Saturday cartoons are a big deal in a kid's life - at least they were for us Gen-Xers. Who can forget the adventures of Scooby-Doo, the Spider Friends (featuring Spiderman), Bugs and Tweety, the ABC Weekend Special marking the end of the animation, all interspersed with snippets from our favorite Schoolhouse, Schoolhouse Rock (featuring that lonely little bill, sitting there on Capitol Hill, patiently waiting to become a law)?
Anime & Me
Then there was anime.
As an adult, I sat down with a friend and watched an anime movie for the first time - I don't remember what it was called, but I do remember lots of blood, guts, and sex - in particular a creature with about twenty-one penises (each of which sported a single eye), raping and pillaging as it went. That put me off anime (and eating) for awhile; then I decided to give it another go - this time sticking to somewhat gentler versions of the genre.
Anime's Enormous Eyes
As a child I had never even heard the word genre, let alone anime, yet I still knew that some cartoons were different. There were cartoons like Bugs Bunny, which were both fun and funny, there were cartoons like Spider Friends, which held notes of seriousness and pathos, and then there were the cartoons with the characters that had the great big shiny eyes.
I was still pretty young when I had begun to group the latter in a class by themselves. Not only were these features easily identifiable by the huge eyes, but by rich story lines. Except for a few (which I will discuss later), I didn't really catch the series too often (such as Speedracer, AstroBoy, etc.) - I'm not certain why this was. Perhaps stations near to us didn't carry them, or perhaps I chalked up some of the above titles as "boy" cartoons - too bad for me if I did, because I probably missed out.
But I did see many of the Japanese-produced feature films and short specials which occurred from time to time. Quite a large number of these carried familiar and well-loved characters I already knew from favorite books; for example, fairy-tales (such as The Little Mermaid) and classics of literature which I would grow to love later on (I remember it was anime that first introduced me to St. Exupery's Un Petit Prince, as well as Kipling's Jungle Book with short productions of "Mowgli and His Brothers", "Rikki-Tikki-Tavi", and "The White Seal").
The best thing about these productions was their faithfulness to the original story lines. I have a very good memory - almost photographic - when it comes to well-loved stories, and a few years ago, long after I had almost memorized word for word Kipling's first Jungle Book, the long-remembered productions of the above-named three, much to my pleasure, were aired on Nickolodeon. I watched them, and was delighted to discover that, if there were any deviations from Kipling's text, they were minute enough so that my ear was unable to detect them (I might also add that "The White Seal" used Beethoven's Pastoral for its soundtrack - an excellent choice).
As a child I first encountered the Jungle Book tales through anime, and seeing the Disney version not long after was a disappointment - not to knock Disney (which often turned out some great animation), but in this case I felt they injured the story line by excessive lightening of the plot and the addition of a number of cutesy songs which left me comparatively untouched.
One of my favorite feature-length cartoons included The Last Unicorn which, with a script by its own author and produced by Japanese artists, included the best of both worlds.
I'm going to provide some links from these pages to some good anime pages, and I plan to add additional author and title information as I see fit in the future. In the meantime, I'm going to content myself with going into the two series I watched the most faithfully growing up, and the ones which first sparked my interst in the anime genre.
