Heads Up, Mickey!

Heads Up, Mickey
Anime may be Japan's first really big cultural export.

By Andrew Leonard

In the universe of Japanese science fiction cartoons, Tokyo is so often pulverized by nuclear explosions - and then rebuilt - the name "Neo-Tokyo" has become a cliché in Japanese animation. In Akira, the most internationally famous of the hypercharged sci-fi flicks, Neo-Tokyo is annihilated not once, but twice. Japan's animated futuristic fantasies carry on a mad love affair with the threats - and possibilities - of technology. They deliver a world in which giant pharaoh-headed robots are run-of-the-mill and every other teenager seems to be able to transform at a moment's notice into a deranged cyborg daemon from another dimension. This is a world populated by humans who crawl and slither like dextrous ants among insanely complex rocket ships and space stations. And that's not all. These lurid visions comprise only one subcategory of the overall genre known in Japan as anime. In Japanese animation, anything goes: a quick glance at the range of anime programs reveals a 50-part animated serialization of the novel Anne of Green Gables, a weekly TV series that depicts the struggles of a fictional soccer team making its way through the playoffs, and soap operas about high school. Fanciful, sensually textured, and hugely popular, anime is more than just an excessively indulged passion for cartoons. It is also Big Business, at least in Japan. Each month, about 100 new anime productions appear on television, video, and film in Japan. While video and theatrical sales of anime products total 15 to 25 billion annually (US$150 to $250 million), that's just a fraction of the hundreds of billions of yen in profits generated by a relentless strategy of cross-merchandising toys, comic books, model kits, and, increasingly, videogames. In 1994, one animated title alone, Lovely Soldier Sailor Moon, a TV series targeting young girls, grossed more than a hundred billion yen in merchandise sales. Now Japanese animators are hoping to export this cultural and economic phenom to the West. For a US entertainment industry desperate to stuff its insatiable content maw, the dream of duplicating the synergistic potential of Japan's cross-merchandised bonanza is tantalizing. Everyone is looking for the next Mighty Morphin Power Rangers toy or Mortal Kombat videogame. "Japanese animation is probably the most exportable part of Japanese culture," notes John O'Donnell, managing director of Central Park Media, a New York-based animation importer and publisher. But despite the increasing popularity of Japanese animation in the United States, anime arrivals on American shores aren't exactly greeted with much fanfare. One particular film, The Wings of Honneamise - regarded by anime connoisseurs as a treasured classic - barely mustered a blip on the pop-culture viewing screen when it was released in the United States in November 1994, seven years after its début in Japan. But this stealth arrival is just the beginning, not the end of the story. For now, the American market for anime may be just a fraction of the US$15-billion-a-year home-video business. Bruce Apar, editor of Video Business magazine, estimates that anime is a US$75 million annual business at most in the US - a microniche. But Apar is quick to note that this market amounted to nil as recently as five years ago. The arrival of big companies like Polygram Video and Orion Home Video is a sure sign of future growth, Apar added. Just in the last year, anime programs have appeared on the Cartoon Network, TNT, TBS, Nickelodeon, and the Science Fiction Channel. If anime keeps booming, one of its giant robots may just gobble up Mickey Mouse.

Considered one of the top 10 films of 1987 by Japanese film critics, The Wings of Honneamise is a bittersweet, introspective tale of an incompetent space program staffed by slacker astronauts who are despised by society at large. It was made by an iconoclastic band of talented twentysomethings who called themselves Gainax. The name is a self-mocking contraction of a Japanese word for great with the English word max. The core members of Gainax had been teenage buddies from well-to-do families who joined up in Osaka, Japan's second largest city. By 1987, they were fanatic animators who slept until noon and never took out the trash, leather-jacketed motorcycle punks who listened to industrial bands like German deconstructionists Einstürzende Neubauten. They had the wherewithal to indulge their obsessions with comic books and animation, publishing their creations in popular fanzines. They saw themselves as creating a lone-wolf company in a country of same-same. Founding members of the group included Hideaki Anno, an animator, Toshio Okada, Gainax's master planner, and Hiroyuki Yamaga, the 26-year-old kid who directed The Wings Of Honneamise. Gainax provides a perfect example of the interconnections between anime as art form and as merchandising vehicle. Before they ever started creating their own anime, the Gainax boys labored long hours manufacturing what are known in Japan as garage kits. In Japan, the English word "garage" is used to differentiate homemade toy kits from the mass-produced injection-molded model kits that are one of the biggest moneymakers for the animation business. Created by a cheap "cold-casting" process using polyurethane resin plastic, the kits usually were based on popular animated characters. Gainax-built kits, however, clearly reflected their manufacturer's quirky sense of humor, and, once assembled, could turn out to be anything from life-size replicas of nearly extinct sea creatures to fantastic imaginary beasts. At first, says Shon Howell, a former Gainax employee, Gainax found it easy to obtain licenses to make garage kits based on established characters. At its height in the late'80s, Gainax had 80 employees. But as the company grew more successful, the licenses became more expensive. Eventually, in addition to the cross-merchandising it already had underway, Gainax began making products based on its own characters. The con circuit In 1984, Gainax began organizing full-scale science fiction conventions that quickly earned a reputation among fans for offbeat events. For instance, at the 1985 DaiCon, an annual science fiction convention held in Osaka, Gainax members called upon their connections in local society to convince the Osaka Philharmonic Orchestra to attend the convention and play a medley of television animation theme tunes. Gainax later used these conventions to showcase self-produced animated short films. One of these shorts attracted the attention of Bandai Company Ltd., a major corporate sponsor of Japanese-animated programming. So in 1986, the members of Gainax convinced the Bandai board of directors to give them about 700 million (US$5 million, at 1986 exchange rates) to produce The Wings of Honneamise. It was, as one Gainax associate put it, "one of the greatest achievements of ballsy fandom in possibly the entire universe."

Until recently, only a subculture of hard-core American fans devoured anime outside of Japan. Often called otaku (Japanese slang for "obsessed fans"), their numbers are estimated at between 50,000 and 100,000 in North America. They are usually young, often Asian-American, and almost always male, although that is changing. If one is to judge by their prolific posting in Usenet newsgroups like rec.arts.anime, a sizable proportion are also computer geeks. As recently as 1991, otaku hungry for an anime fix had limited options. Unless you belonged to an anime viewing club, or regularly attended science fiction and gaming conventions that featured anime showcases, you were stuck, doomed to watch muddy, scratched-up, hundredth-generation copies of bootlegged cassette tapes. Even if the cassette was in good condition, a tape of a program pirated directly off Japanese television and mailed to the United States had limited appeal to non-Japanese speakers. True otaku soon took matters into their own hands. If no one was going to subtitle or dub Japanese animations into English, the otaku would do it themselves, calling it fansubbing. According to one American otaku, Carl Horn, it was possible to set up a fansubbing operation for a relatively low cost. All you needed was an Amiga 500 computer (the otaku machine of choice), some subtitling software (easily obtainable from any of several computer bulletin boards or an anime archive stashed somewhere on the Internet), and a device called a GenLock for matching the video signal with the computer output. No one has a good explanation why otaku and anime subculture thrived on the Internet years before it exploded into mainstream popular consciousness. But there's no question that anime otaku have one of the more computer networked subcultures around. Anime fans expend countless hours online crafting Web home pages festooned with animated art, uploading painstakingly compiled translated scripts of anime programs, and engaging in endless flame wars on every aspect of anime trivia. Such obsessive behavior is a fundamental part of what it means to be an otaku. It's also part of the reason American anime distribution companies are scrambling to diversify their product line, offering comic books, trading cards, games, and even Japanese-style handcrafted model kits. Otaku are the most likely segment of the general population to buy the laser disc collectors' edition of their favorite animated program, along with the CD soundtrack, the complete line of toys, and the role-playing-computer game spinoff.

Anime's big US break took place in 1991 in San Jose, California, at AnimeCon, the first major North American convention solely devoted to anime and manga (the ubiquitous Japanese comic books). With the help of Toren Smith, a comic book writer and adapter of Japanese comics for American readers, the leaders of Gainax organized and financed the convention, hoping to establish a foothold in the American collectibles market. The members of Gainax were special heroes to American otaku: these eccentric geniuses were former otaku themselves. In fact, along with organizing AnimeCon, in 1991, Gainax released an animated "mockumentary" satirizing its own history, entitled Otaku No Video, that gave fans a chance to see how Gainax had started out. Dubbed "the Spinal Tap of Japanese animation" by American fans, Otaku No Video is a tale of a group of megalomaniac otaku whose early activities follow those of the real Gainax - step by step. Interspersed into the story's narrative are a series of interviews with real, live otaku, whose voices and faces have been digitally altered to protect their identities. The interview subjects come across as malformed individuals, pasty-faced refugees from normal life. Toren Smith, who shared a house in Japan in 1988 with several Gainax employees, said the characterization isn't far from the truth. "Their entire life was animation," said Smith. "They never got up until noon, but then they busted their butts all day. They were incredibly hard-working, an extreme example of the creative clique, a group of maniacs working almost completely isolated from the world."

The mid-'80s, when Gainax's fortunes rose, amounted to the golden age of Japanese animation. Anime marketers had learned to skip the stages of theatrical release or television broadcast and aim directly at home-video consumers. Anime creators benefited, especially those who had been working within the tight production schedules imposed by television. Not only did a longer production cycle lead to improved production values, but bypassing television restrictions on content allowed animators to indulge themselves in creating scenes filled with graphic violence or explicit sexual content. Even more important, however, was the booming Japanese economy. In an era when Japanese consumers were spending money like never before, corporations such as Bandai sponsored animated programs as a way of promoting their product lines. For decades, Bandai has been a giant corporate monster towering over the midget industry; it has specialized in sponsoring robot-oriented animation linked to Bandai toys. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, says Trish Ledoux, the editor of Animerica & Manga Monthly, the preeminent anime journal in the United States, Bandai bankrolled so many robot television shows and films that it single-handedly ushered in "the reign of the robot toys." Today, Bandai America Inc. rakes in hundreds of millions of dollars annually as the licensee to manufacture Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. Power Rangers aren't based on animated characters (though it takes a close look at the gaudy-suited teenagers running around in this TV program to be sure), but the cross-merchandising principle hasn't changed in 20 years.

In 1991, the golden age of animation came to an end. Japan's seemingly unstoppable "bubble economy" finally popped. A bruising three-year recession set in. Sales of toys and other anime-related collectibles declined. Corporate advertising support plummeted. Production studios moved offshore. For animators, the choice was stark - starve or find another job. Even the mighty Gainax has not produced an original work of animation under its own name since 1991. Ultimately, argues Ken Iyadomi, a vice president at Manga Entertainment, the American half of the co-production deal that brought The Wings of Honneamise to the United States, Japanese production studios that want to produce quality animation have been forced to look abroad for new sources of financing, thus setting off the rash of co-production deals now prevalent in the industry. "Productions like Wings and Akira are no longer possible," said Iyadomi, a former Bandai producer, "if we target only within Japan. Everybody is seeking business opportunities outside of Japan with productions created using Japanese creative personnel." Like everyone else, Gainax was forced to restructure. But Gainax's attempt to market merchandise in the United States collapsed in disarray, a victim of its own excessive ambition, says Shon Howell, who ran Gainax's US office in 1990 and 1991. Like many other start-up companies trying to maximize a fast-breaking opportunity, Gainax grew too fast. It shed its sideline publishing and merchandising businesses and pulled back from producing original animation. Toshio Okada, formerly Gainax's chief, now lectures on multimedia at Tokyo University. Hiroyuki Yamaga, the director of The Wings of Honneamise, is now Gainax's managing director in charge of multimedia business. Today, computer games are Gainax's staple business, as well as the cause of its most recent notoriety. In January 1994, a strip-tease quiz game created by Gainax (a young woman takes off her clothes in response to correctly answered questions) gave the company a dubious honor: it was this case that set the legal precedent in Japan allowing a prohibition on sales of "sexually explicit" computer games to minors. Gainax claims it hasn't abandoned the production of original animation. The company recently bought a state-of-the-art Silicon Graphics workstation for future creative activities. And star animator Hideaki Anno is now producing a new giant robot TV series. But the emphasis on multimedia shows that the Gainax brain trust has recognized that the return on investment for a successful multimedia software application - such as a computer game - dwarfs what is possible from an animated program. And Gainax isn't the only group of animators expanding beyond animation. Katsuhiro Otomo, the director of Akira, has recently sold the license to a videogame version of Akira to the LA-based company T*HQ Inc. The implications are obvious. In the United States, the dearth of talented multimedia creators is a sore spot for the videogame industry. The huge pool of Japanese animators could be an excellent antidote. If industry observers like Carl Macek and Ken Iyadomi are correct, the international expansion of the market for Japanese animation could open opportunities for studios such as Gainax. But Gainax, which prides itself on displaying the movie know-how that game products need, may instead take advantage of an equal demand for multimedia talent. Already, an English version of one of Gainax's most popular role-playing-games, Princess Maker, is due for release in the United States.

Not everyone is excited about Hollywood's discovery of anime. The otaku - long the mainstays of the American market for anime - are particularly worried. They're suspicious of a distribution deal between Hollywood's Orion Home Video and Carl Macek's Streamline Video to release - among other titles - a Japanese animated version of Orion's star property, Robocop, complete with the whole range of cross-merchandised games, toys, and collectibles. Many American otaku are purists who draw the line at any kind of alteration of the original product that goes beyond subtitling. English dubs are blasphemy. The Hollywoodization of anime is seen as cultural imperialism at its most insidious. But animation as art form in both the United States and Japan has always been a product of cross-fertilization. The "Walt Disney" of Japanese animation, Osamu Tezuka, credits the real Walt Disney as his muse. Frederik Schodt, author of the seminal English language guide to Japanese comic books, Manga! Manga!, points to the big blue eyes characteristic of so many Japanese animated figures as evidence of Disney's effect on Tezuka's work. Such influences continue to travel in both directions. Animator Koichi Ohata, the creator of a dark and disturbing animated series called Genocyber, recalled being inspired by the early 1980s American animated film Heavy Metal. Japanese animators also claim that large sections of Disney's The Lion King were lifted straight from a film created by Tezuka. And Toren Smith, an American comic book writer who adapts Japanese comic books for the US market, says the traditional Japanese attention to detail, with its deeply textured individual frames, informs everything from MTV videos to Disney's recent animated television series, Gargoyles. Gainax itself laced its work with references to American science fiction. Before making The Wings of Honneamise, the members of Gainax visited the US, toured NASA installations, and gawked at the scenery of New York City as part of their research. The reception of anime in the West is still uncertain. Will it remain a cult of otaku, an obsession of online geeks, or will it be the next Sega? The key members of Gainax are now hardly into their 30s. In their own pseudo-history, Otaku No Video, they take over every aspect of the animation business, pushing cross-merchandising to such a degree that they even establish their own animation-business theme park, OtakuLand. Their message: They aren't finished yet. To take your own trip to animeland, ftp to venice.tcp.com and remus.rutgers.edu. The best starting point for Web surfing is at http://server.berkeley.edu/CAA.

Andrew Leonard (aleonard@well.sf.ca.us) is a freelance writer based in Berkeley, California. He specializes in cyber-Asia.