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Anime

"If you don’t know anything about anime, this is what to look for."

Listen to this Commentary!

By Lita Cho

Japanese animation, or anime, needs no introduction if you are a young person in America. Adults might only know of Pokemon and Spirited Away. But anime has been around as a huge subculture in the U.S. for at least a decade. And a lot of kids are part of that underground fan base. Youth Radio’s Lita Cho is one of them.

I saw my first anime cartoon when I was five. I was too young to know what was going on. But a few years later, my mom and I went shopping in Chinatown and saw a Sailor Moon figurine in a store window. I started watching the Japanese TV show, dubbed in English. I became obsessed with the main character, a high school girl saving the world.

If you don’t know anything about anime, this is what to look for. The girl characters have huge eyes and long skinny legs for running. Their hair can come in crazy colors, with animated styles impossible to shape in real life. The giveaway is always the characters’ eyes, with a shine in the corner of their pupil that glitters when they’re about to cry.

When I was 12, I was collecting anime action figures, posters and trading cards, spending all my birthday and Christmas money on the stuff. I started watching shows for older audiences.

Like South Park and the Simpsons, there is a lot of anime for adult and teen fans. But instead of being funny, many of these shows have serious plots that appeal to us. As we’re trying to figure out who we are, we can watch anime characters doing the same thing and changing throughout the series. 17-year-old Gabriela Jacobo didn’t know anything about anime when her brothers got into it…

Gabby: I didn’t like cartoons and I thought anime was just cartoons, and I didn’t want to see someone magically alive after falling from a skyscraper.

But that’s not anime at all.

Gabby: When I started looking at it more deeply, I saw the characters made you question who you are as a human being. They dealt with all these important topics like the existence of god, loyalty, friendship… I never expected anything serious to come out of cartoons.

Now that it’s become a huge fad, anime has a whole underground following of fans. They meet each other on the Internet or at special conventions across the country. When I’m not watching anime in the middle of the night, you can probably find me cruising online shops or e-chatting about the latest shows.

Anime isn’t just TV…it’s a whole industry that includes movies, comics books, and merchandise. When I was 10, there weren’t many kids at my school who knew what anime was -- it was just the kids at my Korean church. But now, kids of all backgrounds are obsessed with my hobby…like ten-year-old Ava Slusser.

Ava: As a matter of fact, this summer I’m like, “Mom, can we please go to Japan, please, please, please,” and she’s like, “Well it costs a lot of money for four people to go,” and I probably have to wait a few years but I really, I’m like, “Imagine how much books and stuff I can get!”

And in Japan, it’s not just the kids who are fans, it’s adults too. If you ride the subway in Kyoto, men in business suits are not only reading the Japan Times, but also flipping through copies of manga, or anime comics. And when they go home, many of them watch anime on primetime TV.

I’m Lita Cho.