Andrew Osmond looks at how two people – one British, one American - first encountered anime, and how they sold very different images of what they found to the world.
At the start of 1991, a man walked into London’s ICA cinema (still in business now). He was there to watch a film that was almost completely unknown in Britain. The man was Andy Frain; he was an executive at a new film company called Island World Communications, on the hunt for acquisitions. The film he saw at the ICA was Akira.
“It blew me away,” Frain told me when I interviewed him a decade later. “Hitherto, I’d had no interest in animation beyond the average person’s love of Tom and Jerry or whatever. But what struck me about Akira was that, quite simply, I’d never seen anything like it. It was like an animated Blade Runner, clearly not for children, but a well-crafted, thought-out, philosophical movie for grown-ups that happened to be animation rather than live-action.”
“In 1991,” Frain continued, “the notion of adult animation was maybe something talked about by a few people, but to the public, it was quite incongruous. The few mainstream experiments were flops or perceived as novelties. The Simpsons had barely touched our screens and even that was still focused on Bart. Putting the words ‘adult’ and ‘animation’ together was unheard of.”
Frain went on to distribute Akira in Britain, snapped up more anime in Japan, and created the label Manga Entertainment. The brand would endure for three decades until 2021, by which time it had become a subsidiary of Funimation, which had been purchased by Sony. It was rebranded as Funimation that year, then as Crunchyroll in 2022 after that platform’s purchase by Sony in 2021.
But in the 1990s, Manga Entertainment was marketed, in Frain’s words, as “an adult animation company, the punk rock of animation.”
With his background in the music industry, Frain compared Manga to the hip hop label Def Jam. “Were there more films like (Akira) in Japan? If so, we could treat them as a record label, like Def Jam, a genre in itself. Nobody in Britain knew the names of the films, the names of the directors, anything about them other than they were brand new (in Britain) and that if you enjoyed one, you were quite likely to enjoy others.”
Think of Frain’s account as Exhibit A. It’s a case study of how Japanese animation had a huge impact on one non-Japanese person, and how that person helped shape the image of anime to the world. Now let’s move to Exhibit B: another man who encountered anime, a decade before Frain. He was a young American animator, and his name was John Lasseter.
Lasseter and Lupin
Unlike Frain, Lasseter always loved animation. “I loved cartoons as a kid,” he said at a talk that I attended at the 2014 Tokyo Film Festival. “I never stopped loving cartoons. Even when it was inappropriate to like cartoons, being a teenager – I should have been into girls, I should have been into cars – I loved cartoons.”
Lasseter, though, was annoyed that Hollywood executives saw cartoons as a kids-only medium. He blamed TV scheduling. “Once everything went to television, and animation was only shown on Saturday mornings and after school, kids’ hours, there was a fundamental change in who (Hollywood) thought animation was for.”
Skip to 1981. Channeling his passion for cartoons, Lasseter was an animator at Disney. A Japanese producer, Yutaka Fujioka, came to America, bringing artists including Hayao Miyazaki. They were there to take part in the Japanese-American film of Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland, a debacle that wouldn’t be released until 1989, but that’s another story – suffice to say Miyazaki dropped out early.
Fujioka showed Lasseter three clips from what was then Miyazaki’s only movie, the Lupin caper Castle of Cagliostro. The scene which electrified Lasseter was the hill-bounding, cliff-climbing car chase near the start of the film. His reaction was just like Frain’s with Akira. “That sequence still blows me away,” said Lasseter.
He remembered studying it intensely. “Fujioka gave me a VHS videocassette copy of the clip. I watched it again and again and again. I had friends at the Los Angeles Film Exposition… Fujioka sent over a print of the film, and I got it into the festival because I wanted everybody to see it.”
“This is what – oh! – this is what we wanted to do,” Lasseter said of Lupin’s joyride. “I watched that clip and there’s no way that it was made for kids – just for kids. It’s for kids, it’s for adults, it’s for teenagers, it’s for everybody.”
While Frain responded to Akira by creating the “Manga” brand, Lasseter used Cagliostro as inspiration in his own career. In 1995, he directed the world-beating Toy Story, the first Pixar movie. Like Cagliostro, it was for kids, adults, teenagers, everybody.
Six years later, when you might have thought Lasseter was too busy with Pixar, he was pushing Hollywood execs with amazing energy, pestering them to give a proper release to another animated film. Not Pixar, but an anime – Miyazaki’s Spirited Away. (Princess Mononoke had been released in America earlier but did little business).
Miyazaki himself called Lasseter “an enormously effective bulldozer” for Spirited Away’s American release. Lasseter turned up on the beginning of the original American DVD, supplying a gushing introduction. “You are lucky… This is an amazing motion picture… My good friend Miyazaki has created his masterpiece.” Lasseter also mentioned, inevitably, that it blew him away. In return, Ghibli released a two-and-a-half-hour documentary in Japan, called Thank You, Lasseter-san.
Pretty much every AWN reader will know about Lasseter’s public disgrace in 2017. But his impact on how the Anglophone world sees anime today remains. Think of how Netflix has all of Ghibli’s films today; how many people link anime with Spirited Away; and how many anime fans today grew up with Spirited Away. So much of that’s down to the bulldozer that was Lasseter.
Toy Story versus punk rock
Frain’s and Lasseter’s accounts are fascinating for their similarities and contrasts. Both men were electrified by seeing something that looked so brand new. But from there, their reactions diverged. For Frain, uninterested in animation previously, he saw the potential to create an adult, punkish, brand with Akira as the paradigm.
For Lasseter, a cartoon fan, it demonstrated how you could make animation for everyone. Lasseter was enthused by the medium’s all-embracing populist potential. With the Manga brand, part of the point was it excluded some groups. Kids, for example, or the easily offended.
I’m not arguing one perspective is better than the other, or they’re the only two perspectives on anime. But they both cast shadows decades later. Frain’s and Lasseter’s stories suggest you can either see anime as exciting because it can be for everyone, or because it can feel exclusive, something you get, or you don’t.
Campaign for Real Anime!
Each person reading this has their own unique idea of what anime “is,” and why it’s good. The next perspective was written by an anime fan in Japan in the 1990s. Try to work out who the Japanese fan is before I give it away. (There’s a clue in the below video.)
“Forfeiting one’s goal leads to despair, and is a sickness that can prove fatal,” said the fan. “I wonder if Miyazaki and his people are familiar with that feeling of despair… I think they don’t want to display the negative things called self-loathing and complexes to others… Ghibli’s works can't show anything but superficial happiness and a reproduction of reality with all the dirty things omitted. …Ghibli’s works have, for me, become things that don’t possess the image of “anime,” but rather of… the Japanese movies that have now lost all their energy.”
Have a biscuit if you guessed those comments were made by Hideaki Anno, the creator of Evangelion. (The comments are taken from an unofficial translation by Mark Neidengard.) With supreme cheek, Anno made his comments in liner notes which he wrote for a Ghibli DVD boxset in Japan. Anno is, in fact, a friend of Miyazaki and a big part of Ghibli history. He animated Nausicaa’s God Warrior in the video above, and voiced the hero in The Wind Rises 30 years later.
But Anno’s vision is quite different from Ghibli’s. It’s informed by an openly “otaku,” fannish background and the dark feelings that many otaku share. And all those negative things, the self-loathing and the complexes, went into Eva’s Shinji Ikari, one of the most iconic anime characters ever. Whether you agree with Anno’s sentiments or not, those otaku convictions shaped what anime is now.
The dangers of gatekeeping
But not all fannish perspectives are constructive. At the extremes, there’s toxic rubbish – “bro” fan attacks on “fake fangirls” and other such nonsense. Then there are more serious arguments, sometimes well made, which still whiff of fannish gatekeeping. I’ll take an example.
Some fans suggest the anime funded by Netflix – the ones that are called “Netflix Original Anime” on the platform – aren’t really anime. The arguments generally claim that they’re over-engineered for foreign consumption, which means they’re not authentically anime.
The problem is these anti-Netflix arguments are very selective. Of course, they highlight the Netflix Originals that were widely panned by fans, such as the CG revival of Ghost in the Shell, subtitled SAC_2045. (I liked it myself, but that’s my problem.) But the fans have much less to say about the Netflix Originals that were widely praised: Beastars, Kakegurui, Violet Evergarden, Pluto...
More fundamentally, anime with an international flavor have been around for decades, long before Netflix. You might as well indict a classic like Cowboy Bebop for being “not Japanese enough,” with its bricolage of references to Bruce Lee and American film noir.
Back in 1995, the British film magazine Sight and Sound already claimed the first Ghost in the Shell was tailored for the world market. Like Netflix’s Original Anime, the film was funded by foreign money; it was co-produced by Britain’s Manga Entertainment, with Andy Frain as an Executive Producer. According to Sight and Sound’s review, “Many of the specifics that prove baffling in the normal run of anime, especially the rape imagery, shrieking ‘cute’ pubescent females and transformer-type robots, have been minimized or eliminated.”
Most of us wouldn’t define anime in those terms today. But the anti-Netflix arguments aren’t very different, really, and they’re not very constructive. Reading them often feels like listening to a fan who grew up on Akira and Wicked City, grumbling that everyone likes Ghibli, Shinkai and KyoAni these days, and they’re not what anime should be. It looks awfully like gatekeeping.
If Frain, Lasseter and Anno have something in common, it’s that they’re enthused by the potential of anime. In contrast, the anti-Netflix arguments start by defining what anime is, and what it should be, as if that’s an easy thing to say. That’s quite a claim, considering anime encompasses at least 60-plus years of constantly-evolving history, and so much content – endless thousands of hours - that two super-fans might never see the same anime between them.
Not all perspectives on anime are useful. Focusing too hard on any anime title, be it Akira, Cagliostro, Pop Team Epic or the Netflix shows, distorts the reality of anime; that it’s too vast for anyone to see it in the round. Yet we still need passionate partial perspectives on anime, to drive it ever onward – and not only Japanese perspectives. Just ask John, or Andy, about when they were blown away.
