Word: worlds
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Tajiri preserved the world of his childhood in Pokemon. In the late '70s, the rice fields gave way to shopping centers, and the ponds were paved over to make way for apartment buildings, highways and train lines. "A fish pond would become an arcade center," he says. Pokemon, he says, is a way for children of a new generation to have a chance to collect insects and other creatures the way he did. For example, the Pokemon named Poliwhirl has a belly decorated with a little whirl--Tajiri's memory of the transparent skin of a tadpole with its coiled...
...collecting Pokemon and pitting them against one another is not a new kind of quest, simply one tweaked with technology. In Asia, fathers and grandfathers still tell of growing up in the midst of World War II, of nights of not knowing what to do with yourself except sneak into the tall grass of the countryside to catch crickets, then take them home, cupped in your hand, to raise in the dark of matchboxes, training the insects for fights with the crickets of other boys who have been on the same nocturnal hunt. The more experience each cricket...
...Nintendo had all the Pokemon pieces to play with--a fully extended product line of games, toys, comic books and cards to appeal to boys and girls from ages 4 to 15. Says Tilden: "We decided to make an all-out effort to repeat the phenomenon in the Western world." An additional part of the strategy, says Kubo, was to hide its "Japan-ness." Nintendo of America and its Japanese partners brought in Al Kahn, who developed the Cabbage Patch doll, to help with toy merchandising. "There's a little bit of magic in what Nintendo does," says Sussane Daniels...
...rest of the world, comics and cartoons have no age barrier, no height bar, no gender gap. It's the same with U.S. anime fans. "Half my customers are female," says Steven Lin, who owns the Anime Pavilion in Falls Church, Va. "And anime targets every age group, from Pokemon for kids to Neon Genesis Evangelion for teens to X-rated hentai [kinky] anime for adults...
...Studio Ghibli to release video or theatrical versions of nine films, including the anime auteur's delightful My Neighbor Totoro (about two kids who befriend a chubby forest sprite) and Kiki's Delivery Service (a cute teenage witch launches her own broom-propelled FedEx). Disney now has the world's top-three animation studios: its own unit and the computer tooners at Pixar and Ghibli...