Cartoon cold war

It's wrong to view Japanese anime as a distant planet, says David Jenkins.

Jan 17 2007

In the early 1950s, animator Osamu Tezuka created a series for Japanese television, 'Jungle Emperor', about a young lion cub who watches as hunters murder his father. The cub flees from the animal kingdom and is raised by humans, eventually returning to protect his brethren from a similar fate. Sound familiar? In the West, a dubbed version of the cartoon was broadcast as 'Kimba the White Lion' and following the 1994 release of 'The Lion King', eyebrows were raised as to the uniqueness of the Disney film’s storyline.

It was later discovered, however, that Tezuka’s original anthropomorphic creation was in fact influenced by early Disney: he had watched Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse cartoons as a child, and later indulged in an act of gross cinematic masochism by making the round-trip from his home in Osaka to Tokyo to see 'Bambi' no fewer than a hundred times.

Two forthcoming film seasons stress the dialogue between Asian and Western animators. At the Barbican, the series of Japanimation screenings is curated by Helen McCarthy, co-author of 'The Anime Encyclopaedia', who believes that anime still conjures images of Frisbee-eyed teens with disproportionate bodies using magical powers to ward off furry blobs in day-glo cityscapes. ‘People still tend to think of Japan and anime in a vacuum, as if it’s this exotic thing that contains nothing for Western eyes. What I want to do with this season is to say: Let’s stop thinking about Japan in a box. Let’s start thinking about a Japan which takes influence from the rest of the world and whose directors acknowledge world cinema and world culture.’

The first screening, on January 30, is Satoshi Kon’s 'Perfect Blue' (1998), about a young pop singer whose decision to go into acting inadvertently upsets a die-hard fan who happens to be a homicidal maniac. Just as Kon took John Ford’s '3 Godfathers' as the blueprint for his 'Tokyo Godfathers' (2003), 'Perfect Blue' contains nods to both 'Vertigo' and David Fincher’s 'Se7en'.

It’s not immediately obvious from the films of Hayao Miyazaki ('Spirited Away', 'Howl's Moving Castle') that, as McCarthy suggests, the director ‘has been passionate about Western fantasy since he was at university’. In fact, she explains, ‘his reading included a lot of European and American fantasy authors, such as Rosemary Sutcliff, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Diana Wynne Jones and Roald Dahl.’ A Barbican screening of Miyazaki’s 1988 masterpiece 'My Neighbour Totoro' will emphasise how accessible his work can be, and suggest that with recent films such as 'Lilo and Stitch' and 'Treasure Planet', Disney was still taking notes from the East.

Trailing Japanimation, the NFT will host a season from the beginning of February that includes little-seen works from the vaults of the Shanghai Animation Studio. The opening film is Wan Laiming’s 'Uproar in Heaven', which introduces us to the character of the Monkey King who, in China, has the same iconographic resonance as Mickey Mouse in the West. The style of animation, too, owes much to Disney, as well as to the creations of Tex Avery and Chuck Jones. At the NFT, a programme of accompanying shorts will demonstrate that the studio was not preoccupied with hand-drawn 2D cartoons either, with works often embracing the paper cut-out style of Lotte Reiniger and the stop-motion techniques of Ray Harryhausen and Jan Svankmajer.

Recognising Asian animation’s thematic and stylistic debts to the West, and vice versa, makes it even harder to view such Japanese or Chinese works in isolation, or dismiss them as distant or inpenetrable. ‘By looking at anime in the same way as we look at Western film and Western TV,’ says McCarthy, we are acknowledging that culture is a permeable medium. Only then can we build a more critical framework through which to view anime. Just saying that Miyazaki is our token Japanese filmmaker isn’t good enough.’

Japanimation starts on Jan 30 at the Barbican. Shanghai Animation on Screen starts Feb 18 at the NFT.

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