How I Learned to Listen to Anime

I was first introduced to Japanese anime like many other adolescent boys lucky enough to grow up in the 90s: through the operatic machismo of Dragon Ball Z, broadcast weekday afternoons on Cartoon Network’s Toonami. And while the score was fully orchestrated, replete with a studio drum kit, electric guitar, and brass stingers, the English-dubbed spectacle only fleetingly captured my juvenile aural attention.

It wasn’t until Joe Hisaishi’s score to Spirited Away (2001) that I realized just how powerful music can be, specifically how a soundtrack aids an image track in storytelling. I was eight years old, and I remember being swept up in the magical world of Japanese folklore and Shinto imagery, as well as the general humanity of Hayao Miyazaki’s eighth feature film. It was a masterpiece that held the title of Japan’s highest-grossing film for nearly two decades and later became the first hand-drawn, non-English-language animated film to win the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. While the animation and imagination of Hayao Miyazaki are legendary, Spirited Away would not have been as culturally powerful as it was without Joe Hisaishi’s iconic score. Today, the Impressionist-esque quartal and quintal harmonies of “One Summer’s Day” still churn within me a nostalgia for the pure exhilaration of falling in love before hormones kicked in.

That’s the movie that got me hooked on anime, and perhaps more specifically, that’s the score that got me listening to soundtracks.

Similar to my fascination with the literary world of Roald Dahl (I voraciously consumed each of his novels one by one in my youth), I made it my prepubescent prerogative to watch each Miyazaki-Hisaishi collaboration, one of cinema’s greatest filmmaking duos, right up there with Hitchcock-Herrmann and Spielberg-Williams.

I went on to Castle in the Sky (1986), whose male protagonist is a trumpeter. The trumpet tune Pazu plays for his domesticated pigeons each morning sounds almost primordial, with the same iconic simplicity as Jeremiah Clarke’s The Prince of Denmark’s March or Henry Purcell’s Trumpet Tune & Air.

The score that perhaps pays the least amount of rent in the minds of younger millennials and older Gen Z is the whimsical yet somewhat sobering waltz “Merry-Go-Round of Life” from Howl’s Moving Castle (2004).

According to the New York Times, Hisaishi now sells out arenas, and it’s not hard to imagine why.

But as I matured, so did my taste in anime. In college, I binge-watched Cowboy Bebop, which also had its American debut on Cartoon Network’s adult programming block, Adult Swim. Each of the series’ 26 episodes is as thrilling to watch for its space-noir, action-packed fantasy violence as it is to listen to for Yoko Kanno’s enchanting, multi-genre score. Every episode begins with the jazz anthem “Tank!,” a nod to the bebop of the anime’s title.

Explosive, high-energy rhythms could seamlessly give way to the hypnagogic tribal soundscape of “Space Lion.”

Or, during a montage of a character’s life flashing before his eyes as he plummets to his death, he and the viewer ostensibly listen together to the churchlike motet “Green Bird.”

While everything up until this point has been an example of music accompanying or being inspired by the image track in anime, that relationship is reversed in stories centered around classical music, namely Your Lie in April and the live-action adaptation of Nodame Cantabile. In fact, the musical references are so strong in these stories that you can even hear the music in their literary origins: the source manga.

With the rise in popularity of anime in the United States in recent decades, reflected in events like the Los Angeles Anime Expo or San Diego Comic-Con, Western musicians have increasingly collaborated with Asian animators and animation studios to produce their own anime music videos (AMVs), like Daft Punk’s Interstella 5555, Britney Spears’ “Break the Ice,” and Pharrell Williams’ “It Girl.” Here, the relationship reverses again: instead of music accompanying the image track, the image track is created to accompany the music.

Filmmakers and media moguls have known that music is essential to visual storytelling, as evidenced by the Academy Awards introducing its first award for film scoring in 1935. And in that tradition, music in anime only heightens the stakes, furthers the plot, and cements the sonic world in which our own imaginations can wander.