1991 saw a man walk into the still-open ICA cinema in London. He was shown a virtually unheard-of movie almost nowhere found in Britain. An executive from a fledgling film company called Island World Communications, Andy Frain, looked at acquisitions. He saw Akira through the ICA.
Ten years later, Frain said, “It blew me away,” during our interview. “Beyond Tom and Jerry or whatever, I was not interested in animation. Still, Akira caught me since I had never seen anything like it. It was a well-made, thoughtful, philosophical movie for adults akin to an animated Blade Runner.
“In 1991,” Frain said, “adult animation was maybe something talked about by a few people, but to the public, it was quite inconsistent. The few mainstream tests were creative or failed. Simpsons hardly aired on our TVs, and even then, Bart was always on show. It was unheard of to mix “adult” with “animation.”
After buying other Japanese cartoons and distributing Akira in Britain, Frain started Manga Entertainment. It ran until 2021 when Sony acquired Funimation, the owner. Thirty years after Sony acquired it in 2021, it became Funcium that year and then Crunchyroll in 2022.
In the 1990s, Frain described Manga Entertainment as “an adult animation company, the punk rock of animation”.
Musician Frain related Manga to Def Jam, but do more Japanese films with Akira’s style exist? If so, they might be a genre like Def Jam, a record label. Nobody in Britain knew the names of the films, the directors, or anything about them except that they were fresh and new, and if you liked one, you could like others.
Think about the tale Frain tells. A. Exhibit A illustrates how Japanese animation inspired one non-Japanese person and helped anime go global. Exhibit B is another guy who found anime ten years before Frain. Young American animator John Lasseter came from.
Castle of Cagliostro is Lupin III., a TMS-K 1980 Monkey Punch picture.
Lasseter and Lupin
Unlike Frain, Lasseter always appreciated animation. As he said in his 2014 Tokyo Film Festival speech, “I loved cartoons as a kid.”I have always enjoyed cartoons. Though I should have liked ladies and cars, I loved cartoons as a teenager.”
Lasseter, however, objected to Hollywood executives labelling cartoons as a kid-only medium. He pointed the finger at TV timing. “Once everything went to television, and animation was only shown on Saturday mornings and after school, kids’ hours, Hollywood changed their view of animation.”
Then leap to 1981. Lasseter chased his passion for cartoons at Disney. Hayao Miyazaki arrived in America under Japanese producer Yutaka Fujioka. They were there to record Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland, a disaster that did not air until 1989. Early Miyazaki left.
Fujioka showed Lasseter three clips from Miyazaki’s sole Lupin caper, Castle of Cagliostro. The opening hill-bound, cliff-climbing vehicle pursuit in the movie mesmerised Lasseter. His response was like Frain’s with Akira. “That sequence still blows me away,” Lasseter said.
He had given it great thought. Fujioka gave me a VHS tape of the footage. I watched it constantly. At the Los Angeles Film Exposition, I had friends… Wanting everyone to see the movie, I entered it into the festival after Fujioka sent me a print.
“We wanted to do this,” Lasseter said of Lupin’s joyride. “That clip was created just for kids, not for children. Kids, adults, teenagers, and everyone else.
While Frain developed the “Manga” brand in reaction to Akira, Lasseter found inspiration in Cagliostro. Helmed Pixar’s innovative Toy Story in 1995. Like Cagliostro, it was for kids, parents, teenagers, and everyone else.
Six years later, Lasseter was fervently pushing Hollywood executives to premiere another animated feature, while you might have thought he was too busy with Pixar. Spirited Away is an anime not Pixar. (Princess Mononoke came out in America but did not do very well).
For the American release of Spirited Away, Miyazaki described Lasseter as “an absolutely effective bulldozer.” Lasseter’s brilliant introduction kicked off the first American DVD. “You are lucky; this movie is really good. My friend Miyazaki created a masterpiece. Lasseter said it blew him away, naturally. In return, Ghibli sent a 2.5-hour Japanese documentary titled Thank You, Lasseter-san.
Lasseter’s 2017 scandal is well known to most AWN readers. Still, his impact on Anglophone anime impressions is felt constantly. Think about how Netflix has all of Ghibli’s films, how many people connect anime with Spirited Away, and how many anime aficioners grew up with it. Most of that fell to the bulldozer Lasseter.
Punk rock contrasted with Toy Story
The stories of Lasseter and Frain are amazing for their similarities and contrasts. Looking at something fresh energised both men. Their responses then started to differ. Though not interested in animation, Frain saw the possibilities for an adult, punkish brand derived from Akira.
For cartoon buff Lasseter, it demonstrated how to create animation for everyone. Lasseter found great populist appeal in the medium. The Manga brand targets some groups excluding others. Children and those easily offended, for example.
I’m not arguing that one anime viewpoint is better or the only one. Years later, both of them left traces. Stories from Frain and Lasseter depicting anime can be intriguing since they either show something you get or don’t, something everyone or something exclusive.
Campaign for Real Anime!
Every reader defines anime differently and has different reasons for finding it amazing. 1990s Japanese anime enthusiast penned the following comment. Before I unveil it, try to find the Japanese fan. Here’s a hint from the video down below.
The fan said, “Forfeiting one’s goal leads to despair, and is a sickness that can prove fatal.” Does Miyazaki and his staff know the hopelessness? They could not want to expose to others their self-loathing and complexes. Ghibli presents just a sanitised form of reality, excluding the unpleasant.Works by Ghibli have lost their “anime” quality and seem to be weary Japanese films.
The maker of Evangelion, Hideaki Anno, made those remarks. The comments come from an unapproved translation by Mark Neidengard. Anno voiced his opinions in very humorous Japanese Ghibli DVD boxset liner notes. Anno is a Ghibli legend friend of Miyazaki. Thirty years after animating Nausicaa, he expressed his God Warrior in The Wind Rises.
Anno sees things differently than Ghibli does. An openly “otaku,” fannish background and negative ideas expressed by many otaku guide it. Among the most well-known anime characters, Eva’s Shinji Ikari personified all the negative aspects and complexes. Whether you agree or not, otaku opinions shaped anime.
The dangers of maintaining gates
Still, not all fannish points of view are optimistic. Extremes include “bro” fan attacks on “fake fangirls” and other nasty behaviour. Still, honest, sometimes rational debates smell like fannish gatekeeping. Consider an instance.
Some fans of Netflix’s “Netflix Original Anime” would say it isn’t anime. Many contend that their over-engineered for foreign audiences renders them not anime.
Anti-Netflix arguments are regrettable in their selective nature. They naturally draw attention to Netflix Originals that viewers hated, including the CG Ghost in the Shell reincarnation SAC_2045. I liked it, but that’s my problem. Fans say nothing about Netflix Originals including Pluto, Beastars, Kakegurui, Violet Evergarden.
International animation have basically existed for decades before Netflix. With its Bruce Lee and American film noir inspirations, cowboy bebop could be criticised as not being “not Japanese enough.”
According to British film magazine Sight and Sound in 1995, the first Ghost in the Shell was created with global market in mind. Andy Frain executive producer of the film co-produced British Manga Entertainment. It was backed by foreign funding, including Original Anime from Netflix. Sight and Sound penned, “Many of the specifics that prove baffling in the normal run of anime, especially the rape imagery, shrieking ‘cute’ pubescent females and transformer-type robots, have been minimised or eliminated.”
Most people today wouldn’t define anime in such terms. Still, anti-Netflix claims are not particularly different or helpful. They sound like a fan raised on Akira and Wicked City complaining that Ghibli, Shinkai, and KyoAni are ruining anime. It seems to be gatekeeping.
An excitement for anime’s possibilities unites Frain, Lasseter, and Anno. Anti-Netflix arguments define anime and what it should be, as if it were simple. Two super-fans might never see the same anime since anime has at least 60 years of constantly expanding history and thousands of hours of material.
Not every anime point of view has application. Whether Akira, Cagliostro, Pop Team Epic, or Netflix shows, obsessing too much on any anime title distorts the reality that anime is too vast to see. To progress anime, we need enthusiastic partial opinions on it not only from Japan. Just ask John or Andy when they first got blown away.
