Thirty-five years ago, Japan’s entertainment industry found an answer to its problems. Still developing in the aftermath of defeat in World War II, and the subsequent restructuring plan instituted by the United States, Japan was without surplus resources. There was no money for the production of films. American films soon began invading the Japanese entertainment industry. Yet the Japanese people longed for entertainment which would reflect their own culture. And so “animation...developed in Japan to fill the void of high-budget film-making” (Marin, 69). In the years that followed, animation would take a pop-cultural foothold in Japan that has grown and transformed