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Comment by lmm | Hacker News Reader

Culture is constantly in dialogue with what came before. The very first anime took their inspiration from Disney; one of the biggest '80s mecha shows got its start from a GI Joe spinoff, while another took heavy inspiration from an adaptation of Starship Troopers. And what "anime" is doing in the '90s is very different from what "anime" is doing in the '10s - doubly so if you're going deeper than Miyazaki (who mostly made very Disney-like westernised things - not a bad thing by any means, but not at all representative of the wider landscape).

In the end talking about being "inspired by anime" is as facile as talking about being "inspired by movies" or "inspired by television".

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I globally agree, with two nitpicks.

Anime from the last twenty years seems less directly influenced by foreign tendencies. Of course, since Japan is impregnated of the American culture (including the language), its anime cannot ignore this context. But decades ago, the Japanese pioneers like Tezuka were following the steps of previous pioneers like Disney, but now, the anime has grown enough to claim a relative independence, meaning their internal tendencies are much stronger than foreign influences.

> Miyazaki (who mostly made very Disney-like westernised things

The level of "Disney-like thing" hugely varies across Miyazaki's films. Mononoke is obviously Disney/Hollywod compatible, but Totoro not so much.

Miyazaki and Takahata, who co-founded Ghibli, repeatedly stated that the work that most influenced them was "Le roi et l'oiseau" (Grimault & Prévert, 1953, 1980). This masterpiece is of course a "western thing", but very far from "Disney-like", especially toward the second half of the film. I heard that the Ghibli museum often had screenings of it.

It’s a pro watch! There are actually two versions of The King and the Mockingbird. The other release is an “unfinished” copy called Mr. Wonderbird, and they have a lot of differences.

I actually prefer it to the “finished” version. It’s more minimalist and weird and somber.

The environment of the totalitarian state is contrasted more strongly in Mr. Wonderbird. You have the grandiose and highly modernist towers on the top, a practically deserted and people-free environment. Then you have the bleak cities underneath the surface with lots of quirky peasants. It’s a lot like a cartoon version of Metropolis.

The finished version adds a lot more cartoonish and baroque elements to the world and it kind of detracts from the feeling imo. They’re both good though.

> The level of "Disney-like thing" hugely varies across Miyazaki's films. Mononoke is obviously Disney/Hollywod compatible, but Totoro not so much.

I'd say Totoro is still a lot more Disney-like than the average anime (if that's even a meaningful concept).

> Mononoke is obviously Disney/Hollywod compatible, but Totoro not so much.

My preferred example would be Pom Poko and clubbing police officers with hypertrophied testicles.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFPaSIy--50

I've seen plenty of other Ghibli films and thought I knew what to expect from Pom Poko, but it was quite a surprise experience. Definitely wild. I need to watch it again!

Yeah the article completely omits the perspectives of the Japanese anime creators. I'm sure that many of them worship live-action American films to the same degree that the article's quoted directors do anime.

The lack of recognition of this fact and the conflation of 'everything' with animation probably speaks to most animation fans' general refusal to engage with other film traditions. Do Studio Ghibli fans care to know what Miyazaki's favorite films are? I guarentee almost none of them are anime or even animated

It's a bit of a different story, right?

Hollywood live-action movies and animation have been mainstream entertainment in Japan for a very very very long time. It's almost so obvious and overt that it can be difficult to discuss. With movies like Terminator and Star Wars playing to packed theater audiences in Japan, it would be more of a story if a Japanese animator was somehow not influenced by such imported media!

It's quite a contrast to how anime infiltrated the minds of American artists. Anime (at least in original and uncut form) was far from mainstream. For decades it was traded peer-to-peer on VHS tapes and such. It was far from a given that any particular person knew about it. It was quite a niche interest even among geeks and artists.

(Not that I wouldn't love an article full of Japanese animators discussing the topic!)

> It was far from a given that any particular person knew about it

Indeed. In the 70s, Star Blazers and Speed Racer were broadcast in my area (USA). No one called it anime. But we knew it was different because of the style, and I really didn’t like it at the time. The eyes, the expressions, the language… I wish I had gotten past that for the stories, but I didn’t.

In my location in the US in the 70's we had poor TV reception for the station that carried Star Blazers and Speed Racer. (Some combination of our antenna quality and our location.)

It wasn't until cable TV reached my area in the early 1980's that I finally got a taste of anime, in the form of Robotech. Catching every single episode was a priority, because if you miss one, it could be years until you had another chance to see it. (I wasn't rich enough to buy VHS tapes for the series, even if I could find them.)

    watching every single episode was a priority, because if you miss one, it could be years until you had another chance to see it.

Oh my god, yeah. The S1 and S2 finales of Star Blazers were huge annual events for me for a few years as a small kid.

Robotech was even tougher because there were so many episodes, since it was three totally different series stitched together hahaha. You miss one, you're waiting a looooong time.

It's funny.

Speed Racer was absolutely bizarre to me as a kid. It still is, really. The art style, the voices. It feels like some kind of postmodern absurdist art. I like it in a way but, man, wow.

Star Blazers always just felt normal to me. The designs and dialog were more grounded in reality. I realize "reality" is a relative term here, since we're talking about a space opera starring a WWII battleship (lol) but it definitely aspired to some sort of a "hard sci fi" aesthetic. Like a Robert Heinlein novel or something.

If you look at isolated cels or something they're pretty close, and of course they share aesthetics like "big anime eyes". But man, they hit me completely differently.

The English dub voice acting for the first two seasons of Star Blazers was actually pretty admirable in places. They hired non-union, off-Broadway actors as opposed to hiring the typical kids' cartoon actors such as the Speed Racer dub gang. Both as a money-saving move and because they wanted people that would try and take the roles seriously.

The first few eps are tough but once the actors settle into their roles, there are some really credible moments. The overall result is highly uneven but I think it was revolutionary in its own way.

Hilariously, for the third season of Star Blazers, the original cast had scattered to the wind so they hired the Speed Racer cast lol. The results are a farce.

I think what I'm trying to say is that anime is just one of dozens of influences that go into any given project. A director (animation or large-scale live-action) will use dozens of films and film scenes for references in planning scenes or art direction. None of the 90s directors' films in the article have that much to do with anime besides The Matrix. Deeming anime 'the root' of all current film or animation is going way too far. Especially when you can scratch the surface of any famous anime and find Hollywood again (as well as dozens of other influences of course).

I agree with everything you just wrote about influences. =)

But, I think we read the article a lot differently. I didn't feel the author meant to claim that anime was the only influence, or even the biggest influence, on western animation. Certainly, I'd agree with you that such a claim would be junk.

From the article:

    Pixar, and by extension Hollywood 3D animation, is 
    attached to anime at the root.

This is probably the strongest claim and also... kind of the weirdest and most ambiguous.

If they said "anime is the root of blahblahblah", that's a pretty unambiguous (and blatantly wrong IMHO) claim.

But what does, "western animation is attached to anime at the root" even mean? Are we saying that one grew from the other? Are there also lots of other things attached to these roots? It's sloppy writing.

However, taken in context, I think the author has a reasoned and informed view. The influence of anime is darn near universal, although I think that's definitely not to say that it is the biggest or only influence.

The author doesn't address all of the things that influence anime, such as western animation. Which is fine. That's a big topic in and of itself. Would have added another zillion words. I think they made the correct choice.

    None of the 90s directors' films in the article 
    have that much to do with anime besides The Matrix

I always felt The Matrix borrowed more from John Woo-type HK live action movies than anything else. Second on the list for me would be video games or maybe Neuromancer-style classic hard cyberpunk. Or PK Dick. Or... probably a few more other things before anime.

> I always felt The Matrix borrowed more from John Woo-type HK live action movies than anything else. Second on the list for me would be video games or maybe Neuromancer-style classic hard cyberpunk. Or PK Dick. Or... probably a few more other things before anime.

I'm sceptical about a lot of the article, but the directors were very explicit about taking inspiration from anime. Ghost in the Shell in particular is a clear direct influence on both the general look and the famous lobby gunfight conclusion.

Some US movies made it big in Japan; others didn't, or never went there for whatever reason. (Hell, I grew up in the UK and there are plenty of american cultural touchstones that sank without trace there, or bands that are known in one country for something that's an obscure deep cut in another). And those movies that did make it into pop culture in Japan were generally dubbed and may even have been cut. So I think it's pretty much the same situation; after all, Robotech was on TV in the US since what, the '70s? And conversely there were certainly plenty of nerdy collectors passing around pieces of obscure cinema (whether US, French, Soviet...) on tape in Japan.

At least in the case of Star Wars, the inverse happened, too: https://www.forbes.com/sites/olliebarder/2015/12/21/understa...

Basically every cyberpunk anime from the 80s through today is at least a stylistic nod to Blade Runner. Sometimes the references are more explicit, like Bubblegum Crisis featuring a band called Pris and the Replicants.

The interesting thing about Blade Runner and almost all modern sci-fi and cyberpunk is that they all took their influence from one single comic, The Long Tomorrow, by Dan O'Bannon and Jean Giraud (aka Moebius).

Dan and Moebius were working on Jodorowsky's Dune. During a slow period, Dan was bored and started drawing a comic. Moebius saw this and offered to rework it a bit. Their collab appeared in Heavy Metal (Metal hurlant) magazine. Ridley Scott used this comic as visual inspiration for Blade Runner. William Gibson even credits this comic for Neuromancer. Other movies influenced by this comic, or the art of Moebius include Tron, Heavy Metal (based on the magazine comics), The Fifth Element, and The Abyss. And, of course, pretty much everything else that came later such as The Matrix or video games like Deus Ex.

It's crazy to think about all the what-ifs with Jodorowsky's Dune. If he did not bring Dan and Moebius together, we wouldn't have Blade Runner (or a vastly different one). If Dune didn't fall apart, Dan wouldn't have gone and written Alien. If Alien didn't happen, Ridley Scott may not have known about Dan O'Bannon or Moebius, and never have done Blade Runner.

Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind was also influenced by Moebius, according to Miyazaki. Look at Azrach (again, Metal hurlant magazine) and the similarities are obvious. The French were really ahead in illustration and animation at one point, and don't often get the credit they deserve. Go and look at what René Laloux was doing with Fantastic Planet, Time Masters, or his short films. Some of this stuff still blows my mind.

Japan has been in a dialogue with Europe for a long time regarding anime and manga. Anime has been huge in Western Europe since probably at least the 70s. France and Italy commissioned some in the 70s to cut on animation costs and it worked so well that it spiralled into a ton of imports. France is still the second largest market for manga in the world in front of the USA despite having a sixth of its population. Strangely I think France and Japan are culturally a lot more permeable than the USA and Japan are.

> Do Studio Ghibli fans care to know what Miyazaki's favorite films are? I guarentee almost none of them are anime or even animated

Miyazaki got part of the King and the Mockingbird by Grimault actually printed to study them when he was a student. It’s notable because the movie was written by a famous French poet and screenwriter from the poetic realist movement and you can some the influences that had on Miyazaki career are fairly obvious.

>The very first anime took their inspiration from Disney

That's not true, are you referring to: Momotaro: Umi no Shinpei?

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