Preliminary Concepts of Japanese Animation

1	Japanese Animation 3	Shorts: Mermaid Forest + Silent Moebius
	Gender Collisions	Teen girl manga; sexual energies; doll culture

"SAILOR MOON" & TEEN GIRL MANGA

While the west tends to produce kid vid animation & live action based on co ed groups of pre teens & teens (from SCOOBY DOO to I TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES to CAPTAIN PLANET & THE PLANETEERS) Japanese animation is abundant with gender specific manga & animation. Most importantly, these gender markets have developed specific stylistic modes and image codes.

The boy markets are largely based on the American super hero style of comics muscle bound bodies hurtling through space expounding energy in dynamic lines connoting hyper motion & kineticism: action men on the move. The girl manga markets are totally different to this. Their pages are often abstract, with the comic boxes & bubbles often blurring, disintegrating and dissolving into a full page wash of dimensional effects and sensational line work & patterning. And whereas the boy mangas fetishize muscle & sweat, the girls mangas are fixated on swimming pool eyes and flowing hair. In fact a major difference is in the eyes: male eyes are clear, graphic and almost logoistic. Female eyes are a haze of sketchy markings with stars and glints.

SAILOR MOON is a popular girls TV animation series which draws upon a long line of girls manga based on younger girls idolizing older girls. The basic recurring plot revolves around Sailor who is befriended by a mystical pair of cats. The cats give Sailor and her group of school friends magic powers, each power being related to their astrological sign. To invoke their magic powers they cry out "MAKE UP!" and are transformed in a swirl of light & colour as jewellery & attire zaps onto them. This is all the power fetishization that normally happens in boys comics & cartoons (east & west), but in SAILOR MOON every fetishistic element is of value only within a prescribed 'girl' world.

In addition to the above, two features mark SAILOR MOON as peculiarly Japanese in its narrative orientation. Firstly, their is a clear split between Sailor romanticizing older boys (even a mysterious young man) and other sometimes older girls at school. Sailor's fixation on others is gender unbiased and not solely at the service of male hero worship. Secondly, the 'evil' beings in the recurring plot are a mournful alien couple who yearn for life like humans have on earth. They always are trying to invade & destroy Sailor and her friends, but they do so not because they are essentially evil but because they are motivated by desire. Both these points contribute to separating SAILOR MOON and many other girls animation from the neutralizing gender effect promoted by most western kid vid animation.

All in all, SAILOR MOON is a good example of pre pubescent female hysteria rechannelled as a form of energy. Rather than typecasting this energy as pre sexual childish frenzy (as the west portrays the crazed/obsessed Bay City Rollers fan, for example) SAILOR MOON takes that energy as a dimension: as a psycho emotional reality which is meaningful to those who have that energy pre teen girls.

RUMIKO TAKAHASHI

Rumiko Takahashi is currently one of Japan's star manga artists. As with any manga title that become popular, most of her mangas have been made into animations. While most manga artists become identities by developing clear stylistic traits within select genres, Takahashi stands out by virtue of the broad range of tones & styles in her work (ranging from anarchic comedy to eerie folklore to romantic melodrama).

URUSEI YATSURA (often loosely translated as "Those Obnoxious Aliens") & RANMA 112 are the most famous of her anarchic comedies Both started in the mid 80s and are still being produced as manga. TV series and ongoing feature animations. URUSEI YATSURA is centred in a high school and follows the exploits of a young guy who is befriended by a rowdy alien wearing high boots & a leopard skin bikini who is part guardian angel & part true love & partly the cause of most of his daily problems. RANMA 112 is truly weird, being about a young guy who changes sex when splashed with cold water The only way to change back to is by being splashed with hot water. His grandfather suffers a similar fate, except instead of changing sex he turns into a giant panda. They live at his uncles place a widower who runs a Kendo school with 3 daughters, a tomboy, a bimbo & a very cynical girl. Each take place mostly in high school settings are complex yet funny allegories on pubescent high school life.

MAISON IKKOKU was an earlier manga series which was made into a limited TV series. While not as famous as the other comedies, MAISON IKKOKU a soap opera about the tenants in a small rooming house run by a young widow is a very skilled low key melodrama. Its attention to detail (milk circling in a cup of coffee, summer cicadas , trains passing in the distance , a leaf falling from a tree) displays an affinity with the more sombre rhythms of Haiku poetry & the cinema of Ozu.

In general, Takahashi's work appeals to a wide audience while being stylistically and thematically rooted in the genres of girls and women's manga. Her takes on teen sex hang ups and gender differences are hysterically expounded throughout URUSEI YATSURA & even more so in RANMA 1/2 But that same sense of difference is handled in complex psycho sexual ways in MERMAID FORREST where themes of incest, bestiality & cannibalism figure prominently. MERMAID FORREST is part of a series of one off stories she did under the title series RUMIK WORLD. the MERMAID story makes up 2 parts of this series, and is based on island folklore concerning the belief that if you eat the flesh of a mermaid you will become immortal. Both stories are centred around a young man and a younger girl who are essentially teenagers slowly coming to the realisation of the burden of forever remaining young. The main drama in the first story revolves around twin sisters, one of whom gave the other mermaid flesh to recover from a terminal illness. The sick sister lives, but only through her father (now an impotent old man) sawing off arms from fresh morgue bodies to replace her contaminated arm which resembles the limb of a hideous monster.

"SILENT MOEBIUS" & GENDERED ENERGIES

As a summary of many of the points raised by Japanese animation in general its view of technology its weaving of mysticism; its concept of energy; its sense of dimensionality , and its diffusion and redistribution of sexual differences SILENT MOEBIUS is a good example of recent animation which gathers together these various strands.

The story is centred on the Attack Mystification Police (typical 'Japlish' rehash of English words that the Japanese think sound attractive'). This is a unit composed and run by women, each of who have special skills arid/or powers. As usual, there is a dimension of the 'other' (this time called Lucifer Folk more Japlish) headed by a monstrous demon who literally melts out from surfaces of the real world to materialize. The story is like a mix of Hill Street Blues, Ghostbusters & the Omen. The difference apart from the stylistic mutations born of such a mix is that the an instance of crime is denoted by the presence of an unworldly dimensional force. The key mix here is colliding the hard legality of a law enforcement agency with the intangible machinations of something that breaks dimensional laws.

Not suprisingly, this metaphysical premise is treated in a straightforward urban manner. Even the major architectural feature of this particular Neo Tokyo is a huge spiral edifice built on the mystical site of an almost forgotten transgression by the human world upon a previous demonic realm. This urban/architectural fix on how a past site collides with a present site is often in Such sci fi mystical animations (as in LEGEND OF THE OVERFIEND).

Whereas GALL FORCE is very much focused on the sexuality and gender of the key protagonists (as the plot deals with genetic engineering and cross fertilization between two interplanetary species), SILENT MOEBIUS 'simply' casts its characters in the female sex. Social issues of work ethics, familial respect, team work and individualism are carried on not in a overtly pro feminist way, but in accordance with the milieu of the OL (Office Ladies) This is the Japanese term for the working woman who has to battle it out with the Salary Men. But whereas the west will stage this socialized environment of gender difference either as womenwith balls or girls laughing at the boys, Japanese entertainment paints the Office Lady first as someone doing a job, and only second as someone of a specific gender. SILENT MOEBIUS carries this tactic through clearly, as the plot never frames the women for us to either champion them or sympathize with them. They're not really doing 'a man's job' (there are no men in the film except for a vaguely male robot taxi driver, and the guttural voice of the Lucifer Folk); and they suffer no gender related discriminatory plight (once again because there are simply no men in their world).

The prime gender collision of SILENT MOEBIUS (and many other all women group narratives set in an advanced future) is that they redefine sexual difference under the terms of erasing the presence of men. In other words, the female characters are left to do whatever is required of/written for them without having to refer back to a male figure or paradigm of behaviour & action. An obtuse but helpful example: in the west, Sharon Stone is possibly only uncrossing her legs for Michael Douglas. If he wasn't there, there would be nothing out of the ordinary in her uncrossing her legs. She probably wouldn't worry either way about crossing or uncrossing her legs, with panties or without. The women in SILENT MOEBIUS get on with the job at hand.