Geek Syndicate Issue 5 | Page 10
Geek Syndicate
THE BLUFFER’S GUIDE TO ... Anime
Ever wondered what all those geeks in the corner were talking about? Sick of missing out of the sly references and obscure injokes? Never Fear! The Bluffers Guide is here to help!
Image © Shawn Logan
tentacle monsters are a thing. But not the thing. 1970s and 1980s? Yep. Most histories of anime look to the 1960s, when Osamu Tezuka’s Astro Boy, an animated adaptation of a popular boys Manga (Japanese comic book) was released. It looks pretty dated now, but was wildly popular and established a style that was copied into other genres. By the 1970s, shows like Starblazers (a Bowdlerised version of a show called Space Battleship Yamato) and Battle of the Planets (Science Ninja Team Gatchaman), which was so cut up they had to introduce clumsily drawn additional characters) were cropping up on television in the United States. Before long, the first “Giant Robot” shows started to emerge and it was a combination of these - actually three series, mashed together and dubbed - that came over to the US as Robotech in 1985.
Image © wildstorm
Giant Robots! Wheee! Have you been watching the Pacific Rim Trailer again? Yes. It’s got Giant Robots fighting Godzilla in it. It does. With any luck it will be live-action Anime, which would be pretty cool. Anime? Thats the Japanese Cartoons with tentacle monsters chasing semi-naked schoolgirls, right? No. Well, yes. Sometimes. But not exclusively. It’s complicated. Complicated how? Well anime is a somewhat catch-all term that refers to Japanese animation that broke through into the West in the 1970s and 1980s and is still pretty popular today. It’s actually quite a broad category; covering a lot of different genres rather than being a genre in its own right. So, yes,
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