First, a confession: I’m not a big fan of anime. I have friends who are remarkably well-versed in it, I’ve seen a fair amount, I’ve even read books on the subject, but it usually leaves me unimpressed. I find much of it to be crudely-done and juvenile (Dragonball Z, Pokemon), ugly and misogynistic (Urotsukidoji), or very derivative (Spriggan). I couldn’t sit through much of the revered Blue Submarine 6 (an adolescent boy’s fantasy all wrapped up in computer-assisted imagery) or Legend of the Sacred Scroll (a Tolkien rip-off told in too many static shots). I get tired of the overweening big eyes and the terrible voice acting (this seems to be a problem whether done in Japanese or English).

So why do I keep watching? I’ll give you a simple one-word one-name answer: Miyazaki. Hayao Miyazaki is one of the great treasures of global filmmaking, live-action or animation. He’s almost never produced a film that was not a masterpiece. Even as early as 1978’s Conan Future Boy he was an astonishing storyteller and visual stylist supreme; his work is distinguished by its intelligence, emotional complexity and social awareness. He is unique in the world of animation for using live-action filmmaking techniques to tell stories which can only be told in animation; just look at how his shots are composed and cut together, and you see the work of an artist with an intuitive grasp of how to tell a movie story brilliantly. Even a film such as Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989), which tells a fairly simple story of a young witch coming of age in a strange city, tells that story in a way that no live-action film could. Miyazaki loves architecture, and Kiki’s city is an astonishing amalgam of Mediterranean, Eastern European and Scandinavian design elements, combined and used in a way that live-action simply couldn’t achieve. Part of Miyazaki’s genius is that he doesn’t simply create brilliant visuals – he creates brilliant visuals that serve the story. In Kiki’s Delivery Service, that amazing city can look warm and inviting or cold and lonely, depending on the heroine’s moods and situations.

Certainly Miyazaki is not alone in offering up great anime (although he is completely without peer in terms of both the length and success of his career, and in producing one perfect film after another). Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira (1988) was released only two years after William Gibson’s seminal cyberpunk novel Neuromancer, and was probably at least as much responsible for redefining science fiction as Gibson’s book. The 1998 series Lain has similarly captured the look and feel of Goth better than just about anything else; Lain also explores a nonlinear, downright avant-garde mode of storytelling that’s unusual in any form.

Unfortunately, for every My Neighbor Totoro or Akira there seem to be several dozen Pokemon’s. Certainly it could be argued that this situation exists in any art form (it does – see Sturgeon’s law); and yet anime, with all its faults, has engendered a large and wildly enthusiastic following in both Japan and America.

So…what’s with these anime fans? If anime is so good, why hasn’t it caught on more in this country? Of course it has – with children’s programmers. Compared to the dull, badly-drawn fare usually offered to kids by American animation studios, anime is a breath of quickly-inhaled fresh air. But in Japan (and in American anime fan circles) animation is enjoyed as much – perhaps even more – by adults. Yet outside of those circles of fans who gather at conventions and internet sites, anime has yet to find a place in the hearts of American adult moviegoers. We Americans – conditioned by fifty years of the Mouse’s marketing – simply refuse to believe that cartoons can be enjoyed by adults (ironically, it’s Disney who has sought to release Miyazaki’s last two features, Princess Mononoke and the Oscar-winning Spirited Away, only to find that the films failed to generate any American heat; Disney really should accept that they have only themselves to blame).

And so we come to "The 1^st Annual L.A. Anime Festival", presented May 2-May 15, 2003, by that bastion of bourgeoisie filmlovers, the American Cinematheque. Somehow, in between their programs "A Celebration of Hollywood Musicals of the 1970’s and 1980’s", and "The Alternative Screen: Independent Film Showcase", they managed to squeeze in the first major Hollywood gathering of anime that wasn’t exclusively fan-driven. It almost seems to signal that anime is now recognized by the American filmic intelligentsia, if not the moviegoing audience at large (in their program notes, the Cinematheque-ies claim anime is now in "the mainstream of American pop culture"). To paraphrase Neil Armstrong, it could be one small step for the American Cinematheque, but one giant leap for anime (especially if the title lives up to its promise and the festival is presented annually).

The programming for the festival was eclectic, opening with a recent effort from Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli, The Cat Returns (directed by Hiroyuki Morita), and offering everything from Pokemon 5 to hentai with titles like Sex Demon Queen. Predictably, the screening of The Animatrix (shorts based on The Matrix and its sequels) was apparently the one program in the festival to sell out.

The artistic highlight of the festival was probably the screening of the three-part anthology film Memories. This 1996 film offers up three very different stories, from three of Japan’s leading animators, and proves that the Japanese just might be right after all: At its best, anime is a very sophisticated and very mature (and I mean that in the best sense of the word, not as in "for mature audiences") form of entertainment.

Too often fans of both American and Japanese animation accept bad filmmaking that they simply wouldn’t tolerate in a live-action film, but, like Miyazaki’s work, Memories is beautifully made by any standards. It’s alternately thought-provoking, surreal and witty, with carefully-crafted stories and vividly-rendered frames. An animated anthology film is virtually unheard-of in Hollywood (or at least one in which, unlike Fantasia, actual stories are told), and although the three segments in Memories have nothing in common (in fact the title serves only the first story), they do share superb craftsmanship.

The first story, "Magnetic Rose", is a Solaris-like tale of a salvage crew called to rescue a derelict spaceship where dreams and memories literally come to life; where it differs from Stanislaw Lem’s science fiction classic is that the menacing spaceship is the product of an egomaniacal opera singer, who left earth and a failed relationship to live alone with her reminiscences and fantasies. The two members of the salvage crew sent to investigate the mysterious ship eventually fall victim to their recollections, and "Magnetic Rose" ends on a bittersweet note, leaving us to ponder both the beauty and the danger of memories. Director Koji Morimoto creates one visual astonishment after another, moving from vistas of debris-ringed spaceships to grand French palaces to caverns of oil lakes and ruins. Memorable shots include the salvage crew astronauts all free-floating in different directions in their own zero-g ship, and eerie small cherub statues suggestive of sinister violence. If "Magnetic Rose" has a flaw, it’s in the voice acting, which makes the Nordic hero Heinz sound strangely like a growling Toshire Mifune.

The second story, Tensai Okamoto’s "Stink Bomb", is a refreshing emotional contrast to Morimoto’s story; where "Magnetic Rose" is dour and profound, "Stink Bomb" is blackly funny. It centers on Nobuo, a hapless schlemiel whose bad cold is not endearing him to his fellow employees at a biolab. When one of them suggests Nobuo try the new fever medicine, he takes a capsule – of course it’s the wrong capsule, and he becomes a living stink bomb capable of destroying all animal life around him. Ordered to bring the suspicious capsules to Tokyo, Nobuo sets out, blissfully unaware that he is what is killing everything around him. Eventually the government calls out the military against Nobuo, and manages to destroy much of the Japanese countryside instead of the target (part of Nobuo’s problem is that he generates even more lethal gas when under stress). Even the U.S. military is pilloried, when ultra-high-tech NASA spacesuits prove useless against Nobuo, who is still more concerned with finding a good lunch and getting to Tokyo. The film’s depiction of military might as bungling blunt force is very funny indeed, as is the (surprise) ending. "Stink Bomb" also boasts a shimmering score that combines Latin rhythms and western-style jazz.

The closing segment is "Cannon Fodder", directed by Akira’s Katsuhiro Otomo, and it’s both the most ambitious and most frustrating of the three pieces. Its depiction of an alternate world based completely on gun power is visually brilliant but obvious; we’ve seen the long, fetishistic pans of gun barrels before. The segment features sparse dialogue, and considerable wit (I especially liked a scene when a fat general steps onto a platform, and the word "SSTEP" is painted on the floor, using the Nazi’s "SS" symbol in place of the single "S"). It’s also completely free of big-eyed waifs, with characters that look like they’ve stepped from a Dore etching or Ronald Searle cartoon. All in all, Otomo’s superb imagery easily outweighs the flaws of the deliberately polemic story.

Without the American Cinematheque’s festival I might never have seen the wonderful Memories, and they’re certainly to be congratulated on their choice of material. It still doesn’t change my opinion of the bulk of anime – but it does make me hope that more work on this level will find its way to American screens, and to the audience that it deserves.