Japanese animated films, familiarly called "anime," have become well-known worldwide. With the success of the 1988 "Akira," the genre became a sound commercial export and its popularity (mainly on home television) continued, thus justifying the publication of Helen McCarthy's "The Anime Movie Guide" in 1996.
Several qualities accounted for the popularity of "Akira": its slick graphics, its futuristic-fantasy architecture and its fashionably doom-laden message. Also important was its extraordinary eroticism. Little Kaori, you will remember, was brutally assaulted by a biker gang and emerged bruised and traumatized.
This event gratified a number of male viewers and perhaps contributed to the film's popularity. At any rate, in the following decade many Japanese anime followed its lead -- so many that erotic anime is now seen to deserve a volume of its own and again Helen McCarthy, this time along with Jonathan Clements, has provided it.
We should define our terms. "Erotic" means amatory, a quality that tends to encourage sexual desire. "Pornographic" means sexually explicit and (according to the American Heritage Dictionary's definition) "sometimes equates sex with power and violence." It also subdues sexual desire as well, since it is often used as an aid to successful masturbation.
In Japan the former is permitted and the latter (since it depends upon explicit, that is, clinical, rendering of the genitalia) is not. There is no legal ground for this ban. Article 21 of the 1947 Constitution says that no such censorship shall be maintained. Nonetheless, there is an agreed-upon ban on sexually explicit material even though there is no consensus on, and indeed, no definition of, what might be considered obscene.
(Creating one was the intention of Nagisa Oshima's defense in the celebrated case of "In the Realm of the Senses." He bravely challenged the authorities to define obscenity. Instead, they -- to the director's chagrin -- let him win the case, but continued to ban the work both in its film and book versions.)
The kind of cinema the Film Ethics Sustaining Committee (Eirin) and its associate video body (Biderin) allows follows convoluted custom -- always a respectable distance behind public opinion. Right now, the "hair line" (on women, not men) has been breached, but since there is no definition there can be no real ratification.
That this is not in itself a challenge to the erotic is one of the themes of this book. The authors (though they do not always distinguish between erotic and pornographic qualities and though they strew their text with claims of "explicit" for material that is not) feel that the ban can excite the imagination.
Symbols instead of organs, for example, or creatures instead of humans. This latter might account for that sub-genre known as "Tits and Tentacles." The tentacle "while it may often look suspiciously like a penis . . . is not a sexual organ by definition." And even censorship itself can be enrolled as an erotic aid. The dots or blurs can increase tension by convincing the viewers that "they are watching something so dangerous that it has to be cut."
Though Japanese erotic anime has an often-deserved reputation as the work of extreme misogynists, trading as it does in rape and violence, the authors maintain that it has been demonized unfairly (particularly by the English, the intended audience for this publication). This does not mean that the often sickening ("Overfiend") is not fully described; it means that the nonviolent is included.
In perhaps the most interesting section of the book, the authors examine "shojo anime," those films made for a female audience and almost overwhelmingly about young men in love with each other. This anthropological singularity is well known (the taste extends even to mainstream cinema -- "Maurice" is still playing in Japan) and the authors give a number of cogent reasons for it.
It shows men not as powerful beings, but also subject to the kinds of emotional pressures thought to afflict mainly women; it establishes homosexual -- if beautiful -- youths as prey to the kind of marginalization that women regularly experience; it portrays men who do not perceive women as sexual objects and are hence more approachable; and there is the possibility that women like "gay" scenes for the same reason that men like lesbian scenes: "If you like to watch attractive members of the opposite sex in sexual situations, then gay scenes give you twice as many men for your money as straight material."
There is much else in the volume: a history of the genre, profiles of the more prolific cartoonists, outlines of the various archetypes, as well as a complete filmography, a glossary and a bibliography. There is, however, no index. And if you look up, say, "Overfiend" in the filmography, you will not find it. You must know that its Japanese title is "Urotsukido," but this fact is buried inside the "Tits and Tentacles" chapter.
To this extent, the volume is not reader-friendly. On all other counts, however, it is as full and lively a rendering as we are ever apt to get, or want. The style is bright, the scholarship is precise and the patience -- to have sat through all those hours of puerility -- is most impressive.
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