Made in Japan – This Week in Anime

Chris


Coop, I think it’s apparent to readers that we here at This Week In Anime aren’t always about anime. We’ve got other stuff we’d like to talk about. Sure, you’ve somehow convinced the boss-lady to greenlight columns on Metal Cardbot and Baby Assassins, but then there’s me with Transformers, of course. And editor Rebecca was regaling us with her love for the old Tiny Toon Adventures feature.

But alas, those are Western cartoons, and there’s just no reason we’ve been able to talk about them in a column called This Week In Anime—

Oh, huh.

Thanks for everything, sir. The history of animated series like this pointedly comes up a fair amount over in discussions along my Transformers fandom fronts. I’ve heard it parroted in conversations and even at panels (not mine) that “The original Transformers cartoon is anime!”

But if you know me, you know I don’t…necessarily agree with that. So in the interest of compelling column discussion, I think it makes sense to revisit our mate Lucas’ irregular refrain: “Is it anime?” Who knows how opinions might…transform along the way?

Never mind Netflix‘s own inconsistent invocation of the term, which we can absolutely round back to before the end of this.

But in the case of the earlier examples, it’s notable because a lot of these co-conspirators are shows the broader audience wouldn’t normally think of as anime. Transformers was produced by Hasbro, Sunbow, and Marvel Productions, by and for a Western audience, and the animation was simply outsourced to Toei, among multiple other studios from multiple other countries. As you mentioned, several other shows were made this way, though for some reason I see a lot fewer people trying to argue that G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero is actually a Japanese cartoon.

Jem at least has a magical girl and idol show thing going on, but then not nearly as many people talk about poor Jem these days.

If Jem is a mecha, does that make her anime?

But yeah, having some animation outsourced to Japanese studios does not cartoons like Transformers anime make, in my opinion. But it does still make them interesting to talk about from an anime perspective! For instance, I’ll always be happy to point out that a young upstart named Masami Ōbari actually contributed to the original Transformers pilot miniseries!

Of course, there’s no way to tell which specific cuts are his. Total mystery.

It’s cool, but it also lays bare some of the other problems that can arise out of this practice. There are persistent rumors, based on style alone, that the third-season episode “Call of the Primitives” was directed by Obari…though it was directed by Eiji Suganuma. Meanwhile, the episode “Microbots” features some of the nicest animation in the whole, often otherwise uneven series, but who at Toei was specifically behind much of it is obscured by the crediting practice toward outsource-ers at the time.

Given the sheer number of shows that were made with said outsourcing, it can create issues with that aforementioned historical component.

It’s so wild how 80s cartoons were outsourced to Japanese studios mainly as a cost-saving move, hardly ever giving them the time and resources to bring their A-game. Meanwhile, Orbots is out here with the mission statement of “What if we showed American audiences what these teams were capable of if they were unleashed?”

It is unreal that this aired on TV the same year as Transformers.

Blasted through its production so briskly they didn’t even get to make the toys until forty years later. Though really, a lot of that was Tonka’s fault (long story).

Now, Orbots being so closely a collaboration with the likes of TMS, Dezaki, and the gang does tilt it a bit more in the “Is it anime?” discussion, I’ll concede. It at least earns the consideration of “collab,” similar to the nature of what had been done between French companies and Japanese studios years earlier, with Ulysses 31 and Mysterious Cities of Gold…both of which would also be brought westward, just to mix things up further.

Man, we totally missed the Odyssey hype cycle to talk up Ulysses 31.

This is what I’m talking about when I argue about the excitable fanboy urge to classify and hype things, overriding the actual details of how things are made. So “Japanese animators worked on Batman TAS” becomes “Did you know that STUDIO GHIBLI animated BATMAN?” when, like, no.

Never mind that specific crediting could still be inconsistent. For the Tiny Toons flick, WB gave full shout-outs to the TMS staff that worked on it. Batman? Less so.

Of course, that kind of granularity doesn’t play as well as clickbait for pop-culture reporting sites. And it’s why specific attribution is so important to hone in on these discussions when you can. It also reflects why I get punchy about any serious argument that these cartoons are “anime” in the first place. To wit: “Feat of Clay, Part 2” is always my go-to example of the power that TMS brought to Batman TAS when they worked on it…but it follows up “Feat of Clay, Part 1,” which was animated by AKOM, a South Korean studio that, while not at the bottom of their game here (hello Transformers season 3!), is clearly just waiting to be outclassed by TMS.

So do shows like Batman, Tiny Toons, and Animaniacs only count as “anime” when they’re the nice-looking episodes animated by Japanese studios? Shouldn’t take the world’s greatest detective to figure that out.

Hey, that very context prompted a “But Is It Anime?” discussion Lucas and I had last year!

And admittedly we’re not immune to this either, as we also visited K-Pop Demon Hunters ourselves. Though I like to think we’re better about being up-front about things not being anime and the context we’re discussing them in, in spite of that. Hence, this column.

You also have companies like Netflix further muddying the waters by marketing shows that aren’t necessarily anime as “original anime,” which I alluded to with the Transformers: War For Cybertron shows…which did have their animation produced by Japanese studio Polygon Pictures, so hmmm.

Oh yeah, to be sure, this is not the Transformers column. Even as I point out that other shows like Transformers Prime also got animated by Polygon, those just didn’t get marketed as anime; I’m not marketing this as the Transformers column.

Seriously though, you’re right about all this feeding into broader conversations. Going back to other 80s toy properties, this also allowed an outlet for Rebecca to get her own particular kicks in with a recommendation of the Rainbow Brite movie, which netted the extremely rare for the time on-screen, front-loaded credit for its Japanese director, one Kimio Yabuki of Toei.

Also, some other people I could curse, but I won’t talk about them.

Once again, I’m thanking Kurt! Rainbow Brite is an example of the anime heritage compelling a visit to a movie that would certainly be…interesting to visit on its own. A lot is going on here, from dialogue to a robot horse who feels like a decades-early Aqua Teen Hunger Force bit, to an evil Princess who styles on every other character in this movie, to another reason to pour one out for Peter Cullen.

And it also demonstrates how deep the rabbit hole can go when you get to investigate cross-cultural contributions in these kinds of productions. Holy crap, is that Dōga Kōbō in the credits?

Toei and TMS being the big studios for this sort of outsourcing shows what big names they were back in the day (not that they still aren’t big today). It makes sense that they were ripe for contributions and co-pros, as they were looking for ways into other markets. That probably explains Lupin VIII, a space-age Lupin spin-off TMS proposed with DIC that never fully got off the ground thanks to legal shenanigans.

Shout-out to the Leblanc estate and “The Wolf.”

But of course, if you know your history, you know that the partnership wasn’t totally fruitless, and instead of Lupin, DIC went on to work with TMS to produce a cartoony icon all their own!

Sorry, I’ve gotten to deploy a lot of my favorite trivia pieces here, and “Inspector Gadget is descended from Lupin the 3rd” is another one of them.

The progenitor of so many anime and cartoons. But not straight through any Ghibli connections, as we’ve discussed.

All that said, yeah, I think this helps show why following up on different productions outside of Japanese anime can be illuminating and valuable to the anime-fan experience. And sometimes you just get to watch some cool and interesting cartoons in general! It’s why having a balanced media diet is important alongside knowing how your favorite material gets made, as opposed to searching for avenues to appreciate something simply because you can say it’s “technically” anime.

You had animators referencing classic noir cinema while using anime abilities to draw Batman. That’s a soup of skill that makes for good viewing if I’ve ever seen it.

Now, hopefully studying that skill so closely is enough that Lynzee won’t ask to see you, me, and Rebecca after class.