East, Meet West: A History of Inspiring Hollywood

It was a Czech writer, Karel Capek, who invented the term "robot," and American and European filmmakers who pioneered movies that imagined space travel, future societies and wars of the worlds. Yet Japan rapidly adapted and refined such fictional science, much as it did the West's real technology. Today, American action and sci-fi movies are heavily influenced by their Japanese counterparts.

Among the most conspicuous recent examples are Quentin Tarantino's two "Kill Bill" films, which include a Japanimated chapter, and "The Matrix" trilogy, with its anime-like design sense and its very Japanese portrait of a highly regulated technocratic society. Although "The Matrix's" combat scenes rely on the innovations of Hong Kong's film industry -- which has increasingly overlapped Japan's in recent years -- much of the sensibility was translated from the Japanese. The movies' directors, brothers Andy and Larry Wachowski, even commissioned a companion piece, "The Animatrix," a group of short films made with some of anime's leading creators.

The futuristic visions of anime and manga have some distinctively Japanese characteristics. World War II's atom- and fire-bomb attacks have left an enduring interest in massive cataclysms and devastated cityscapes. Although technology is sometimes depicted as a threat to mankind, Japanese sci-fi often eagerly anticipates a not-so-human future, with large populations of robots, androids or cyborgs. When manga pioneer Osamu Tezuka created "Metropolis," a 1949 comic inspired by Fritz Lang's 1927 "Metropolis" -- one of the first films to feature a robot character -- he revealed a characteristic sympathy for mechanical life forms. The story, which became an anime film of the same name in 2001, replaced Lang's exploited proletarians with oppressed robots. (Ridley Scott's 1982 "Blade Runner," also heavily influenced by Japanese culture, shows a similar rapport with its "replicants.")

Some of the most-loved robots of modern time appear in the six "Star Wars" films, which show substantial Japanese influence. In fact, R2-D2 and C-3PO were derived from the comic-relief sidekicks in Akira Kurosawa's 1958 "The Hidden Fortress," made long before the anime boom. In this case, an American director transformed human characters into mechanical men, proving that it's not only Japanese storytellers who sometimes decide that the most likable people are robots.

-- Mark Jenkins