Ex’pression College | All Access

Emmy award-winning Guitarist, Recording Artist, and Music Composer for Albums, Television, and Film, Snuffy Walden, spoke at Ex’pression College this past fall during the quarterly Ex’pert Series.

Ex’pression College recently completed construction and installation of the new Vicon Motion Capture Performance system in the Emeryville campus.

Anime properties such as “Transformers,” “Speed Racer” and “Avatar” (the latter announced for M. Night Shyamalan to direct) may make for obvious tentpole fodder now, but the medium took decades to gain critical mass among U.S. auds.
First introduced in the 1960s via family-oriented shows such as “Astro Boy” and “Speed Racer,” Japanese anime enjoyed early popularity but limited respect among kid-driven crowds. In the following decades, sci-fi shows like “Gatchaman” and “Transformers” helped keep younger auds interested, while “Akira,” “Ghost in the Shell” and other mature anime featuring violent and sexual elements earned cult standing among adults.

By the late 1990s, anime maestro Hayao Miyazaki (already viewed as the Walt Disney of the format in Japan) began to catch on with U.S. auds. By the time his “Spirited Away” won the animated feature Oscar in 2003, major Hollywood directors were at work on live-action versions of their favorite Asian toons. What follows are the benchmarks from anime’s rise to prominence in the U.S.