The 69-minute film, shown at various film festivals prior to its DVD debut, notes how some of the earliest Japanese television animation, notably Speed Racer (Mahha Go Go Go, 1967) and Kimba the White Lion (Junguru taitei, 1965) had wide exposure in America during those pre-cable, pre-VCR days when children had far fewer viewing choices and became engrained in the American pop culture consciousness. The appeal of these shows, which had more adult (if still melodramatic) scripts and striking artwork contrasted sharply with bland American television animation (as dominated by Hanna-Barbera). By 1977, according to the documentary, anime fandom began rearing its head as an offshoot of larger sci-fi and comic book conventions.

By the 1980s, fans were trading videotapes with pen pals in Japan and anime fans in the United States were getting together for anime marathons, even drafting Japanese pals to sit in at parties to simultaneously translate bootlegged tapes. Meanwhile, Harmony Gold producer Carl Macek recognized the potential of legitimately licensed anime in a more mainstream American market, syndicating Robotech in 1984, using raw footage from a Japanese show he acquired, Super Dimension Fortress Macross (Chojiku yosai Macross, 1982). The program was hugely successful, the Pokemon of its day, and threw open the gates for the anime boom to follow, especially after Macek formed his own distribution company, Streamline Pictures, and Robert Woodhead formed AnimEigo, to distribute English-dubbed and -subtitled editions of anime directly to both middle-America and hard-core anime fans. Cable and home video technologies further fueled the anime boom, and the Internet explosion of the 1990s - of which anime fans were among its pioneers - continued to drive it even faster.

Otaku Unite! does a good job explaining how all this evolved. The filmmakers managed to license choice film clips from many seminal shows, no small feat at a time when even major studios are loathe to pay the big money asked for even the briefest of film clips. The film indirectly touches upon another subculture of sci-fi/fantasy fandom, Japanese giant monsters (kaiju eiga) and live action special effects films, with a long opening segment on "Kaiju Big Battel" (sic), a bizarre but apparently popular meshing of guys in rubber suits with amateur wrestling. The segment is colorful but plays tacked-on and is utterly disconnected from the rest of the film.

Macek and Woodhead are interviewed at length, along with anime pioneers like Peter Fernandez (Speed Racer) and historians like Fred Patten, Frederik L. Schodt (author of Manga! Manga!), Gilles Poitras (The Anime Companion), and Helen McCarthy (The Anime Encyclopedia). The latter are especially important because Otaku Unite! often seems more the product of anime fans as opposed to Trekkies which, while sympathetic to Trekkies/Trekkers, clearly was made outside the box.

Less successful are its efforts to ride the same goofy appeal of Trekkies and its sequel with its portraits of extreme fans. Otaku Unite! acknowledges how anime has essentially "taken over the geek culture," illustrating this by focusing on one unfortunate and unblinking fan who dreams of becoming a voice-over artist and longs to win a costume/talent contest but is obviously ill-suited for either. Trekkies seemed to hold a genuine affection for all but its most extreme eccentrics, taking care to note how many Star Trek fans went on to celebrated careers as astronauts, engineers and the like, and that even those who "live" Star Trek 24/7 could do worse than model their lives after the optimistic, tolerant, and science-based culture the Star Trek universe advocates.

Otaku Unite! takes itself more seriously, the effect being that the genuinely hardcore fans and their goofball ways feel as if they're being thrown to the lions, while some of the convention organizers come off as clique-ish and proprietary. (One topic that's addressed though not explored as much as it might have is how anime like Pokemon and the work of Hayao Miyazaki have entered the American mainstream - and how some anime fans feel threatened that their "private" passion is fast-becoming widely accessible to all.)

Not surprisingly, the film offers a few choice oddballs and startling anecdotes, like the death threats Macek began receiving once anime fans learned that Robotech didn't necessarily reflect the Japanese show from which it was adapted. Or the female anime fans who meet to exchange underground manga and tapes depicting male anime characters engaged in hardcore gay sex.

Video & Audio

Otaku Unite! was shot on digital video and presented in its original full frame format. The image is fine and the stereo sound up to professional standards. There are no alternate audio or subtitles options, though the DVD is all-region.

Extra Features

Otaku Unite! has the kind of supplements that will appeal to anime fans in a big way but no one else. Otaku Unite Premiere Coverage, for example, runs 14 long minutes and was shot by film students covering the film's debut at the Philadelphia Film Festival. It tries to be jokey but is merely geeky and insufferable.

More sober are the 16 minutes of Philly Live News Coverage, "courtesy of WYBE" (as superimposed dead-center over the entire segment), a local talk show featuring an interview with director Eric Bresler, who also discusses the film on an audio commentary track. Also included are a series of Kaiju Big Battel commercials, a trailer, and a photo gallery

Parting Thoughts

Otaku Unite! is mildly amusing but very informative and a documentary those less familiar with the anime boom will appreciate, while hard-core anime fans will likely find it an entertaining tribute.

Stuart Galbraith IV is a Kyoto-based film historian whose work includes The Emperor and the Wolf - The Lives and Films of Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune and Taschen's forthcoming Cinema Nippon. Visit Stuart's Cine Blogarama here.