Escaping Cartoons

On the rise of "animation."

A still from Doggie March (1963)

Welcome! It’s another Thursday edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter, and this one’s about a revolution powered by a single word.

The term cartoon has been loaded forever. It calls to mind simplicity and broadness, and often humor. Plus, in some circles, the view survives that cartoons are for children exclusively. There are a lot of wonderful cartoons, and the label doesn’t feel as limiting as it sometimes did in the past. But the stigma isn’t fully gone even now.

When Japanese animation swept America in the ‘90s, the refrain that these films and series were “not cartoons” was hard to avoid. Which made sense, all things considered. Jan Scott-Frazier, an early foreigner in the anime industry, summed up the thinking well. “I wanted to make films, not just cartoons,” she said, “and anime was the only place they were doing that in animation.”¹

A lot of work from Japan felt new. The loan word “anime” (a key tool of American marketers back then) came to represent animation amenable to many styles and tones, and stories that weren’t just for kids. This was a world beyond just cartoons. To many, it looked like freedom: even Disney’s artists were reinvigorated.

Yet Japan wasn’t immune to limiting labels itself. A struggle had played out there, too — just a little bit earlier.

The exact terms were different, but the ideas were similar. Mid-century America had print cartoons and animated cartoons; in mid-century Japan, manga referred to both animation and comics.² Notably, the word “manga” tends to get rendered in English as “cartoon.” And, decades ago, terms like manga eiga (cartoon movie) were in everyday use. They were loaded.

Directors Rintaro and Toshio Hirata were two who felt trapped by this language, as they worked together on children’s cartoons during the ‘60s. A couple of decades later, when the pair collaborated again on the film Bobby’s Girl (1985), it was clear that the situation had changed. Bobby, adapted from the hip novels of Yoshio Kataoka, is a semi-arthouse tragedy about a teenage runaway.

The film isn’t a cartoon. When it came out, Hirata pointedly referred to it as “animation.” That was a loan word from English, and a key tool for Japanese marketers back then. It represented work that wasn’t just for kids, that could tackle all kinds of stories. For Hirata, it meant freedom. As he explained in the ‘80s:

Back when animation was known as manga eiga (cartoon movies), both Rintaro-san and I were busily making manga eiga.

We were very dissatisfied.

After all, the prevailing view was that manga eiga was something for children to watch.

We would talk about our dreams, saying that there should be all sorts of possibilities for animation. We were like literary youths (bungaku seinen).

And now it’s Yoshio Kataoka. It’s astonishing. We’ve entered an era of Yoshio Kataoka animation. “Amazing!” I think. It feels like the times have totally changed. … We’ve become able to make all sorts of things.

Animated films (animeshon eiga) have finally branched off from manga eiga.

More and more animated films of all sorts will surely continue to be born. Bobby’s Girl is just one of them.³

A snippet from Bobby’s Girl (1985) — the film is available on YouTube