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Women and Anime Essay Meanwhile, ever since the huge international box office success of Star Wars (released, coincidentally, in 1977, the same year as Space Cruiser Yamato), a growing number of Hollywood blockbusters might best be described as live-action anime. Kathleen Kennedy, executive producer of Steven Spielbergs The Lost World, has acknowledged that Spielbergs method of conceiving a movie closely resembles the composition of an animated film in the sense that the visual ideas precede the story. The computer-generated images used so lavishly in The Lost World, and in other recent Hollywood films, are in essence animation drawn by computers. From this it might be deduced that the gap between physical reality and peoples image of it is widening in other countries as well. That said, there is an undeniable difference between animation-like live-action and live-action-like animation. At the heart of this difference lies the Japanese peoples deeply entrenched sense of self-loathing, extending even to their own ethnic traits. The famous British science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke once published a short story in which aliens, visiting earth after the human race is destroyed by nuclear war, use Disney movies to study the extinct human species, never realizing that the films do not represent real life. Needless to say, Clarke wrote the story as a joke. But his joke is uncannily close to the actual situation in Japan today. And the concern that situation ultimately raises is that the Japanese people, like the human race in Clarkes short story, have engineered their own extinction. There is the story told by Ide Toshiro, who co-wrote the script for the movie Aoi sanmyaku (The Green Hills of Youth, directed by Imai Tadashi), an enormous hit in 1949, during the Allied Occupation. Speaking of the movies last scene, where the high school hero Rokosuke walks along the shore with his girlfriend Terasawa Shinko shouting, I love Terasawa Shinko! I love her, I do! Ide reveals the script originally had him yelling, I hate Terasawa Shinko! I hate her, I do! Of course, this is simply an example of reverse psychology at work. Everyone knows Rokusuke is in love with Shinko. However, such rewrite kills the nuance conveyed by the original line, namely that Rokusuke is trying (rather transparently) to conceal his emotional vulnerability. How, then, did I hate you become I love you? The problem is that these days it would seem just as false to say I hate you in such a scene. How, then, is an actor to perform? This is precisely the problem Aoi Yoji confronts when he criticizes Japanese dramatists for reeling off line after self-satisfied line that actors are viscerally unable to make their own, justifying it by saying thats my style. Aoi complains with good reason that actors are forever struggling with dialogue that has little style and even less substance, and since they have to render the material in some way, they have no choice but to resort to cheap theatrics. These idea discussed in the foregoing essay appears in unusually explicit form inn the 1998 live-action sci-fi movie Andoromedia (Andromedia). This is the story of a brilliant computer scientist who loses his only daughter Mai in a traffic accident but then resurrects her in cyberspace as an artificial life form named AI — pronounced like ai, the Japanese word for love, but being also the acronym for artificial intelligence. However, whereas Mai (played by Shimabukuro Hiroko, member of the teen pop group Speed) has black hair and eyes, AIs hair and eyes are both bluish, and her skin is lighter as well. In other words, Mai has undergone a drastic ethnic bleaching upon her digital resurrection. Andromeda would have us believe that instead of going to heaven when they die, the Japanese go to virtual heaven and become Caucasians. In 1999, George Lucas, the creator of Star Wars, released the fourth movie of the series, Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace. The film uses a tremendous amount of computer-generated images, so much so that producer Rick McCallum commented that it could be regarded s the first animated movie in history that was as realistic as live action. Inasmuch as Star Wars Episode 1 is fundamentally a live-action movie, saying it could also be called an animated movie with all the realism of live action not only places animation on a par with live action but also implies that there are live-action movies without the realism of live action. By ignoring the difference between reality pretending to be cartoons and cartoons pretending to be reality, McCallums words eloquently attest to the fact that the gap between live action and animation is closing in the West as well. It would seem that Japan is not the only country where peoples vision of reality is undergoing a process of animation. Conclusively, the tendency of Japanese to reject their own history and traditions in favor of a Western ideal has undermined live-action film also by affecting the performances of Japanese screen actors. An obvious example is the inability of todays younger actors to portray Japanese of earlier eras with authenticity. A live-action version of Princess Mononoke, for example, would be impossible to produce even if one could overcome budget constraints and the difficulty of its special effects. There are simply no young actors in Japan today who can wear the traditional clothing, duel with swords, or shoot arrows on horseback as convincingly as the animated characters in Miyazakis film. Bibliography/Sources 1) Boden Sean (2001), Women and Anime: Popular Culture and its Reflection of Japanese Society 2) Ibid (2002), Resistance to the Japanese State through Popular Culture. 3) Kenji Sato (2002), Media in Asia. 4) Shimomura, Roger (1999), An American Diary. Exhibition catalogue, Japanese American National Museum.