Procrastination

As you may have noticed, the whole blog thing is not going as well as I had initially hoped. I have been having trouble staying focused, and it got me thinking that maybe there is something to this little tidbit of news:

The Interweb is making us stupid!

After not too much introspection, I find that my attention span does indeed seem a bit diminished compared to what it once was. It takes me much longer at 40 to read a book for example than it took me as a 16 year old, when I would devour 500 pages in a couple of days. Now I am doing well if I finish a book in under a month.

Anyhow, this doesn't have much to do with Japanese fantasy... or does it? Well, it actually turns out that my first exposure to the medium of anime, which contains plenty of fantasy, was the 1977 film by Rankin Bass based on what remains one of my all-time favorite books: The Hobbit. 

An Unexpected Party

While technically not an "anime" per se, the entire animation staff for this feature was Japanese. A quick glance at the above picture shows many of the tell-tale signs of Japanese animation (large eyes being the most obvious). The setting of course is undeniably Western fantasy based however.

Although derided by many as deviating too far from the source material and leaving out important scenes, the animated version of The Hobbit remains a favorite from my childhood. A few short years later, Japanese animators were involved in the film adaptation of Peter S. Beagle's The Last Unicorn. Again, the artwork is very much anime.

My next exposure to Japanese fantasy via animation, and probably the first time I was aware that said animation was called "anime", would have been sometime in the early 80's. I'll take a look at some of these classics in my next update.