GUIDE TO JAPANESE ANIMATION

Two hundred years ago

(in 1985)

nobody knew

nothin' 

about

Japanese animation.

Sure,

there was 

Speed Racer

and 

Star Blazers 

and stuff.

But there was also this 

MASSIVE

hidden world of 

movies and TV series

from Japan

that had no way of 

getting to the US.

And then one day I was at
a teeny tiny comic book convention in
Valley Forge, PA
and I stumbled across a table
where a bootleg VHS copy of this
was playing:

Macross: Love -  Do You Remember?

I immediately bought a copy and watched it 

over and over and over again

even though

I HAD NO 

IDEA WHAT THE HELL

WAS GOING ON!!!

It was completely in Japanese with

NO SUBTITLES!

And there was

no such thing as

internets

to help me find out

WHAT THE HELL

WAS GOING ON!!!

But there were giant robots 

shooting lasers and missiles.

I can understand that

and

I soon bought other movies:

Black Magic M-66

Vampire Hunter D

Angel's Egg

Area 88

All of them were incredibly cool and

incredibly different from American cartoons

AND I HAD INCREDIBLY NO 

IDEA WHAT THE HELL

WAS GOING ON!!!

My growing fascination with anime

eventually led me to a Japanese book store

in Philadelphia called

Books Nippan.

That's where I found this:

It was originally the program guide for 

a Japanese animation festival at

Baycon '86.

But this edition was distributed

by Books Nippan

as a primer for people

like me that needed to 

know what the hell was going on

in their bootleg anime VHS tapes.

If you like anime,

you should really find

Toren Smith

and thank him since he's one of the 

original pushers of anime on the

American public.

The book is filled with

basic synopses

of over 50 

old-school anime titles.

Like Urusei Yatsura:

Lupin:

Lensman:

Crusher Joe:

Nausicaa:

Area 88:

Vampire Hunter D:

And my first love,

Macross: Love - Do You Remember?

Since Japanese storytelling is often 

a bit wonky compared to what we're used to,

the synopses were often only marginally helpful.

In the case of

Angel's Egg,

which is just a moody,

stream of consciousness story,

there wasn't much to explain:

But in the pre-interweb

days this book

was a life saver!

If you're into old-school anime,
see if you can find a copy of this book!