Anime Anime 101

Anime's allure goes academic

Japanese animated films - even the most violent, rock 'em, sock 'em, sci-fi dramas - served up as scholarly fare?

That's exactly right, according to two instructors at Bellevue Community College who are teaching the first academic course in the state on the subject of anime, or Japanese animation.

The college is serious enough to allow students to take "Anime Revealed" to fulfill a composition-course requirement.

The college could be in on the early stages of an academic trend. The University of Michigan recently started an anime-history course, and film professors say many other colleges are preparing to do the same.

Anime, pronounced "AH-nee-may," is an essential element of Japanese pop culture, notes Terry Weston, who along with Scott Bessho teaches the Bellevue course to a full house of 46 students.

And although the art form may be most widely known for some of its more graphic and violent examples, it can be quite sophisticated, much more detailed in plot and artwork than the ordinary Saturday-morning TV cartoon.

While there are plenty of examples of slapstick stories for young viewers, anime often tackles such themes as death and betrayal, and the stories sometimes are so intense that they are edited for children in the United States.

The animations are shown as television series or feature-length movies in Japan, where adults are as likely as children to be the core audience.

The academic movement in the U.S. reflects the fact that so many students had already become anime aficionados on their own. As elsewhere in the country, the University of Washington and most colleges around the state have student-run anime clubs.

In the Bellevue class, students pack a classroom four days a week to watch and dissect an anime production, breaking down its symbolism, character development and message.

The class focuses mostly on the works of Hayao Miyazaki, the Shakespeare of the field, whose work includes the recent box-office hit "Princess Mononoke," an epic steeped in Japanese legend and contemporary themes such as the effect of industrial development on nature, mixed in with a struggle between good and evil.

While parents sometimes decry anime for its violence and gory graphics, anime fans argue that those more intense animations are geared toward adults, not kids.

Anime, with its intricate layers of stories, plot twists and moral dilemmas, also has loyal fans at the University of Michigan and the University of California, Berkeley. The University of Michigan, for instance, offered a class in anime last fall, and professor Abé Mark Nornes says other colleges have inquired about his syllabus.

He predicts classes will be offered at many universities before long.

"A lot of people are trying to figure out how to do it," Nornes said. "Even more are integrating anime into other courses."

Western Washington University includes lectures on anime as part of its Asian-history course.

Nornes attributes the phenomenon partly to the Internet, which has made Japan animation more accessible.

The craze borders on obsession for some. At Washington State University, a handful of students gather weekly to learn conversational Japanese simply to understand anime better. And diehards watch anime with subtitles instead of dubbed versions because they feel the dialects and the voice inflections get lost in translation.

WSU senior Trevor Menagh, a computer-science major and one of the founders of the campus anime club, says he went to study in Osaka, Japan, with the main purpose of understanding Japanese cartoons.

At Bellevue Community College, as soon as posters went up last fall announcing the new course, so many students signed up that a waiting list formed with names of anime fanatics such as Jeff Ravatt of Kirkland.

"I rearranged my schedule and jumped through hoops to take the class," he said.

http://seattletimes.n wsource.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/SeattleTimes.woa/wa/gotoArticle?zsection_id=268466359&text_only=0&slug=anime23m&document_id=134269451

[This message has been edited by Cloud (edited March 13, 2001).]