Transmutation and recolonization in Japanese animation: Battle of the Planets and Anime’s Growth in the West

Japan has enjoyed a market for animation that extends far beyond its country’s borders since the beginnings of anime. While anime is usually produced predominantly for the country’s domestic market, international markets have developed a taste for Japanese anime over time, increasingly now in its subtitled, Japanese-language form (Pellitteri 2014; Ruh 2010; Daliot-Bul 2014). Prior to this, throughout the latter half of the twentieth century, the transnational flow of Japanese animation to the West and specifically to the United States had met barriers, both industrial and cultural. Anime franchises were not imported for the value found in their Japaneseness, but to be domesticated — transmutated and (re-)colonized— so to fit local cultural, political, and economic standards.