Anime Invades America

In the 1960’s, as animation was started to rise in popularity in Japan, a few movies were distributed to America to act as tests to see if they would sell abroad. These were three films released by the Toei Doga film company: Panda and the Magic Serpent, Magic Boy and Alakazam the Great. None of these sold well. A few (eight) cartoon series were brought over to America, most notable of which was Astroboy, but these too failed to produce strong results because of the different ideologies of the two countries. Fred Patten in his essay, ‘Anime in the United States”, says that this is due to the fact that the Japanese never really created the “‘just for kids’ perception”, that was prominent in American cartoons at the time (Patten, 55-57).

In the 1970’s, however, three major factors brought Anime to slight commercial success. First was the fact that American cartoons, which had previously focused on foolish antics of animals who could talk now started to shift to American comic book heroes. It was around this time that the Fantastic Four and Spider Man were getting their own cartoon series, and it was hard for the creators to eliminate the action-violence accustomed to these comics without taking away most of the plots, so violence was becoming more acceptable on American air waves (Patten, 56-57).

Second, the giant-robot genre of anime was becoming the major trend in Japan. These shows would be broadcast to Japanese neighborhoods via community TV channels. These shows produced toys which were now more complex, opposed to simple, cheap American toys. These new toys created appeal in the male teen audience. The third factor was that the local channel broadcasts of anime could also now be recorded with the introduction of VCRs, which allowed a wider group of people to see the shows (Patten, 57).
These shows appealed to teen audiences more than American cartoons because opposed to their American counterparts, Japanese shows had more dramatic situations and more mature backgrounds. Also, in the late seventies, Star Wars made a large impact on American culture, hitting it big for science-fiction, which was a major section of Anime at the time (Patten, 57).

In the eighties, anime amassed a cult following amongst the growing sci-fi audience, and soon many magazines and fan booklets were being produced and swapped between fan clubs. When video games became popular, many video games were based off of anime, or vice-versa, and fans were eager to find the connections. Conventions sprang up, and with the advent of the internet, anime became widely accessible (Patten, 59-63).

It was the Nineties however, when anime became as large as it is today, due to major motion picture releases, such as Akira, or Cartoon Network’s "Toonami", as well as other channels’ promotion of the art. These factors helped make anime a common household term that most people in America have at least heard once, or some variation of, i.e. Japanese animation, japanimation, etc. It is perhaps because it has become such a common term that people are often misinformed about the subject matter, as will now be discussed.