Excerpted from the May 2001 edition of "Strange Colors: The Power of Japanese Animation," the anime column of PULP magazine, published by Viz Communications. Used by permission of the author.

"Vive l'otakuisme"
by Carl Gustav Horn

A shameful and delightful experience, this work of the hands. I slipped underground with the baby-blue scrap of a ticket that is all it takes to convey you along the Paris Metro. In the street tribunal of Gainax's Otaku No Video, a drunken citizen accuses one who spends a life in anime of avoiding the light of day. I had gone down from the square above the Concorde station—that's where they set up the guillotine. From Bastille I escaped, naturally, transferring there from the first to the eighth line. And not until Ledru Rollin did I emerge once more, having to bear the sun for no more than two corners to reach 17 Rue Trousseau. “Atomic Club,” an anime and manga store, where Evangelion’s Gendo Ikari is nasally menacing in his version française doublée; where you can find all those back issues of OUT, spoken of by Secret Comics Japan’s “Editor Woman,” where, in these end times before all must carry the mark of the Euro, you can still purchase Ranma X, filthier than anything you'll find in PULP, for 49 francs.

Best of all, you may in all reality find French otaku as you hoped you might find them—all dressed in black, smoking Gauloises and Gitanes, one—yes, one even wearing a beret. Looking as if they are discussing the existentialist implications of Nadia. And as well they should; you can't dismiss anime or being an otaku of it with a mere c'est absurd. Because being really, really into the nothingness of Japanese animation has hardly relieved you of that common human problem of existing. You may have been told anime is just something made up of cels; made by taking a clear sheet of plastic and covering it up with acrylic. You thought you had taken a window through which you could see the world—and then painted it over. But I should have mentioned that on this route you also pass the Louvre. And if you're of the type so inclined to only ever get off at one or the other, neither have you been relieved of the knowledge that all the stations are connected.

Welcome to the first column of PULP's "Strange Colors"—anime in the vernacular, as it has been for all of us, ever since some missionary set up business in our town, and we first ogled frescos of Lum or Belldandy or Rei, of virgin queens of heaven come down to hold us limp upon their laps, and we demanded first, a translation of this gospel, and second, three nails, driven straight through. Or since we were told of the manly martyrs: Space Pirate Captain Harlock dubbed in French, Voltes V dubbed in Tagalog, Future Boy Conan in Brazilian Portuguese. Verses often garbled or deliberately suppressed, footage snipped and scripts rewritten, for fear the flock would miss the higher truths of licensed merchandise sales. That they would be led astray from the toy store if they knew—before they cut the scene—that those '70s butch really had died for the faith. Or, more likely today, to know—before they changed the dialogue—that those two femmes in the sailor suits really did prefer to lie with womankind.

But it's faith that begets heretics, as another Parisian reminds us; and they are not to be flummoxed (www.shoujoai.com/~anilesbocon). Please then, thou bishops of ancillary rights, at your Las Vegas synods—anime is not the next big thing. Here, there, now, then, anime is played; Speed Racer on UHF in 1967, on MTV in 1992. Hayao Miyazaki's Flying Ghost Ship lit American drive-in screens during Nixon's first term; his Princess Mononoke shone in multiplex for Clinton's second. The tribunal is mistaken about this otaku; he loves the light, the way it's fed live and direct onto the screen through all those little windows, obsessively tinted and assembled together like cathedral glass. No post-modern need to have it called The Force; this is the light of the world. No Campbell to break it down and say anime has a mythic force, a thousand faces. Not a myth, but truth; a face, behind a thousand masks.

We are drawn to the masks, which are, in the manner of masks, a different thing than human beauty. No conclusions can be drawn. How can one, when, if they were human faces, their half-dollar eyes and squirrel-nut cheeks and jaws sanded to a point would be neither child nor adult, but a hideous birth defect topped by a carnival wig? Somehow an aesthetic dimensional equation is performed in our minds—anime overturns the natural order, and it all seems adorable. Anime abroad is sold especially on the strength of its masks: cuteness and chaos. But because this otaku regards the masks, he remembers there is always a face behind them—real features of real Japanese. So, next month, a secret history of Japanese animation begins with: 1. born in fire. Spring, 1945: With only months remaining before Hiroshima, the Japanese Imperial Navy struggles desperately to finish an extraordinary project—the world's first feature-length anime film...

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Carl Gustav Horn lives in Oakland, California and is currently employed as an editor at Viz Communications. He has provided commentary on the anime/manga field for publications such as Wired, Newsweek, and Newsweek Japan and was also a contributing editor for Trish Ledoux and Doug Ranney's The Complete Anime Guide and to Anime Interviews, Trish Ledoux, editor. He can often be seen at anime conventions across the country where he never approves of the factioning of fandom.