I’ve been sucked out of anime for the past year and couldn’t figure out why. Why I, whose namesake has been immortalized in a web domain, could ever not have anime be a part of my life. At one point it was inconceivable, but was slowly becoming reality.

So I searched for the reasons why. Could it be because the US anime market was becoming oversaturated with mediocre licenses? Did the introduction of manga segment the US audience? Could the high price point start to have negative impact on the market? or maybe it’s the fact that CGI animation just doesn’t produce the allure of traditional hand-drawn animation? The answer is yes, to all of these, in various fluctuating states of importance.

But then it hit me the other day. I am currently watching two series – The Guyver from the late ’80s/early ’90s, and the recent Samurai Champloo. Both series are very different. Guyver is a product of its hyper-violent time period, whereas Samurai Champloo is from a more hip, mature, transculture environment. But the common denominator is there, and to borrow a common phrase that’s been attached to anime, it’s “animation for adults.”

There was a several-year drought where anime wasn’t “disguised” for US audiences. See, I was raised by Battle of the Planets, Star Blazers, and Speed Racer back in the late ’70s. But it wasn’t until Voltron and Robotech in the early ’80s that anime made it back in the US. In each series, some more than others, there are root elements which were for a more mature audience. Star Blazers was a space opera, with running storylines and complex characters; Robotech carried on this tradition. But they were all marketed to the US as “cartoons” and shown in the traditional children’s programming blocks.

In the late ’80s and early ’90s, Japan again cracked the US market because anime was different. It was the complete opposite of Disney or Hanna-Barbera – hand-picked anime aimed toward adults, rich with sex and violence. It took a production with the magnitude of a Vampire Hunter D, or Urotsukidoji, or Wicked City, to recapture the attention of wayward fans and introduce new ones to the medium.

OVAs, which were primarily licensed back then, were short runs of about 45 minutes per episode; theatrical releases were one shot productions around two hours. Because of these short runs, they could span a limited number of VHS tapes. The advent of the DVD format provided a cost-effective way to mass-market full television series to the US – generally twenty-six episodes of anime, spanned across six to eight DVDs, which were cheaper to produce and easier for retailers to carry. Thus, this is when things started to go wrong for anime.

Why do I dare say this is where it went wrong? The golden age of anime where you can walk into nearly any video store and peruse tens if not hundreds of anime releases, spanning multiple genres? The time when anime finally received mainstream acceptance and maximum penetration? Because as the flood gates for licenses opened, we got a lot of anime that necessarily didn’t fall into our perception of anime. Anime to the US was blood and guts and sex, with mature themes and complex storylines. Anime was not cute little girls with wings, or girl robots who did nice things for people and picked flowers, or harem comedies, etc. Whether these types of shows had always existed, or if Japan saw the potential for international licensing and merchandising for a younger demographic and made the transition during the influx to the US, I can’t answer that. And for the record, putting boobs on a girl robot does not constitute a “mature” anime.

Granted, not all anime has to be focused on blood and guts and sex. But if they do not carry mature themes, what constitutes the differences between anime and american cartoons? That’s where The Guyver has its appeal, along with Samurai Champloo. That’s also what gives shows like Berserk, Battle Angel Alita and Neon Genesis Evangelion their appeal as well. Again, to reiterate, it’s “animation for adults”.

So enough about where anime went wrong, let’s talk about how anime went right. Samurai Champloo, from the same director as Cowboy Bebop, is an example of how anime should be made – comedy, action, violence, for adults who get it. In addition, it follows the Quentin Tarantino school of filmmaking. New York Times film critic Elvis Mitchell wrote about how Tarantino was the modern day equivalent to the mix tape; where we as high schoolers used to compile our favorite songs on to a 90-minute cassette tape to show off to our friends, Tarantino essentially does the same with his films, taking all the best bits from his favorite films and mixing them into a cohesive package. Kill Bill is the quintessential model for this.

Samurai Champloo follows this model wisely. It combines Japanese history with modern day action and comedy, and the gum sticking everything together is hip-hop culture and music. Brilliant, absolutely brilliant. It may not be mature in the sense of its individual elements, like being overly violent or pornographic, but it has elements that when mixed together give it a feeling that is far wiser and sophisticated than the droves of anime that came before it. Bebop also followed this model, and I feel it had more substance than Champloo but less of its style, but personally I think each series benefits because of it.

So where can anime go from here? Less cute, more cool. Approach each production as a big mix tape and apply the cool elements to a central theme. I’m not talking genre-bending here, but try to fit elements that are not natural to the genre or medium. For example, without the use of Pillows music as the soundtrack to FLCL, it would have been just another Abenobashi. Keep in mind a more mature audience with its pulse on the world. Any or all of these things will help progress anime and shake their perception as “cartoons” as they are quickly again being tagged.

It’s about time anime grows up with its audience.