The Mike Toole Show

Anime At The Movies

I love going to the movies. The total experience - getting the ticket ripped, the massive bucket of hot popcorn, the unbelievably gigantic screen, the thumpingly loud sound system, the murmurs and whoops from the audience next to you - is something that just can't be approximated any other way. So naturally, when an anime film hits the movie theatres, I'll do anything I can to go out and see it. I've had two opportunities to do so recently. First, there was Rebuild of Evangelion movies - it was the only area screening of the brand-spanking-new second installment, and if I was going to see the second one, why not see the first? That screening was a technical curiosity, too - it was done not via film, but via 1080p blu-ray.

Of course, it's been years since I've seen an anime film in theatres. The last one was Paprika, and that was in 2007. Going to the movies to see anime is an occasional treat at best, so at these screenings, I found myself wondering about how the medium has fared in theatres over the years, so this time, I've decided to put it all under the microscope and see what sort of germs I can come up with.

First of all, let's make one point clear: anime was on the big screen for a couple of years before it hit the small screen. That's right, for quite some time before Arnold Stang, but none of the films were a hit.

That's alright, though, because the wave of Japanese-animated films heading westward would continue the following year. Signal International made the swoop for two more Toei features, The Adventures of Sindbad and The Littlest Warrior, and dumped them into theatres during the summer. Here's where questions start to arise: why were these films always released during the summertime? Well, that's easy - it's because school was out during the summer, and you could really only get movies like these booked during the daytime, at children's matinees. See, outside of major hits like 101 Dalmatians, one could not really get a kids' cartoon film into theatres for prime-time showings - kids and family movies just weren't the unbelievably huge draw that they are now, a time when astonishing dreck like Hotel for Dogs and Chicken Little can command 7:00pm showings for weeks on end. Instead, these films would very often only be seen at 1pm and 2pm showings, and only on weekends. If you start digging through old movie posters, you'll notice this - some local handbills and promotional material will explicitly mention that the showings are "MATINEE ONLY... SATURDAY AND SUNDAY!"

These showings weren't complete humdrum affairs, either - they were carefully programmed to keep kids occupied for the entire afternoon, so a single matinee show might involve a couple of crummy old cartoons, some sort of funny made-for-kids documentary short, one of those Republic serials, and one (or maybe two!) main features. As TV ascended, the demand for these screenings waned, but in their heyday, they were a great way to keep kids busy and theatres filled during otherwise dead time. To an animation nerd like me, they were doubly important, because the demand that fueled them also constantly sought new cartoons, and American studios couldn't always keep up. It's that demand that brought us imports of oddball feature films like 's The Curious Adventures of Mr. Wonderbird and the Belgian Pinocchio in Outer Space. It also brought us 1963's Little Prince and the Eight-Headed Dragon, another Toei stunner based on one of Japan's earliest myths, and 1965's Milton Delugg. This is probably my favorite film of Toei's big run of family movies in the 50s and 60s, so naturally this is the only one that's never had some kind of home video release or TV broadcast after its theatrical showcase.

Anime would continue to occasionally rear its head on the big screen throughout the 1970s, with generally decent fare like WATT and her compatriots had dubbed Jack and the Beanstalk, and they'd heard that the C/FO was doing a screening of the film at a campus basement. They never saw the finished film, could they all come and visit? Naturally, Beck agreed!

During this period, a few highly interesting examples of anime in theatres happened to take place. The first of them was noted B-movie maven Robotech movie.

The Robotech movie was a curious animal, and one that in many ways reflects its predecessor. Like the Robotech TV series, it's an oddball gestalt of different animation works - in this case, the film is an edited version of Carl Macek, who felt that he could at least recoup the costs of making the movie by getting some one-off screenings booked. Fortunately, Carl knew a guy who worked in film distribution named Jerry Beck.

That's right, Beck had moved westward to Los Angeles, where he went to work for Kiki's Delivery Service, which was the first big moneymaking operation that Streamline did."

During that period, a Japanese distributor called Kodansha was desperately flogging their English version of a big-deal TOHO movie called Akira. They worked hard to sell it to American studios and distributors, who universally balked at the film because of its violent content. The only party that showed real interest in promoting the film properly was Streamline Pictures, and they ended up shopping it to theatres in 1989. The movie was received well pretty much wherever it went, which is what really started the domino effect of getting anime into theatres as anime, and not just as animated kids' movies. Beck recounts, "We had to work hard to convince theatres to play Japanese cartoons... the stuff was just too new and weird for them. But our grosses were always good, and that would help get bookings at other theatres. Arthouse bookers would tell me, 'Your films draw an audience that never, ever comes to my theatre,' and the entire situation led to this amusing situation where theatres would be very dismissive of us, only to come begging for our films after they'd been successful elsewhere."

Streamline got an impressive string of hits into theatres as repertory showings throughout the 1990s - fare like Wicked City, and Neo Tokyo. But eventually, the company would turn its focus to home video, and midway through the decade, Beck quit to pursue other interests. "There just wasn't another Akira on the horizon," he comments. "I felt like I'd taken things as far as they were going to go: mission accomplished." Getting the stuff into theatres was really Beck's game, so it isn't surprising that their movies stopped touring when he left the company. Still he recounts the Streamline experience fondly: "We were essentially a mini-movie company," he re. "We designed our own posters, Carl and his wife Svea would create the video box art, I'd write the copy, and we'd end up driving the film reels to the shipping center ourselves." Despite moving on, Beck still sees great value in experiencing anime at the movie theatre. "There's really an experience in seeing anime in theatres," he says. "It helps us that this stuff is art, and it's quite a spectacle."

But besides Streamline, what else was there in the 1990s? Tara Releasing would eke out a few goodies (a festival screening of Pokémon: The First Movie.

Yeah, yeah, it's based on a hugely popular line of video games and kids' toys and it came out at the absolute zenith of the NCM Fathom.

Fathom specializes in delivering content to theatres digitally - both live events and pre-taped stuff. This means that there's no pesky film reels or shipping issues, and the company has used this service to great effect to deliver events like the New York Metropolitan Opera and the World Cup to theatres around the country, in one-night-only affairs similar to your traditional repertory screening. In 2007, Fathom entered the anime market by digitally distributing the first Patrick Macias interviewing the film's two stars.

Another solution to the distribution bugbear is using actual portable media, like DVDs and blu-rays. Now, I object to the former, simply because DVD isn't anywhere near as high-resolution as 35mm film. Seeing Evangelion 2.0 in blu-ray on the big screen was something of a revelation, though. Technologically, it's hard to compare 1080p video to 35mm film, because the latter is analog and therefore can't really be measured in lines of resolution like the former can; it'd be like looking at a Monet painting and trying to figure out how many pixels it contains. What I can tell you is that, for most moviegoers, it's probably going to be pretty hard to perceive the difference between the two, as long as a good screen and projector are used for the digital stuff. What does this mean? Well, between Fathom's digital and blu-ray delivery, it could get a lot easier for anime movies to get booked in theatres.

I'll wrap this adventure up by commenting on my most recent experience, seeing the Evangelion films at the Brattle. One of the things about seeing movies at the movies is that they can affect your perception of the material. I absolutely loved the bonkers, borderline-incoherent Tank Girl movie when I saw it with a sellout crowd of drunk college students in 1995, but seeing it at home the following year just bored me. A subsequent viewing at a packed film festival brought the magic back.  Evangelion 1.11, viewed on the small screen, left me cool - I liked the new animation, but wasn't drawn into the story and felt like too much of the film was treading on familiar ground. But having my senses almost completely filled by the movie on the big screen drew me in a lot more - combine that with the roars of the crowd around me, and I ended up liking the movie a lot more the second time around. Another appealing aspect of seeing these films in theatres is that, quite simply, I felt surrounded by like-minded people. Conversation came easily, and a lot of the crowd chattered back and forth with each other during the intermission between films. Experiencing these great works of animation is valuable, but making them a shared experience by going to the movies just makes it even better.

I think the best thing about seeing this stuff at the movies is the sense of anticipation. Moviegoing turns the act of watching a film into an event, something special that must be planned for and greatly anticipated. I felt that sense of anticipation all around me as the lights darkened for Evangelion 2.0, at the roars of surprise at each twist in the plot, and in the resounding cheer that sounded when the film closed... oh, and of course, in the amused laughter at the post-credits preview for the third film. When is that one coming out, again? Let me get my calendar out...