The Mike Toole Show

Animation Appreciation

I didn't really think hard about the “animation” part of anime until I met a guy named Yuu Watase. But back to Mr. Tsunoda.

At the opening ceremonies, the crowd beheld Mr. Tsunoda, a handsome older gent, who entreated the throngs of fans to let him teach them to how to actually animate big favorites like Dragon Ball to the list, which got the reaction he was looking for. Tsunoda returned to Animazement a number of times over the years; using markers and large flipbooks, he'd walk a classroom of fans through the creation of simple motion in an animated sequence; a walk cycle here, a thrown punch there. Tsunoda was a good artist, but his drawings for these classes were simple, workmanlike, and sometimes a bit sloppy. The lesson was obvious: you didn't have to be a machine-precise draftsman to be an animator, you just had to be ready to work hard and make an awful lot of corrections as you went along.

I've had animation on the brain for months now. It's because of a whole bunch of reasons—meeting some talented animators earlier in the year, witnessing the premiere of Kids on the Slope, but for Dandy he makes broad creative decisions (he's pitched in some scripts, as well) and lets the team run wild. Some have wryly speculated that his biggest duty in Space Dandy is hanging out and preparing his next project as much as possible!

But Watanabe's taken a novel and really awesome approach to putting this series together. Every episode has new key creative staff—each one boasts a different director, some pretty famous (Michiko & Hatchin's Michio Mihara). In that way, despite the fact that Watanabe's steering the ship, every episode's a little different.

The reason I've been thinking about the technical side of Dandy so much is the sheer accessibility of its production data to English-speaking dorks like myself. Typically with simulcasts, much of the production credits are left untranslated, but Space Dandy's details are splashed all over the ending sequence in English every week. This is also the first show that's boasted creative staff like Ben Ettinger's AniPages, which has been carefully breaking down the technical details of every Dandy episode.

So that's one reason why I'm enjoying Space Dandy. Another big reason is also tied to social media—it's the way the show's been rolled out, almost totally worldwide, day-and-date. At Ghost in the Shell all hit the airwaves/screen here first, and I'm sure there are others) Space Dandy is the first anime TV series to roll out globally, starting in the US, in the age of social media. There's a huge contrast between watching this show and 2009's Kurokami: The Animation, which aired on the now-defunct ImaginAsian network the same day of its Japanese release. It was a neat phenomenon, and Kurokami is tons of fun, but it just didn't have the insane buzz that Space Dandy does.



To get back to the Gundam Unicorn, a man who appeared to be about my age. I asked him what it was like to make the jump from ink and paint to digital, and he smiled shyly and said he'd used digital tools his entire career; the shift had started even earlier than I'd thought. I'm not much use at writing fiction and I certainly can't draw, so learning details like this helps me feel closer to the animation.

More than anything, these experiences make me feel kinda dumb for not zeroing in on this aspect of anime sooner. When I first became a fan, I started to learn the names of famous directors like Miyazaki and Oshii, because those are the people most responsible for a show being good or bad, right? From there, I spent time mooning over my favorite character and Makoto Shinkai not once but twice, but if you visit conventions, lectures, or screenings with the people who make this stuff, don't up the chance to hear them speak! Even if they speak a little quietly.

I thought this column was gonna be a short one, but then this suddenly appeared in my mailbox.



“Ha,” you're saying, “that's a crummy ol’ American cartoon movie! What does that have to do with anime?” Well, Max Fleischer's Gulliver's Travels does happen to be an amusingly obvious influence on one of my all-time favorite anime movies.



That frame's right out of the beginning of DreamWorks Smirk in that poster, though. The thing is, until I sat down to enjoy this new blu-ray, meticulously restored by cartoon historian Steve Stanchfield, I'd never taken note of just how much the 1939 American film had influenced the 1966 Japanese one.



See, during World War II, there was a ban on foreign media in Japan, so they didn't get all of the swell theatrical cartoons of the time period. Once the war was over and the embargo was lifted, it was obviously time to open the floodgates and get the Japanese public caught up on all of those great Disney movies of the 30s and 40s! Except that, as it turns out, the first foreign cartoon film out of the gate in 1948 was Gulliver's Travels. I find it fascinating that, almost 20 years later, it would have such an obvious influence on a cartoon Made in Japan. But hang on a second—what's this?



The lower frame is Gulliver's Great Activities, a 1950 cartoon short that was actually produced by Japan's National Tax Agency. The idea was simple—when a mysterious giant is washed ashore, the tiny denizens of the land fret about feeding and caring for their big friend—they can't afford such an expense! But by pooling their resources and paying the tax, “Gulliver” is fed and cleaned up, and immediately sets to work building public facilities, helping with disaster relief, and driving foreign trade. Yep, that's a tax propaganda cartoon, alright. The short is rough around the edges, but it unmistakably and cheekily swipes a whole bunch of imagery from Gulliver's Travels.
I marveled earlier about Gulliver's Travels Beyond the Moon still showing its roots despite being made 18 years later, but the fact is, it probably couldn't have been made any sooner. All those successful, flashy Disney films did an amazing job keeping domestic animation projects from being greenlit, but by 1958, the supply had dried up. By an astonishing coincidence, Toei started releasing animated films in 1958. The idea of Japanese animated films having to compete (or not) with technically savvier Disney fare never occurred to me. I just figured Toei didn't have their shit together until then!



I still find it hard to describe Gulliver's Travels Beyond the Moon. It looks almost wholly unlike any anime film before or after it; if I had to make a comparison, I'd say it's animated in Little Golden Book-o-vision. Its undeniably quirky story (a street urchin takes up with Gulliver himself, along with a talking dog and tin toy soldier, on a trip to battle an oppressive robot army in space) is augmented by great music and songs (just like Fleischer's Gulliver, this film is packed with music—though it's not quite an operetta, which Gulliver's Travels definitely is) by Isao “Hayao Miyazaki served not just as an animator; he made key suggestions to help improve the film's story. It's a marvelous little movie, and I'm bummed out that there's still not yet an official, high-quality DVD release.

I dropped some Gulliver knowledge in the above paragraphs, but that doesn't mean that I'm a smart, cool guy. I just learn awesome stuff from books like Anime: A History, Hiroshi Ōkawa as a burly, intimidating, ill-tempered man who nevertheless always exhibited excitement for Toei's animation potential. Even about one of my favorite films, I still learn more from this book. It's a good one.

This column's kinda wandered around a bit, hasn't it? We started with a mind-expanding experience with a great old animator, talked some Space Dandy, and then took a trip to several different versions of Lilliput. All of these things just make me excited for more anime. While Space Dandy's gonna be on vacation for the summer, it looks like we might be getting a great fill-in in Masaaki Yuasa's Ping Pong. In the meantime, you can catch me in two weeks at Anime Boston, doing my usual Dubs that Time Forgot/Anime Hell circuit. If you take anything away from this little screed, let it be this: whether it's a global hit like Space Dandy or a classic influencer like Gulliver's Travels, animation isn't merely a tool for imaginative storytelling, but a restless, breathtaking, and amazing canvas on its own. If you're not paying close attention to it, you may not know what you're missing, so please find out soon!