The Decade's Best Science Fiction Animation

Animation would seem to be the most natural medium for science fiction. It literally has infinite creative freedom--anything a creator can envision can be drawn and animated on screen.

Unfortunately, at least in North America, the potential of the medium in scifi has been slow in catching on. Fantasy stories and comedies have dominated American animation for decades, while science fiction has usually been a creature of live-action films. This is not to say there hasn't been a lot great live-action scifi, but it would be nice to see Hollywood really cut loose and see what it could do with animated science fiction. But the situation has improved, haltingly, in the last decade. If I'd done this list ten years ago, it would have been all Japanese anime with one exception (The Iron Giant.) I'm glad to say that this list has a number of very strong American entries, and I hope that trend continues.

And it is probably Japanese anime that has shown, and continues to lead the way, in what can be done with animated science fiction. Though the anime industry has become infamous for certain banal cliches (big-eyed schoolgirls, giant robots, tentacles...), it has also produced some truly classic works of science fiction such as Akira, Ghost in the Shell, and Cowboy Bebop. Its too bad that people in North America still tend to turn up their nose at these works simply because they're animated, because they stand shoulder to shoulder with the best live-action science fiction Hollywood has ever produced.

Now for the actual list, which includes both movies and TV series. Please keep in mind that these choices are MY OPINION only. I'm sure many people will disagree and will have their own picks, which is the way it should be. lists like this are always very subjective. Also, I haven't been able to watch everything; its certainly possible that there are some works that blow these all away that I just haven't seen.

First up are the honorable mentions. These works are all great in their own right and deserve to be seen, but lack that certain extra je ne sais quoi that could put them in my top 5.

The Incredibles (movie)
Justice League Unlimited (TV series)
Code Geass (TV series)
Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex (TV Series)
Last Exile (TV Series)

The main picks:


5. LILO & STITCH (2002): A dysfunctional little girl, still mourning the death of her parents, prays for an angel so she can have a friend. She gets the most unlikely one imaginable: a vicious, violent, super-powered monster from outer space.

There's a school of thought that science fiction has to be serious and profound, like Battlestar Galactica and Lost, to be good. I reject that outright. It not to say serious works can't be high quality, but in fiction, its much harder to make people smile and laugh than to make them frown, and takes just as smart a story. With its stylized design, sharp story, and quirkily-realized players, Lilo & Stitch has smarts in spades. From Lilo with her bizarrely skewed worldview to Stitch's gleeful vileness to the awesomely named Cobra Bubbles, the movie is an inventive, fun and character-driven romp that both sends up and greatly improves upon the science fiction monster movie.


4.THE GIRL WHO LEAPT THROUGH TIME(2006): Makoto, a 16-year old student in Japan, discovers on the verge of a fatal accident that she can literally leap backward through time. At first using her newfound ability frivolously, she finds that interfering with past events can have unpredictable and often disastrous consequences. The more she tries to correct them, the more things veer out of her control, until someone dear to her is threatened by the same accident she herself avoided. And when the source of her new power is uncovered, it brings a heart-wrenching revelation.

A much more thoughtful and intelligent take on time travel and romance than the clunky Time Traveler's Wife, this Japanese anime film is fun, intelligent, surreal, and at times profoundly moving. Too often teen-age protagonists are just stand-ins for cynical 40-year-old screenwriters, but Makoto comes across as a real 16-year-old, a tomboy who can be very cocksure one minute and very hesitant and vulnerable the next, especially when she begins to confront her first real romantic feelings. The director Mamoro Hosada very skillfully crafts his tale, allowing the heroine, and the audience with her, to take her time to react and think about developments naturally. I can count the number of truly good time travel movies on the fingers of one hand, and The Girl Who Leapt Through Time is one of those.


3. WALL-E (2008): On a future Earth choked lifeless by human garbage and neglect, one last robot spends year after year, century after century, clearing away mountains of trash long after all his fellows shut down. Slowly becoming self-aware, he longs for more from his existence, having only human junk and one lone recording of an old movie musical to guide him. Then, one day, a mysterious probe from space lands nearby...

WALL-E is the very best film created by Hollywood's very best animation studio. It has won scads of awards, even the Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation. Its been described as lyrical and enthralling, full of a gosh-wow sense of wonder that is missing too much from modern science fiction. The first half of the film, which goes almost completely without dialog, has been called as close to a true work of art that computer animation has yet come. The robots of the film come across as much more fully-realized characters than the humans that are eventually weaved into the story, and the production's attention to detail is no less than astounding. It is the best animated scifi film of the decade, and one of the best overall science fiction films ever, for that matter. A true classic.


2. PLANETES (2003-2004): By the year 2075, an economic and energy boom created by exploiting Helium-3 on the moon has allowed humankind to expand wildly into space, with many small stations, nine large orbiting colonies, and even a full scale city of a hundred thousand on the Moon. However, all that activity generates an enormous amount of orbital debris that can pose a hazard to all the new orbital real estate. Enter the Debris Section, blue-collar stiffs working out of second-hands spacecraft to clean it all up. This 26-episode Japanese anime TV series follows the lives and happenings of these spaceborn garbage collectors.

I cannot reccommend this series highly enough. I've written about it before as a Hidden Treasure Of Science Fiction. For those who love truly hard science fiction, the series is a treasure trove, showcasing very believable near-future technologies with nary a hyperdrive or giant robot in sight. It should be required viewing for would-be scifi writers just for that aspect alone. But this realism extends also to most of its cast of internationally diverse characters, treating nearly all of them with complexity and maturity. Though the series can at first seem a bit off-putting--its main female character starts off as very annoying--it quickly builds up to a number of astounding, smartly-plotted, and at times deeply affecting stories. Combining gritty realism with aspirations toward humanity's greatest hopes, this series may be the single best work of on-screen science fiction Japan has produced since Cowboy Bebop.


1. FUTURAMA (1999-present): Lowly delivery boy Fry accidentally gets frozen for a thousand years and wakes up in a very oddly skewed Thirty-First Century. Befriending cynical robot Bender and the sexy one-eyed Leela, he finds his true destiny--as a delivery boy.

Futurama is to on-screen science fiction what The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy is to literary science fiction--all at once a mainstream comedy, a tour-de force parody of all things science fiction, and a great work of imagination in its own right. I also predict it will ultimately the most long-enduring and popular work of on-screen science fiction to be produced in the last decade, live action or animated, on small screen or large. It just seems to have that kind of populist resonance, that will ensure it will be a well-remembered classic decades from now.

The first thing that stands out about the series is its wonderfully demented characters: Fry, dimwitted and hypnotized by pop culture; Leela, sexy and heroic but self-conscious about her single gigantic eye; Bender, the joyfully amoral, alcoholic robot; Doctor Zoidberg, a clueless sadsack lobsteroid; and many more. There's more detail and dimension just in many of Futurama's walk-on characters than in many works' main ones. Then there's the universe it inhabits, a vast collection of of visual-puns, gonzo scifi motifs, and skewered sacred cows. An alien race addicted to thousand-year-old Earth TV programs; space bee hives; a planet-sized retirement home; a museum that resurrects celebrities just so they can spend all eternity as heads in a jar. It is a world where literally anything can happen, where the creators' imaginations can be fully unleashed, often to highly humorous effect.

It also helps that the series has consistently had some of the smartest writing on TV. As stated earlier, comedy is harder than drama to write well, and the fact that the show so consistently hits the funny bone is proof of the quality of its scripts. Surprisingly, its not all just laughs either. Very occasionally, it waxes both profound, such as when Bender postulates the nature of God, and heart-felt, such as when Fry learns the fate of his time-lost brother and nephew. Futurama is definitely a show for the ages.

SciFi TV: Maybe Its Time To Abandon The 1-Hour Format

Recently there has been a dust-up on certain blogs and forums about the state of science fiction on TV, either a) bemoaning its quality or b) bemoaning how shows that are actually interesting, like Firefly or Dollhouse, often don't last long.

I think at least part of the remedy to both these problems can be solved with a relatively simple shift in approach: abandon one-hour shows for half-hour ones.

The idea would be attractive to networks, as half-hour shows would be cheaper to produce and invest in in the long term. They could try out twice as many ideas and approaches than they do currently, enabling them to more easily find the properties that will strike a chord with audiences and make them a profit.

And for fans, the switch would be even better in my opinion, as writers would have to cut a lot of extraneous dramatic junk that I think tends to drag down the worst of the hour-long shows. Scifi stories on TV can get leaner and meaner, focusing much more on important story elements while cutting a lot of the b-story plots used to just fill in time in hour-long episodes.

I haven't come to this conclusion in a vacuum, either. I've recently watched quite a bit of half-hour science fiction shows that easily equal anything the hour dramas have produced. Unfortunately, they weren't made in North America or even Europe. Yes, I'm talking about (gasp!) Anime.

Despite what some purist snobs in the West may think, Anime has indeed produced science fiction on par with the very best the West has produced. All one has to do is watch series like Cowboy Bebop or Planetes or Ghost in the Shell to attest to that.

That's not to say that there isn't a lot of mediocre anime out there; there is, and Sturgeon's Law (which states that the majority of anything is crap) holds true for it as for anything else. But the very best of it does demonstrate definitively that half-hour science fiction can be high-quality, mature, intelligent, and exciting. And there was nothing I saw FX-wise in shows like *Bebop* or *Planetes* that couldn't be done in live-action nowadays. It would just be a matter of finding the right pacing and approach to make such shows work, depending on the concept.

Somehow, though, there seems to be a stigma against half-hour dramas in the US. Half-hour time slots are reserved for comedies, hours for dramas, and that's the way its been for decades now. I'm not sure if that could be changed around enough to give any half-hour scifi TV show a decent chance. But then, if the show is good enough, it would find an audience no matter what.

What I'm basically saying is that if the Japanese can produce quality half-hour science fiction shows, we should be able to as well. And it would help to seriously re-invigorate a TV genre that seems stalled for some time now. Anyway, something to think about.

(Cowboy Bebop copyright Sunrise.)

Hidden Treasures Of Science Fiction: Planetes!

(I don't know why I keep putting exclamations after the titles for the 'hidden treasures', it just somehow seems appropriate.)

Planetes is a 2003 hard science fiction anime TV series that, like Cowboy Bebop before it, is quickly building up a substantial fanbase in North America mostly from sheer word of mouth about its quality. You don't even have to be an anime fan to like Planetes; its very West-friendly, features a broad cast of international characters, and like most great fiction, speaks to universal themes independent of cultural nuance.

The series begins in 2075, when an international treaty organization of space-capable nations (the US, Japan, Russia, and some European countries) have built up a substantial infrastructure both in orbit and on the Moon. The development of Helium-3 fusion, with Helium-3 mined from the Moon, has replaced the old oil economy and has led to a major financial boom among the treaty countries, allowing them to fully expand into space. Hundreds of thousands of people now live and work off-Earth.

But of course there's a downside; all that activity in space has produced a tremendous amount of debris; i.e., space junk. Today, in real life, orbital junk represents a potential hazard to space missions. Sixty plus years from now, its a primary ongoing danger to all orbital activity. So who gets the thankless job of cleaning it up?

The series focuses on a crew of these space-going garbagemen. Called 'Half Section' because they are constantly under-funded and undermanned, they go out in an outmoded shuttle and haul off rogue satellites, old space station sections, abandoned experiments, and much more for recycling.

The crew includes Hachi, the series' main character, who is a young, cynical Japanese EVA specialist. Tanabe, the female lead, is another young Japanese national and the idealistic rookie on her first day in the first episode. The pilot is American Fee Carmichael, a brash, loud chain smoker. System specialist Yuri Mihairokov rounds out the space crew, a stoic, soft-spoken Russian. There's also a small office staff, and they all get their moments to shine throughout the 26-episode run, but the focus is definitively on the crew of the garbage scow shuttle called Toybox.

Planetes shines above most other on-screen SF, both live-action and anime, Japanese or American, in two areas: depth of character and scientific accuracy. The series' great strength lies within its characters' stories and their interactions. As the series progresses, they come across as real and compelling, with both noble moments as well as petty. In other words, they act very human, and the viewer very easily can get caught up in their daily lives.

The series also gives us the most realistic representation of future space travel I've ever seen, and given all the research I've done on space tech for orbitalvector.com over the last several years, that's saying a lot. There's not a single scientific or technological gaffe that I could spot in the series. It is hard science fiction the way it should be, and reminded me in some ways of Allen Steele's Near Space series of novels, which also contemplated a very similar type of future in space. This technological accuracy greatly adds to the series' verisimilitude.

This isn't to say Planetes is perfect, however. The series' greatest weakness is its female lead, Tanabe, who is annoying in the extreme. This is especially true in the first handful of episodes where, as the rookie, the viewer is introduced to Half Section through her POV. There is nothing wrong with portraying a character as idealistic or foolish or reckless, but she takes all three to such a degree that its hard to believe the other characters would keep her around, especially after she deliberately endangers the crew more than once. In fact, of all the characters, it takes her almost until the series' very end to find any real depth. Fortunately, after the first three episodes or so, the series begins focusing less on her and much more on the its larger cast, and quickly becomes much more watchable. Planetes also relies too much on unlikely coincidences to move its plot along at times.

But if you can get past these gaffes, you're definitely in for a science fiction treat. Episodes 10, 11, ands 12 are the series highlight, in my opinion. Episode 10, focusing on Yuri's past, has an intense emotional gut-punch. Episode 11 features a wannabe space explorer from a third world country's humble program, and though he starts out as a kind of comedic character, one can't help but be moved by his underdog determination by the end. Epsiode 12 focuses on Fee and her bad habit of smoking, but her obsession turns out to be an unlikely salvation for everyone in orbit in the wake of a terrorist attack. The last third of the series focuses on a sprawling eight-episode storyline involving an expedition to Jupiter that Hachi tries to qualify for while also trying to deal with a personal crisis. This is in addition to the mounting terrorist plot to stop it. Planetes also has something very rare among not only anime, but just about all TV series as well--a pitch-perfect ending.

The complete series of Planetes is available on DVD, which you can find HERE and other outlets that sell anime products. Select episodes are also available for viewing online.