-every once in a while I work on an essay that I don’t feel is something I want to seek publication for but is yet something I enjoyed thinking about so I save them up for a blog post. Here you go!

Finding Anime

One of my favorite movies is My Neighbor Totoro. If you had told me 20 years ago that one of my favorite movies would be an anime, I would have laughed at you because—for years—
I refused to watch anime.

The first anime I ever saw was a Dragonball Z movie. I was about halfway through college and I had a new friend who seemed likely to become a new boyfriend. He lived at home and had a plethora of imported Japanese Animation on VHS. This was before you could walk into any big box electronics store to pick up a DVD of subtitled and/or dubbed episodes of Naruto. No these were probably illegal, un-subtitled copies that my friend had purchased from a local sci-fi store. Not a comic book store, but a store that specialized in Star Trek figurines and the like. The owner had a contact in Japan but she didn’t know a thing about these new anime movies and collectibles she was selling. She only knew that people were started to ask for them.

I didn’t completely understand what was going on in the Dragonball cartoon but I did have a good laugh when one of the little boy characters proceeded to pee on one of the other characters. “Well,” I thought, “you wouldn’t see that on Tom and Jerry.” I can’t say I became hooked but I became interested because it was something my friend truly loved. I never went out of my way to buy or rent anime videos for myself and I had yet to even hear of manga.

Early in college I had been offered the chance to watch anime with the guys who lived downstairs from me in the dorm. The Dungeon, as it was known, was filled with likeminded nerds. And I mean nerds in the best of ways. I would call myself a nerd, albeit a bit of a late bloomer, who began reading and enjoying science fiction and fantasy books, as well as associated movies, late in her teens. Early in my teens I had refused to read or watch any geeky material because my brother liked it. I limited myself due to pure sibling rivalry. Back in college, I turned down the offer to watch anime with The Dungeon Boys because one of the guys said the movie had lots of boobs and bloody action. It was called Vampire Hunter D. I still haven’t seen that particular anime.

It wasn’t until I was almost out of college, when everyone seemed to be on AOL, that I realized I had seen anime when I was very young. My friend, now fiancé’s, oldest sister was Trelaina online, a character I remembered from an old cartoon called Starblazers. The show Starblazers used to air on our local UHF station early on weekday mornings. My siblings and I would watch it while we ate our breakfast before going outside to wait for the school bus.

Back then anime had a cult following. 20 years later and the genre has exploded to the point where I’d call it mainstream. There are even American shows that are made in what could be considered the anime style of fast action and characters sporting large attentive eyes. Manga have taken over the bookstores and at $10 a pop are much more expensive than comic books which, while making some indie resurgence, are still appear to be on the decline. I read comics until I was a pre-teen and everyone I knew had a favorite comic. I can’t think of the last time I saw a kid reading a comic book though. The chunky mangas are being read, but not the slim $2.99 or more a piece comics of today.

I’m not sure why I stopped reading comics. Did comics disappear from my life because they were no longer easy for me to purchase? My mother used to bring home the week old copies from the drugstore for us in piles. Did I have the feeling, as I did with my Barbie dolls, that it was time to put them away because I was a big girl now and big girls don’t play with dolls or read comics?

I started really watching anime and reading manga early in my 30’s. Anime and manga, in Japan, are read by people of most ages. The variety of topics covered in manga is astounding compared with the way they are marketed in America. As I scan local bookstores, the mange sections appear to be mostly geared towards teenage boys with a few girl friendly issues thrown in for balance. Comics, on the other hand, as they gain some ground in the market again, are being read by more than teenage boys. Are we all trying to recapture a piece of our youth or are we drawn back into comics and manga because of the powerful art and writing that just happens to be in animated form? Why do I even have to still question myself or feel odd about being drawn to the world of anime?

Early in our marriage my still friend but also now husband continued to watch his favorite Japanese shows and movies but I tended to do something else while they were on. Did I still have that hang up that that type of entertainment was still somehow just for boys? I don’t think it was until I fell in love with Totoro and every other Studio Ghibli movie I watched that I found my anime niche. I found manga to which I could relate like R.O.D (Read or Die) which has nerdy girl lead characters.

For a while, my husband felt cheated by the sudden popularity of anime in the states because he had been watching it for so long before it became popular. I thought of how I had been wearing flannel shirts long before that became standard grunge attire and realized how much we all like to be a little different, to have our own little corner of the world. One of the great things about finding anime is that, once you weed through it, you will start to find writers and animators that speak to you. Finding anime and manga that I will enjoy have become a past time, something my husband and I can even share even if we don’t read or watch all the same books and shows. Like finding a good song or a quirky restaurant we can say, “Here, try this.”