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http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/09/0916_030916_millenniumactress.html#main
Mostly stuff we already knew, but a moderately interesting read anyway.
Mostly stuff we already knew, but a moderately interesting read anyway.
Cartoons for Grown-Ups, Japan's Anime Draws Millions
Stefan Lovgren in Los Angeles
for National Geographic News
September 16, 2003
It has tens of millions of fans around the world, more than 30,000 Web sites, and its artists are household names in Japan.
Yet most Americans have never heard of anime (AN-uh-may), the elastic definition used to describe all Japanese animated movies.
Thus, when Millennium Actress, voted Best Animated Feature at the 2001 Fantasia Festival in Montreal, finally arrived in the United States last Friday, it quietly snuck into only a handful of art house theaters.
Anime films from Japan like Millennium Actress (scenes pictured above) have long drawn a large cult following for the genre. But can the highly-stylized films break into the mainstream with filmgoers?
That's a shame, say die-hard anime fans, who cherish Japanese animation for its imagination, adult themes, and unconventional storytelling techniques.
"Think of every cartoon you've ever seen, and then remove all limitations," said Patrick Drazen, author of the book Anime Explosion! "In anime, anything becomes a viable topic and nothing is beyond the abilities of the artist."
A Search for Love
The premise of Millennium Actress, the first release by Go Fish Pictures, an independent arm of Dreamworks Pictures, is simple enough.
A documentary filmmaker and his cameraman travel to a remote mountain lodge to interview Chiyoko Fujiwara, a reclusive former movie star who disappeared from public view 30 years ago. When presented with a key that unlocks her memories, Chiyoko begins to tell her life story.
As a young girl, she bumps into an injured artist who is fleeing from the police. Chiyoko hides him in a storage house—and promptly falls in love. Before she can learn his identity, however, the stranger is gone, leaving behind only a mysterious key.
But here's where things get complicated. Chiyoko's lifelong search for her elusive love is told through her movies. As her identity changes in each movie, so does that of her love interest. Further blurring fantasy and reality, the documentarians soon enter her movies and begin interacting with the plots.
"The storytelling in Western animation is usually linear," said Frank Gladstone, head of artistic development at Dreamworks. "Eastern animation is more circuitous."
Time periods and settings shift as Chiyoko's roles take her through centuries of Japanese history. She travels back to the 15th century Warring States period; through the time of the rule by the Shogunate; the rise of the Emperor in the 19th century; the militancy of the Showa before World War II; and life in post-war Japan through the occupation.
It's a whirlwind history lesson, albeit with a cinematic twist.
"I wanted to intertwine fragments of Japanese history with the story of Chiyoko's life," said Satoshi Kon, the director of Millennium Actress. "Historical verification doesn't really matter. We created this film with our vision of Japanese history."
Blurring Fantasy and Reality
Kon earned rave reviews for his first movie, 1997's Perfect Blue. Interweaving fantasy and reality, it tells the story of a pop singer-turned-actress who is stalked by fans in both cyberspace and the real world. In this thriller, Kon often switches to the heroine's point of view without warning his viewers.
Millennium Actress is equally demanding to watch. But the shifts in time and place are cleverly conceived. The movie creates the blurring of fantasy and reality because, in Chiyoko's memories, the two mirror each other.
On the downside, some of the dialogue, perhaps lost in the translation from Japanese to English, comes across a little wooden. And even though Millennium Actress is a love story, it lacks real emotional punch. American audiences may find it hard to accept the minimalist and often "jerky" animation.
"This is just a convention that the Japanese have come to accept over time as natural," explained Drazen. "Animation started for them in the early 1960s when Japan was still recovering from the war and resources were limited. Cartoons for Japanese TV were drawn less smoothly than Bugs Bunny, which was drawn for movie house short subjects."
From Samurais to Robots
Anime is closely integrated with comic books, or manga as they are known in Japan, as well as video games. Animated mini-movies have been used in Japanese video games for years, and many films began in the pages of comic books.
It's also common for anime to borrow from both Hollywood and Japanese cinema. Millennium Actress pays homage to the samurai epics of Akira Kurosawa, Godzilla movies, and Casablanca.
Themes are reoccuring, from the tragedy of war to gender-bending romances. Some characters, like samurais and giant robots, seem to pop up in almost every anime movie.
"Anime reflects the culture out of which it grew, like Hollywood movies reflect American beliefs and values," said Drazen. "American movies emphasize the lone hero and the rebel. Japanese culture is based on the group, whether the clan or the nation or one's job or high school class. Loners in anime aren't always right or always victorious just because they're rebels."
With parts of it set during and after World War II, Millennium Actress also has a distinct anti-authoritarian streak. Drazen says it has become proper in anime to denounce the military imperialism that ruled Japan from about 1895 to 1945. Add to this a very public backlash to the wave of revelations in the 1990s about scandals and corruption among high government officials.
Whether Millennium Actress will find a U.S. audience remains to be seen, but fans think U.S. acceptance of the artform is long overdue.
"Americans have now grown up on video games and other forms of entertainment being made in Asia," said Ron Scovil, who runs the Anime Web Turnpike, perhaps the most popular anime Web site in the United States with almost 1.8 million readers. "The action, attention to detail, and varied story types are what's drawing in new fans."
Adds Gladstone, the Dreamworks executive: "Americans have pigeon-holed animation as a genre for kids. In Japan, anime has its own genres. It can be science fiction, romance, or sophisticated dramas."