Life Is a Dream, Anime, and Animation

"La vida es sueno" the great Lope de Vega of Spanish Golden Era fame titled his most famous play: Life is a dream. His words were reverberating in my head yesterday as I stumbled upon the Anime Convention at the Hynes Convention Center in Boston: GI Joe and Little BoPeep... Vamps and Vixens... Maids and Mistresses of the night... They were out in force for the Anime Convention. Most were around high school age.

At first, as I appraised the Thor figure, and the Purple horse lady, and the Japanese school girl dressed as a Japanese school girl, I couldn't honestly figure out what sub-group from high school I was observing. They all wore passes around their necks and I was able to ascertain from their credentials that they were aficionadoes of Anime, the extremely eccentric, often violent cartoons originally originating out of Japan, but now - apparently - popular with fans the world over.

The Anime conventioneers had literally taken over the Copley Plaza mall where the Hynes Convention Center is located. At the mall food court, there were Wood Nymphs queuing for Cashew Chicken and Musclemen ordering pizza. In the restrooms, Sci-Fi geeks applied mascara and racy, transgendered Anime figures adjusted their thongs. In the plaza courtyard, all and sundry posed for pictures. The folks at the mall who were not of the convention had the best day of voyeurism ever. One staid couple with a child approached a group of conventioneers outside of the Copley Post Office in the mall and asked what it was all about. "Oh, we came in from New York," a pastoral African-American BoPeep replied. "We come here and dress up. There's a ball tonight. It's a lot of fun."

A friend of mine from high school who is visiting me from New York gave me the first whiff that something odd was in town. When he arrived off the bus from New York, he noticed in the Back Bay station two Asian guys dressed as Warrior Bugs with plastic shields and bug-like armor. We talked about whether in high school any of us could have possibly been part of that subgroup. My friend assured me that I had not been a wannabe Anime aficionado (Anime really only caught on in the States in the nineties and we graduated from high school in '87).

In reflecting on Anime, my friend and I realized that the Bible has epic stories and Anime does too: both are essentially a fight between good and evil. Both are about people who are struggling for the better angels of their souls to prevail... My friend reminded me of an epic story that he wrote that is ripe to be animation...if not Anime. His epic story penned in 1986 - long before we'd even heard of anime - is about a high school graduate who marries his sweet heart and the next day observes from the balcony of his large Victorian home that someone is stealing his tandem bicycle. He confronts the thief who tells him that this is not really his bicycle because it's lacking the bell with his signature snail on it. Instead, the thief was taking Max off to the war.

Max's great adventure begins on a navy ship on Fourth of July. He believes he's under attack but it's really just a Fourth of July Celebration. He ends up in the waters off the South Pacific and about to embark on an endless series of adventures. My friend then drew a picture of Max with sharp teeth and cannibalistic proclivities. "He should be on the big screen," I mentioned to him. It was at that point that I was reminded of a producer the Sages recently stumbled on. This gentleman says he is associated with an investment group that has put up $100 million for new technology and animation. I thought of how perfect a fit Max would be.

Back in our day it was PeeWee Herman's Great Adventure. Maybe nowadays Max could be written for this producer as an animation project with anime overtones. Then, maybe, this time next year I will be seeing Max figures on the T on the way to the Anime Convention.