Amazing Anime

The other day I rented a new anime based on a famous manga. The main chara is this CB kami, cuter than Pokemon and as dishy as Can Can Bunny, who's pursued by an evil mecha--a total SD kaiju. I loved the OAV. And so of course, like a real otaku, I had to run out and buy the OST.*

Reader, come back! We promise to use standard English (mostly) from now on. And if the words get too gnarly, relax and look at the pictures: those Frisbee-eyed kids, the guys with their steel-sinewed biceps, the heroines' celluloid bosoms that defy gravity and logic--and all with spiky hair that could really use some mousse.

At first the argot of anime (rhymes with Connie Mae) can sound as inscrutable as, say, Japanese to a guy in Joliet, Ill. But the only two words you need to know are anime, the Japanese animated films that are made for theaters, TV and home video; and manga, the graphic novels (upmarket comic books) on which most anime films are based. Together they dominate Japan's narrative media. Manga account for a third of all books published there, anime for about half the tickets sold to movies.

Finally this worldwide cult is colonizing the U.S. For a decade, animania has sprouted vagrantly in the land of Walt Disney and Hanna-Barbera, its true believers convening in comic-book stores, on the Web and at conventions like last month's Anime Weekend Atlanta. But the form needed a blockbuster and a benediction from the critics. Enter Pokemon (nuff said) and Princess Mononoke, a daunting ecological epic by anime god Hayao Miyazaki, now being released by art-house arbiter Miramax Films. All the latter movie did, in 1997, was become the highest-grossing film in Japanese history (later topped only by Titanic).

So what is anime? Easier to ask: What isn't it? An American cartoon is simple to define. It's Disney--the Disney style of romantic realism, questing kids and cute critters. Anime is all kinds of differents. "There isn't a single artistic style in anime," says Helen McCarthy, British author of four books on the subject, including Hayao Miyazaki: Films, Themes, Artistry. "The major difference from Disney-style animation is the limitless possibilities existing in anime." If you can dream it, anime-tors can draw it.

Anime is kids' cartoons: Pokemon, oh, yes, and Sailor Moon, a TV series about intergalactic Spice Girls that airs in a heavily edited version on the Cartoon Network. But it's also post-doomsday teen fantasies (Akira), futuristic fly-boy films (The Wings of Honneamise), schizo-psycho thrill machines (Perfect Blue), sex-and-samurai sagas (Ninja Scroll)--the works. "If you want to see a story told as fast as the most exciting comic book," McCarthy says, "but with amazing movement, music and dialogue, that's what you get from anime."