Japanophilia

Another article I looked at was Amazing Anime.I'm a pretty big anime and manga fan and this article interested me a lot since it informs people who don't know about it. The article discusses how Anime came to be so popular and what it is. Below is a summary of the article.

No matter who you are or where you come from and if you've been exposed to media, you've come across Anime or Manga at some point in your life. Think about it...haven't you seen the characters with eyes like saucers and hair that never ceases to stick up? That's Anime and Manga, a defined style of Japanese Art and Animation.

So what makes Anime and Manga so popular and so much more attracting than western animation? The answer that the article provides can be summed up in just a few sentences. Anime and Manga is more open-minded, you can think of any scenario and it probably has been or will be made into an Anime or Manga. Western animation can easily be narrowed down to one thing...Disney. Disney is usually based on a very simple idea "Good Vs. Evil" This idea has become so common that it doesn't really do much for an audience anymore. Anime and Manga take that idea and all sorts of other concepts to a whole new level. This is why the audience that consumes Anime and Manga has no age group, or gender division. Everyone can find something that they'll like.

So of course you can tell that people out of Japan and Asia wouldn't want to miss out. Aside from the consumers a lot of western companies are putting in an effort to bring Anime and Manga to North America. The biggest form of this is in the form of Films. Hayao Miyazaki is one of the renowned Anime film creators and Disney teamed up with his "Studio Ghibli" to release his films "My Neighbour Totoro" and "Kiki's Delivery Service" on video.

The article focuses a lot on Miyazaki's "Princess Mononoke". It was the highest-grossing film in Japanese history in 1997. The Titanic topped it later. This film did very well in both USA and in Japan. There were only two problems that were seen in the film, the violence and the length of 2 hours and 13 minutes. These however didn't prove to be major obstacles for the film when it came out in USA along with a Pokemon craze that swept North America in 1999.

The article being written in 1999 states that Anime might never reach the point of ever being as overwhelmingly popular in USA as it is in Japan and mentions that it's still started of pretty well with the current happenings. But as you can see a lot has changed in the past 7 years and Anime is widely supported in all of North America.