Anime Magic

David Jenkins reaches beyond the Adults Only aisle to delve into the world of Japanese Animation.

Aug 10 2006

Walk into any record shop in London and you’ll find: the rack holding the Japanese animation DVDs (or 'anime' to those in the know) – more often than not be located opposite or adjacent to the Adults Only section. Ask managers why this is and they'll give you a 'beats me?' shrug while swiftly alerting the store detectives to your presence. So how has anime acquired a reputation which places it on a par with a porn? To redress the balance, the NFT are putting on a season of screenings in order to place the genre in a higher-brow light.

Kicking off this week and continuing throughout August, the season presents a neat cross-section of films, shorts and animated series which otherwise wouldn't have made it to these shores. If nothing else, these selections seek to reintroduce a genre whose breadth is constantly widening and, as such, is managing to gradually transcend its early pigeonholing.

First up is a week's worth of screenings of Isao Takahata's exercise in racoon anthropomorphism, 'Pom Poko', in which a plucky band of tanuki use their special powers to avert a housing development that is progressively impinging on their natural habitat. It's one of the lesser known Studio Ghibli films (the animation house Takahata co-founded with Hayao Miyazaki), but still manages to reach the unfathomably high standards of quality control the studio calls for.

Eschewing conformist animation styles in favour of something a little more wilfully expressionistic is Masaaki Yuasa's waywardly enjoyable 'Mind Game'; a love story about Nishi, a comic book writer who is given another chance to live after he is brutally shot (in the anus) by a bullying pro footballer. The rich textures of the animation gracefully fluctuate between surreal flights of fancy and tender, romantic whimsy, with the bulk of the story taking place in the belly of a malevolent whale. Produced by Studio 4°C (responsible for 'The Animatrix' films), it's a fantastically executed assemblage of animated flotsam punctuated with moments of dry humour and a heartbreaking final montage which gives the film its message – make every moment count. If Jan Svankmajer ever considered a move to anime, it may look something like this…

Perhaps the most enticing, if not entirely edifying prospect is the screening of Jun Awazu's 'Negadon: The Monster From Mars' which is a 25-minute homage to the great tradition of the Japanese monster movie. The film's most interesting feature is that the human characters do not adhere to the distinctive anime aesthetic (big eyes, small mouth) and are instead engineered to look more true to life.

Indeed, you may want to prepare yourself for a double-take or two as minutiae such as rain drops, plant life and human hair are rendered with such delicate precision as to almost fool the eye. In truth, the film is more like a manifesto for Awazu's visual intentions than it is an original, thought-provoking story but, technically, it marks the director as a major new talent in the animation world.

The only live action feature in the season is Suzuki Matsuo's strikingly droll 'Otakus in Love' about two young manga fanatics who bump into each other on the street and then gradually fall in love. The pair's will-they-won't-they courtship serves as a backdrop to the sprawling manga culture that dominates much of Japan as they take in Manga bars, anime singalongs and dress up as prominent computer game characters.

'Otakus…' is the perfect choice of closing film for this, or any anime season as (with great affection) it provides us with a social context for the preceding films. It also confirms just how life-affirming both Anime and manga can be to some Japanese consumers. So lets just pray they never have to visit one of our culturally reductionist record shops.

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