2003, Part 1: The Cresting Wave of Cool Japan

When Bradley Meek is not coding, sleeping, reading or playing Dota 2, he's watching every kind of anime he can get his hands on. At times, this means he subconsciously channels Madarame from Genshiken, which is known to frighten away women and small puppies. Sometimes he writes on his blog, Those Damn Cartoons, but to be honest, he would usually rather watch anime than write about it. You can find him opining about cartoons over on Twitter (@BradleyCMeek).

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Do you remember superflat?

That bizarro pop art movement of the early 2000's where Andy Warhol, street graffiti, ukiyo-e and thirty-plus years of anime and manga were dropped into a blender, dished out onto canvases and sculptures, and then served to the world of high art in Tokyo, New York, Paris and London? It featured art that was a cheery mix of kawaii mascots and apocalyptic imagery, with dollops of a potent mixture of sexiness and child-like innocence familiar to anime fans. It was a grab-bag of forty years of Japanese culture informed by much older, more traditional Japanese art styles, and it was, by all accounts, a big success. One of the short-lived movement's primary authors, Takashi Murakami, was profiled in the New York Times in 2005, and it's an instructive read.

Murakami was an otaku throughout the 80's and 90's, and that meant grappling with the destructive legacy of serial killer Tsutomu Miyazaki, who embedded a nasty impression of otaku on a culture that was already suspicious of them. As the article recounts:

"When Miyazaki's room was revealed to the public, the mass media announced that it was otaku space,'' Murakami once told an interviewer. ''However, it was just like my room. Actually, my mother was very surprised to see his room and said: 'His room is like yours. Are you O.K.?' Of course, I was O.K. In fact, all of my friends' rooms were similar to his, too.'' Murakami added that Miyazaki was only ''different from us'' because he ''videotaped dead bodies of little girls he killed.''

Miyazaki's murders were a dark cloud that hung over otaku, and superflat was part of Murakami's attempt to wrestle with that legacy and contextualize it in Japan's larger cultural struggles to define itself. Riding a wave of renewed interest in Japanese culture, he found international success and inspired others who would make similar work.

What interests me about superflat isn't so much what it was, but what it represented to anime fans in Japan and elsewhere: legitimacy. Here was the world of high art writing flattering profiles and gallery reviews of art that was inspired by anime and its culture, and in the same way that Roger Ebert's enthusiastic reviews of Ghibli movies galvanized and inspired fans, the renewed interest in Japanese culture gave fans who had been around for years reason to hope that more mainstream recognition was soon to follow. And the growing popularity of superflat in high art was reflecting a trend elsewhere: anime was becoming exponentially more popular, with growing fan convention attendance in the US and bigger and bigger sales of home media and merchandise in Japan. Anime and its fandom really left behind the long shadow of Miyazaki and other basement-dwelling creeps and was coming into its own as a medium to be recognized by even the most mainstream and highbrow of cultural critics and consumers.

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.

Welcome to The Golden Ani-Versary of Anime!

A Happy New Year to you, weary traveler.

Look to your left. Look to your right. Remember everything you see around you. That is the current landscape of what you as an anime fan know as the current state of the industry. Remember it as firmly as you can, as there is no way of telling how it will look fifty years from now.

First of all, let me, as editor of this large-scale production, welcome you to what I have dubbed "The Golden Ani-Versary of Anime". While animation as a medium has been thriving in Japan for much longer than 50 years, many of the shows that you watch now can be traced back to one larger-than-life show.

It was back on January 1, 1963, fifty years ago to the date tomorrow, that Tetsuwan Atomu, known as "Astro Boy" in the English-speaking world, debuted on national TV in Japan. The show ran on Fuji TV for a total of four years, but influenced generations of Japanese citizens to strive to be animators, mangaka, directors, and producers, spawning a multi-billion-yen industry that has reached into businesses around the world.

Since 1963, when the number of running televised anime shows could be counted on two hands, anime has exploded into a juggernaut where the number of shows produced on a yearly basis easily hits triple digits. There have been memorable moments, disappointing climaxes, embarrassing endings, and unheralded successes for the past five decades, and as fans and writers, we all have our input as to which shows have made a lasting individual and collective impression.

That's where this blog comes into play.

Over the next six months, we will take a journey through everything that history has recorded in anime, pausing on our way at each year to look at what shows our panel of fifty bloggers and writers consider solid milestones and landmarks. The entries will come in various formats, whether they be essays on the state of the industry at that time, articles on the one show that changed the playing field, or rankings of what the writer considers the important shows of the year.

As the editor, I leave it up to each blogger and writer to present their thoughts, and hopefully by the end of the half-year we'll look back at an encyclopedia of knowledge and appreciation for what we all have embraced as a form of art and entertainment that has quite possibly changed our lives.

A Happy New Year to you, weary traveler. Let's enjoy what the next journey has in store.

 

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