Hello, pandemic stay-homers. Are you bored? Have you seen literally everything American networks and studios produced in the last five years, including the terrible things, and including the things even more awful than those? Are you fighting to keep yourself from acquiring new hobbies that will cause you to spend thousands of dollars you don't have to fill your home with hundreds of things you don't have room for? Not a gaming fan? Not into sports, much less reruns of sports?
You could do worse than trying a bit easy-to-digest foreign culture, right? Probably. Usually. Maybe it will be your cup of tea; maybe it won't, and that's fine too. If American television has been seeing a bit of an animation revival, albeit in sporadic fits and starts, it's due in at least some part to the influence of Japanese animated shows and movies. That’s not to say that the Japanese market hasn’t seen its share of stagnation and trope-entrapment itself, mind you, but in the United States the medium has descended from the more-adult-oriented-than-it-now-looks spectacle of an early Flintstones to a three-tiered system that struggles to produce anything not (1) specifically geared towards young children, (2) the "edgy" or not so edgy sitcom formats of The Simpsons, Family Guy, or South Park, or (3) the Disney "event" movies.
What It Is
It’s not Disney. There are no singing woodland creatures in Japanese animated shows. Usually. Well, with some notable exceptions. There is a folklore-famous rabbit that goes on a killing spree; that's not quite the same thing, and certainly skips the treacle. There are endless superhero shows, but in anime versions the superheroes tend to lean far less on Burly Punching Man tropes and more on unexplained magical powers manifested in exasperated children. There's some top notch horror, if that's your thing. There are enough young people in love romances that you could fill a dump truck, drive it up to your house, and make a ski ramp from the DVDs.
Anime, or simply animated movies and television, has a breadth that puts most recent American efforts to shame, but in past decades it was often difficult for American audiences to get into. The reasons are not hard to understand. The language differences; a handful of pretty significant cultural differences; the difficulty, until recent years, of being able to find any if you wanted to; an often weird, weird fanbase that can obsess over fictional worlds with the same protective fury that American obsessives might display over Batman, Harry Potter, or Game of Thrones.
And, of course, the always-present mountains of sheer crap. Good God, there's a lot of crap. Randomly tune in to any network channel in America and nine times out of ten you will be watching crap, which is one of the reasons you are bored right now, as we speak. There are countless foreign production companies that produce unambitious channel filler in similarly copious volumes, and this leads to the biggest blockade newcomers to Japanese and Korean animation find before them: how to find the good stuff before becoming so disillusioned with the whole experiment that they give up.
So let's help with that last one. This will be a short little series answering the question that follows every conversation in which someone mentions the name of a usually-Japanese animated show with praise. I liked Spirited Away or Princess Mononoke or [insert name of any other top-notch work by Hayao Miyazaki's Studio Ghibli here], but is there any more stuff like that? All I can find is things like Pokemon.
Everyone wants more Studio Ghibli, unless they are Wrong and a Jerk. Trying to find it can be a bit like changing the channel from the ultra-satisfying conclusion to your favorite movie to find yourself on a QVC show promoting a new kind of blender. It can cause physical nausea, and nobody wants that.
With no further ado, let's get to the actual ado. We’ll start with some questions and their answers, just so even the newest of newcomers can find their bearings.
I liked Spirited Away, where can I find more movies like—
Yeah, got it. Well, have you tried the not-as-famous Miyazaki films? Hayao Miyazaki is rightly dubbed the Walt Disney of Japanese animation. He has produced numerous classics, each with lasting influence on the genre. It's all family-friendly. A partnership with Walt Disney Studios has brought most of them into the American market, with solidly done English voiceovers.
My Neighbor Totoro is the most famous. A Japanese family moves to the countryside, where the family's two young children immediately encounter mysterious but friendly forest spirits. It's got a Catbus. It's got the Catbus. Everyone, and I mean everyone, loves Catbus. Harry Potter only wishes it had Catbus.
Kiki's Delivery Service easily matches anything Walt Disney ever produced. A young girl is tasked with proving herself as an apprentice witch by moving to the big city, where she struggles to find a role for herself despite not feeling particularly skilled at doing anything. It’s a family-friendly coming of age story with magic, and the requisite black cat, coming along for the ride.
Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind is a beautiful and mystical look at a post-apocalyptic world in which humans screwed up and have been displaced by new flora and fauna that renders even the air toxic across most of the world. Coping with that environmental legacy is now, literally, an existential question. An early masterpiece, you can see scenes and techniques used here that Miyazaki would return to in later films—sometimes to even better effect.
Porco Rosso is an oddball, an ambiance-rich homage to 1930s aviation. A world-famous but soul-haunted ace pilot battles sky pirates over the Adriatic Sea, achieving dominance in part due to brilliant young engineer Fio. Also, Porco is a pig. Not a cute little pig, but a full-size market hog dressed smartly in aviator gear. Also also, as a work originally planned as an in-flight film exclusive to Japan Airlines, a core message of this adventure flick is that you can do almost anything to an airplane and it will still fly—to the point where life-and-death battles between bounty hunters and sky pirates are, in the film’s world, the basis for a thriving air tourism trade.
What all these particular films have in common, you may later observe, is strong and/or heroic female characters. There is no maudlin come-save-me-ism here—except in Porco Rosso, where characters that expect it are quickly given a thrashing. Nausicaä may be too slow-paced and oblique to land with the youngest viewers; the rest are near-sure hits. You can also try the more recent Howl’s Moving Castle, probably the closest equivalent of Spirited Away in theme.
Okay, it's been two weeks and I watched all of those and a few other feature-length movies besides. Again starved for entertainment, I'm ready for round Not-Miyazaki. Help.
For starters, a lot of this stuff I’m looking at isn't dubbed, but only comes with subtitles. I am now officially nervous and intimidated.
You will find that the argument over whether to watch subs or dubs, or subtitled versus dubbed releases, is among the most contentious frothy hate-fights among the anime obsessed. Ignore those people. They are weird and everybody avoids them. Do what you want.
As with all foreign films and television shows, the central question around rerecording dialog for different languages and audiences versus providing only textual subtitles is how well each effort was done. This particular battle, however, was specifically born of some not-pleasant corporate choices in the 1990s, as Japanese animation was just beginning to catch hold in America and Canada after being first introduced to each country via bootlegs and piracy. So there's quite a bit of spite behind it.
Settle back and I shall tell of the old ways, and of the battles of our ancestors.
In ye olden days, the first anime imports were bootlegged versions by devoted fans with subtitles provided by the bootleggers themselves. Those subtitles were amazingly gawdawful, with English translations that ranged from barely coherent to inexplicable. Japanese idioms were presented literally, similar-sounding words were flubbed, and so on. It was either quirky and charming or ... not. It was anime potluck, and fans got whatever got brought. Those early bootlegs proved that there was an audience for Japanese content in this country, and possibly a sizable one. A new marketplace had been born.
The first officially for-profit anime distribution into this hemisphere, in contrast ... yeah, there’s no sugarcoating this. It was also done on the Extreme Cheap. Oh, the newly licensed shows had voiceovers. They definitely had voiceovers. And those voices were infamously out-of-sync with the animated mouth movements, and were done not necessarily by professional actors, or even semiprofessional ones, but by whoever the importing company could corral into a voiceover session with the offer of a cold sandwich.
The results are things you probably saw on your own television set if you are a certain age and were a child at a certain time. Things like Speed Racer, a minor hit of a show so cheaply animated as to make Scooby Doo's more slapdash scenes look like artwork, with English voices piped into the show from, apparently, a crew that was not allowed to look at the animation they were attempting to translate.
This era of shows thrilled, but also traumatized, a generation. And not traumatized in the pleasant way, as when badly dubbed Godzilla movies amped up that franchise’s inherent camp into something that went from surreal to manic fever dream, but in a bad way, such that 50-year-old men are now fighting on the internet as to whether dubbing foreign shows into English at all is, in fact, the work of devilry.
More recent marketing decisions would not help. A certain company that shall remain nameless became infamous for "Americanizing" its imported children's fare: Where a character on kids’ show Pokémon might once have been biting into an easy-to-eat Japanese staple, the rice ball, or opening up a bento (lunchbox) featuring a typically sparse-on-meat Japanese meal, now the animation might be overlaid with hamburgers, hot dogs, or white-bread sandwiches in an attempt to spare delicate North American yutes from the absolute terror of seeing someone eat something that could not be found for two bucks at a truck stop.
That's right. They may have been importing these things onto American televisions, but they still were sure that those shows would never be accepted by American audiences unless they hid every last bit of foreign content they could, tricking the audience into thinking this story of supernatural battle monsters was taking place in, say, Nebraska.
So now we all feel slightly worse about ourselves, right? Yeah. We suck.
The good news is that those days are mostly behind us, and anime is now so popular with American audiences that anything expensive enough to be both imported and dubbed will be dubbed by a cast of professionals. The bad news is that the results, as with any corporate work of art, can be mixed. If you're watching Fullmetal Alchemist or Cowboy Bebop, watch them in English—the casts are great, the acting is solid, the tone of each show carries over with nothing lost. If you're watching an older show brought to foreign audiences during earlier times, or a newer and not-especially-popular show brought to this country still on-the-cheap, the dullness of the acting might be so unbearable that it ruins the entire show.
For those who want to duck a while into another nation's cultural norms, quirks, and tics, however, the same rules hold true for Japanese animated fare that hold for Swedish or French art films: Without the original voices saying the original lines, with subtitles used only as minimalist bridge from there to here, the art is stripped of a layer of its original meaning.
If you're watching a kids' show with the family, get over yourself. You're not at the Met, and nobody asked your opinion on whether Hasbro Toy #32, available in stores now, delivered their lines with the same rodent-like squeak the original actress brought to the role. If you're watching near-broken wanderers navigating through dystopian gloom and murk, precise tones and turns of phrase might be more significant and you’re allowed to notice and enjoy that.
In practice, this all goes one direction and none of it is so high-minded. Most people start with the translated-to-English shows, usually the shows that already made it to American television via Adult Swim or a few other past risk-takers. For anyone who churned through those and now wants even more, the subtitles get turned on and the library of available titles becomes enormous. Fans that get hooked, truly hooked, on specific genres or specific constructed worlds begin to catch on to the subtleties of language—why is this character referred to as san, not kun? Why is ganbatte translated twenty different ways?—and might find themselves subconsciously missing those newly internalized cues and nuances in conversations rewritten into English.
You said genres. There're going to be genres?
Of course, but it’s not fussy stuff. Each has a direct and obvious U.S. equivalent. There are shows aimed at children and at adults. There are fantasy worlds, sci-fi worlds, sports dramas, shows designed to appeal mostly to young girls, to young boys, or comedy fans, or horror enthusiasts.
The differences are often in the tropes; certain genres reuse the same story tropes so eagerly that some shows seem to be satirizing each other. (Psst: Many are.) Layered on top of older, well-entrenched manga (serialized comics) genres like shounen, shoujo, mecha, isekai and the like, we're now in a new era of anime in which North American companies are so eager for anime content that they're willing to produce (that is, shell out money for) new series and movies themselves, and these intended-for-world-distribution efforts don’t bother identifying themselves by the Japanese groupings.
It might be marginally useful to know that, for example, isekai lumps together the now furiously popular trend of character-transported-to-alternate-world stories. (It’s hardly new: Even Mark Twain tried his hand at that one.) You might see those terms on fan sites as a quick categorization method, but they are more often put to use to establish social dominance when two or more compulsive anime fans meet online.
You said there'd be no further ado, but actually there has been nothing but ado. You've only been giving ado this whole time. You’re a fraud! Where are the actual recommendations?
I did do that, didn't I? Yeah, that's kind of like me. This was the introduction, the launching point so that we wouldn't be straying hither and thither later on. Not saying there won't be more ado later, but we'll try to, um, space it out. Was any of that at least interesting? A little?
If so, you may have a hundred or so new shows just waiting for you to find them, things both familiar to American audiences and things that delve into folktales, alternate histories, and social pressures that might be refreshingly new.
If you can't stand animation as art form—as in, the Disney movies would bore you to tears even if they did not have incessant musical numbers and forest animals that are always suspiciously good at doing housework, or if you consider the off-and-on-again American animation revival to be a pox, money that could have better been spent creating the next Friends clone, that's okay. You can bow out with no harm done. The advantages of animation as storytelling device remain what they always are: exploring places in this world and on others that cannot be coaxed into existence on film, at least not without the prohibitive costs of a summer blockbuster.
Next time: the low-hanging fruit. The famous shows you’ve heard of and should watch, and the omnipresent shows you’ve heard of but might want to pass on.