The popular Netflix series isn’t anime, is it? AWN’s anime columnist Andrew Osmond wades into the definition debate.
I write about anime, but this week, I’m talking about Castlevania: Nocturne. As its fans know, it’s an action-horror series, following the original animated Castlevania that started in 2017. A new batch of Nocturne episodes dropped onto Netflix in recent days, paying off the cliffhanger from last year.
In both incarnations, the series isn’t anime, but that’s not obvious to the average viewer. Netflix itself classifies Castlevania as anime. You’ll find it called anime on various outlets, and in Britain it’s sold on Blu-ray by the distributor Anime Limited. Of the main English-language anime websites, My Anime List doesn’t have a Castlevania entry, but Anime News Network has one, classing the show as “not anime but related.”
As usual in these columns, I’ll park Castlevania for now, getting into wider issues first.
Definition debate, Round One
Anime is Japanese animation, and any animation that’s not Japanese (like Castlevania) isn’t anime. That’s how I and many other people see it, but not everyone. For Western pundits, the question’s usually, “But can’t anime be made outside Japan”? In Japan though, it’s as common to ask, “Is some Japanese animation not anime?”
For many Japanese people, anime means animation, any animation, not just Japanese. Frozen, South Park, the oeuvres of Jiri Trnka and Adam Eliot; they’d all qualify as anime. As the great anime director Satoshi Kon once reflected, “As a child, I loved animation, all of it, whether it was Japanese or whether it came from overseas. If it was a moving image, then it made me very happy.” Kon’s a case in point. I’ve argued elsewhere that his reality-bending ethos is reflected more strongly in today’s American animation than in current anime.
For some Japanese animation professionals, “anime” is a genre. That heresy was uttered by Yoshiaki Nishimura, founder of Studio Ponoc (Mary and the Witch’s Flower, The Imaginary). In a 2019 Cartoon Brew interview, he highlighted how “anime” has often been linked with violent and sexual content outside Japan. Nishimura wanted to disown the anime label, and he wasn’t the first. Decades earlier, Hayao Miyazaki railed against “anime” for aesthetic reasons. He linked it with the extreme distortions of space and time that occurred when limited TV animation tried showing exciting action – the “anime style” that would inspire the CG post-reality of The Matrix.
The Animation Obsessive Substack explores this subject in a trio of excellent articles (the first two paywalled). It describes how there were other labels for Japanese animation before “anime,” such as “manga eiga” (“cartoon movie”) or “kara chohen manga” (“full-length cartoon in color”). The latter phrase was applied to the 1968 film The Little Norse Prince, by the Toei studio. Have a look at The Little Norse Prince clip below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4TLPi-qgKg (must be viewed on YouTube)
Now contrast the next clip:
The second clip is the opening of Astro Boy, often seen as the foundation of Japan’s TV animation tradition. And these two kinds of animation – Prince’s full, lush, and expensive approach, versus the limited, stylized and functional animation of Astro Boy - are sometimes depicted as the sides of a schism. For Miyazaki, who worked on Prince, Astro Boy’s approach came to define “anime,” and it wasn’t what he wanted to make. “We have consistently tried to make ‘films,’ not ‘anime,’” he declared in the 1990s.
Many anime fans would retort that Miyazaki’s argument is crude and self-serving, based on false dichotomies. Limited animation can be artful; full animation can be functional. As for today’s TV anime, it’s light years beyond Astro Boy. Studios such as MAPPA, Kyoto Animation and Science SARU have produced TV animation rivalling any work on the big screen.
But some readers may think of how English labels such as “cartoons” can become contested ground, much like “anime.” Think of “cartoon,” for instance. Does it describe a medium or a genre?
A detour to DreamWorks
Miyazaki’s comments remind me of those made by Jeffery Katzenberg, back when he was a top mover in Hollywood animation. In a 2001 newspaper interview, he said, “One of the things that always hurt was every time I heard the word ‘cartoon’ used to describe animation. Because it feels pejorative. It feels demeaning. It’s placing it into this little ghetto called ‘children’s stories.’ And you know, for all the years I’ve been making these movies, I just wanted them to be movies.”
I asked Katzenberg about these comments when he attended Bristol’s Animated Encounters festival. (My 20-year old AWN report is here). Katzenberg said he no longer hated the word “cartoon,” though he added the word had gained negative connotations through Saturday morning TV cartoons in America.
That dovetails with comments John Lasseter made at a talk I saw at 2014’s Tokyo International Film Festival. “Once everything went to television, and animation was only shown on Saturday mornings and after school kids’ hours, there was a fundamental change in who they (Hollywood) thought animation was for.” Lasseter was disheartened about animation, till he saw footage brought by a Japanese visitor to Disney. It was from Castle of Cagliostro, Miyazaki’s first feature. It’s interesting how these things marry up.
Making a brand
To recap; words such as “cartoon” and “anime” accrue negative baggage, especially for practitioners who work in animation. What baggage? Baggage like Saturday-morning disposability; tropes that just aren’t my animation; and a rep for sex and violence. The last should be remembered by Anglophone fans who met anime in the 1990s, in Akira’s wake. (And not just the Anglophone fans. Fist of the North Star provoked a backlash when it was shown on French kids’ TV, as Ken le Survivant, as I mentioned in a previous column.)
In my native Britain, “anime” wasn’t talked much about at the time of Akira. Rather, marketers and newspapers talked about “Manga cartoons,” as the M-word’s pronunciation was more obvious. But regardless of labels, the baggage disliked by creators and fans was embraced by distributors marketing anime.
Andy Frain, founder of Britain’s Manga Entertainment, told me that he was out to build a brand with Akira as its paradigm. Brand-anime would be violent, action-packed, Not For Kids, and not necessarily Japanese. Even in the 1990s, Manga Entertainment marketed South Korean animated action films amid the Japanese ones. They included Armageddon (1996, different from 1983’s anime Harmagedon) and 1995’s Red Hawk: Weapon of Death.
You could argue “anime” could mean whatever you wanted. As we’ve seen, the Japanese word “anime” covered animation from any country, so any non-Japanese person borrowing “anime” to mean Japanese animation was changing its meaning anyway. The marketers had used “anime” to make a brand. Why shouldn’t fans categorize “anime” according to what they liked?
Fight me! Round TwoAs its name makes obvious, Avatar is an anime. F*** You. Fight Me is a purposely provocative video by Geoff Thew. He’s the host of “Mother’s Basement,” and an established fan pundit on YouTube. His seven-year-old video has a million-plus views.
Thew specifies he’s talking about “anime” in “the loose American sense of that word.” He says the word’s meaning “is largely shaped by what satisfies us when we sit down thinking, ‘I want to watch anime,’ and what we deem worthy of discussion in anime communities.” From there, Thew goes on to claim some of the oldest institutions in Japanese animation aren’t “anime,” precisely because anime fans don’t talk about them. That would rule out, for example, the world’s longest-running cartoon series, Japan’s staid sitcom Sazae-san.
Instead, Thew says, anime should be seen as a series of creative movements in animation, each generation of artists inspiring the next. Those artists needn’t be Japanese, and can certainly include, for example, the American anime fans who created Nickelodeon’s Avatar: The Last Airbender, animated in South Korea.
For myself, I think amorphous categories are great. I’d argue, for example, that the excellent 1999 anime film Jin-roh is plainly film noir – one of cinema’s most flexible categories – and that’s despite its lack of detectives or gangsters. But it’s perilous to tie “anime” so closely to fan tastes. Does anime’s definition change every few years, whenever a majority of entry-level fans find their new number one? If not, how do even fans know what anime is?
Thew’s notion of an “American sense” of “anime” is also a strikingly insular way of seeing a non-American medium. Anime came into different countries at different times, and different titles caught on. The children’s adventure Candy Candy (1976-1979) was a beloved hit in France; most Anglophone fans don’t know it. The same goes for the robot series Mazinger Z (1972-1974) in Mexico, or the soccer anime Captain Tsubasa (1981-1988), called Captain Majid in the Middle East.
If you find such facts interesting, then here’s my own appeal to the foreign fan experience. Anime’s appeal to newcomers rests on the sense of discovering something new and different. That’s hard to square with any account based on fan consensus, on fandom’s head-canon.
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'The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim.' Image © 2024 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. All Rights Reserved.
For myself, I go with the definition of “anime” offered in the Anime Encyclopedia by Jonathan Clements and Helen McCarthy, in the entry on “Argot and Jargon.” “Anime refers to animation from Japan… A work is Japanese if the majority of the main creatives (director, script writer, character designer and key animators) are Japanese.”
Even that implies borderline cases, such as a film I covered in a previous column, The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim. That used anime studios, as well as a respected anime director (Kenji Kamiyama). But its writers weren’t Japanese, and many of the designers and animation supervisors weren’t either. It would probably fail Anime Encyclopedia’s test, and Anime News Network deems the film “not anime, but related,” like Castlevania.
Castlevania
Castlevania is a much clearer-cut case of a series that’s not anime. It was made by Powerhouse Animation Studios in Texas. Unsurprisingly Powerhouse used Asian collaborators, but they weren’t Japanese. Like Airbender, Castlevania employed the animators of South Korea. “Animation Services” on Nocturne’s new episodes are credited to Seoul’s DR Movie studio; the Key Animator credits are full of South Korean names. Castlevania’s most obvious Japanese connection is it’s adapted from a long-running videogame franchise by Konami.
Sam Deats is Powerhouse’s Creative Director, and he’s helmed Castlevania from the start. In a 2017 interview with Gizmodo, his comments were a temperate echo of Thew’s above. “I think any artist that’s been doing this for a while will tell you the same thing, that they are the sum of their influences. And if you’ve grown up being influenced by anime-style work, then that’s going to be the look and feel of the work that you’re doing. Hopefully, folks that like anime will enjoy what we’re putting together...”
Producer Adi Shankar highlighted how Castlevania was deep-rooted in action anime such as Vampire Hunter D and Ninja Scroll. (Both anime, notably, were far more famous in America than they were in Japan.) In the new batch of Nocturne episodes, those anime feel closely homaged in the first minutes, when the half-vampire Alucard elegantly slices vampires in a desert, sometimes with barely an in-between. There was another impressive homage in the original Castlevania – Season 4, Part 3 – where an armored woman takes up a very big sword, in the gory tradition of the anime Berserk.
Newcomers to Castlevania can start either with the original series or with Season 1 of Castlevania Nocturne. I thought the original series was marred by too much puerile bickering between its main characters. For all the script’s f-bombs, it felt like a holdover from Saturday morning cartoon scripting.
Castlevania Nocturne, by British writer Clive Bradley, has no such crutch; it’s also far more obviously political. The show is set in revolutionary-era France; Nocturne’s heroine is an ex-slave who threw off her chains in the Caribbean. Two supporting characters are gay men, fighting for antithetical causes, who somehow become lovers. Multiple players are forced into new forms by vampirization and other means, struggling to keep their authentic identities. Bradley describes his (very relevant) politics in a 2024 interview.
Still, all that doesn’t necessarily make Nocturne better. The first Castlevania’s leads argued annoyingly, but they became a memorable team over time. One issue with Nocturne, especially in its new episodes, is that its multitude of characters split into sub-plots with a weak center, a generic boy hero who can’t hold them all together. Both the old and new series have indulgently sluggish patches. If the first Castlevania is facetious – Part 1 had a barfly argument about goats like a sweary Family Guy - then Nocturne’s glum portentousness undercuts the true drama it has.
Still, the new episodes improve, serving up exciting heroes’ journeys for their young central couple, plus vibrant animated action. Both of the best sequences have dragons. The first beast manifests in a church, symbolizing damnation for more than one main character. The humans’ expressions as they gaze at the monster are some of the show’s best human drawings, raging or terrified.
The second dragon is quite different. It’s a pugilist bruiser like Godzilla, who joins in the frenzied climactic battles in revolutionary Paris and gains a personality through its fighting alone. Its punch-ups and flame-out would certainly satisfy fans sitting down to watch “anime,” to use Thew’s criterion, but it’s not anime. It’s Castlevania’s own achievement, and it should be celebrated as such.