Anime on US cable TV

[Aaron Gerow]

>I'm sure many of you know that Ichikawa Kon was an animator early on in his
>career (later on as well--however his 2000 film Shinsengumi seems to have
>drifted into obscurity after its short run at Euro Space).  I spent some
>time watching a couple of the director's 1930s-40s shorts, and found myself
>wondering if these sorts of films would fit under the rubric of "anime" at
>all.  Have the Wachowski brothers hired Ichikawa to decimate physics with a
>popsickle-stick-figure Animatrix short yet?

A very good question which gets to the heart of the problem of "anime" in 
some ways. To my Japanese students, anime is simply short for animation, 
so they would have no problem in calling not only 1930s shorts but also 
puppet animation as anime. (There are scholars in Japan who take more 
care with words, however, so the main academic society, the Nihon 
Animeshon Gakkai, prefers the term animation as the general term.) But 
abroad anime has become a brand name (along with other terms like 
Japanimation or manga) which signifies a difference from other forms of 
animation (or comic books) or a particular stance towards moving images 
and the world. My problem in teaching anime and manga is to recognize the 
possibilities of this difference while also trying to point out the 
histories of different forms that don't fit the foreign canon of Akira 
and Ghost in the Shell and thus which have been repressed or ignored. 
Ueno Toshiya has addressed some of the problems of a, to him, 
"techno-orientalist" view of anime, but I think a lot more needs to be 
done on the cultural dynamics of definition and canon building with 
regard to Japanese 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