"While the animation may be uniquely Japanese, the stories may not be. I think people forget that, it's just a medium of expression. These are stories and the only reason we associate them with something solely Japanese is because that's where they came from," says Rhona Medina, Marketing Manager at Urban Vision.

Notably, though, the way creative teams treat these stories as narratives lies at the core of my concerns. Coming from an American sensibility that demands narrative closure - the tying up of all plot threads in a clear and tidy ending - Japanese anime offers me an open narrative that draws its themes into an introspective light. And it can do this while still tackling popular genres such as science fiction, horror, romance, action and even comedy. In Miyazaki's "Laputa: Castle in the Sky," all of his characters' motivations and goals become eclipsed by the floating island's own need to shed its technological innards and banish the scourge of humanity which floods its interior. Every episode of "Cowboy Bebop" closes with even more questions than it answers. And Urban Vision's recent "Bio Hunter," while following hackneyed action conventions, punctuates its scientific themes with a surprising, and poignant, human revelation.

Medina notes, "I think America might be able to learn from those endings. The way Japanese are, there's a certain feeling that if you give something a final ending, it's dead. You can't go on past that. But if you leave an ending open, you leave your imagination in it. You still got it in your head, you still have your hopes, you're still involved in it in some way."

And in this respect, Japanese anime may be setting the course for American cinema. Already, global cinema has embraced the Hong Kong action movie conventions that were at one time only considered B-movie material. Films like "Matrix" and the upcoming "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" represent the high mark of that genre's assimilation into the public consciousness. Perhaps anime is destined for the same fate. Of course, popularity opens the floodgates of exploitation, over exposure and, eventually, redundancy.

As Ebert writes in this "Ghost" review, "This particular film is too complex and murky to reach a large audience." And so "Ghost", though it does well in the U.S., doesn't spearhead a wide-spread adoption of anime into the culture. In 1999, however, "The Matrix" picked up and made more accessible "Ghost's" themes with a colossal, primarily American, budget and the kind of star power that drove people unwisely to "Johnny Mnemonic" in 1995. So, without me really having to point it out, at the same time anime, and in this case "Ghost," informs the western thematic and stylistic tone in popular entertainment, it suffers from having its edges sanded for mass market consumption (although "Matrix" is probably a certifiable cross-over success, it still soft-serves its themes and saddles comfortably into action movie conventions).

Now that "Matrix" has enjoyed its box office success, American business has been able to at least tease the kinds of themes Japanese anime promotes. American money in "Ghost" could very well have paved the way for the "Matrix."

But the cycle of innovation, popularity, commercialization, duplication and demise operates like a natural law in the arena of pop culture. American money may inherently corrupt the Japanese aesthetic, but its elements will bleed into the American popular dynamic. And, being a part of the cyclical pop culture, anime will return to innovation, like a phoenix from the ashes, eventually reinventing itself devoid of the mass marketed trash it spawned during its peak.