I have a question for you, dear readers. It’s actually a question that my husband came up with. We were in the middle of watching the anime series Gurren Lagann. Gurren Lagann is a very enjoyable show, mixing high action, over the top giant robot battles with surprisingly engaging characters and involving stories. But the question that came up while we were watching it had more to do with anime in general. My husband commented on how anime – just about any anime – still felt special to him. I agreed that there was a particular thrill that I got from watching anime, different from the excitement I get from watching other kinds of animation.
A little background: when my husband and I were younger, Japanese animation was not readily available in the U.S. Some kid-friendly shows from Japan were being shown on American television, as had been the case for decades before. But such shows were few and far between. Fans looking for anime aimed at an older audience had limited options. A local Japanese import shop might have boasted a decent selection of videos. Regular video retail stores were a crapshoot. Videos, and later DVDs, usually had between two and three episodes of a show per tape or disc and cost around $30 each. Budding otaku were lucky to find a single row of anime videos at the video rental store, often indiscriminately labeled “Adults Only” whether the film in question was Akira or My Neighbor Totoro.
It’s a very different story today. Anime has won mainstream acceptance, thanks to the success of kid-friendly shows like – love it or hate it – Pokemon. Anime and anime-inspired shows remain staples of many networks’ children’s programming blocks. Some channels, most notably cartoon network with their Adult Swim block, show anime targeted towards older viewers. DVD rental websites like Netflix feature robust anime collections, as do sites like Amazon for those looking to buy. Anime is everywhere.
I’m not trying to portray myself as someone who liked anime “before it was cool” or define the time when I first discovered Japanese animation as “the good old days.” Far from it. I can remember the frustration of purchasing one of those $30 DVDs with only three episodes on it and only later discovering that one of the episodes was a clip show. I don’t long for the days when I had to purchase grainy VHS bootlegs of Miyazaki films because there was no other way to see them. (All have since been replaced with legitimate release DVDs.) I love that I can easily rent and view almost any anime series I desire from the comfort of my home, or go and see a film like Ponyo in theaters. Now is unquestionably a better time to be an anime fan than when I was first becoming interested in anime.
All that said, my husband and i couldn’t help but wonder if kids growing up with anime so readily available will regard it with the same excitement that we do. I think there’s still a part of us that thinks of anime as something new and different, maybe because we are rather picky and don’t watch that much of it. One generation’s cutting edge will inevitably become another’s boring mainstream. So anime becoming more accepted and less fringe is neither unexpected nor something to fight against. What I wonder is just where we are in that cycle. Do today’s kids still see anime as something new and different, or has it become what they expect to see on TV?
What do you think? How did you first discover anime and how do you see it today? Do you think anime has lost it’s newness and is ripe to be replaced by a different animation style? Or does it still have the power to thrill audiences like no other kind of animation?
The image is this article is copyright Pioneer Entertainment.
