How Anime Changed Western Cartoons (Avatar: The Last Airbender, Teen Titans, The Boondocks )

0:00 the age-old saying goes like this if it looks like an enemy sounds like an anime and acts like an anime is it an anime us mere mortals will never know the answer to this question but over the past few decades the styles of more than a few western series have gotten fans talking because of how much they look and feel like anime whatever anime means to you a few people have even given the clumsy moniker of america anime amer americ anime american anime american whatever the american man no matter how you feel about the is it anime debate well i think we all love to see north american cartoon

0:46 creators pay homage to the anime that inspired them but how do we get from a few anime references to shows like avatar the last airbender the boondocks teen titans and castlevania series that unbashedly wore their anime hearts on their sleeves and how did this trend come to almost redefine a medium well folks let's find out first though a bit of a disclaimer the cartoons i'll be covering have actual anime influences with the creators often explicitly saying yes we were inspired by anime so you know we won't just be listing american cartoons that were animated overseas and then released in the united states if i did that this video would roughly be a million years long also we won't be

1:32 talking about anime series that were heavily edited for their release in america like beast can go lion which was heavily tampered with to create voltron because they were japanese anime that were localized not us homegrown organic amer america anime i'm gonna i'm gonna stop saying that out loud so if you've watched one of my videos before you know that most of them start by looking back to that first iconic anime import astro boy and you know this one is no different but i'll keep it quick in 1963 america jfk was president the number one tv show was the beverly hillbillies and zip codes had just been introduced by the good folks at the united states postal service but more important than all of that

2:18 combined astro boy the legendary robot boy created by the legend osama tesca was broadcasted on the us airwaves astro boy it was loud action-packed and created and licensed fairly cheaply from then on the us receives stuff like gigantor speed racer star blazers and eventually even akira and fist of north star this moved us along to the 80s and the early 90s and it's here that the anime influences on things really start to shine through where you ask well in two little cartoons that you might recall pretty fondly transformers and x-men first the transformers was originally inspired by a japanese toy

3:03 series called microman a line that included not only little robotic looking figurines but big robots for them to pilot toy company hasbro was quick to team up with marvel productions to create a storyline for what would become an empire of action figures and cartoons and in a way that nearly mirrored mobile suit gundam's resurgence thanks to ramp and model and toy sales in japan just a few years earlier transformers was created with toys in mind u.s regulations on basically using cartoons to promote products had been loosened at this point and so transformers became one big japanese-inspired toy commercial other north american shows about big robots doing big stuff like mighty or bots would quickly follow as with shows about fantastical

3:50 heroes set in space like the adventures of the galaxy rangers but now the x-men colorful dynamic and with an intricately serialized plot that resembled anime storyline far more than its other peers in the fox kids block x-men looked a bit like anime all the way down to its editing see warner brothers had just guaranteed the iconic batman the animated series a lavish budget seeing as if it was coming hot off the heels of the blockbuster success of the batman returns x-men didn't have the same kind of luck and so its creators had to construct a marvel tv show with far less resources along with designs that seem like a blend between the comic book characters at the time and anime heroes they also borrowed the

4:36 anime technique of swiffer editing to hide any animation imperfections the result was a fantastic show that featured classic american creations but felt unlike anything else on tv oh and when it aired in japan it got a rad japanese theme song and a complete anime opening to match please check it out you won't regret it magneto is summoning uh like zerglings and the x-men just annihilate them and all of a sudden you get a shack but there's one more branch on this limb of the tree as the two of the influential writers of x-men the brothers mark edward edens and michael edens would depart the show to work on exo squad the universal family's

5:21 network attempt at beating anime at its own game with the themes of war and loss and the pew pew mecca's like this one that looks like the alien robot suit and that one just looks like goliath from starcraft it was a little heavier than saturday morning programming was known to be at the time but what rose in the 80s and 90s absolutely flourished in the 2000s the early arts were full of tv series that took heavy cues from anime combining humor martial arts and the awesome designs of artist jeff matsuda jackie chan adventures had action and adventure scenes that looked straight out of naruto meanwhile echoing classic japanese pop cultures like lone wolf and kub and akira kurosawa gandhi tarkovsky samurai jack would be a hit on cartoon

6:09 network a channel that was already making a splash in the anime world with its hit programming block tsunami however none of these series received as much attention for their anime inspired visuals and storylines as [Music] other avatar other one damn it avatar the last airbender created by michael dante dimartino and brian koinetsko it's been praised as one of the greatest animated series of all time the two creators had come

6:56 from animating shows like family guy but were desperate to work on something epic like lord of the rings but with a little different style thus michael and brian took their love for anime martial arts and east asian philosophies and constructed the story of aang a bald 12 year old kid who has incredible air control powers when coming up with the structure of the show the creators remembered three anime classics in particular princess mononoke cowboy bebop and fully cooley like most of the works of studio ghibli and director hayao miyazaki had a kind of heart that was far removed from the typical western shows they've been working on meanwhile cowboy bebop had a wide array of tones and

7:41 kick-ass action and fully coolly rewrote the rules for everything according to them one potential issue though at the time nickelodeon had stayed away from the kinds of anime and anime inspired series that their competitors had stuffed themselves with and had turned down various shows like these however what they found with dimartino and koinetsko was unbridled passion for their creation a passion that led them to hire sifu kisu a martial arts consultant and a chinese calligrapher to give that extra oomph for the show nickelodeon as they grew increasingly impressed ordered six episodes to start and then 13 and finally 20 for the show's first season and the anime inspiration was not something that the creators took very

8:27 lightly in fact while they hoped anime fans would like it koinetsko said in an interview with ign i'll just say that america us included has a long way to go to catch up with the animated works being done in a handful of countries namely japan okay i'm going to take this done being the avatar around the same time teen titans was a refreshing new entry into the annals of animation based on dc comics a company that's provided more than a few examples of americana the superman shorts created by fly shore studios in the early 1940s are some of the most influential cartoons of all time and pieces of them even inspired the works of hayao miyazaki they would also

9:13 help instill a certain energy in batman the animated series a show that is many fans preferred version of the dark knight so to have a dc series that looks more like anime than the traditional western property was fairly unprecedented at the time but teen titans never wavered coming off his works on batman beyond glenn murakami was chosen to be the show's sole producer which was a first in his career and he wanted to differentiate his new series from what had come before especially the film noir-esque antics of batman so having loved anime for a long time and adoring stuff like speed racer kimba and akira murakami felt it was a natural choice for inspiration he'd also grown to respect anime even more as he

10:00 worked with the japanese studio tms on superman the animated series and batman beyond and since younger viewers at the time were growing up with the likes of pokemon and gundam he figured it wouldn't seem out of place to them though he was accused of doing fake anime murakami stuck to his storytelling guns he focused on the emotion and the humor and on trying new things and teen titans would become a major success lasting for five seasons and even getting a movie and it gave us a version of robin that's one of the best ever with spiky hair and a relatable personality bringing the character out of batman's shadow murakami also found it cool that many anime characters didn't look like buff bodybuilders but rather have body types that the kids watching the

10:47 show might have and so murakami applied that idea to robin it wouldn't take too long for the caped crusader to get an anime inspired treatment either in 2004 kids wb fans got to watch the batman a series that oversaw the evolution from batman's early years as a street level crime fighter to his role as a member of the justice league with jeff matsuda from jackie chan adventures helping to produce and providing the character designs the batman used an anime style to provide a new twist on a character that at that point was 65 years old from then on creators would be more and more open about the beautiful japanese animation that drove them the boondocks was often celebrated for its anime style a style that series creator aaron magruder had based

11:32 off his love for shows like cowboy bebop and samurai champloo and it doesn't take too long for that influence to become extremely clear in many episodes meanwhile megas xlr took the giant robot genre and spun it on its head providing a funny adventurous and tragically short-lived cartoon from two creators who grew up loving any and all anime that featured big old mechs and even before teen titans had ended a guy who worked on the show went off to devise his own anime inspired epics sierra nelly who had directed a notable episodes of teen titans including the first season would end up creating super robot monkey team hyper force go nickelodeon once hesitant to produce anime series or series like anime ended up embracing it the avatar sequel the

12:17 legend of korra was produced and though nickelodeon initially felt boys might not watch an adventure show with a girl as a lead character they were quickly proven wrong test screening shows that boys absolutely did not care who the hero was as long as it was a good series and the legend of korra went off for four very wonderful seasons and in an example of this trend coming full circle dreamworks produced voltron legendary defender in 2016. this voltron series was made by american companies and lasted for eight seasons on netflix there are countless other series that were at least partially influenced by anime glenn murakami would go on to produce two installments in the ben 10 franchise the late extremely talented monty owned would create ruby for rooster teeth the

13:03 netflix castlevania with show runner slash producer artie shankara citing ninja scroll vampire hunter d and captain harlock as inspirations and even crunchyroll a streaming service that you might have heard of has onyx equinox which takes on an anime influence and applies it to the mesoamerican inspired setting and these are just a few want to find more it's kind of a thrall rock deal now you know anime is everywhere even when it's not exactly anime but why is this so important we have anime and we have western cartoons shouldn't it be enough to just kind of let them be a separate thing well to an extent you know at a certain point appropriation becomes a concern where creators refuse

13:50 to acknowledge their inspirations which does a disservice to both anime and american cartoons slightly unrelated but i am looking at you christopher nolan but total separation is not how art or culture for that matter evolves like japanese art have been helping the art of other countries to evolve and expand for centuries like it was a huge influence on painters like vincent van gogh and the impressionist movement as a whole the haiku a style of poetry that branched off the traditional japanese art of renga eventually became an integral part of how we teach poetry on a global level the famous poet jack kerouac wrote a whole book's worth of them star wars changed the way that hollywood makes and promotes movies

14:36 as a whole and it might have not been possible if director george lucas hadn't fallen so much in love with films like hidden fortress and other works by akira kurosawa martin scorsese has been nominated for more academy awards than any other director living today and even he dubbed kurosawa as my master now of course on the flip side of that there are plenty of japanese art that were inspired by the west like you know kira kurosawa was inspired by cinema and we could even do a whole video about that let us know in the comments if uh you like that you know just love any excuse to talk about panty and stalking those are just a few examples but it goes to show that japanese influence has done more than make american cartoons

15:23 feel like dragon ball z japanese pop culture has driven western artists to find new influences seek new ways of creating and challenge themselves to progress trends and eventually establish new ones when you look at things like avatar the last airbender and teen titans you're not just watching cartoons that happen to feel a lot like anime you're watching talented people who are inspired by talented japanese people create new inspirations for many others thank you for watching this video and please be sure to subscribe and check out our other videos also why not watch onyx equinox huh or a bunch of other great anime titles on crunchyroll.com or go somewhere else.com and and watch

16:09 avatar the last airbender i guess you could do that but i gotta take this take this avatar suit off see you later guys bye