You cannot understand contemporary cinema (that of the last decades) or cinema (to dry) if you do not take anime into account. Perhaps the Western viewer is unable to fully measure the scope of the exchange, largely due to (or because of) critics and historians who relegated animation for too long to the lackluster canton of the childish, always incorporating it reluctantly or untimely into the pages of cinema with capital letters.
However, the cinema of the West found in films and animated series from Asia, especially Japan, a constellation of forms and stories that it appropriated at different times and scales. How much of the visual speed and narrative turns, of the taste for science fiction or aesthetic excess, how much of those gestures that today model the "filmed" cinema were imitated (extracted) for years from the expressive quarry of anime? We refer to that hyperbolic, intensified tradition of moving images, but images that move at their own, different, wayward rhythm. Animation, and especially Japanese animation, is not only a constitutive part of cinema, but one of its most powerful areas, a space open to experimentation, to play with the forms and codes of genres.
Astroboy: cradle and continuity in the history of Japanese popular narrative.
Before the surprises in the 60s with Astroboy, the arrival of giant robots in the following decade, the series in the 80s that regurgitated martial arts cinema for hundreds of chapters, the slow emergence of animators with personal worlds (to which the rubric of auteurs was applied), Japanese animation had had a somewhat tortuous history, similar only at times to that of the West. Anime was born and grew practically at the same time as Japanese cinema, but just like in the United States. UU or Europe, retained a minor cultural plot. Japanese animation has a first boost during the Second War: the war machine receives constant injections of funds; During the conflagration and the rise of state propaganda, animation knows a first moment of consolidation whose sediment will allow in the 60s the explosion and exploration of one of the most spectacular artistic industries on the planet.
Mazinger Z, a classic of Japanese animation.
For many years the products of that factory of forms that anime (baptized with the French word, animated) were known little, badly and with delays. TV was a first way of access: there entered the aesthetic horizon of children and young series such as Mazinger, Cobra, Dragon Ball, Sailor Moon, Ranma or Knights of the Zodiac. The large number of episodes imposed restrictions: TV channels did not always respect the chronological order or modified the programming leaving the stories unfinished. These difficulties, added to the knowledge of other productions thanks to word of mouth and data obtained through magazines, launched the followers of anime and manga (Japanese comics), obsessive scholars identified with the somewhat derogatory title of otakus, to frantic VHS searches that helped recompose the fragmented viewing of TV. and hunting for films and medium-length films whose circulation was confined to the video market. Sporadic theatrical releases were added, the number of which was increasing: after the year 2000, with oscillations, there are several premieres per year. At present, the Argentine viewer has on streaming platforms such as Netflix, Amazon Prime Video or HBO Max (we leave aside the specific ones such as Crunchyroll) a large number of films and series that draw a general map of the present of anime and reconstruct its milestones.
Fables of yesterday and today
The Castle of Cagliostro (1979), included in HBO, is the feature film debut of the consecrated Hayao Miyazaki, who made his first weapons in the big leagues of anime (there were still some years before the foundation of the mythical Ghibli studio). The success of Kazuhiko Katō's Lupin III comic strip and its television adaptation set the stage for one of the major international milestones. The extraordinary Cagliostro tells a new adventure of the famous thief Arsenio Lupin. On this occasion, the noble swindler robs a casino and discovers that the bills are counterfeit. Frustration leads him to the forger's trail in the small country of Cagliostro, ruled by a mysterious count. The elegance and playful spirit with which Miyazaki narrates Lupin's plans and setbacks belong to a lost cinema. The melancholic jazz of Joe Hisaishi, who would be the main composer of the Ghibli studio, but also one of the greatest in Japanese cinema, ends up imbuing Cagliostro with the charm of an unrepeatable sensibility.
Hayao Miyazaki, creator of the legendary Ghibli studio together with his collaborator Isao Takahata.
In 1985, with more than fifteen years of experience in the animation and manga industry, Miyazaki founded the Ghibli studio with his collaborator Isao Takahata, with the aim of replicating the Disney experience in Japan. Ghibli would become the emblem of anime on a planetary scale, a seal marked by fantastic and long-term stories, which mix interest in science fiction and visual realism with national traditions. Also, it would synthesize the old desire to replicate in Japan the experience of Disney and its empire of stories, myths and forms.
The Netflix catalog includes much of the studio's production, from the most popular to others less remembered. Some, such as Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984), My Neighbor Totoro (1988), Princess Mononoke (1997) or Spirited Away (2001) already have legendary status and condense Ghibli's creative program: they are stories that take place in decidedly fantastic universes, in which battles are fought between forces that embody good and evil, or fables that narrate the transition to a magical world, where the young protagonists undertake the entrance to adulthood. There is no child in Japan (and, happily, there are fewer and fewer children in the West) who has grown up outside of these wonderful stories.
Still from the beautiful Spirited Away, by Miyazaki.
Although less remembered, Porco Rosso (1992) is among the best that Miyazaki has ever filmed. If the huge Totoro, Nausicaä or Chihiro open in Disney and in the tradition of pedagogical stories, Porco Rosso tells a story apart from those stridencies. Marco, a pilot who made a name for himself in the First War, subsists as a bounty hunter chasing air pirates in the Adriatic Sea. Miyazaki abandons for a moment the rules of wonderful tales to return to the codes of war and adventure cinema, recovering the elegance of The Castle of Cagliostro. The magic, although concealed, persists: by the work of a secret curse, the protagonist is turned into an anthropomorphic pig.
The influence of Studio Ghibli and Miyazaki on anime is immeasurable. Of the wave of films that every year break that same land stand out those of Mamoru Hosoda, one of the most prolific animators of the moment. The Boy and the Beast (2015), available on HBO and Prime Video, tells the story of Ren, a boy who loses his mother and runs away from home to wander the streets of Shibuya (Tokyo). The story combines martial arts with domestic comedy and the drama of broken families like Disney. The capacity for wonder and emotion of Hosoda's films point to the most outstanding disciple of the tradition set by Ghibli: Miyazaki's exceptional art has offspring and enjoys the best health.
A lot of struggle
An important area of anime from the 80s to this part revolves around martial arts cinema put in dialogue with Asian folklore. For the Western audience, the case that best represents this miscegenation is that of the Dragon Ball series and films. Adapted from the manga by Akira Toriyama, Dragon Ball drank from the waters of wuxia pian (cinema of Chinese swordsmen) and the story of the Monkey King, legend of great pragnanz in countries such as Japan and Hong Kong. The result is a long-winded story that follows the adventures since childhood of Goku, a warrior of Saiyan race who, from Dragon Ball Z (1989-1996), is dedicated almost exclusively to looking for powerful rivals to increase his skills. On HBO you can see Dragon Ball Z Kai, launched in 2009 for the 20th anniversary of the series, a new version that significantly improves the audiovisual work and reduces almost by half the number of chapters (from 291 to 167), maintaining the narrative and stylistic spirit.
Dragon Ball.
Kai proposes two ways of seeing them: one aims at the younger generations, who knew the story of Goku and his friends through later sagas (such as Dragon Ball GT), or through other cultural products (films, video games and merchandising), and another, aimed at adults interested in reliving the television experience of the 90s, which for many was of a formative nature. that is, the same aesthetic function that the nineteenth century delegated to the genre of Bildungsroman, that is, of formation of the character of the protagonist.
The remarkable validity of Dragon Ball Z in popular culture is evident in the many contemporary fighting anime whose narrative arc revolves around the realization of a tournament. Co-produced by Netflix, Baki (2018) and Kengan Ashura (2019) deploy brutal updates of that format. Both narrate the preparation for a fighting contest in which a protagonist with a dark past must prove his courage against warriors as charismatic as ruthless. The pleasure of characterological description fills the combats and oxygenates them with biographical data and revelations: in this type of anime, as already happened in Dragon Ball Z, the fight is always an occasion for narrative deployment that exceeds the physical fight and intensifies it. These anime show another access to images and their temporality: a combat can be delayed for chapters and the aesthetic enjoyment lies in the exchange of dialogue: a strange paradox for Western audiences, since physical action allows the revitalization of the oral word.
The End of Innocence
From its beginnings, anime found in science fiction a trunk of tools that could be appropriated at will. This relationship goes back to the 60s and the Astroboy of the great Osamu Tezuka (for many, the father of Japanese animation), and is consolidated in the following decade with the mecha genre, which brings together stories in which a handful of humans must pilot gigantic robots and face monsters from outer space, of a lost civilization or the feverish mind of a mad scientist. The foundations laid by Mazinger Z in 1974 were followed and readapted in the following years by Grand Mazinger, Grendizer, Getter Robo or Tetsujin-28, among many others.
Evangelion, the success of the Japanese Hideaki Anno.
The evolution of the genre remained more or less stable until Evangelion in 1995. Hideaki Anno's series, on Netflix, subverts all mecha conventions: the pilot is no longer a testosteronic and arrogant teenager but an introverted and doubting young man with an inferiority complex. The usual succession of rivals takes the form of surprise attacks by "angels", monstrous and multiform creatures of unknown origin. Each battle leads the pilots to a state of increasing physical and moral exhaustion and reveals the operations of a network of corporations vying for the management of the Evas and the safeguarding (or final immolation) of humanity. As the series progresses, religious symbolism, silences, dead times and leaks of meaning multiply. The ending, anticlimactic, inscrutable, borders on total incomprehension. To the fury of the fans, the director responded with a manga and two films (also in Neflix) that complete the story but add more questions than certainties. Like Toriyama with Dragon Ball, Hideaki Anno raised an enduring myth. After Evangelion nothing would be the same for mecha stories. The genre lost once and for all the willful and energetic innocence of its beginnings.
Any myth ensures its survival in the continuity of its reproduction mechanisms. For Evangelion, that process began in 2008 with four films (included in Prime) that retell the events of the 1995 series and imagine new narrative coordinates set in other universes. Retelling is a frequent operation in anime, as well as the habit of introducing narrative transformations into a well-known story that reinvent it: Evangelion: 1.0 You Are (Not) Alone (2008), the first film of the new cycle, inscribes the myth of Anno in that joyful circuit of playful rereadings. It is, basically, a case similar to that of stories in the oral age, indelibly inscribed in the popular imagination.
Fear and trembling
The impertinences committed again and again by Hideaki Anno against the mecha genre were made possible by an authorial tradition, consolidated more or less a decade earlier, that enabled creative detours. In the 80s, in addition to the stylized wonders of Miyazaki, the Ghibli label or the more or less anonymous modes of television series such as Dragon Ball, a quarry of animators affirmed their personal visions of the world and an exploration of the expressive limits of the medium.
One of those animators is Katsuhiro Otomo, who after long years of experience in manga, shorts, medium and collective feature films, has with Akira (1988) a success on a planetary scale. Akira appropriates the then still nascent current of cyberpunk, established shortly before in novels such as Neuromancer or in films such as Blade Runner. In a dystopian and technified future, a group of orphans lives performing petty theft and vandalism while waging wars with other gangs, until one of them is captured by an unknown organization and subjected to strange experiments. The noir story is imbricated with the crazed science fiction that surrounds the transformations of Tetsuo, apparent repository of psychic powers similar to those of an extrasensory entity called Akira, whose ominous presence threatens to destroy the city of Neo-Tokyo again. With formidable aesthetic forcefulness, Akira anticipates in several decades the renaissance of sci-fi cinema and retains, without a hint of loss, its ability to stun senses and reason alike.
Akira. First manga, then anime and finally film with real actors.
A decade later, thanks to the path opened by Otomo and others, Satoshi Kon returns with Perfect Blue (1998), one of the great promises of anime. Admirer of the new waves of cinema of the 60s, cultist of the strange and attentive reader of surrealism, Kon made perhaps his most remembered film – Tokyo Godfathers (2003) – and his only classic film. He died at age 46 from cancer. Paprika (2006) confirms that the director would have followed a modernist path: his filmography suggests that the traditional melodrama of Tokyo Godfathers would have been a luminous exception in that trajectory inclined to experimentation.
Science fiction knotted with the noir has another key chapter in Ghost in the Shell (1995), by Mamoru Oshii, another animator with a world rabidly his own, Otomo's generation mate. One of his first works, The Angel's Egg (1985), is one of the most enigmatic animated films ever made. Ghost in the Shell (Prime Video and Netflix) follows a group of elite agents tasked with national security cases. In Oshii's fable, people improve their bodies with implants until they become hybrids: from the thriller noir to an existential drama where uncertainty devours everything. Anime, that intensified area of cinema that critics often overlook, is also forged around those essential questions and their shudders.
See also