It's not just any shrine.

The authentic period guitars, drums, even original Vox amplifiers and speakers are all propped up and ready to rock. A giant poster of four gawky young musicians leans against the wall. The set up is a memorial to the Shadows, an early '60s British instrumental combo that had hits like "Apache" and "Wonderful Life," and played backup to the likes of Cliff Richard. So what is this shrine to other-side-of-the-world nostalgia doing in the attic of a gingerbread-house studio in a quiet sidestreet off ultrahip Harajuku-dori? Ask Susumu Matsushita, caretaker of the shrine and the illustrator who, together with two co- conspirators, is revolutionizing the way that animation is produced.

The Shads were one of many formative foreign influences on the 45-year-old artist. "I had an aunt who married an American, and I often went to visit her at the U.S. military base," Matsushita recalls. "One thing I've always remembered is the American comic books in her house--I'll never forget the bright colors they used." Later on, when starting out as an illustrator he would be influenced by Robert Grossman, an American airbrush ace whose style was fashionable during the '70s.

One of Matsushita's main claims to fame is that he designed mascots for J- League teams. Before that, he was best known for his alter ego, Mac Bear, a goofy-looking character which has been featured on the cover of Japan's biggest selling manga, Young Jump, since 1978.

Like the puppetmaker Gepetto in Pinocchio, Matsushita desperately wanted to see his work come to life. But his forte is airbrush, and airbrush illustrations, with their characteristic light effects and subtle color gradations, are almost impossibly labor-intensive to animate by hand. Even Disney, whose 1939 feature version of Pinocchio was the first animated film to make extensive use of airbrush, uses the technique for backgrounds only. "I kept thinking, isn't there a better way?" says Matsushita.

Enter Takashi Sakurai, a big fan of Matsushita's work and a man with an enduring fascination for children's toys, novelties and Astro Boy, the first-ever Japanese TV animation, which premiered in 1963. In a previous incarnation--as director of marketing at toymaker Takara--Sakurai was the man who gave the world the flower rock and the dancing can. So when Matsushita and Sakurai met, it was only natural that the animator should tell the marketer of his longing to see his characters move.

As the independent-minded general manager of multimedia at the major Tokyo talent agency Amuse, Sakurai was perfectly placed to help out. The pin he wears in the lapel of his dark green linen jacket indicates support for Act Against AIDS, not allegiance to a firm. His collarless white shirt suggests connections to the world of creatives. If he were an American, Sakurai would be an independent producer. "But in Japan," he explains, "there is no such job description." You want to assemble some cash? Put some deals together? Then you had better have a solid corporate name behind you. Hence Sakurai's affiliation with Amuse, where he has worked since 1991.

Sakurai's speciality is fusion, bringing creative people together to make things happen. A couple of years ago, he introduced Susumu Matsushita to Tsuneo Maeda, an award-winning animator whose company, Group-TAC, produces cartoons for TV. His obsession with computers dates back about six years, to when Maeda acquired his first Macintosh to do some simulations. In the endless pursuit of bigger screens and more processing power, Maeda kept buying new machines. He soon discovered why Japanese Apple enthusiasts often refer to themselves as "Mac binbo" (that's "binbo" as in "impoverished").

Like Matsushita, Maeda also had a dream: to use computers to transcend the limits of conventional animation. Maeda's obsession put him on the leading edge of the revolution that is sweeping the world of animation. The advent of specialized hardware and software tools means that animators can do things that were previously impossible, like 3-D tracking shots, zooms, lighting effects and subtle color gradations, just like . . . a digital airbrush, in fact.

Maeda realized that the new technology was eminently marketable and, with an artist like Matsushita, he felt certain the dream could be fulfilled. In 1993, he and Matsushita began collaborating in the creation of a pilot for a new television show called Bit the Cupid. It took them three months to produce an animation that lasted ten minutes. (Today, the production system they built cranks out one episode of Bit every six days.) What Maeda didn't know at the time was that it would take a grueling period of one year working together in order to raise the first primitive efforts to a level that would satisfy the meticulous illustrator. "I'd been waiting a long time to do this," says Matsushita. "I wanted to do it right."

To check out what state-of-the-art animation looks like, tune in to Bit the Cupid on TV Tokyo at 7pm on Thursdays. Traditional TV cartoons like Doraemon look cheap because they're produced on a shoestring and use old technology. Bit the Cupid looks like it belongs to a different era--3D computer graphics have given it Disney-feature-quality at a price network TV can afford.

It's also enough to make a marketing wiz drool. Because digital content can be reformatted and repackaged in a dozen different ways, Sakurai was able to persuade several of Japan's biggest companies to put up US$12 million in production costs for Bit. As his first stop in the search for sponsors, Bandai was a no-brainer. The toymaker has a long history of bankrolling TV cartoon shows, including two current hits, Sailor Moon and Crayon Shin-chan. Bandai alone can slice and dice bits of Bit in all sorts of ways--dolls, overseas distribution, you name it. Other backers followed: Sony Computer Entertainment, which needed new content for its Playstation game machine (Bit the game will appear this fall), trading house Itochu, which had ambitions in digital broadcasting, and Culture Convenience Club, which is the country's largest chain of video stores.

Bit the Cupid is the very first example of what Sakurai calls "a new form of digital entertainment. It took a year to pull all the pieces together, but now that the system is up and running, Sakurai dreams of applying it to other programs with different content--maybe even movies--and selling them all over the world. Others have the same idea. Later this year, for example, Disney will release Toy Story, a 79-minute animated movie that is billed as the first computer-generated feature-length film. But for the moment at least, Sakurai and Co. have the jump on their giant U.S. rival.

Japan's most technologically advanced production line is located not in a factory, but in an overcrowded 3LDK on the third floor of a Sapporo apartment building. The line consists not of robots and conveyor belts, but of Silicon Graphics Indy computer workstations and their optical fiber connections. These bright blue machines are the workhorses of SFX magicians everywhere. Memorable effects they were responsible for include the liquid-metal cyborg in Terminator II and the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. These days, most animation shops own one or two Silicon Graphics machines, which sell for $20,000 and upwards. In this apartment there are 20 of them.

The raw material to feed the Indys comes from Matsushita and his team of four--two illustrators plus two airbrush operators--who create the original artwork (black and white line drawings) at Matsushita's Harajuku studio. From this, Group-TAC's animators in Tokyo generate the basic cells, thousands of individual drawings which, when viewed sequentially, give the illusion of movement. The cells are scanned into Power Macintosh computers, then transmitted via high-speed ISDN digital lines to Hokkaido.

Why Hokkaido? Not because that is where Maeda comes from, or because costs are cheaper up there, though he does and they are. The reason is that Sapporo happens to be the headquarters of BUG, a very hip, alternative company started by four entrepreneurs, which develops specialized software and hardware solutions. One-third of the full-colour, high-end magazines in Japan, for example are laid out and produced on systems developed by BUG.

When Sakurai was looking for a company that would help him set up a studio, a partner to realize his dream, he found that most companies in Tokyo could not deliver what he wanted. According to John Cheuck, an inside advisor to both Amuse and BUG, the biggest reason was the personality of the BUG president, Hiroyuki Hattori. "Of all the people Sakurai talked to, Hattori was the one person that saw that the digital revolution that took place in the Japanese publishing industry could take the Japanese animation industry by storm. He's the one who said `Let's go for it!' So one day the studio did not even exist. And the next week it did.

The actual computer graphics work is done by BYSE (which stands for "by Super Engineers"), a wholly-owned multimedia production subsidiary of BUG. BYSE is where the Silicon Graphics workstations live.

Also in Hokkaido, in a small town called Iwamizawa, is a rehabilitation facility called Ryoikuseien. There, handicapped people color in the line drawings using 30 Power Macs. The colored cells are transmitted back to Sapporo where the computer artists set to work editing them. The results are recorded on digital disk, then converted to analog videotape ready for broadcasting.

At BYSE, tousle-headed young animators in jeans stare intently at color monitors which display stripped-down cartoon characters on which are superimposed windows containing lines of the program code that will bring the characters to life. The animators add 3D elements to scenes so that, for example, the characters appear to be flying through space, as opposed to conventional animation, where characters merely travel across or up and down the screen. A special effect that lasts just a few seconds on your screen--like one of Bit's magic arrows heading for its target--may take a computer animator several days to contrive. In conventional animation, it couldn't be done.

For animators, the elimination of most drudge work is one of the most wonderful things about computers. For example, rendering a fairy's flapping wings using conventional, hand-drawn animation is mind-numbingly repetitious. With computer animation, the wing movements only have to be input once, then a simple instruction will fetch them from a library of software subroutines as often as required. Disney fans will remember the famous scene in Peter Pan where light from the rising sun floods over the pirate ship. Achieving that one effect took a small army of illustrators weeks. Similar effects in Bit are more or less just a matter of specifying the direction of the light, then hitting the return key.

The biggest problem the producers of Bit faced was finding talent. Remarkably, other than Maeda, none of the 70-odd young animators who produce Bit the Cupid had ever worked with computers before. "There is no preparation for the digitalization of animation here," Maeda says. "The art schools don't teach computer skills. So we have to grow our own talent--you can't just switch from the old way to the new--and that will take three or four years."

Says John Cheuck, "It was a great challenge right from the beginning. It was fascinating to contemplate using the handicapped people, but initially there were almost 300 people involved in the project. There were the unskilled, the professionals; creators and designers versed only in the traditional ways of animation and then the technies who saw only the computer hardware and software systems. But Maeda was confident that the skills could be taught, the creative process could be managed and that a middle way could be found. He made it happen."

The main software tool the animators use is a rendering package called PRISMS, which is made by Side Effects, a Canadian company. Asked what he thinks of Bit, Side Effects president Greg Hermanovic responds, "It's totally logical. [The question is] why isn't everyone else doing it this way?"

The fact that not every one can call on the talents of an artist like Susumu Matsushita is one reason why. After Sakurai drummed up the cash for the pilot, he gave Matsushita a free hand to create the content. "He told me, `Do something you like doing,'" Matsushita recalls. And as it happened, the illustrator had a brilliant idea, something he had wanted to do: an animated version of the ancient Greek myths. Like, you know, Zeus and Co.

Matsushita's idea was ingenious for several reasons. One is that the Greek myths offer a rich source of story ideas that have been refined over many centuries. But though the myths have stood the test of time, few Japanese kids know them. And in these latter days of Power Rangers and Ninja Turtles, that goes for Western kids, too.

Then again, though nominally Greek, Mount Olympus and its inhabitants are actually borderless characters, so Bit the Cupid has a potentially global appeal. Or, to put it another way, apart from the soundtrack there is nothing obviously Japanese about Bit. And last but not least, since no-one owns the rights to the Greek myths, there is no need to pay anyone royalties.

Of course, Matsushita has taken some creative liberties with the original text. Take the character of Bit the Cupid himself. Classical scholars will tell you that Cupid was the Roman god of love. The Greek equivalent was Eros, but Eros is a name which has unsuitable nuances in Japan. Besides, Eros didn't have a magic bow and arrow, which are indispensable props in Bit. A further departure from the classical original is that Cupid is traditionally depicted with curly blond hair, whereas Bit the Cupid has a blue, pudding-basin cut the primary inspiration for which, according to Matsushita, came from Moe of The Three Stooges.

Another key influence on Matsushita was the work of Ray Harryhausen, the special effects wizard whose Dynamation stop-motion effects enlivened a whole series of otherwise appalling movies. Bit the Cupid is populated with dragons, centaurs and cyclops which are direct descendants of monsters from '50s and '60s films like The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad and Jason and the Golden Fleece.

Still another departure from classical orthodoxy is that the chief monster in Bit is named "Lucifer." But Matsushita's most outrageous addition to the pantheon is a tiny female fairy with wings, named "Twinka." That ring any bells? Twinka is the character who is responsible in the first episode of the series for bringing Bit into the world. In a parody of Dr. Frankenstein and his monster--Bit the Cupid is full of anachronisms--Twinka programs a machine to create Bit. But the machine malfunctions, and the result is a Cupid who is a few bits short of a byte . . . in the cutest possible way, of course.

Matsushita draws Twinka wearing a green halter top that appears to be several sizes too small for her ample bosom. A similar overflow affects Venus, the show's blond bimbo-goddess, described in the promotional literature as "resembling Marilyn Monroe." When the time comes to export Bit the Cupid, this sort of thing may give censors in less liberal countries pause for thought. "If you think that Twinka looks sexy now, you should have seen my sketches," Matsushita grins.

If you don't have kids, then you probably weren't aware when TV Tokyo began broadcasting Bit the Cupid in April this year. Bit is followed by Bono Bono, another Amuse production, a traditional, 2D-type animation, which gives viewers a chance to compare the two very different styles back-to-back.

The initial reaction to Bit was interesting--many kids simply found it too rich compared to what they were used to watching. But as time goes by, say the producers, the show's ratings are steadily improving and by year end when all the other Bit-related goodies come up, Bit the Cupid will be Japan's first truly cross media hit.

"The most important thing," Sakurai says, "is to appeal to the kids who are playing with 3D games," on new machines like the Sega Saturn and Sony Playstation. "If we can do new things, the kids will be impressed." (As far as my own children are concerned, my 9-year-old son prefers Bono Bono to Bit, while his 11-year-old brother thinks Bit is cool because, "It looks like it was made by computer.")

Bit the TV show will run for a full year until the end of March 1996. As it gains in popularity, backers like Bandai and Sony are working on CD-ROM, video and game versions. Novel marketing techniques using the World Wide Web that take advantage of Bit's digital bits (download your own Bit the Cupid screen saver) are also under development.

Meanwhile Sakurai, is busy trying to sell the show to overseas markets. Initial reaction in the U.S., the largest and most voracious market, seems favorable. "They couldn't believe we got such good quality for such low cost," he says. At the same time, the follow-up to Bit is already in the pipeline.

Will Bit the Cupid follow in the footsteps of Godzilla, Super Mario, Sonic the Hedgehog and the Power Rangers as the next big cultural export? Tune in next Thursday and decide for yourself.

For further information about Japanese animation, start at U.C.Berkeley's Anime page. From there you can check out scripts, screen clips, sound bytes, and more information than you'll ever need.