Anime on Animation

[Aaron Gerow]

My son was flipping through the channels on Saturday morning and came 
across a TV animation show called Totally Spies aired on TV Tokyo. What 
was interesting about this Charlie's Angels for teens show was the fact 
that, while it was made in France (TV1) for the French and 
English-language--and ultimately Japanese--markets, it clearly showed the 
influence of Japanese animation in character design, bodily and facial 
movement, and even in some of the conventional "signs" of anime. Yet it 
was not quite like anime.

Perhaps this style was selected in part to aim for the Japanese market 
(the story I saw in fact took part in part in Tokyo, though the spies 
live in California), but I was intrigued about how extensive the 
influence of Japanese anime is having on the visual style of non-Japanese 
animation. We hear a lot about animators being fans of Miyazaki, et al., 
but how much of this is changing the way non-Japanese made animation is 
being made? One could divide this answer into geographical centers (Asia, 
the US, Europe, etc.), but I was interested in what people outside of 
Japan have been noticing in all sorts of animation.

Aaron Gerow
Associate Professor
International Student Center
Yokohama National University
79-1 Tokiwadai
Hodogaya-ku, Yokohama 240-8501
JAPAN
E-mail: gerow at ynu.ac.jp
Phone: 81-45-339-3170
Fax: 81-45-339-3171