Annie May, Anyone?

That's my name, anyway, for anime-wannabes produced in the west. There have been a few, some with better provenance than others. The Powerpuff Girls were a deliberate parody, and have even been recycled in Japan into something resembling anime. (See pic on left)

IGPX is a co-production between Cartoon Network and Production I.G., but you can pretty much tell which side of the scale is heavier.


Two series are fairly high up on the Annie May scale. Avatar, The Last Airbender may seem to be the best crossover candidate with its blatantly Asian (Chinese-ish) setting. The main problem is that this series still holds back at crucial moments. There are some attempts at taking emotional depth to anime standards, and a few scenes come close. However, there's still the built-in cultural bias against animation; repeat after me: it's a medium for kids. This gets in the way, and the script defaults to the wisecracks often found in modern toons. They might as well rename Sakka The Sidekick as Han Solo: he even quotes one of Han's lines, "I couldn't let you steal all the glory."

But the closest we've gotten to anime is, oddly enough, Nickelodeon's Kappa Mikey. Yes, the art generally sucks, but that actually becomes less important as we realize we're watching a series clearly inspired by madcap Japanese comedies like Excel Saga and BoBoBo-Bo Bo-BoBo.

Kappa Mikey is the story of the cast of a TV series about superheroes, collectively known as LilyMu. Basically a nerdy guy, two girls, an alien and a kinda-pokemon critter, they have to deal with the head of the network (who comes across like a wierd mix of Ted Turner and Mr. Sulu from Star Trek), his fawning flunkie, bizarre fans, and anything else the writers can dream up. And those dreams can get pretty interesting. In one episode, LilyMu becomes a rock band (they can't play music; they just rip off ringtones); they get called on it and challenged to a Battle of the Bands by a real group (bearing a distinct resemblance to Puffy AmiYumi). Best touch: the host of the Battle sounds like Joan Rivers but looks like Yubaba the witch in Spirited Away.

Put all this together with their tendency to go Super-Deformed at a moment's notice, and add bumpers featuring dancing sushi(!), and you have the closest to anime we've hit yet, and it's tasty! Enjoy!

Oscar Animation: Quantity over Quality

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences--the overly grand name for the folks in the film biz who congratulate themselves each year by handing out Oscars--have already put forth the list of 16 potential films for the Academy's consideration for the 2007 Oscar for Best Animated Feature. The sheer number of contenders (which is still provisional) hasn't been this high since the 2003 awards, in which the Oscar went to Hayao Miyazaki's sumptuous classic Spirited Away.

2007 looks like more of the same: The quantity is there, but as for the quality...

Let's see what we have. The Ant Bully, Happy Feet, Arthur and the Invisibles, Barnyard, Cars, The Wild, Curious George, Everyone’s Hero, Ice Age: The Meltdown, Flushed Away, Over the Hedge, Monster House, Open Season, A Scanner Darkly, Renaissance, and Paprika.

Sixteen features, and, let's be honest: did you actually want to see any of them?

That Disney is represented by Cars and The Wild shows just how far the studio has sunk from its glory days. Some of the films are not only dreck, but almost identical dreck: The Wild, Open Season, Over the Hedge, Barnyard.

Only three of the films at least try to push the envelope; A Scanner Darkly and Renaissance, though, basically work the same territory with heavy rotoscoping.

If there were any justice in Hollywood, the Oscar would go to the only film of the bunch with the creativity to qualify as art and science: Paprika. The latest feature by Satoshi Kon, creator of Perfect Blue, Millennium Actress, Tokyo Godfathers, and Paranoia Agent, continues his playing around with perception, blurring the lines between reality and illusion, the objective and the subjective. This time, science creates yet another labor-saving device. This one, however, plugs into a mental patient's thoughts, in hopes of uncovering the deep-seated problem.

It's not just Kon's visuals, which are among the best in the business, or the fact that the coolly logical scientist and her alter-ego Paprika are voiced by anime character goddess Megumi Hayashibara. But the other films, for the most part, have given up. They're content to pitch the pre-pubescent set, expecting that the next generation will glom onto the old.

A Bit Late, But...

Last month Yoshiyuki Tomino came to town: Chicago, to appear as part of the Chicago International Film Festival and screen the trilogy of Z Gundam movies.

Tomino himself is bald, with black bushy eyebrows, and resembled the dust jacket photos of Zen monk D.T. Suzuki. When he spoke through an interpreter, it seemed at times as if he finally had a chance to get stuff off of his chest; at other times, he held back, although hinting at his opinions. He said, for example, that he didn't want to say anything about Dr. Osamu Tezuka, his first employer and mentor; later, though, he allowed that Tezuka's consistent optimism was a problem for him. (Of course, Tezuka himself gave up that optimism later in life, but that's beside the point.)

No earth-shaking revelations, except at the post-panel-discussion dinner at Lawry's. (Can someone tell me what's supposed to be so great about prime rib? Fish is fish and cow is cow, to me...) He finished off his remarks by saying "I hope the three great religions of the world can come together in peace. Of course, that may all be science fiction." As one of the major creators of 20th century sci-fi, I guess he'd know.