If you loved Speed Racer as a kid, you’ll probably like Japanese animations of today…in fact, a group of NIU students is betting on it.

Most people don’t know Speed Racer is Japanese.

Japanese cartoons are shown at the NIU Art Building…

The Northern Illinois Society of Illustrators invites anyone to see the movies and requests only a 50-cent donation. The small change goes into an NISI fund for things like hiring speakers for their meetings.

Tuesday, Feb. 12 at 9 p.m., “Fists of the North Star” will show in the AB100/Auditorium. The subtitled movie is a “violent, post apocolyptic story” that deals with an unusual sort of karate—people explode when hit on certain body pressure points, Moy explained.

The movies shown are part of Moy’s personal video collection of about 45 commercial and 100 television-copied tapes, he said. Moy gets the videos from a store in San Jose, Cal., Nikaku Animart, that receives the tapes from Japan.

“Japan is a very visually-oriented society,” Moy said. Most animations start as comic books, or mangas. Mangas are written for all ages and all types of people, from businessmen to athletes, Moy said. “It seems like everything in their culture is tied together with comics,” he laughed.

Jeff Moy, NIU senior, art major, Chinese…studying Japanese, wants to someday go to Japan.

NISI started showing the movies, which are shown through a video projector onto a large screen, about two years ago. The first movie they played was the American broadcast of “Robotech,” a war cartoon. Since then, the shows have been offered about every other week, drawing anywhere from 50 to 70 people.