The Anime Almanac

Along with being an anime buff, I’m also a big movie buff. I probably see a new film at least once a week, so I am quite familiar with the way Hollywood and the industry works. Because I have such a huge admiration for the medium, it takes a lot to make me hate a film. In fact, I’ve only hated three films within the past year while finding the 50-some other films at least tolerable.

I hated Twilight because it was a dull film that was only meant to show off a pretty boy with bushy eyebrows. I hated Mama Mia! because the film ripped out my testicles, threw them at the screen, and then sang a song about it. I hated The Legend of Chun-Li movie not because it was a poor video game adaptation, but because it was a bad action flick.

But as difficult as it is to make me really hate a film, it’s even harder to make me really love a film and make it significantly stand out for me. So when the end credits began to roll for Dragonball Evolution last weekend and I gave it a genuine applause out of admiration, that really meant something.

Yes, I actually enjoyed this live-action adaptation of the popular manga series. I was a fan of Dragonball even before I was a fan of anime. This simple story of strength, power, and domination has reached out to many Americans and has made the franchise the most popular anime ever released over here. So because I thought that the final moments of the film captured the same awesome feeling that the original comic and anime had, I felt very satisfied that Hollywood brought the property to the big screen.

But looking around, it would appear that I was the only one who enjoyed it. The Dragonball fans hated the movie before it was even made. As every photo and trailer came out, the blogoshpere would complain about how bad the movie looked and how much it was going to suck. And in the weeks leading up to the film’s release, I was bombarded with blast after blast of hate as anime fans illegally downloaded the film and watched it on their computers.

With all this negative press leading up to the film’s release, it was no surprise that the film bombed its opening weekend and only took in a dismal $4.6 million at the box office. It even undersold everybody’s already low projections.

So where did it go wrong? How did the most popular anime property in America fail to reach out to its target audience?

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I should probably make this a regular feature. Every once in a while, I receive an email that deserves a little extra attention from me in my response. When I received an email titled, “Keitaro Urashima Post and Why You Should Speak For Yourself Only!” I thought it was just going to be another flamer email to put on my block list.

But upon reading the email, I discovered that it was indeed filled with rage, but this rage seemed to be seriously misplaced and completely contradictory to what he was trying to prove. It was the perfect example of the otaku-vs-otaku hate that I have preached against in the past.

He never posted this up on his LiveJournal account, so I’m going to keep the letter anonymous and removed any form of identification in it.
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I once heard that in marketing, the customer will become interested in a product after it has been recommended to them three times. A year ago, I had read a gushing review of the OEL manga series Scott Pilgrim in ANN’s weekly review section. A month later, the hosts of the video podcast The Totally Rad show had also given very positive impressions of the series. So it was almost too easy for Amazon to sell me a copy of the series when I was hit with it a third time in their “Recommended for you” section.

The title character of the series is an unemployed 23-year-old Canadian just off of a major break-up. After trying to date a shy high school girl, he meets a wild American girl, Ramona, who turns his boring life completely around. What follows next is six surreal volumes of comedy and ridiculous ninja action as Scott has to literally confront and battle every ex-boyfriend of Ramona in order to be with her.

And because it is created by Canadian artist Brian Lee O’Malley, Scott Pilgrim is proof that a manga series created by a Westerner can speak to the Western audience in ways that Japanese comics can’t. It is one of the best comics I have ever read, and it is OEL at its finest.

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Today FUNimation re-released the anime adaptation of Love Hina, the franchise that introduced me and many otaku of my generation to the wonderful world of anime and manga. To celebrate the return of this series, I’d like to repost this essay I wrote about its impact to the anime and manga industry in America, and just why I believe it was able to speak to a whole subculture of geeks around the world.

Originally posted on August 18, 2005.

If you were a manga fan over five years ago, you will recall just how different things were back then compared to now. Manga was flipped, expensive, heavily edited, and had a very limited variety of titles. But then a newcomer by the name of Tokyopop decided to make a radical change to the market. They introduced a new line of manga in which they called, “100% Authentic.” Not only were the pages un-flipped, but the size of the book was smaller, the cost was only 10 bucks a volume, and they didn’t translate any sound effects.

The new format was a hit, and created a new interest in Japanese comics. The shelf space expanded at an exponential rate. And yet, surprisingly, the series that was on the top during this revolution wasn’t from a well known anime actions show like Dragonball Z or Cowboy Bebop. Instead, it was a series about a 20-year-old boarding house manager and the 5 girls who lived with him.

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Today starts the trial of Christopher Handley for the content of his pornographic manga collection. Under the PROTECT Act of 2003, the fictional depictions of children having sex and bestiality in his collection could put him away for 20 years in prison.

This is not the first time that PROTECT has put an otaku on trial. After that man was convicted on those charges three years ago, I wrote out the following editorial piece on the problems with making works of fiction illegal. I feel that the piece is still applicable to Mr. Handley’s situation.

Originally posted on December 4, 2005.

Update: The trial has been postponed until next month.

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