1989: The Year Anime (Sorta) Broke

Evan Jones is a writer and a communications analyst working in Hollywood. He regularly attends and speaks at anime events in the LA area, and he wrote this article while sitting next to framed cells from Patlabor and City Hunter. Find him on Twitter via @CrusherJones (for anime content) or via @EvanRJones (for non-anime content).

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"1989! The number...another summer..." - Public Enemy

Retrospective pieces are a real challenge.

There's a lot of pressure about what to include, what to exclude, what to emphasize, and what to just blithely mention in a parenthetical. There's also a big threat of retroactive awareness coloring things in an odd light, especially after 20 plus years of time passing between back then(tm) and now(tm). It's a whole new game these days: our viewing habits, purchasing options, and information exchange processes have undergone a drastic evolution and are now light years ahead of the "good luck!" approach that characterized old-school fandom.

("Up-to-date streaming anime? Forgetta-bout-it. Back in those days we had import laser-disks, Xeroxed scripts, and comics printed on third-rate papyrus. 80 miles to school barefoot in the snow with nothing to eat but old stacks of Shonen Jump!")

But the long and short of it is simple; 1989 was a great year for televised anime. It was an adventurous and ambitious year that held something of interest for everybody regardless of taste. It was also a heady time where Gods of Manga, Super Saiyans, mechanized war machines, conflicted judoka, and gigantic belligerent pandas all vied for our eyeballs, our pocket money, and our hearts.

And we as fans were better for it.

1980, Part 2: What Anime Bloggers Would Typically Say About It

(We swear that this is the last section of Daryl Surat's analysis of anime from 1980. Seriously, this is it. He wanted to write about more, but there's absolutely nothing left for him to cover. Nothing. - Ed.)

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Now comes the easy part. The stuff you guys know about; the part of 1980 that the Internet anime fan blogging sphere has on their radar thanks to fansubs and disc-based commercial media releases. Did I forget to mention there was a Doraemon movie in the preceding parts, given its Japanese mega-popularity and English-language obscurity? Nah! I just didn’t bother to talk about it because THERE’S ALWAYS A DORAEMON MOVIE. Though not mentioning it did mean I had no place to note that a second TV series was made for one of Fujiko Fujio’s less famous creations, Kaibutsu-kun…

1967: Best Year for Coming Out Second

An eternal English/Graphic Design major that spends way too much time playing video games and watching Japanese cartoons, Basil Berchekas III has his fingers in many anime-related cookie jars. He's one of the mega-podcasters at OSMCast!, he runs his own geekfest blog at The Basil Blog, and he's also the grand "Director of Awesome" at Hama-con in Alabama. His words, not ours, folks.
 

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Do you remember your first anime? You know, the show that blew your mind away when you were just but a child? A show that, even if you didn’t know it at the time, was something completely different from what you were used to? The show that expanded your mind’s possibilities that animation could be so much more?

I do. As it turns out, my first anime aired in the September of 1967.

Anime in the 1960s, in case it wasn’t obvious, was a decade of firsts. First television shows, first in color, first to star awesome robots—you know, the important things in life. 1967 did not have these firsts. It didn’t land the first color anime, as 1965 swiped that with Kimba the White Lion. Some people say that the first shôjo anime premiered in 1967, but as we've seen before, others may say the first shôjo anime was in 1966 with Sally the Witch.

But you know what 1967 did have?

1966: Reflecting the Economic Expansion in Anime

When we were putting out fliers for our "Golden Ani-Versary" project, he came to us known only as "Inaki", but he convinced us that he'd be the fan for the job when it came to anime. A lifelong fan of Japanese animation, particularly the magical-girl genre with a love of the history of the medium, he can be found on twitter at @aliveinthewired, where he thinks too hard about anime.

WAY too hard about anime.

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Like much of the world, times for Japan the 1960s were incredible and tumultuous, a time of great change. The economy boomed, and society underwent many changes; the country itself was transformed as massive building projects worked to accommodate the new Japan, its industry, and its people. It's in this era that television—as well as televised animation, of course—would become firmly established in Japan's popular culture.

Television wasn't new or novel in Japan in 1966, immediately becoming popular after its introduction in 1953, with everyday Japanese people crowding around televisions in public plazas, shops, bars, restaurants, and other such drawcards. Private television was also not novel in 1966, as many Japanese homes bought television sets to watch the Royal Wedding in 1959 with a second upsurge for the Tokyo Olympiad in 1964. It's into this environment that Tezuka's bold experiment, an animated television programme of his hit manga Astro Boy, was brought into the world.

It's no secret that Tezuka's magnificent experiment wasn't exactly a success. Despite building a television anime industry from the ground up and more or less inventing modern television animation to do it, Astro Boy still failed to turn a profit for Tezuka's newly-founded company. However, that was in 1963, and by 1966 things had changed significantly. In the 1960s, the Japanese economy was booming, and every year the GDP nearly doubled, a phenomenon unheard of in economics. More televisions, more money, and more people drove the demand for entertainment up further each year. The seeds of the anime industry were beginning to blossom.

1964: Confronting World War II Through Animation

(As an avid viewer of both Japanese animation and cinema for more than a decade, Miguel Douglas has written for Midnight Eye, PopMatters, Manga Life, Directory of World Cinema: Japan, Shadowland Magazine and JapanCinema.net. Miguel is also the editor-in-chief at iSugoi.com, a website started in 2008 as an outlet for the exploration of Asian cinema and animation, and runs the @iSugoi Twitter account.)

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Coming in the wake of perhaps the most influential year for Japanese animation, 1964 arrived with considerably less impact on the animation industry as a whole. With the massive success of such titles as Tetsuwan Atomu (Astro Boy) and Tetsujin 28 (Gigantor) just a year prior, the industry was attempting to essentially recuperate and further explore what the medium of animation could offer in terms of storytelling.

Stemming from this effort, 1964 saw the release of only three animated series: Shōnen Ninja Kaze no Fujimaru ("Fujimaru of the Wind"), Big X, and Zero Sen Hayato. While numbering only three, these series would provide production studios and directors an opportunity to explore Japan’s traditional past, confront controversial issues of patriotism surrounding Japan’s involvement in World War II, and even exploring the social philosophy of eugenics during the war. Certainly these were difficult subjects to elaborate upon within animation—most would even suggest taboo—but seemingly mature thematic material was increasingly finding the medium of animation as a viable platform within Japan. This year also saw the release of only one theatrical film, Tetsuwan Atomu: Uchû no Yûsha ("Astro Boy: The Brave in Space"), a production featuring the recently famous robot boy created by Osamu Tezuka, introduced to the world only a year prior.

1963 (Part 2): On the Outside, Looking In

(The article for 1963, the first year featured here at Golden-Ani, has been provided for us by Charles Dunbar, maintainer of the Study of Anime blog. He can also be found on Twitter at @Studyofanime. Part 1 of Charles's analysis covering 1963's two biggest shows, Tetsuwan Atomu and Tetsujin 28, can be read here.)

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Now while Atom and Tetsujin might have made the biggest splash in that first year of television anime, there was a third cybernetically-enhanced fellow who flew “under the radar,” so to speak. His name was "Eitoman" ("8 Man"), and while he is often forgotten in the modern era, he made a splash of his own that would be felt long after he vanished from the airwaves.

Created by Kazumasa Hirai and illustrated by Jirô Kuwata (who would eventually garner more fame as the Japanese adaptor of Batman later in the decade), Eitoman occupies the position of first cyborg hero in Japan. While Tezuka and Yokoyama were debating a future in which robots coexisted with humans, Hirai decided to take the more (arguably) “humanist” approach of creating a hero out of a murdered policeman. Saved from death by Professor Tani, felled cop Hachiro Azuma’s brain is transplanted into the 008 robot body, where he continues to fight crime and defend the weak against evil.

1963 (Part 1): On the Outside, Looking In

Charles Dunbar, maintainer of the Study of Anime blog, is graduate of Hunter College, CUNY, where he received a BA in Religion and Anthropology and an MA in Cultural Anthropology. His thesis, Pilgrimage, Pageantry and Fan Communities was published in 2011 and focused on anime convention participation, including spending habits, cosplay, demographics, communal behaviour and convention culture.

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I’m beginning this essay with a disclaimer. I often utilize this American pie institution to clarify what I know, as opposed to what I will be presenting. This is one of those times, so please allow me a few moments to get a few things off my chest.

I came into anime fandom in the late '90s, and like many from that age of Dragon Balls and Sailor Scouts, I had little knowledge of anything beyond those two series. I had never heard of Astroboy or Gigantor, let alone Tobor. I barely knew what manga was, aside from what Stu Levy was releasing through MIXXzine. As my fandom grew, it occasionally embraced the older stalwarts of Japanese animation, but in general I kept myself close to what was new and accessible.

I say this because this essay was something of an enlightenment to me. I chose to cover the year 1963 because it was something I did not know, as opposed to something I was deeply familiar with, and in this way, I learned more about the roots of Japanese animation than I had ever thought. At the same time, I refuse to present myself as an authority on all things Tetsuwan Atomu or Ôkami Shônen Ken. This was as much a learning experience for me as a chance to write, and for that I beg your forgiveness if I get something wrong, or miss something obvious. I am still learning about this amazing time, and while I am hardly an expert, my enthusiasm and interest have grown exponentially.

You have been warned.