Last night I was talking to my friend Ellen about the differences between Japanese animation and American animation. So finding this article on sfgate.com seemed fitting.
And then along comes one of those extraordinarily rare and shimmering hunks of gorgeous pop-culture art/entertainment to make you rethink everything you thought you believed and about which you were sort of comfortably sad and bitter and resigned.
.You know the ones. Those astonishing unexpected gems that somehow manage to break through your thick wall of bitter media-numbed ennui and slip right around your fine-meshed bullshit filter and hit you right in the solar plexus of hope and enchantment and maybe humankind isn't so utterly savagely doomed after all even though it probably is, but oh well.
Because this is when you finally catch the animated Japanese masterpiece "Spirited Away" on DVD. This is when you finally find a pop-culture art piece that speaks to multiple levels of human creativity and divine imaginative power, which you want to champion and cheer and exalt and bow humbly before and say to the jaded world hey, you know what? [sfgate.com]
While I think at times the author gushes a little bit too much about how good "Spirited Away" is, I think he does make some good points about how US animated films do tend to be a bit dumbed down (though I don't think things are as bleak as he makes it seem). I find that in general I think anime (both movies and tv shows) tends to have more complex plots. Oh there are definitely shows that are mindless entertainment, but most shows there are produced to tell a single story. Look at shows like Cowboy Bebop, which has been experiencing a growth in popularity over here. It's a single season show, there's a movie to accompany it, and that's it. The creator of it has no intentions to do anything else with it. This is much different from the US model where they hope to get at least a few seasons out of a show so they can pass it on into syndication.
The hope I have is that with the growing anime audience American animators will take notice and start producing more complex things. I'd love to see someone produce something like Voices of a Distant Star, which is due out on DVD here next month.