For British viewers, the anime boom took a long time to arrive. In America, Japanese shows like Kimba The White Lion, Gigantor and Astro Boy were a common sight on television in the 1960s, yet it took until the late 70s and 80s, and a string of European-Japanese co-productions, before anime finally began to find a hold on UK television.
Marine Boy
Airing in 1969, this charming anime show was the first of its kind to appear on UK screens. Like many later Japanese shows, it was marked out by its distinctive style, which favoured colour and design over smooth movement, a hummable title song and a fun set of characters. Its star is an athletic teenager who, with his sidekicks Splasher the dolphin and Neptina the mermaid, heads off on a string of breezy undersea adventures. While America enjoyed a whole range of Japanese TV shows, Marine Boy appeared to be the only one that made it to the UK until the 1970s – things like Astro Boy and Star Blazers, all much-loved by kids in the US, didn’t make it to Britain. But then Battle Of The Planets came along, and things began to change… The only problem was, the original Gatchaman was quite a violent show, at least compared to the kind of stuff we were used to in the west at the time. As a result, the sharper edges were smoothed off, and to fill in the gaps, a comedy robot named 7-Zark-7 was ushered in to bring the episodes back up to the requisite length. Even in its edited form, the dynamism of Tastsunoko’s original anime series remained just about intact. Its range of unspeakably cool space ships and characters weren’t quite like anything that had been seen on western television at the time, and Battle Of The Planets remains a fondly-remembered cult item. Taking its cue from Gerry Anderson’s TV series like Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet, Star Fleet nevertheless felt entirely distinct from those shows: for one thing, it told a single, coherent saga about Earth’s fight with an alien threat called the Imperial Alliance, and that story was invested with quite a few effective twists and turns. I can still remember an episode where a major character was suddenly killed by a robot assassin, and I was left saucer-eyed with shock; so far as I can recall, this was the first time I’d ever seen a likeable hero die in a Saturday morning TV show. Scooby Doo this was not. Star Fleet wasn’t a particularly big hit in Japan, but it seemed to find a ready audience in the UK. Shops sold Star Fleet annuals one Christmas, while the series even managed to find a fan in Queen guitarist Brian May – he liked the English version’s theme tune so much, he recorded a cover of it with Eddie Van Halen and the drummer out of REO Speedwagon. You don’t see Ben 10 getting attention like that from the rock gods of today.
Ulysses 31
Ulysses 31 was one of several Japanese-European co-productions to appear on UK TV in the 1980s, and for this writer, it’s the very best. A sci-fi reworking of Greek myths, it sees the enviably hairy protagonist Ulysses stuck in unknown space with a bunch of kids (his son Telemachus, an alien girl named Yumi and an infuriating robot sidekick called Nono) and tasked with finding a route back to Earth. Each episode sees Ulysses flying from planet to planet in his eye-like ship, the Odyssey, and encountering all kinds of ancient gods and eccentric mortals – most of whom are up to no good. The robot and the kids are annoying, admittedly, but there’s also a spooky, icy atmosphere in Ulysses 31. An episode which retells the story of Sisyphus is startlingly downbeat, and there’s something oddly frightening about the god Zeus and his sadistic punishment of poor old Ulysses. Moments of comic relief try to keep things light, but the series successfully gets across the sensation of drifting in a cosmic void; even the final episode is packed full of luckless souls and nightmare imagery. Created by France’s Jean Chalopin and Nina Wolmark, Ulysses 31 was animated by Tokyo Movie Shinsha, and had a number of famous names working on it. Shingo Araki and Michi Himeno (who later worked on the Saint Seya anime) were responsible for its superb design, while Toyoo Ashida also appears on the credits. Ashida went on to direct, among other things, the Fist Of The North Star movie and the 1986 cult favourite Vampire Hunter D – both released on VHS by Manga Entertainment in the 90s.
The Mysterious Cities Of Gold
For some readers, this French-Japanese co-production will have provided the soundtrack to their childhoods. About a group of kids looking for the Seven Cities of Gold in the 16th century, The Mysterious Cities Of Gold tied with Ulysses 31 when it came to catchy theme tunes. Created by Jean Chalopin (who co-created Ulysses 31), The Mysterious Cities Of Gold was animated by Studio Pierrot, famous these days for things like Naruto and Bleach. The pairing was a fruitful one; Chalopin’s story rattled along like a classic matinee serial, while Pierrot’s animators brought the tale’s characters and ships to life in eye-popping fashion. Cities Of Gold imagines South America as a hotbed of mysterious people and ancient technology; one unforgettably eerie episode depicted the Olmecs as a race of subterranean ghouls in thrall to a massive crystal. Cities Of Gold‘s impact was such that, nearly 30 years after it originally aired, a new series was finally created – and it remains surprisingly faithful to the show’s 80s roots, both visually and in terms of its sprawling adventure.
Thundercats
Humanoid cats-in-spandex adventure show Thundercats didn’t necessarily look like anime at first glance, but it was, in fact, animated by Japanese animation studio Topcraft. For TV at the time, the quality of the animation was extremely good – the highlight, in technical terms, is its opening credits sequence you can see above. Echoing the athletic nature of its feline characters, it’s a constant dervish of movement and colour, and an effective showcase for what the studio could do with 2D cel animation on a relatively tight budget. The studio also had some legendary staff working for it – among them Hayao Miyazaki, Toshio Suzuki and Isao Takahata. As producer Ethan Spaulding later revealed, Thundercats had a spectacular hidden pedigree: “A lot of the artists went on to be in Studio Ghibli,” he told MTV, “and worked on Hayao Miyazaki’s first film”. That film, funnily enough, is the subject of our next entry. On a side note, Japanese animators had a particular way of depicting lens flares and explosions in their work. You can see it at play in Thundercats‘ title sequence, and while the show isn’t commonly thought of as anime, it captures much of the same dynamism of Japan’s finest animated output. The film often appeared in UK video shops, and like me, you may have rented it in the assumption that it was some sort of Star Wars-type action adventure. Even in its butchered form (which, in retrospect, really was borderline criminal), Warriors Of The Wind soared thanks to Miyazaki’s animation and world-building. For many, this would have been an early, unexpected introduction to one of the medium’s undisputed masters. Miyazaki was understandably appalled by New World’s treatment of his work, and he became much more wary about the way his subsequent films were packaged and localised outside Japan. He even managed to win a battle of wills with Harvey “scissorhands” Weinstein; when Weinstein said he wanted to edit Princess Mononoke for its American release in 1997, Miyazaki famously sent the producer a samurai sword and an accompanying note, stating “No cuts.”
The Transformers and Transformers: The Movie
Japanese shape-changing robots went global with The Transformers, a tie up between US toy company Hasbro and Japanese outfit Takara. A disparate set of toys, all united by their ability to be manipulated from robots into cars and household objects and back again, became a multimedia phenomenon which is still going strong 30 years later. The TV series, which first aired in the mid-1980s, was handled by Toei Animation, one of the largest and longest-standing anime companies in Japan. The show’s robots may have been voiced by the likes of Peter Cullen, Frank Welker and Casey Kasem, but the fingerprints of its Japanese animators were all over the finished product: they had a particular way of bringing hunks of metal into kinetic, thrilling life. With 1986’s Transformers: The Movie, Toei got to throw off the shackles of the TV format and really push the quality of the animation: made on a princely budget of $6m, it looked great for the time. It was also unexpectedly violent, with beloved robots being casually killed off left and right – Hasbro had a new toyline it wanted to push, so the old faces had to go. That corporate cynicism was entirely lost on me, age nine – all I cared about was that Optimus Prime was suddenly lying dead after a fight with Megatron. Along with the small-screen death in Star Fleet mentioned earlier, the loss of Prime was another mildly traumatic childhood moment.
Dogtanian And The Three Muskehounds
In the mid-70s, the Japanese success of Heidi, Girl Of The Alps ushered in a number of other anime adaptations of European stories. Many of these, such as Alice In Wonderland, Dog Of Flanders and Anne Of Green Gables, didn’t air in the UK. But two European-Japanese co-productions did make it to our windswept isles – one being Dogtanian And The Three Muskehounds. A retelling of the Alexandre Dumas story with cute puppies and a catchy yap-yap theme tune, Dogtanian stood in stark contrast to the forbidding, doomy Ulysses 31 or the epic adventures of Cities Of Gold.
Around The World With Willy Fog
Like Dogtanian, Around The World With Willy Fog was a co-production between Spain’s BRB International and Studio Nippon and an adaptation of a classic French novel – this one, of course, by Jules Verne. Also like Dogtanian, Willy Fog is populated by cute animals, but it’s otherwise a surprisingly respectful adaptation of Verne’s globe-trotting adventure story. Willy Fog (now a lion) is an urbane Victorian gentleman who tries to make a complete trip around the world in 80 days, while a case of mistaken identity sees him pursued from country to country by Scotland Yard detective Inspector Dix, who thinks Fog robbed the bank of England.
Robotech
For many years, this sci-fi series divided opinion among anime fans; on one hand, there were those that argued that Robotech helped introduced a generation of kids to Japanese animation, while on the other, there’s the argument that writer-producer Carl Macek held little respect for the shows he’d acquired. While it’s true that Robotech awkwardly throws together three largely unrelated anime: Super Dimensional Fortress Macross, Southern Cross and Genesis Climber Mospeada, I fall into the former camp: a straight translation of all three shows would have been preferable, but Robotech still managed to bring a style of animation to an audience that might otherwise have missed it. Robotech’s best-known story is its first: the Macross Saga. In the far future, Earth has managed to reverse-engineer some advanced alien technology, and our finest pilots now fly around in transforming planes (designed, in spectacular fashion, by Shoji Kawamori). But then an alien race of giants called the Zentraedi decide to invade, and only the crew of the SDF-1 space battle cruiser can save humanity from destruction. Oh, and the singing abilities of an idol singer named Lynn Minmay may also prove helpful.
Akira
Here it is: director Katsuhiro Otomo’s sci-fi masterpiece that brought anime to the attention of a whole new audience. A hit in Japan, Akira was, like many other Japanese animated features, largely shown in arthouse cinemas in the US. But when Carl Macek’s company Streamline Pictures put Akira out on video, and largely born by word of mouth, Akira grew into a cult phenomenon. By 1991, the Streamline dub of Akira had appeared in UK shops, courtesy of Island World Communications. Its impact, on this writer at least, was seismic: its animation was of a calibre unlike any I’d ever seen; it was deliriously violent, intelligent, bewilderingly plotted and unspeakably cool. Suddenly, the UK had a window into the anime realm, and things would never be quite the same again.
Honourable mention: Krypton Force videos
This is where things get a bit weird. If you lived in the UK and wanted to get hold of Japanese shows like UFO Robot Grendizer or Leiji Matsumoto’s Starzinger in the 80s, the best place to start was the bargain bin at your local video shop. Back then, tiny companies like Krypton Force were punting these shows out on tape. The boxes were clad in shoddy, homemade looking artwork, and it sometimes felt as though you were watching a bootleg rather than a legitimate release – the picture quality was hideous, the sound warbled, the introductory graphics looked as though they’d been knocked up on a Commodore 64, and the stories had been badly edited to oblivion. Follow our Twitter feed for faster news and bad jokes right here. And be our Facebook chum here.
