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There’s an old saying that behind every good joke there’s just a bit of truth: And the poster above seems to capture a certain contradiction about anime and anime fans which is interesting to say the least. I think part of the reason for this is that on a meta level most entertainment aimed ay kids is made to be so saccharine sweet that it seems that all of the life has been beaten out of it. For example if you look at the Disney channel so many of the shows look and sound like gentle sitcoms from a long past era — however my guess is that a certain number of kids want something more. In fact the best way to get a kid to read a book is to tell them that “you’re too young to read this book” and I think anime has that attraction to it.As for the proliferation of anime high school shows my mind drifts to the old saying that “the problem with youth is that it’s wasted on the young”. Frankly most older folks (myself included) have a bad tendency to dwell in nostalgia, and making matters worse from a cultural perspective we inflict our childhood on today’s youth. It doesn’t matter if it’s baby boomers thinking about Woodstock or Gen Xers filling their iPod up with new wave and old school hip hop songs, the effect is that we’re yearning for a more “simple time” when we has less responsibilities and didn’t have to worry about taxes, health insurance and the paying the rent.And looking at my own life I see a bit of myself in this meme: As a kid the first anime show I loved was Star Blazers, and part of the appeal of that show was not only did it have a sophisticated plot but also there was a great deal of violence that you didn’t see even in a film like Star Wars. Of course in Star Blazers they edited some of the more graphic scenes, but when they’d say something like “hey we killed all of those robot soldiers” even I knew better. It was about the same time that the first Mad Max film was becoming a hit on cable television, and I think many of the fans of that film were in fact younger kids who had a hunger for something more graphic.Flash forward to the future: As an adult I was in Manhattan during 9/11 so watching animation about giant spaceships blowing up seems unrealistic next to what I’ve seen. I still watch violent films from directors like Quentin Tarantino, yet the violence in his films always seems so much more personal. So when I come across a show like Lucky Star there’s a certain escapism to watching a world where not much of anything seems to be going on.
Wow wow wow wow, they are 17? What the hell.. Japanese board members got some issues differentiating children from near adults.
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The adult anime shows are Azumanga Daioh, Lucky Star and Potemayo.
