Change your toon: Japanese anime dares to go where no animation has gone before

"Pokemon" may be the most successful Japanese cartoon to wash onto American shores, but it's far from the only one. On Internet sites such as animenation.com or in video catalogs, you can purchase hundreds of video titles featuring "anime," as Japanimation is commonly called.

But you may want to think twice before you let some of the most popular anime films fall into the hands of your "Pokemon"-loving kids.

Take, for instance, "Ghost in the Shell," a violent action movie that was dubbed into English into 1996 and has sold half a million copies in the United States alone. Like many anime films, "Ghost in the Shell" takes place in a not-too-distant but barely recognizable future. Humans are surgically altered to assume the qualities of robots. These hybrids are then hooked up to the Internet so the police can keep tabs on their brains. All is well in this Big Brother fantasy until one day an evil virus hacks its way onto the Net and starts erasing people's hard drives ... er, memories.

Not only is "Ghost in the Shell" hard to follow - one of its chief intrigues is that one never quite knows where a character's human nature ends and robotic nature begins - but there also are frequent gun battles, female nudity and, in the opening minutes, a graphic assassination scene.

That's not to say there aren't also several best-selling anime titles appropriately aimed at children. In fact, anime has almost as many different flavors as "Pokemon" has critters. In Japan, where the average adult reads 200 comic books a year, anime - which grew out of Japanese comic book art - has been a dominant force in the culture for three generations, with something for every age and interest. Think of anime almost as a medium rather than a genre and you get a sense of its breadth and diversity.

Anime also is Japan's MTV, the one entertainment product it can export seemingly everywhere. In the United States, where anime videos began trickling onto the market 10 years ago, the genre is finally starting to go mainstream:

Cable's Cartoon Network airs a "Toonami" anime block weekday afternoons from 3 to 5, leading off with the half-hour series "Sailor Moon," about a talking cat who turns a group of young girls into high-kicking warriors for justice. Since last year "Toonami" has helped double Cartoon Network's afternoon audience of 9-to-14-year-olds.

Disney's Miramax Films last month had the premiere of the English-language version of "Princess Mononoke," the highest-grossing domestic film in Japanese history. Although it tells a complicated story set in the Middle Ages, "Princess Mononoke" captivated audiences with its lush scenery and its unusually graceful motion, the result of 80,000 animation cels drawn by its venerated creator, Hayao Miyazaki.

Other anime releases are making their way to theaters for limited runs. The top distributor of anime in the United States, Chicago-based Manga Entertainment, is showing "Perfect Blue," a thriller it expects to be as big as "Ghost in the Shell," in more than a dozen cities nationwide. ("Perfect Blue" should arrive in Kansas City this spring, according to Jerry Harrington, owner of Tivoli Manor Square Theatre.)

Hundreds of anime clubs have sprung up in cities and on university campuses across the United States, where members screen new releases and swap videocassettes of old favorites. An anime sales house, Right Stuf of Des Moines, Iowa, has a mailing list of 200,000. After 'Astro Boy'

All of which suggests that anime has come a long way from "Astro Boy," the black-and-white Japanese import that was a staple of Saturday mornings on American TV in the 1960s.

"Astro Boy," created in 1952 by Osamu Tezuka, the father of anime, was a crime-fighting machine - literally. The story went that Astro Boy's "father" had built him to serve humanity after the man's own son had died.

With "Astro Boy" and other early cartoons, Tezuka borrowed from the style of Walt Disney's characters, with their doe eyes and pencil-line lips.

Anime characters have never looked especially Japanese, but their appearance is distinct to that country's animation style.

"I still get asked: Why does their hair stand straight up? Why do they all have such big eyes? Why do they all look like Speed Racer?" says Steve Pearl, who chairs the Anime Alliance, a network of anime clubs in the New York City area.

"I call them 'the stupid questions.' The kids who are into 'Pokemon' - they just accept it."

Anime's beginnings are found in the economic ashes of postwar Japan.

With little money to support a movie industry, the nation's creative community instead began producing "manga," cheap-to-print black-and-white comic books. A voracious public ate them up, and by the 1960s the most popular manga were being turned into movies. Today half of all movie tickets sold in Japan are for anime features.

Yet when videos began crossing over to the United States, something was lost in the translation.

"I remember when we would screen anime five, 10 years ago, we'd hear that it looked different, that it was strange," recalls Mike Lazzo, senior vice president for programming at cable's Cartoon Network.

Part of the problem was bad dubbing and animation that paled next to the American product. But anime's soap-opera-like continuity was also to blame.

TV executives would hear complaints from parents because "Speed Racer" - another well-known '60s import - would leave stories hanging at the end of an episode. American cartoons told a story (and sometimes two) in a tidy half hour.

Many anime serials are more complex than their American counterparts, but that may not be the problem TV executives thought it was.

"Pokemon," with more than 150 distinct characters, has certainly caught on. Still, the "Sailor Moon" repeats seen in the United States feature just five heroines, compared with nine in the Japanese version. Magical girls

"Sailor Moon" is typical of the "magical girls" genre, as it's known to anime aficionados.

To a female viewer of a certain age, the magical girls have endless appeal, as was evidenced this summer at the Comic-Con in San Diego, the world's largest cartoon and fantasy convention.

Hundreds of preteen girls had coaxed their parents to bring them down to the convention center and stand in line to see a feature-length "Sailor Moon" film, a well-traveled 1993 production known on Web sites around the world as simply the "S Movie."

The lead character in "Sailor Moon" is an irrepressible 14-year-old Kewpie doll whose path is crossed one day by a mysterious black cat named Luna. (Why is she blond? "It differentiates her character," says Pearl.) The cat presents the girl with a brooch that turns her into a leggy tyro in a miniskirt.

Sailor Moon and her comrades (each named for a planet) eschew traditional male weaponry, instead sending thunderous kinetic bolts at their enemies. As the supergirls invoke their respective cosmic forces, the girls in the audience scream their delight:

"Moon prism power, make up!"

"Mercury star power, make up!"

(Interestingly, the biggest cheers at this screening were for the four heroines not seen in the American "Sailor Moon.")

Nearby, around the vast Comic-Con exhibit hall, anime was the hottest thing going, with aisles of vendors selling videos, paraphernalia, limited-edition cel art and other mementos covering the whole range of anime.

Hundreds of adoring kids showed up for "Pokemon" panels. Exhibitors ran out of prizes to give to people who signed up for their anime clubs.

Asked to account for anime's grass-roots ascent, Cartoon Network's Lazzo cites the recent success of professional wrestling. Young boys now stay tuned for weeks to follow a storyline involving their favorite wrestler. So why not a cartoon character?

Lazzo adds: "Another thing that complicates anime is that sometimes a character will be good one week and bad the next week. But that's something wrestlers do, too."

Anime and professional wrestling also share a fascination with buxom, scantily clad women - big, blond timbers who aren't exactly native to Japan - and with violence.

Unlike wrestling, some of the best adult anime are meditations on the senseless and tribalistic rite of killing, whether the primeval warfare between the forest gods and humans in "Princess Mononoke" or the high-tech terrorism of "Ghost in the Shell."

Yet there's something intrinsically disturbing about the world's finest animators applying their craft to ever-more exquisite ways of depicting human bloodshed.

Fangoria, a magazine specializing in horror movies, recently ran stills from the critically acclaimed "Perfect Blue," a movie about a pop star who is stalked by a murderous fan.

One of the images shows a homicide in a blood-rained elevator, the victim's face so bloody as to make gender identification impossible. Pornographic would not be too strong a way to describe it.

It would seem that if there's one thing American mass culture doesn't need more of, it's gratuitous bloodshed.