Story

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.” ...