Ask John: Are Americans Capable of Fully Understanding Anime?

Question:
I admire your insight on Japanese animation and its unique difference to American ones. I agree. Japanese animation does challenge the imagination of children. Every year, you learn something different from it. With the demand for more Japanese animation, do you think Americans will finally understand why Japanese animation is more interesting? I mean, even Pixar doesn’t get it!

Answer:
I’m not an animator, and I don’t personally know any American animators, so I can only speculate about American perspectives on the way animation is created. But if my hypothesis is acceptable, I’ll share it. To some degree Japanese animation is, and always will be unique because only Japanese artists can create Japanese animation. Likewise, it takes American artists to create American animation. American artists may employ Japanese or Korean studios to assist, and Japanese studios commonly export supplemental animation work to Korea, China, and the Philippines. But it’s the primary creative decisions made by the main staff that influence how an anime looks and feels to an audience. Japanese animation is influenced by Japanese social customs and perspectives that are unique to Japan. Unconscious characteristics and nuances from the original artists can’t be easily recreated or imitated by other artists. But I do think that a lot of the characteristics of anime can be recreated or emulated. I don’t think that America is incapable of making animation that looks and feels similar to Japanese animation. Rather, I don’t think that there’s a motivation for American animators to create works that are indistinguishable from anime.

On a practical level, there’s no financial incentive for American animators to emulate anime. On a creative level, I imagine that American animators are more interested in expressing their own, unique artistic vision than trying to imitate Japanese animation. It’s true that Pixar has not created an animated work that looks or feels similar to anime. However, all of Pixar’s works have been hundreds of times more successful and profitable in America than any genuine anime. If Pixar is tremendously successful with its established style of animation, there’s little reason for them to change. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. American animation is created by and for American viewers, so naturally conventional American animation is more popular and successful in America than imported foreign animation.

Contemporary American animators including Bruce Timm, Gendy Tarkovsky and John Kricfalusi are good examples of the mindset of American animators. These highly successful artists seemingly have the freedom to create animation in any format or style they choose. Particularly Tarkovsky’s work on Samurai Jack and Star Wars: Clone Wars exhibits some inspiration from anime, but it’s not anime. These artists choose to create animation that expresses their own, individual artistic vision. I believe that these, and many other American artists, are capable of producing animation that’s very similar to anime, but they don’t do so because they don’t want to. These individual artists want to create their own original art rather than imitate someone else’s artistic style.

The secret to creating animation that emulates anime doesn’t lie in mimicking the appearance of Japanese animation, or including lots of distinctive Japanese visual cues and sight gags. The secret to creating “anime” is approaching the animated work with respect and dignity; treating the work not as an inherently inferior cartoon, but as a legitimate film. Animation that respects the audience’s intelligence, and presumes that the audience is willing to set aside disbelief and temporarily accept the reality depicted in an animated work; and animation that treats its characters as dignified, believable human characters with histories, desires, thoughts, goals, and opinions comes much closer to being “anime” than animation drawn with primary colors and big eyes. So I do believe that America is capable of creating animation that’s difficult to distinguish from Japanese animation. I just don’t think there’s a significant motivation in America to create an original American “anime.” There’s no sign that an original American “anime” would be highly profitable, and I suspect that most, if not all, of the American animators in a position to create such a work have no interest in following someone else’s footsteps.