About NipponNana

I use generative models, editing software, music tools and a frankly unreasonable number of hours to make original animated stories inspired by the Japanese OVAs, television series and films I grew up with.

The production level is inevitably that of one person working in his spare time, learning as he goes, with limited resources and tools that are still very far from predictable.

There will be imperfect shots and continuity mistakes and odd frames.

That is the technical explanation.
The real one starts much earlier.

1. The television was already on

I am Italian. I was born in the 1980s.

And before somebody discovered the urgent necessity of informing me that what I had been watching was called anime, Japanese animation had already occupied a substantial part of my childhood.

I did not discover it through a specialist shop.
I did not subscribe to some Japanese culture package.
I did not join a fandom.
I turned on the television.

One of the first shows I can remember watching was I-Zenborg.

And when I was about four, Junior TV was already showing the original Dragon Ball.

Not Dragon Ball Z. Not Super Saiyans.
Little Goku. Bulma. The yellow cloud. An enormous mysterious world somewhere beyond the next mountain.

And wonderfully, the opening I remember was still in Japanese.

I had absolutely no idea what those words meant.
So naturally I learned the song.
I couldn't have translated a single line.
But at four years old I understood it perfectly.

Goku flying away on that yellow cloud meant freedom.
Mystery.
Adventure.

There was a whole world beyond my street.
That was translation enough.

2. Then came the avalanche

• Goldrake
• Jeeg
• Daitarn 3
• Candy Candy
• Sasuke — Il piccolo ninja
• I Cavalieri dello Zodiaco
• Dragon Ball
• Ken il Guerriero
• Sailor Moon
• È quasi magia Johnny
• Lamù
• Ranma ½
• Maison Ikkoku
• City Hunter
• Nadia
• Golden Boy
• Cowboy Bebop
• BT'X
• Calendar Man
• Virtua Fighter
• Street Fighter
• Motori in pista
• Pat, la ragazza del baseball
• Jenny la tennista
• Gigi la Trottola
• Anna dai capelli rossi
• Mary e il giardino dei misteri
• Robin Hood
• Slam Dunk

And no, Sasuke is not the Naruto one, damn it.

Even Fantazoo, which for us was simply Alvaro e Camilla, appearing around dinner time with voices and expressions that became inseparable from the Italian version.

And this list is still ridiculously incomplete.

Because we are not talking about twenty or thirty Japanese shows that became successful abroad.

690

Six hundred and ninety.
At that point, “foreign influence” starts sounding a little inadequate.

For roughly thirty years we did not merely watch Japanese animation. It was woven into ordinary Italian childhood and teenage life.

After school.
At lunchtime.
Before dinner.
On Saturday mornings.
On national television and strange local stations.
On magazines, notebooks, backpacks, pencil cases, stickers and whatever questionable merchandise somebody was selling outside the school gates.

We argued about it.
Drew it.
Imitated attacks from it.
Sang the songs.
It became part of everyday culture.

This happened elsewhere too, of course. Other countries have their own histories with Japanese animation. I can only tell mine. And mine happened in Italy.

3. We called them cartoni

We did not call them anime.
We called them cartoni.
Cartoons.
That was it.

• Italia 1
• Junior TV
• Odeon TV
• Italia 7
• MTV

And whatever mysterious regional station your antenna happened to capture after ten minutes of tuning the analogue receiver, redirecting the aerial toward some unknown hill and eventually applying the traditional Italian method of electronic repair:

hitting the television harder.

Somewhere inside that static there was Japan.
Usually speaking Italian.
Often accompanied by completely Italian opening and ending songs.

Older kids had I Cavalieri del Re and that extraordinary generation of television themes. Those of us born in the 1980s practically had Cristina D'Avena's voice living permanently somewhere in our heads.

And then there were cases like I Cavalieri dello Zodiaco, where the Italian dub became almost a work of popular culture in its own right.

It wasn't merely translated.
The characters suddenly spoke this absurdly elevated, heroic, pseudo-classical Italian that turned the whole thing into something else.

Was it faithful?
That is another discussion.
Was it legendary?
Absolutely.
It became our Cavalieri.

There were a few enormous pillars in that world for me.
I Cavalieri.
Ken il Guerriero.
Dragon Ball.

Then the flood kept coming. By the 1990s Japanese animation had become so normal that you could watch Sailor Moon on mainstream television and later the same evening find Bud Spencer and Terence Hill. Or Fantozzi.

Nobody perceived some great clash of civilizations.
That was simply television.
That was Italy.

Japanese animation wasn't standing outside the culture asking for admission. It was already on the sofa.

4. Slam Dunk, and streets that were never as beautiful

Some things, however, remained unmistakably Japanese.
And strangely, those could leave the deepest impression.

Slam Dunk is one of those memories for me. When I was going to middle-school sport practice, I would walk through the streets of my little town with that opening somewhere in my head.

Those Japanese streets.
The railway.
The houses.
The light.
The sea.
That beautiful, almost ridiculously beautiful everyday landscape the characters moved through.

And I would look at my own town and try to find something resembling it.
I tried.
Really.
Sadly, my streets were nowhere near as beautiful.
And the sea was much too far away.

But that is precisely the point.
By then I wasn't merely watching those places.
I was comparing reality to them.

Nobody had taught me Japanese aesthetics.
A television opening had done it.

5. Things I knew before I knew their names

And when hundreds of these programs enter your home while you are growing up, little pieces of another place become familiar before you even know their names.

• Tatami
• Sliding doors
• Futons
• Shrines
• School uniforms
• Summer festivals
• Railway crossings
• Utility poles
• Tokyo skylines
• Residential streets
• Japanese schools
• Lunch boxes

A six-year-old does not catalogue these things anthropologically.

I remember eventually reaching Italian high school and being vaguely disappointed that my liceo looked like an apartment building where somebody had accidentally installed blackboards. My middle school, ironically, had looked much closer to the Japanese schools I had seen for years.

Somewhere inside my childhood imagination, Japan had already helped establish what a school was supposed to look like.

The same thing happened with food.
For years I saw characters eating those triangular rice things wrapped in dark seaweed.
I had no idea what they were called.
I only remember wondering why nobody around me ever cooked the damn things.

Then, years later, I finally held an onigiri.

I had never eaten one.
I had never been to Japan.
Yet somehow I already knew the object.

That distinction matters to me. I am not Japanese. I have never lived in Japan, and watching Japanese animation obviously does not give me some magical understanding of Japanese society. But neither am I approaching this visual language as something completely alien that I discovered yesterday.

A railway crossing on a summer afternoon.
An empty school corridor.
A quiet road beneath electrical wires.
Someone sitting on tatami.
Tokyo glowing at night.
A kid disappearing over the horizon on a yellow cloud while a four-year-old Italian sang along in a language he didn't understand.

These are not memories of Japan. They are memories with Japan inside them.

6. Japanese images, Italian voices

And I think that describes something particular about my generation.
Japan made the stories.
Italy imported an astonishing quantity of them.
Then Italy did what Italy does.

We dubbed them.
Renamed things.
Changed songs.
Changed dialogue.
Sometimes misunderstood them.
Sometimes arguably butchered them.
And sometimes accidentally created something wonderful in the process.

Japanese images.
Italian voices.
Japanese stories.
Italian songs.
Tokyo streets passing through a television set in a small town outside Naples.

It was obviously not Japanese culture as somebody experiences it growing up in Tokyo, Osaka or Kyoto. But after thirty years it wasn't simply an untouched foreign product either. Something had happened between the two.

A hybrid.
A strange little cultural territory somewhere between a Japanese animation studio and an Italian television antenna.
And for a few hours every afternoon, millions of us lived there.

7. The streets went quiet twice

Around 2000, the whole phenomenon reached its almost ridiculous peak. I grew up among the small towns outside Naples. There were basically two situations in which I remember the streets becoming strangely quiet.

When Napoli or Italy were playing football.
And when Goku was fighting.

Dragon Ball was on national television around lunchtime.

School ended.
Backpack down.
Lunch.
Italia 1.
Goku.
Homework somewhere further down the constitutional order.

You didn't need to find an anime community.
The community was your classroom.

Everybody already knew what had happened the next morning.
That is how completely Japanese animation had entered everyday life.

8. That was the algorithm

And I think we were incredibly lucky that much of this happened at the end of the analogue age.

Before everything became searchable.
Before recommendation systems knew what we supposedly liked.
Before every cultural interest became a market segment and every audience acquired a label.

You could discover something precisely because you had never searched for it.
Nobody had profiled four-year-old me and determined that users with similar characteristics had a 73% probability of enjoying Japanese martial-arts fantasy.

I turned on Junior TV.
There was Goku.
That was the algorithm.

9. Thank you

And this is where I should stop for a moment and say the most important thing in this entire page.

Thank you.

Really.

Thank you to the Japanese artists, animators, directors, writers, musicians, producers, technicians and everyone else who created all of it.

Most of them never knew we existed.
They could hardly have imagined what their work would become thousands of kilometres away.

A Japanese song memorized phonetically by an Italian four-year-old.
A basketball opening following another kid through the streets on his way to practice.
Characters drawn on school notebooks.
Arguments during recess.
Italian children growing up with images of places they had never seen.

Their work crossed the planet and became part of people's lives.

And thank you to the Italians who brought it here.

The broadcasters.
The translators.
The dubbing studios.
The voice actors.
The singers.
The musicians.
The people filling endless afternoon schedules on regional television stations.

And yes, even the programmers and accountants who looked around for animation they could actually afford to put on the air and discovered that Japan happened to have an extraordinary amount of it.

They probably thought they were solving a programming problem.
Instead, almost by accident, they helped create a thirty-year cultural phenomenon.

There is something beautiful about that.
Nobody designed this Italian-Japanese childhood from above.
It happened.

10. And that world is mostly gone now

I do not live in that Italy anymore geographically.
And much of that Italy no longer exists in the same form anyway.

The chaotic ecosystem of analogue television and regional broadcasters gave way to consolidation, cable, satellite, digital television, streaming and finally the giant platforms.

We gained extraordinary access.
Today I can find in seconds things I once had to wait weeks to see again.
But the strange accident that created this particular cultural world belongs to another time.

11. Where NipponNana comes from

I use generative models because these tools finally allow one person working independently to attempt animation that once required resources completely beyond my reach.

They are not magic.
They do not decide what matters to me.
They are tools.

I write the stories.
I create the characters.
I edit the scenes.
I shape the pacing.
I choose the dialogue, music, imagery and atmosphere.

And I use these incredibly new machines to chase something deliberately old.

Painted skies.
Summer haze.
Neon.
Railway crossings.
School corridors.
Impossible machines.
Melancholy.
Adventure.

Those wonderfully excessive stories that could somehow fit romance, science fiction, comedy, friendship, giant weapons and existential catastrophe into forty-five minutes and simply assume the audience could keep up.

Then, under one of my videos, a Japanese viewer wrote:

全部知らんけど全部知ってる！

I couldn't have asked for a better description.
Because that is the strange loop behind NipponNana.

The signal travelled from Japan to Italy.
It stayed with me for most of my life.
Now I am sending a little of it back.

That is why NipponNana exists.
It is my small thank-you to the people who made that childhood possible.

My way of turning the old television on again.
Adjusting the antenna.
Waiting through the static.
And trying to find that strange little place somewhere between Japan and Italy that probably never existed on any map.

I don't live there anymore.
Maybe nobody ever really did.
But to me, at least,

it feels a little bit like home.