CHENNAI:Something that originated from a commercial in Japan has become a rage in the city. That’s right...we’re talking about Anime, a Japanese animation that has quite the fan following in the city. While the origins and the timeline of anime are debatable, anime gained a cult following in the West post the 80s, and our countrymen started following it like religion. Naruto, Goku, Yagami, Ryuk and others came to influence the post-baby boomers when the country was more focused on disco. CE catches up with some of the Anime fanatics from the city...
“I started watching anime 20 years ago with Dragon BallZ. Unlike a cartoon series, anime has a storyline and it is more realistic,” says Arunkumar Balakrishnan, founder of an anime enthusiast group on facebook.Anime fans can be categorized in to different categories. Some are casual fans...people who treat the genre as a hobby; then there are weeaboos who take the obsession with anime to next level where they try to implement the life of anime in to reality; and of course there’s the otakus, where the ‘obsession’ is healthy. “I am both otaku and seasonal. I watch it with passion and I follow it in a healthy manner, whenever there is a season,” adds Arun.
Every year, ideally there will be four seasons of one anime series. The anime trend observers believe that the surge is because of the rise of internet and social media which gave anime fans a platform to come together and promote the concept. “Social media played an important role in the current rise in the number of anime enthusiasts. Because of that we could organise cosplays and travel together to comic cons,” says Chris Ichigo, a graphic designer who categorises himself as a mix of casual and otaku.
After the internet boom, the inactive anime fans started to gather together and started organising cosplay events and started projecting them in comic cons. This trend attracted many newbies and more people started to pour in to the culture. “There was a time when anime fans are all ‘day walkers’. Their fandom was an alter ego that they wore; they feared that people might judge them since other mainstream fun packed animations were more popular then. But now, we have a great number of followers. My Facebook group itself has over 2,000 members,” says Aditya, co-founder, Anime fans of Chennai on FB.
Ever since Hollywood started showing interest in making movies on famous Anime characters (The Lion King, Inception, Avatar, The Matrix, Van Helsing and more), more people started to know about the genre. Such examples where the film adaptations failed the originals are 2009 release Dragon Ball Evolution, a blow more powerful than the Kamehameha wave to the fandom. The latest disappointment is the remake of the classic Death Note by Netflix.
“Hollywood should understand that they won’t be able to do justice to the originals if they make it. It is a decade of evolution. You cannot make it into a three-hour action wrap. The only good thing is that more people will come to know about anime,” says Loki Luffy, an anime fan, who co-founded another Anime fan group in the city.The anime fans get together and discuss comic con expeditions and cosplay events to promote and spread the idea every month.
swan or blue?
It is rumoured that director Darren Aronofsky bought the rights of the anime flick Perfect Blue (1998) before he directed Black Swan (2010). Whether that’s true or not is a debate for another time, but the iconic bathtub scene in Black Swan looks like a complete rip-off of the Japanese Anime classic
snow white or the princess?
In Snow White and the Huntsman (2012), there are elements of environmentalism that resemble those used in an anime movie, Princess Mononoke (1997). The green motif, forest backgrounds and the breathtaking visuals are proof positive of the fact that it was inspired from the latter.