Do you Anime? I do

Anime is short for Japanese Animation. You've probably seen it and thought, "Those are cartoons." Well, yes they are like cartoons, but Anime is a bit different. It's not Bugs Bunny, Fred Flintstone, or Woody Woodpecker. It has a plot and it is not all slapstick. Good Anime has certain characteristics. And believe me, there is bad Anime too. Typically there are a few distinctive things that good Anime has:

1. Giant Robots
2. Robots that turn into something
3. Big swords
4. Over expressive characters
5. Really well developed backgrounds and depth of motion
6. Huge guns
7. Characters that actually get killed

My first Anime I ever watched was Star Blazers. In Japan the title of the show was, "Space Battle Cruiser Yamato." It was awesome. The plot of the show was that Earth was under attack by this race of aliens who wanted to colonize the Earth, so they dropped radiation bombs on the Earth to make it inhabitable. The Earth's last hope was a team called the Star Force who traveled the galaxy in a retrofitted battleship in search of a planet called Iscandar who offered Earth a machine to remove the radiation.

Sure it sounds nerdy, but there was character development, there were trials and struggles you got to see the Star Force go though, some characters were killed, and there was some really cool animation. Especially the "WAVE MOTION GUN" the big hole you see in the front of the ship above was a huge cannon that could be fired.

The second best Anime I have seen is Robotech. Robotech was called Macross in Japan. Robotech was also a great big Anime soap opera. A huge alien batte fortress crashed into Earth and we Earthlings are able to decipher the technology and rebuild the fortress to claim our place in the universe. Of course just at the time the fortress was launched, the aliens who the ship originally belonged to want it back. It was a pretty cool plot line, and it had planes that transformed to giant robots:

So what's JP's current Anime? Quite simple Inuyasha. Inuyasha is an Anime that is set in Feudal Japan. Inuyasha is the main character and is a 1/2 demon and 1/2 human. He travels around with his group looking for sacred jewel shards. Inuyasha carries a sword that transforms into a huge fang and is able to throw blasts of energy at his opponents, which are mostly full demons. His group consists of Kagome, a girl who can sense the sacred jewel shards, Miroku, a Buddhist monk that carries a sacred staff and has a wind tunnel in his hand capable of sucking up objects and opponents to a void, and Sango, a demon slaying girl who wields a huge boomerang.

So this is what JP does in his free time besides golf. Now I don't dress up like characters, I do not attend the big Anime conventions, but I'll pick up a t-shirt here and there, grab DVD's and I do have some Anime figures in my office. Sharkey just accepts it, and every so often mocks me by saying in her ditzy voice, "Inuyasha!! Inuyasha!!"