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Jacob Sundeen Elizabeth Bermingham ENGL 382 28 October 2011 Moon Prism Power! The Shojo Anime Uncovered Thinking back to when I was a fourth grader, I can remember no greater excitement than coming home from school, turning on the TV, and watchingSailor Moon? Okay, I wasnt really a fan of those Sailor Moon girls, but it was always conveniently on before my real favorite show Dragon Ball Z (of course). What I didnt realize all those years ago was that I was watching a shojo anime which is essentially anime for girls. What I also didnt realize was that my much-ballyhooed Dragon Ball Z was a shonen anime, or basically an anime meant for boys. Now I did kind of subconsciously pick up on the fact that Sailor Moon was more of a girl show and that Dragon Ball Z was a show for guys. Because of this, I would have never been caught dead admitting that I watched that girly Sailor Moon show outside the confines of my home (oh the humiliation!) even though most of my DBZ friends probably watched it as well (oh the irony!). So whats the deal with splitting Japans anime into boy and girl categories? No, Japan is not being sexist, and the categories are much more complicated than simply being regulated to the different sexes because a boy can watch a shojo anime just as much as a boys favorite color can be purple (which happens to be my favorite color). Shojo is a complex form of anime that has characteristics inherently different to it than other types of anime that include the art style, the heroine, and the plot.

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You can tell that an anime is shojo almost immediately upon seeing it because the art style of shojo is distinctly different especially when compared to shonen. The art style of shojo tends to be much more simple, and Susan J. Napier, Professor of Japanese Literature and Culture at the University of Texas and author of Anime: From Akira to Howls Moving Castle, succinctly sums up the differences between shojo and most other anime: the dreamy and charming world of the shojo stands in attractive counterpoint to the darker and more violent texts of much science fiction anime (149). So shojo anime is just that: a dreamy, happy, candy-coated world. Now that isnt entirely true either because shojo anime often deals with surprisingly dark subject matters, but the overall art style gives off that kind of lollipops and cherry blossoms feeling. Literally, though, you will witness a lot of cherry blossom imagery in shojo animation. Take a very well known shojo anime for example: Fruits Basket. In the opening credits of this anime, you are visually assaulted by a barrage of cherry blossoms, and once the actual episode begins, you are introduced to an extremely bright and washed-out art style that is distinctly dreamlike in quality and features many simplistic but stylized drawings. This sharply contrasts with shonen anime such as Inuyasha (which ironically features a shojo heroine but more on that later) that utilizes a much deeper and richer palette of colors and features characters and backgrounds that are rendered in a more realistic fashion. These are all distinct qualities of shojo anime, but there is much more to shojo than just the appearance: the shojo heroine is an essential part to shojo that can appear in not only shojo anime but shonen as well. The shojo heroine is immediately recognizable with her gigantic, water eyes, her long legs, skinny physique, terribly annoying voice, school girl outfit (which most of the time consists of an impossibly short skirt), and a penchant for getting into trouble. Shojo heroines, who tend to be around the magical age of 16, also often have an emotionally-troubled and dark past, and this

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is where the faade of simplicity and happiness in shojo can be undermined. While on the surface the show Fruits Basket appears to follow a mostly harmless and jovial narrative structure, you soon learn that storys protagonist Tohru lost both of her parents in a car accident, and the story promptly takes a darker, more complex turn as Tohru is tasked with breaking the curse on the Sohma family. Other shojo heroines share similar dark pasts such as Yuki from Vampire Knight whose earliest memory is being attacked by a vampire. However, unlike Fruits Basket, Vampire Knight is much darker in tone from the start and considerably less dreamlike in appearance. Shojo heroines are ubiquitous in all sorts on anime, not just shojo anime. For example, the heroine in Inuyasha, an anime featured on Shonen Jump, is clearly shojo considering that she is a 16-year old school girl with watermelon-sized eyes, the body of a supermodel, that annoying shojo voice, and, yep, there she goes falling down a mystical demonfilled well (and she was just on her way to school, man, shojo heroines really do have the worst luck!). Regarding the aforementioned mystical demon-filled well, shojo heroines are in constant need of rescuing which turns out to be a common plot device in shojo anime. Since shojo heroines tend to be overwhelmingly average and extremely nave, they generally arent the most resourceful or intuitive of thinkers. Combine this with their general knack for finding themselves in demon wells, and you have a considerable problem. Luckily for our wide-eyed heroines, there is always a pretty boy lurking around the corner in the shojo universe to get them out of their debacle. Unfortunately for our wide-eyed heroines, these pretty boys tend to turn out to be a significant love interest (not a problem, right?) while simultaneously being their brother (oh). At least, we should assume that this would be unfortunate for our poor 16-year old heroine to become romantically entangled with her brother, but in shojo-ality (shojo+reality, if you didnt

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catch it), incest is not necessarily a problem; in fact, its encouraged! Incest is understandably a powerfully taboo subject, so it might seem odd that it becomes such a prevalent plot device in many shojo anime aimed at young girls. However, incest in shojo, such as the relationship between Yuki and her brother in Vampire Knight, doesnt necessarily romanticize incest as much as it depicts it in a different light: like a mirror, shojo manga distorts as much as it reflects back those desires (incestual desires)the protective older brother becomes a perfect lover (Birmingham 3). He comes to represent everything that our heroine should look for in a healthy relationship (besides the fact that hes her brother, of course). Another prominent plot device in shojo anime is the shojo heroine holding some kind of secret, supernatural power or influence that will greatly affect the course of events in the story or even the entire world. In Inuyasha, Kagome holds in her possession a mystical jewel that holds the key to critical plot points later in the story, and in Scrapped Princess, Pacificas very existence represents the possible destruction of the world. And despite often needing help, these shojo heroines are often endowed with supernatural powers and strengths such as in Sailor Moon and Vampire Knight that allows for them to eventually conquer whatever evil they are facing and wrap the story up nice and sweetly. Shojo animation is comprised of many different elements, and is an artistic endeavor just as much as any other anime and much more than just a girl anime. As weve seen, many of them involve complex storylines even if on the surface it doesnt appear so (as in the case of Fruits Basket) along with similarly complex characters. In fact, many a shojo anime could be considered deeper and more profound than the serious shonen anime. While I was watching galactic space monkeys battle for a dragons magical balls, shojo anime was depicting a young girls search for true love and simultaneous struggle to grow under severe circumstances so that she could eventually achieve happiness; essentially acting as a mirror of Japanese girls and

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womens desires and expectations (Toku 30), and consequently, depicting a much more realistic struggle. Thats not to say all shojo is this way (there are offenders on both sides), but shojo does hold a unique place in Japanese society as it reflects the evolution of the social roles of Japanese girls and women during this period (20). Shojo might not be everyones cup of tea, but it has certainly had a profound and everlasting effect on the world of anime. As for me, Ill stick with my galactic space monkeys.

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Works Cited Birmingham, Elizabeth. No Man Could Lover Her More Manga and Philosophy. Barkman, Adam, and Joe Steiff, ed. Chicago: Open Court Publishing Co., 2010. Fruits Basket. FUNimation Entertainment. 5 July. 2001. Television. Inuyasha. Viz Media. 16 October. 2000. Television. Napier, Susan J. Anime: From Akira to Howls Moving Castle. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Print. Scrapped Princess. Bandai Entertainment. 8 April. 2003. Television. Toku, Masami. Shojo Manga! Girls Comics! A Mirror of Girls Dreams Mechademia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. Vampire Knight. Viz Media. 8 April. 2008. Television.