Konnichiwa! I'm Jason, I'm 19, I'm a sophomore at the community college, and I have been hooked on Japanese animation since a friend of my older brother's loaned us a beat-up VHS copy of Akira in 1994. I watched it four times in one weekend. My mom thought something was wrong with me. Something WAS wrong with me: I had become an otaku.

This page is my attempt to (a) tell you what's actually worth your money at the video store, (b) settle the subtitles vs. dubbing thing once and for all (kidding, that will never be settled), (c) explain how the fansub scene works for people who keep e-mailing me about it, and (d) brag about our club. Enjoy. If you disagree with a review, e-mail me and we'll fight about it like civilized people.

AKIRA (1988 movie)  
The one that started it for me and for about half the otaku in America. Biker gangs in a rebuilt Neo-Tokyo, a kid named Tetsuo who gets psychic powers he can't control, and an animation budget that still looks bigger than anything else on the shelf eleven years later. It is based on Katsuhiro Otomo's manga and he directed it himself. The story gets confusing at the end (the manga is much longer and explains more), but you won't care. If your video store has one anime tape, it is this one. Rent it. Buy it. Watch it four times in a weekend.

GHOST IN THE SHELL (1995 movie)  
Mamoru Oshii's cyberpunk movie about Major Kusanagi, a cyborg cop hunting a hacker called the Puppet Master, and what it means to be a person when almost all of you is machine. It's slow in places and it makes you think, which some people at the club hold against it. I don't. The mix of cel animation and computer graphics was way ahead of its time and the music (those chanting choruses) gets in your head for days. The Manga Entertainment tape is easy to find. Rated for grown-ups; there's a reason.

NEON GENESIS EVANGELION (TV series, 26 episodes)  
Teenagers piloting giant bio-mechanical robots called Evas against monsters called Angels, except it's really about depression and fathers and whether anybody can ever really understand anybody else. ADV put the whole series out on tape here, a couple of episodes per volume, and it cost me most of a summer's worth of lawn-mowing money to collect all thirteen. Worth it. The last two episodes are either genius or a rip-off depending on who you ask at the club (we have had this argument at least six times). Get the subtitled tapes if you can find them. Shinji whining is somehow more bearable in Japanese.

DRAGON BALL Z (Toonami, weekday afternoons)  
OK, here's the deal. Goku and his friends fight increasingly powerful bad guys, mostly by yelling and glowing. A single fight can take eight episodes. It is edited for TV, the dub is what it is, and it is also completely addictive and the reason half my Intro to Sociology class knows what a Saiyan is. Cartoon Network's Toonami block has done more for anime in America in the last year than ten years of video-store tapes. Three rockets for the show, five for what it's doing for the hobby.

SAILOR MOON (TV, syndication and Toonami)  
Don't laugh. A klutzy middle-school girl named Serena (Usagi in the original) turns out to be a magical warrior and gathers a team of Sailor Scouts to fight the Negaverse. Yes, it's for girls. Yes, I've seen every episode that's aired. The English version cut a lot and changed names, but the show underneath is funny and sweet and the girls in our club will fight you if you say it isn't real anime. Three rockets, and I'm being tough because the transformation sequence is the same every single time and it's 40 seconds long.

POKEMON (TV, weekday mornings and Saturdays)  
Ash Ketchum and his Pikachu travel around catching pocket monsters and trying to become a Pokemon Master, and the whole thing exists to sell the Game Boy game and the cards. My 9-year-old cousin can name all 150 of them. I can name Pikachu. It's anime, it counts, it's fine for what it is. The movie comes out in theaters here in November (the 10th, I think) and the line will be full of 9-year-olds and a couple of otaku pretending they are there with their cousins. I will be one of them. Two rockets, plus one if you are nine.

What I'm dying to see: COWBOY BEBOP
This one aired in Japan last year and it has NOT come out here, so all I know is what my fansub contacts tell me and the one tape I traded for in August: it's about bounty hunters on a beat-up spaceship, the music is jazz, and everybody who's seen it says it's the best-looking TV anime ever made. The two episodes I've seen were unbelievable. Somebody in the U.S. please license this so I can stop bugging people for copies. (Rumor at the con was that somebody has, but nobody could say who. I'll update when I hear.)

Also on the way: Miramax is putting Princess Mononoke (Hayao Miyazaki's 1997 movie) in American theaters at the end of October with an English dub. I have seen a fansub. It is amazing. Go see it on a big screen even if it's dubbed; I'm going to.

Here is the argument that has ended friendships. Subtitles: you hear the original Japanese voice actors, who are usually really good, and you read what they're saying at the bottom of the screen. Dubbing: American actors re-record the dialogue in English so you can just watch.

I'm a sub guy, and here's why. The Japanese voice actors were cast by the people who made the show; the dub actors were cast by whoever had the budget for a Saturday in a studio in Texas or Vancouver. Dubs also tend to get "adapted," which means rewritten, which means Usagi becomes Serena and rice balls become doughnuts. And there are only about a dozen dub voice actors, so after your third series every character sounds like the same guy.

BUT. In fairness to the dub side (hi, Derek): you can't read subtitles and watch the animation at the same time, and the animation is the point. Dubs are what got DBZ and Sailor Moon on TV where millions of kids could see them, and some dubs are honestly good. And subtitled tapes cost about $5 more, which when you're 19 is real money.

My compromise: watch it dubbed the first time to see the pictures, subbed the second time to hear the real thing. If you only have money for one, get the sub. If you only have TIME for one, get the dub. Now stop e-mailing me about it.

A fansub is a tape of a show that hasn't been licensed in the U.S., which some fans (usually a college club with somebody who reads Japanese and somebody with two VCRs and a genlock) have translated and subtitled themselves. It's how I've seen Bebop and Mononoke. Here are the rules of the road, which are taken seriously:

1. Nobody sells fansubs. Ever. You pay for the blank tape and the postage and that's it. Anybody charging more is a bootlegger and the fansub groups will blacklist them.
2. Once it's licensed here, it's dead. When a U.S. company picks up a show, the fansubbers stop distributing it and you're supposed to go buy the real thing. That's the whole deal that keeps the companies from coming after the fans. Respect it.
3. How you get one: find a distributor (there are lists on club pages and at cons; ours has a couple of contacts). You mail them a blank T-120 tape, a SASE (self-addressed stamped envelope, or really a self-addressed padded mailer with enough postage to get the tape back), and a note saying what you want. Two to six weeks later your tape comes back with the show on it. Some distributors ask for a couple bucks toward wear on their VCRs; that's considered OK.
4. Tape quality goes down every generation. A copy of a copy of a copy is going to look like it was filmed through a fish tank. Ask how many generations from the master it is. Use SP speed. Don't be the guy who copies at EP.
5. Trading: once you've got a few, you can trade with other fans, tape for tape. This is how our club's library got started. Keep a list of what you have and be honest about the quality.

Our club library is up to 61 tapes and we have a trading list. Members only, sorry, but joining is free.

Fall semester meetings: Thursdays, 7 pm, in the student center, room 214 (the one with the TV cart). We started the Anime Club in the spring of '98 with five people and a VCR that ate tapes. We now have 23 people on the list, a VCR that doesn't eat tapes, and a LaserDisc player somebody's dad donated. Every Thursday we watch two or three episodes of something, argue about it, and eat whatever snacks somebody brought back from the Asian grocery. This fall we're doing Evangelion from the beginning for the new people (ha ha, good luck) and something from the fansub library the second half of the night.

You don't have to be a student to come. You do have to be OK with subtitles, because we vote and the sub side always wins.

Over the Fourth of July weekend, four of us from the club piled into Derek's Civic and drove eleven hours to the big anime convention in Anaheim. I had never been to a con before. Things I learned:

• There are more of us than you think. Thousands. In the middle of the day. In costume. I saw eleven Sailor Moons before lunch on Friday, and one Sailor Moon who was a guy with a beard, and everybody cheered for him.
• The dealers' room is where your money goes to die. Import CDs, tapes, cels (actual painted frames from actual shows, and the good ones cost hundreds), models, and wall scrolls. I came home with a soundtrack CD, two Evangelion cels I can't afford, and no money for gas. Derek covered the gas.
• The video rooms run 24 hours a day. We watched Bebop episodes at 3 in the morning in a hotel ballroom with 200 strangers and it was the best I have ever felt.
• The industry panels are where you hear what's getting licensed. That's where I heard the Bebop rumor.
• Bring a pillow. Four guys in a hotel room with two beds means somebody's on the floor, and since I'm the youngest, that was me. Twice.

Going back next year. The scanner at the library is broken so no pictures yet, but Derek's mom is getting the film developed and I'll scan the good ones when I can.

• Sakura Asian Grocery - where the club snacks come from.
• Eastside Judo Club and Bonsai for the Patient - the rest of the Tokyo neighborhood.
• Quake II Clan [DUST] - what I do when I'm not watching anime.
• Reel Talk: Jen's Movie Reviews - she reviews the live-action stuff.
• The Tokyo neighborhood | GeoCities.us home