Some series like ‘Puella Magi Madoka Magica,’ ‘Made in Abyss’ and ‘Promised Neverland’ bafflingly blur the lines between family and adult anime. Andrew Osmond asks why.
Are you up for a quiz? Good! Look at the following descriptions of scenes from three different anime, then name the films. The second description is a story spoiler, but it is from a 16-year-old film.
- A teenage girl frantically tries to help a giant intelligent insect which looks like a massive woodlouse. Deeply wounded, it’s moving toward a lake, but the girl knows the water’s lethally acidic. She tries pushing the bug back, but it’s too strong, and the girl’s pushed back instead. Her boot slips into the water: there’s a hiss, a cloud of steam, and the girl shrieks as the acid burns her foot...
- A Japanese family clan has gathered to celebrate the 90th birthday of their beloved matriarch. But early one morning, just before the birthday, they find she’s died in the night. Adults and children cluster round her bed, shouting and crying, but she’s gone. The family grieves quietly in the morning light.
- A teenage boy wakes to find he’s been magically transported into the body of a girl. Thinking it’s a dream, “she” examines her new body, and she’s just touching her “new” breasts when her little sister opens the door to ask what she’s doing.
Easy, yes? In order, the films are Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaä of the Valley of Wind, Summer Wars by Mamoru Hosoda and Your Name by Makoto Shinkai. And while those three scenes are all very effective, none have content to surprise anime fans: severe injuries, characters dying, teen sexuality.
These films might all be broadly called “family” films. Certainly, they appealed to both youngsters and adults in Japan. (Miyazaki said he didn’t make Nausicaä for young kids but then saw primary-schoolers in the audience anyway.)
But there’s one odd thing. Today, Hollywood’s own animated films are bold and broad ranging, from epic sagas of a boy and his dragon to whole films set in a girl’s head. But look again at the three scenes described above. Can you imagine any of them getting into a Pixar film, a Disney film, or a DreamWorks film? It’s a stretch.
There still seems to be an implicit attitude, shared between Western studios and audiences, that those are the kind of scenes you don’t put into a Hollywood family cartoon (with some big exceptions that I’ll discuss at the end.) It’s much more common in anime… and also, I should say, in some other Asian animation, such as the current Chinese blockbuster Ne Zha 2, which I covered a few weeks ago. That was even weirder, colliding Kung Fu Panda hijinks with wholesale massacres.
Now, let’s bring up another kind of anime. Namely, anime that look like they’re entirely safe viewing for kids until, suddenly, they go somewhere so dark and nightmarish that you wonder what you’re watching. They’re usually made for TV rather than cinemas, and examples include Puella Magi Madoka Magica, The Promised Neverland (both on Crunchyroll), Made in Abyss (on HIDIVE), and the short film Pigtails.
All three anime start so charmingly and innocently. Puella Magi Madoka Magica is about girls being granted wonderful powers by a cute cat-creature to fight evil – why, it’s practically Sailor Moon. Pigtails starts with a girl living in a house full of talking toothbrushes and clothes-pegs, drawn in a lovely picture-book style. Promised Neverland starts with boisterous kids laughing and playing in what looks like the loveliest orphanage on earth. And then, with scant warning, all three anime suddenly turn into horror stories.
Made in Abyss starts with an orphanage too, and two kids embarking on a fantastic journey into the depths of the earth. Again, it starts so innocently, though it gets darker and tougher on its heroes as it goes along. But it’s only in the second half that the show plunges into pain and blood and trauma, material unimaginable in any Western “family” cartoon. Indeed, it would be hard to picture in a TV anime outside a late-night slot, and Abyss was indeed shown around midnight in Japan.
These anime are obviously very far away from Western family cartoons. Could we compare them instead to adult series like Robot Chicken or Family Guy? Certainly both these shows often spoof family cartoons: Family Guy showing what we all wanted to happen to Scrappy Doo, or Robot Chicken putting Scooby Doo’s other characters into an X-rated slasher flick. But the anime in the previous paragraph aren’t spoofs. On the contrary, they’re earnest stories that just happen to start like kids’ shows and then go “adult.”
It’s impossible to know how many kids watch such late-night anime in Japan (in the same way we don’t know how many underage kids follow Rick and Morty or Family Guy). Promised Neverland, for example, was shown at 1 a.m. in Japan, a true graveyard slot. But Neverland was also based on one of the most popular current manga in Shonen Jump, whose readership stretches down to elementary schoolers. Presumably some of them could operate video timers.
So far, I’ve talked about two types of anime; “family” films like Nausicaä and shows like Abyss which can plunge into very dark, tough territory without warning. Let’s stay with Nausicaä and Abyss. Many fans would stress their differences, partly for fear that a careless parent might think their 10-year-old Nausicaä fan is ready for Abyss and end up with a traumatized tot.
But there are obvious ways in which Abyss is like Nausicaä and similar family fare. And here’s the thing. Some of the most acclaimed late-night shows may not be family anime, but they draw extensively on family anime. As I’ve mentioned previously, they often feel like revved-up versions of those family shows, with much the same eager, earnest, adventurous heroes battling monstrous adults. It’s just that the perils and traumas facing the kids can be so much more terrible, bloody and soul-destroying.
Extending the point, there’s a continuity between family anime and late-night anime that doesn’t exist in Western animation. And to discuss why that’s so, it’s time to go deeper into the history of anime, and manga.
A History of Shocks
For decades, Japan has had no problems telling tragic, intense stories in comics and animation read by young children. In his book Starting Point, Hayao Miyazaki remembers being hooked at primary school by the manga of Osamu Tezuka. “Around 1945-1955,” Miyazaki wrote, “during Tezuka’s paperback manga period when he was first creating Astro Boy, my childhood mind found the tragic quality in his work frighteningly appealing.”
In the first scene of Tezuka’s Astro Boy anime in 1963, a little boy driving a car smacks into a truck and is killed. Try getting that into a Disney toon. One amusing side-note is that when Astro Boy was screened in America, the tragic opening was kept, but the man who localized it, Fred Ladd, changed the script to specify the boy’s car is being driven automatically, and the boy’s death is caused by a terrible malfunction. “It is difficult for an American audience to sympathize with a reckless driver,” Ladd wrote.
As the Japanese kids grew up through school, they progressed though ever-more grandiose tragic manga. The ‘70s generation had Rose of Versailles and Devilman, neither known for happy endings. Many anime fans know about them. What’s less highlighted, though, is the way that, 40 or 50 years ago, there were already anime that changed much like Abyss; they started as fun-looking kids’ series and then went crazily dark.
An early case is Zambot 3, a robot series directed by Yoshiyuki Tomino in 1977, before he made Gundam. Like many robot shows back then, Zambot seemed goofy, cheesy, cheerful nonsense, where one of the giant robot’s pilots is a dog and the baddies look so silly that today’s viewers would laugh them off the screen.
Right. And in the later episodes, the silly-looking villains start kidnapping kids, including the hero’s friends, implanting them with bombs and blowing them up. By the ending, the heroes are dying like flies: the show gave Tomino his nickname of “Kill’em’all.” Zambot wasn’t the first tragic space anime. But the shock was how it went from something light and silly-looking to something so crazily intense.
A few years on, there was the notorious Minky Momo – no, nothing to do with that stupid hoax meme from the 2010s. Made in 1982, Minky Momo was a magic girl way before Sailor Moon or Madoka, back when magic girl shows were aimed squarely at preteen girls. And for 40-odd weeks, Minky Momo played exactly like a kids’ magic girl show, barring a surprise twist when she loses her powers. But she gets them back, right? No. She gets hit by a truck on the road, and she dies and is buried. (The series is an early case of what anime fans call, with gallows humor, the “Truck-kun“ meme.)
Okay, so that’s not the end, as the following episodes bring in dream realities and reincarnation, but it was a hell of a thing for a kids’ anime to do. And if you want a still weirder case, there’s the film Ringing Bell (1978). It starts as a story of a sweet little lamb; it ends as a story of killing and twisted revenge. The lamb itself ends up as a monster, in a film that the Anime Encyclopedia found “mindbogglingly disturbing.” And it was a kids’ film, by Sanrio, the company behind Hello Kitty.
These are freaky cases. But they lend support to the idea of a real continuity between kids’ anime and non-kids’ anime in Japan, which goes beyond anything in Western animation. Perhaps the closest we got in the West was a British animated film made in 1978, the same year as Ringing Bell.
The cinema film Watership Down – not to be confused with the later TV remakes – wasn’t about cute lambs, but about cute rabbits seeking a new home. By the film’s end, we’ve seen those same rabbits gassed, snared and ripped apart. Google “watership down trauma” for a sense of the film’s lasting reputation four decades on.
It’s a film that’s remembered, but it’s never really been repeated in Western animation. And that’s the key. In anime, the lines between kids’ and not-for-kids anime have been blurred for decades, following the template of manga. Hence Ghibli could release the joyful Totoro in a double-bill with the heat-breaking Grave of the Fireflies in 1988, which even seasoned fans think was messed up.
It’s why there could be shows like 1990’s Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water and the first Fullmetal Alchemist in 2003, both on Japanese primetime TV. If you’ve followed them through, you’ll know how they evolve from something that could be mistaken for a light, cheery kids’ cartoon into something way more intense.
Primetime TV anime has mostly gone in Japan, but now such shows evolve at midnight, into the likes of Made in Abyss, with decades of history behind them. There’s no equivalent history in Western animation. Most of the Western adult animated series we know now evolved in the 1990s, using the sitcom template set by The Simpsons. These comedies can be dark and heartrending under the laughs, but in entirely different ways from family animation.
Imagine if the bestselling teen novel Hunger Games wasn’t already a live-action blockbuster. An anime studio could adapt it easily. Could a Western studio animate it? Well, if you’re talking about parodies, there’s no problem. Robot Chicken already made a spoof with the cartoon Smurfs far bloodier than the Jennifer Lawrence film. Can you imagine an animated version done straight in the West? That’s far tougher.
The one part of Western animation that’s developed like anime is superhero animation. It’s no coincidence; the source superhero comics have evolved for decades, often in adult directions, very like manga. Back in the 1990s, anime studios helped animate the groundbreaking Batman: The Animated Series. 30-odd years on, the Spider-Verse films are pretty much the only mainstream, “family” animated films from Hollywood which do have scenes like those at the start of this article. Who would have thought the Spider-Verse was also the anime-verse?
