It is one of the smaller school organizations, but is well-known nonetheless. The Anime Club meets on Wednesdays after school.
It’s a place where students get together to watch popular Japanese cartoons and make new friends or to hang out with old ones. The man behind the club, Kevin Jones, first started sponsoring it in the 2007-2008 school year when the club first started off.
For students who do not know what anime is, it is Japanese animated cartoons. It also is an art style, captured in graphic novels called manga. The thing that distinguishes manga from other graphic novels would be that manga is bound backward, and has to be read right to left instead of left to right.
Anime and manga are major parts of Japanese pop culture. Characters from anime can be found on different advertisements, such as food packaging and car commercials. An example of an anime that students may be more familiar with would be Ponyo or My Neighbor Totoro.
“I watch anime myself, and it was always in the back of my mind that if I wanted to sponsor a club, the anime club would be it,” said Jones.
After a group of three students were turned down by their own physics teacher who did not want to sponsor them and start the club, they asked Jones to sponsor them instead-Thus the Anime Club was born. Since it was founded seven years ago, different generations of anime fans have come and gone, changing the club with each new school year; and through each year, they change as a group.
“It kind of goes through phases where all the students watch the anime that is playing to doing other things while some people watch,” said Jones. “Right now they’re focusing more on the other things.”
“I like that I can hang out with my friends who are in different grades and watch anime with them,” said sophomore Hannah Casey, vice president of the Anime Club, “sometimes we play games or talk but usually we sit and watch anime.”
The Anime Club meets inside the planetarium every other Wednesday of the month after school, and is open for anyone who is interested in visiting or joining the club itself. The only requirement? “Show up,” said Jones.