2003, Part 3: Ten More for the Road

Last time, Bradley talked about some of the most notable series that aired in 2003. This time, he concludes by talking about some of the more obscure series you might have missed, and closing with a comparison of anime in 2003 and anime a decade later.

And now, our exciting conclusion...

So in addition to stalwart anime subject matter like giant robots and bouncing breasts, 2003 also had plenty of weird, out-there stories. Kino's Journey is one such anime, based on an adaptation of some unconventional material, this time from a light novel series telling the tale of a boy and his talking motorcycle who travel a world with an incredible variety of cultures and wildlife. Kino's stories often bloom into short, poignant observations about life that echo many of Aesop's Fables. Combined with a muted but very pretty animation style, this is a series that really earns its moments of emotional resonance with a little bit of fairy tale magic and a lot of earnestness.

Also weird but a lot more pretentious was the follow-up to the depressing and beautiful Haibane Renmei from writer Chiaki J. Kanaka and character designer Yoshitoshi ABe: Texhnolyze. The two created a vibrant yet depressing cyberpunk world with underground fights between cyborgs and social strife that become gang wars. It's an utterly surreal watch, but difficult to penetrate. Partly this is because the story is non-linear, but also because the pacing is really slow, which doesn't quite fit the action that the DVD cover promises with an angry kid with a metal arm looking like he's ready to punch someone.

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.