Pokeman, You Dragonball! -- November Is Japanimation Month in Buffalo

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Anime -- Japanese animation film -- has exploded in popularity and variety since the 1980s to become a source of endless fascination for fans and cultural analysts alike.

There's good news this month for Buffalo "Digimon" and "Card Captors" enthusiasts and the die-hard fans of environmental savior "Princess Mononoke of the Wolves" and "Akira," the innovative, layered film said to have pioneered anime's modernist form.

Nov. 9 is the day the University at Buffalo and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery will team up to focus on the thriving anime industry, whose storylines now represent most major genres of fiction and most motion-picture media from television broadcast, DVD and VHS distribution to full length motion pictures.

Events will consider anime's origins, authors and artists, many genres, thematic elements, visual characteristics, body design, relationship to Japanese comics (manga), modern Japanese literature, popular culture (especially science fiction and fantasy), contemporary constructions of gender and the body, and technology and culture.

It will also offer something for those unfamiliar with any of this who would like to explore 21st-century cinematic culture. Events are free of charge and open to the public.

On Nov. 9 at 2 p.m. UB will host a lecture by noted anime expert and author Susan Napier of Tufts University titled "Anime and Visual Culture: Is Animation the Medium for the 21st Century?" in the Screening Room, 112 Center for the Arts on UB's North (Amherst) Campus.

That evening, from 6:30-9 p.m., the Albright Knox will host "Anime Night," featuring a Japanese culture exhibition, with "cosplay" (anime-related costumes) presented by the UB Anime Club, and a showing of the anime feature "Millennium Actress," which will be introduced by Napier of Tufts.

The film chronicles the life of a famous actress whose life and the lives of her characters span Japanese history. "Cosplay," by the way -- a morpheme of "costume" and "play" -- is a term also used to define a Japanese subculture centered on dressing as characters from anime, manga (Japanese comics), video games and tokusatsu (live-action Japanese film and television dramas that use special effects).

The UB Libraries Online offers links to a variety of guides to anime and magna at http://ublib.buffalo.edu/libraries/asl/guides/comics.html and the nine-year-old UB Anime Club at http://ubanime.buffalo.edu/ meets weekly, sponsors an anime forum, hosts a gallery of anime art, sponsors contests and other events and has a library of 700-plus anime films on VHS and DVD.

As a narrative film form, Japanese anime (AH-nee-may) originated at the turn of the last century and by the 1930s, its films were more popular than those produced by the country's underdeveloped live-action film industry, which, among other things, had a hard time finding Western-looking actors for use in films set outside Japan.

It experienced a surge in popularity in the 1970s and many of its products -- Japanese shows such as "Pokemon," "Speed Racer," "Sailor Moon" and "Dragonball" -- were dubbed into English, edited and aired on American television as children's shows.

Despite the huge-round-eyed personas of its characters (formulated, as it turns out on the popular American animated characters of the 1930s, Betty Boop, Snow White and Bambi), anime is not just kiddy fare, but a narrative form used for a broad range of genres -- action, adventure, children's stories, comedy, drama, erotica (more specifically ecchi or hentai), medieval fantasy, occult/horror, romance and science fiction.

It is so ubiquitous, moreover, that it has led scholars like Napier to consider anime's effect on American culture.

Napier, professor of Japanese and Mitsubishi Chair of Japanese Studies at Tufts University, holds a Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Civilizations from Harvard University. She has written several books about anime, including "Anime from Akira to Howl's Moving Castle: Experiencing Japanese Animation" and the forthcoming "From Impressionism to Anime: Japan as Fantasy and Fan Culture in the Eyes of the West," as well as numerous articles on the subject.