I love going to the movies. The total experience - getting the ticket ripped, the massive bucket of hot popcorn, the unbelievably gigantic screen, the thumpingly loud sound system, the murmurs and whoops from the audience next to you - is something that just can't be approximated any other way. So naturally, when an anime film hits the movie theatres, I'll do anything I can to go out and see it.

I've had two opportunities to do so recently. First, there was GANTZ, the big-screen adaptation of Hiroya Oku's manga, which hit theatres in a very novel way back in January. It wasn't a traditional 35mm showing - in fact, the film was beamed to more than 300 theatres digitally. Just a couple of weeks ago I hit the Brattle Theatre in my hometown of Cambridge, MA for a double-feature of the two Rebuild of Evangelion movies - it was the only area screening of the brand-spanking-new second installment, and if I was going to see the second one, why not see the first? That screening was a technical curiosity, too - it was done not via film, but via 1080p blu-ray.

Of course, it's been years since I've seen an anime film in theatres. The last one was Satoshi Kon's wonderfully mesmerizing Paprika, and that was in 2007. Going to the movies to see anime is an occasional treat at best, so at these screenings, I found myself wondering about how the medium has fared in theatres over the years, so this time, I've decided to put it all under the microscope and see what sort of germs I can come up with.

First of all, let's make one point clear: anime was on the big screen for a couple of years before it hit the small screen. That's right, for quite some time before Astro Boy wowed kids in NBC in 1963, you could go to the moviehouse and see Japanese animation in color. Many times I've mentioned Alakazam the Great, the Journey to the West spin created by Toei and distributed here by American International Pictures. That one hit theatres in the summer of 1961, along with two other films: Magic Boy, and Panda and the Magic Serpent. In fact, all three of these films are Toei features, and they're all stylistically quite similar. You can thank producer Hiroshi Ôkawa and director Taiji Yabushita for that - the former steered Toei's animation department for years, and starting in the mid-1950s, he enacted his vision of the company competing directly with Disney, with lavish, fully-animated movies featuring fairy tales, cute animals, and lots of sing-a-long songs. Director Yabushita fulfilled Okawa's demands admirably, creating a series of colorful, fanciful films that still look and sound great today. Panda and the Magic Serpent was technically the first anime released in the United States, getting an exhibition screening on March 15, 1961 (that's right - fifty years ago this month!), but the film, along with Magic Boy and Alakazam, would hit wide release during a merry month that summer. Panda saw release courtesy of a smaller operation called Globe Corporation, but Magic Boy was shipped to cinemas by MGM, and American International put significant muscle behind Alakazam, securing the services of teen idol Frankie Avalon to sing the songs and casting comedians Sterling Holloway, Jonathan Winters, and Arnold Stang, but none of the films were a hit.

That's alright, though, because the wave of Japanese-animated films heading westward would continue the following year. Signal International made the swoop for two more Toei features, The Adventures of Sindbad and The Littlest Warrior, and dumped them into theatres during the summer. Here's where questions start to arise: why were these films always released during the summertime? Well, that's easy - it's because school was out during the summer, and you could really only get movies like these booked during the daytime, at children's matinees. See, outside of major hits like 101 Dalmatians, one could not really get a kids' cartoon film into theatres for prime-time showings - kids and family movies just weren't the unbelievably huge draw that they are now, a time when astonishing dreck like Hotel for Dogs and Chicken Little can command 7:00pm showings for weeks on end. Instead, these films would very often only be seen at 1pm and 2pm showings, and only on weekends. If you start digging through old movie posters, you'll notice this - some local handbills and promotional material will explicitly mention that the showings are "MATINEE ONLY... SATURDAY AND SUNDAY!"

These showings weren't complete humdrum affairs, either - they were carefully programmed to keep kids occupied for the entire afternoon, so a single matinee show might involve a couple of crummy old cartoons, some sort of funny made-for-kids documentary short, one of those Republic serials, and one (or maybe two!) main features. As TV ascended, the demand for these screenings waned, but in their heyday, they were a great way to keep kids busy and theatres filled during otherwise dead time. To an animation nerd like me, they were doubly important, because the demand that fueled them also constantly sought new cartoons, and American studios couldn't always keep up. It's that demand that brought us imports of oddball feature films like France's The Curious Adventures of Mr. Wonderbird and the Belgian Pinocchio in Outer Space. It also brought us 1963's Little Prince and the Eight-Headed Dragon, another Toei stunner based on one of Japan's earliest myths, and 1965's Gulliver's Travels Beyond the Moon.