The Independent (London) March 5, 2000, Sunday SECTION: FEATURES; Pg. 2, 21, 22, 23 LENGTH: 1302 words HEADLINE: MADE IN JAPAN: CHASING THE DRAGON; POKEMON WAS NICKNAMED 'KIDDIE CRACK'. BUT A NEW WAVE OF JAPANESE MONSTERS THREATENS TO BE EVEN MORE ADDICTIVE. RUPERT HOWE REPORTS BYLINE: Rupert Howe BODY: Tai and Koromon are pulled through the rift and find themselves back on Earth. Tai goes home and visits his little sister who seems to be aware of the DigiWorld. Koromon digivolves to Agumon in order to battle the dreaded Ogremon. Confused? Well, you should be. Unless you're 12 years old. Or an executive at an American television network. Because this is the weird and wonderful world of Digimon, the latest Japanese animation to be hailed as the global future of children's entertainment. The Japanese are coming, it seems. And Pokemon was just the beginning. Of course, we've been here before, whether with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. But this year's Japanese phenomenon has proved to be both enduring - Pokemon for Nintendo's Game Boy was still the biggest selling video game in the US last summer - and infectious. Prompted by the success of the pocket -sized monsters, TV networks in the US have now lined up a whole new range of Japanese animated adventures, including Digimon, Monster Rancher and Cardcaptor, which is due to reach American screens later this year. Even old favourites such as Dragon Ball Z, which has been on the Comedy Network since autumn 1998, have been given a new lease of life. Dragon Ball has nearly doubled its American audience in the past 12 months. Most of these shows are aimed at a well-defined six- to 12-year-old age group - young enough still to take an interest in toys but old enough to know exactly which evolution of Digimonster will excite most jealousy in the playground. So far the strategy has worked beyond the wildest dreams of the show's producers. Digimon is now the highest rated show on the Fox Kids network in the US, despite the fact it premiered within the past six months. According to the network, children who were already watching Pokemon on Warner Bros are now switching over immediately afterwards to catch Digimon on Fox. Yet until recently, these Japanese imports were a relative rarity in America - even though, as Benoit Runel of Fox Kids Europe points out, other Japanese animations such as Sailor Moon and Dragon Ball Z had previously been a big success in France and Germany. The sheer volume of animation produced in Japan - where cartoon culture crosses all age groups and genres, from stylised pornography to fairytale swords-and-sorcery epics - meant that US buyers tended to take a cautious approach. The Japanese may not mind their kids growing up in a fantasy world inhabited by bloodthirsty samurai and priapic demons, but parents in Middle America might need some convincing. But Pokemon was different. Pokemon monsters, famously, do not die; they simply suffer a cute fainting fit. And it's this emphasis on non-violent problem -solving and group action which also informs the new shows. Digimon, which debuts on British screens in April via Fox Kids and CITV, is clearly intended to operate on a similarly holistic level. The storyline concerns a group of seven schoolkids who are transported to a digital fantasy land called DigiWorld. There they are befriended by a species of tiny digital monsters (the Digimons of the title) who assist them in defeating the forces of evil by "digivolving" into larger, more powerful beasts. According to Maureen Smith at Fox Kids in the US, the show "is about teamwork - the characters don't digivolve until the kids need help" and, unusually, has proved popular among girls as well as boys. This is all good news for the toy and games manufacturers. As any parent knows, kids' programmes now have a significance way beyond a half-hour TV episode, and Digimon, like Pokemon, has a huge range of characters - from blob- like ghosts to bearded unicorns and unfeasibly spiky reptiles - ideally suited to a lengthy and widespread marketing campaign. So far, the Digimon spin-offs include videos, action figures, computer games, even on-line trading cards, all of which have been aggressively marketed to create maximum impact on children, who are furiously collecting and bartering them with their friends. There are even reports of kids making a beeline for each other in restaurants to swap trading card while their parents peruse the wine lists. Until recently, most of these shows have been geared largely towards boys. Not only do they appeal to the same collector mentality which has kept football -sticker albums going for decades, but many Japanese cartoon serials also start life as video games. Pokemon was derived from a 1996 Nintendo title, while Digimon is available as both a PlayStation adventure and tamagotchi-style virtual pet. Perhaps the most innovative variant on the pocket monster template is Monster Rancher 2 - which also airs on Fox Kids as an animated TV series - in which users can create unique creatures by placing their own audio CDs or CD-Roms into a PlayStation. The console reads off the track lengths and numbers and converts them into digital DNA for creating new monsters. One show which is hoped to have a broader appeal is Cardcaptor, an animated adventure licensed by Toronto-based animation house Nelvana. Developed from a hugely successful Japanese comic strip, Cardcaptor is geared mainly towards girls - a largely untapped but potentially lucrative market in animation terms. The show even boasts a female lead - a teenage superheroine who has to rescue the world from a magic pack of cards. It also has a similar marketing potential to shows such as Digimon. The rewards for turning a generation of young girls into card collectors is obvious when you bear in mind that the market for girls aged between six and 11 in North America is now worth an estimated $ 1.5bn a year. Yet what is it about Japanese animation which has proved so successful? And why are US networks choosing to buy in material rather than make their own? Well, for one thing, it's proved almost impossible to capture the unique flavour of Japanese animation outside Japan. A criticism levelled at the US version of Pokemon was that it sanitised the puckish humour of the original. One of the great things about Japanese animation is that it never takes itself too seriously. How else could they have dreamed up a character called Sonic the Hedgehog? Equally, the dynamic drawing style, fantastic settings and weird storylines are virtually a language unto themselves, and seem to operate in a separate dimension to their Western equivalents. "Their direction is very much inspired by the graphic language of comic books," says Benoit Runel of Fox Kids in Europe. "It can also be seen as cheap animation and some of it doesn't have the same budget as in the West. But it's the scriptwriting and direction of the scenes which make it so appealing." The fascination for Digimon is simply a more youthful version of the manga obsessions which influenced the Warshawski brothers' special-effects epic The Matrix. Kids like animated shows for the same reasons that readers of style magazines fawn over limited edition gadgets and Nike trainers made solely for the Japanese market: they're new, they're different and, most importantly of all, they look cool. Even grown men have been known to develop enduring, and possibly unhealthy, fixations with agile animated nymphets such as Sailor Moon. For Michael Hirsch at Nelvana, the increasing interest in Japanese animation is part of a wider trend of the globalisation of children's programming. "You've got European shows travelling to the United States and doing better than ever before. A few years ago, that wasn't the case. Programmes tended to be either inexpensive and locally produced or something that came from the United States. So really what we've seen is an opening up of borders. It's just that the Japanese are particularly wily travellers." GRAPHIC: Monster mania: Goku of 'Dragon Ball Z' (above) and Tai from; 'Digimon' (far right) Scary: 'Monster Rancher' is another successful video game offshoot; Toon town: in 'Digimon', children are helped by mini monsters to fight the forces of evil