Now on to animation part 2 : The invasion of anime.

The year was around 1996 to 1997.
All was peaceful and boring in America for kids. Nobody would expect
the phenomenon that would soon hit our shores. I was one of the lucky
youngsters who grew up during this time.

For me it all started one day before school. UPN ( A channel at the time ) which ran cartoons in the early mornings aired one that was quit peculiar....



I didn't know what it was, I didn't know why it looked so much different from any other cartoons I ever watched. All I knew was that I was hooked.

Now before you go " wtf mate that's a girl show. " Why did you like that shit?
First off,out of my friends it wasn't just me who watched this show .
At that time none of my friends or I ever saw a cartoon like that before. Cartoons in the US were little funnies that dealt with nothing more than humor and light story lines. This was something totally different. As you saw in the opening it had action out the kazooo, the story line keep going from episode to episode , the villains didn't look all goofy in fact some of them were down right scary. This was the first taste of more mature animation. Now we were all awed by this show...but still it was for girls. So as much as we liked it we boys couldn't really connect. And me and my friends couldn't express our like for the show in public because in the end it was a girl's show!

That is when this show came along...




The show us adrenalin junkie boys were waiting for. Now the craze for Anime started to boom. They had the girl market and now they just appealed to the boys. All that was left was the video game community which could appeal to both girls and boys and the marketing geniuses over in Japan just had the right answer. This is what made Anime known in the US and really started the mega craze.



That was it. We were invaded. For the next 5-6 years Anime would be at max popularity in America. You couldn't go anywhere without being able to hear about it or see it. Someone who thinks that Anime is big now really doesn't know. Compared to back then the Anime market now is a waste land.

This little era would greatly influence me during those couple of years in intermediate school.

But now back to how I overall decided I wanted to be a cartoonist / director.
So at this time I liked to draw. I drew very seldom though. Mostly Godzilla, video game characters and spider-man and or Ninja turtles.
( I was a huge Godzilla fan and ironically something else from Japan I was hooked
on )

But now I would start drawing the characters from Pokemon and Dragonball Z ALL THE TIME.




I would draw and draw for hours. Not any reason behind it just for fun like most kids do.


Most often during school when I was bored lol.


The Anime craze is what really started my own drawing craze. But at this point I still didn't know what a cartoonist was or even think about doing it for a profession.

I had yet to discover the main reason for me going in this direction.

Now on to Animation.

So what lead me here to the road of wanting to become a well known cartoonist?
Well it's a story that starts 19 years ago when I was about 4.
My mother had never seen the Disney movies as a child. She thought it would be fun to watch them for family time, so she bought me oodles and noodles of them and looney tune tapes along with many other animated shows and movies. At that time I would watch these shows for hours on end like a zombie. Especially my childhood favorite "Pinocchio" I usually watched 3 times a day then singing the songs and dancing around the house to tunes such as this

This is how I would I initially grew a love for cartoons and animation. Then there were the saturday morning cartoons

Like most children though, by age 7 to 10, my love for cartoons would soon dwindle. I still watched them but I didn't get pulled in. For I was getting bored of all the US cartoons. They had the same BORING stories and plot lines and reoccurring bad guys that always had their plans ruined by the end of the 30 minute episode. And the Disney movies didn't have enough appeal for me because of its new direction of appealing mostly to girls. AND on top of that was the natural mindset on cartoons in our culture; where it's immature and weird to watch cartoons after a certain age, that I was slowly slipping into. At this point all my attention was going on wanting to be a director of live action movies. ( I was also a avid movie watcher as well. I was your classic sit in front of the TV kid. ) If you asked me about cartoons or animated movies at that point I would probably laugh and tell you they were for kids. So how did I turn a total 360 degrees and gain my passion back for cartoons?

You shall find out in the continuing post :)