Charley-san,
How about some "snuff cartoons"?
The Dark Side of Animation
By Karen Mazurkewich
Issue cover-dated August 10, 2000
The three-storey walk-up in a Tokyo suburb looks innocuous enough. Once inside, all a visitor sees on the walls leading to the mid-sized animation studio on the second floor are stills depicting cute animals.
Indeed, some of what this studio produces is educational fare for kids. But most is not. What really keeps it going is animated pornography and adult games. The main draws are depictions of young girls in school uniforms being raped and tortured.
While the American marketing machine is rolling out the carpet for Pokémon and Digimon movies, anime enthusiasts in Japan are increasingly turning to more hardcore fare.
The character designer behind some of the raunchiest videos, Le Bleu Girl and Words Worth, is known as "Rinshin." Rinshin's identity is so secret that only a few in the business know that the designer is in fact a woman in her thirties. An animator for more than 15 years, Rinshin designed her first characters for hardcore films 10 years ago, when élf, a gaming producer, wanted to make a series of videos based on its adult game Le Bleu Girl.
Reluctantly, Rinshin has agreed to be interviewed. What made her want to animate schoolgirls being sexually assaulted? "I was forced to," she says. At the time, there was no work for the studio, Arms Co., so it was either produce hardcore animation or starve. Today the studio makes four to five videos a year and earns profits that average $2 million annually from direct video sales to Japan and the United States. Although the company sells equal numbers of videos in the U.S. and Japan, profits are almost four times higher in the local market. In Japan, the half-hour videos sell for Yen6,800 ($65), while in the U.S., a one-hour version retails for $30--a typical price differential for the two markets. Sales may not be in the Pokémon licensing orbit, but it keeps the studio in work.
Arms Co. is preparing to launch creator Yasuomi Umetsu's latest half-hour videos, A Kite and Mezzo Forte, as a one-hour package in the U.S. Umetsu's stylized films feature teenage killers traumatized by twisted men. A Kite opens with a girl in a blue school uniform being pawed by a famous actor in an elevator. But the man will soon be toast; the girl is a trained assassin, driven into her deadly profession after being viciously raped by a kidnapper. What makes the scenes so disturbing--and they are--is not their pornographic element, but the distress on the face of the female character. These videos "entertain" through fear and humiliation.
But like it or not, this genre is growing rapidly. Industry guesstimates--few reliable figures are available--put growth over the next few years at anything from 30% to 100%.
According to Masanobu Arakawa, an animation co-ordinator and director at Imagin, which has produced three animated porn titles, interest in sexually explicit animation was stoked after the TV series Evangelion aired several years ago on TV Tokyo. The series, which pits teenagers against a robotic race, featured a rape scene. The shows not only pulled in a huge audience but also led to lucrative spin-offs. Suddenly other animation producers jumped on the bandwagon.
But are the animators concerned about the trend toward kiddie-porn? For Arms Co. President Osamu Shimizu the videos "should only be sold to people who like it. It's not good to put this animation in ordinary society; it should be kept private."
Arakawa, meanwhile, says that "in Japan morality doesn't matter, compared to the West," though he adds that some staff members don't use their real names. He's not one of them--"I'm proud of what I'm doing"--but it's nevertheless clear that even he feels some unease.
"Customers who buy it are afraid of real women so they tend to be interested in cartoon characters," he says. "I sometimes feel scared with the increasing number of people who are unable to communicate with each other."
Sex and violence have been part of the genre since the 1960s. But in Japan, they are not taboo, and violent cartoons are even seen as safe outlets for people's fantasies. In Japan, whole families gather to watch adult shows like Evangelion on television. In the West, says columnist Fusanosuke Natsume, "the Lolita complex is not a joke, it's a serious social problem."
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