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by Noboru Ishiguro
By the time this column reaches you, it may already be resolved, but the incident lasted all last December starting with the TV Tokyo broadcast of the popular animated TV show Pocket Monsters.
Pocket Monsters is the latest video game hit from Nintendo, which has been struggling against Sony with its Playstation. It's now the most popular item among kids, having replaced Tamagotchi. The video game was then made into an animated TV show, and despite its origin on a local Tokyo station, it got onto the national network and was earning an 18% rating on Tuesday evenings.
One day, about 20 minutes into the show, children around the country started to collapse. There were 700 of them. As of the 10 o'clock news, the cause still wasn't known and it was reported as a mystery incident. But soon afterwards, it was discovered that all affected children had been watching the same TV show. It was Pocket Monsters.
At that time, the screen had shown flashing backlighting of interleaved red and green light, which caused the children watching it to collapse.
The media was obsessed with covering this strange phenomenon, something that might otherwise show up in a science-fiction movie. Nippon TV and Fuji TV especially extended their Pocket Monstrer-bashing compaign for weeks. (In my speculation, they were probably trying to crush their rival station's popular show.) TV Tokyo seems to have wanted to keep its top show on the air, but for now, it won't be resuming broadcast until an investigative report comes out in March.
This strobed backlighting effect isn't something new or rare in Japanese animation. In fact, I learned about it first on the animated show Moomin 28 years ago. Backlighting is a technique special to Japanese animation. Back then, it was called pinhole backlighting. We poked holes in a black sheet of paper with pins and simply lit it from behind. Eventually, the technique grew more sophisticated, with the lines and shapes cut out on the sheet. These days, colored paraffin is put on the mask and the frame is exposed multiple times.
Use of this lighting effect has been getting excessive. For one thing, the mask used to be hand-cut, but it can be easily made on a machine today. Perhaps because of that, young directors these days seem to be all too fond of using backlightinhg. I tend to think that an ultimate technique of expression like backlighting is only effective when used sparingly. However, young people these days seem to be intersted only in heightened stimulation. This current incident was a result of this tendency, and it hit children in a vulnerable spot. The problem was with the director's lack of awareness.
But the media don't see it that way. Pundits claim that this type of subliminal effect is dangerous, so it should be banned. Wake up and smell the coffee! Animation is entirely a subliminal process. What looks like a moving picture is actually only a series of similarly drawn figures. This is animation's fundamental difference from live-action.
This is a tendency in the Japanese media. Like the saying "Burn your tongue on hot soup, and now you blow on pickles," the government overreacted and suddenly put strict guidelines on animation backlighting. Thanks to that, my studio got guidance papers for every single episode, and it became quite chaotic in the industry. Basically, the instructions said not to use strobing more than three times per second or for over two seconds. Either way, animated shows suddenly became quite quiet after the incident. Of course, it's fully possible to make good shows without backlighting, but personally, I don't want to see it come to us as an outside restriction.
The headline on the 16 January newspaper said "Space Cruiser Yamato
arrested." The producer of Space Cruiser Yamato, Yoshinobu
Nishizaki, was arrested for the possession of methamphetamine. I
thought they went overboard to say "Yamato arrested," but
the problem happened a week after that. I went to a meeting, and
I was going to be introduced in front of 20 to 30 people. The host
came to me beforehand and said the organizers wanted to omit Yamato
from the list of my works. This was the meth speaking. Come
on, people. Would society think that everyone on the Yamato
staff was doing drugs? By this token, no on in Hollywoood would be
empolyable. In the end, at the meeting, they decided to not mention
my past works at all, but this Japanese style of being so worried about
saving face is the core of the media's conscience. I think the result
can be seen in how they handled the Pocket Monsters incident.
As director of some of Japan's most influential classics such as Space Cruiser Yamato and Superdimensional Fortress Macross, Noboru Ishiguro is one of the most respected creators working in the anime indurstry today. He also teaches seminars in animation technique at Japan's Yoyogi Animation Institute.
Pocket Monsters was not created by me. It was created by Satoshi Tajiri and the crew at TV-Tokyo. Pokemon is (c) Game Freak, Nintendo, 4Kids Productions, Hasbro, Bandai, and a ton of other companies. When you have a popular anime like Pokemon, lots of people own it so it's impossible to list every company who owns a piece of Pokemon. No infringement of copyrights is meant by the creation of the web site. All images were gotten from official websites (Nintendo, TV-Tokyo, etc.) unless otherwise noted (I don't steal images from other sites!).