Anime life

As a child, I grew up with and partly believed the fluffy themes of good and evil, brotherhood, friendship, love and filial piety as epitomised in such animated classics like Lion King, Aladdin and Cinderella. I loved every dancing, singing minute of it, so, as life began to slide beneath a viscous gloss of routine, animation became something I indulged in as an escape, enjoying for an hour or so the sweet naivety, the innocence that is fought for and retained, the beauty and simplicity of its primary coloured characters and set-ups.

When I was first introduced to anime, my Disney-fed sensibilities were electrified. I was shocked at the bold, sometimes vicious manipulation of the medium that created colours, movements, and angles that somehow manages to capture the hints, the subtlety, the greyness of ourselves and the world we inhabit. I was mesmerised by the use of colour, shadow, stills and tableaus in the creation of atmosphere that is more real that reality yet more fantastic than fantasy.

I was completely hooked. Animation was no longer the attempt to escape into a familiar and simple childhood world. Animation was no longer a revisitation of a warm and happy place, a place whose worth lay in the fact that it was so unlike the one we slog, cry and mess up in. Animation, now, became kindred - able to emphatise and comfort in a way that only a fellow-sufferer could. And more than that: animation became education, opening up horizons limited by first-hand experiences and exposing sheltered souls to the very edges of depravity.

In my world, anime was like a gentle yet a life-hardened cynic who loved standing in the rain.

Of course I refer to only a particular section of the whole anime community i.e those who use anime to tell tales of life’s tragedy, psychological bleakness and all other dark and unhappy things that afflict us. Yet even in the most mainstream of anime – Dragonball or Pokemon or Naruto – there resides an aching pathos that all fans would recognise as the single defining characteristic of anime.

What it is – this pathos – is something that I am still fighting to pin down. The ungodly juxtapositions of silly caricature and rape? The shameless combinations of lolita innocence or happy tragedy?

As close as I could figure was this: anime showed us life itself ; life, with its irony, tragedies and hard-earned joy; life, with its free happiness and simple goodness; life in all its sullied glory.

Life - unapologised.