As a kid, my favourite format of cartoons was anime (アニメ).
In those days, RTM’s channel 1 (what is now TV1) would start at 3pm on a Saturday with CHiPs (otai aje paham ni – hahaha), then at 4pm they’d show this mecha anime called Blocker Gundan 4 Machine Blaster. We only had a B&W Toshiba in those days and I never failed to follow the exploits of Tenpei Asuka and his team which comprised the usual chara combo of another young chap, a fat guy, a kid and a gorgeous woman (with the largest non-oriental sparkling eyes known to man). I remembered one day being told off by my late mom for watching Doraemon (ni bukan untuk budak lagi, ni TADIKA!). I was twenty. Go figure. Hehe.
Even now I still favour anime if you were to give me a choice. Animation has gone through leaps and bounds with digital technology. Gone are the days of handpainted cels – just take a look at Matt Groening’s Futurama and the new Appleseed 2004. CG animation films of the Pixar persuasion are great but when it comes to cartoons, anime really does it for me. When I was a student at medical school, anime was beginning to be a growing phenomenon in the west unlike Malaysia. Movies/OVAs were then available only at specialty comic shops like Forbidden Planet. I am sure one possible reason for the popularity of anime in those days was the availability of mild hentai titles the likes of Urotsukidoji (mild on the hentai, not so on the violence. hahaha). I had to be content with the poorer quality of VHS in those days and some titles costed a bomb, as they sell them by the episodes (like Bubblegum Crisis which lasted for only 30 minutes per tape). I personally prefer to watch anime in Japanese with subtitles, even if the story was set in the west with western characters. Probably I had been scarred by watching badly dubbed versions on Malaysian telly. Who can’t forget the teeny female voice used to dub the likes of Nobita (the voice was so castrated in quality) and Doraemon (this one is castrated times four). The subbed (as opposed to dubbed) titles available then were actually not many and we weren’t really spoilt for choice.
Manga was also quite popular with titles like Ranma 1/2 and Dragonball Z, but it didn’t really catch on for me. Not really into reading black and white drawings and you have to read it from right to left even though the text has been translated into romaji.
Unlike the stories you see in western animation, Japanese anime has a whole gamut of stories available. Like manga, there is a multitude of anime titles aimed at different age groups (shonen for boys, bishojo for girls, hentai for pervs – the list goes on). Due to different cultural sensibilities, it would be normal to find violence, nudity and mild sexual references in animation aimed for upper primary school children and teens like Naruto as an example. You would find tales revolving around issues seen in day to day life engrained in the story, may it be in mecha-type anime like Macross, sci-fi like Cowboy Bebop or teen action like Bleach (not THAT kind of teen action, dammit). So far in the few anime series I have watched, none were at the level of, say, MTV’s moronic Beavis & Butthead.
With the advent of broadband internet connection in the recent years, current TV anime titles have been available for download via IRC and bittorrent. In a week or so after an episode of a series is being aired on the telly in Japan, you get diehard fans doing the subtitles (fansubs, the anime version of scanlation) and it’d be available for the non-nihon go speaker to download and enjoy. I recently finished watching Samurai 7 which was a delightful and somewhat faithful sci-fi adaptation of Akira Kurosawa’s 七人の侍 Shichinin no Samurai (Seven Samurai). There were a few changes, obviously to suit the sci-fi nature of the series, but if any of you who had watched the original 1954 classic, many aspects of Kurosawa’s film remained in the anime. I thought seeing Toshiro Mifune’s Kikuchiyo as a steam-powered robot was one of the most enjoyable aspect of the story.
I think the somewhat serious aspect of these stories had maintained my interest in watching Japanese animation. Films made by the likes of Mamoru Oshii (Patlabor and Ghost In The Shell) and Hayao Miyazaki (from My Neighbor Totoro to Spirited Away – can’t wait for Howl’s Moving Castle) have so much more depth to them whilst maintaining the enjoyment factor that the audience would expect from a cartoon.
I second that: Macross Zero has the best dogfight scene since Macross Plus–Yea from the protoculture addicts.
The ol’ school mecha fame like Voltes V is still hard to come by–Boo from the mecha otakus.
Transformer is going to be auteured as live action so has Voltron Lion–A collective “huh” had been known to be a catalyst in the chaos theory behind the recent global deluge and drought.
I always had a thing for mech anime. I started with Macross on Saturday mornings. Ponteng gi scout meeting masa primary school (sakit perut, demam, no mood digunakan) I liked the Rick Hunter one and the Mospeda(sp?) Yang middle tu hampeh sikit. Now it looks like I must get Macross Zero…mana limau nipis nih.
Did you watch evangelion? Good mech scenes, bloody weird storyline. Screws with your head.
Aaaah… reminds me of Tempe Asuka, everyone’s favourite hero. And little Marco in ‘From Apennine to Andes’… a beautiful epic.
haaa terror pun buat capture.. nak modest plak hehe 😆
Yeah back in KL we had Rick Hunter, we had Mospeada, we had Macross Saga, we had Doraemon, we had Ranma 1/2… but man.. those voiceovers were really cheesy. To appreciate anime you need to watch and listen to it like how it was meant to be.. in Japanese. I was already in UK when Akira was my first anime that I experienced in Japanese with English subtitles. 2nd was Guyver: Bio Booster Armor. Then I had a crush on Pink Ranger from Power Rangers for a while hahaha! Err.. where was I?
ni semua dari avi’s on windows media player, bro. ini aku tau buat dah (you can see them in previous entries). it’s just that i wanted to use some shots from a dvd that i couldn’t use the same technique.
Masa zaman sekolah aku, antara aktiviti solitari paling memuaskan ialah membikin kapal angkasa tempe – lengkap dengan muka yang boleh diturunkan!
When I first went to Nippon, all the guys I know studying in the UK (circa 96) sibuk tanya pasal Akira. Was never into anime, until I saw Totoro. Doraemon, in actual nihongo is so much better than the nasty dubbing we had in msia. And my all time fav. series is Samurai X, aka Rurouni Kenshin.
And I still regretted that I didn’t go to the Ghibli museum last december, padahal it was just an hour away from where I stayed in Tokyo…
norzu-kun: i have like probably 80% of miyazaki-san’s work on DVD, totoro being one of my favourites. animetech in KL sells the ori DVDs rather cheaply! if you like samurai X, you’d probably like bleach (set in the present day, though) which started sometimes in oct 2004 on TV tokyo. currently ep42 (aku dah gila bittorrent… aaargghh!).
sufian-san: nasib baik akitiviti solitari yg sebegitu… 😆
anyone knows if there is a site that has details on 70’s anime? i tried googling broker corps machine braster but nothing comes up!
a friend’s BIL is editor of Lo Magazine in Cape Town. Don’t know if that helps.
And yes, ori anime dvds can get for cheap in kl. cuma saya jer yg miskin. hehe
kudo: google x dapat pasal silap eja. it’s > ‘Blocker Corps IV Machine Blaster’. taupun title jepunnya : ‘Blocker Gundan IV Machine Blaster’.
try again…
atok , you’re a star! obviously in nihon-go there is no letter L! 😆 thanks for the info.
i remember watching on sunday mornings robotech. the love triangle between rick and lisa and that mei mei pop star, v. emo. such a long running + confusing series, lost the plot along the way.
Urotsukidoji – The on-air patuk-mematuk scene lives on – it haunts me for life. lol.
anime is best watched when it is served in japanese. when i was in the states they charge additional usd 5 for the japanese languange vhs with english subtitle.
my favorite is aways been evangelion, ghost in the shell, princess mononoke, and spirited away. nowadays busy downloading cowboy bebop from wayar limau nipis
But the question is, what would Doraemon be without the dubbing? So heinous its almost cool.
And dude. Even my Mom is into Ranma 1/2. Far better argument against gender stereotyping than sth like Boys Don’t Cry.
Need to get me a decent GITS 2 DVD. The one lent to me had weird subtitles.
nads: GITS2 is out now on columbia tristar, so the subtitles are done properly now. if you wanna watch GITS stand alone complex and SAC 2nd GIG, download ’em from laughing man fansubs.
well..i dont know much about anime, but i like miyazaki’s a lot. esp spirited away. (it was by him rite?).. bbq? done that, last sunday, sorry only the housemates were involved. 3 internal guests..haha..not much of a bbq is it…
broker corps machine braster? .. tempe asoka? dah jadi Otai (with a capital O) dah aku rupanya….
nikQ: haha. i was jesting. i half-expected you to be at the IMAM bbq in sheffield on saturday actually. busy moving house/own bbq eh? how are you keeping anyhow?
[…] remembered first writing about anime in this blog all those years ago and for some strange reason, I thought there was never another post on this subject in the […]