On Genre in Manga and Anime

On Manga and Anime  

Japanese animation is what I grew up with; it has been ingrained into my history since I could remember, and to be honest, I’m not even sure what the first anime I’ve ever seen is. Maybe it’s Crayon Shin-chan, Astroboy or Detective Conan. I remember my first Gundam craze, after secretly watching Char’s Counter Attack on television; my first Miyazaki film was Nausicaa; my first super robot experience was Mazinger Z; my first tears shed during a movie was during Grave of the Fireflies.

I’ve always loved animation. Over time, I’ve grown to notice the differences between western animation, and Japanese animation. Japanese animation caught my heart since an early age, perhaps due to the feeling that they treated me as an older ‘child’. I know that there’s the possibility that I’ve been looking in the wrong places to begin with, but it struck me that western animation I watched during my childhood, always seemed to assume my intellect was a little lower than what it actually was. Even as a kid, I wanted variety in what I watched; Cow and Chicken, or Power-puff girls, as good as they were, never really had the emotional impact on me Detective Conan did, even though the target audience was about the same.

Maybe that was a little off the mark for an analogy, but I still firmly stand beside my observation on western animation still lacking the reach to breadth of audiences. I don’t mean this in an age group perspective, but one of genre. Mainstream western animation, even today, is mostly geared towards either comedy, or family friendly adventure. Other genres exist, for sure, but they’re usually difficult to access, or unknown to the general public.

 Japanese animation’s appeal, to myself, often stems from the fact that it covers almost anyone’s tastes. Drama? Check. Comedy? Check.  A coming-of-age story featuring brotherly love and overcoming all odds in the cosmos with the help of a handheld drill? Or how about a story where the world’s greatest surgeon accidentally saves a juvenile serial killer? And a story where a man is placed deeply into debt, and goes onto a floating casino to win himself out? Check, check, all checked.

Don’t take this wrong, though, I love western animation all the same. Action is found in shows like Young Justice and Avatar; Pixar themselves, pump out a variety of movies. I just don’t think it’s that far yet; there’s so much potential. What we see is the budding that has somehow been slowed. Looking towards the past, it may have been due to the stigma parents placed on Comic books, which subsequently led to their disdain towards animation in the early days. A good portion of the last generation see comics and cartoons as just cartoons, things made to move to entertain children. 

            It saddens me to see this sort of connotation attached to one of my favorite art forms of all-time. Many people still see animation as a children’s thing, and it’s not. In the western world, animation is an inferior form compared to live-action. Batman is more popular after hitting the silver screen; Ironman was practically reserved for the “nerds”, until recent years, where it has become a pop symbol. The uprising of “geek-culture” in western pop culture is nice, but it is still spearheaded by live-action movies, followed by millions who couldn’t care less of the Batman’s other stories, prior to his screen debut.

            Examples of this sort of idea of animation inferiority can be seen in appropriation of anime to Hollywood. Dragon Ball, Dead or Alive, Street Fighter for instance, weren’t great adaptations. It’s not going to stop, though, as they’re planning Akira, Ghost in the Shell, Space Battleship Yamato, Death Note…so on and so forth.

            Not that adaptations never work though, as we can see from From the Edge of Tomorrow (Based on All you need is Kill), which was done pretty effectively. I just hope that Animation gets its well-deserved time in the spotlight, or at the very least, the same general respect like live-action films. They’re a great medium that allows things to be stretched, stylized and exaggerated to an almost infinite degree, and the potential in that is inspiring in its own right.