Sunday August 3, 2008
Grey heroes
By ROLAND KELTS
I ONCE asked Yoshihiro Shimizu, general manager of Tezuka Productions, the company formed by anime pioneer Osamu Tezuka, what made their signature character, Astro Boy, uniquely Japanese.
“He worries a lot,” was Shimizu’s prompt and terse reply.
He went on to describe what he called “the grey areas” inhabited by many of Japan’s manga and anime protagonists, who tend to struggle with their desire to do good deeds and their flaws or inner failings. Anime heroes, he contended, have always been thus, reflecting the nature of Japan itself – a nation caught between the mighty continent of Asia and the challenge and allure of the West, and a culture without rigid biblical commandments dictating right and wrong.
“Our characters haven’t changed,” another prominent anime producer said. “It’s America that changed. That’s why anime is so popular there now.”
Animatrix, the bicultural predecessor of Batman: Gotham Knight. So popular, indeed. Last week, Batman: Gotham Knight was released in Japan, three weeks after its US launch. The DVD features six anime vignettes with interlocking stories about the so-called Caped Crusader himself, the American comic-book hero who is right now selling out US cinemas in his newest incarnation: a live-action antihero with a troubled psyche. He watched his dad get murdered when he was a child, and his name is Batman.
I grew up on American superheroes like Batman, Superman and Spider-Man. They were comic-book figures who had dark sides that never surfaced long enough to overtake them, and were usually rendered secondary to their extraordinary powers.
But one look at Gotham Knight suggests that things have clearly changed.
Six American writers, DC Comics, Warner Bros. and three of Japan’s most progressive anime studios – Production I.G, Madhouse and Studio 4°C – made Gotham Knight, working in tandem to produce a Japanamerican dream: Batman as seen through Japanese eyes.
It’s an extension of an earlier joint effort, The Animatrix, which brought Hollywood and anime together five years ago to riff on themes from the Wachowski Brothers’ uber-successful Matrix series.
But Gotham Knight was created and released prior to the opening of The Dark Knight, the new live-action film. Like its Animatrix predecessor, its animated visuals are stunning; unlike the earlier bicultural effort, Gotham Knight feels like a fully rounded work of very dark implications.
True to anime archetypes, the character of Batman is never fully clear. He appears as a crypto-cyborg, bleeding from the mouth but spouting mechanical devices, a city-crawling weirdo, and a desperate seeker trapped in his own vanity.
In one particularly compelling sequence, the character called Batman is stuck in a gutter, attempting to amass in his arms a pile of guns culled from the bodies of dead criminals. Alfred, his trusty butler and confidante, reaches out to Batman from the limousine parked curbside above.
“Give me your hand,” says Alfred.
“I ... I can’t,” Batman replies, the pistols and automatics slipping out of his grasp.
Of course, Hollywood has been edging towards the anime portrait of divided heroes since the start of this century. The suits in Los Angeles know a money-maker when they see one. Anime is not only being remade; its themes are being emulated. Spider-Man 3, which had its world premiere in Tokyo last year, introduced the Webslinger’s inner evil – thus distancing itself from the failed Superman franchise, which embodied the idea of an infallible superpower.
Hegemony dies hard, but fast.
Anime master Hayao Miyazaki’s Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea (Gake no Ue no Ponyo) is dominating Japanese cinemas as I write, and the live-action The Dark Knight is doing the same in the United States.
But Gotham Knight is a significant transcultural event. It may signal an American pop culture industry desperate for Japanese ideas about being grey – neither good nor evil.
And it may also speak to a 21st-century global youth culture that no longer trusts Superman’s promise to save the day, not when America has recently failed to live up to its most basic promises of justice, and not when the day in question was Sept 11, 2001. – The Daily Yomiuri / Asia News Network
Roland Kelts is a Tokyo University lecturer who divides his time between Tokyo and New York. He is the author of ‘Japanamerica: How Japanese Pop Culture Has Invaded the US’ (www.japanamericabook.com).
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