Censorship of anime in Italian distribution

Editing of anime – Japanese cartoons – is a process through which the product is altered in order to be made appropriate for the public. Such a practice is quite common all over the western world, and Italy is no exception. Japanese anime are not conceived only for an audience of children, and there exist different types of products aimed at publics of different ages. In Japan there are proper broadcasting time slots for each age group, starting from the morning till late at night, and anime are shown during the various slots according to their characteristics. In Italy, on the contrary, cartoons are generally considered a product targeted exclusively at children, and even those anime which were originally conceived for an older audience are broadcasted during the protected time slot. This is mainly due to economic reasons, as the advertising of products and gadgets related to such cartoons is usually undertaken during the afternoon slot. Consequently, since these anime are broadcasted in a protected time slot, they have to comply to certain canons of content and language. Censorship thus takes place both at the visual and at the verbal level: scenes considered inappropriate (because too violent or too sensual) are removed from the story, the plot is often changed, the text is frequently domesticated in its references to the Japanese culture, and the language is flattened (every reference to the semantic field of death, for example, is to be avoided, and vulgar or strong expressions/interjections are turned into unlikely neutral utterances). Italian translators take active part in the editing of anime: as they are the first ones to actually see the episodes, they are supposed to report any ambiguous element they come across (which will then be removed during the phase of post-production), and they perform the verbal censorship, manipulating the language as is expected by the commissioners. The Italian association ADAM (Associazione Difesa Anime e Manga) has been actively fighting against this kind of censorship since 1997, but the main free terrestrial channels still continue to edit all the anime they broadcast.