People sometimes ask me why I still work in the Japanese animation industry if I hate it so much. Well, there are two answers to that.

	1.	I don't really hate it and it is necessary for the retention of the remainder of my sanity to complain constantly about it just like everyone else in the industry.
	2.	Because I really hate everything in the whole world and it's just lessening degrees of hate. On one end of that hate scale there are things like my wife, directing, high quality chocolate and sex and on the other end there are things like catheters, rum raisin ice cream, PLASTIC LITTLE and the global destruction of mankind by biological weapons. (And the way some bread gets soggy so when you bite into your sandwich or hamburger there's that gloppy soggy mass of meat juice flavored goobread that bursts like a pustule in your mouth when your tongue hits it making you think you have accidentally bitten into a dew-covered lichen colony. I really hate that.)

There are things about the anime industry that I find are either unique to it or very difficult to find in the animation industry in other parts of the world. While I would like very much to spend some time working in other parts of the world, like perhaps New Zealand, I am not sure that I would be able to find something I would like to do. (Unless someone in a place, say like New Zealand, was to form a new animation studio where they wanted to do things a new way.)
I really like the amount of creative freedom that an anime director is allowed. Most of the time, the sponsors don't stick their noses too deep into production and that allows the creators to do more creative and interesting things. As I have said before many times in this column, the more the sponsors and producers stick their noses in, the more contaminated and awful the show will be. There are, of course, specific issues that need to be handled that the creative team may have overlooked. There are also times when it would be better if the creative team would have been better managed by the producers so they would not have created something that has no real ending and where all the various threads of the story did not come together and where the audience was left totally clueless as to what the heck all those oddly shaped destructive things were coming for and what would happen to mankind since that incredibly wimpy slackboy couldn't even manage to figure out that he should have killed his psychotic father back in episode 13 and well, you get the picture.
So that freedom does come at a price and it takes a long time for Those in Charge to be willing to entrust someone with that freedom.
Along with that freedom comes something else that is very important to me (being an egotist) and that is the auteur theory of making animation. The dictionary defines auteur as "A filmmaker, usually a director, who exercises creative control over his or her works and has a strong personal style". In other words: One person controls the whole thing. No committees, no 12 scriptwriters, no animators taking control and doing scenes the way they decide they should be done rather than the way they were storyboarded, no other directors who dilute the personal vision of the main director.
Without being able to express yourself through your work you are not an artist. A director who directs according to somebody else's rules, or who directs according to someone else's direction is not really directing, he is managing. (This has been gone over so many times before in film discussions that it's not worth explaining further.) I feel that the director of a show should be allowed complete and total freedom to do the show any way he wants. If you don't want him to do what he does then hire a different director! If nobody will direct it the way you want then direct it yourself. (Producers directing = disaster on the way.) If you know nothing about construction and hire some a company to build you a new house, you don't go to the site every day and tell them what to do. If they do listen you get a house with 30 doors, 1 window, no load bearing walls and a garage that opens into the kitchen—which is on the second floor. No. You research the work that various companies have done, choose the one who does what you feel is the best, discuss it with them and then let them build the house.
So, anyway, to bring this back to my almost-nonexistent point, I can have the chance to totally control a show here where I probably would not in the US. I definitely would not have control in the case of a film. Disney makes wonderfully successful films but I can't say that I would have wanted to work on any of their more recent films. It's not that I hated them but that I would have been one tiny voice, lost in the crowd. That would be OK if I was building a space shuttle or a bridge or a pyramid but I make animation, not monuments.
I want to express myself through the work I do. I want to tell stories and entertain people with the hope that we can all learn something together. The producers and sponsors and companies perhaps feel that creation by committee is safer and less likely to go in a direction that they don't like and that their viewers may consider "wrong" or "dangerous". Perhaps you say, "Well, they're spending 60 million dollars on a film and that's a lot of money—3 times the cost of PRINCESS MONONOKE." My immediate answer to that is, "Yeah, well Cameron spent a little more on TITANIC and that was very much an auteur film and I'd say that it worked out pretty well". It's hard for me to justify the complaint that investors will not trust a single director when they do trust single people to run companies and make very expensive live action films. Then they always say that it's different for live action films. Which brings me to my next reason.
Content. It is not very likely that I could produce a show with the content that I would like to from the U.S.. I like dramatic episodic series. There are dramatic series like BATMAN and SUPERMAN and others on the air but most of them are based on existing popular materials rather than original works. I know I could produce a show that would be acceptable to the average viewing audience in the U.S. but I probably would have to create it in Japan and export it because it would be very hard to get the interest and investment in a show with no pre-existing comics or movies or something. There are companies who would broadcast it and companies who could produce merchandise and such but finding a company that is willing to develop it would be another matter entirely. It would be difficult to develop a TV show like GUNDAM or EVANGELION or COWBOY BEBOP at a U.S. company. It's not that they can't—they definitely have the resources and money and the creativity. (Maybe not the experience in directing that way.) If that changes, I would be interested in being part of the change. Especially if it was at a company is a really nice place. (Say, like New Zealand for example.)
I don't really like cartoons—TOM AND JERRY, WOODY WOODPECKER— very much. (Now there's a statement that will generate a lot of hate mail.) I'm not saying that they're inferior, they're just not really interesting to me. I've always been drawn to more dramatic shows perhaps best exemplified by (the original) JOHNNY QUEST. While I really like to watch THE SIMPSONS, it is not something I would like to work on. Although they are amusing I would not feel fulfilled working on SOUTH PARK or something like REN AND STIMPY, either. I don't just work on a show as a job, I dedicate my life for that time to it. I want to dedicate that time, to spend what little bit of life I may have, on something that I feel enhances not only me and my bank account but as many of the viewers as possible. (Sure, I've worked on plenty of junk but when you're working your way up there isn't a lot of choice. The key is to get to the point where you can make a choice.)
(When the Cartoon Network first came on in Japan all they had were old Hanna Barberra cartoons and after looking at it for a little while I thought, "Gee, watching The Can Opener Channel—24 hours of non-stop people opening cans—would be better and more intellectually stimulating than this.")
A lot of the creative work for U.S. television animation is being done overseas and it is very diluted and dull to me. Some of it has the feel of being just thrown together and dumped on the air with no consideration about quality or interest in the characters or the story. The quality of stories in American TV animation has risen but the animation quality has fallen. I can't stand it when we have to get our inbetweens or painting done at animation factories but I can't imagine working on a show where the keys and layouts and all the creative work is out of my hands. That would be frustrating and depressing beyond belief.
But I also intensely dislike the Young/Junior/Kids thing. TINY TOONS, JAMES BOND JUNIOR, OZ KIDS, and all of those shows are very much the opposite of what I want to work on. (This may be because of the unreasonable rejection of my own similar but superior show concept, Young Stalin. It was the story of a gentle but misunderstood Josef Stalin when he was 6 and how society made him the way he was. It was full of humor (plenty of gulag jokes) and songs and had Dmitri the Armadillo as a cute mascot. They just weren't ready to understand it. Someday, someday.)