The Anime Encyclopedia, 3rd Revised Edition: A Century of Japanese Animation

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A-CHANNEL *

2011. AKA: A-Channel The Animation. TV series, video. DIR: Manabu Ono. SCR: Tatsuhiko Urahata. DES: Masakatsu Sasaki, Hiroki Matsumoto. ANI: Masakatsu Sasaki. Sayuri Sugifuji, Hong Shen, Hideyuki Kataoka. MUS: Satoru Kosaki. PRD: Aniplex, Dentsu, Houbunsha, MBS. 24 mins. x 12 eps. (TV), 25 mins. x 2 eps. (v).

Toru passes the entrance exam that will let her attend the same high school as her childhood friend and secret love Run. She goes to Run’s house to break the good news, but finds her hugging another girl. Yuko is at Run’s school already, and soon Toru becomes a part of the group with their other friend, Nagi. A gentle slice-of-life comedy with mild overtones of girls-love, this is based on a four-panel manga strip by bb Kuroda, running in Manga Time Kirara Karat since December 2008. Eleven two-minute episodes made up of outtakes from each episodes, +A-Channel, were included on the Japanese DVD and BluRay release in 2011. The trials and triumphs of high school life and loving your best friend are supplemented with fun out of school in a standalone two-part video, A-Channel + Smile, released in 2012 from the same producers, director, and writer.

A.I.C.

Literally Anime International Company, although it is usually identified by its acronym, not its full name. Founded in 1982 by former EG World and Anime Room staffer Toru Miura, the company first contributed to later episodes of the color ASTRO BOY remake. Notable employees have included Katsuhito Akiyama, Hiroyuki Kitazume, Hiroyuki Kawagoe, and Hiroki Hayashi. Representative works include AD POLICE, BLACK HEAVEN, and numerous projects for Pioneer/Geneon (see DENTSU).

A.LI.CE *

1999. Movie. DIR: Kenichi Maejima. SCR: Masahiro Yoshimoto. DES: Hirosuke Kizaki. ANI: N/C. MUS: Akira Murata. PRD: Gaga Communications. 85 mins.

A.Li.Ce throws the viewer straight into the middle of the action, with its heroine fleeing from cyborgs across icy wastes. The background details are only filled in gradually—we are in Lapland in 2030, but 16-year-old Alice’s last memory was of an accident on a space shuttle many years earlier. Her guardian is a stewardess robot programmed to protect her, and their traveling companion is Yuan, a local orphan who has lived alone since his parents were relocated in an illogical environmental scheme by the Earth’s new ruler, Nero.

An early effort in digital animation, A.Li.Ce often resembles a long scene from a computer game, unsurprising as its writer’s previous credits included the game Shen Mue. Like all the best computer games, the movie regularly alters its protagonists’ aims for maximum effect. What begins as a straightforward chase sequence soon becomes a quest to acquire information and resources. Once Alice realizes that someone has brought her to the future for an unexplained purpose, it changes once more into a train journey fraught with peril. Eluding Nero’s Stealth Warriors, only to be captured by the rebellious Liberation Forces, the cast is temporarily split up, as Yuan and Maria escape from custody, while Alice enters cyberspace to help the resistance break into Nero’s fortress. This, it transpires, is why she is needed, as her past self was/is Nero’s mother, affording her identical brain patterns access to the citadel’s defensive computer systems.

In a series of last-minute twists, Alice discovers that she is partly responsible for Nero’s reign of terror. Nero has decimated the world’s population in a misguided attempt to reduce pollution (compare to BLUE REMAINS), itself a misreading of Alice’s memories of the dying wish of her suicidal school-friend Yumi. The motives of the Liberation Forces are found to be even more questionable, and Alice returns to the past to set things right. This, however, is where the narrative falls apart, as her return is visibly demonstrated to make little difference to the future she has just left. We also see her meeting the man who will become Nero’s father, though now she presumably does so with the full knowledge of his future death, thereby making it impossible that the events we have just seen will actually take place.

Time-travel paradoxes aside, A.Li.Ce remains an intriguing entry in the genre, and a surer step into computer animation than the disappointing VISITOR. In Maria, it also has an intriguing take on the ubiquitous robot-girls of anime—a svelte woman in revealing costumes, with an array of pop-out gadgets and power sockets like a 21st-century DORAEMON. Her name is bestowed upon her by Alice herself, not in homage to the Maria of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (see METAL ANGEL MARIE) but because of her chance resemblance to a statue of the Virgin Mary. Later, she is augmented twice, once by Yuan and once in a self-inflicted upgrade, ending the movie with high-powered retractable machine guns, and built-in roller skates that help circumvent the film’s primitive motion-capture. Soon transformed into a battle-robot, Maria retains vestiges of her former programming, and persists in bossing her charges around as if she is still serving in-flight drinks.

A15 ANTHOLOGY: COSMOPOLITAN PRAYERS, AIM FOR THE HIT, LOVE LOVE

2004. JPN: Cho Henshin Cos ∞ Prayers; Hit o Nerae; Love Love. AKA: Super-Transforming Cos(mopolitan) Prayers; Aim for the Hit. TV series. DIR: Takeo Takahashi. SCR: Naruhisa Arakawa. DES: Miwa Oshima. ANI: Miwa Oshima. MUS: Toshihiko Sahashi. PRD: M-O-E, Imagin, Studio Live, TV Kanagawa. 13 mins. x 8 eps. (Cos Prayers); 13 mins. x 8 eps. (Aim for the Hit); 13 mins. x 9 eps; 13 mins. x 9 eps. (Love Love); + 4 bonus DVD episodes each.

Three stories strung out in short snippets in a late-night slot showing PG-15-rated titles. In Cosmopolitan Prayers, a Japanese schoolgirl is transported to the legendary land of IZUMO, where she must team up with local priestesses to rescue the sun goddess, Amaterasu, who has been imprisoned within a network of black towers. Using their mystic powers to transform, or charm up, to their magical forms, the girls fight demons and demigods to keep the world safe—FUSHIGI YUGI crashed into SAILOR MOON, with a title deliberately designed to recall cosplay (Costume Play), the Engrish term for anime-related fancy dress.

Similar allusions might be expected in Aim for the Hit (AKA Smash Hit), which, despite its titular resemblance to AIM FOR THE ACE, is concerned not with sporting triumph but a ratings-chasing TV program. Twenty-five-year-old mystery fanatic Mizuki gets the chance of a lifetime when she’s appointed as producer of a new show, but she’s hardly the ideal choice for the job. She’s physically immature, and her childlike appearance goes with a whining attitude that leads to her colleagues making fun of her. Nor is the film much to her liking, since it is a derivative show about a Japanese schoolgirl saving the world. In a triumph of solipsism, the show that Mizuki cannot stand is Cosmopolitan Prayers—perhaps in an allegory aimed at animators forced to put aside their dreams in order to pay the bills on shows like this. But like her media colleague ANIMATION RUNNER KUROMI-CHAN, she finally pulls through.

Love Love features Naoto Oizumi, a high school student with an off-putting stare, hired as a cameraman by the production company in Aim for the Hit, and tasked with filming the training of the actresses who have been hired to star in Cosmopolitan Prayers, thereby achieving what must be a modern animator’s idea of franchise paradise: the pop idols of KIRA KIRA MELODY ACADEMY crashed into TENCHI MUYO!

ABASHIRI FAMILY, THE *

1991. JPN: Abashiri Ikka. Video. DIR: Takashi Watanabe. SCR: Takashi Wata­nabe. DES: Shigenori Kurii. ANI: Shigenori Kurii. MUS: Takeo Miratsu. PRD: Dynamic Planning, Studio Pierrot, Soeishinsha, NEXTART. 75 mins.

Papa Abashiri, leader of one of the most notorious criminal syndicates in history, decides it’s time for his superpowered family to retire so his daughter, Kukunosuke, can have a normal existence. However, her normal school turns out to be a hunting ground for crazed perverts and brawlers, who have no intention of teaching the students anything. As the violence escalates, Kukunosuke calls in her family to fight against the principal in a final showdown of bone-crunchingly epic proportions.

Recalling SUKEBAN DEKA, with its tale of a bad girl trying to go straight, and DEBUTANTE DETECTIVES, with its well-connected students, The Abashiri Family was originally released as four short chapters in the RENTAMAN video magazine. It was soon compiled into this omnibus edition, which is the version circulated in the English language. Its cartoonish comedy angle gives it more in common with creator Go Nagai’s KEKKO KAMEN and HANAPPE BAZOOKA than with his more serious stories, but the disjointed nature of the original production makes for an inferior offering. Director Watanabe would go on to adapt another Nagai story, BLACK LION.

ABE, YOSHITOSHI

1971–. A graduate of Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, Abe’s dark, brooding artwork established distinctive looks in SERIAL EXPERIMENTS LAIN, HAIBANE RENMEI (based on his own amateur publication), and TEXHNOLYZE. He also designed the characters and wrote the manga of NIEA_7. He favors unorthodox typography and likes his name to be written with the Y in lower case and the B in upper. We prefer to keep our English-language text readable.

ABNORMAL PHYSIOLOGY SEMINAR

2010. JPN: Hentai Semi Seminar. AKA: Hen Semi. TV series, video. DIR: Ryoki Kamitsubo, Takao Kato. SCR: Takamitsu Kono, Deko Akao. DES: Sunao Chikaoka, Aya Kuginuki, Toshihiro Kohama, Kaoru Aoki. ANI: Sunao Chikaoka, Makoto Oda, Park Sang-Jin, Noboyuki Furukawa. MUS: Kei Haneoka, Masaru Yokoyama. PRD: Xebec, Starchild Records, Kodansha, Starchild Records, The Klockworx Co., Ltd. 12 mins. x 2 eps. (v), 15 mins. x 13 eps. (TV).

An innocent university student is taking a sexual perversion seminar led by a deviant professor. Will she keep her morals and her sanity intact? Well, what do you think? In Britain this could be the plot for one of the Carry On films, a series of bawdy movies in which more was suggested than shown. In Japan, and in anime, the clichés have developed in a different way: deviant doctor/innocent nurse, deviant teacher/innocent high school girl, and on and on and on. Based on a manga by Tagro, who drew the manga for Gainax’s PANTY AND STOCKING WITH GARTERBELT, this riff makes mildly interesting use of cheap design, animation corner-cutting, and story tropes, but not so interesting that you should spend four hours of your life checking them out. Of more interest is the Korean Park Sang-Jin, director of three episodes, and the number of Korean key animators on the credits. Such foreign creatives usually endure a subaltern status on anime productions; here we see them getting credit where it’s due, although perhaps they wish they hadn’t.

ACCEL WORLD *

2010. TV series, video. DIR: Masakazu Obara. SCR: Hiroyuki Yoshino, Jukki Hanada, Masahiro Yokotani, Noboru Kimura. DES: Yukiko Aikei, Nobutaka Ike, Takafumi Nishima. ANI: Yukiko Aikei, Eri Ogawa, Shinsuke Yanagi. MUS: Hiroyuki Oshima, MintJam, onoken. PRD: Sunrise, ASCII Media Works, GENCO, Bandai Namco, Warner Bros. 24 mins. x 24 eps. (TV), 24 mins. x 2 eps. (v).

In 2046 a virtual network called Neurolinker is accessible by the entire world on its cellphones (compare to SUMMER WARS). It’s a refuge for Haruyuki, a middle school student who escapes into the world of online gaming to avoid the bullies that target him constantly. Then the most popular girl in his school beats him at online squash and sends him into a panic. That’s not the worst of it—she approaches him in real life and, seemingly for no reason, gives him a new fighting game called Brain Burst. Haruyuki finds he can actually pause reality with the incredible cognitive acceleration the game gives him—but there’s a downside. If you lose too often you are thrown out of the game, never to return.

The rest of the world may mock the loser whose only skill is a facility for computer games, but within another world, where a cool avatar can take over from the unkind physical reality, he may be an idol and a hero. So when that reality is taken away from him, the rest of the world naturally crumbles. Reki Kawahara’s understanding of this basic truth of VR is key to this clever, if rather talky, take on the integration of technology into everyday life. Although written later than SWORD ART ONLINE, this novel series was animated earlier but stayed largely below the radar. Video sequels in 2012 and 2013 caused relatively little interest in the West until the anime arrival of its flashier sibling.

ACCELERANDO

2007. JPN: Accelerando—Datenshitachi no Sasayaki. AKA: Accelerando—Angels’ Secret Whispers. Video. DIR: Hideki Araki. SCR: N/C (Accelerando), Shinichiro Sawayama (both sequels). DES: Hideki Araki. ANI: Hideki Araki. MUS: N/C. PRD: Pink Pineapple. 30 mins. x 4 eps. (v, Accelerando), 27 mins. x 12 eps. (v, Stringendo), 30 mins. x 3 eps. (v, S&A), 30 mins. x 2 eps. (v, Stretta), 40 mins. x 4 eps. (v, Core Mix).

Waitress Tamaki and her lover Kurono have sex at the café where Tamaki works. Ohashi, a friend of both, has a crush on Tamaki and often visits the café to see her. Realizing how he feels, Kurono decides to force the shy boy to confess his feelings by getting Tamaki aroused and sending her to wait on Ohashi, who can’t resist the scent of her arousal.

Director Araki started as an in-betweener on NIGHT ON THE GALACTIC RAILROAD and worked his way through key animation, animation directing, and design to directing a number of Pink Pineapple titles. The stories are predictable (with scenes from the first two repeated in the second) and character development is almost nonexistent, but the art and design are excellent, though initially good animation quality declines across the series.

Animator and Accelerando manga creator Yuko Seto has named three manga after musical terms, though the stories have nothing to do with music. Araki also directed the video series based on Seto’s Stringendo, set in a high school and written by veteran Pink Pinkapple scriptman Shinichiro Sawayama. Stringendo: Angel-tachi no Private Lesson ran to 12 27-minute episodes between 2006 and 2012. The common thread that ties all Seto’s manga together is the fantasy of average dorks having sex with beautiful high school girls and watching them turn each other on, and Araki produces good-looking anime versions. For those without time to watch the whole series, four compilations of sex scenes were released in 2012 under the title Stringendo: Core Mix Megamori: Okazu Desu Yo.

A 2008 video series, the three-part Stringendo & Accelerando Ultimatum—Sera, is intended as a sequel to both Accelerando and Stringendo. In 2009 Araki and Sawayama also worked on Stretta, a two-part series along the same lines as Stringendo. The couples from both earlier series appear in Stretta.

ACROBUNCH

1982. JPN: Makyo Densetsu Acrobunch. AKA: Haunted Frontier Legend Acrobunch. TV series. DIR: Masakazu Yasumura, Satoshi Hisaoka. SCR: Masaru Yamamoto. DES: Shigenori Kageyama, Mutsumi Inomata, Masakazu Higuchi. ANI: Kazuhiro Taga, Masakazu Yasumura, Hideki Takayama, Yutaka Arai, Kazuhiro Ochi. MUS: Masaji Maruyama. PRD: Nippon TV. 30 mins. x 24 eps.

Half-Japanese amateur inventor Tatsuya Lando talks his five almost all-American children into piloting his latest project, a transforming super-robot called Acrobunch. Older boys Hiro and Ryo pilot the two Buncher Hornets, while twin girls Miki and Rika ride the Buncher Arrow flying motorcycles. Middle-child Jun is the 15-year-old boy who gets to pilot the Acrobunch unit formed from the combination of all the vehicles with dad’s Falcon Buncher main craft. Tatsuya is searching for the ancient treasure of Quaschika, which was the true inspiration behind the ancient stories of Atlantis. But Lando is not the only one—Emperor Delos of the undersea Goblin empire is also searching for the Quaschika, and the Acrobunch robot becomes the last line of defense between them and Earth. Each week, it must fight against the robots of the Goblin armies, one of which is led by Delos’s own daughter, Queen Shiira, who develops a crush on her enemy Hiro.

Shunted around the schedules and between two different production studios, the troubled Acrobunch ("a robot controlled by a bunch of acrobats!") nevertheless served as a training ground for a group of new talents who would find fame in the decades to come. It was the first anime job for future TEKKAMAN-designer Rei Nakahara. Among the animators, Arai would work on CITY HUNTER, Ochi would make HIKARIAN, and Takayama would become the director of the notorious UROTSUKIDOJI series. Two decades later, Inomata produced similar character designs for BRAIN POWERED.

AD POLICE *

1990. Video, TV series. DIR: Akihiko Takahashi, Akira Nishimori. SCR: Sho Aikawa. DES: Tony Takezaki, Fujio Oda, Toru Nagasuki. ANI: Fujio Oda, Hiroyuki Kitazume. MUS: Kaoru Mizutani. PRD: Artmic, Youmex, AIC. 40 mins. x 3 eps. (v1), 25 mins. x 12 eps. (TV), 30 mins. x 3 eps. (v2, Parasite Dolls).

A dark spin-off from Toshimichi Suzuki’s BUBBLEGUM CRISIS, AD Police concentrates on the AD(vanced) antirobot crime division of Mega Tokyo’s police force. Leon McNicol, a minor character in the original series, is partnered here with butch lady-cop Gena in several investigations that play with ideas of humanity in a high-tech society. The voomer/boomer robots here are all female in the man’s world of the ADP, where only women who are prepared to become one with machines stand a chance in it. Whereas this device was used in Bubblegum Crisis as an excuse for girls with impressive high-tech kits, here it is far more misogynistic, as femininity is gradually eroded by bionics and prosthetics, taking characters’ humanity with it. A businesswoman, for example, is only successful in the boardroom after she has a hysterectomy, but the trauma turns her into a serial killer. There are shades of Blade Runner in the sex-android stalker that locks onto the man who injured her, and there are also blatant steals from Robocop in the final chapter, wherein one of Gena’s ex-boyfriends receives so much augmentation that his tongue is the only part of his original body that remains.

Canceled after just three of the planned five episodes, the franchise was not revived until 1999, in the wake of the Bubblegum Crisis 2040 remake, as a 12-part TV Tokyo series directed by Hidehito Ueda. The new AD Police was a far shallower affair, ditching many of the old characters in favor of a buddy-movie cliché between rapid-response robot-crime cop Takeru Sasaki and his new partner, Hans Krief. Clearly made with half an eye on the overseas market (all the other leads have foreign names like Paul Sanders, Liam Fletcher, and Nancy Wilson), the melting-pot remake is something of a disappointment.

The franchise was briefly resurrected in Parasite Dolls (2003), a three-part video series directed by Kazuto Nakazawa, focusing on a clandestine branch of the AD Police, called, somewhat unimaginatively, Branch. The story focuses on Buzz, an officer like writer Chiaki Konaka’s earlier Ross Sylibus in ARMITAGE III, who is transferred to an unappealing new posting and forced to cooperate with a detested robot partner. Parasite Dolls also exists in a movie-length edit, which is the version most commonly found outside Japan.

ADRIFT IN THE PACIFIC *

1982. JPN: Jugo Shonen no Hyoryuki. AKA: 15 Boys Adrift; Deux Ans de Vacances. TV special. DIR: Yasuji Mori, Yoshio Kuroda. SCR: Shunichi Yukimuro. DES: Hiroshi Wagatsuma, Rumiko Takahashi. ANI: Tatsuo Ogawa, Hideo Maeda. MUS: Katsutoshi Nagasawa. PRD: Toei, Fuji TV. 75 mins. (TVm1), 84 mins. (TVm2).

When bad weather causes her to slip her moorings and drift out to sea, the British schooner Sloughi is left in the hands of the 15 schoolboys on holiday. Without officers or sailors on board, the French boy Briant manages to organize the group and beach the ship on a deserted island they name Cherman after their school. The upper-class British boy, Doniphan, begins to argue with Briant about who should be in charge, and problems are multiplied a hundredfold when a 16th castaway washes up on the shore—a schoolgirl called Kate.

Deux Ans de Vacances, Jules Verne’s low-rent copy of SWISS FAMILY ROBINSON, remains immeasurably more popular in Japanese than in English. This TV movie included a young design assistant called Rumiko Takahashi, whose growing success with URUSEI YATSURA would make her rich and unlikely to work in animation again.

In 1987, the story was remade as another TV movie to cash in on the popularity of the Hollywood movie Stand By Me (which also featured several boys going exploring and getting mildly upset). Directed by Masayuki Akehi, the new version featured Maria Kawamura, shortly to find fame as Jung Freud in GUNBUSTER, as the troublesome Kate. This second TV movie was released in English as Story of 15 Boys, a pedantically faithful TRANSLATION of the Japanese title suggesting that the U.S. distributor knew little of Verne’s original. See also VIDEO PICTURE BOOK, VIFAM, and in an awfully bleak variant, BOKURANO.

ADULT FAIRY TALES

2000. JPN: Yonimo Osoroshii Nihon Mukashibanashi. Video. DIR: Soichi Masui. SCR: Shige Sotoyama. DES: Kaoru Honma. ANI: N/C. MUS: Miki Kasamatsu. PRD: Tac, Toei. 50 mins.

A deliberate attempt to take GRIMMS’ FAIRY TALES away from their cuter modern image and back to their darker roots, this series comprises three short versions of popular tales augmented with copious horror and flavor-of-the-moment computer graphics. The tales include Hansel and Gretel, Blue Beard, and Cinderella, all chosen because they presented an opportunity for the crew to depict stories of love and obsession.

ADULT WOMEN’S ANIME TIME

2011. JPN: Otona Joshi no Anime Time. TV series. DIR: Hiroshi Kawamata. SCR: Reiko Yoshida, Kei Yuikawa. DES: Kazuki Ikeda. ANI: Kenichi Tsuchiya. MUS: Mine Kawakami. PRD: The Answer Studio Co. Ltd., NHK, CurioScope. 25 mins. x 4 eps.

An occasional drama series for women, presenting the kind of stories that could be made more expensively with live actors, this first installment, Kawamo o Suberu Kaze (The Wind that Glides Downriver), tells the story of Noriko. She’s been living in America for five years, and is now heading back to her hometown with a four-year-old son. How will she adjust to life back in Japan amid her old memories? Three further episodes were aired on BS Premium in March 2013, the first directed by Toru Takahashi and written by Tomoko Konparu based on a story by Amy Yamada. CurioScope and NHK have now shifted animation work to Production Reed. There hasn’t really been an attempt to present anime dramas about everyday life for an adult audience since HUMAN CROSSING. This may well help in broadening the TV audience for anime.

ADVANCER TINA *

1996. Video. DIR: Kan Fukumoto. SCR: Wataru Amano. DES: Hironobu Saito, Kenji Teraoka. ANI: Dandelion. MUS: Ann Fu. PRD: Dandelion, Green Bunny, Beam Entertainment. 45 mins.

Three thousand years after pollution renders Earth uninhabitable, the human race is a space-faring people in search of new planets to settle. Elite super-scouts called Advancers blaze trails for the rest, but Omega 13 is one world proving difficult to conquer. Nine teams have failed to return, prompting high-ranking executive Mugal to make convict Tina Owen an offer she can’t refuse. If she can solve the mystery of Omega 13, he’ll knock a whole millennium off her 2,000-year sentence for an undisclosed crime.

Tina only spends five tedious minutes on Omega 13; the rest of the story involves the pointless hunt for a crew (telepath/alien/comic relief Frill and Japanese love interest/sidekick Akira), and the rescue of fellow Advancer Garuda from a beleaguered ship. The alien menace turns out to be a multi-tentacled creature with acid saliva that burns through bulkheads and clothes but not through girls’ skin. The alien murders all the disposable members of the cast (three concubines whose sole role is to be sexually assaulted) before being summarily executed as it tries to rape Tina. This, apparently, makes the planet safe and avenges Akira’s dead parents all in one shot, allowing Tina to fly off to her next mission, though a sequel was never made.

Despite promising beginnings that unite the last-chance mission of The Dirty Dozen with the interstellar trouble-shooting of DIRTY PAIR, Advancer Tina soon collapses into a tacky exploitation movie. With an ithyphallic menace that gestates in human stomach cavities and a predictable, false ending, its debt to the Alien series is obvious, but the film is shoddily assembled from start to finish. Fukumoto, Saito, and Teraoka, the real-world perpetrators of this anime crime, are still at large and can be found elsewhere in this book in the entries for VENUS FIVE, SEXORCIST, and GIGOLO.

ADVENTURE BOY SHADAR

1967. JPN: Boken Shonen Shadar. TV series. DIR: Juzo Kataoka. SCR: Masaki Tsuji. DES: Shinichi Kuwajima. ANI: Takashi Saijo, Nobukazu Kabashima. MUS: Atsutoshi Soda. PRD: Nippon TV. 10 mins. x 156 eps.

When Earth is threatened by the invading Ghostar, a young boy with nerves of steel and the strength of 50 men appears from a cave on Mount Fuji. He is Shadar, a boy of unknown origin who, with his faithful dog, Pinboke, fights each week to save the world in several ten-minute installments, guaranteeing a final showdown for Japanese viewers each Saturday.

Ghostar actor Kenji Utsumi’s voice would come to represent the ultimate in evil to a Japanese audience, and he would go on to play the title roles in DRACULA: SOVEREIGN OF THE DAMNED and DON DRACULA.

ADVENTURE KID *

1992. JPN: Yoju Sensen Adventure Kid. AKA: Demon-Beast Battle Line Adventure Kid. Video. DIR: Yoshitaka Fujimoto. SCR: Atsushi Yamatoya, Akio Satsugawa. DES: Dan Kongoji, Ryunosuke Otonashi, Yuji Takahashi. ANI: MW Films. MUS: Masamichi Amano. PRD: MW Films. 40 mins. x 3 eps.

Wartime Japanese scientist Professor Masago devotes himself to his research, ignoring his beautiful wife, Michiyo. In 1945, he is murdered by the dastardly Captain Matsubara’s soldiers, after first being forced to watch them rape her. Fifty years later, the husband and wife are reincarnated as students Norikazu and Midori. Norikazu unearths Masago’s prototype dimension-hopping device, and it propels them into a parallel universe where Masago’s bitter psyche has created a world of marauding zombie soldiers. Eventually Norikazu (good side) defeats Masago (bad side) by dropping him into the Hiroshima bomb blast. The couple then find themselves in Hell Zone, where lusty elf-girl Eganko latches onto Norikazu and accompanies him back to Earth. Back at Norikazu’s school, the reincarnation of Captain Matsubara, college-boy Yukimoto, wants Midori for himself and schemes with Eganko’s mother, Queen Dakiniten, to make Norikazu fall in love with Eganko. The plan goes awry when love potions are mixed up and given to the wrong victims.

A pornographic tale of rape and domination that suddenly turns into a farce, Adventure Kid contains erotic musings on the alien girlfriend-squatter set-up of URUSEI YATSURA, a clumsy attempt to integrate computers into horror (also seen in DIGITAL DEVIL STORY), and a final episode that pokes merciless fun at the excesses of both itself and creator Toshio Maeda’s earlier UROTSUKIDOJI. In an attempt to draw in new crowds, the producers hired live-action erotic actresses to provide some of the voice roles, a move which backfired spectacularly when they couldn’t actually act. In the U.K., the series was heavily cut and renamed Adventure Duo in order to avoid the term kid fooling customers into assuming it was suitable for children (LAW AND DISORDER). The authors suggest it’s not suitable for anybody.

ADVENTURE ON KABOTEN ISLAND

1967. JPN: Boken Kaboten Shima. TV series. DIR: Motokazu Watanabe. SCR: Aritsune Toyoda, Masaki Tsuji, Arashi Ishizu, Junichi Yoshinaga. DES: Fumio Hisamatsu. ANI: Shizuko Komooka, Toyoo Ashida, Kazuo Mori. MUS: Various. PRD: TBS, Eiken. 30 mins. x 39 eps.

SUPER JETTER–creator Fumio Hisamatsu’s 1967 comic in Shonen Sunday magazine featured a group of boys and girls marooned on a South Sea island in an imitation of Jules Verne’s ADRIFT IN THE PACIFIC. The anime version reduced the female cast to a single comic relief little sister called Tomato, preferring instead to concentrate on the male characters as they explore their new home.

ADVENTURES OF KOROBOKKLE

1973. JPN: Boken Korobokkle. AKA: The Mountain Gnomes. TV series. DIR: Yonehiko Watanabe, Yukizo Takagaki, Toru Murayama, Takanori Okada, Yoshikata Nitta. SCR: Shunichi Yukimuro, Noboru Shiroyama, Minoru Takahashi. DES: Masatoshi Kobayashi. ANI: Kazuo Kobayashi. MUS: Bob Sakuma. PRD: Eiken, Tatsunoko Pro, Yomiuri TV. 25 mins. x 26 eps.

Sword-wielding hero Bokkle, flute-playing mystic Cous-Cous, and brave female Love-Love are very small gods who live under the butterbur leaves in the countryside. Becoming increasingly annoyed that humans no longer pay them any respect, they decide to head closer to human habitation in search of worshipers. Mild-mannered country boy Seitaka is the only person able to see the spirits, who teach him how to stand up for himself against local bullies. His gentle woodland friends, however, are unafraid of fighting with vicious little knives when they are in trouble.

AoK was sponsored, like PIGGYBACK GHOST before it, by Sumitomo Life Insurance as part of the company’s classic series—an attempt to associate a company with a successful anime series that paid off much better for the Calpis drinks company with WORLD MASTERPIECE THEATER. The original children’s book Stories of Korobokkle, itself based on folktales from northern Japan’s indigenous Ainu people, was initially adapted with character designs by its author Satoru Sato, but these were replaced with designs by Masatoshi Kobayashi after they tested poorly with young focus groups. That, at least, is what was claimed in Japanese sources, but it seems outlandishly odd to buy the rights to a book if one is only going to throw away its creator’s input! The problem was probably more connected with creating character designs that could be more easily replicated by a group of animators. In an additional attempt to appeal to a young audience, the leading role was taken by Satoshi Hasegawa, who had previously appeared in NHK’s child-centered Grave of the Wild Chrysanthemums (*DE). With its disappearing spirits, Korobokkle could be said to be a foreshadowing of later Studio Ghibli efforts like POM POKO and MY NEIGHBOR TOTORO.

ADVENTURES OF KOTETSU *

1996. JPN: Kotetsu no Daiboken. Video. DIR: Yuji Moriyama. SCR: Yuji Kawahara. DES: Yoko Kikuchi. ANI: Tetsuya Watanabe. MUS: Kuniaki Haishima. PRD: Daiei, Tokuma Japan. 30 mins. x 2 eps.

Hot-headed Linn Kotetsu Suzuki is an accomplished martial artist at 14 and the last in a long line of warriors. Running away from her old-fashioned Kyoto home to look for her brother in Tokyo, she helps a shapely private investigator, Miho, defeat two possessed street thugs. The two soon move in together, and Kotetsu inadvertently saves Miho’s life once again when Tetsuya, the man hired by a corrupt businessman to kill her, instead falls in love with her new roommate. Settling their differences at a hot-springs resort, the trio is attacked by a tree demon, sent by Tetsuya’s boss. Upon defeating it, Kotetsu’s grandmother tells her she can stay in the big city.

Recalling both DEVIL HUNTER YOHKO and LA BLUE GIRL with its female inheritor of a family martial arts tradition, this silly affair was based on the best-selling 1992 adult manga by MEE (AKA Mikun). Though featuring atmospheric music from SPRIGGAN’s Haishima and direction from PROJECT A-KO’s Moriyama, the fan-service nudity and set-ups make it less than the sum of its parts—one assassination attempt involves a nude clone of Miho in the bath simply to arrange a lesbian scene between the two girls. Despite undeserved popularity for its nude heroine’s resemblance to RANMA ½, the series stopped after the experimental two-part opener. MEE would have better success with his next anime project, the TV series HYPER POLICE.

ADVENTURES OF PINOCCHIO *

1972. JPN: Kashi no Ki Mokku. AKA: Mokku (Woody) the Oak Tree. TV series. DIR: Ippei Kuri, Yukihiro Takahashi. SCR: Jinzo Toriumi, Akiyoshi Sakai. DES: Yoshitaka Amano. ANI: Masayuki Hayashi. MUS: Nobuyoshi Koshibe. PRD: Tatsunoko, Fuji TV. 25 mins. x 52 eps.

Finding driftwood that has been struck by lightning, toy-maker Gepetto constructs a puppet that comes alive but wants to be a real boy. Based on the 1881 children’s story by Carlo Collodi, it was also animated as PICCOLINO. Yoshitaka Amano’s first work in character design. Shown on HBO in the U.S., and not to be confused with the NEW ADVENTURES OF PINOCCHIO (1960).

ADVERTISING AND SPONSORSHIP

Corporate sponsorship in one form or another is one of the vital cornerstones of the anime business, and has been since the days of EARLY ANIME. The advertising industry is not only a direct sponsor of animation but also an indirect patron of the arts through the investment it generates in productions and in animators who are otherwise known for their art-house output.

With early movie censors hostile toward children’s films, Ikuo Oishi cunningly found a way to exhibit outside theaters, showing his The Hare and the Tortoise (1918) in department stores as a lure to sell audience members the products of the sponsor, Morinaga Chocolate. Japanese animation has been a tool in the selling of products and services ever since, with sponsorship often providing the funding for innovation. While Seitaro Kitayama is remembered today for his smallish output of fictional films and fairytales, advertising contracts formed the bulk of his studio’s output from 1921 onward for everything from political campaigns to cleaning products. Breathlessly described in its day as the longest Japanese cartoon ever made, Kitayama’s Oral War (Koku Eisei, 1924) formed the closing reel of a documentary about dental hygiene made for the Lion toothpaste company and is likely to have clocked in at eight whole minutes—one of the problems with such milestones is that they were trumped on an almost monthly basis until anime reached full feature length in the 1940s.

During Japan’s Fifteen Years War of 1931–45 (which dovetailed with World War II after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941), it was a legal requirement for all films to demonstrate an educational function, or at the very least, the maintenance of moral fortitude, turning even children’s cartoons into oblique promotions of the war effort or Japan’s colonial empire (WARTIME ANIME). But it was in the postwar period that anime came into its own as an advertising medium, with its punchy shorts and graphical conveyance of information deemed ideal for the selling of products. In cinemas, and increasingly on television from 1953, animators were called upon not only to fully animate commercials, but also to provide inserts of graphics, diagrams, or maps into commercials otherwise filed as live action, if they are preserved at all.

While posterity remembers the primary Japanese animation event of 1958 as being Toei’s first color animated feature PANDA AND THE MAGIC SERPENT, the most widely seen cartoon of that year was actually Tory’s Bar, a TV commercial for a whiskey brand visible to anyone with a television, several times a night. By 1958, a corporate report from Dentsu, the largest advertising firm in Japan, estimated the number of advertisements made by that point to be 1,200, of which fully half were animated, not merely in cel form but in neglected media such as PUPPETRY AND STOP MOTION. Although commercials today are often timed in mere seconds, the earlier examples of the form were often better described as short films, with running times up to three minutes. By 1960, of an estimated 500 workers in the Japanese animation industry, 300 were working for Toei and another 20 for Otogi Pro. The remaining 150 were spread across two dozen small ateliers in the advertising world, often staffed in mere twos and threes, making hundreds of commercials, many of which have now been lost.

According to the historian Nobuyuki Tsugata, whose untranslated book Before the Dawn of TV Anime (Terebi Anime Yoake Mae, 2012) is the most substantial analysis of the topic available, there is an entire substratum of advertising-focused animation, from companies like Ikkosha, Saga Studio, and Osaka Eiga, whose work has been forgotten by anime history because they did not make the programs but instead the filler that came in between those programs. The only studio likely to have name recognition with modern fans is TCJ, which made some 1,400 commercials between 1954 and 1960 (2,200 if one includes live-action commercials with animated inserts), but even TCJ is only remembered not because of its commercials output but because of its move into narrative entertainment, with a name-change to Eiken and its most famous and enduring work SAZAE-SAN. This forgotten influence on the medium also extends into production, with award-winning works such as Asahi Beer’s Beer Through the Ages (1956, Beer Mukashimukashi—see PUPPETRY AND STOP MOTION) and advertiser-funded programming such as INSTANT HISTORY, sponsored by the confectionery company Meiji Seika. Summarizing this day in history in three-minute sketches, Instant History switched backers and channel to become Otogi Manga Calendar in 1962, funded by Kirin Beer. This subsequently developed into several Kirin-sponsored shows forming early exercises in anime DOCUMENTARIES AND HISTORY, including Knowledgeable University: Tomorrow’s Calendar (1966, Monoshiri Daigaku: Ashita no Calendar), Knowledgeable University: Cartoon Biographies (1970, Kirin Monoshiri Daigaku: Manga Jinbutsu-shi), Learning Around the World (1971, Sekai Monoshiri Ryoko), The Kirin House of Knowledge (1975, Kirin Monoshiri Yakata), and The Kirin Calendar of Tomorrow (1980, Kirin Ashita no Calendar). This long genealogy of inter-related shows only came to an end in 1984, 23 years after its first iteration, racking up a combined total of 6,021 episodes.

It became standard practice for advertising companies to buy entire sectors of airtime in half-hour slots and to then supply not only the program that filled them but also the commercials that filled the breaks. This involved the advertising companies directly in original production and encouraged symmetries and synergies as clients cooperated to find suitable shows. Animators were commissioned not just to make the shows, but also often the attendant commercials. The swift proliferation of television channels quadrupled the size of advertising’s investment between 1958 and 1963. However, after 1963, the involvement of advertisers in the television market largely plateaued, except for chemicals, pharmaceuticals, and food products. Although Osamu Tezuka is remembered as the father of TV anime, it was Kaoru Anami, Tezuka’s liaison with the advertising company Mannensha, who suggested that he seek commercial sponsorship for ASTRO BOY and who suggested that Tezuka approach a confectionery company. This embroiled Tezuka in a struggle within the 1960s candy marketplace referred to in advertising histories as the Chocolate Wars, with Morinaga Chocolate refusing to take a risk on Astro Boy and Morinaga’s competitor Meiji Seika offering the money instead.

Anime TV in the 1960s was riddled with sponsors, often for confectionery but sometimes from elsewhere, such as Seiko Watches (MICROID S), Fujisawa Chemicals (FUJIMARU THE WIND NINJA), and the Oranamin C vitamin drink (STAR OF THE GIANTS). It was soon noted, on the production of QTARO THE GHOST, that anime created to sell toys usually took about two years to wring all related purchases out of their young fans, after which point it was better to simply come up with a new anime in the same slot that was almost exactly the same but just different enough to justify new purchases.

Toy companies were to have the longest-lasting impact on the medium. Where some anime included product placement for certain items sold by the sponsors, anime in the 1970s came to be dominated by the more invasive form of context integration, in which the product to be advertised formed a fundamental part of the story. MAZINGER Z, in 1973, was supposedly the first anime made by a production committee (seisaku iinkai), in which a number of interest groups, from record companies to toy companies to manga publishers, collaborated on the creation of a franchise that would allow each of them to benefit from a context-integrated narrative.

Anime thereafter has often had to literally dance to such sponsors’ tunes, for good or ill. Some creatives, such as Yoshiyuki Tomino, even flourished in this environment, embracing the opportunity to tell any story the sponsors wanted, as long as the requisite number of toys were name-checked in each episode (GUNDAM). Later iterations of the same process can be seen in ZOIDS and TRANSFORMERS, and, indeed, most anime made for children up to the present day.

Anime made for older viewers since the 1980s often repeat the same processes. Computer game companies and the publishers of novels are often found sponsoring anime incarnations of their titles, and the modern otaku market is arguably supported less by anime itself than by the attached fields of merchandising. Marc Steinberg, in Anime’s Media Mix (2012), notes that this is a tantalizing prospect for modern corporations and that while a fridge or car might be expected to last for seven years, short-lived media franchises still have a half-life of less than two years, allowing sponsors to sell the same old stuff all over again.

In the 21st century, production committees remain a powerful presence behind the scenes of most anime. This can manifest in unexpected ways, not only in the continued support in the industry for toy and game tie-ins but in subsidiary meta­textual artwork, such as that created at the time of the BERSERK movies, showing the leading characters anachronistically eating hamburgers. Meanwhile, context integration is far more insidious and skillful than some might think, and spotting it is one of the subversive pleasures of modern anime viewing. As a rule of thumb, if a product’s name is spelled correctly on screen, such as with the presence of Nissin Cup Noodles in FREEDOM or Love Labo cosmetics in THE BIHADA TRIBE, the manufacturer has paid for it to be there. And if, as in the movie of K-ON, characters spend several minutes of screen time flying on a prominently featured airline and blundering around London, asking where their brand-name hotel is, you can be sure that money has changed hands. As a result, many of the holy lands and places of pilgrimage of modern otaku, where they pay homage to their favorite shows by seeking out their locations in the real world, are often imitations of journeys made by the fictional characters in the pursuit of selling a product. Since context integration does not require ticket or DVD sales to monetize a production, it is likely to become more, not less, prevalent in the future. Not even piracy can diminish it, but will instead amount to free distribution of commercial messages from sponsors.

AESOP’S FABLES *

1983. JPN: Manga Aesop Monogatari. TV series. DIR: Eiji Okabe, Jun Hagiwara, Fumio Kurokawa. SCR: Michiru Tanabe, Mami Watanabe, Ryo Nakahara. DES: Yu Noda. ANI: Hirokazu Ishino. MUS: Pegumo, Toko Akasaka. PRD: Nippon Animation, Transarts. 25 mins. x 52 eps.

Aesop, an ancient Greek storyteller thought to have lived in the 6th century, has been a staple of anime since the beginning with EARLY ANIME such as Sanae Yamamoto’s Tortoise and the Hare (1924) and Frog’s Belly (1929). The 1983 TV series added the term manga to accentuate the children’s-picture-book quality of the presentation, running through tales such as The Ants and the Grasshopper, The Sun and the North Wind, and The Thirsty Crow. Eight of the stories were combined to make the theatrical feature Aesop’s Fables (1983, U.S. release 1985), with a framing device of young Aesop tricking his fellow villagers into believing that a wolf is attacking. When a real wolf comes, nobody believes him, and he is chased down a magic hole into a kingdom of animals. As he looks for a way out, he meets a tortoise, a hare, an ant, and other creatures who tell him their stories. Several of Aesop’s fables were also used as part of the Shogo Hirata’s Picture Book series (1995). See also VIDEO PICTURE BOOK.

AESTHETICA OF A ROGUE HERO *

2012. JPN: Hagure Yusha no Aesthetica. TV series. DIR: Rion Kujo. SCR: Ryunosuke Kingetsu, Masahiro Okubo, Tetsuto Uesu. DES: Hiroshi Tsukada. ANI: Hiroshi Tsukada. MUS: Kayo Konishi, Yukio Kondo. PRD: ARMS, AT-X, GENCO, Hobby Japan, Lantis, Media Factory, Showgate. 24 mins. x 12 eps.

Akatsuki Osawa has been spirited off to a fantasy realm, where he has fought against evil and defeated the demon lord. But that’s only the beginning of this anime series, which follows his return to his homeworld, and his attempts to rehabilitate back into human society, attending a normal(-ish) high school, and dealing with the inevitable fact that he has somehow come back home with the demon lord’s daughter in tow.

Anime has mixed mundane men with unearthly women ever since URUSEI YATSURA, so there is nothing particularly new in a premise that lumbers a Japanese boy with a harem (ROMANCE AND DRAMA) of adoring and/or diffident girls. There is, however, something rather sweetly postmodern about a world that regards fantastic adventures in a parallel universe as an entirely mundane malaise, from which young men need to be rehabilitated on their return, hopefully with a few applied skills learned from their adventures elsewhere. In that regard, Aesthetica of a Rogue Hero is as incisive an allegory of 21st-century culture as the virtual-reality overlays to be found in DENNO COIL. Many modern gamers are indeed the leaders of armies and captains of space vessels in their free time, living in fantasy worlds that surely impact, to some extent, on their mundane lives. This premise offers rich narrative potential, unfortunately and entirely squandered in a humdrum, gropey harem story that soon devolves into bickering about boobs. Compare to THE DEVIL IS A PART-TIMER.

AFRO KEN

2001. AKA: Afro Dog. Video. DIR: Takashi Imanishi. SCR: Takashi Imanishi. DES: Tetsuro Aimi. ANI: Toyonori Yamada, Kayoko Murakami, Fumie Anno, Naoyuki Takasawa. MUS: Takeshiro Kawabe. PRD: Sunrise, Bandai Visual, Green Camel. 30 mins.

Like its Bandai stablemate TAREPANDA, this one-shot, fully computer-animated wonder is an attempt to tap into the HELLO KITTY merchandising market, putting the brand first and following with animation only reluctantly. Afro Ken is, as the name implies, a dog with a multicolored Afro hairdo, and several equally hallucinogenic friends. In several short sequences, he is shown visiting various tourist sites, playing with some of his canine friends, walking through Tokyo like a friendly Godzilla, and appearing in ancient cave paintings. The half-hour running time contains only 15 minutes of animation—the rest is bulked out with a Making Of documentary that manages to recycle much of the footage already shown, along with creator interviews. The only truly worthwhile item on the disc is the catchy theme song, and even that is played twice.

AFRO SAMURAI *

2007. TV series. DIR: Fuminori Kizaki, Jamie Simone. SCR: Takashi Okazaki, Tomohiro Yamashita, Derek Draper, Chris Yoo. DES: Hiroya Iijima, Takeshi Koike. ANI: Hiroya Iijima. MUS: RZA. PRD: Gonzo, Fuji TV. 25 mins. x 5 eps. (TV), 97 mins. (m).

After his father dies in a duel with the warrior known as Justice, young Afro resolves to study the martial arts. He becomes a wandering swordsman in a milieu that mixes samurai-era epics with science fiction in the style of SAMURAI 7. Supposedly conceived in 1995 by a young Takashi Okazaki, the concept achieved new life in the 21st century when it gained the backing of Samuel L. Jackson as coproducer and voice artist. Riding a wave of interest in anime fueled in part by KILL BILL: THE ORIGIN OF O-REN, but also drawing on the co-option of martial arts imagery and samples in hip-hop culture, Afro Samurai takes the irreverence of SAMURAI CHAMPLOO to extremes, with characters such as Kuma, an anonymous fighter who wears a teddy bear’s head to hide his identity. The main purpose of the show, and of Afro Samurai: Resurrection, the movie that followed in 2009, is to flood the screen and the speakers with cool images and sounds. Every moment is a pose, every instant a beat. The art direction has fine color design and beautiful, kinetic, flowing movement. The fight scenes are amazing, as ritualized as the bullfight, as fluid as the ballet. The motorbikes are every teenager’s dream machine. Story? Dialogue? Character development? You’re missing the point if you even ask. Composer RZA, of the Wu-Tang Clan, would later try his own hand at Afro-orientalism as the writer-director of the live-action film The Man With the Iron Fists (2012). Afro Samurai does not appear to have been dubbed in Japanese, instead being released in Japan with the English audio track intact, in order to add that little touch of the exotic occident.

AFTER CLASS LESSON *

2005. JPN: Hokago—Nureta Seifuku. AKA: After School—Get Your Uniform Wet. Video. DIR: Masato Kitagawa. SCR: Rokurota Makabe. DES: P-zo Honda. ANI: Kazunori Higuchi, Mamoru Sakisaka, Ryota Ito. MUS: Salad. PRD: T-Rex, GP Museum Soft, Milky. 30 mins. x 3 eps.

A perverse teacher at an elite girls’ school is still a virgin at the start of this series. That soon changes when he finds himself strangely drawn to gorgeous cheerleader Ayumi. Finding out her secret weakness, he drugs and molests her. She soon realizes his attractions and can’t get enough of him. When he finds out that another girl is sleeping with one of the faculty and blackmails her into sex with him, Ayumi even films them in action. He’s soon bedding all the hottest girls in school in this anime based on a game by Bishop. Episode two sees Ayumi, despite her growing feelings for the protagonist, helping him molest and rape two sisters—another cheerleader and a tennis star. In episode 3, one of the female teachers, also a virgin, is given a compromising photo of him with one of the students and sets out to get him fired. Because this is a porno anime, she doesn’t go straight to the police and the principal, which gives him time to assault her with the help of his pupils. There is an argument that this kind of wish fulfillment fantasy really helps the introverted loner who doesn’t know how to talk to real girls. But he’s not going to learn much about conversation here.

AFTER … THE ANIMATION

2007. Video. DIR: Kanzaburo Oda. SCR: Keisuke Kanemaru. DES: Hikari Haruno. ANI: Hikari Haruno. MUS: AG Promotion. PRD: Kotaro Murakami, Milky. 27 mins. x 2 eps.

Based on the game by Ciel, this is a love-triangle story featuring two childhood friends, Yiuchi and Kana, and their romantic/erotic adventures in high school. There is no plot, just a string of sex scene segues as feeble as anything in live porn. Two boys, three girls, a female teacher and more sex than is strictly compatible with passing exams, plus pedestrian animation and the kind of muzak you get in elevators makes for a forgettable package, in every sense.

AFTER-SCHOOL LOVE CLUB ÉTUDE

1997. JPN: Hokago Ren’ai Club Koi no Étude. Video. DIR: Moritaka Imura. SCR: N/C. DES: Yoshiaki Hatano. ANI: Yuki Mine. MUS: N/C. PRD: Pink Pineapple, KSS. 31 mins. x 2 eps.

Originating in Libido’s mildly titillating computer role-playing game in the same genre as TOKIMEKI MEMORIAL, this is the story of Shunichi and Sanae, who are attracted to each other, but whose relationship seems to go nowhere. Neither does the plot until episode 2, when the members of the love club start to get into the sex scenes promised on the box. In the original game, the player had to manage his resources to ensure he could get the most out of 12 sex-starved female members of a dating club in just 30 days. The anime doesn’t retain its appeal for quite that long.

AFTER-SCHOOL MIAOW-MIAOW

2011. JPN: Hokago Nyan-Nyan. AKA: After-School Nyan-Nyan. Video. DIR: N/A. SCR: N/A. DES: N/A. ANI: N/A. MUS: N/A. PRD: Studio9MAiami, Max, Advanced Anime Jigyo Kumiai. 19 mins., 25 mins.

Based on the erotic manga by Rikako Inomoto, whose art style relies heavily on big bottoms and thighs and soft, intense highlights, this video consists of two very short stories. A nameless schoolgirl, who is sexually inexperienced but intensely curious, asks underclassman Yu to masturbate in front of her and things go predictably further. In the second story, a guy spends the night at his girlfriend’s house while her parents are away. At just 19 minutes long and with a wholly uncredited crew, the package seems overpriced at ¥5,000 even by Japanese standards, but it was successful enough for a sequel to be made in 2012. Lovely Day: Boku to Kanojo no Nanoka Kan (Seven Days of Me and Her) is the story of two cousins who are hot for each other and have just one week to act on their feelings. It clocks 25 minutes, according to the MediaBank website. Maybe there are extras. The titular nyan-nyan, Japanese for the noise a cat makes, has entered modern slang as a verb for fooling around.

AFTER-SCHOOL MIDNIGHTERS *

2012. JPN: Hokago Midnighters. Movie. DIR: Hitoshi Takekiyo. SCR: Hitoshi Takekiyo, Yoichi Komori. DES: N/C. ANI: Kenichiro Tanaka. MUS: Reiji Kitazato. PRD: T-Joy, Amazon Laterna, CoMix Wave, Ozmig Corporation, Mont Blanc Pictures, Sanfride, Sony Music Entertainment, Starchild Records. 95 mins.

Three young girls exploring their school’s condemned science room encounter a talking anatomical dummy and a dancing skeleton. Dared to attend a late-night party where other inanimate residents come to life, they hatch a plan to collect magical artifacts that may save the building from its scheduled demolition.

This inoffensive school romp betrays its origins as an apprentice piece—a series of short films used by Hitoshi Takekiyo to drum up work for himself and several other directors in Fukuoka who were looking for work in animation and advertising. Unexpectedly, their test footage got picked up in France and shown on television, so it went from being a showreel to a project that had already secured a degree of foreign interest.

The originals were dialogue-free, with humor added to familiar figures—Dracula, a ninja, Jesus Christ, and an anatomical model, the latter of which came to prominence in the movie remake. Motion capture is the primary method—a lot of the action is created through the use of performance capture, which makes it, arguably, less animated than it is a special effects movie—compare to VEXILLE. There are moments of real animation, but there are also elements of cunning recycling, such as the reduplicated skeletons in a dance sequence.

AFTER-SCHOOL TINKERBELL

1992. JPN: Hokago Tinker Bell [sic]. Video. DIR: Kiyoshi Murayama. SCR: Akira Oketani. DES: Yasuhide Maruyama. ANI: Yasuhide Maruyama. MUS: N/C. PRD: Life Work, Ashi Pro. 45 mins.

In this animated adaptation of two novels in Shoichiro Hinata’s After School series, high school investigators Kenichi and Misako get on the case when the popular Broadcast Club disc jockey, Ryoko, goes missing.

AGE OF THE GREAT DINOSAURS

1979. JPN: Daikyoryu no Jidai. TV special. DIR: Shotaro Ishinomori with Hideki Takayama. SCR: Shotaro Ishinomori, Makoto Naito. DES: Shotaro Ishinomori. ANI: Kozo Morishita. MUS: Shogun. PRD: Ishi(no)mori Pro, Toei, Nippon TV. 73 mins.

CYBORG 009–creator Ishinomori (just plain Ishimori at the time) was heavily involved in this anime shot on 35mm film, in which naïve boy Jun, his female companion, Remi, and her little brother, Chobi, are whisked away to the Cretaceous Period by a flying saucer. There they hobnob with Cro-Magnon men, which would be damage enough to the program’s educational merit even without the suggestion that aliens wiped out the dinosaurs when their population became too great—a dark portent for the expanding human race and a typical touch from the dour Ishinomori. Dinosaurs also cropped up in Makoto Sokuza and Shigeru Omachi’s one-shot video Dinosaur Guide (1989), in which Professor Doctor (sic) escorts children Tai and Ayumi on a trip to the prehistoric past. Aliens would return to do away with the dinosaurs in LAWS OF THE SUN.

AGEDAMAN

1991. JPN: Genji Tsushin Agedama [sic]. TV series. DIR: Masato Namiki. SCR: Takashi Yamada, Shigeru Yanagawa, et al. DES: Hatsuki Tsuji. ANI: Hiroaki Sakurai, Hideyuki Motohashi, et al. MUS: Toshihiko Sahashi. PRD: Studio Gallop, TV Tokyo. 25 mins. x 51 eps.

Average boy Genji can use his warp key to transform into the superhero Agedaman, the last line of resistance against the evil 11th-century scientist Nostradamus and his equally evil granddaughter, Kukirei, in a brightly colored show that mixes action and comedy.

AGEMAN AND FUKU-CHAN

1991. Video. DIR: Teruo Kogure. SCR: Susume Yoshiike. DES: Masamichi Yokoyama. ANI: Masamichi Yokoyama. MUS: Jiro Takemura. PRD: Knack. 30 mins.

Mantaro Nishino is obsessed with money and women, but his schemes invariably fail in this satire of Japan and the Japanese in the late 1980s bubble economy. The sexy strumpet Fuku-chan is Mantaro’s eventual undoing in this erotic fable based on a manga by Masamichi Yokoyama, who also created MISTER HAPPY. The title recalls that of Juzo Itami’s live-action Ageman: Tales of a Golden Geisha (1990).

AGENT AIKA *

1997. JPN: Aika. Video. DIR: Katsuhiko Nishijima. SCR: Kenichi Kanemaki. DES: Noriyasu Yamauchi, Hidefumi Kimura, Yoko Kikuchi. ANI: Noriyasu Yamauchi. MUS: Junichi Kanezaki. PRD: Graviton, Bandai Visual. 30 mins x 7 eps. (v1), 4 mins., 2 mins., 4 mins. (Special Trial), 5 mins. (music video), 25 mins. x 3 eps. (v2. R16), 27 mins. x 3 eps. (v3, Zero).