Story

In the 1980s, when the word “content” was beginning to spread, I worked for a time at Company F, a personal computer maker. Hardware alone was becoming hard to profit from, and I experienced on the ground the mood in which value was shifting toward the software that ran on PCs (personal computers) and the information that flowed through them. It was said that the word “content” was born at IBM, the giant of the PC industry in those days, and spread from there. ...

The talk turns back to animation once more, and I would like to look at Disney’s works. Among the features are “Snow White,” “Cinderella,” “Sleeping Beauty,” “Beauty and the Beast,” “The Little Mermaid,” “Rapunzel,” and so on. Of course, the number of titles is far greater than that. Many of Disney’s works take their material from the collections of fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm and by Perrault, who gathered folk tales from Germany and, beyond it, from around Italy and France. The contents of the Grimms’ book are quite cruel; in the second edition some revision was made to the treatment of the mother, and it is said that with every edition after that, revisions here and there were unavoidable. And one often hears that when these became Disney animation, a great many more revisions were made on top of that. ...

At the end of my last piece on limited animation, I declared that next time I would write about “Japanimation.” The name Japanimation was a label bestowed in Europe, meaning: that stuff is not animation. After “Astro Boy,” thirty-minute series came to be produced one after another, and by the 1990s series like “Candy Candy” and “Urusei Yatsura” were airing on French and Italian broadcasters. They created a boom among children, and at the same time criticism began — and the word born of that criticism was “Japanimation.” ...