by Patrick Drazen

Art doesn’t always travel well, especially across borders. Opera, sculpture, literature have their admirers, but are hardly “mass media.” Japanese animation goes against all that, finding fans literally around the world, even where there is no knowledge of anime’s cultural and historic roots. Brazilians embraced Sailor Moon, Palestinians embraced Haruhi Suzumiya, and in 2007 the fourth most popular search word on Google was “Naruto.” Pop culture seldom reaches this level of popularity.

I’ve tried to isolate what I love about anime by recalling favorite moments and scenes; many of these moments come from Studio Ghibli. Miyazaki Hayao has been an animator, writer, director, producer of some truly amazing animation, but by that I don’t mean something as dazzling as Disney’s Fantasia. Sometimes there are small moments of surprising depth and beauty: the richness of a sunset or the vibrancy of fresh-picked vegetables in Tonaro no Totoro. When Princess Nausicaä’s wounded foot is pushed into an acid lake, her scream on the soundtrack is frighteningly real.

One of my favorite moments is from a less spectacular Ghibli film, an adaptation of the girls’ romance comic Mimi-wo Sumaseba. Would-be writer Shizuku and her boyfriend Seiji talk about their future; Seiji wants to go to Italy as an apprentice violin-maker. He takes his instrument and starts playing “Take Me Home, Country Roads”—a song which Shizuku had been trying to adapt into Japanese. In the middle of the song, Seiji’s grandfather shows up with some friends; they grab instruments and join in. It’s the kind of magic that happens sometimes at parties, and in its own way tops any magic Harry Potter could do.
The spectacular visuals of Macross Plus (as well as the music of Yoko Kanno); the philosophical speculation of Fullmetal Alchemist; the shocks and thrills of Perfect Blue; the madcap humor of Ranma ½; this list could go on forever, because other writers and artists are always waiting to bring in something new, something different, something that stretches a medium that in the west is dismissed as a diversion only for children. Still, if I had to describe the appeal of anime in two words, they would be: no borders.

Animation (and the comic books—manga—which inspire much Japanese anime) is a fantasy medium, free to create whatever one wishes. Still, as a collective effort requiring dozens of people on even the simplest projects, this usually means that “whatever one wishes” is still limited. There’s no sense in investing time, money, and resources in a project that nobody wants to see. But, somehow, these economic principles are less important in anime these days. As I said, many anime were based on manga; the audiences were ready-made.

But something happened when anime took off around the world. People who couldn’t speak a word of Japanese, who couldn’t tell sushi from Shinto, embraced the vitality and creativity of the medium. Anime studios had assumed for years that the global audience for anime was limited. But that audience, like anime itself, is without borders.

PATRICK DRAZEN is author of Anime Explosion: The What? Why? And Wow! Of Japanese Animation (Stone Bridge Press); he is also a freelance writer on anime, and a member of the Editorial Board of Mechademia, a scholarly journal devoted to Japanese pop culture.