Ask John: Is Toonami Good or Bad for Anime?

Question:
What do you think of Toonami? It seems that most hardcore anime fans don’t like it and say that it hurts anime and that’s it just another craze like Fox Kids’ Anime Invasion thing.

Answer:
Simply because I don’t watch dubbed anime, I don’t watch either Toonami or Adult Swim (beside occasionally catching Space Ghost and Sea Lab), so I actually don’t really have a personal opinion on the Cartoon Network broadcast of anime. It’s easy enough for me to come up with some positive and negative criticisms, though, based on what I know of the Cartoon Network’s broadcasts. In a way, it could be said that the Cartoon Network is good for anime, but ironically not quite as good for anime fans. There should be little doubt that Toonami and the Cartoon Network broadcast of anime is a good thing for anime fandom. The massive popularity of Dragonball Z and the other anime programs broadcast during Toonami has proven to the television industry that there is a market for foreign “cartoons” in America. There should be little doubt that there have been hundreds, or more likely thousands of people that have bought anime tapes and DVDs because they discovered this genre of animation through the Cartoon Network. In turn the Cartoon Network has encouraged new anime to come to America. According to popular traditional rumor, the Gundam franchise would never have come to America had it not been for American TV exposure. FUNimation has licensed the Yu Yu Hakusho TV series almost certainly because they knew that it could serve them well through television broadcast. The impact of Toonami and the Adult Swim programming, even though these anime broadcasts make up only a small minority of the Cartoon Network’s full schedule, have made an immeasurable impact on the state of anime in America.

But while the Cartoon Network has opened the door for anime to gain mainstream recognition and acceptance in America, it may have done so at a cost that many anime fans, in retrospect, find difficult to reconcile. Regardless of how ultimately petty it may be, it cannot be ignored that the Cartoon Network broadcasts have created a legion of uninformed but excessively enthusiastic “fanboys” – fans whose assume authoritative knowledge for themselves based on disproportionately limited experience. At the same time “hardcore” anime fans want more recognition and acceptance of anime in America, they also want anime to remain a private club- an exclusive, personal treasure. The Cartoon Network broadcasts have created an army of new fans that have only the Cartoon Network broadcasts for reference. Outlaw Star, Gundam Wing, Tenchi Muyo, Dragonball and Cowboy Bebop are suddenly the greatest anime ever created in the minds of these new fans because they have no point of reference- nothing to compare these shows to. This sudden “authoritative” stance from such a multitude of new fans can be simply offensive to long time veterans that feel threatened or disappointed by such single mindedness when the traditional attitude of American anime fandom has always been open-mindedness, sharing and experimentation. The Cartoon Network should be applauded for exposing so many new fans to anime, but unfortunately the Cartoon Network has done nothing to contextualize or educate these new fans of what they are watching. The selection of programming that the Cartoon Network has broadcast over the past year or two has been exclusively testosterone fueled “shonen” action/adventure anime. This is, of course, good for ratings, but creates a constricting, inflexible impression of anime as nothing more than big eyes, big robots and explosions.

The Cartoon Network can futhermore be chastised for partially eliminating a degree of the Japanese cultural integrity from anime by editing it for American television. The Cartoon Network can’t solely be held at fault for editing the anime that it broadcasts. American cultural standards are, of course, beyond the power of a single cable television network to singlehandedly evolve. The Cartoon Network can, however, be blamed for its choices of what to support and broadcast. One must wonder, out of the thousands of anime TV series available, why air ones unsuitable for American television when there are plenty of other programs that could be aired uncensored? The Cartoon Network, of course, is a business and exists to make a profit. Their goal and purpose is not to promote Japanese culture for the education and enlightenment of American society. That is what anime fans do. Broadcasting anime in heavily censored form eliminates the Japanese cultural integrity of the anime, and creates the wrong impression in new viewers. Even in an anime series like Cowboy Bebop, which does not necessarily have overt Japanese cultural references, the very fact that the series contains graphic violence and deals with topics similar to contemporary world events like airline hijackings and domestic and international terrorism reveals that Japanese animation is a current, intelligent, mature and challenging art form. By toning down this element of the animation, the Cartoon Network essentially eliminates or reduces the characteristic of Japanese cultural acceptance of adult subject matter in animation that typifies anime and makes it different from Western cartoons. The editing of anime for television broadcast, on a theoretical level, is also disturbing because it is a blatant compromise of artistic credibility for commercial interest. Anime series like Tenchi Muyo and Cowboy Bebop are commercial products, but they are also works of contemporary art. The fact that they are distributed in Japan in one form but edited for content in America signifies that America is simply bastardizing these works to make them more marketable and more profitable in America, and more suitable to American taste. Their artistic credibility, which is intact in their native Japan, is stripped from them by American television broadcast. So why not broadcast programs that don’t need to be “Americanized”; shows that don’t contain “excessive” content but are still entertaining? It is this apparent lack of questioning that offends many “hardcore” American fans.

The relatively recent creation of the Adult Swim program signifies that the Cartoon Network is progressing toward an attempt to screen anime in America the way its Japanese creators intended that it be seen. The fact that Columbia Pictures is theatrically distributing Metropolis in American theaters subtitled is no doubt partially inspired by the success of the Cartoon Network, and also a signal that America is beginning to evolve culturally. It’s ironic that while AD Vision released Spriggan theatrically in a dubbed version, and Viz and Bandai continue to promote theatrical screenings of dubbed anime including Jin-Roh and Escaflowne, it is not the traditional anime companies that are taking the most significant steps toward bringing the Japanese element of Japanese animation to America. The Cartoon Network may be justifiably berated for choosing to broadcast heavily altered and edited anime, but the creation of Adult Swim and its adult content warnings suggest that the Cartoon Network is trying to expose the American mainstream to something it’s not used to. Perhaps, in another year or two, we will see purely unedited anime broadcast on the Cartoon Network. So while it’s easy to attack the Cartoon Network for its shortcomings, it’s equally necessary to praise the Network for its decision to take risks and push the envelope.