Michaele Jordan is the author of the period occult thriller Mirror Maze and her stories have appeared in Redstone Science Fiction, Buzzy Mag, The Crimson Pact, Volume 4 and Fantasy and Science Fiction. You can visit her website at www.michaelejordan.com while waiting for the upcoming steampunk adventure Jocasta and the Indians.

IN PRAISE OF GENNDY, THE SAVIOR OF AMERICAN ANIME

For some time now, Japan has been getting all the credit for animation, so much so that the term anime has come to mean Japanese anime — even though in Japan the word simply means animated video — and you have to specify that it’s OE (original English) anime if it was made here. Despite the success of such gems as The Incredibles (Brad Bird, 2004) and WALL-E (Andrew Stanton, 2008), Disney/Pixar studios have always aimed their big guns aggressively at children. I say aggressively, since they have made only token gestures at rendering their offerings palatable to the long suffering parents, and have apparently never even considered attempting to expand the demographic sufficiently to lure teenagers into the theaters.

This left television to make animation for an older audience, a mantle it picked up only reluctantly. Granted that Batman: The Animated Series was significantly cool and wonderfully drawn, it was hardly typical. Apparently, if a superhero was considered interesting enough for video, it was interesting enough for a multi-million dollar live action film.
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