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NEWPORT — A spy, an assassin and a child telepath become a fake family to accomplish a mission. Two alchemist brothers search for the Philosopher’s Stone to restore their lost bodies. A genius high school student discovers a notebook with the ability to kill anyone whose name is written in it.
These are the synopses of “Spy × Family,” “Fullmetal Alchemist” and “Death Note,” the anime that the teens and preteens of the Newport Library Anime Club watched at their last three meetings.
Anime is animation mostly produced in Japan. Anime Club meets at the Newport Library on the second Saturday of each month to watch just that. Their clubroom is the library teen room, where at least a third of the books on the shelves are manga, the graphic novel equivalent of anime. During the meetings’ three-hour runtimes, members eat Japanese and other East Asian snacks in lieu of popcorn.
“It’s a nice way to connect to like-minded individuals,” member Dakota Campbell, 18, said at the club’s April 12 meeting. Campbell has been an anime fan since 2020. “And people around the same age bracket too.”
Anime Club is the only one of its kind in the county: a club for anime fans dedicated to anime watching and other anime fandom activities.
The Newport Library founded Anime Club three years ago, as anime and manga’s international popularity surged in the late 2010s and continued into the 2020s. Since then, library districts across the country have been receiving more and more requests for manga to order for their collections. At the Pend Oreille County Library District, of which the Newport Library is a branch, many of those come from members of Anime Club.
“They do help with the manga selection quite a bit, which is great,” Anime Club coordinator Celene Thomas said. She is also the Newport Library manager.
Membership was “really small” at Anime Club’s founding, Thomas said, but now has a core of six to 10 she sees at the meetings month to month. As many as 16 were at the club’s March 8 meeting, despite the clubroom only having seating for about eight.
“I was like, ‘Oh man. It’s getting cramped,’” Thomas said with a laugh.
Anime Club’s monthly three-item agenda — watching anime, eating snacks and hanging out — used to include making arts and crafts, but members now are “really big into the snacks,” Thomas said. She buys them online or from a specialty store in Spokane, some at members’ requests.
This month’s snacks included lychee water, marshmallow twists, chocolate- and strawberry covered biscuit sticks, soft drink-flavored candy, rice cake snack bites, panda-shaped butter cookies and flavor-changing trick gum. Many were from Shogun Candy, a monthly Japanese snack box subscription that delivers from Japan to the U.S.
“It’s been pretty fun to try all sorts of weird stuff with them,” Thomas said. “And they let me know what they don’t like, and so I’m like, ‘All right, I’ll scratch that from the list and we’ll do something different.’” Campbell split this month’s snacks with the other two members at the club’s April 12 meeting — little sisters Nicole Campbell, 15, and Gabi Campbell, 11. As they ate, the Campbells watched “Spy × Family,” dubbed in English, on a small-sized television in the clubroom.
Categorized as shonen, the anime and manga genre created and marketed for boys and young men, “Spy × Family” features action, comedy and elements of romance. Seven missions — the series’ stylized word for chapters and episodes — of “Spy × Family” played during Anime Club’s three-hour meeting. In them, the Campbells saw the Forger couple go from proposing to each other mid-fight and reciting their vows with a grenade pin, to meeting with a schoolmaster after their daughter punches her bully/mission target in the face.
Due to some language and depictions of violence and smoking, “Spy × Family” is rated around PG-14. Members of Anime Club are young adults aged 10 and over, so Thomas only selects or accepts requests for anime appropriate for that age group. Otherwise, members can watch whatever anime they want.
“Anime is such a big, broad spectrum of so many little subgenres that it really helps to say, ‘Oh, I really wasn’t into that romance one, but I love the sci-fi one,’” Thomas said.
Grenade pin rings and bully-punching aside, “Spy × Family” is a story about found family — one that has millions of fans worldwide.
Among them is Thomas. A mother herself, Thomas said she relates “so hard” to Yor Forger, the assassin-turned-adoptive mother of the Forger family. With the strength and skill of a highly trained killer, Yor fights not just against enemy spies and assassins, but also to become a real mother to Anya Forger, a child telepath who knows Yor’s secret identity.
“I have never related to an anime mother more than I relate to Yor from that series,” Thomas said with another laugh.
Thomas, who has been an anime fan since she was at least 8, said anime tells these stories with a creative freedom distinct to Japanese animation. She referenced the award-winning films of Studio Ghibli, whose “crazier” designs and plots cannot be replicated in live-action or even Western animation.
Having a love for fantasy and the action in series like “Spy × Family,” Campbell gave two words to describe anime.
“It’s fun,” Campbell said. Anime Club’s next meeting is from 2 to 5 p.m. June 14. The May meeting was cancelled due to a conflict with the Newport Library-organized Ren Faire, which is from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. May 10 at the Newport Rodeo Grounds.
