Small groups of high school students from Vail and Sahuarita gather every week or two to watch cartoons, draw pictures and talk about superpowers.
The teens — about 30 from each community — are members of anime clubs at Cienega and Sahuarita highs schools, and they are plugged into a growing, multibillion-dollar industry.
Anime is a form of Japanese animation characterized by colorful, often doe-eyed characters with fantastic powers. The cartoons — and the comic books, called manga, that spawned the animes — have been popular in Japan for decades. It is only in recent years that anime has gained popularity in the United States.
In 2005, box office receipts and DVD sales from anime films were expected to exceed $5.2 billion globally, according to a June 2005 story at BusinessWeek Online. And that figure didn't include the $18.5 billion in Japan alone, for games, toys and other marketing tie-ins linked to anime characters and films.
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Anime is so popular in Japan that its best-selling manga weekly sells 3 million copies per issue — about the same number of copies that Marvel comics sells in a month, according to BusinessWeek.
For the students, though, anime's appeal transcends economics.
"Anime nurtures my budding imagination and leads me to thresholds I would not think to go alone," said Cienega senior Stacie Stempkowski, 19.
"When I go to the (anime) club it's more fun to see other kids with the same interests, and in that way it becomes less about anime and more about friends," said Sahuarita sophomore Paul Bird, 16. "Getting involved in school activities keeps my self-esteem up. I'm grateful for a school that supports teen groups like anime."
