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!