koizumi. mus: N/C. prd: Taki. 42 mins. x 2 eps.

The Sea Monkey biker gang fights over its turf. Yet another bikers-beat-each-other-up anime, this one based on a manga by Yu Furuzawa. Compare to Bomber Bikers of Shonan. LV

Topstriker

1991. jpn: Moero Topstriker!. aka: Burn Topstriker; Enter the Topstriker. TV series. dir: Ryo Yasumura, Akira Kiyo­mizu, Shigeru Yamazaki, Masahito Kitagawa. scr: Yoshiyuki Suga, Yoshimasa Takahashi. des: Kazuyuki Okaseko. ani: Kazuyuki Okaseko. mus: N/C. prd: Nippon Animation, TV Tokyo. 25 mins. x 49 eps.

Hikari Yoshikawa arrives in Italy to develop his soccer skills with the Columbus team under top trainer Bertini and Dr. Robson, who used to be a top-level English player—he is, as anyone acquainted with the current state of the English game would realize, rather old. Hikari has some problems with rival player Cesare but eventually leads the team to the final, losing with honor, and is selected by Robson for a new international team, the Jupiter Wings. This consists of talented players from all over the world who haven’t been selected for their national teams. The aim is to compete with the best at the international level, but with so many strong personalities involved, it will take time and effort to get them to work together. The story has a similar premise to 1992’s Free Kick for Tomorrow, but without the focus on the family relationships of the hero; the presentation of the game itself was more realistic than in many earlier series. It was screened in France as School for Champions, with Hikari renamed Benjamin, Cesare called Mark, and almost every Japanese name removed from the credits—a yellow card for local boy Thibault Chatel for crediting himself as director.

Tora-san: The Anime

1998. jpn: Otoko wa Tsurai yo: Torajiro no Wasurenakusa. aka: It’s Tough to Be a Man: Torajiro’s Forget-Me-Not. TV special. dir: Setsuko Shibunnoichi, Tetsu Dezaki. scr: Tadao Hayashi. des: Kenichiro Takai. ani: Kenichiro Takai. mus: Naoki Yamamoto. prd: Eiken, TBS. 95 mins.

Torajiro Kuruma is an itinerant peddler, eternally unlucky in relationships but forever prepared to help others in need. In this case it is the singer Madonna Lily, who asks for his aid in Hokkaido but rejects his offer of love. A tragicomedy spun off from Yoji Yamada’s long-running “Tora-san” series, which produced 48 movies, starting with It’s Tough to Be a Man (1969, Otoko wa Tsurai yo). The franchise, arguably the most successful movie series on the planet, was thrown into chaos by the death of its leading man Kiyoshi Atsumi late in 1996. The character had a brief cameo, played by a double, in Yamada’s live-action The Man Who Caught the Rainbow (1997), but this anime version can be seen as an attempt to move into a medium where the absence of the star would be less noticeable. The original was pastiched in the anthropomorphic anime Dorataro, and its 28th installment was shown on a double bill with Tao-tao the Panda.

Toriumi, Hisayuki

1941– . Sometimes miscredited as Eiko Toriyumi. Born in Kanagawa Prefecture, he graduated in law and politics from Chuo University in 1966. He found work as a writer and director at Tatsunoko on Battle of the Planets and subsequently wrote many other anime, including Salamander, Tekkaman, and The Mysterious Cities of Gold. He was a founding member of Studio Pierrot, but is now a freelance novelist.

Toshinden *

1996. jpn: Toshinden. Video. dir: Masami Obari. scr: Masaharu Amiya, Jiro Takayama. des: Tsukasa Kotobuki, Kazuto Nakazawa, Masahiro Yamane. ani: Hiroshi Kato. mus: Kensuke Shina. prd: Animate Film. 30 mins. x 2 eps.

Uranus, leader of a powerful secret organization cleverly called “The Organization,” wants to build an army of indestructible, invincible warriors. To foil the plan, the world’s indestructible, invincible warriors reunite. Eiji, Sophia, and tooth-rottingly cute little Ellis are among the chosen ones, but Uranus’ minions are gradually picking off the opposition and time is running out. Yet another game-based clone in the Street Fighter II mode—a large cast of two-dimensional video game “characters” brought to the screen in a cynical promotion, each given barely enough screentime to have a fight and use their little combat catchphrases or moves. Meanwhile, the big-haired Eiji embarks on a halfhearted quest for his missing brother, with risible attempts at depth resulting in immortal dialogue like, “We both know your brother killed my dad.”

Obari’s direction starts off well, with a line of soldiers aiming guns upstaged by a journalist aiming a camera. He pastiches the Akira manga as the robotic Sho takes on a U.S. aircraft carrier, then shifts the scene to a Chinatown setup redolent of his later Virus. But this remains an anime-by-numbers that ticks every perfunctory box of a game adaptation—including a female character in a shower scene (Sofia actually manages to put her clothes back on while jumping through a window), fights between allies engineered through “mind-control,” and a big fight at a secret hideout (in this case, two nicely inconspicuous skyscrapers). V

Touch

1985. TV series, movie, TV special. dir: Gisaburo Sugii, Hiroko Tokita, Naoto Hashimoto, Akinori Nagaoka. scr: Yumiko Takahoshi, Shigeru Yanagawa, Tomoko Konparu. des: Minoru Maeda, Shichiro Kobayashi. ani: Yasuo Maeda, Masako Goto, Hajime Watanabe. mus: Hiroaki Serizawa. prd: Toho, Group TAC, Fuji TV. 25 mins. x 101 eps. (TV), 93 mins., 80 mins., 85 mins. (m), 60 mins. x 2 (TVm).

When his popular twin brother is killed in an accident, Tatsuya tries to fill his shoes, both on their high school baseball team and romantically with Minami, the team’s manager. A moving and involving story based on the 1981 manga in Shonen Sunday by Slow Step–creator Mitsuru Adachi. Touch the anime was a huge hit, both in Japan, where its rating topped 30%, and in Europe. The series transferred into theaters for three movie editions—T: Ace without a Backstop (1986, Sebango no Nai Ace), T2: Goodbye Gift (1986, Sayonara Okurimono), and T3: You Are Too Right (1987, Kimi wa Torisugi Daa to ni)—ending with the team about to play the national championship finals and Tatsuya asking himself if he has succeeded either on the field or in love. The closing credits of the series rolled without showing fans the outcome of the big game, or giving answers to either of Tatsuya’s questions. Over a decade later, released in a period that also saw the long-delayed ending of Kimagure Orange Road, the TV special Miss Lonely Yesterday—Are kara, Kimi wa . . . (1998, MLY: Since Then, You’ve . . . ) takes place three years after that fateful match and shows us how Tatsuya and Minami have dealt with life and their own relationships outside the protective routines of school days. Series director Sugii and original designer Maeda returned for this follow-up. After it gained outstanding 23.3% ratings, it was only a matter of time before a further follow-up was announced: Crossroads: Whereabouts of the Wind (2001, Crossroads: Kaze no Yukue). In this latest installment, Tatsuya joins the minor U.S. team the Emeralds, and he soon finds himself courted by the team owner’s young daughter, Alice Vormont. Meanwhile, Minami becomes a sports photographer’s assistant, and the two nonlovers’ paths are fated to cross once again. Adachi’s baseball manga also reached anime in H2, Miyuki, and Nine.

Tour Conductor

2005. jpn: Shinjin Tour Conductor Rina. aka: Tour Guide Tour Conductor Rina. Video. dir: Toshiaki Kanbara, Shigeru Yazaki. scr: Guts Maro. des: Masaki Hosoyama. ani: Masaki Hosoyama. mus: N/C. prd: Ypsilon, Studio Matrix, Film Works, Movie King, GP Museum Soft. 30 mins.

Rina is a new recruit working for a travel firm placed in charge of the ominous sounding Demon Princess Tour. Her job is to take a tour group to the spooky village of Murasawa, famous for a local ghost legend. However, she discovers that at least part of the legend is true and that a terrible fate awaits the women on the tour bus when they are delivered into the clutches of rapacious local men in the remote country village. Based on an erotic novel. LNV

Tournament of the Gods *

1997. jpn: Toshin Toshi II. aka: Battle City II. Video. dir: Takehiro Nakayama. scr: Takehiro Nakayama. des: Takehiro Nakayama. ani: Takehiro Nakayama. mus: N/C. prd: Pink Pineapple, KSS. 30 mins. x 3 eps.

At the Battle Tournament, fighters struggle to become proclaimed the supreme “Battle God.” The victor of each gladiatorial bout gets the possessions of the vanquished, including their female partner. Sid, a mere fourth-level fighter, enters the tournament not because he wants to find his way through the maze and become an “angel eater” (use your imagination), but rather because he wants to win the hand of his beloved Azuki. Even though Sid wins the day with his pure heart, he is infected with a bizarre drug by the evil Aquross and becomes subject to incredible sexual urges that must be satisfied by copulation with angels. Though the superior Sexorcist got there first, this erotic anime is based on a computer game that came even closer to the original inspiration—even the Japanese title is designed to look almost, but not quite, exactly like Toshinden. LNV

Toward the Terra *

1980. jpn: Terra e. Movie. dir: Hideo Onchi. scr: Hideo Onchi, Chiho Shioda. des: Masami Suda. ani: Masami Suda. mus: Masaru Sato. prd: Toei. 119 mins.

Earth is a distant memory. Five hundred years after a revolution replaced human government with computer-aided totalitarianism, machines control every aspect of human life. Artificially created children are examined on reaching adulthood—telepaths are weeded out and destroyed. These “Mu” rejects marshal their strength in a desperate attempt to escape this hostile environment. They need a dynamic leader who can take them to a world of their own, where they can live without fear of persecution. Meanwhile the computers declare that a fugitive Mu is at large, and Keith, one of the elite caste who work for the computers, realizes that his servant Jonah is more than he seems to be.

Keiko Takemiya, author of Song of Wind and Trees, wrote this science-fiction epic for Manga Shonen in 1977, and the anime remains close to the original style—boys’ manga from a girls’ artist. Despite the old-fashioned character designs, the film has held up well. The story handles familiar science-fiction concepts with assurance: Orwellian social and political oppression, computers that dictate human­kind’s every move, mutant monsters shunned and hunted by humans, and pilgrims braving danger for a freer world. The film does not shy away from death, and, though violence and gore are kept low-key, some scenes are disturbing. N

Tower of Etruria

2003. Video. dir: Motoaki Ishu. scr: Yuji Suzuki. des: Ryosuke Morimura. ani: Ryosuke Morimura. mus: N/C. prd: Milky, Museum Pictures. 30 mins. x 2 eps.

In an erotic variant on the fairy tales of Rapunzel and Sleeping Beauty, an evil witch kidnaps the beautiful princess Cecilia, imprisoning her in a supposedly impregnable tower. While the princess is abused and tortured, her royal parents decree that they will offer her hand in marriage to the brave knight who rescues her. The warrior Albion duly volunteers, although this is an anime that concentrates more on the princess’s misery than the quest to end it—compare to Blood Royale. Based on a manga by Hiyo Hiyo in Core magazine. LNV

To-Y

1987. Video. dir: Mamoru Hamazu. scr: Izo Hashimoto. des: Naoyuki Onda. ani: Naoyuki Onda. mus: Masayuki Matsu­ura. prd: Studio Gallop. 60 mins.

To-Y, leader of the up-and-coming band Gasp, has an intense rivalry with another young musician, Yoji. An ambitious manager, Miss Kato, tries to use this to persuade him to dump his band and let her manage his solo career. She plays him and Yoji off against each other and threatens to stop Gasp playing a big open-air concert that is vital to their career. In the end To-Y decides that playing his own kind of music with his own kind of people is more important than manufactured pop success, and this commitment pays off when he and Gasp set up their own gig near the open-air concert and draw a good crowd. An enjoyable pop soap opera based on Atsushi Kamijo’s 1985 manga from Shonen Sunday Comics Wide, it had added cred thanks to music director Matsuura, a member of hit band PSY-S, who also have a single on the soundtrack, along with Zelda, Barbee Boys, Street Sliders, Kujira, and more.

TP Time Patrol Bon

1989. TV series. dir: Kunihiko Yuyama. scr: Shunichi Yukimuro. des: Tsukasa Fusanai. ani: Tsukasa Fusanai. mus: Hiroshi Tsutsui. prd: Studio Gallop. 25 mins. x 26 eps.

A lackluster Time Bokan rip-off from Doraemon-creators Fujiko-Fujio, in which Japanese schoolboy Heibon is enlisted in the efforts of the time patrol to keep the past out of trouble. Compare to Flint the Time Detective.

Tragedy of Belladonna

1973. jpn: Kanashimi no Belladonna. Movie. dir: Eiichi Yamamoto. scr: Eiichi Yamamoto, Yoshiyuki Fukuda. des: Kuni Fukai. ani: Gisaburo Sugii, Shinichi Tsuji, Yasuo Maeda. mus: Nobuhiko Sato. prd: Mushi Pro. 89 mins.

In medieval France, country-boy Jean falls in love with country-girl Jeanne. As part of a strange ritual, the local landlord forces himself on Jeanne, and then allows his soldiers to gang rape her. Jean’s hand is cut off when he fails to raise enough funds for the war coffers. Losing faith in God, Jeanne starts to have conversations with the Devil. Both Jean and the villagers throw her out, believing her to be possessed, and the disillusioned girl devotes herself to the Devil. Based on the 1862 novel La Sorcière by Jules Michelet, it adapts the story of Joan of Arc for an adult art-house audience, using a combination of still frames and full animation deliberately aimed at breaking free of the full-animation mold and extending anime’s “artistic” potential. Compare this with The Sensualist, aimed at the same kind of artsy audience, and Heroic Legend of Arslan, which uses the still-frame device with considerable artistic invention purely to reduce costs. It is the last of three films made for an adult audience by Mushi, though before production began, Osamu Tezuka had already lost control of the company. New president Eiichi Kawabata appointed Yamamoto to direct Belladonna, and the result is different in mood and tone from Arabian Nights and Cleopatra: Queen of Sex, made by Mushi under Tezuka. N

Tragic Silence *

2005. jpn: Shojo Yugi. aka: Girl Game. Video. dir: Tsuyoshi Kano. scr: Miki Kano. des: Wataru Yamaguchi. ani: N/C. mus: N/C. prd: Onion Studio, Five Ways. 30 mins. x 2 eps.

Luticia is a girl from a clan of vampires, who finds herself falling into forbidden love with Sho, her human childhood friend. Luticia’s vampire relatives are very strict about avoiding human relationships—normal people are to be regarded as a food source, not potential bedmates, although this does not seem to have prevented Luticia’s clan-mate Rick sleeping with Elana, a woman in a nearby town. This sets up an obvious tension between the humans of the village and the vampires that they now realize are dwelling in their midst. Although many vampires and humans appear to be in forbidden relationships, it’s the one between Luticia and Sho that forms the focus of this short erotic anime—dumping the angst of Romeo and Juliet into a setting more akin to Dracula: Sovereign of the Damned. Based on an original story by Hashiba Hayase. LNV

Transformers *

1985. jpn: Tatakae Cho Robot Seimetai Transformers. aka: Fight Super Living Robots Transformers. TV series, movie. dir: (Japan) Takayuki Nakano, Shoji Tajima (TV1–2), Katsutoshi Sasaki, Takao Yoshizawa (TV3–5), Mika Iwanami (BW), Osamu Sekita (Car-Robot). scr: (Japan) Ka­tsushige Hirata (translator, TV1–2), Keisuke Fujikawa (TV3–5) Tomohiro Ando (v), Mika Iwanami (BW). des: (Japan) (TV1–2), Ban Magami (TV3–5, v). ani: N/C. mus: Shiro Sagisu (TV1–2), Kazunori Ishida (TV3–5, v). prd: Toei, Nippon Animation, Toei; TV Asahi; TV Tokyo. 25 mins. x 64 eps. (TV1), 25 mins. x 30 eps. (TV2), 25 mins. x 35 eps. (TV3), 25 mins. x 35 eps. (TV4), 25 mins. x 35 eps. (TV5), 25 mins. x 36 eps. (Beast Wars, TV1), 25 mins. x 36 eps. (BW, TV2), 25 mins. x 36 eps. (BW, TV3), 25 mins. x 39 eps. (Car-Robot), 25 mins. x 39 eps. (Car Robot), 25 mins. x 52 eps. (Armada), 25 mins. x 52 eps. (Energon), 25 mins. x 52 eps. (Galaxy Force).

Far out in the galaxy is a planet where life has evolved in mechanical, rather than organic, form: Cybertron, a world of intelligent transforming robots. Two forces struggle for control of the planet—the evil Destrons (Decepticons in the U.S. version) led by Megatron (later upgraded to Galvatron), and the heroic Cybertrons (Autobots), led by Convoy (Optimus Prime). The energy that sustains the planet is running out and the good guys build a huge starship, the Ark, to look for new energy sources. The Destron too have their own starship, and after their plotting leads to both ships being flung far back in time to Earth, good and bad robots are buried under the crust of our planet until, in the 20th century, they are awakened by the eruption of a volcano. Remodeling themselves to allow transformation into automobiles, jets, and other indigenous technology in order to conceal their presence from the local population, they plan to carry on their war on Earth. The Cybertrons team up with a few humans who stumble across their base, but the Destrons see humankind as inferiors to be enslaved or removed.

A U.S.-Japanese coproduction and the Pokémon of its day, Transformers was originally made to order by Toei from scripts and designs prepared in the U.S. It was based on a toy line by Takara that was not originally known as Transformers until it was licensed to Hasbro for Western markets. Though nothing particularly new (Macross was way ahead of the game with transforming robots) or believable (a consistent sense of scale disappearing for good), the concept of two-toys-in-one wormed its way into boys’ hearts, and there it stayed.

Transformers: The Movie (1986) was notable for a voice cast including Orson Welles, Eric Idle, and Leonard Nimoy. It moved the action back to the robots’ homeworld in 2005. Supposedly designed to bridge the gap between the first and second series, it was not shown in Japan, creating the first wobbles of confusion that would eventually split the franchise into four distinct and contradictory continuities. Optimus Prime dies, handing on leadership of the Cybertrons to Ultra Magnus, who in turn passes on the leadership to Rodimus Prime. On the dark side, Megatron is remodeled by the mighty Unicron, an even nastier Force of Evil that goes around the galaxy eating planets, into a new leader named Galvatron—possibly after his Japanese self, who appeared in a new TV series the same year.

Transformers 2010 (1986) continued the story without reference to the movie continuity, ending with another heroic self-sacrifice for Convoy and featuring a whole range of new transforming toys. The format of “new transformations to fight new battles” was set, and from here on the complications multiplied, with U.S. and British comics from Marvel taking the story in separate directions, while the animated version continued in Japan. Originated completely in Japan, the third series, Transformers Headmasters (1987), has the goodies led by Fortress Maximus and Galvatron still leading the Destrons, as the search for new energy sources goes on across the galaxy.

The fourth series, Transformers Chojin Master Force (1988), introduces a new breed of robots, known as Pretenders, that can mix with human beings. The Destron have been driven off Earth, but under their leader Metalhawk, the few remaining Cybertron Pretenders are fighting to defend humans from a demonic force. The transformations that sold toys were still paramount, with the robot characters changing into other forms such as starfighters. The fifth season, Transformers: Victory (1989), focuses around Star Saber, the Galaxy’s greatest swordsman, who leads the Cybertron to protect Earth from the menace of Deathsaurus.

Transformers Z[one] (1990), in which a supernatural evil has resurrected the Destron, was canceled, and instead it was released straight to video as a 25-minute special. The series returned with a vengeance as Beast Wars (1998) on TV Tokyo, which reduplicated its checkered origins for a whole new generation. Though now using computer animation (from ReBoot creators Mainframe) the franchise began once more as a U.S.-Japan coproduction, which was then continued in Japan as Beast Wars Second (1998), Beast Wars Neo (1999), and Beast Wars Metals (1999). Just to confuse things, there was an additional non-anime Beast Wars sequel, Beast Machines (2000), animated in Canada by Mainframe, and only later exported back to Japan as Beast Wars Returns. A twist was borrowed from Jurassic Park as the two opposing robot ships crashed on planet Gaea and the good guys merged with local animals, while the bad guys linked up with fossil dinosaur DNA, enabling the protagonists to transform into cyber-versions of the local fauna both alive and extinct. The Destron (Predacon in the English version) under souped-up T-Rex Galvatron (Megatron) want the planet’s mysterious energy source, and the Cybertron (Maximals) under Live-Convoy (giant gorilla Optimus Primal) mean to stop them.

Transformers: Car-Robot (2000, released in America as Transformers: Robots in Disguise) returned to cel animation and the basic vehicle-to-robot transformation on which the series originally made its name. At the beginning of 2001, it was rebranded as Transformers: Powerful Cars. The next series was a true international coproduction between America and Japan, the 52-episode Transformers: Armada (2002, subsequently released in Japan as Transformers: Micron Legend), focusing on a group of special, smaller Transformers known as Mini-cons in America (Microns in Japan), who flee to Earth being pursued by the larger, bullying versions. The difference between the American and Japanese versions is not limited to the language track—the American version was rushed into production and onto the airwaves, resulting in numerous bloopers and substandard animation that were cleaned up for the localized version in Japan, which had more time to work on the materials.

Despite such embarrassments, the coproduction method clearly made things a little easier for both sides, and the cross-Pacific collaboration continued in Transformers: Energon (2004, released in Japan as Transformers: Super Link), set ten years after the events of the previous series and featuring two new twists. The Transformers themselves are locked in a struggle to seize the powerful element known as Energon, but the series also introduces the other great robot gimmick—the Energon continuity robots can not only transform, but they can also combine.

The emphasis on quests and collection was continued in the next international coproduction, Transformers: Cybertron (2005, released in Japan as Transformers: Galaxy Force), in which a black hole threatens to destroy the galaxy, and both Autobots and Decepticons rush to acquire the MacGuffins of the season—the Planet Forces (Cyber Planet Keys in Japan) that will allow them to control the energies involved and save the universe, or conquer it, or something.

With the concept still selling toys to a new generation of six-year-old fans, and “vintage” 1980s items acquiring collectible status, it seems the Transformers concept will run and run. Edits of various series were also rebroadcast as seven “TV specials” throughout the period and were also shown as Beast Wars “movies” in 1998 and 1999. There have also been two computer-animated Robotmaster DVDs released as special deals with toy packets, which feature characters from several of the continuities. Transformers Takara is a special DVD release of episodes from the original series previously unseen outside Japan. An American Transformers “live-action” movie (the term seems strange considering how much CG animation will doubtless be used) is forthcoming in 2007.

TRANSLATION

Translation is the rendering of any text into another language, replicating the original author’s intent and tone. A difficult enough task in simple conversation, it is even more difficult when languages are as different in structure as Japanese and English. Since an anime is not the work of a single creative, translating Japanese animation requires a series of decisions concerning the intent, not only of the original author, but also of some actors. Translation in the anime world is often a labor of love—it is no coincidence that many translators are surprisingly young, idealistic, and ready to take intern-level salaries for complex work that in other sectors would usually require at least one, if not two university degrees and a decade of linguistic experience.

The basic form of translating anime is the subtitle—a text-based translation superimposed on the film. When movies are screened at film festivals, distributors sometimes supply a print with white subtitles. When viewed at a high resolution on a cinema screen, such subtitles are clear and easily read; however, the same subtitles can often fade into the image when viewed on a television screen. This is a handy means of discouraging piracy, although some distributors have not realized the qualitative loss inherent in using “white on white” subtitles for home video releases, where they tend to bleed and disappear into white backgrounds.

“Hard subtitles” are part of the finished image; “soft subtitles” are digital in origin, and can be turned on or off depending on the language needs of the viewer. Preferred subtitles in anime are usually yellow or white outlined in black (a type style called drop shadow), although some companies use multiple colors to denote different speakers or even onscreen titles to translate signs or background details not part of the main dialogue.

True translation requires a rare set of skills—a mastery of the Source Language (in this case, Japanese) and the ability to write fluently and professionally in the Target Language (English). In order to facilitate sales abroad, some Japanese companies provide a “spotting list”—a very basic translation, often prepared by someone in the Japanese office who is not an English native-speaker. Some Western distributors, particularly before the 1990s, liked to believe that spotting lists were close enough to the original dialogue to completely remove the need for a translator. However, many spotting lists, summarizing rather than translating dialogue, missing jokes, puns, and exact meanings, often neglecting songs or onscreen credits altogether, are next to useless in preparing a professional quality translation.

Translators usually require a copy of the source program with a burned-in timecode (BITC)—an onscreen counter that allows each line’s location to be identified to the precise fraction of a second. It is also usual to request a copy of the Japanese script. Anime scripts were often hand-written until the mid-1990s, but today are largely word-processed, and divide neatly into descriptions of onscreen action (at the top of the page), and dialogue (on the lower half of the page). In this regard, they bear a closer resemblance to scripts used in English-language commercials, rather than the playbook format used for English-language screenplays and theater scripts. Subtitle scripts must be fitted within a limited space on screen, forcing subtitlers to limit their language, often condensing or summarizing meaning. As with all translation, one must walk a delicate line between the communicative (what people say) and the referential (what they mean). This is particularly difficult translating Japanese into English, since word order, honorifics, and cultural differences can often ruin punch lines or moments of drama and need to be carefully considered. A perennial problem is translating simple forms of address, since Japanese are often apt to call one another by titles rather than names, creating a dissonant sense in a viewer who hears the word: “Senpai!” but reads the translation “Motoko!”

The fees offered for translation vary widely. The lowest payment we have seen for an anime script was barely 0.03% of the highest, reflecting the variation in both skills and expectations in the industry. The ideal translators are fluent speakers of both source and target languages, with an appropriate level of skill in the target language to have sold books or scripts of their own, but the prices for such individuals often proves prohibitive. Company accountants argue that it makes far better economic sense to hire a translator to do a “basic” translation into English and a rewriter who will then polish the script. This can lead to generational loss, also known as semantic drift, where the meanings of certain phrases will mutate from the original author’s intent, since the rewriter rarely understands enough of the original to check. It also leads to a form of job-title inflation—merely having a “translation” is no longer enough; instead we must now talk of “English-language adaptations,” or “trans-creations.”

Subtitled releases appeal to roughly 10% of the anime-buying market. Outside the fan community, in some mainstream sectors and particularly on television, it is more normal to see “dubbed” anime—that is, anime whose Japanese language track has been replaced by an English-language track. As a rule of thumb, a dubbed release costs ten times as much to produce, but can sell ten times as many copies and is more easily sold to television. The expense is incurred through the need to hire voice actors and a recording studio. Early dub releases, made for the children’s market and often subject to drastic Censorship and Localization, often had dub scripts with names, plots, and even locations differing entirely from the original—the location of Battle of the Planets was moved into space, that of Mospeada back to Earth. Since the 1990s, when the Japanese origin of anime became a selling point in itself, even dub translations have aspired to a more faithful reproduction of the original. There are, however, still some exceptions, such as the brief vogue for “fifteening,” in which anime were refitted for an older audience by the addition of superfluous bad language, and the occasional improvisational throwback such as Ghost Stories. Some English-language rewriters even go so far as to credit themselves as the “authors” of a script, regardless of the person who actually wrote it or the often uncredited figure who translated the script into English.

The voice track in an anime is usually separate from the Music and Effects track (or M&E). This allows for a far easier process, although there have been cases in the anime world where the M&E track has been lost or damaged—such as the original Gunbuster, which has never been dubbed into English owing to the prohibitive costs of reconstructing the audio from the ground up. Recording is usually done using an Automated Dialogue Replacement process (ADR, known as post-synching in Britain), in which single lines or scenes can be dropped in and manipulated digitally, one at a time. Digital editing processes allow for lines to be moved fractionally ahead or behind, speeded up or slowed down in order to achieve synchronized lip movements (lip sync), although the limited nature of Japanese animation sometimes means that lips do not necessarily sync completely, even in the Japanese original. The movement of characters’ mouths is sometimes known as “lip flaps” in America, and the process of synching known as “fitting the flaps”—a term which did not survive in Britain, where it sounds laughably obscene.

Dialogue recording for actors is commonly done one voice at a time, in order to allow for audio manipulation, and to avoid paying a performer by the hour to largely sit and watch other actors work. Some anime dubs are recorded with ensemble casts, although the immediacy and interactivity of such performances is often outweighed by the extra studio time spent doing retakes. Actors are sometimes brought in to the studio in twos and threes to record all the sequences in which they share screen time. There is thus no single method employed in recording dialogue, but often a mix of all three, even over the course of dubbing a single title. “Making Of” documentaries often imply a prevalence of ensemble casts, purely because they are usually shot for technical reasons on the “crowd-scene” day when most of the cast will be available for interviews.

A subtitle script is subject to further rewrites for performance, both for ease of delivery and fitting the flaps. The worst cases of semantic drift can often occur on the spot, as actors misread, mispronounce or misinterpret lines. For this reason, the best choice for ADR directors is usually whoever wrote the ADR script—there are several in the modern anime industry who started as voice actors or translators and progressed through ADR rewriting to directing.

Translators are also obliged to make a judgment call on “ad libs” in the original script, where the Japanese screenwriter calls for the cast to improvise. Whether to faithfully reproduce whatever the Japanese actors said on the day of their recording, or to interpret the “author’s intent” as being one of letting the English-language actors similarly improvise, is one of the no-win situations of anime translation. Incidences of semantic drift are more common in dubbing, and the subject of increased indignation among fans at the liberties they believe to have been taken with the original script. Matters are often confused further by the use of “Japlish,” English words adorning box art or press materials in Japan, frequently misspelled, which then establish themselves within fandom as the “approved” terms.

Translators on dubs are often obliged to make another judgment call, particularly with humor, as to whether they should reproduce the exact meaning of a line, or instead substitute it with a different line that will induce the same effect in the viewer—be it a belly laugh, shocked surprise, or a groan. It appears traditional in anime fandom for the translator to take the blame for anything a fan doesn’t like, particularly if the fan has learned a little Japanese and can use the occasion to boast of his own supposed skill. The best example of this is the controversy over Kosuke Fujishima’s Aa Megamisama, which was initially (and excellently) translated as Oh My Goddess!, only to incur the wrath of fans who knew enough Japanese to read the letters “aa” but not enough to know that it could be a contraction of “anna ni.” A later incarnation of the series was subsequently released as Ah My Goddess, an inferior translation that nevertheless matched the Japlish title already seen on Japanese materials, and hence greeted as somehow more “correct.” Similarly, Streamline pictures felt obliged to release the Lupin III movie Secret of Mameux under the title Secret of Mamo, since the latter title was already popular in fandom, and the producers had given up fighting.

Some humor can be unintentional, leaving translators with a further problem—to faithfully translate an author’s text if doing so would make it seem laughable to foreign audiences. Even the great Osamu Tezuka was unable to resist making a few English puns with his character’s names, which often makes them difficult to translate, while spelling and names in Gundam and Captain Harlock have been a source of constant argument between self-appointed interpreters of the original creators’ will.

Fans, however, are not the worst enemy of translators, and can often lend diligent and impressive support. Fandom has potentially limitless time to debate and correct its understanding of any anime it chooses, whereas translators are unable to predict what project will be the next to land in their laps. Time itself can be the most crushing limitation on a translator’s performance. In one case, the translator was driven to an airport freight terminal at two in the morning to meet the tape directly from the plane, with eight hours to translate the script, for a producer who wanted a master ready for one o’clock in the afternoon, ready for review copies to be made and biked over to magazines by two. He made the deadline, although Samurai Gold hasn’t won any awards.

Another controversy in the anime world concerns “dubtitling,” in which a distributor uses a dubbing script as the source for subtitling. This often creates subtitles that do not appear to translate the onscreen Japanese dialogue at all, and is greatly frowned upon in fandom. However, fandom’s censure sometimes extends too far, occasionally deriding perfectly reasonable translation decisions as dubtitling, simply because they do not match the critic’s preferred translation to the precise letter.

Semantic drifts can sometimes range further than the original target language, in cases where a “second generation” translation is prepared from the English text. Although most European distributors claim to translate direct from Japanese, there are cases of companies using some or all of an English-language translation in the preparation of the version in their own language. In the eyes of anime companies, this is usually a victimless crime, although it can be galling for English-language translators to see others taking the credit for their work and hard-won skills. This practice was common in the early 1990s, but now seems to have faded away, largely because many European anime translators are now better paid and better trained than their English-language counterparts.

Traveler in Darkness with Hat and Books

2004. jpn: Yami to Boshi to Hon no Tabibito. aka: Yamibo. TV series. dir: Yuji Yamaguchi. scr: Hideki Shirane, Rika Nakase, Tomomi Mochizuki, Toshifumi Kawase. des: Asako Nishida. ani: Kyuta Sakai. mus: Akifumi Tada. prd: Studio Deen, MBS. 25 mins. x 13 eps.

Eve is one of the overseers at the Great Library, an interdimensional institution where multiple realities from the entire universe are contained within books—at least, that is how it appears in our dimension. Eve, however, has lived many lives in these other worlds and has had many names, all while searching for a particular girl, in a multiverse drama recalling the works of Neil Gaiman and Roger Zelazny. Compare to Read or Die. Based on an erotic game by Root, with designs by Carnelian.

Treasure Island *

1965. jpn: Shin Tarakajima; Dobutsu Takarajima. aka: New Treasure Island; Animal Treasure Island. TV special. dir: Osamu Tezuka (TVm), Hiroshi Ikeda (m1), Osamu Dezaki, Toshio Takeuchi, Hideo Takayashiki (TV1). scr: Osamu Tezuka (TVm), Satoshi Iijima, Hiroshi Ikeda (m1), Haruya Yamazaki, Hajime Shinozaki (TV1). des: Osamu Tezuka (TVm), Yasuji Mori (m1), Akio Sugino (TV1). ani: Gisaburo Sugii (TVm), Yasuji Mori (m1), Akio Sugino (TV1). mus: Isao Tomita (TVm), Naoki Yamamoto (m1), Kentaro Haneda (TV1). prd: Mushi, Fuji TV (TVm), Toei (m1); Tokyo Movie Shinsha, Nippon TV (TV1). 52 mins. (TVm), 78 mins. (m1), 25 mins. x 26 eps. (TV1), 90 mins. (m2).

Jack the wolf sea-pirate is killed in a harbor inn. The innkeeper’s rabbit son, Jim, finds a treasure map on the old sea-wolf and sets out to find the booty, berthing on a ship crewed by other animals, chartered by the deer Dr. Livesay and financed by the pig Squire Trelawney. He befriends Silver, another wolf, who is revealed as the leader of the local pirates when they seize control of the ship. Eventually, the pirates find the island on the map and go in search of buried treasure. The anime then deviates from Robert Louis Stevenson’s original 1881 story, in a style that not only contains elements of creator Osamu Tezuka’s occasional heavy-handed moralizing, but also his genius. As the animals near the treasure, they lose their anthropomorphic characteristics, devolving back to a feral state and running off into the jungle. Eventually, only Silver and Jack are left, and Silver struggles between the two states. Reasoning that no treas­ure is worth losing one’s “humanity” to animal greed, Silver and Jack leave the treasure behind. This anthropomorphic adaptation should not be confused with Shichima Sakai and Osamu Tezuka’s 1947 manga Shin Takarajima, which shares the title but not the concept. Some sources list this as the first-ever anime “TV special,” a somewhat pointless distinction since it was not the first one-shot anime to be broadcast—see Instant History. The U.S. release was colorized for Fred Ladd by animators in Seoul, who ensured that it was the South Korean flag, not the Japanese one, that the animals accidentally raise in a throwaway visual gag.

Hiroshi Ikeda’s Animal Treasure Island (1971, Dobutsu Takarajima) deviated further from the original. The human Jim Hawkins and his mouse companion Lex set sail in a toy boat, pursued by a porcine Long John Silver (perhaps thanks to animator Hayao Miyazaki, who worked on the production). Jim also joins forces with a third party in search of the map, Captain Flint’s granddaughter Cathy. At the climax, the treasure is found to be at the bottom of a drained lake, a conceit later reused in Miyazaki’s Castle of Cagliostro and ripped off in other anime, including Ladius and Beast Warriors. It was released in the U.S. as just plain Treasure Island, coincidentally featuring many of the same voice actors from the U.S. dub of the earlier version.

A more faithful version came in the form of the TV series Treasure Island (1978), director Dezaki’s follow-up to his Nobody’s Boy for TMS. This version restored the human characters from the original but did insist on giving Jim Hawkins a leopard cub for a pet. As well as directing, Dezaki provided storyboards under his pseudonym of Makura Saki, and this version was also reedited into a “movie” release, with Takeuchi credited as director and Dezaki as assistant. The series has been screened in Europe and run in Spanish on Puerto Rican TV.

Treasures of the Snow

1983. jpn: Alps Monogatari: Watashi no Annette. aka: My Annette: Story of the Alps. TV series. dir: Kozo Kusuba. scr: Kenji Yoshida. des: Issei Take­matsu. ani: Issei Takematsu, Eimi Maeda, Yoshiharu Saito. mus: Ryohei Hirose. prd: Nippon Animation, Fuji TV. 25 mins. x 48 eps.

In the remote Swiss village of Rossiniere, local bully Lucien causes Annette’s younger brother Dani to fall into a valley and break his leg. The 13-year-old Annette vows revenge on Lucien, determined to damage his life in any way she can, although she eventually realizes that a truly good person should forgive others, even if they do wrong to them. Based on the 1950 children’s book with a heavy Christian subtext by Patricia M. St. John, the anime version added many sequences not found in the original story, taking several episodes, for example, to cover the years leading up to the fateful leg-breaking incident. Compare to another World Masterpiece Theater Alpine story, Johanna Spyri’s Heidi.

Tree in the Sun, A *

2000. jpn: Hidamari no Ki. TV series. dir: Gisaburo Sugii, Rei Mizuno. scr: Tatsuhiko Urahata. des: Marisuke Eguchi. ani: Noriyuki Fukuda, Masahiro Kitazaki. mus: Reiko Matsui. prd: Madhouse, Nippon TV. 25 mins. x 25 eps.

At the end of the Tokugawa period, as Americans enter feudal Japan, two young men come of age. Manjiro Ibutani is a samurai through and through, beholden to his lord and obliged to lay down his life before his honor. But Manjiro’s code is put to the test by a succession of humiliations, such as guarding the U.S. consul and commanding a unit composed of lowly farmers. Eventually, Manjiro becomes one of the fundamentalists who refuse to modernize (see Oi Ryoma!); he is unable to survive in the brave new world of the late 19th century. But Ryoan, the doctor who tends his wounds, is very different. Ryoan has studied Western-style medicine and appreciates all the good that can be learned from the foreign powers. Both love their country and want to help their people, but in very different ways—compare to Sanctuary, which similarly observes life from two very different perspectives. Based on the 1981 manga by Osamu Tezuka and partly inspired by the life of his own great-grandfather, Ryoan Tezuka, a 19th-century doctor. Broadcast with English subtitles in the U.S. on Asahi Homecast.

Tree of Palme *

2001. jpn: Parumu no Ki. aka: Palm Tree; Wooden Palm. Movie. dir: Takashi Nakamura. scr: Takashi Nakamura. des: Toshiyuki Inoue. ani: Mamoru Sasaki. mus: Takashi Harada. prd: Palm Studio, GENCO, Kadokawa, Toho. 136 mins.

On planet Arcana, a mystic tree is said to absorb the memories of the civilization where it takes root. A sentient android boy, Palme, is made from this wood to care for his maker’s sick wife. When she dies, he is paralyzed with grief and loses all sense of purpose. Then blue-skinned Koram, a woman warrior of the Sol tribe, arrives at their home fleeing a group of armed pursuers, and he mistakes her for his dead mistress. She asks Palme and his maker to take a mysterious egg to the sacred region of Tama. When his maker is killed by Koram’s attackers, Palme takes over and journeys through Arcana, encountering danger and friendship and learning what it is to be human. This Japanese take on Pinocchio is beautifully rendered, with backgrounds by Mutsuo Koseki, whose work is better known from Nausicaä of the Valley of Wind and Castle in the Sky. Attractive and interesting designs show stylistic echoes of Catnapped; but it’s poorly paced and the character of Palme himself is not sympathetic. V

TriAngle *

1998. jpn: Terra Story. Video. dir: Yukihiro Makino. scr: Yutaka Hidaka. des: Hiro Asano. ani: Hiro Asano. mus: N/C. prd: Daiei. 30 mins. x 2 eps.

Nineteen-year-old Keisuke gets a whirlwind education in the art of love from several enthusiastic ladies. Will they help him win the woman of his dreams? And will she mind some extra company? Based on a computer game, so the answers are probably yes and no. N

Triangle Heart—Sweet Songs Forever

2000. Video dir: Akiyuki Shinbo. scr: Maki Tsuzuki. des: Satoshi Ishino. ani: Satoshi Ishino. mus: Hiroaki Sano. prd: Starchild. 30 mins. x 4 eps.

Fiasse Christella, headmistress of a renowned music school, is a former singer who still does a charity World Tour every year. Her mother left her very wealthy, and mysterious evildoers covet both her and her inheritance. Her old friends Ellis McGaren and brother/sister sword masters Kyoya and Miyu Takamachi are drafted to protect her. The World Tour is coming up and Fiasse is determined that the show must go on. The story is based on a computer game by Ivory. It took two and a half years to release the four episodes on video, but Tsuzuki spun a creator credit for two Lyrical Nanoha TV series off them in 2004 and 2005.

Triangle Staff

Company formed in 1987 by defectors from numerous anime companies, the first work for which was animation on the video remake of Devilman. Notable staffers have included Ryotaro Nakamura, Noriyuki Suga, and Takashi Hirokawa.

Trigun *

1998. jpn: Trigun. TV series. dir: Satoshi Nishimura. scr: Yosuke Kuroda. des: Takahiro Yoshimatsu. ani: Yoshimitsu Ohashi. mus: Tsuneo Imahori. prd: Madhouse, TV Tokyo. 25 mins. x 26 eps.

A space Western in the style of Eat-Man, set in one of those star systems that look exactly like the fantasy American West, if you ignore the two suns and the presence of a pair of female insurance investigators. Derringer Meryl and Stungun Millie, both as cute as pie, are there to keep an eye on a one-man destruction machine named Vash the Stampede, to try and minimize the collateral damage and expense of his shootouts. But Vash, a fabled gunman chased by every bounty hunter in the area, is not just another bad guy. He avoids killing at any cost and only fires off one of his mighty weapons to prevent injury to others. When you get right down to it, he’s just a skinny geek with spiky hair and a good nature, whose main passions in life are food and girls. With hot lead flying from just about every other direction, Vash doesn’t fire a single shot until episode five. He also raises issues such as exploitation of natural resources and the ethics of murder. And in Nicholas Wolfwood, a sexy young Christian priest whose weapons (wielded only in a good cause) include a portable confessional and a huge cross packed with weaponry, he’s created an unusual antagonist. Ranged against him are his real enemies, the Gung-Ho Guns, whose secret agenda is to blacken his reputation by provoking him into murder. Based on Yasuhiro Nightow’s original manga in Young King Ours. V

Trinity Blood *

2005. TV series. dir: Tomohiro Hirata, Daisuke Chiba. scr: Atsuhiro Tomioka, Yuji Hosono, Masahiro Sekino, Masayuki Kojima. des: Atsuko Nakajima, Thores Shibamoto. ani: Atsuko Nakajima, Yasuomi Umezu. mus: Takahito Eguchi. prd: AIC, Madhouse, Hanjin, FAI, Angle, Anime Aru, Gonzo. 24 mins. x 24 eps.

In a postapocalyptic scenario not dissimilar from that in Vampire Hunter D, a race of vampires faces up to a new threat, long-lived humans who have modified their bodies with cybernetic implants and nanotechnology. Peter Abel Nightroad is an agent for the Vatican but is also a secret operative in Ax, a special tactical unit run by the maverick Cardinal Catherina—compare to Hellsing and Chrono Crusade. Based on a novel by the late Sunao Yoshida, although it is likely that the anime made it into production more through the artwork that accompanied the text, since artist Kiyo Kujo later adapted it into a manga for Asuka magazine. LNV

Tristia of the Deep Blue Sea *

2004. jpn: Aoi Umi no Tristia. aka: Tristia; Blue Ocean of Tristia. Video. dir: Hitoyuki Matsui. scr: Kazuharu Sato. des: Eiji Komatsu. ani: ufotable zippers. mus: Norihiko Tsuru, Yuriko Nakamura. prd: Kogado Studio, Inc., Kumasan Team, Inc., The Klockworx. 30 mins. x 2 eps.

It’s been ten years since the ocean city of Tristia was ravaged by dragon attacks, and Nanoca, granddaughter of the great inventor Prospero Flanka, still dreams of carrying on his work and restoring the city to its former glory. That’s enough plot for a Miyazaki movie, but not for an anime based on a computer game like this one. Accordingly, Nanoca’s rival Panavia Tornado challenges her to enter the upcoming Golem Building Contest, in which inventors compete to create a useful household magical robot. Many of the characters are named after aircraft, which, we’re sure you’ll agree, more than makes up for any other elements that may seem derivative or futile. Cute girls and Roman centurion-inspired robot designs hint that this may not be rocket science, although a leading lady who aspires to be a great engineer is at least a welcome change from the usual anime roster of wannabe pop idols and doormats. LNV

Triton of the Sea

1972. jpn: Umi no Triton. TV series, mo­vie. dir: Yoshiyuki Tomino. scr: Seiji Ma­tsuoka, Masaki Tsuji, Yuki Miyata, Chi­kara Matsumoto, Minoru Onotani. des: Osamu Tezuka. ani: Akiyoshi Hane. mus: Yoshimasa Suzuki. prd: Animation Staff Room, Westcape; Office Academy. 25 mins. x 27 eps. (TV), 74 mins. (m).

Poseidon rules the depths of the sea cruelly, imposing his will through armies of vicious creatures. Little Triton’s parents died resisting him, and now the boy carries on their struggle, helped by the intelligent and gentle female dolphin Lukar and by little mermaid Pipi. Triton began life as a 1969 manga in the Sankei Shinbun and was first animated as the unreleased eight-minute pilot Blue Triton (1971, Aoi Triton). Taken from Osamu Tezuka by skullduggery behind-the-scenes, both Triton and Wansa-kun may have been birthed by the Astro Boy creator, but they were reared by other hands.

Tri-Zenon

2000. jpn: Muteki Trizenon. TV series. dir: Takashi Watabe, Matsuo Asami, Hiroshi Kimura. scr: Katsumi Hase­gawa, Takao Yoshioka. des: Naomi Miyata, Rei Nakahara. ani: Naomi Miyata, Naoko Yamamoto. mus: Kenji Kawai. prd: Ganges, Kadokawa, TBS. 25 mins. x 22 eps.

“Hot-blooded and straightforward” Akira Kamui lives with his father and kid brother, Ai. His mother is mysteriously missing, and Japan is under threat from alien invaders. To fight the enemy, Akira has help from his childhood friend Kana, with whom he constantly squabbles, his dog Gon, the enigmatic but cute Shizuku, and sisters Uma and Riku (complete opposites), as well as Rama, a girl from an old Japanese family, and Umu, the standoffish singer of a local amateur band. Akira’s rival Jin, who is strong, handsome, cool, and really nice, and Jin’s sister Ena make up the rest of the team. Conceived as a multimedia project by Rui Araizumi, its publicity claims that Tri-Zenon will simultaneously encompass manga, anime, and novels, with each freestanding enough to be enjoyed independently, but together forming a complex interweaving story. A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, but this may be rather too ambitious for the creator and team that gave us Slayers.

TROPES AND TRANSFORMATIONS

Anime’s most common stylistic device is the appearance of the characters themselves. Many, but not all, creators take their lead from Osamu Tezuka (himself working in imitation of the Fleischers’ Betty Boop and Disney’s Mickey Mouse) in using visual “pedomorphism”—many anime characters have skulls more like those of babies than adults, with large, widely spaced eyes and a drastically reduced lower jaw line, often creating a pointed chin and small mouth. Much imitated by foreign artists who claim to draw in a “manga style,” this tradition is more related to the concerns of anime, with large eyes to help convey expression and emotion, and a reduced mouth size to lessen the time spent animating lip movements. Perfected with Tezuka’s Astro Boy, this drawing style is now commonplace in anime, in manga based on anime designs, and consequently in much graphic art from Japan. It is merely one of many art styles used in Japanese comics, but the one most likely to appear in the kinds of works that are usually adapted for animation.

Unreal proportions do not merely apply to the faces of anime characters. In anime for the young, the baby motif is often continued for the whole body, with an outsized head and, occasionally, feet and short legs. In anime for older viewers, torso and leg dimensions are elongated to create tall, elfin body shapes, although, as in Western comics, the boys are sometimes given carved, muscular physiques, and many girls get large breasts. Regardless of the proportions of characters in a show, they may sometimes devolve into squashed down, “super-deformed” (SD) cartoon versions of themselves in moments of intense agitation, or sometimes in entire SD spin-offs in which the cast remains permanently in a cartoon parody state.

Anime hairstyles have their own traditions. Period pieces like The Tale of Genji will sometimes use natural shades for all characters, but the combination of black Asian hair and limited animation can make it difficult to tell them apart. In general, anime characters are differentiated by blatantly unreal coloring—it is not unusual in a cast of all-Japanese characters to find black hair alongside foreign variants like red, blond, and brown, and artificial shades like pink, blue, and green. Similarly, many characters have instantly recognizable hairstyles. Anime boys have quiffs and spikes in their hair that remain in constant position for ease of animation (but may occasionally droop into their line of sight), while girls have complex accessorizing. Drawing plaits or braids is unnecessarily fiddly for artists on a short deadline, but bows or ponytails with distinctive scrunchies are much quicker to draw and often present another excuse for brightly colored adornment. Such hairstyles can make anime girls seem younger than their age, but help make a hero’s five love-objects at least a little different.

Anime clothing is similarly differentiated, with a cast line-up of girls likely to be dressed in mini-skirts, trousers, shorts, and long dresses, usually in direct reflection of their characters. Some anime, such as Hummingbirds, even feature the rather desperate inclusion of a pair of pants with one long leg and one short—an apparent attempt to do something offbeat. The only place where clothing is not set apart in this way is in female underwear, for reasons based on animation concerns and erotic subtexts. Animators at Studio Fantasia, long-time purveyors of soft-core titillation like Agent Aika, reported that overly lacy or frilly underwear was simply too time-consuming to animate. Distinguishing underwear with straightforward colors often backfired, since a pair of red or blue panties could look too much like gym-wear or a swimsuit, and hence lost much of its erotic edge. Instead, the default setting for anime underwear became plain white panties (Studio Fantasia taking this to an extreme, where they had their own identifiable style of panty, worn by both protagonists and antogonists), which are not only easier to draw, but can also carry an erotic charge based on Japanese censorship—a blank space in the image as a substitute for what is hidden beneath it.

The slapstick and externalized emotions common to cartoons around the world also play a major part in anime comedy. Lechery can be signaled by drool or nosebleeds (a sign of high blood pressure caused by sexual arousal), or an elongated philtrum that accentuates pursed lips; anger by enlarged and throbbing veins, red face, or steam coming out of the ears; panic or relief by an exaggerated sweat drop on the brow or hair; romance by the sudden eruption in the frame of hearts and flowers. Sight gags can work even when the visual grammar of the medium is a little unfamiliar. One does not have to know much about Japan to enjoy many of the visual gags in Project A-ko, whose very title is a spoof on a Jackie Chan movie, or to get the joke when Lupin III, eyes bugging out and body suddenly rigid as an arrow, spots yet another cute girl.

Another visual trope in anime is the exaggerated freeze-frame. The use of a single still image for a prolonged period represents an obvious saving in animation costs (taken to ludicrous extremes in later episodes of Evangelion), but also accentuates moments of high drama. A samurai holding still, waiting for his opponent’s head to fall off, or a freeze-frame of kung-fu action, inadvertently resembles the mie—a held-pose used to similar effect in kabuki drama. It has since been much copied in live-action science fiction, most notably the “bullet time” sequences of The Matrix (1999), which ironically spent large amounts of money imitating an anime trope originally designed to save on a budget. Sometimes, a heroic pose is accompanied by a gleam of highlighting on a character’s sword or armor with a chiming sound effect. This can also be parodied by a self-confident (male) character producing the same effect from his white teeth, or even his glasses. Unconfirmed popular myth asserts that this is the origin of the Jamaican slang term bling, for jewelry or other conspicuous accessories.

Anime excels at adapting visual devices from manga and inserting them into action. Sudden crash-zooms into character’s eyes, often accompanied by a bling sound effect and the narrowing of the screen, can denote steely resolve or intense rivalry between two characters. Watery, starry eyes and a sudden outbreak of hearts, flowers, or soft-focus is used to show a girlish crush or adoration. Silence itself can be illustrated by a sound effect, with an uncomfortable pause, perhaps in the wake of an unfunny joke, marked only by the calling of distant crows. A clonking sound of hollow bamboo is a reference to the shishi odoshi (“deer-scarer”), a pivoted bamboo tube used as part of a Japanese water landscape that fills up with water until it tips, hitting against a stone, and denotes the passage of time. Sometimes anime will even steal sound effects directly from manga and write them onscreen. There is even a manga “sound effect” for total silence—the word shiin, which can sometimes be seen onscreen as an additional visual gag.

Until the advent of video, anime’s audience was primarily juvenile, and anime fictions often deal with the politics of exclusion and inclusion, filial duties, and family obligations—such as Astro Boy’s Pinocchio-inspired yearning to become a real child and, when that fails, his Superman-inspired quest to do good for the human race. Juvenile and teenage anime viewers are in an a permanent liminal state, facing the pressures of puberty and adolescence, and wishing both to grow up fast and never to grow up at all. Anime deals with these concepts by injecting story lines of transformation, allowing its characters to experiment with becoming something different—the superhero duality of Clark Kent and Superman, later remodeled with the symbiotic existence of Ultraman, but also that of the “magical girls” like Marvelous Melmo (1971), able to transform into an older, more sophisticated version of herself.

Anime for girls had often drawn directly on the cross-dressing traditions of the Takarazuka musical theater, particularly Osamu Tezuka’s Princess Knight (1967) and Riyoko Ikeda’s Rose of Versailles (1979), creating a subgenre running all the way to Utena (1997), in which heroines become their own knights in shining armor. The notion of girls assuming men’s clothing is given the weight of history in Yotoden (1987) and Otogi Zoshi (2004), where the heroines assume the roles of dead or sick brothers. Despite the inclusion in Mospeada (1983) of a hunky hero who likes women and also dresses up as one, men’s cross-dressing efforts often get less respectful presentation—such as a gentle comic sideswipe at school cross-dressing in Here Is Greenwood (1991). In the same year, Okama Report and 3x3 Eyes presented more sympathetic cross-dressers, but in 1992 Go Nagai lowered the tone of the whole girls’ school genre with Delinquent in Drag. The right and wrong way for a samurai to cross-dress is graphically illustrated in Peacemaker Kurogane (2003). Note that transvestism is distinct from transsexuality, a topic most famously treated in Ranma 1⁄2 (1989), whose hero regularly transformed into a heroine and back again, forcing him to deal with both sides of the battle of the sexes.

One of the most important innovators in the anime of transformation is Go Nagai, who gave male viewers the sight of a superheroine whose clothes regularly disintegrated in Cutey Honey, and another whose “costume” left her almost completely naked in Kekko Kamen. These, however, were mere diversions compared to his true achievements in the boys’ market, notably the pilotable robot Mazinger Z, which could combine with other robots to form a super-robot. This simple device not only generated a powerful pester factor among children who would demand all the toys in order to re-enact their favorite moments from the show, it also allowed for a prolonged transformation sequence, and hence the weekly reuse of preexisting anime footage.

Such transformations have been a common feature of anime ever since, reaching their apotheosis with Macross and the Transformers, created during a general reduction in the size of toys during the 1980s. Smaller toys were easier to store and transport, not just for children but for toy companies, and the reduction in size was compensated for by increased variation—more intricate moving parts that allowed each model to be “two toys in one.”

Anime is currently engaged in one of its biggest transformations, its format and scheduling shifting from a communal experience delivered at set times in theaters and on TV to infinitely mutable packets of data accessed on a handheld device. This reflects a change in society, camouflaging the big idea in a colorful wrapper. New tropes and transformations will doubtless emerge as a result.

Trouble Chocolate *

1999. TV series. dir: Tsuneo Tominaga. scr: Hideki Sonoda. des: Sachiko Hikabe. ani: Robot, Junichi Takaoka. mus: N/C. prd: AIC, TV Asahi. 25? mins. x 20 eps.

Timid teenager Cacao, a student at the Microgrand Academy, spends more time lusting after gorgeous green-haired Hinano next door than studying, even though the classes on offer include magic. His magic professor, Professor Garner, reveals that, since he’s over 120 years old, it’s time for him to stop goofing around and move on to the next stage of his magical education. As Cacao slowly starts to regain his memory, he recalls that not only has he already achieved his ends with Hinano, but she also isn’t quite as human as she seems. Most males forget how old they are at some point, but very few forget who they’ve slept with, so Cacao isn’t the brightest apple in the barrel, and his continuing progress may be problematic.

Troubled Times

1991. jpn: Michiteru Kuru Toki no Muko ni. aka: Toward a Time of Trouble. TV special. dir: Eiko Toriumi. scr: Eiko Toriumi. des: Takayuki Goto. ani: Hisatoshi Motoki. mus: Teruhiko Sato. prd: Studio Pierrot, Nippon TV. 80 mins.

It’s a fantasy adventure as tribal boy Bokudo, his red-deer guardian spirit, and the chieftain’s pretty daughter Faya go hunting in the Gobi Desert. A one-shot adaptation of Koji Suzuki’s novel Paradise, which won the 1991 Japan Fantasy Novel Award.

True Love Story

2003. aka: True Love Story: Summer Days, and yet… Video. dir: Hidehito Ueda. scr: Masashi Takimoto, Naotaka Hayashi. des: Tatsuya Oka. ani: N/C. mus: Ryo Sakai. prd: KSS. 30 mins. x 3 eps.

Another story set in a high school where a bevy of cute girls covering all the teenage wish-fulfillment stereotypes surround one ordinary teenage boy.

Trusty Ginjiro

1991. jpn: Koha Ginjiro. Video. dir: Koichi Ishiguro. scr: Hirokazu Mizude. des: Kazuya Takeda. ani: Kazuya Takeda. mus: N/C. prd: Animate Film, Visual 80. 45 mins. x 3 eps.

After the death of his elder brother, Ginjiro Yamazaki appoints himself his parents’ protector. Transferred to a new school, he gets into a lot of fights, as one might expect in an anime from My Sky–creator Hiroshi Motomiya, this one based on a 1975 manga originally serialized in Shonen Jump. V

Tsubasa Chronicle *

2005. TV series, movie. dir: Koichi Mashimo. scr: Hiroyuki Kawasaki. des: Minako Shiba. ani: Minako Shiba, Yukiko Ban, Takao Takegami. mus: Yuki Kajiura. prd: Bee Train, Production IG, NHK. 25 mins. x 26 eps. (TV), 60 mins. (m).

Wannabe archaeologist Xiaolang is dragged in an unexpected career direction when his childhood friend, Sakura the Clow Princess, loses her memory. Xiaolang is advised by a witch that he must recover the scattered pieces of Sakura’s memory from a number of points in space and time—a quest tinged with tragedy, since if he succeeds, she will still not know who he is. Memory loss might be an apt subject to bring up for the CLAMP collective of creators as well, who, in imitation of the eternal self-referential recycling of Leiji Matsumoto (see Submarine Super 99), have simply dumped characters from some of their earlier works into a vaguely defined quest narrative. So it is that we have two characters from CardCaptors joining forces with a number of elements and creatures from Rayearth to chase after a new MacGuffin. As in the case of the “original” manga, also created by CLAMP, there are also frequent crossovers with xxxHOLIC—most notably in the case of the Tsubasa Chronicles movie spin-off, TC: Chronicles of the Princess of Birdcage-land (2005, Tsubasa Chronicle: Torikago no Kuni no Himegimi), which was shown in a double bill with the xxxHOLIC movie A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Tsukikage Ran: Carried by the Wind *

2000. jpn: Kaze ni Omakase Tsuki­kage. aka: Moonshadow Drifting on the Wind, Lordless Retainer Tsukikage. TV series. dir: Akitaro Daichi. scr: Yosuke Kuroda. des: Hajime Watanabe. ani: Takahiro Yoshimatsu. mus: N/C. prd: Madhouse, WOWOW. 25 mins. x 13 eps.

In the olde-worlde nostalgia spirit of the turn of the century that also created Clockwork Fighters and Tree in the Sun, this anime is a jokey retelling of old samurai dramas, written by Jubei-chan the Ninja Girl’s Akitaro Daichi, and broadcast on Japanese TV while the latter show was still on-air. As with Jubei-chan, Daichi takes an old favorite (in this case Moonshadow, a wandering samurai originally popularized by heartthrob Jushiro Konoe, star of Zatoichi Challenged and Sworn Brothers), switches the character’s sex, and gives her a gimmicky favorite food in place of any personality. Ran Tsuki­kage is a wandering samurai lady, righting wrongs and doing good deeds all around Japan, accompanied by Miao, a female specialist in Chinese kung fu. Tsukikage likes drinking sake and eating bean-curd dregs (see Akane-chan)—a meal that Newtype, without a scrap of irony, recommended its readers eat in front of the TV for the ultimate viewing experience.

Tsuru-hime

1990. jpn: Tsuru Hime Jaaaa!. aka: Princess Tsuru, Crane Princess. TV series. dir: Tameo Ogawa, Yoshihiro Yamaguchi, Yoshiko Sasaki, Shigeru Ueda, Koichi Sasaki. scr: Hirokazu Mizude, Tadashi Hayakawa, Tameo Ogawa. des: Yoshiko Tsuchida. ani: Hiromi Muranaka. mus: N/C. prd: Aubec, Nippon TV. 17 mins. x 67 eps.

The ugly Princess Tsuru makes life hell for everyone in the samurai-era Hagemasu Castle. This gag anime was based on the manga in Margaret magazine by Yoshiko Tsuchida.

Tsurupika Hagemarukun

1988. aka: Little Baldy Hagemaru. TV series. dir: Hiroshi Sasagawa, Tetsuo Yasumi, Tsukasa Sunaga, Hiroyuki Sasaki, Teruo Kigure, Koichi Sasaki, Junji Nishimura. scr: Masaaki Sakurai. des: Munekatsu Fujita. ani: Akira Kawajima, Katsuhiko Yamazaki. mus: Kuni Kawauchi. prd: Shinei Doga. 25 mins. x 58 eps.

In this adaptation of the four-panel gag strip by Shinbo Nomura, ten-year-old brat Hagemaru Hageda causes mischief all over his small Japanese suburb.

TV Asahi

Often abbreviated in Japanese broadcast listings as “EX,” this channel began life in 1957 as NET—Nippon Educational Television. Subsequently renamed Asahi National Broadcasting (ANB—Zenkoku Asahi Hoso) in 1962. Asahi has a large number of children’s titles and often appears to stick to long-running family franchises instead of short bursts of riskier entertainment like TV Tokyo. It is the home of both Doraemon and Crayon Shin-chan. The newspaper the Asahi Shinbun is a related company.

TV Tokyo

Established as Television Tokyo Channel 12 in 1964 by the Foundation for Science and Technology, TV Tokyo, or “TX,” is a subsidiary of the Nihon Keizai Shinbun newspaper. A smaller channel with a far greater interest in niche programming, TV Tokyo is the home of many of the anime series recognizable to Western teenagers, particularly the short-run shows lasting for 13 episodes. The channel’s biggest anime successes are arguably Pokémon and Naruto, although it was also the home of many modern favorites, including Evangelion and Cowboy Bebop (see also WOWOW). TV Tokyo also runs the dedicated anime satellite channel Anime Theater X (AT–X).

TWD Express: Rolling Takeoff

1987. Video. dir: Kunihiko Yuyama. scr: Izo Hashimoto. des: Kazuyuki Kobayashi. ani: Kazuyuki Kobayashi. mus: Minoru Yamazaki. prd: Gakken, Shochiku. 55 mins.

Space cargo workers Ken Kato, Duke Stern, and Ivan Sernikov run the Tiger Wolf Dragon Express service, but they land themselves in big trouble when they rescue the beautiful android Rina. She is being pursued by the evil Baron Gohdam, who wants her so he can seize control of the superpowerful Hydra. Based on a manga in Comic Nora by Yuki Hijiri, it was also shown in some theaters on a double bill with the Maps movie.

Tweeny Witches

2004. jpn: Maho Shojo Tai Arusu. aka: Magical Girl Squad Alice. TV series. dir: Yoshihari Ashino, Yasuhiro Aoki, Toru Yoshida. scr: Shinji Obara. des: Daisuke Nakayama. ani: Studio 4°C. mus: Tamiya Terashima. prd: Tohoku-shinsha, Dentsu, Beyond C, NHK. 9 mins. x 40 eps.

Fifth-grade schoolgirl Alice dreams of having magical powers. One day she’s pretending to study in class, but the book on her desk is a magical one that transports her to a forest. She meets and befriends witches-in-training Eva and Sheila, and it seems her dreams are about to come true. This is not, perhaps, what one would immediately expect from a creation of Iria’s Keita Amemiya, whose remarkable live-action fantasies (Hakaider, Moon over Tao) have a grittier edge. However, that darkness soon emerges. Alice, who has always imagined that magic powers are there to be used for good, finds her wonderland can be as harsh and unjust as her own world—senior witches are enslaving other magic beings. She and her new witch sisters free an elf from captivity, but like many Amemiya characters, they find the price of doing good is high. In the magic world releasing a captured elf is a criminal act, and they are punished by a curse that will prevent them from growing up until the elf is recaptured—shades here of Those Who Hunt Elves, without the kinky undertones.

Twelve Kingdoms *

2002. jpn: Juni Koku-ki; Juni Kokki. aka: Chronicle of Twelve Kingdoms; Record of Twelve Countries. TV series. dir: Tsuneo Kobayashi, scr: Sho Aikawa. des: Hiroto Tanaka, Yuko Kusumoto. ani: Hiroto Tanaka. mus: Kunihiko Ryo. prd: Studio Pierrot, NHK, Sogovision. 25 mins. x 45 eps.

Unhappy teenager Yoko Nakajima is suddenly confronted by a strange man who says she is his queen and he is her sworn subject. He fights off a group of beast demons before taking her and two of her classmates into another world, where people from Earth are hunted fugitives. The friends and their protectors wander the lands, trying to survive and find out why they are there and how to get home.

Based on a series of novels begun in 1991 by Fuyumi Ono, the first story arc in Twelve Kingdoms often plays like a new version of Escaflowne or Fushigi Yugi. We have, of course, a Japanese girl transported to an otherworldy kingdom—the early episodes coincidentally based on the book Sea’s Darkness: Moon’s Shadow, although they have no relation to the Chie Shinohara story of the same name. Yoko’s “difference” is telegraphed from the earliest moments by her naturally red hair. Whereas anime hair colors are often wholly random and unrealistic, the script soon calls attention to Yoko’s, when her parents urge her to dye it black in order to fit in. A brown-red deviation from the normal black is what happens when you try to bleach Japanese hair and is often used in fiction to suggest a girl is something of a wild-child. This has led, ironically, to Japanese girls who genuinely do not have standard issue black hair being forced to dye their hair black in the manner to which Yoko’s parents are alluding. Yoko, it is alleged, is one of the latter, a straight-A student who has been voted class president, but who is being led away from her previous childish things by the allegorical temptations of the twelve kingdoms.

By the sixth episode, however, the story has taken a radical departure, dumping Yoko into the company of a number of beast-like creatures in a more surreal setting. Yoko’s adventures start to take on elements of The Wizard of Oz, or, more properly, The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, as Yoko discovers that she really is fated to be queen of one of the lands and that only her successful ascension to the thrown can restore the sundered and ruined kingdoms. In another parallel with the Narnia books, or perhaps even John Norman’s Gor series, the focus of the story leaves its original protagonist for long periods of time, concentrating on some of her associates. In the next story arc, based on the Ono novel Sea’s Wind: Maze’s Shore, there are also elements of the lost children of Haibane Renmei, in a series of fairytales that unite the stories of mundane, urban tragedy in our own world with the incarnation of fantastic creatures in the twelve kingdoms.

Later chapters, based on the novel Ten Thousand-League Wind: Dawn’s Sky, see Yoko becoming ruler of one of the kingdoms and forced to deal with the aftermath of her less than illustrious predecessor, alongside politicking by some of her rival queens and long tangents that discuss some of their own backstories. A few final stories prepare the ground for a last battle, as Yoko rides off to save her newfound home.

The original novels presented a sprawling saga, distantly inspired, in the fashion of Like a Cloud, Like a Breeze, by Chinese history and mythology. However, it is worth noting that the stories have been shuffled and rearranged for this anime version. Two of them, “Correspondence” and “Ally of the Moon,” were originally short stories, and are dealt with in just two episodes, while others stretch over many chapters. The final story arc, five episodes that draw on the novel Eastern Sea God, Western Ocean, almost exhausts the original source material featuring Yoko, although other books about other cast members still remain unadapted. As with Ironfist Chinmi, the exhaustion of the original material left the producers with the difficult choice of pressing on regardless and diverging from the original even further, or calling a hiatus with the vague hope of restarting if the material became available. Hence, although originally planned as a 68-episode series, Twelve Kingdoms currently grinds to a halt at episode 45 with some plot elements left unresolved; an unfortunate fate for an anime that has gained a large and appreciative following for its literally novelistic density and complex relationships. Two PlayStation 2 spin-offs also followed.

Twelve Months *

1980. jpn: Mori wa Ikiteiru. aka: The Forest Is Alive. Movie. dir: Kimio Yabuki, Tetsuo Imazawa. scr: Tomoe Takashi, Kimio Yabuki. des: Yasuhiro Yamaguchi. ani: Takashi Abe, Takao Kasai, Shinya Takahashi. mus: Vladimir Grifutsov. prd: Toei. 65 mins.

Sent out to collect spring flowers in midwinter by the wicked queen, Anya believes her life is lost, but she is saved by the spirit of her mother, who chases the snow from the forest. Anya is helped by the twelve spirits of the months of the year, each one a handsome prince, and within an hour, the once-barren winter wood is awash with the colors of spring. A Cinderella-like fairy tale based on a story by Soviet poet Samuel Marshack and featuring powerful orchestrations from the Leningrad Symphony Orchestra.

24 Eyes

1980. jpn: Nijushi no Hitomi. TV special. dir: Akio Jissoji, Shigetsugu Yoshida. scr: Sumie Tanaka. des: Kazuyuki Honma. ani: Shunsaburo Takahata, Hiromi Yokoyama, Kanetsugu Kodama. mus: Takeo Watanabe. prd: TMS, Fuji TV. 84 mins.

Young Miss Oishi is the new school teacher on the island of Shodoshima in 1928. When she injures her leg, her 12 students visit her at home and discover that she cycles nine miles every day to teach them. Miss Oishi transfers to a new school in time to see her students five years later (1933). In 1941, the boys go off to war, preferring a glorious military career to a humdrum home life. Four years later, a widowed Miss Oishi comes out of retirement to teach once again—her new students including a sister and a daughter of the original class. The surviving class of 1928 arrange a reunion and buy her a new bicycle.

Based on the book by Sakae Tsuboi, 24 Eyes draws lightly on Tsuboi’s years at the periphery of Japanese anarchist counterculture and her disgust that “pacifist” Japan was rearming during the Korean war. The book was also adapted into a live-action film by former propagandist Keisuke Kinoshita in 1954. Made after the previous year’s Diary of Anne Frank made WWII an acceptable subject for TV, this anime remake mixes animation with live action (old Tsuburaya studio hand Jissoji handling the former, Hello Spank–director Yoshida the latter) to depict different times of Miss Oishi’s life. The story was remade again as the fully live-action Children on the Island (1987). Many other anime would copy 24 Eyes’ concentration on children, recognizing that a cast too young to have started WWII need not be held accountable for those who really did. Hideaki Anno would pay homage to 24 Eyes in Gunbuster with a scene in which a teacher bids farewell to a class including the daughter of her former classmate.

21 Emon Welcome to Space

1981. jpn: 21 Emon: Uchu e Irasshai. Movie. dir: Tsutomu Shibayama. scr: Masaki Tsuji. des: Yuko Yamamoto. ani: Michishiro Yamada. mus: Shunsuke Kikuchi. prd: Fujiko F, Shogakukan, Shinei. 93 mins.

In the 21st century, would-be space pilot Emon discovers that he is the sole heir to the dilapidated Tsuzureya Inn in Tokyo. But the inn hasn’t changed since the 19th century, and customers no longer find it quaint. Realizing that Emon can be “persuaded,” the owners of the Galaxy Hotel chain invite him on a space holiday to get him away from his inheritance. Emon is accompanied on the trip by his wacky potato-digging robot, Gonsuke, and the all-powerful alien, Monga.

The Fujiko-Fujio team behind Esper Mami and Mojacko were heavily involved in this adaptation of their series from Corocoro Comic, even to the extent of singing the theme song themselves. The film was shown on a double bill with another Fujiko-Fujio production, the Doraemon short What Am I for Momotaro?, and reuses the footage for one scene in which Doraemon and Emon briefly share each other’s movie.

Twilight of the Cockroaches *

1987. jpn: Gokiburi no Tasogare. aka: Cockroach. Movie. dir: Hiroaki Yoshida. scr: Hiroaki Yoshida. des: Yoshinori Kanemori. ani: Toshio Hirata. mus: Morgan Fisher. prd: TYO, Kitty Film. 105 mins.

Naomi, an attractive young cockroach, enjoys the easy life with her boyfriend, Ichiro, and other roaches in Mr. Saito’s apartment. This is because the lazy Saito lets the roaches eat the scraps from his table and never tries to hurt them. Hans, a hard-bitten fighter-roach from the other side of the yard, is a rival for Naomi’s affections, but he eventually returns to his own people. Naomi embarks on the long quest across the yard (50 human feet, an incredible distance) to find him. There, she discovers that Hans did not lie, and that other humans are engaged in an all-out war to exterminate the roaches; Hans and his people are fighting a suicidal battle they cannot win. The unthinkable happens when Momoko, the woman across the yard, moves in with Saito—a newly house-proud Saito kills off the roaches. Soon, only Ichiro and the pregnant Naomi are left, then he too is killed. Naomi escapes to give birth to a new litter, and a new generation of cockroaches, just that little bit more resistant to human poisons, is ready for a rematch.

A very Japanese insect movie that mixes a neighborly human romance with the anthropomorphized characters of Hoppity Goes to Town and the apocalyptic armageddon of WWII—A Bug’s Death, if you will. Beginning with Naomi’s first encounter with the human female, the film is chiefly told in flashback, lending it the weight of inevitable tragedy that also characterizes Grave of the Fireflies. Shot in a mixture of live action (the humans) and animation (the roaches) that is all the more impressive in these days of digital easy-fixes, it mixes the comic spectacle of humans battling their only serious rivals for planetary domination, with the heroic defensive actions of a tiny community facing impossible odds. The director reportedly thought of his cockroaches as a metaphor for the way the Japanese appear to the rest of the world—he meant as selfish, parasitical trading partners, though many foreign critics saw other parallels, particularly in TotC’s glorification of fanatical suicide missions and its insect cast’s self-assured belief that they will, eventually, become the masters of Earth. A fascinating and unexpectedly entertaining experiment, comparable in some regards with the U.S. movie Joe’s Apartment (1996), which also featured a single guy who shared his apartment with roaches. V

Twilight of the Dark Master*

1997. jpn: Shihaisha no Tasogare. aka: Twilight of the Master. Video. dir: Akiyuki Shinbo. scr: Duanne Dell’Amico, Tatsuhiko Urahata. des: Hisashi Abe. ani: Hisashi Abe. mus: Keiji Urata. prd: Madhouse. 46 mins.

In the beginning, the Great Mother created a Demon Master, an adversary designed to test the mettle of human beings. However, the Demon Master exceeded its design specifications, and the Great Mother had to create a Guardian to protect humankind. Eons later, in the year 2089, a strange force transforms the Japanese Eiji—he turns on his lover Shizuka, mutilates her, and escapes into the city. Determined to give her mutated fiancé the release of death, Shizuka pursues him, accompanied by a police detective and Shijo, an androgynous man who is the current Guardian. As in Doomed Megalopolis, the monster terrorizing the city is simply a pawn of the true evil, in this case the Demon Master himself, who is asserting his powers through a new illegal muscle-enhancement drug. This predictable sci-fi gorefest was based on the manga by Saki Okuse and originally serialized in Wings magazine. LNV

Twilight Q

1987. jpn: Twilight Q Toki no Musibume—Reflection; Twilight Q 2—Meikyu Bukken File 538. aka: TQ: A Knot in Time; TQ2 Labyrinth Article File 538. Video. dir: Tomomi Mochizuki, Mamoru Oshii. scr: Kazunori Ito. des: Akemi Takada, Katsuya Kondo. ani: Shinji Otsuka. mus: Kenji Kawai. prd: Studio Deen. 30 mins. x 2 eps.

Mayumi is on holiday when she finds an old camera while swimming. Out of curiosity she has the film developed—only one frame can be saved. The picture shows her with a young man she has never met. Returning to her holiday base to investigate, she learns from the camera manufacturer that this model hasn’t even been made yet. She finds herself caught up in weird events that take her back in time to WWII and forward to her own graveside. This unsettling paradoxical tale is seemingly without meaning, a bizarre entry in the girls’ anime catalog. The second story takes matters even further into fantasy, opening with the transformation of an airship into a giant carp and focusing on a small girl, seemingly the reincarnation of a powerful deity, and a mysterious detective in shades. He’s a Tokyo detective who wants to find out why every aircraft over his town has suddenly vanished without a trace. The magic of the transformation sequence is unforgettable, but there’s little that could be described as action.

The surreal goings-on in this short-lived “twilight zone” were made by the crew of Patlabor but owe a heavy debt to the 1960s live-action show Ultra Q[uestion] (a forerunner of Ultraman). Whereas its predecessor threatened to “apart your soul and going into the mystery zone [sic],” this modern update preferred to “take over your reality and disable the stop button.”

Twin

1989. jpn: Hassai Circuit Roman Twin. aka: Racing Circuit Romance Twin. Video. dir: Noboru Ishiguro, Osamu Sekita. scr: Takashi Yamada. des: Tsuneo Ninomiya. ani: Tsuneo Ninomiya, Koichi Endo. mus: N/C. prd: Japan Home Video. 80 mins.

Hyo Hibino grows up a confused orphan after his mother dies giving birth to him—alternately blaming himself for her death and believing himself to be invulnerable. He gets the perfect opportunity to prove it when he becomes a motorcycle racer. An anime based on the 1986 Young Sunday manga by F and Dash Kappei–creator Noboru Rokuda.

Twin Bee Paradise

1999. Video. dir: Kazuhiro Takamoto. scr: Yasunori Ide. des: Akihiro Asanuma. ani: Akihiro Asanuma. mus: N/C. prd: Public & Basic, Beam Entertainment. 30 mins. x 3 eps.

Fresh from the video game that spawned them, the Twin Bee team is carted off for an intergalactic adventure, complete with big hair, babies, and UFOs. The series was preceded by a 1994 “episode zero,” which must have made for one of the slowest anime productions in history.

Twin Dolls *

1994. jpn: Seijuden Twin Dolls; Inju Seisen Twin Angels. aka: Holy Beast Story Twin Dolls; Lust Beast Crusade Twin Angels. Video. dir: Kan Fukumoto. scr: Oji Miyako. des: Rin Shin. ani: Akira Ojo. mus: Teruo Takahama. prd: Dandelion. 45 mins. x 2 eps. (Dolls), 30 mins. x 4 eps. (Angels).

The one thing you can be pretty sure of in anime is that people who look like ordinary high school girls rarely are. Mai and Ai are professional demon hunters, descended from an immortal being, dedicated to defending mankind (and, in particular, high school grrrl-kind) from the demons of the Pleasure Underworld. They are appointed guardians of the infant Messiah who will save the world. For once tentacles aren’t used as penis substitutes—instead the crew animates optimistic renditions of the real thing. This openness doesn’t last long as the story introduces one of the most meretricious of all plot devices, the “orb of orgasm”; pop it in a woman’s mouth and she’ll enjoy being raped. Historical and mythical figures are used as set dressing in the background of an unpleasant exercise in taking money for old rope.

For reasons we’ve never been quite able to fathom, the franchise not only changed its Japanese title to Twin Angels, but also gained itself a new U.S. distributor, moving from Softcel to Anime 18 for the distribution of the 1995 sequel.

For Angels, the sorcerer-nuns must defend their charge, Lord Onimaro (who is 21, allegedly), from another demon assault, when Kama and Sutra, the King and Queen of Seduction, drag him off to a ritual orgy. Onimaro’s guardian Dekinobu worries that if he succumbs to his demonic heritage, he will become the Demon King and his legion of sex-crazed monsters will subdue the world. He makes a predictable choice and has the twins stripped and tortured for his pleasure, planning to have them sacrificed. But Dekinobu is determined to rescue Onimaro from his destiny, even if it costs him his life.

Angels adds staggering naiveté to its other offenses—what hormonally normal male, offered the career choice of ordinary human or Demon King with ultimate power, is going to be persuaded into the paths of righteousness by two “19-year-old” bimbos who can’t even find sensible underwear? It is difficult, however, to completely write off any show that has immortal dialogue like, “Commence creation of an evil sex barrier!” and a scene featuring two miniskirted girls on a stormy school roof trying to hang onto a magic staff while lightning transforms it into a giant penis. LNV

Twin Love

2004. jpn: FUTAKOI/Futakoi Alternative. TV series. dir: Nobuo Tomizawa, Takayuki Hirao, Matsuri Ose. scr: Tomoko Konparu, Miho Maruo, Masahiro Yokotani, Katsumi Terato, Kazuharu Sato, Matsuri Ose, Ryunosuke Kingetsu. des: Mineko Ueda, Toshimitsu Kobayashi. ani: Toshimitsu Kobayashi. mus: So Kikuchi, Shunsuke Suzuki, Tatsuya Murayama, Toshimichi Isoe. prd: Feel, Flag, UFO Table, Media Works. 25 mins. x 13 eps. (TV1), 25 mins. x 13eps (TV2).

Ninth-grader Nozomu Futami moves back to his childhood hometown to live alone, boarding and helping out in a temple so he can go to school while his father works overseas. He welcomes the chance to get reacquainted with his childhood friends, twins Sumireko and Kaoruko Ichijo, and hopes to get closer to them both; but his school is overrun with girl twins, plus a few pairs of siblings for variety. There’s a local legend about twin girls falling in love with the same boy, and he is set to become the beneficiary. However, as with the D3 Series tales Lustful Mother and Lustful Sister, this twin story has a literal twin story—a second tale runs in parallel, in which redheads Sara and Souju Shirogane work as assistants in a private detective agency that has recently been taken over by the son of the original owner. The trio run into trouble with local gangsters, and high jinks ensue. This series was also adapted as a manga in Comic Dengeki Daioh with art by Kanao Araki. Yes, it’s yet another geek-gets-girls show, this time based originally on a magazine story and illustrations by Hina Futaba and Mutsumi Sasaki.

Twin Signal

1995. Video. dir: Takashi Sogabe. scr: N/C. des: Toshiko Sasaki. ani: Toshiko Sasaki. mus: Takeshi Suzuki. prd: Tokyo Kids. 28 mins. x 3 eps.

A-S Signal is the newest, most sophisticated Human Formed Robot (HFR) in the Atrandom series, created by Professor Shinnosuke Otoi, a brilliant engineer. Signal looks like a cute 16-year-old boy, programmed to be “big brother” to the professor’s grandson, Nobuhiko. Made of the revolutionary material MIRA by a secret process, Signal is the constant target of kidnap attempts and other efforts to steal the Professor’s secrets. But there’s one small problem with the process—
whenever Nobuhiko sneezes, Signal transforms from a normal teenage boy into a sweet three-year-old super-deformed dwarf. Chibi Signal, as he’s known in this state, is phenomenally cute and obsessed with eating chocolate, but his powers as a bodyguard are severely compromised.

Luckily, lots of pretty-boy robots pop up to help Signal out. They are earlier models in the Atrandom series. Signal’s older brother and prototype, Pulse, also lives with the Otoi family as does Code, a robot bird also made by the same secret techniques. Based on the early chapters of the Shonen GanGan manga by Sachi Oshimizu, which has also spun off novels and drama CDs.

Twinkle Heart

1986. Video. dir: Seiji Okuda. scr: Kenji Terada. des: Sachiko Yamamoto. ani: Moriyasu Taniguchi. mus: N/C. prd: Project Team Argos. 45 mins.

On a distant planet, the treasure of Love is being sought by planetary ruler Ogod. Three insufferably cute aliens—Cherry, Lemon, and Berry—join in the search and finally reach Earth. In order to look for information about the treasure, they decide that the best course would be to turn their spaceship into a hamburger bar, so as to blend in with the natives and listen for any intelligence. A comedy, in case you were wondering.

Twins at St. Clare’s

1991. jpn: Ochamen Futago Clare Gakuen Monogatari. aka: Story of Mischievous Twins at Clare College. TV series. dir: Masaharu Okuwaki, et al. scr: Haruya Yamazaki, Michiru Shimada. des: Shuichi Seki. ani: Keiko Sasaki, Satoshi Hirayama, Toshiharu Mizutani. mus: Masahiro Kawasaki. prd: Tokyo Movie Shinsha, Nippon TV. 25 mins. x 26 eps.

Patricia and Isabel are identical twins whose rich parents decide that their girls should learn the true values of life. They don’t feel their expensive, luxurious school is making a very good job of this, so instead they send them to St. Clare’s, a much simpler school. At first the girls resent this, seeing it as a step down the social ladder. Their privileged background doesn’t help them adjust to life as members of a community unimpressed by wealth. They are determined to win respect, but because they’re completely unused to communal life, they rebel against the rules, going on strike, stealing, and causing all sorts of trouble. Instead of the school’s best students they become its biggest troublemakers, but they eventually settle down, make friends, and learn to value and respect others while having lots of fun. There are midnight feasts, adventures, and all the things people do at boarding school in novels like the 1941 book by Enid Blyton that inspired this series. Unfortunately real English boarding schools were never so exciting, but Japanese audiences didn’t care; nor did those across Europe. TMS followed with another twin story, Me and I: The Two Lottes.

Two Down, Full Base

1982. aka: Two Out, Bases Loaded. TV special. dir: Tsutomu Shibayama. scr: Seiichi Yashiro. des: Michishiro Yamada, Hideo Kawauchi. ani: Tsutomu Shibayama, Kenichi Onuki. mus: Takeyoshi Hoguchi, Joe Hisaishi. prd: Group Tac, Asia-do, Toho, Fuji TV. 85 mins.

Musuke “Shorty” Sato is a shortstop for the local junior baseball team, the Eggs, who is asked by his mother to look after some money for her. He foolishly lends it to Tower and Dump, the school bad-boys, and must enlist the help of the pitcher’s pretty little sister.

Two on the Road

1992. jpn: Itsumo Futari. aka: Always the Two of Us. Video. dir: Hirotoshi Hayasaka, Seizo Watase. scr: Seizo Watase. des: Seizo Watase. ani: N/C. mus: BEGIN. prd: Cure. 37 mins., 30 mins.

Two anthologies of short stories, 13 in all, based on originals by Chalk-Colored People–creator Seizo Watase. As with other adaptations of Watase’s work, they are set to music—stories here include Ashes of Love, White Fish/Blue Fish, Dance on the Sands, Glider, Handbag Mirror, Blue Snow, and Living in the World. Though several early ones were broadcast on the WOWOW satellite channel, this qualifies more as a video production.

Two Takas, The

1984. jpn: Futari no Taka. TV series. dir: Takao Yotsuji, Hiroko Tokita, Junichi Sakata, Hiroshi Negishi. scr: Sukehiro Tomita, Hideo Takayashiki, Jiyu Watanabe, Yasushi Hirano. des: Shiro Murata, Akira Nakanishi. ani: Shiro Murata, Yasuhiro Moriguchi. mus: Joe Hisaishi. prd: Movie International, Fuji TV. 25 mins. x 32 eps.

Two boys both named Taka (“Hawk”) are both passionate motorcyclists and both determined to be champions. The similarity ends there; one’s a rich kid from a good family, one’s from the wrong side of the tracks, constantly fighting with his mother. Then they learn that, following a fire in the maternity unit where they were born, two babies were accidentally swapped over.

Based on Kaoru “Area 88” Shintani’s 1981 manga in Shonen Sunday, this was the last Movie International production. The studio closed down before it could be completed, so only by reading the manga could fans find out how the story ended; but the series gave them Hisaishi’s music by way of compensation.

2001 Nights

1987. jpn: Space Fantasia 2001 Nights. Video. dir: Toshio Takeuchi. scr: Chiho Katsura. des: Akio Sugino, Takashi Watanabe. ani: Hisatoshi Motoki, Noboru Tatsuike. mus: Satoshi Kadokura. prd: TMS. 57 mins.

In 2085, a sleeper ship carrying the embryos of the “Robinson Family” launches for planet Ozma. A community begins to thrive onboard the ship, and when it reaches Ozma 375 years later, the terraformed planet is settled peacefully. Then, a second ship arrives, captained by yet another Robinson, who urges the colonists to help spread the human race even further into space. Owing much more to 2001: A Space Odyssey than Swiss Family Robinson, this majestic video was shot in “Super Perspective Technique” (whatever that is) to capture the photo-real quality of Yukinobu Hoshino’s original 1984 Action Comics manga. Note also the homages to The Wizard of Oz.

Two’s Company

1998. jpn: Futari Kurashi. aka: Two People Living Together. TV series. dir: Futa Morita. scr: Fumihiko Shimori. des: Masayuki Hirooka. ani: Masayuki Hirooka. mus: Katsuo Ono. prd: TBS. 5 mins. x 36 eps.

The romantic misadventures of an out-of-work manga artist, based on a manga by working manga artist Kenjiro Kakimoto. These shorts were broadcast as part of the late night Wonderful program. N

Typhoon in Ise Bay

1989. jpn: Ise-wan Taifun Monogatari. aka: Story of the Typhoon in Ise Bay. Movie. dir: Seijiro Kamiyama, Yasuo Iwamoto. scr: Seijiro Kamiyama. des: Masahiro Kitazaki. ani: Masahiro Kitazaki. mus: Masao Haryu. prd: Mushi. 90 mins.

This self-explanatory true story of a 1959 storm that decimated Western Japan was directed by Kamiyama, who also wrote the original book.