The Anime Encyclopedia: A Guide to Japanese Animation Since 1917, Revised and Expanded Edition

2836 Pages·2006·9.47 MB·English

by  Jonathan Clements

THE ANIME ENCYCLOPEDIA
REVISED & EXPANDED EDITION
A Guide to Japanese Animation Since
1917
Jonathan Clements
Helen McCarthy
Stone Bridge Press • Berkeley, California
Published by
S B P
TONE RIDGE RESS
P. O. Box 8208, Berkeley, CA 94707
510-524-8732 • [email protected] • www.stonebridge.com We want to
TEL
hear from you! Updates? Corrections? Comments? Please send all
correspondence regarding this book to [email protected].
Text © 2006 Muramasa Industries Ltd. and Helen McCarthy.
Original illustrations © 2006 Steve Kyte Credits and copyright notices
accompany their images throughout. Every attempt has been made to identify
and locate rightsholders and obtain permissions for copyrighted images used in
this book. Any errors or omissions are inadvertent. Please contact us at
[email protected] so that we can make corrections in subsequent
printings.
Cover image : Astro Boy (Tetsuwan Atom) © Tezuka Productions Co. Ltd.;
used by permission. Pages 386, 539 : Artwork from the series Macross and
Robotech courtesy of Harmony Gold USA, Inc., © 1985 Harmony Gold USA,
Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Book design and layout by Linda Ronan.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission
from the publisher.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Clements, Jonathan, 1971– The
anime encyclopedia : a guide to Japanese animation since 1917 /
Jonathan Clements, Helen McCarthy.—Rev. & expanded ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and indexes.
ISBN-10: 1-933330-10-4 (pbk.) ISBN-13: 978-1-933330-10-5 (pbk.) 1.
Animated films—Japan—Encyclopedias. I. McCarthy, Helen, 1951– II.
Title.
NC1766.J3C53 2007
791.43’340952–dc22
2006028265
To Peter Goll, anime’s unsung hero
INTRODUCTION
Has it really been five years since we launched the first edition of the
Anime Encyclopedia at Anime Weekend Atlanta? We still fondly
remember the happy smiling faces of T M ! fans at our first
ENCHI UYO
signing session; the boy clutching a Lodoss War DVD boxed set who
informed us that our cover price was “too much to pay for a book”;
the young man who loudly complained that the book was trash
because it didn’t include a new show that he had downloaded just the
previous day; and the sweet young lady who thought the pages were
“too white.” And here’s a big hello to the guy who proclaimed that it
“couldn’t be a real encyclopedia, because it only has one volume.”
Everyone’s a critic. We also recall the bearded man, with a Southern
Baptist preacher’s voice and gravitas, who bellowed that we should
be proud of what we had achieved, and the girl with red contact lenses
who showed Jonathan her bra. It was anime fandom in all its glory,
from the mother who bought three copies for her children, to the
weirdo who talked to us for 40 minutes and then left without buying a
copy because he “didn’t really like anime anyway.”
Five years later, anime has its first Academy Award. Meanwhile,
our correspondence has racked up several incoherent exhortations to
do the biologically impossible and one proposal of marriage on
Amazon.com’s review pages. One reader complained that he had
almost died laughing at one of our reviews when his wife read it to
him in the car and he temporarily lost control of the vehicle. Another
announced that she would pray for us, in the hope we had better things
to say about her favorite show.
It is for these people, and many thousands like them, that we have
wasted another year of our dwindling lives to assemble this new
version of the Anime Encyclopedia.
This book is a palimpsest of the first edition, augmenting many
earlier entries and adding new ones. With that in mind, we have
preserved most of our original introduction and added some new
material in order to outline changes made and developments observed.
TITLES
We have included as many Japanese titles as possible, but owing to
space limitations, many episode titles, TV specials, and minor films
have simply been left in English. We give variant titles but have
indexed by Western release where possible—hence Space Cruiser
Yamato is filed as S B . The “three-dimensional” typography
TAR LAZERS
of many anime titles leaves them with a foreground name and a
background qualifier, which plays havoc with filing: is it M , or
ACROSS
is it Super-Dimensional Fortress Macross? Where possible we have
used the Western title most recognizable—few fans in the U.S. or
Japan speak of Neon Genesis Evangelion; instead they refer to it as
E , though both variants will be found in our index.
VANGELION
Similarly, the anime known in Japan as Shojo Kakumei Utena (and
translatable as Revolutionary Girl Utena) is often given the French
title La Fillette Revolutionnaire on Japanese merchandise and was
mystifyingly renamed Ursula’s Kiss in some studio sales documents
(press releases whose tenuous relation to the shows they purport to
sell has confused many attempts to determine names and plots). We
have filed it simply as U but indexed it by all its variants.
TENA
For consistency, we have replaced the ampersand (&) with the word
“and,” although box typography and “official” titles may offer variant
forms.
Titles printed in B C L refer to main entries
OLDFACE APITAL ETTERS
elsewhere in the book. The indexes can be used to find titles that are
referred to but that do not have their own entries.
Note that in our commentaries we often (but not always) space-
savingly refer to the anime under discussion by its initials or a
shortened form: in the text about C L , for example, we
REAM EMON
refer to it as CL and to a related work as New CL, and we refer to the
film E as Eva.
VANGELION
Titles appear in the listings in alphabetical order using the
alphabetize-by-word system. Thus, B C ’ E comes
OY WITH AT S YES
before B . If you are unfamiliar with this system (the one
OYFRIEND
favored by computers and databases), you may need to turn a page or
two to find the title you’re looking for. Some variant titles known to
exist appear in the index as well, although they may not be in the main
listings. Finally, if a title contains a numeral, it is alphabetized as if the
numeral were spelled out in English: 2 = Two, in other words. The
only exception to this is when a word is comprised of both letters and
numerals, such as D-1 D and D4 P . In this case, the
EVASTATOR RINCESS
numerals are sorted before alphabetical successors.
See also the note on romanization, below.
INTERNATIONAL RELEASES
An asterisk (*) by a title heading denotes the existence of a legal
English-language release of at least part of a show at some point,
though not all titles are internationally available. The U.S. has T
HE
S B W to itself, H is not available
ECRET OF LUE ATER UMMINGBIRDS
outside the U.K., and K W B was only broadcast in
EN THE OLF OY
Australia. Furthermore, while an English edition may exist, some,
such as M I , were only seen as subtitled prints at film
ADCAP SLAND
festivals or on Japanese DVD with English subtitles. Since this is an
English-language book with limited space, we have avoided
discussion of other languages, although a few well-known French title
variants have been included for the benefit of readers in Canada, and
there is occasional reference to Spanish-language versions.
FORMATS AND RUNNING TIMES
The nature of the medium has changed radically through
technological and economic influences. Animation was an obscure
cottage industry until its use as military propaganda led to the first
full-length feature, M ’ D S W , in 1945.
OMOTARO S IVINE EA ARRIORS
Television created a larger medium during the 1960s, which came to
be dominated by merchandising tie-ins in the 1970s.
The arrival of home video players in the 1970s and 1980s,
especially the video cassette recorder, allowed for the targeting of
smaller niches in the audience, beginning the process whereby anime
studios held on to their audiences as they left childhood behind.
Before video recorders became widely available in the 1980s,
producers could expect a reasonable number of fans to pay to see
repeat performances of TV shows in theaters, leading to holiday
reruns, erroneously credited in some sources as genuine “movies.”
Furthermore, many shows made for video, such as B B ,
ELOVED ETTY
were also shown theatrically as second or third features. We have
listed these shows as video productions, though some other sources
describe them as movies. A , for example, is listed as a video
PPLESEED
work because that was its original format, even though it was shown
in theaters outside Japan.
The 1990s saw many more developments—the “retro” revival as
studios tried to appeal to former fans and their children, the advent of
digital animation, and the use of satellite/cable as an even cheaper
preview medium than video (the studio only has to pay for one tape!).
We have had to piece together some entries, especially for older
shows, from sources with time listings that do not account for
commercial breaks. Sometimes the difference can be drastic: the
Animage 25 Years of Television Cartoons gives the broadcast time of
B as 120 minutes, whereas the Newtype Animesoft Complete
AGHI
Catalog entry lists it as only 86 minutes, and the Animation
Filmography of Osamu Tezuka infuriatingly disagrees with both. We
have also had to consider different companies’ editing and
compilation policies, which can affect published running times.
We have given full episode counts of shows made, even if the
complete runs of shows such as U 31 and A
LYSSES LICE IN
W were only ever seen outside Japan. We have tried to
ONDERLAND
distinguish among multiple versions of an anime using different
abbreviations, and also by using a short-form of the title after the time
and episode count. Finally, where we have had to cram several
incarnations of a title into one entry, pertinent changes in staff or
running time are separated by semicolons or denoted by numbered
abbreviations, e.g., “m1” for the first movie, “TV2” for a second TV
series, or “v2” for a second video series. See the list of abbreviations
on page 2.
CREATIVE CREDITS
We have listed as many crew members as space allowed. Though not
exhaustive, we have included the most important parties responsible
for the five major areas of production on each anime. The period
under study is so vast that meanings have changed over time. As well
as lead animators ( ) and composers ( ), we have listed directors
ANI MUS
( ), scriptwriters ( ), and designers ( ), though these last three
DIR SCR DES
job titles have had over 12 definitions during the last 50 years.
A “series producer,” for example, is sometimes a “story editor” (i.e.,
a lead writer— ) and sometimes a “supervising director” ( ),
SCR DIR
depending on the whims both of the studio and the English translators,
who may not know as much about film terminology as they do about
Japanese. Similarly, “supervising director” is sometimes an honorary
title for a producer, but it is also occasionally used for the chief among
several directors on a long-running series. We have done our best to
pin down exactly what a staff member did and place him or her in the
right slot, but sometimes we had to admit defeat—Frederik L. Schodt
himself is not quite sure why he is credited as a “planning brain” on
S F .
PACE IREBIRD
In cases where a manga has been adapted into anime, we have
followed the Japanese practice and credited the original creators as the
writer/designer where no alternative is given.
Those who check our credits against Western releases may notice
discrepancies; this is often because some distributors use the same set
of credits for long-running shows, though writers and animators may
change with each episode. Where possible, we have checked the
credits of the Japanese originals, and though we have had to admit
defeat on many occasions, jobs go uncredited (N/C) only after a trawl
through every available option, including several Japanese-language
listings and studio histories.
ABOUT JAPANESE NAMES
Japanese names are particularly troublesome, as they are generally
written with non-phonetic kanji characters. Even the Japanese
themselves are not always sure how to pronounce a particular kanji in
every context. Matters are not helped by the proliferation of
pseudonyms, often deliberately hard to read.
Watching every anime made, end-to-end, in order to catch the
names of all the staff and all the fictional characters would have taken
over 18 years. We have been necessarily frugal with our time and
utilized other sources where possible. Sometimes we have had to wing
it, as in T 2086, where not even ITC-approved
HUNDERBIRDS
publications can agree on spellings. However, where we know
Western credits to be in error, we have replaced them with our own.
We have elected to present Japanese names in Western order, that is,
family name last, because this is generally how they are presented in
English-language credits. This has resulted in the names of some well-
known historical characters being given unconventionally as, for
example, Nobunaga Oda or Musashi Miyamoto.
Doubtful names have been passed on to our research assistant
Motoko Tamamuro and her mystified family, who have provided the
best pronunciations they could. Where a guess is the best we can
manage, we have opted for a guess made by Japanese native-speakers.
TERMINOLOGY
Some points remain the same across cultures—more money is spent
on a film than a TV episode. Movies “made for television” tend to be
cheaper and more conservative in their execution. Shows that go
“straight to video” are generally for a smaller, niche audience. We
have avoided the spin-doctor’s term OAV—an “Original Anime