AN ANIME SUBCULTURE GROWS IN NEW YORK
By Britt Yu
It looked like an early Halloween party. Thousands of people walked around the Jacob Javits Center, many in colorful and strange costumes. Some were recognizable as Sailor Moon, others as Naruto, both characters of popular Japanese cartoons.
At the Anime Festival at the Jacob Javits Center. (Photo by Britt Yu)
Hundreds of booths run by companies, big, small and all specializing in selling anime and Japanese goods lured customers with exclusive merchandise, free giveaways and special sales. Music blasted from various places while the attendees cheered and laughed. For three days, the New York Anime Festival was like a party.
It was also evidence of a subculture that has been growing in New York and throughout the country.
“You can get anime down at Chinatown. You can get anime at Kinokinuya [by Bryant Park]. You certainly have way more access to Japanese products and Japanese culture than you would in most places,” said Merideth Mulroney, creative design director and specialty packaging designer for Media Blasters, an anime distribution company based in Manhattan. “But you know, that’s New York. You can have almost whatever you want at any time of day.”
Anime are animated shows from Japan. Some of the medium’s popular examples in the United States include Dragonball Z, Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh, cartoons that aired either on Saturday mornings or on cable channels such as Cartoon Network. While children are the target audience for these shows, anime as a whole has bought in people from all types of backgrounds. In a big city like New York, this can be especially noticeable.
“There’s so many people and more things can happen.” said Clyde Adams III, webmaster of nyc-anime.com. “More clubs can get together. They have more people coming. More stores can be supported, all that sort of thing.”
Anime’s appeal is arguably towards how it is a recognizable medium and yet, very different in some ways.
“It’s familiar enough that you can get into it. It’s a cartoon which you watch a lot as a kid and have good memories of,” Said Shawn Molyneaux, creative content producer and production supervisor for Media Blasters. “And at the same time it’s very different, always different enough to be engaging. And nowadays, it’s actually on TV.”
For 10 years, Adams’s website has helped fans find anime and anime-related merchandise in New York as well as listing special events. “I wanted to create a website…that it would have resources for people, people like me. If somebody had that, I would want to go there. I wanted a New York anime site since I was finding New York things,” Adams said.
How anime came to New York and turned into a subculture is a story of how the medium came to the US and gained popularity. Although NBC aired “Astro Boy” in 1963, anime’s status took serious shape around the 1980s. Future Academy Award winning director, Hayao Miyazaki, was beginning to create animated blockbusters such as “Castle in the Sky” and “Kiki’s Delivery Service.”
With the rise of the home video market, studios featured more anime and began to reach out to an older audience, including those who were in the military and living overseas abroad, said Adams. In the 1990s, American distribution companies licensed Sailor Moon, Dragonball Z and Pokémon. They became smash hits across the country and gave companies incentive to bring more over.
“So a lot of things were coming together at that point,” Adams said. “Fans started finding each other through the Internet and conventions and local clubs and it just snowballed from there.”
Some of these snowball effects came from the tri-state area. According to Anime News Network and fanboy.com, back in 1993 when few people had home computers, Steve Pearl created the rec.arts.anime.info newsgroup for English-speaking anime fans to discuss shows. Pearl also co-created one of the very first anime clubs, Atlantic Anime Alliance, for fans in the New York area in 1992. His efforts would go on to make him fan guest of honor for several years at Otakon, one of the biggest anime conventions in the country.
“He did so much to spread anime,” said Mulroney. She also added that small college clubs, “especially in the east coast,” also helped create the subculture. “Definitely the colleges where it really succeeded. To a degree itself, once word of mouth kind of spreads, it goes from there. Having some sort of public exposure like Cartoon Network made it accessible to everyone.”
Anime clubs, usually set up by college students, allow fans to gather and watch new shows and recommend each other what to see. They also double as social functions, which was a necessity in the ’80s and early-to-mid ’90s due to few legal anime releases, few places that sold them and thus, a small fan base. A “hunter and gatherer” environment when it came to anime as Mulroney described it.
“It kind of got a lot of people who might not have been super social before interact with people,” Said Molyneaux. “You had to do that just to be a fan.”
“Different clubs have very different styles,” said Adams. He describes how some, such as the oldest non-collage affiliated anime club, Metro Anime, does mostly screenings of shows and movies recommended by members during meetings while activities that are more social happen afterwards.
Clubs remain common though, particularly on campuses such as Baruch College, Brooklyn College, School of Visual Arts and Columbia University. However, thanks to the Internet, it is now much easier and accessible for anyone to watch almost any anime.
“It’s [the fan base] grown a lot and it doesn’t feel as exclusive. It doesn’t feel as special. ‘Hey, wow! You’re anime fan, I’m an anime fan. We’re special.’ No, you’re not special anymore,” Adams chuckled.
The fan base in New York has become big enough to hold conventions. From 2001 to 2003, was the Big Anime Fest with attendance ranging from 3,500 to nearly 13,000. Starting from 2007, there is now the New York Anime Festival, which had over 18,000 attendees this year. The next festival, scheduled for September 2009, is already in the works.
With anime becoming more mainstream and easy to access to it between the Internet and at a multicultural city like New York, being an anime fan is becoming more ‘normal’ or as Adams puts it, “It’s not as considered as weird as it used to be.”