Wherein I Ponder Something I Know Next To Nothing About
My earliest giant robot related memory isn’t Transformers, but a Mazinger Z video I’d get my Dad to rent out for me from the local garage. I think it was a garage, anyway. May have been a newsagent. It certainly wasn’t a dedicated video shop. It would be a couple of years before Caerffili got one of those. I was 4, maybe 5, and I suspect the cartoon had a disproportionate effect on me. About the same time, S4C started showing their Welsh language dub of Voltron. These were the first anime programmes I remember watching, the other Japan related cartoon being Hanna-Barbera’s Godzilla, which I really loved.
It wasn’t until the early 90s that I became aware of Japanese anime having a specific kind of identity. Around then, the Guyver series was released on video, along with the publication of Manga Mania. The latter was a magazine that reprinted various stories, including the legendary Akira, Appleseed, and an adaptation of the mid-80s Godzilla reboot movie, another video rental that I’d loved when I was younger. I distinctly remember the accompanying article comparing the Gozilla movies’ new direction to Burton’s Batman. It was an informative read, and explained a lot about what constituted anime, manga, and Japanese comics.
The Guyver was a revelation. It was released along with a wave of other anime titles, all significant in that I’d never seen animation like it. It was dark, adult and pretty fucking violent. The creature designs were absolutely brilliant, the mysterious backstory intriguing, and the main character’s voice an annoying nasal whine.
I haven’t really watched much anime since the Guyver ended, only about half of Evangelion and Miyazaki’s films, and haven’t read any manga for a long while. The gap in my knowledge of manga as a genre emphasises the difference between my perception of manga and anime being largely horror-based adult material, and the current prejudice of manga being only for kids and (icky) girls. Needless to say, both skewed views are wrong, and very much a product of their respective times. It illustrates, perhaps, the limitations placed on the medium in Europe and America by two differing marketing philosophies seperated by about twenty years.
