The Fascination of Anime Written by Brad Burchards

There will always be the thin line that separates the kids from the adults in terms of the fondness for animation.

In the digital age, gone are the old school ways of creating animations or cartoons with the help of thousands of pages with drawings on them after which they are colored and run through a machine that turns the simple images on paper into full length animated films. I remember the time when Disney was at the forefront of such animated films with Aladdin, Beauty & The Beast, Little Mermaind, and classics such as Snow White and Cinderella. Now most of such animated films starts of in the confines of an artists computer thru lines that look like a complicated framework of a "parol" where everything is done easier. I was never that good at drawing but I did have a knack for making caricatures way back, I also enjoyed the comic books that featured the X-Men (Marvel) and Superman (DC) which was as exciting as watching live animation. Right now what interests me the most are purely Japanese Manga animations, one thing that the Japanese are known for besides their advance technological prowess is their addiction to Manga (Japanese word for "comics" and consists of comics and print cartoons). Walk down an alley in Japan and you are flooded with countless Manga creations from small time artists to huge publishing houses that which all originated from the post-war era starting off with Astro Boy. From that simple "manga" creation it boomed into a money making industry both in film and print. My particular genre of manga comics or movies are the sci-fi plots such as Gundam, Code Geass, Ghost in a Shell, Gantz. First "manga" cartoon show way back in the 90's would've been Sailor Moon which I fondly recall seeing girls my age pretending to be the merry bond of female heroines out to battle the forces of evil. Most Japanese manga evolve to become movies if their popularity exceeds the expected outcome, examples of these are Resident Evil which rumor has it will have a 5th installment to the franchise, Final Fantasy: Spirits Within, Initial D, and the classic Astro Boy which was released way back 2009. One crazed Japanese Manga fan (yours truly) can only fathom what would be in store as well as someday dream of walking the busy streets of Japan hoping to personally see the stalls lined up on the streets selling comic books (crash course in reading Japanese is a must). So until that time comes, I'd have to make do with the translated / sub version I can get off the internet.