The Washington Post May 15, 1997, Thursday, Final Edition SECTION: STYLE; Pg. B01 LENGTH: 1833 words HEADLINE: Cross-Cultural Cartoon Cult; Japan's Animated Futuristic Features Move From College Clubs to Video Stores BYLINE: Paula Span, Washington Post Staff Writer DATELINE: NEW YORK BODY: A gun battle has broken out on the ship where the politician's comely daughter is being held. "Die!" yowls the bad guy in English-subtitled Japanese, spraying his enemy with machine-gun fire. "Shaddup, you sadistic slug," the hero screams back, shooting madly. Bodies crumple. Stuff explodes. In a darkened classroom, about 30 Columbia University students watch the cartoon action in rapt silence as Ryo Saeba -- a raffish mercenary with cunning, courage and a marked lingerie fetish -- triumphs again in the latest "City Hunter" movie. It's Thursday night, and the university's Anime Club (pronounced AH-knee-may) is holding its regular screening, a selection from the myriad animated films and TV series that are wildly popular all over Japan. A lot of the regulars are here. There's Alex Hawson, a premed sophomore and the club's president and Webmaster, in the front row. And Ben Turner, the club's leading techie, whose dorm-room decor includes an oversize poster of Princess Lum, the alien in the tiger-skin bikini from the series "Uresei Yatsura," hung above his self-built computer. Turner's roommate, Eugene Myers, is here, too, even though he has a big exam tomorrow. He used to be a normal guy. Now, when Hawson asks the assembled members how often they want to have screenings next fall -- weekly? biweekly? -- it's Myers who calls out, only half-jokingly, "As often as possible!" He's hooked. And he's not the only one. Anime fans once relied on video bootleggers or buddies in Tokyo for their regular installments of futuristic space adventures and epic robot duels. But the genre, sometimes called Japanimation, is outgrowing its hipster cult status, expanding beyond trend incubators like New York and California. "Two years ago, if you wanted anime on laserdisc, you had to turn to mail order," says Maryland fan John Scofield, one of the organizers of the Otakon anime convention planned for Hunt Valley -- north of Baltimore -- this summer. "Now, I can go down to Columbia Mall." A trend is clearly eddying into the mainstream when products show up in chain outlets like Blockbuster Video, Tower Records, the big HMV and Virgin music stores -- and in Saturday Matinee in Columbia, Md. But there are other portents, too. For instance: Stores devoted entirely to anime and its associated knickknacks are doing brisk business. (In Japanese, the term refers to any animation, from Gigantor to Mickey Mouse; here it's reserved for Japanese imports.) Anime Crash opened in Greenwich Village -- with Pretty Sammy, a turquoise-pigtailed psychic, beaming above its entrance -- two years ago. Inside, devotees stock up on pricey imports: CD soundtracks, kitschy pink toys from the series "Sailor Moon," model kits with which to build your own armored mobile suits from the "Gundam" series. "I want an Anime Crash in every mall between here and California," says co-owner Scott Mauriello, who took the first steps by opening a second store in Boston last spring, with leases being negotiated for Providence, R.I., and Times Square. And Anime Pavilion, an emporium within comic book stores around Washington, has expanded from one location to four. On television, where intermittent anime offerings have helped spur Americans' interest ever since "Astro Boy" and "Speed Racer" in the '60s, a syndicated anime series called "Dragon Ball Z" is doing well enough on weekend mornings (it's seen at 8 a.m. Saturdays on UPN's Channel 20) to expand to two airings a week next season. Intense merchandising will follow: Action figures, trading cards, skateboards and a toy weapon known as the Kamehameha Blaster are in the works. On cable, meanwhile, the SciFi Channel is showing 15 to 20 anime movies a year. Campus anime clubs, long a presence at West Coast colleges and heavy-on-science schools like MIT and Cornell ("temples of geekdom," says Trish Ledoux, editor of the monthly magazine Animerica), are flourishing. In the Washington area, for instance, the five-year-old Terrapin Anime Society at the University of Maryland -- that's Gamera the flying, fanged turtle, defender of Japan against loathsome foes, on its membership cards -- gathers every other Sunday for screenings that stretch on for four or five hours. The American University Anime Society is marking its first anniversary. Virginia Tech has so many anime fans that they support three clubs. About the Geek Thing. Ever since the videocassette recorder and the modem made a thirst for anime easier to satisfy, the genre has appealed to the same core of technologically adept young males who embrace Nintendo, attend science fiction and "Star Trek" conventions, and double-major (like Columbia's Turner) in physics and computer science; they're a strong presence on the Internet, debating the fine points of which mecha (see glossary) could beat which monster on numerous anime Usenet groups and Web sites. "Anime tends to be a very nerdy type of hobby," acknowledges Hawson, who's been struggling to raise female attendance at Columbia screenings above half a dozen. But through TV series, broader retailing, magazines like Animerica and general buzz, the audience is growing wider -- mirroring the broad appeal in Japan, where two or three different anime shows are broadcast in prime time every night. "It's on TV and everyone watches it," says Ledoux. "There are shows on cooking and mah-jongg." John O'Donnell, managing director of Central Park Media, which distributes six to 12 new anime video titles each month, puts U.S. retail sales somewhere between $ 50 million and $ 100 million a year -- and that's without the Mouse. Last summer, Disney acquired distribution rights to several feature-length animations by revered Japanese filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki. Eight of the movies are destined for video stores, while "Princess Minonoke" may also be seen in theaters and on television. The anime world is braced for the aftershocks. "Their power of promotion and advertising will draw a lot of attention," O'Donnell says. That's the good news. But for the true otaku (see glossary) -- whose demand for authenticity is such that subtitled anime, with the original Japanese voices and accurate translations, is widely preferred to English dubbing -- there's a potential dark side. "Whether Disney will edit them, rescore them, change all the names to Tommy and Suzie remains to be seen," O'Donnell says, sounding less than sanguine. Devotion to anime, a force that a few months back led Ben Turner to take an all-day walking tour of Manhattan offered by the Atlantic Anime Alliance -- including pilgrimages to bookstores selling manga (see glossary) and to Japanese cultural landmarks -- can be tough to explain. "The technical quality is outstanding," Turner says, flailing. "The stories are always great." Hawson, struggling similarly, talks about the "sophisticated" characters and subtle plots of certain titles, the way drawings can convey what live-action can't. "My favorite is called 'Porco Rosso,' about a World War I pilot who turns into a pig," he says. "It's a very deep story." Actually, the range of subjects and tone in anime is vast, from classics of Japanese literature to goofy comedies and sci-fi escapades. "Maison Ikkoku," set in a suburban Japanese boardinghouse, is pure TV soap opera. "It's a G-rated 'Melrose Place,' " says Scofield, the Otakon convention organizer who in his other life is a Defense Department computer network analyst. "I cried at the end, it was so good." He's seen each of the show's 96 episodes at least twice, courtesy of an otaku pal who paid two grand for the laserdisc boxed set. But the G rating hardly covers the whole genre. "There's a typical assumption in our country, and in no other, that if it's a cartoon, it must be for children," O'Donnell says. In Japan, a significant proportion of anime is for adults only. It can be sexual or grotesque -- the rape of female characters by tentacled demons is a favorite theme -- and it can be vividly violent. "You've got plain old karate fights, karate fights where a guy rips someone's arm off, monsters eating guys," O'Donnell says, ticking off the possibilities. Even the less graphic series often are edited, or sanitized, depending on one's point of view, when they're shown on U.S. television. To stave off a flap about "cartoon porn" by outraged parents, Central Park Media and most other U.S. distributors sticker their adult videotapes with warnings or ratings. Anime Crash, which draws throngs of fans to hentai (see glossary) screenings of erotic anime, checks IDs at the door and admits only those 18 or older. Perhaps in a few years, if anime is established enough to draw scholarly attention, sociologists or anthropologists will explore some of these cross-cultural puzzles. Why the brutality, even if the fighting involves robots and cyborgs more than humans? ("Japan is the safest place in the world to walk -- you never see cops, there's almost no crime," says Anime Crash's Mauriello, who flies there four times a year to stock his stores. "But the manga and video can be incredibly violent. This stuff appeals to something.") Why so many butt-kicking "babes in battle suits" from a country where women are traditionally so subordinate? And Central Park Media's O'Donnell wonders whether the Japanese affection for robots in the workplace, as opposed to some American workers' fears of job displacement, stems from decades of watching robots in anime. But these are questions for future dissertations. At Columbia, members of the Anime Club don't want to analyze what's on the screen. When Hawson halfheartedly asks for interpretations of an anime music video he's just shown, everyone stares and no one speaks. What they want is to lose themselves in the next attraction, "Irresponsible Captain Tyler," featuring a slacker pilot of the United Planets Space Force. Hawson understands. He loves the stuff himself, even if it's a losing battle to elucidate the reasons to an outsider. "It's just cool," he says. HOW TO SOUND LIKE AN OTAKU An anime glossary: Hentai -- literally, perversion or abnormality. Refers to weird sexual anime like "Urotsukidoji: Legend of the Overfiend." Kawaii -- cute. Common trait in Japanimation. "Hello Kitty" and other wide-eyed fuzzies are kawaii. Manga -- comic books. Read by commuting businessmen, homemakers, kids, everyone. Forty percent of the books and periodicals published in Japan are manga. Mecha -- a robot or mechanical device. Otaku -- obsessive fan. A derogatory term in Japan, something of a badge of honor among U.S. anime enthusiasts. Also known as a "fan boy." Seihuku -- uniform. Worn by anime characters, and by real-life Japanese, from space cadets to schoolgirls. Shojo -- material for girls. "Sailor Moon" and "Battle Skipper" are shojo video. Would-be otaku are referred to the Anime Turnpike on the Internet: http://soyokaze.biosci. ohio -- state.edu/ jei/anipike GRAPHIC: PH,,CENTRAL PARK MEDIA; PH,,MANGA ENTERTAINMENT, Sayonara, slimeball: Action man from "M.D. Geist II: Death Force," above, and curvaceous characters from "Battle Arena Toshinden." "The technical quality is outstanding," student Ben Turner says of anime scenes such as this one from "Patlabor." "Dragon Ball Z" airs on Saturday mornings; expect a line of action figures soon.