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Academy offers exhibition devoted to the art of anime

Anime has yet to catch on big time for American moviegoers, but that hasn't prevented the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences from assembling a huge exhibition devoted to Japanese animation. "Anime! High Art - Pop Culture," which runs through Aug. 23 in the academy's Grand Lobby Gallery in Beverly Hills, collects 400 figurines, film clips, drawings and cels related to genre classics such as "Akira," "Dragon Ball Z," "Ghost in the Shell," "Pokemon: The First Movie," "Princess Mononoke," "Sailor Moon" and "Yu-Gi-Oh!"

"This kind of storytelling is radically different from American animation," curator Ellen Harrison says. "Anime grows out of a visual culture emanating from woodblocks, which then led to manga comics. So many adults in Japan read comic books, rather than novels, that you get a more free-associative style of narrative that American audiences aren't accustomed to."

The exhibition includes a section on Studio Ghibli, co-founded in 1985 by Hayao Miyazaki ("Spirited Away"), whom Harrington describes as "the Walt Disney or John Lasseter of anime." A special X-rated gallery has also been set aside for erotic anime.

"You have to be 18 to enter this space, where you can see the clips and figurines and art work, " Harrison says, pointing out that "Japanese culture has a lot of restraints and codes of behavior, but as far as sexuality goes, it's a much more accepted form of artistic expression, which is why you'll see animated characters having sex. In America, when Ralph Bakshi's X-rated movie 'Fritz the Cat' came out in 1972, it got pilloried. In that sense, there's less prudery in Japan."

Studios have not yet cracked the code for marketing anime to mainstream audiences. That may change when Steven Spielberg finishes his 3-D remake of the futuristic thriller "Ghost in the Shell." Harrison figures it's only a matter of time before anime goes Hollywood.

"There's this upward-trending number of kids, teens and people in their early 20s who are interested in the subject," she says. "Any American media company that looks at this fan base will realize there's a lot of money to be made. Somebody's going to figure out how to get feature films to them."

For information on the exhibition, go to www.oscars.org.

The importance of family heirlooms

In "Summer Hours," Juliette Binoche plays a restless designer tangling with relatives during a family reunion. But the real stars in this leisurely drama turn out to be an antique vase, a desk and a Bauhaus cabinet. For filmmaker Olivier Assayas, these heirlooms embody bittersweet lessons about the value of memory, place and property.

"The objects of the family legacy are charged with emotion," he says of the project, which started as a short film commission from Paris' Musee d'Orsay. "A chair and an armoire are made to participate in the lives of humans," Assayas says. "On display, they lose their meaning. I wanted to talk about how these objects have a friendly presence in the house but become almost like captives when exposed in a museum."

Expect summer box office to boom

Heading toward Memorial Day in the wake of "X-Men Origins: Wolverine," "Star Trek" and "Angels & Demons," an especially robust three-day holiday weekend is in the offing with the release of "Terminator Salvation" (opening Thursday) and "Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian" (opening Friday).

"Heavyweights usually don't go mano a mano on the same weekend," says Jeff Bock, box-office analyst at Exhibitors Relations Inc. "But the 'Terminator' and 'Night at the Museum' movies should both fare well and produce some record-breaking grosses."

This year's box office, currently 12 percent ahead of last year's numbers, is expected to experience continued momentum, Bock says.

"We're looking at the highest- grossing summer on record, possibly $4.5 billion," he says. "The previous high was $4.1 billion in 2007 and 2008. We may be looking at the best attendance on record."

That would be quite a feat, considering the current state of the economy.

When the season tally is finally totaled in September, Bock predicts that "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" will have succeeded in topping "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" to snag the No. 1 spot.

"Before the first 'Transformers' dropped two years ago, your average moviegoer was a bit gun-shy about plopping down $10 to see a film based on Hasbro's toy line," Bock says. "Not any more. Shia LaBeouf is a bona fide star." {sbox}