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What is "anime"?

(AH-NEE-MAY)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anime

What is "Animania"?

(AH-NEE-MAH-NEE-AH)

Animania is the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor campus) Japanese Animation Film Society. Animania is a not-for-profit student group that is dedicated to showing anime to the masses free of cost in its original Japanese dialogue with English subtitles, sometimes subtitling the shows themselves. The organization was technically formed in the mid-80's and reached its peak in the late 90's. I have had the priviledge of attending Animania's monthly screenings since '93 as both audience and staff (they somehow convinced me to be the president for a while). In that time, I have watched Animania grow from a relatively obscure group (40-60 members) to a club that was (for a while) unofficially recognized as one of the largest and best in North America (450+).

I have also witnessed the club's focus change rather dramatically. In the beginning, the audio and video quality usually wasn't very good, but the audience put up with it because anime (and Animania) was "special"--the lineup consisted of shows that wouldn't see the light of day in the U.S. for many years, if ever. Unfortunately, anime went mostly unappreciated during that time because most of the screening-goers were college males who wanted to see "eechi" and "giant robot shows," and they often made non-anime watching folk believe that's all there was.

In the mid-to-late 90's, the audio-visual quality got a lot better (thanks in large part to the digitial media revolution), and it became much easier to obtain cutting edge material. Although anime was coming to U.S. shores more frequently at this point, it was still taking long enough that anime clubs everywhere, for the first time, had more hit material on hand than they had time to show. The word got out that anime had more to offer than porn and mecha, and suddently, anime audiences everywhere became more family oriented. Animania slowly embraced its more diverse crowd, and changed its playlist accordingly to milk the imminent anime boom for all it was worth.

Unfortunately, the boom did come. Anime hit the American mainstream hard circa the millennium, and Animania lost much of its non-college student appeal when it could no longer present cutting edge shows that wouldn't be available at BestBuy or Target within a few months--a problem that plagues all such clubs, I'm sure. Luckily, the digital subtitlers appeared in mass soon afterward, giving anime clubs a little extra lead time before the shows were picked up for U.S. release. Although anime is no longer special as it once was, Animania is still doing its thing to this very day, and is doing a great job, especially when one considers the current state of anime.

A little random trivia about Animania: Looking at the name of the club, one might think it should be pronounced with a long second "a," i.e., the word "mania." While that was indeed the original intent of the club, when the name was officially printed, the wrong katakana character was used to represent the "may" sound, leading to the current "mah" pronunciation we all know and love.

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