Site Index | Blog What's New? Review List Stuff Review Outline Why Hate Anime? Wheat RoD: The TV Haibane Renmei Teen Titans Chaff Akira Legend of the Overfiend Black Heaven Okay, just real quick, I know that Teen Titans isn't anime. I'm well aware of that fact. It's not even on the fence like The Animatrix; it's a full-fledged American cartoon, through and through to the bone. I am not, however, betraying the initial goals of this website (ie: to review anime) by randomly tossing domestic toons into the mix; there is a very clear reason Titans belongs here, and it all goes back to Pokémon. Or Digimon, or Beyblade, or YuGiOh, or any of their ilk. Anime is becoming very, very mainstream with kids. Specifically anime designed to sell as many trading cards or plastic tops as possible. It was a few years ago (right after they started playing Pokémon on Cartoon Network) that I realized that it wouldn't be long before American cartoons started taking notes. I postulated we'd start to see American studios churning out cartoons that were increasingly rooted in the realms of anime. Teen Titans is the first step that caught my eye. A small step to be sure, but they'll get bigger with time. Though the show is based on characters from DC comic books, and the art style is largely of the generic domestic variety, and the plots and pacing are essentially the equivalent of any other action-based cartoon you can think of... there is no denying that Teen Titans very deliberately borrows a few pages from the anime textbook. Characters: Teen Titans is comprised of five teenage superheroes, and I love every one of them. Robin gets to be the leader because he has the spikiest hair. The leader of the team is Robin (Natural Scrapper [martial arts / super reflexes]). Though the least "super" out of the five, Robin has the biggest ego. I can distinctly envision the first time the Titans got together, and Robin saying "Okay, I get to be leader because I've worked with Batman." Not that he doesn't have a point; Batman is awesome. Robin's powers include an all-purpose utility belt, spikey hair and a cape. Quintessential big guy is Cyborg (Technology Tanker [invulnerability / super strength]... with a gun-arm), a fun-loving and athletic young man stuck in a robot's body. Cyborg's job on the team seems to be to start arguments, which he is more than capable of doing. He's locked in a never-ending battle with Robin over the role of alpha male, and a constant prank-war with Beast Boy. Cyborg's powers are a glowing red eye, super neutrino blaster cannon, and sassy black 'tude. Comic relief is usually provided by Beast Boy*, a sickly little green elf with a quirky sense of humor. As the least mature member of the team it is Beast Boy's job to constantly get into trouble and make snide comments about his teammates. At least once per episode Beast Boy is required to transform into an animal and charge at the villain, only to have the villain to dodge out of the way, thus resulting in the hapless Beast Boy crashing into a stack of garbage cans. Beast Boy's powers are shapeshifting, sharp teeth, and being a vegetarian. The insurmountable task of playing straight-man in a team of goofballs falls to Raven (Magic Defender [force field / dark blast], almost to the letter). Raven is mopey and creepy, usually withdrawn except for the occasional sharp-tongued retort, and completely devoid of any real emotion. She views her teammates with the sort of morbid fascination one might watch clown wrestling. Raven's powers are channeling her pent-up emotions into swirls of dark energy, chanting cool magic words, and having a jewel on her forehead. Expressions like this are usually against the rules, but Starfire gets a free pass because she's an alien. The character I was most impressed with the first time I watched the show, however, was Starfire (Mutation Blaster [energy blast / energy control]). Both the initial previews for the show and my personal biases in how cartoon teams should be built led me to believe Starfire was a typical ditz/airhead/prissy princess character, but that isn't the case. While she is a princess, her role on the team is that of the curious outsider. As an alien who came to Earth just recently, Starfire turned out to be naive and innocent but charming at the same time. Sometimes she tries to fit in with her teammates and gets it wrong (like when she think she's drinking a tasty orange beverage but is actually drinking mustard), and sometimes she tries to foist her alien traditions on the rest of the cast (such as making everyone eat "the pudding of unhappiness" when Cyborg temporarily leaves the team). All five characters are likable (though not instantly so; I had to let Cyborg and Robin grow on me a while) and play off of each other nicely. Like all American cartoons Teen Titans was required by law to do a body-swap episode, using Raven and Starfire as the unwitting victims. This actually turned out to be my favorite episode to date; I was astounded by how much I learned about these two characters and how much they came to know each other during that short 22 minutes. I'm not used to that kind of depth in a cartoon series. Story: Well above average for a domestic cartoon series... especially one targeted at kids. Titans tends to be a fairly episodic show (though there are longer story arcs thrown in here and there for good measure) in the sense that last episode generally does not flow into next episode. A typical episode "Hold it right there! Don't make me bust out the Search Snakes!" of Titans spotlights one of the characters to develop. Said character's problem(s) inevitably balloon into something the entire team has to tackle, with lessons learned all around. As I'm sure you've gathered just from the brief character descriptions above, there's been an episode about Starfire coming to grips with her insecurity about being an outsider, one with Beast Boy learning not to play mean tricks, one with Raven learning to open up to her friends... and around and around we go. But here's the kicker: out of the twenty-ish episodes of Titans I have seen to date, I have not seen a single one in which the Titans are simply thrown against a villain, and roll credits. The Titans are always personally invested in their struggles, at least a little. One of the worst things a superhero cartoon can do, in my opinion, is to just set the heroes up against a villain for some generic reason and let the fireworks fly. Titans is about more than the super powers its stars weild, which means the show is always interesting to watch. The pacing of the series is wholly American; this is not where the anime-ish liberties have been taken. There are no flashback episodes which flash back to flashbacks about flashbacks, no dull "plot-grind" episodes where nobody fires a shot or throws a punch, no bogging love-angst that stops the flow of the series in its tracks. Every episode is just good clean solid fun. Animation: Now here's where we get to the Japanishness. Right out of the gate the art style has a very slight hint of anime to it (though it's mainly a slightly less realistic blend of typical DC cartoon fare), what with the pointed chins and glistening eyes and big fat mouths. Er, and let us not forget Robin's hair. What really lights the fuse are the animemotes peppered throughout the series; sweatdrops, gushing waterfall eyes, mouths that could swallow a canteloupe, sudden spurts of chibi-itis... it's all here. These sudden hiccups in animation style are spread randomly through the series... some episodes are very sparse while some break them out almost non-stop. Sometimes it's a mild effect (such as Raven blushing bright-orange cross-hatches across her cheeks) and sometimes it's gargantuan (such as spontaneous thought-bubbles full of chibi versions of the Titans), but the effect always tips its Wile E. Coyote would be so proud. hat to anime. As mentioned earlier, the Titans have the spotlight of the show at all times. This has the unfortunate side effect of generic and sometimes boring-looking settings and villains. Thunder and Lightning, for example, look like hilariously bad Mega Man robots dressed in pajamas. They're not terrible, per se... definately of good enough quality for bit parts in one episode of a cartoon series... they just look like they lack imagination, a contrast which really shows through, since the five main players are overflowing with it. Culture Shock: American comic book stars (well, they were stars back in the early 80s anyway) in an American cartoon that is largely similar to an already well-established American superhero cartoon formula. That should be six hamhams, hands down. I only knew two of the Titans before my first viewing (Robin and Cyborg... and I had only heard of Cyborg), but nobody took any getting used to. Each character played out their very familiar role in an almost cookie-cutter fashion, which was very comfortable for me. The stories, the fights, the action... nearly everything about Titans is just as American as apple pie. However, the out-of-place anime-style wild takes merit a half-a-ham at least. (There were so many hyphenated words in that sentence it's almost embarassing.) They were very irksome at first, but over time I came to terms with them. I've found solace in the fact that Titans is supposed to be a fairly cartoonish world (as opposed to Batman or Justice League, anyway) and as such it's going to slip on the silly hat once in a while. I've even grown quite fond of chibi-style Raven; there's just something about a superdeformed goth that I find overwhelmingly amusing. Taste the rainbow. The other half-a-ham is the fault of Puffy Ami Yumi, the bubblegum J-pop duo who performs Teen Titans' opening theme song. Now, it's not to say the song is bad; I've learned to like it after a time, even though at first it was sandpaper on the brain. If the phonetically-pronounced English version weren't strange enough, though, once in a while the series forgets what country it's in and sings the song in Japanese. And lo, now Puffy Ami Yumi has their own cartoon, which is just another notch or two down the "trying to be anime" scale from Teen Titans... which means I've come full circle with this review. The reason I decided to review Teen Titans isn't only because I like the show... there are dozens of great cartoons which will never get a page devoted to them on AA (alas! Kim Possible, Powerpuff Girls, Batman Beyond, Futurama...). I'm not about to bust out a "Disney-only" section and I'll never venture a big fanboyish musing about how much I absolutely love The Iron Giant (although no less than three people have suggested I do exactly these things). Links Official Site Ugly Fansite Teen Titans Gallery IMDB Listing Teen Titans merits a mention because in the quest of an American boy seeking good anime to watch, one must be aware that American cartoons are, indeed, migrating in that direction. Not all of them, of course, and it'll never happen altogether. But increasingly we'll start to notice the eyes getting shiner, and the ears getting pointier, and the breasts getting bulgier. These are the good points, anyway; equally likely we'll start seeing the stories get more contrived, the pacing slow down to a crawl, and the animation chopped up into panning manga-esque still shots. Given that, Teen Titans takes a small step forward without actually changing the paradigm of the show. All you have to do to rinse the anime out of Titans is mute the program during the opening title and just remind yourself every time someone's eyes blank out that Elmer Fudd was pulling wild takes back in the forties. Overall Rating:

© 2005 Richard Scibbe | brickroad@gmail.com | hosted by rpgmaker.net *As of the time of this writing Beast Boy does not have a City of Heroes equivalent.