Here we go again, racing in where angels fear to tread: manga and animé are international sensations, with the most rabid fans this side of Star Trek. Anybody presuming to write anything so presumptuous as an introduction to or survey on this topic risks saying something incredibly wrong and/or dumb. That's never stopped us before. So let's GO!

By now most people are aware something is going on: though, perhaps with high profile examples like Pokemon, they're hoping that if they ignore it, it will all go away. Good luck. animé, or Japanamation, is flowing down the Western airwaves, not exactly yet a Tsunami, but steadily enough that ignoring it is no longer an option; indeed, while ignoring it might seem a good defense against Pokemon and worse, that strategy will leave you unprepared to divide the bad from the good; while such an approach might help keeping out the bad (and there is much) it would be a shame to miss the good: for the best animé can be wonderful.

Getting up to speed means first learning about manga: long comic strips serialized in Japanese magazines, often later compiled into paperback books, which then might be animated for film or tv — animé — or turned into novels, maybe even an opera. In Japan, comics have reached a level of acceptance and popularity seen nowhere else in the world. The artists who create manga are treated like rock stars, surrounded by microphones and tv cameras wherever they go. Not only are theirs household names, but they are also names and faces on billboards, endorsing products. Fredrick L. Schodt points out that a sign in the window of one of the largest Japanese publishers depicts, from that nation's perspective, the most famouse people of the 20th century: Einstein, Princess Di, JFK, the Beatles — and Tezuka, the kami-sama ("god") of manga.

All the major publishers in Japan are subsized by manga. Though invented in US, the comic book is a neglected form in the states, accounting for under 5% of the total books and magazines sold in this country. Manga, either book or magazine, account for 40% books and magazines sold in Japan. And they are sold everywhere: at subway station newspaper stands, huge piles of manga are snapped up to be read on the train, tossed in the trash at destinations. Manga is sold in vending machines, especially manga of racier content. There is a huge industry of amateur manga, which is sold in huge conventions. There's a black market of heavily discounted manga sold by shady characters who obtain their stock through means unknown. Manga is lying around everywhere: in beauty shops you'll find those manga which target ladies or young girls, though the ladies read men's manga, too. There has been an explosion of manga coffee shops in Japan, where customers can sip coffee and read manga from late morning until early morning. Many Westerners have also acquired this addiction. It's like discovering a new ethnic soup: once you get the hang of eating with chopsticks, you can't get enough.

Here's a friendly warning, however: you may not want to eat everything in that bowl. That is to say, it's a bad idea, on the basis of a wonderful encounter with manga or animé, to let the kids consume it freely. You have to reorient your mental image of the animé universe — it's bigger than you think. Manga and animé are not just cartoons, they're an entire culture: one that runs the gamut from sensitive character studies, as intricate and interminable as a Russian novel, to porno comics with the violence level of a snuff film. In between, there are often bizzarre subdivisions tailored to very specific tastes, including genders, age-group, hobbies and sexual preference. There is manga for Mah Jong players. For young mothers. For girls. For people you don't want to know. Like mushrooms, certain manga and animé you will find are to be avoided, while others are too tasty too miss. You'll have to learn the difference.

First, though, let's dig a little deeper and get acquainted with the roots.

Brief History of Manga

Japanese people have loved line drawings and sequential art for hundreds of years, going back at least to medieval picture scrolls. The word "manga" comes from a series created by Japanese woodblock print artist Hokusai in the early 19th century who used successive panels to tell a story. At the same time, there was a boom of illustrated humor books for the common people. There were no word balloons, but rather a running narrative done on wood block prints.

When Japan was opened to the West, Japanese artists began to look to what their American and European counterparts were doing. In New York, American cartoonists were experimenting with newspaper comic strips. This medium was adopted quickly by the Japanese, and American comics had great influence on the already proto-comic tradition of Japanese art. Japanese artists then led the way in turning strip comics into comic books. In the 1930s, longer and longer comics appeared in Japanese newspapers and magazines, and these became extremely popular. Production of this art form paused during the war, but afterwards, pent-up demand led to an explosion of comics. People in post-War Japan were very poor, and very much in need of cheap entertainment. All these circumstances resulted in the rapid development and popularity of contemporary manga.

The most important figure in development of manga culture was an artist named Tezuka Osamu (1928-1989). Tezuka utilized cinematic techniques in creation of comic stories, borrowing compositions and narrative elements from films. His stories became longer, and his approach was more serious in both content and in depth. When he began drawing newspaper comics, Tezuka revolutionized Japanese popular culture with an extraordinarily popular comic book, New Treasure Island, which spawned imitators who adapted both his style and his conventions: these included the big, Westernized eyes now so characteristic of manga and animé. The Japanese media industry, recovering from the war, found that inclusion of manga increased sales — and so began to include more and more. Kids raised on manga didn't want to give it up as they got older, so as the market aged, the producers created stories that were appealing to ever-older readers. Suddenly, comics were no longer just for kids. Many of these consisted of science fiction and adventure of the Tezuka style, but the bounds were pushed beyond traditional comic book content: manga stories included realistic action (often violent), drama, and competition for a faithful buying public created a diversity of genres.

Not only was manga not just for kids, it also wasn't just for boys: there arose the genre of shoujo manga, or "girls' comics". Exploding demand created this genre made mostly by female artists for an audience of girls and young women. Rather than action and adventure, girls wanted stories about ordinary life, stories of relationships, told with a certain depth: i.e. boy meets girl, but more sophisticated treatment that emphasised the relationship rather than sexuality. This genre in turn spun off its own subgenres, segmented by age and interest, appealing from those sharing mainstream values to those on the social fringe. Again, this component of manga grew with its market, creating comic books ranging from romance of the soap opera sort to erotica.

Manga is so big in Japan, it's gone beyond the manga-ization of novels to include the novelization of manga stories. If you have a message to get across in Japan, use manga: for good or for ill. The notorious Aum cult combined science fiction and religion, making news when they set off poison gas in the Tokyo subway. Aum recruited members and spread its message by turning it into manga.

From Manga to Animé

The manga industry is where animé emerged from. Tezuka's "Tetsuwan Atom" ("The Mighty Atom") debuted in animated version in 1951 for Japanese televeision, known around the world as Astro Boy, the little robot boy with an atomic heart. Astro Boy made fans around the world, and touched off a flood of animated manga stories at home for Japanese television, of varying quality. Some of these were exported internationally, including Speed Racer, along with many more that only serious fans in the West know today by name. It was in the 70s, as animé conquered theatrical films, that the medium began to be well known in the West. Translation became an issue, and tended to limit the available quantity — though an underground of amateur subtitled films spread the popularity of animé among afficianados.

The easiest entrance to the world of animé for Western audiences were the major studio releases of dubbed films distributed in the US. Akira (1988), was widely released in this country, a bloody action story featuring motorcycle gangs and mad scientists and more violence than Westerners were accustomed to in cartoons. Ghost in the Shell (1999) was an R-rated cyberpunk feature which found huge audiences in the West. The highest profile animé thus far released in the US was 1999's Princess Mononoke, a better introduction both because of a PG rating but also for its spectacular presentation the elements that animé does best, in terms of atmosphere and unexpected detail. Mononoke was the first animé film released as a part of a worldwide distribution deal made between the Walt Disney company and the company which some have called "the Disney of Japan," Studio Ghibli. The presentation of these films, including Mononoke and 2002's Spirited Away is of a far higher quality than most other available releases available in either dubbed or fan-subtitled releases.

Animé, like manga, does not represent a single genre, but an entire media: there are mysteries, adventures, literary efforts and pure visual entertainment. Much of the appeal of animé in either East or West, no doubt, comes from the violence and sex, and there have been pressures to tone down, especially the depiction of violence against women. There are other cultural elements that will both mystify, delight, or disgust Western viewers: differences from the attitude toward women and oddities like shared family bathing, to the intricacies of courtship and other social relationships. Plenty of the films are unconventionally conventional science fiction shoot-em-ups, but others offer facinating slices of Japanese life: froms chool, to family, the way people live and relate to one another, with elements of their religious beliefs and cultural expectations woven in.

Most parents will want to take an active role here. They'll have to go online and educate themselves about specific films to figure out which ones to see at all costs, which ones to likewise avoid. It's a good excuse to talk about cultural differences and strange, or new pagan mythologies (which ultimately may not be any bigger an issue than "Grandmother Willow" was in Pocahantus). An excellent resource for learning about animé in general and individual films in particular is the Parents Guide to Animé at the website, The Animé Cafe.

Get ready for a certain amount of culture shock no matter which films you decide to see, and get ready to have your mind blown. And if you can, try to see them on the big screen: the visual details of the best animé, especially the Studio Ghibli films is breathtaking: the way the artists depict reflections in the water, smoke, clouds, fire and the sunlight dappling leaves will change forever your understanding of what an animated cartoon can do, and do to you.

Be sure to check out our survey of films from Studio Ghibli and the review of the 2002 Ghibli release, Spirited Away