I honestly can’t remember the first time I saw a Disney movie, but whatever it was it was the beginning spark of my creativity. Disney movies back then were so different from the stuff that was on TV it was mindblowing at the time. Ninja Turtles was my first exposure to an action show, and Inspector Gadget is another of my childhood favourites.
After I got a little older and entered high school at 11, this was around the time when the internet was starting to become mainstream. I was exposed to Dragon Ball Z. I had never seen the show before then, but friends of mine would always talk about it. In later years, my friends and I would go on to download every single Dragonball/Z/GT episode onto the school’s computers, and we watched every one of them.
Soon after graduating and starting college, I was exposed to fansubs. And this really expanded my animation horizons to a much wider range of what’s out there. RahXephon was one of the first few anime I was into on fansubs, but up until that point I was just under the impression that anime was ‘cool’. After all, all I had seen up until then was Cartoon Network/kid’s WB stuff. When I got into college, a new friend exposed me to fansubs, and I started out with RahXephon, Zone of the Enders and another show I can’t remember. RahXephon in particular blasted open my view and appreciation of anime, and remains at the top of my all-time favourite list. I have a gorgeous box set that contains all the DVDs and the movie, possibly my most prized DVDs.
So my growing-by-the-gigabyte anime collection, and even some of the non-Japanese animated shows on TV are really fascinating with their quality and the range of emotions/genres they stretch across. If I didn’t have the exposure that I had now, I would probably think that animation could never be as deep or emotionally involving as watching real people or reading something, but I know from experience that is not the case at all.
Lazy Onion 