Notes on anime & animation

by Jim Piper

September 2005

Animation, including Japanese anime, has probably been undervalued by we Americans and by many other filmgoers around the world, thanks to Disney. His - or I should say the Disney Studio's - style and values has made such a splash worldwide that other approaches to animation have trouble registering on filmgoers. It certainly did me that way. The first motion picture my parents took me to was Pinocchio, and though I can't remember how I reacted to it, it so happened that Pinocchio was also the first movie I took my son Chris to, when he was four. The movie ended, the lights came on, I looked at Chris - tears streamed down his cheeks. Maybe I reacted that way too.

It's the total effect. Cartoon storytelling. Bang. Bambi's mother drops dead nearby off camera. Poor Bambi. Poor me. Dark colors. Cold snow. Swelling music. Big, tear-filled eyes. After Bambi, Disney downplayed death. Hardly anyone today remembers that in the original Peter Pan, Tinker Bell nearly expires, her glow dimming like a dying firefly. Contemporary cuts of the movie leave that out. Parents can't deal with death in Disney. Today Disney struggles to keep up. It's once-predominate style, -- the cute furry animals, the cantankerously loveable dwarfs, the clean-living, close-tonature virgins with sexily filledout butts under wasp waists, the modesty and strong family values and loads of sentimentality - this utter Hollywoodization of animation finally fell out of favor with viewers ten years or so ago as studios like Pixar came along with tougher product - Toy Story and A Bug's Life. I mean, there is nothing in The Lady and the Tramp or Peter Pan, my favorite Disney, quite as profound to me as Woody in Toy Story contemplating nothingness as he looks down that infinitely-regressive ventilation shaft. The thing is, animation isn't just for kids. It can be for grown-ups too - and I don't mean the kind of maddingly inoffensive things you can take your kids too, like Monsters, Inc. I mean adultsonly animation. My favorite American animator is Ralph Bakshi whose X-rated Fritz the Cat - Imagine! An X-rated animated film! -- full of pig cops and pot-smoking college students, and the rotoscoped American Pop, a lively history of rock 'n' roll with plenty of sex and drugs, are about as far from Disney as Sin City is from Donald Duck.

I started teaching film in 1970 and discovered nonAmerican, unmawkish animators like Norman McLaren of Canada who made short, socially significant animated films and the Germans Walter Ruttmann and Oskar Fischinger who experimented with abstract, changing geometric shapes. I went to animation film festivals and discovered an exciting world of anything-goes animation that made Disney look like a heavy-footed realist. It's sad that most Americans don't know a thing about alternative animation. But the Japanese with their anime - a Japanese word derived from "animation" -- are changing all this. Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away actually won an Oscar a few years ago. It's been a long time since Disney has won an Oscar. The mantle passes. What then is anime? It's a captivating mix of fantasy, cynicism, innocence, corruption, realism, original artwork, and myth. When I saw Miyasaki's Princess Mononoke I blinked and blinked. I couldn't believe the depth of the film, the breadth, the subtlety, the maturity, the wondrous emotions it stirred in me. Howl's Moving Castle may affect you something like this too.