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Some years ago, I saw an animated feature that really surprised me. Like most people in the West, I had a certain idea of what a cartoon was supposed to be. I generally assumed that they involved one character hitting another with a blunt instrument. Occasionally one would drop an anvil on the other for variety.
My perspective changed a bit when I saw an anime called Tokyo Godfathers.
Tokyo Godfathers is the story of three homeless people who find an abandoned child. At first they think of turning her over to the police, but they decide to try to find the mother instead, so she can have a chance to raise her child.
One is an alcoholic, another is a trans woman, and another is a runaway teen. Along the way they have to deal with their own personal problems.
Watching it me realize that animation can be much more then it usually has been in the US. Even the modern movies that Pixar has produced are always aimed at children, but there is no real reason why such things should only be made for them.
When you look at what is going on in the US in both animation and the movies, what you see are the same plot being retold again and agin, made for the same audience, and produced by the same people.
Once a successful movie would spawn imitators. Gradually sequels became more and more common as Hollywood decided it was only interested in “franchises.”
Now they have gone so far as to simply remake the most successful movie over and over again. They remade Spider Man with a new lead barely a decade after the first one, and now Terminator is getting a third reboot. With every year that passes, the creative process in Hollywood looks a little bit more like an assembly line. Any sort of original thought is too inefficient to make it through the process.
When I watched Tokyo Godfathers, it made me realize that other stories could be told if you could find a way around the people who have a choke hold on the movie industry. In time, I realized that I wanted to help make something different. I wanted to start my own animation studio, and do something fresh. That might be the only way left.
If you haven't seen this, I encourage you to give it a try. Whether it is to your taste or not, I think that its good to look somewhere different and see what' a different corner of the world. There still seems to be room for stories about real people there, at least some of the time.