Anime~ March P.P.O.W

I think this happened in fifth grade when I was ten. I just got home from school and I did my homework. I decided to get on Netflix. I was looking through a category called anime. I didn’t know what anime was at the time, but one particular show caught my eye. It was called WitchBlade. The show turned out to be about a woman and her six year old daughter going to Tokyo after a huge earthquake that demolished the city. The earthquake happened six years prior to the woman going to Tokyo.

The woman’s name is Masane. She woke up in the epicenter after the earthquake and a search and rescue team found her. She woke up with no memories of before, she had a baby in her arms and a strange tattoo on her wrist. She eventually finds out that the thing on her wrist is called a witchblade. It allows her to turn into something of mass destruction. A man finds her and makes her work for his company because he was searching for the witchblade. It turns out people are trying to kill her and they would even destroy the whole city to do that.

In the end Mesane finds out that after she dies the witchblade will pass on to her daughter and she doesn’t want her daughter to go through what she did so Mesane sacrificed herself and used her power to kill herself and take the witchblade with her so it can’t get her daughter. The ending was sad but really happy at the same time.

This particular anime is what made me obsessed with anime. After that anime I watched so many more my favorite ones I have watched are called: Angel Beats, Clannad, Clannad After Story, Attack on Titan, Fairy Tail ,Chobits, Sword Art Online, Kaichou wa Maid-sama, and Black Butler. There is a lot more than that in my list of favorites, but this P.P.O.W wouldn’t of been done in time if I put them all.

Anyway let me explain anime to you. Anime is a Japanese animated show that features hand-drawn or computer animation. The term anime is an abbreviation for the word animation. The earliest commercial animation was made in 1917, the drawing style emerged in the 1960’s thanks to man named Osamu Tezuka. It spread internationally in the late twentieth century. It gained a large domestic and international audience.

Anime is distributed by television broadcasts, directly to home media, and by the internet. Which includes Netflix, and Crunchyroll, which is a site from a computer or an app on your phone and/or tablet. There’s a lot more sites and stuff that you can watch it on though.

The anime industry consists of over 430 production studios. Some of those studios are really popular, for example, Studio Ghibli. So yes, if you have ever seen Ponyo, My Neighbor Totoro, or even Spirited away, you have in fact, watched anime before and if you haven’t seen Spirited away I highly recommend it.

My favorite anime production studio is called Funimation. It licenced a lot of my favorite animes. They licenced: FMA, which stands for Fullmetal Alchemist, Heaven's Lost Property, Fairy Tail, Kaze no Stigma, Soul Eater, Fruits Baskets, Hetalia, Black Butler, Dance in the Vampire Bund, Deadman Wonderland, Eden of the East, The legend of the Legendary Heroes, Noragami, OHSHC, which stands for Ouran High School Host Club, The Sacred Blacksmith, Rosario + Vampire, Sekirei, Spice and Wolf, Tokyo Ghoul, WitchBlade, and Wolf Children. Those are just the ones that I have watched that they licenced.

Anime got even more popular when they released dubs of the show. There are different genres of anime including Kodomo, Shōjo, and Shounen. Kodomo is more for kids and probably an easier to understand plot, but Shōjo and Shounan most likely have a better plot but are still for teens and such. I prefer the more grown up ones that have a great plot with a lot of character development that children would probably find boring and they wouldn’t be entertained by it.

There are many different styles to anime too. Some may have horrible character art, but has the best scenery, or there both really good. To me it doesn’t matter because all I care about is the plot, but having pretty things to look at isn’t so bad. I think out of all the animes I have watched the one with the best art would be SAO (Sword Art Online).

The plot is a bit fast and stuff like that, but it kept me on the edge of my seat. It’s like an action adventure with some romance in it. When I first started to watch it I didn’t expect  there to be any romance in it, but there was. I’m not complaining, the romance in the story is actually quite cute, but I didn’t think this awesome anime would turn into a romance.

There is also something called an Otaku, which I am classified as one. An Otaku is a Japanese term for people with obsessive interests, they are usually obsessed with anime and manga. The term came into use in 1983.

In the Western Countries, which includes us, anime had a lot of influence. The movie Astro Boy, yep, Western anime. So, if you have seen Astro boy, you have technically seen an anime. Fun fact right here, Avatar: The Last Airbender, was made in America, yes, but it was made with “Anime-Style”.  Anime has an influence all around the world, whether  you like it or not.