What American animation provides

• Children who are superficially ordinary actually have sup1er powers/assets they utilize to combat a secret war, taking place in a domestic, contemporary setting, with/without their parents’ knowledge/support, and must balance heroism with mundane affairs of life.

• Frenzied, moody teenagers stuck in an endlessly repeating situational comedy arc must deal with challenges drawn from various pop-culture references, stereotypical caricatures, parodied movie-plot devices, and their own idiocy. (Edgar and Ellan, Kappa Mikey)

• Sit-coms with animal/vegetable/normally-inanimate-object characters enacting clichéd sit-com plots, but with ludicrous objects or subjects inserted arbitrarily. (Spongebob Squarepants)

• Adults with absolutely no depth or social life, wearing skin-tight outfits, and using unexplainable powers to thwart a vast array of psychopaths with strange, thematic outfits and organizations that seek power or wealth in ways too brazen to be believed, motivated by equally shallow reasons. (Batman, Superman, etc.)

What American animation used to provide but (mostly) no
longer does:

• Bizarre aliens/robots/super-humans stuck in a precarious situation, are locked in an endless struggle with equally bizarre aliens/robots/super-humans, and must use their powers or assets for “good,” because the latter group uses similar powers for “evil,” set either far, far away, long, long ago, or somewhere/when that defies description. (He-Man, Thundercats, Transformers)

• Adult humans and one or two teenagers are part of a secret organization that combats another secret organization that exists in the contemporary world, utilizing transforming vehicles, James Bond style hidden weapons, and an awesome array of firepower that somehow fails to kill anyone, with an exhaustive cast of characters representing every ethnic group. M.A.S.K.,
  G.I. JOE, C.O.P.S. (why are they all acronyms?))

• An epic space/fantasy opera with adult characters that die, fall in love, and do all the things that adults do, fighting an enemy that is deeply motivated (as opposed to having petty motivations), locked in an epic struggle that takes them to many places, involves dozens of story arcs, complications, and serial cliff-hangers. (Robotech, Voltron (sort of), Samurai Jack, Avatar the Last Airbender)

• Whimsical animal characters that form a family/community go on various adventures around their world/lands, encountering strangeness and danger, cooperating to defeat their enemies and return everything to normal within the allotted 22 minutes. (Gummi Bears, Ducktales, Smurfs)

Thesis: American Children’s Programming Producers Are Afraid To Take Risks and Thus Losing Audiences.

Let’s start with the issue of violence. Since the 80’s, cartoon violence has been relegated to non-lethal combat, even going so far as to censor the act of one person striking the other. What we see now is a character swinging, then another character suddenly falling backwards, as if masking the impact somehow lessons the “violent” aspect of the animation. Characters never seem to say “kill,” “die,” “bleed,” or any such things except in comical dialogue (“I’m going to kill you!”), when it is clear that no such thing would ever happen in the cartoon.

One problem is a disconnection of action and consequence. Someone punches, but nobody is hurt; pilots always escape a burning aircraft; and people never suffer lasting/debilitating injuries. Younger children and older children know that the real world doesn’t lack consequences of violence – thus, the violence of the cartoon is meaningless and vapid, merely eye candy, and doesn’t emotionally engage the viewer.

How would viewers react if halfway through an ongoing series, one of the characters loses a limb permanently? In any story, this certainly ups the stakes for that character, especially if it is demonstrated that the loss cannot be cured by magic or technology. Each episode of Batman seems to involve multiple falls by the titular character that would permanently cripple an ordinary person (ironically, Batman is supposed to be an “ordinary” person). If he is injured, Batman usually fully recovers within one to two scenes. If action is the draw of the show, inconsequential action pretty much nullifies it altogether.

This leads straight into the second problem: episodic stories. The Transformers series had a first episode, it had mid-season multi-episode stories, and it had season finales. From season to season, Transformers keeps adding new characters (new toy lines), and things that happened before have ongoing consequences. Really young children (ages 3 to 6) may not have the attention span for multi-episode stories, but there’s no reason to turn on the show week after week if you can just watch it at any time, in any order.

Part of the reason children have such short attention spans may be the fault of television: it is not providing any reason to remember anything beyond 22 minutes in length. This is a cynical attitude of producers, to think that viewers are not willing to commit mind-space to remember things like plots and characters. This cynical attitude is completely at odds with the facts: people love serial shows, adults and children alike. Shows that distrust their audiences’ faculty to remember only encourage channel-flipping; notice that shows and documentaries like Mythbusters have to do a recap every time they return from a commercial, reusing footage from the same show, and discouraging anyone from watching the show straight through.

Serial comics succeeded for a reason. Human beings have not changed their ability to remember and anticipate since the 30’s – but writers have gotten lazier while producers have gotten more cautious.

We move now to a deeper problem: lack of development. Children may become enthralled, at first, by the superficial aspects of a show: the art style, the action, the funny dialogue, but that interest will not bear out more than a year if the show doesn’t bring anything new to the table for them. The second big disconnection is lessons learned and character development. If a character supposedly learned an important moral/social lesson in ep. 23, shouldn’t that affect them in ep. 24? What about season 3? Why are they still afraid of the dark if that problem was addressed in season one? How can any child respect/admire a character that never learns or grows? After all, growing up is the implicit goal of childhood, because children understand that growing up means more trust, more freedom, and so forth. Why would they be interested in characters that are stagnant, and thus losing the game?

Young children look up to older children, who look up to adolescents, who look up to young adults, who look only at themselves, and everyone older than that only looks back on the younger generations. It follows, then, that an 8 year-old who admires a 12-year old character, will still like that character at the age of 12 if that character is now 16. The only age group that tolerates stagnant characters are young adults and older, because of course they want to be young forever. For children to become attached to a franchise, it must grow with them. Because of DVD’s, younger children will have plenty of material to grow up with, should they come into the franchise later. There is no benefit to keeping a franchise stagnant.

Here’s the risk that producers are avoiding: they are afraid of the surfer-viewer. The surfer-viewer might turn on the show and not know what is going on, and be completely baffled, because none of the characters is explaining the show’s premise after every commercial break, and surf away. This is a realistic scenario, but the cowardly producer is operating on a false premise, which is that the surfer-viewer is the audience they should be trying to capture.

A responsible parent does not allow their children to surf the channels at whim, but if all parents were responsible, then they wouldn’t drive SUV’s, live in the suburbs, vote for Republicans, drink soft drinks, and a thousand other sins. But a child with a remote control is not necessarily a vacuous idiot, seeking explosions and car crashes to kill time between chores/responsibilities. The child without parental supervision also craves stories and escape. That latch-key kid needs to have something to look forward to when they come home, not a mindless diversion; stories with continuity, with characters they care about, and a self-consistent fantasy world they can escape to for a half hour, at least.

There’s no imaginative sparks flying when they watch car-crashes or cops wrestling half-naked drunks. There’s no story when they mine gold for hours, on World of Warcraft. There’s no story to a hyper-real sit-com with characters that get reset every half-hour. There’s no fun watching a mega-powerful kid with powers if they must deal with mundane reality, the same reality that the kid watching is trying to escape.

Now we come to the final point: kids can smell contrivance. Children are naturally curious, because if they weren’t, humans would never have evolved beyond small rodents. Contrivance is putting a super-human pre-pubescent into a normal, domestic setting and somehow maintaining that life. Contrivance is making the characters return to the “real” world and using the “real” world as a safety net for their adventuring.The worst contrivance is staging a 22-minute plot around a moral lesson that can be summarized with a simple maxim, in the vein of Aesops’ fables.

Injecting a moral lesson into a story is completely ineffective, especially when it is simply presented as such (think GI-JOE’s “knowing is half the battle”). A character that learns a “life-lesson” must of course use that life-lesson, not simply lecture the viewer about it. It must be demonstrated that failure to heed the warning (don’t play with matches, talk to strangers) leads to real and dire consequences for the characters. This is accomplished by making the “lesson” a very real part of the story, not simply a plot device.

The distinction we draw is subtle, though – a plot device is by definition a contrivance, but how that differs from simply something that happens is a matter of debate among writers. In the end, it works against a writer to have a “lesson” in mind before writing an ep – rather, the lessons are simply learned as a matter of course for the continuation of the story. All good stories contain lessons, because all good stories are written with an understanding of human nature, and treat the characters realistically. The viewer gets a nebulous lesson about human nature, and the nature of life in general. It is folly to declare certain principles are more important than others – the most important life lessons might be the most subtle ones.

The distinction between knowing and understanding is not as subtle. It is clear as the difference between theory and practice, in fact. You cannot make someone understand something simply by telling them, in words and pictures, of the principle. So they may understand beyond mere knowledge, so that the theory goes into practice, they must trust the messenger, and experience the lesson, even vicariously through the life of a fictional character. Only then does the knowledge become understanding, and practical.

The simplest example is: “don’t play with matches.” A child wonders, why do these adults prohibit this? They get some matches, and burn their hand. Better yet, they light something of value on fire by accident, and share the emotional consequences (assume something of sentimental value – children do not have the adult psychosis of monetary attachment). The lesson has now been experienced and understood.

Now imagine a cartoon character doing the same thing. To make the lesson stick, consequences must carry forth. People must remain begrudged to the character, and losses must be permanent. Efforts to “set things right” cannot be easy, because if they were, there is little emotional investment. Loss must be real and permanent, because it is the singular most important fact of life to impart on children. (The middle-class is now flooded with adults who cannot deal with loss.) Characters that never lose anything cannot be identified with, and will not fare long.

Children need strong role models who deal with realistic problems (that is, realistic for their native world).They do not need characters that live in our world but deal with problems that require too much suspension of disbelief to appreciate. Young children watching Voltron knew – only after a few episodes – that all they had to do was form a blazing sword to vanquish the foe, yet the show always waited for the last minute to do so, and kids saw right through it. When the blazing sword didn’t work though – that was when the kids really sat up and paid attention.

Japanese shows suffer from a host of other problems, largely from cultural differences, but the ones that do well heed the warnings outlined above. We will address anime in a different essay, but here we make our claim that American animated shows, for the 8+ age group, need to fundamentally change. There is a reason that Avatar, the Last Airbender has taken so many awards and so much revenue – it is a decently-crafted story, written by people who really believe in it, requires little suspension of disbelief, has an ongoing story, avoids contrivances (some cannot be helped, of course), utilizes a self-consistent universe, and has characters that clearly develop as the series progresses.

Avatar is the only show to do so, and even though it is merely competent, and generally follows the ideas outlined above, it has enjoyed great success and won many awards. A franchise with even greater attention to detail, greater realism (regarding action and consequences), and a compelling story can be just as, if not more successful

What Japanese anime provides

• Adolescent girls in powered/magical/revealing armor with their loyal robot/adult sidekicks, partying as they kick corporate and military ass, fueled on sass, paid with fashion, and leaving a wake of bewildered boyfriends. (too many anime’s to name)

• Brooding adolescent boy stumbles on secret power/item, impressing veterans and shamans with his novice skill, refines his art to claim the highest prize/weapon and beat the odds/evil entity, whilst claiming the heart of the femme fatale, whom he ditches in favor of the girl-next-door / childhood friend. (Full Metal Alchemist comes to mind, but also, too
  many to name)

• Emotionless band of rag-tag mercenaries/government agents take on a tough assignment that reveals a deeper conspiracy, thrusting them into a battle not only of epic forces but moral stakes, splitting the group into factions; their personalities develop along different lines, as alliances and back-stabbings continue, until an apex of moral and violent conflict is reached (Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex).

• Parentless children enter into a contest involving their ability to find/manage/train monsters/demons/robots, then through sheer luck and innocent ingenuity manage to make it into the pro leagues, garnering fans, parasitic adults, and arch-enemies, whom they must judge carefully as they navigate the hostile world of adults and their various, complicated deceptions, learning valuable life lessons along the way. (Pokemon, Digimon, Monster Rancher)

• Children have their parents killed by horrible catastrophe/monster/alien/corporation, are taken in by wise guru/sensei/benevolent corporation/pirates, and are trained to serve revenge to the aforementioned horrible entity, notwithstanding various interpersonal conflicts/relationships/heartbreaks/betrayals and harsh life lessons as they grow into brooding adolescents with way too much power. (Naruto)

• Adolescent boy/girl is transported from ordinary, contemporary Japan to bizarre fantasy world, from which they may or may not return from at will or ever, where they integrate while learning the rules this weird world, are thrust into the role of savior, given quests to complete, and befriends a bunch of weird supporting characters, one of which will be a forever unconsummated love interest. (Inuyasha, Bleach)

Thesis: Japanese Anime is too Japanese for Americans.

There is no better way to express it. Anime is simply too Japanese for American audiences. The Americans who have come to like anime are those willing to shuck away all their ties to American culture, for whatever reason, and live in a cult-like fantasy subculture much akin to the Trekkie subculture (in fact, there is much crossover of the population). These otaku are willing to forgive many faults of anime, which has the same noise/signal ratio (that is, in the sense of being worthy television) of cable television, and that ratio is approximately 400:1.

So what we’re talking about here is what anime means for not only regular,
working-class, socially functional, and non-geek audiences, but also for the
children, who for lack of better experience, have nothing to base their
judgments on but their own instincts.

What is the first thing you notice when turning on an anime? Why, it’s the endless talking sequences! Not only are they easy to animate, since you only have to make their tiny mouths flash open and closed, but it shortcuts a lot of story that otherwise doesn’t fit into the budget. These talky bits contain the worst sin of any story – science-fiction, fantasy, mystery, whathaveyou – exposition.

Anime is full of exposition, whether it’s a monk on Inuyasha explaining why the bear-demon they’re fighting is invulnerable to certain kinds of attacks, or a government agent on Ghost in the Shell ruminating on the end result of humans becoming more and more cybernetic. Characters will stop in the middle of swordfights to explain their lineages to each other; little boys will wax philosophic while on the run from cosmic powers; and overall, the action sequences all take a nosedive when this happens. A friend of mine once described how two characters fought each other for six continuous episodes of Dragonball Z, because their fight mostly consisted of talking and macho posturing.

There’s something to be said for clever dialogue and meaningful exchange of ideas, but it’s entirely beside the point to have an animated show, in which the principle animation is eyebrow twitches and lips flapping. Why not just have live actors talk? Why not have someone on the screen simply recite the entire story like Homer (the ancient Greek Homer)? The whole point of animation is that we can depict things that would otherwise take outlandish budgets to render, either on film or within a computer.

The problem of extra-exposition is indicative of another problem of Japanese
director/creator/writer/producers: they are too in love with their own
creation. The Japanese create some exquisite, wonderful worlds to play in – magical, beautiful, highly detailed – but actually, too detailed. They create a world-scenario; they conjecture thousands of possibilities for what might happen within it, with their characters, and for some reason, every single possibility gets made into an episode. It gets to the point that an entire season contains as much of the overall story as a single episode should.

Bleach and Inuyasha are excessively guilty of this. You can see this happening with every serial anime (or perhaps we should more accurately call them “pseudo-serial”) – the creators mine their created world far too much, distracting us from the main plot arc, the real story, and it wastes our time.

Is it really a “waste of time” to provide more of the escapist fantasy that the fans crave and love? No. But it is a waste of time when all the little side-plots and expository dialogues make only trivial contributions to the overall story. There is so much attention to particulars – for example it takes about 50 episodes of Inuyasha for the titular character to learn the “wind scar” attack, which is quickly leapfrogged by his enemies counter-moves. Though exaggeration, there is almost a psychotic obsession with the detail of how Inuyasha finally learns this attack, complete with redundant dialogue, multiple failures, and unbearable rumination in the wake of such failures.

This is moral sin of taking the audience for a ride. Explicitly, it means that the show exploits an already-captive audience; it pulls you along for something that seems to be very important, drawing it out, and in the end, it means very little for the overall story. The poor audience already loves the show, the characters, and the fantasy; they won’t understand how their time has been robbed until it’s over and they say, “what? All that build-up for nothing?”

It’s been said that the Japanese have a process-oriented culture (Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics has posited as much), rather than goal-oriented. It may be true that Americans can stand to learn something positive from a process-oriented culture, but let’s be clear, here: we’re talking about cartoons whose primary purpose is entertainment. Plop any average American down in front of an episode of Bleach and they’ll say, “I don’t get it – what’s going on?” The answer: “not much.” The only people who genuinely like that stuff are those who are predisposed to liking it – Japanese children and American anime-nerds. Forcing American children to appreciate that kind of thing only makes them ill-suited to integrate with contemporary American culture.

Speaking of culture, the second fault of Japanese anime is with their character archetypes. We do not claim that anime character archetypes are any more or less “deep” or “fully realized” than American animated characters. What we do claim is that their archetypes mismatch American culture wildly, and are irrelevant to us.

It is just as inappropriate for the American middle-class goth/metalhead teenager archetype to be superimposed in, say, a post-colonial 3^rd world country, like Kenya. Their audience simply would not relate, or if they did, it would simply be for only the more universal threads, such as the “rebellious teenager” complex. Would they understand that a goth/metalhead teenager in middle-class suburbia is a complex mixture of a carefully defined pseudo-subculture aesthetic, combined with edgy tropes within a certain acceptable range, following years of punk/new-wave tradition?

Japanese children go to school 6 days a week, endure grueling and life-changing exam processes, and then must live in a crowded, xenophobic, technophilic, sexually repressed society with an unforgiving work ethic. Many of the domestically-set anime’s are informed by problems and dilemmas that an American never must face, and ignore the problems that Americans face all the time. Compared to the Japanese, Americans live in an exciting and dangerous milieu, filled with heterogeneity, scathing inequities, poor healthcare, deteriorating schools, deadly urbanities, shrinking ruralities, hyperreal suburbanities, empty political processes, and general postmodern angst. An American child watching only anime would be perplexed by other Americans who would rather get to the point than wax metaphysical, who would rather act than think, and who lacks reasons for anything they do.

Americans aren’t shallow or stupider – they’re just more complex. That is, our lives are much more complex because our culture is such a tossed salad of culture and ideas. It’s not that children need to be taught how to deal with American culture in its entirety, but rather, they need to know how to deal with complexity itself. For the Japanese, the way is always clear, the next step is apparent – in anime, even more so. Life is planned out in advance for them, for their characters, so they choose to concentrate on all the little steps – they know where they’re going. The uncertainty of where they’re going is what provides conflict for many anime’s, like Ghost in The Shell. Thus all the exposition – the Japanese are on a runaway locomotive on a mysterious track.

For Americans, there are more ways than there are goals. Goals and means are sometimes indistinguishable, and philosophers only serve to confuse the matter. American animation concerns itself with finding the way – how to solve the crime, how to beat the criminal, how to pull off the heist, escape the aliens, get revenge, etc. Americans are trying to get their locomotive going.

One of the most confusing things about anime is that all the characters spend no time weighing their options (other than trivial tactical decisions). They don’t think, “why am I fighting this guy? Is it what I really want to do? Does it help me in the end?” They’re only thinking about how. Anime’s will jump right into a bunch of characters talking about stuff, assuming the audience will figure it all out later. For some reason, anime directors think characters talking about stuff the audience has no grasp of will be fascinating.

Here’s the boiled down version: Knowing the means and the end means no conflict, and thus no story. Knowing the means but not the end makes Japanese media. Knowing the end but not the means makes for typical American fare. A character’s uncertainty of the means AND the end might make for a true work of art, something truly universal. We might just have to try it.