After all, what nation could better embody the title of America's younger sister than that of Japan? No other nation quite parallels America's young enormous industrial and technological history/success? When I think of market-dominating multinational conglomerate companies that impact my day to day life, the first that pop into my mind are American and Japanese.
Given America and Japan's economics, free market capitalism, technological innovation and refinement - it almost makes the rest of the world's contributions seem expendable in comparison. It's true that still nobody builds a car quite like the Germans, and we all love our Beatles and Monty Python - but overall Europe feels a bit like yesterday's news. If Japan is America's younger sister, Europe seems like an aging, less relevant, less agile, less vivacious grandparent.
Americana infiltrated Japan in a large part thanks to our post-war occupation. We flooded Japan with pro-American propaganda, we imparted our values and they absorbed much of them. We might have been the innovators of video games with Atari, but few would contest that the Japanese had perfected the video game in the 80's and 90's. When Nintendo reached our side of the Pacific, the decontextualizing was already present in the games.. what kid glued in front of the TV with an NES controller in hand would have figured out on his own that the working class Italian he was navigating through baddies and over deadly pits was a Japanese creation? The fact that it was indeed Japanese was irrelevant. Merit alone won the hearts and minds of America's youth. And it was through the video game medium that I got my first taste of Anime.
Final Fantasy III (1994) was, and may still be, the pinnacle of the Japanese Role Playing Game (JRPG) which was very anime-esque. An epic apocalyptic event separates the first half of the game from its dystopian post-apocalyptic second half.. The entire world is blown up and shattered. It also features an iconic Opera House scene that pushed 16 bit gameplay to elegiac depths one might not have previously thought possible.
In other words, it was Japan's dominance in video game excellence that slipped anime in through the back door for me any many of my peers as kids. At some point we became aware that the games we were playing were Japanese, and at some point we became aware that there were Japanese cartoons being stocked at art-house video rental stores if not Blockbuster's shelves. It's only natural that having been dazzled by Japanese entertainment in one form that we'd venture to give the animation a shot. And from there it's all down hill. What adolescent couldn't fall in love with the likes of Ranma 1/2? I'd dare to say it's universally appealing, I've never seen a young person give it a fare shake and not enjoy it. Bias might have kept American adults disinterested, but kids don't really have bias and cartoons were still age appropriate anyway.
Other acclaimed animes became available. The quality was high. It delivered entertainment that was just plain good and addicting in the case of TV series. So why anime? For me it was "why not anime?" John Lasseter has said that "Quality is the best business plan." And it's hard to not see quality bursting out of every inch of the screen in Akira, Ghost in the Shell, and the other anime classics. Sheer quality brought Japanese video games to the top in the 80's and 90's, so why can't the same simple fact be true for anime?
I also question the notion that Anime is all that different or weird from already present mainstream tastes as Napier seems to assert. The highest grossing (thus presumably most universally appealing) American film of all time is brimming with anime's signatures. The apocalyptic, the elegiac, the festival, and even the relentlessly dis-assuring. I don't speak of Avatar or Titanic, though perhaps a case could be mode for those films as well, but I speak, of course, for the prevailing giant after adjusting for inflation: Gone With The Wind.
Gable's Rhett is unmistakably carnivalesque in the first half of the film. The instant the Yankees were invading and his confederate countrymen were heroically fighting to the death, Rhett was spending some quality time at a whore house; how do you not love this guy?
Then there's the aftermath of the post-war Georgia. Leigh's Scarlett suffers through famine, uncertainty of the fate of her precious childhood home, at one point she's even drawn to murder out of necessity. This is very much apocalyptic and dystopian on the screen. There's also an elegiac element at play with the tension between Scarlett and the man she thinks she loves, but perhaps loves more as a proxy to her idyllic adolescence.
Finally, while Scarlett is too old for the shoujo role in most of the film, she definitely is burdened with not just the charms and vulnerabilities of an uncommonly beautiful young woman, but also the frailties one would usually attribute to a man.. losing her humanity through capitalist ambition and losing love through insecurity and masking her true self. This drama feels fresh to us as Scarlett transcends her gender box. She's incredibly complex, most viewers will both hate her and still feel empathy for her as the film ends with a bitter false hope of somehow gaining the strength to win back her squandered love by venturing back to her hometown. A rather elegiac and dis-assuring ending.
This rambling about Gone With The Wind was to wager that some of the elements intrinsic in anime's appeal was already wildly successful and became a timeless classic in America even before Osamu Tezuka, an anime pioneer, first put pen to paper copying Disney's films.
This is why I question the notion that it took such an emotionally potent image as 9/11 to make anime more appealing to Americans. 3000 did tragically die on 9/11, but America knows greater loss: 600,000 died in the American civil war, 60,000 died in Vietnam... heck, over 2000 Japanese-Americans died in Hiroshima in August of '45.
Indeed 9/11, or not, Anime is growing and would have grown because it's good and fans are continuing to wake up to that fact. It almost seems too simple. We just like good entertainment. Why not Anime? Especially in the days when Hollywood seems to be losing its way many of us are turning to more thoughtful or novel foreign offerings anyway, and anime scratches that itch quite well. The bias against cartoons was a generational thing.. It's now gone, young adults no longer have that bias. They play video games, they appreciate the Japanese anime aesthetic and artistry... in some ways it just seems an inevitable change between the pre and post videogame generations.
