Magazine
POKEYMON OR PUKEY MAN?
By Peter Adamakos
The so-called Pokemon invasion has been fascinating. American news shows subliminally bemoan the invasion of another culture totally oblivious of course to their own marauding mice, ducks and wabbits around the globe. Perhaps it’s because it looks like an alien thing (the Beatles weren’t?) or perhaps because it’s something generational. The parents don’t get it but their children do instantly (unlike the Beatles?)
When it comes to animation, those who hate Japanese animation have an easy target. It’s not great animation, not even good animation, but hey, aren’t the words Japanese animation an oxymoron anyway, appealing to the moron in each of us? Or are they?
Music is an international language, it has been said. Yet each country has its own musical culture so to speak, some similar to others’ and some very different. The music of China or India is so vastly different from that of North America that appreciation of if among the general public there has yet to catch on in any meaningful way. Are the sounds of a sitar so hard on our ears that we can’t listen to it and appreciate its worth when well played? Of course not and few would argue the point. Who cannot appreciate the guitar music of both Carlos Montoya and Jimmie Hendrix? Isn’t theater around the world equally valid, be it OKLAHOMA or Japanese puppet plays or Punch and Judy?
Music has evolved in each country or each culture over eons of time, of course. Animation is new, and the main expression of it culturally that travels well has been the Hollywood cartoon in style, tone and so on. There is hardly a culture that hasn’t seen it, enjoyed it, and understood it instantly for its strengths. Does that mean that American animation is what everyone should be doing? Is that “real” animation and any wide divergence from that norm not equally worthy?
That is I think at the heart of the matter. Japanese animation until recent times did not travel well. Why does it now? Audiences are tired of seeing the same old subjects in North American animation, primarily. Many are fed up with cutesy moral tales of talking animals that Aesop would think needed a rewrite. After almost one hundred years of animation, we’ve still only scratched the surface in North America subject-wise, FANTASIA, Norman McLaren and a few others to the contrary. There have always been experimental and personal films done in North America that defied the trend, but these got minimum distribution and made no lasting impact, though they made an impression on those professionals who saw them. Even when Disney animators like John Hubley went out on their own and created wonderful un-Disney like fare as other post-Disney people did at UPA, they never took control of the reins of the business from the Disney and Warners studios. Funny, how Disney, the most innovative and diverse studio gets 100% of the blame for this while Warners, which only did one thing constantly, improved but never changed, gets off scott-free. Oh well.
Actually, John Hubley points up what is wrong with Japanese animation as a whole. Forget their sex and violence content-there are always the sickos who are attracted to making it and to seeing it, and if you judge Japan from its comics and animation alone, that is one sick society. John Hubley shows what they should have done. The man worked at Disney and was by all accounts a strong member of the team. He learned the best Disney had to offer-solid animation, personality characterization and solid story-telling. His later style was not Disney’s, but his abilities in the above disciplines showed through. He adapted the best Disney had to teach him. Some of his films are among my favorites.
Along come the Japanese and their animation skills suck. Their characters suck. Their story-telling sucks. They are popular by default. If you don’t want more mermaids, more mice and more toys talking what do you do? You embrace the opposite, even if it sucks. And it sucks big-time. If they had only learned how to tell a story well, how to take their often great ideas for stories and told them in -no, not an American way, but in a way that Aesop, Anderson, Homer and others did long before there was animation-in a universally accessible way, then some of their animation stories would have entered the culture of many countries as those of Grimm, Lafontaine and others have.
Their characters-characters with no personalities who react rather than act-(here go the big open-mouthed screaming faces again, eyes bulging. ) It’s both demeaning and insulting to an audience. Their stories are situation-driven rather than character-driven, and this does not work as well. Remember Spielberg’s AN AMERICAN TAIL? It opened up with the mouse family enjoying a quiet time at home and then suddenly, the Cossack cats burst in and all hell breaks loose. That’s all in the first five minutes. You never got to know the mice other than as mice, the obvious good guys. No mouse, not even the hero, was a fixed personality this soon into the picture. He was a type, a stereotype a standard good little mouse who had not yet earned our sympathy. So the cats burst in. So who cares? Eat them all.
It’s the same with Japanese animation characters. We “care” because we’ve been programmed to care for the standard children in Japanese cartoon shows, especially the youngest one, you know, the one with the equally young pet? Same for the standard villains. The development of characters’ individual personalities is very important, even all-important to caring about them. I’ve always been amazed at how long Disney features take to get the plot rolling. There is so much time setting up the setup and getting to know the characters as personalities before the action starts. Look at how long it takes for Pinocchio to start his adventures, for Snow White to meet the dwarfs, for Peter Pan and the children to get to Neverland, for Bambi to go out into the forest and so on. The time spent on these early sections is long, about 20 minutes in a 75 minute film. Yet it is time well spent. It makes the rest exciting, it makes it involving, it makes it matter. Yet you never feel that the introductory sections of these films are such. They are so expertly done that they are an integral part of the film. You never want to fast-forward through to Neverland or Wonderland only. They are the underpinnings of the film and all the success they and the characters have had.
The Japanese, of course, understand nothing of this. Their characters are standard dime-a-dozen types in the way they are drawn and in their lack of individual personalities. They look at Disney but do not see. You’d think they feel that if they adapt the principles of good animation, good storytelling, and good characterization they will end up making funny little bunnies cartoons. Not true. Good animation principles can be adapted to any subject or style you wish to use. Japanese animation is like a lavishly presented plate of undercooked food.
Surely enough time has gone by that someone would have decided to adopt these principles to better their product. So that’s the catch. If every culture is to define its own animation, like its own music, and its own filmmaking, can they ignore, should they ignore good animation principles in the name of culture? You do what you like, but our animation culture is the absence of personality, good animation etc. We adopt shorthand animation as our animation culture so get off our back.
Well, no. I love Japanese features like Kurosawa’s YOJIMBO, Teshigahara’s WOMAN OF THE DUNES and so on. But how well would these films have traveled if they were shot out of focus or had bad editing that marred the narrative? Filmmakers around the world have their own cinematic culture, but they have adopted those basics of good filmmaking that is accepted by audiences instantly to better convey their unique cultural visions. The lack of craft in Japanese animation is akin to shooting a live-action film out of focus.
Good animation principles are not negatives. Employed, they can only be positives. It’s about time Japanese animation got its act together to expand their audience with better-crafted works. Animation principles plus their cultural animation story-telling would be phenomenal. It would be Disney’s greatest nightmare. As it is now, the people at Disney sleep well.
One last thought: Today’s adults and older adults grew up with the great Hollywood animation. TV came in later with its limited animation. We had a balance. Today a child’s animation viewing is almost all TV garbage, that is, made-for-TV crap. This is how animation will die as an art form, how craft dies. I remember as a child seeing THE FLINTSTONES on TV when it first came out. My friends and I happened to see one of the first evening episodes. We laughed at the horrible animation (honest!) We never watched any of the other early Hanna-Barbera programs either, those first made-for-television shows. Eventually of course that’s almost all that was on television but back in the early 60s we could still see the great Hollywood animation on television, the Disney, Warners and Lantz and so on. We had a wider choice. I looked at some TV shows from time to time, about four minutes at a time, the maximum I could take at one time. But I only saw a complete FLINTSTONES show, a whole half hour, a few years ago, in the presence of Joe Barbera, who thought anyone would love to see an early episode on the big screen. It was the longest half hour of my life and should have been called THIS THIRTY MINUTES HAS TWENTY TWO HOURS. He must have thought I had a medical problem. I was literally squirming in my seat the whole time.
Okay, okay. There’s nothing wrong with second-string entertainment. The Three Stooges, old movie serials, NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, WC Fields and others were all considered second-class entertainment once upon a time. But they and many others have entered our film consciousness as top-flight entertainment alongside CASABLANCA and others. Even THE WIZARD OF OZ is pretty cheesy technically, but its solid storytelling and characters are among our favorites.
And you there on your high horse, don’t forget that along with your Disney there were also Terrytoons, Van Beuren and other weak cartoons at the same time as the Disney classics so it wasn’t a uniform type of production even in the so-called Golden Age of Animation anyway. The only difference is that while a lot of Terrytoons, Lantz etc were not up to the standards of the industry leaders, they were not substandard as to craft the way Japanese animation usually is. Their stories, their characters and their animation were nothing to write home about, but they were passable and watchable. They may have bored but never insulted their audience. Ask anime fans for examples of good Japanese animation and you’ll get the same four or five titles each time in varying order. That’s not a long list.
But hey, what’s the big deal? Everything evolves and animation will too. There must have been some guy long ago in a parchment newsletter decrying the lost art of building pyramids. Well, get over it. Things change, sometimes for the good, sometimes not. But change is inevitable. Maybe the animation universe is unfolding as it should. Maybe today we can’t do the Disney-Warners animation as the norm. Maybe our animators can’t do good animation today. We must produce as much footage in a week as they did in a year back then. They didn’t have television and the rest of today’s destinations for animation.
Rock and roll and classical music have co-existed for many years. Disco is dead (sort of) but rap is still with us and so is Bing Crosby every Christmas. The same street can have a MacDonald’s and a gourmet restaurant. Why can’t there be Japanese and American animation side by side, each appealing to its constituency and there are a lot of people who enjoy the best of both. No one fears great cooking will go out of style because of fast food so why should Japanese animation threaten quality animation? Like anything else, what is good in Japanese animation will remain and what is not will be forgotten.
But an awful lot of harm can be done in the meantime. If POKEMON can make more money than IRON GIANT why bother making a film as well done as the latter anyway? If crap is what they want, give ‘em crap. Easier, faster and cheaper. Unless you are in animation and hey, you are, you’ll never understand how every time the art falls a step behind, how hard it is to regain that step. The forces allied against quality, effort, and taste in animation are so pervasive today, that to lose an inch of ground is to lose a mile. MacDonald’s can never threaten good cuisine because there are always people learning it and doing it. In animation we teach quality animation in our schools to people who may never get a chance to do it in their careers. A couple of generations of this and it can be lost.
Producers of old were as much in it for the love of animation as for business. Not so today. Animation has attracted those in it for the money only. Every time some poorly done Japanese animation is successful it’s an excuse for even worse North American animation. It justifies putting the bar a little lower. . Canadian mass-producers of television animation must smile as they see the never-ending lowering of standards in animation which allows them to continue doing their typical TV fare.
What would and maybe should have been laughed off the screen, or better, be considered as substandard in the past, not good enough to air is not only considered acceptable today, but is the standard of most animation produced in the world today. And so quality animation and an art form dies a little more. We could lose it before we realize it. But this was the subject of my article in the last newsletter. Japanese animation, as it generally is today, therefore, is in my opinion, a negative force in the scheme of things. And this from a guy whose first job in the film industry was in the dubbing of the original SPEED RACER television series from Japanese to English! I apologize for that.
He can be reached at e - maiL or at P.O. Box 37009, 3332 McCarthy Road, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada KlV OWO.
