By Andrew Osmond.

Last year, the film magazine Little White Lies interviewed Shoji Kawamori, famed for his creative role in Macross. He was asked what future he saw for hand-drawn animation in anime. His reply was blunt. “I imagine,” Kawamori said, “that in about ten or twenty years, (hand-drawn animation) will be heading in the direction of Kabuki or Noh or other very old Japanese culture, as there are so many cases that wholly depend on the level of each artist’s specialised craftmanship.” Computer graphics, Kawamori said, was anime’s future. The rest of us had to live in it.

When Macross debuted in 1982, the vast majority of animation round the world was hand-drawn, and CG was confined to experiments in films like that year’s Tron. That was still true when Akira opened, and still true when the first Ghost in the Shell debuted, though GITS used CG elements, meshed with traditional animation in a hard drive. Ghost premiered in Japan in November 1995. The same month, Pixar’s original Toy Story premiered across the Pacific.

A quarter-century later, anime, which was once promoted as a new kind of animation, increasingly seems like something else – a bastion of old-school, hand-drawn animation in a global sea of CG. Drawn animation seemed increasingly like the magic world in Spirited Away, a shadow cultural presence hidden behind high-tech Hollywood, an old bathhouse which only comes to life after dark. Continue Reading