Look at the TV cartoon lineup and you’ll find
“Yu-Gi-Oh!” and “Digimon.” Go to theaters
and you’ll find “Spirited Away” and
“Pokemon 4Ever.” Japan may be across the Pacific, but
its culture is definitely here.
In conjunction with the American Library Association’s
Teen Read Week, the 2D/3D Cartoon and Animation Festival will be at
the Santa Monica Main Library tomorrow afternoon. Based on this
year’s Teen Read Week theme, “Get graphic @ your
library,” the festival features workshops on two-dimensional
drawing and three-dimensional design, including “Drawing
Cartoon Characters” and “Publishing Disney
Storybooks” by Scott Tilley, who is writing the book for
“Treasure Planet.”
The screenings, however, focus mainly on Japanese animation
series including “Neon Genesis Evangelion,”
“Arunja,” “GateKeepers,” and “Initial
D.” For these, librarian Catherine Ronan consulted with the
local Japanese animation (or anime) authorities, the Santa Monica
High School anime club. She also contacted Fred Patten, a veteran
freelance anime writer.
While animation is generally relegated to mere cartoons in
America, Japanese animation has branched out to genres including
action, adventure, romantic comedy, fantasy, science fiction and
even pornography (known as hentai).
“Anime is very hot right now it seems,” said Ronan,
a recent alumna from UCLA’s department of library information
science. “There’s a wider range of subject matter and
content. It appeals to girls as well as boys. It’s not all
violence. There’s a lot of humor and interesting ways of
approaching subjects.”
Recently, Disney has seen the booming interest in anime and has
brought over the work of Hayao Miyazaki, including “Princess
Mononoke” and this year’s “Spirited Away,”
which included the voice talent of UCLA alumna and theater actor
Susan Egan.
If Disney wasn’t interested in the artistry of the films,
at least it cared about its box office clout. In Japan,
“Spirited” earned an equivalent of $230 million and
“Mononoke” earned $148 million outside of the United
States, according to the Internet Movie Database (imdb.com).
The connection between Disney and Japan has long been in the
making. As early as 1965, when Osamu Tezuka wrote his TV show
“Kimba the White Lion,” Tezuka drew upon the Disney
film “Bambi.” Later Disney allegedly drew upon
Tezuka’s work in “The Lion King,” whose Simba
character is similar to Kimba.
Now, features of anime are influencing American animation even
more, especially with the large eyes, the spiky hair, the
kinetically sharp angles, and the foreshortened body.
The festival is not limited to films, however, and Ronan hopes
to get people reading animation as well as watching it.
“There’s a lot of interest in illustrated books,
graphic novels, and comic books also,” Ronan said. “We
just started a graphic novel collection at the library.”
Log on to www.smplteens.org for more information.