Idols in Anime: IDOLM@STER Edition

I’m one of the lucky few people in the world whose job it is to watch anime, and I’ve been checking out THE IDOLM@ASTER, a series based on a popular game about cute girls trying to make it in Japan’s professional JPOP idol world. Anime has a long history of stories about girls becoming idols going all the way back to Super Dimensional Macross (which turns 30 years old next year, by the way), when Lynn Minmei rode the general wave of JPOP idols in the 80s to become the first “anime” idol singer, though she would not be the last. THE IDOLM@STER is a fun anime that deconstructs both idol groups and what makes them tick as well as moe characters in general. In the first episode, the new manager asks the girls why they want to be idols, and he records each girl’s answer. “It looks like a lot of fun!” came one girl’s reply, followed by “I want to sing…that’s all,” and “I don’t know, I just always yearned to become an idol someday, ever since I was a child.” I’ll keep watching this show and see how it all unfolds.

Idol culture crosses over with anime quite often.