If, as many people claim, Japanese pop culture is sweeping the globe, then anime is the hand that wields the broom. A number of recent big-budget Japanese animated features, including Mamoru Oishii's "Innocence," currently in competition at Cannes, have attracted funding from Hollywood without the usual Hollywood demands to make stories and characters more acceptable to non-Japanese (read: American) audiences. Disney is happy to distribute Studio Ghibli, because Disney has nothing to fear from Studio Ghibli and everything to gain in terms of multicultural cred.
It's the perfect time to revisit the legacy of the God of Anime, Osamu Tezuka, who started out as a cartoonist. Westerners are familiar with him because of "Astro Boy (Tetsuwan Atom)," which was broadcast in the United States and Europe back in the '60s.
Tezuka was inspired by Walt Disney, but while his draftsmanship owes much to the adorable big-eyed look that Disney perfected, from the outset the cartoonist was just as interested in enlightenment as he was in entertainment. Astro Boy was the robot that wanted to be a boy. This idea was suggested by "Pinocchio" -- not a Disney creation, but certainly a story many people identified with Disney -- but Tezuka took it to its limits. For most people, this is where Western animation and anime diverge -- not in its visual style, but in its narrative implications.