Cloud Matsuri May 2020 - Official Magazine

MAGAZINE

FEATURING ARTICLES ON ©TRIGGER,Kazuki Nakashima/XFLAG

PROMARE: The burning talents of TRIGGER ANIME VERSUS VIRUS: Your Guide to Legal Streaming in 2020 PLUS Makoto Shinkai on stage Robot Riot: the day that Gundam changed it all & MORE

www.mangauk.com

SO MUCH ANIME. STREAM IT

www.funimation.com

OWN IT

CONTENTS 8 12 16 20 24 32 42 44 50 56 60 64 72 76 80 86 88 92 96 100 108

CAN ANIME KEEP GOING? ANIME STREAMING GUIDE 2020 BOXING CLEVER THE FUTURE WILL BE TELEVISED FROM GURREN LAGANN TO PROMARE GHIBLI CONFIDENTIAL PILLOW FIGHT PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS AN OLD MAN HER STORY MANGA: RYUKO THE WORD GIRL SHINKAI ON STAGE 100% PERFECT SUNSHINE GIRL GIRLFRIEND IN A COMA THE DAY THAT ANIME CHANGED WHY WE FIGHT B COOL PICK UP A PENGUIN WHERE EVERYBODY KNOWS YOUR NAME ROYAL SPACE FORCE STARDUST MEMORY

CONTRIBUTORS Jonathan Clements is the author of Anime: A History Helen McCarthy is the author of A Brief History of Manga Eija Niskanen is the programme director of the Helsinki Cine-Aasia Festival Andrew Osmond is the author of 100 Animated Feature Films Shelley Pallis writes about anime and manga for All the Anime Chris Perkins is the editor of Anime for Adults.

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WELL, THAT ESCALATED QUICKLY. It somehow feels like simultaneously only yesterday and also a million years ago that we were all sitting in our office and doing our day-to-day work. Anime Limited, like a lot of businesses, started lockdown a few weeks earlier than any government mandate which has given us loads of time to think.

That thinking time has led (so far) to two main adventures from the team here.

First up is Cloud Matsuri, which is where you’ll find this magazine! We’ve got an almost unreal level of guests for a convention hosted out of the UK too - from delving deep into BEASTARS to industry panels, we have something for everyone.

It’s our first swing at it but you can bet it won’t be our last, so please do tune in and let us know what you think when it’s running.

Asides from that we have also launched Screen Anime - which is an online film festival delivering the very best in Japanese animated film to the UK and Ireland monthly from now onwards. It’s weird to be revisiting this idea for me as I drew up ideas on the infrastructure and what resources you’d need for a film festival back in 2012 and it’s been bubbling away in my mind ever since. Now it’s escaped my brain and onto the web you can enjoy PROMARE, Penguin Highway, Patema Inverted and Royal Space Force - The Wings of Honneamise right now alongside Wolf ’s Rain as a TV series, with some real gems lined up for the rest of the year and beyond…

Digital is something that has always been close to our hearts here. When I started Anime Limited, the move towards Collector’s Editions as our hallmark was as much recognition that the future for mainstream viewing lay online as it was because we believed the UK deserved and was criminally underserved for shiny editions that showed off the best that anime had to offer. Embracing digital should never mean sacrificing having a beautiful copy of shows you love on your shelf, so we’ll keep making them as long as there’s demand. Judging by our online store, that’s not going to be anytime soon!

So sit back, relax and enjoy the very best a convention has to offer. You don’t even have to leave your sofa to do it!

Andrew Partridge, CEO & Co-founder, Anime Limited

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CAN ANIME KEEP GOING? Andrew Osmond asks if COVID-19 will turn out to be a boss Japanese animation can’t beat...

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©1988 MASHROOM/ AKIRA COMMITTEE

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he world can change so quickly. At the beginning of March, for example, it still seemed quite possible that the ExCel Centre would host the next MCM Comic Con as scheduled. Now the news is full of sobering stories about NHS Nightingale, the 4000-bed field hospital set up in the ExCel Centre to accommodate victims of COVID-19. Any event like MCM Comic Con, with its milling crowds of thousands, feels unimaginable for the foreseeable future. Officially the London event has been postponed to July; current forecasts suggest it will have to be far later than that.

You don’t need us to tell you that everything is uncertain. Going through what’s known as of writing… London’s Hyper Japan 2020, which was due to run in July, has been delayed indefinitely. MCM’s Birmingham event is postponed. The new stage version of Makoto Shinkai’s Garden of Words, which had been due to run in London this July and August, is also postponed, though its creators stress they’re “beyond excited” to premiere the play whenever it becomes possible. Umpteen cinema films are delayed indefinitely, including Disney’s new live-action version of the Chinese story Mulan.

Of course, there have been similar cancellations all around the world. In Japan itself, the situation was anomalous for a long while. For most of March, the official number of infections was low; remarkably low actually, given Japan’s infamously crowded cities and transport. The optimistic explanations pointed to the emphasis on cleanliness and hygiene in Japanese society, the prevalence of facemasks, and the aversion to overly physical greetings. Bowing is far safer than hugging in the age of coronavirus.

The pessimistic explanation was that the official infected figures in Japan were gross underestimates, resulting from perfunctory virus testing.

That, in turn, was linked by many pundits to an obvious vested interest; the Tokyo Olympic Games. There was global incredulity at Japan’s reluctance to admit it was impossible for the Games to go ahead this summer. It was only

after multiple countries, including Britain, declared they could not conceivably send athletes to the Games that Prime Minister Shinzo Abe announced the Games’ postponement on 24th March. They’re now planned for 2021.

One amusing side-note to the Olympics fiasco relates to Katsuhiro Otomo’s classic anime film Akira. Since it was first announced that Tokyo would host the 2020 Olympics, anime fans have hailed Akira for predicting it. The 2020 Games are being prepared in the background to the film – made in 1988, and set in 2019 – and several of the biggest scenes take place in the Olympic stadium itself.

In February, as the coronavirus threat became clear, the phrase “Just cancel it” topped Japan’s Twitter feeds. The phrase is taken from one shot in Akira which shows a signboard advertising “147 Days Until The Games” (which would have been February 28th in our world, if everything had gone to plan). The “Just cancel it” comment is graffitied under the sign – the text is all in Japanese, so Anglophone viewers missed the detail entirely. If you think how Akira ended, it’s unlikely Neo-Tokyo could have held the Olympics in 2020, so the film was right on that front, too.

On 7th April, the Prime Minister finally declared a state of emergency, not over the whole country, but in Tokyo and six other prefectures.

According to Abe, the conditions will be in place for about a month, with about 44% of Japan’s population affected. (On the day of the announcement, the hashtag “Escape from Tokyo” trended, although officials asked city-dwellers not to travel to other prefectures, some of which had no reported infections at all.) A stimulus package was also announced, amounting to 20% of Japan’s economic output.

Department stores, cinemas, and other leisure facilities will be closed through this period, at least in the major population centres. Tokyo’s Ghibli Museum had already shuttered much earlier, together with amusement parks such as Tokyo Disneyland and Universal Studios Japan 9

in Osaka. Comiket, the massive fanzine festival in Tokyo scheduled for May, has been cancelled, along with many smaller events – for example, the run of a kabuki-style stage version of Naruto in the city of Nagoya. The last film in the Fate/ stay night: Heaven’s Feel cinema trilogy was scheduled to open in Japanese cinemas at the end of March. Reportedly, some screenings were fully sold out; so much for social distancing.

However, the film’s release was postponed at the last minute. Other spring films were postponed too, including Kyoto Animation’s second Violet Evergarden film (called Violet Evergarden: The Movie), along with Princess Principal: Crown Handler and the new Doraemon.

If Tokyo, where most anime studios are based, is shut down, can the mass production of anime, the hundreds of hours of content each month, continue? It seems much of it can. On the one hand, advances in computer power mean that

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much anime production can be carried out “remotely,” by workers who are safely isolated – and not just in Tokyo, but also in the overseas countries on which anime studios rely, to create in-between animation and other subsidiary work. And yet, there are plainly limits to this remote production. Some anime have been delayed; for instance, the new TV season of Re: Zero was supposed to start in April but is now scheduled for July. The third series of A Certain Scientific Railgun (designated “T”) suffered delays during its broadcast in the winter season.

Meanwhile, the pinch has been felt more in merchandise, particularly those releases that promised a lucky gonk, plushie, keyring or other attachment that was relying on Chinese factory labour for supply.

With the anime delays, the issue may not have been with making the animation, which may have been all finished already. Rather, it may

have been problems with the voices. In America, Crunchyroll announced it was pausing its simuldubs of new anime, which can no longer be recorded safely. By sad coincidence, former voice-actor Jay Benedict, who had voice roles in Project A-ko and the vintage puppet series Star Fleet, died from Covid-19 complications on April 4, aged 68.

Of course, if it becomes impossible for Japanese actors to record episodes, then eventually new anime broadcasts must stop, unless viewers can accept silent episodes, or artificially-generated voices a la Hatsune Miku. As of early April, two of the most mainstream TV family anime, Sazae-san and Anpanman, announced they had stopped voice-recording sessions. However, there may have been enough forewarning of the crisis for actors to pre-record episodes longer in advance, if that was logistically possible.

chaos and disruption at every level, just like the rest of the world. Still, there are lighter stories. A Japanese man calling himself “Inosuke Hashibira” – the name of a grumpy but selfless character in the manga hit Demon Slayer – made a surprise donation of a hundred masks to a nursing school in Iwate Prefecture. And if the international lockdown lasts as long as the downbeat forecasters are predicting, then at least we can hope studios may release more of their back catalogues online while we stay at home.

After all, Ghibli set a huge precedent with its surprise Netflix deal this January. So has Toei with its new “Toei Tokusatsu” YouTube channel which launched on 6th April, offering vintage robot anime and Rangers fisticuffs. If new anime starts grinding to a halt, thank heaven there’s more than half a century of old material to delve into.

For the anime industry, the coronavirus means

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ANIME STREAMING GUIDE 2020

By Chris Perkins

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©2017 REKI KAWAHARA/KADOKAWA CORPORATION AMW/SAO-A Project

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e return for our annual round-up of places to legally access anime online, with yet another major player getting in the ring. As if the average anime fan didn’t already have an embarrassment of riches to choose from in 2020, the arrival of Channel Four’s online portal All4, with over a hundred hours of free streaming anime seems set to create a whole echelon of new fans. All4 is available for free (with ads) via desktop, mobile apps, smart TVs, game consoles and tablets.

You’ll need to sign up for a (free) account to watch – although there’s an ad-free option for £3.99 a month.

There’s a mix of series available – some of them are already available streaming elsewhere, while others are available for the first time in the UK. All titles are presented in English dubbed format.The initial line up is loaded with some stone-cold classics, recent favourites and a few curveballs. In the classics corner, we’ve got the gold-standard sci-fi-western-noirblaxploitation-crime-show-kung-fu-mash-up Cowboy Bebop, fantasy epic Vision of Escaflowne, CLAMP’s Cardcaptor Sakura (the original series), and Rumiko Takahashi’s Inu Yasha.

Meanwhile, representing more recent series are sci-fi sports show Megalo Box, blood-splattered gore-fest Tokyo Ghoul (seasons 1 and 2), fantasy Charlotte, and light-novel adaptation Durarara!!.

OAV series Mobile Suit Gundam: The Origin (6 episodes) and The Dragon Dentist (2 episodes) are available for those looking for a shorter binge.

Also set to be available are the Hiroyuki Imaishi double of Gurren Lagann and Kill La Kill, Sword Art Online’s third season Alicization, and the video game-inspired Persona 5: The Animation.

Presumably, if demand is high enough, there’s every chance that more titles can join in the future.

The newest arrival in the world of online anime sneaked in under the radar in April under a

super-hero’s cloak. Toei Tokusatsu, a massive online bundle of rubber-monster and team shows from Toei, freely streaming on YouTube, also includes a rash of obscure anime shows.

Mainly giant robot serials from the 1970s and 1980s – Laserion, Daltanious, Combattler V and Daimos rub robo-shoulders with Albegas and Guy Slugger. But there’s a catch: “At launch, we will have the first two episodes of all 70 shows available with English subtitles! Further episodes will be available in Japanese for now, but there could be frequent updates. We plan on making a public call for subtitles in any language.” So, try not to get too hooked, as it sounds like they will be waiting for public-spirited fans to do the heavy lifting on later content.

Elsewhere, the usual suspects are still providing a steady flow of new anime. Funimation’s acquisition of Manga Entertainment has seen a host of the latter’s licences join the line-up on FunimationNow. These include series such as Naruto, Full Metal Alchemist Brotherhood, Sword Art Online, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex and Eden of the East. There’s also a decent selection of classic feature films including Akira, the original Ghost in the Shell and its sequel Innocence, and Mamoru Hosoda’s The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, Wolf Children and Summer Wars. Funimation has also inked a deal with US distributor Nozomi, seeing catalogue titles Ninja Nonsense and Gravitation join the service.

A FunimationNow subscription (£4.99 per month/ £49.99 a year, available via web, consoles, iOS and Android) features both subtitled simulcasts and ‘Broadcast dubs’, streaming just weeks after the original airing. Recent popular additions include Fire Force, Fruits Basket, Dr Stone and Fairy Gone. Light novel based Sorcerous Stabber Orphen, Bishonen series A3 and Smile Down the Runway join the line-up for Winter 2020. FunimationNow is also the home of dubs of the enduringly popular My Hero Academia and Attack on Titan.

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Crunchyroll (£6.50 a month, or free with ads, via web, console, iOS and Android) continues to offer the largest library of anime titles, as well as ongoing simulcasts. Recent popular series include Fire Force, Food Wars! The Fourth Plate, Dr Stone and the Rising of the Shield Heroes. New titles for winter 2020 include the fourth season of Haikyu!!: To the Top, A Destructive God Sits Next To Me, In/Spectre, and Magia Record: Puella Magi Madoka Magica Side Story. Ongoing series such as Boruto: Naruto Next Generations, My Hero Academia and Black Clover are also available. The site is now adding an increasing number of dubs, including Magical Sempai, High School Prodigies Have It Easy Even in Another World and If It’s for My Daughter, I’d Even Defeat a Demon Lord.

HiDive ($4.99 a month/ $47.99 a year, or limited access for free, via desktop, iOS and Android) can’t compete with the other services in volume, but still offers an interesting library. As well as a handful of recent exclusive titles such as Is It Wrong to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon? Season II, Judo Boy and Bloom into You, HiDive also offers a more esoteric line-up featuring Armoured Trooper Votoms, Maria Watches Over Us, Gatchaman and Legend of Galactic Heroes.

Netflix (From £8.99 a month, available basically everywhere) has continued to boost its anime selection. Shinichiro Watanabe’s Mars-musical Carole & Tuesday, Studio Ponoc’s anthology Short Film Theatre: Modest Heroes and US co-pro Cannon Busters are among the highestprofile additions.

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© CLAMP, ST

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Netflix’s anime “originals” cover a pleasingly wide spectrum, from the whimsy of Mari Okada’s Dragon Pilot to the excesses of BAKI and Devilman Crybaby to the kiddie-friendly Dino Girl Gauko and cultfave Aggretsuko. Netflix is now the only place to find the original Neon Genesis Evangelion and the Death and Rebirth and End of Evangelion movies. The site even produced a “documentary” called Enter the Anime, although in reality it is a thinly-veiled promotion for their own ‘anime’ content (much of it not even Japanese). Other recent titles include BEASTARS and Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045, Eden and the Masaaki Yuasa directed Japan Sinks 2020 also set to arrive in 2020.

Amazon Prime (£7.99 a month or £79.99 a year with a host of other benefits) continues to be the exclusive home of a small selection of shows each season, with the latest including samurai opus Blade of the Immortal, Viking drama Vinland Saga and cop show Babylon. A number of other anime titles are available to Prime subscribers, including various Yu-Gi-Oh and Pokémon series, No Game No Life Zero and Initial D. FunimationNow and Viewster are also available as ‘add on’ subscriptions via Amazon channels.

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BOXING CLEVER Andrew Osmond on the 50th anniversary reboot of an old classic.

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© Asao Takamori,Tetsuya Chiba/Kodansha/MEGALOBOX project. All Rights Reserved.

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egalo Box is a combo of sports show and SF. It’s a boxing series about an underdog who, as we’ll see, is linked to an older battered hero than Rocky. The show was made by TMS Entertainment, which is a new name for the famous Tokyo Movie Shinsha studio. In Megalo Box, the tearaway kids pop red “candy” pills, and the story kicks off when the boy hero’s motorbike nearly hits a stranger.

Tokyo Movie Shinsha, you might recall, made Akira…In Megalo Box, boxing has gone cyber.

It’s still two guys in a ring, with the screaming crowds, the trash-talking and jaw-socking, the blood and saliva and mouthguards sent flying.

But this is a future where robotics is part of the sport, where boxers become cyborgs. Some fighters have metal rigs strapped to their arms and shoulders, pistons driving their blows faster and harder, a vision of hi-tech steroids gone legal. Other fighters go for deeper cuts. They really are cyborgs, with metal muscles and skin integrated with flesh and bone. The underdog in this show is called – fittingly enough – Junk Dog. He’s a member of this world’s underclass, an outsider charging round the badlands on his motorbike, without the ID documents to be a “citizen” of society. This blocks him from entering Megalonia, the world’s most prestigious boxing tournament. Instead, Junk Dog prostitutes his talents in the same way that struggling boxers have done since antiquity. He throws fights. His burly trainer Nanbu – and that’s another type who’s been around forever – fixes matches for the local crime bosses. Junk Dog takes nightly dives, while his gullible fans are fleeced. That’s until our hero, riding his trusty motorbike, has a near-fatal collision with a woman and a cyborg boxer. The incident leads to an angry face-off, and later a sensational surprise match between Junk Dog and the cyborg. The combatant is Yuri, world-champion of megaloboxing. Junk Dog loses, but the fight triggers him; he refuses to be a fall guy any more. There’s blowback from the match-fixing 17

mobsters, of course, and Nanbu frantically gambles their lives on the impossible – that Junk Dog can not only enter the Megalonia tournament but that he can win it.

Beyond the shades of Akira, Western viewers are likely to compare Megalo Box to anime by Shinichiro Watanabe and Sayo Yamamoto, though neither director was involved in the production. This is a cool series, with a hero whose physical build and fight style can’t help recall a certain Spike Spiegel. It’s also a show led by its music, by a score whose shifts set the tone of the series: funky, ironic, melancholic, tragic.

Of course, the fights are Megalo Box’s big draw.

They’re brutal and bloody, sometimes lightningquick, sometimes gruelling and ugly, booed by the crowd. But the anime is just as effective – and perhaps more – at depicting the punch drunk limbos of the battered boxer, far scarier than mere violence. Dog sits in a dead-eyed 18

stupor between rounds; or he lies broken on the floor of the ring, being counted up to oblivion.

Anime, especially sports anime, have always distorted space and time. Memo to Interstellar director Christopher Nolan: black holes do nothing to you that a brutal boxing match won’t do just as well.

By the end of the second episode, Dog has found a way to enter the Megalonia tournament.

He controversially opts to fight without the robotic parts (called Gears) which have become mainstream in the sport. However, there’s no suggestion that robotised boxing is any less valid. You might link this attitude to Japan’s heritage of cyborg heroes and robot pilots in fiction, and how the real country rebuilt itself with technology after the war. You might even think of the arguments that rage about transgender contestants in sport.Dog also takes on a new name in the ring – Joe. For most

Western fans, it’s just a name. For Japanese viewers, though, it’s a link to a classic long past.

For Megalo Box is a show that’s tied to one of the most important manga and anime epics you may never have never heard of.

Tomorrow’s Joe (often referred to by its Japanese title, Ashita no Joe), was a massively popular boxing manga by Asao Takamori (writer) and Tetsuya Chiba (artist). The strip ran from 1968 to 1973, collected in twenty volumes. There were also two TV anime series directed by Osamu Dezaki. Long before Rocky, Joe’s saga of an underdog boxer became a national icon, linked to Japan’s own post-war journey from ruin to rebirth. Neither the manga nor the anime were ever translated into English, probably due to their age and the unpopularity of sports stories in Anglophone territories.

Megalo Box was officially marketed as a halfcentury anniversary tribute to Tomorrow’s Joe. Its cool Bebop trappings rub shoulders with oldschool character designs – the trainer Nanbu just looks timeless, while a little-boy character who turns up later could have stepped from a kids’ anime from forty years ago. Megalobox can’t strike the national zeitgeist like the earlier Joe did, but among today’s TV anime, it’s a contender for champion.

Megalo Box will be released in the UK by Anime Limited.

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THE FUTURE WILL BE TELEVISED Jonathan Clements on a book that lifts the lid on the home cinema lifeline

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n a publicity coup to rival no other in January 2016 at the Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings announced that while he had been talking, Netflix had rolled out (at least in theory) in 130 countries, including Azerbaijan, Vietnam, India, Nigeria, and Poland. It’s a suitably grandstanding opening for Ramon Lobato’s book Netflix Nations: The Geography of Distribution, which aims to explain just what has happened in the last few years.

Times move fast. My own Anime: A History, for example, finishes in 2012, with the shutdown of Japan’s analogue broadcast signal, but Netflix didn’t even start in Japan until three years later. At Scotland Loves Anime in 2019, festival juror Jack Liang showcased the first episode of Polygon Pictures’ new show, Levius, which was made for Netflix. Lobato quotes one television theorist in 2014 who notes that the big difference between HBO and Netflix is that one arrives over cable, and the other over broadband, “a distinction I suspect will be technologically nebulous the next time I revisit this book.” A distinction, in fact, that is already a matter of history.

Lobato doesn’t disappoint in his deconstruction of digital streaming, with all sorts of interesting comments on, for example, the 2015 redesign of the Netflix menu screen to hide the finite

nature of the content available. A history of conflicts over television broadcasting sets the scene, peppered with useful concepts like signal spillover, and handy differentiations in the nuances between transnational and global. He observes the palpable effect that Netflix has had on shutting down piracy, at least in some cases.

As Reed Hastings commented in 2015: “The key thing about piracy is that some fraction of it is because [users] couldn’t get the content. That part we can fix. Some part of piracy, however, is because they just don’t want to pay. That’s a harder part.”

Lobato details in depth with the panoply of widgets, laws and infrastructures required to put an episode of, say, Evangelion on your television, and the degree to which such provisions tie up local bandwidth in different countries. He details Netflix’s cunningly lowtech Open Connect service, which puts an actual, physical box into the server farms of 1,000 Internet Service Providers around the world, so that Netflix users can go direct to a particular machine for their content. In other words, it is “a private network built on top of the public internet.” Faithful to his arguments in his earlier Shadow Economies of Cinema (a book I highly recommend) Lobato includes “informal” distributions, such as BitTorrent, in his account of the legal world of streaming, and also notes that even legal streaming can run 21

into unexpected walls – Netflix itself was blocked in Indonesia over “permit issues”, and cannot be streamed in Syria, North Korea and Crimea because of American foreign-policy restrictions on doing business in those territories. In terms of content, Lobato shows how MTV’s initial idea of exporting American pop culture to the world foundered when it turned out that viewers in far-flung territories like India and Korea didn’t particularly care for Michael Jackson, and preferred local stars. If only that were true. I recall once being trapped in a Beijing hotel room with a sick child for days on end, and commenting: “Who the hell is Nicki Minaj, and why does she keep showing up on a Chinese television?”

The idea of imposing cultural exports globally evolved into a “glocal” set of parameters tailored to local requirements, such as an age verification stage in Singapore, and an “Australian movies” tag in Australia, but also a translation testing 22

program called Hermes, which from 201718 attempted to examine and standardise the army of human translators who prepared the company’s subtitles.Amid several national case studies, Lobato includes Japan, where Netflix rolled out in September 2015 for 650 yen a month, little more than a paper manga anthology magazine. Entertainingly, in a reaction to the conspicuously un-Japanese content of Netflix’s original offerings, the channel became known as the Black Ships (kurofune), in reference to the gunboat diplomacy of commodore Perry in the 19th century. “Netflix was especially criticized for its measly collection of anime, which is a must-have for any streaming service in Japan. To be fair to Netflix, this anime deficit was not entirely the company’s fault. Netflix found it very difficult to license high-quality anime, reflecting its wider problem of securing rights to Japanese content.”

Netflix fought back by signing co-production deals with Fuji in 2015 and, in 2017, announcing it was throwing money at twenty new anime

shows. Compare this to China, where Lobato’s case study rewardingly engages with a territory where Netflix has failed to roll out, preferring instead to licence selected content to local services.The disruptive potential of Netflix has been felt at every stage of the chain from Ownership to Access.

Cosplayers show up at conventions dressed as characters who won’t appear on Blu-ray for years.

Water-cooler conversations about last night’s television have been shattered into multiple nodes. Some people have seen all of the new series of Orange is the New Black, the day after it dropped. Others won’t get to see it for months. Many Japanese animation studios are booked up three years in advance on projects for overseas streaming sites. This doesn’t stop them taking work from other clients, of course, although the canny media watcher will have noticed that some of these projects have been passed under-the-counter to Korean subcontractors.

Lobato closes with a chapter on geoblocking and VPN access, irresistibly titled “The Proxy Wars”, and dealing with Netflix’s changing attitude towards those users who used Virtual Private Networks to game Netflix servers into thinking they were watching in another country. But he is the first to admit that there is more to be written about the disruption brought about by digital access, not the least the peculiarities of Netflix’s original production strategy, “which really deserves its own book.” For the meantime, however, Netflix Nations is a richly detailed account of changes to the media that have come so fast that many older users have yet to appreciate the differences they have wrought.

Netflix Nations: The Geography of Digital Distribution is available from New York University Press.

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FROM GURREN LAGANN TO PROMARE Andrew Osmond on Studio Trigger’s path from madness to super-madness.

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© GAINAX, KAZUKI NAKASHIMA / Aniplex, KDE-J, TV TOKYO, DENTSU

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urren Lagann, available to watch on Bluray and All4, and Promare, coming soon to home formats, both share a love of Big Dumb Anime Action. Mecha-riding heroes punch through frames at lightning speed while the world swivels and curly-wurlys to keep up.

They also share a history and director: Hiroyuki Imaishi. He has spoken of growing up on action animation; he was born in 1971, when the genre itself took flight. “I always liked action, robot animation; they’re not slow or atmospheric,” he said. “Or kids fighting; I liked that sort of thing since I was a child.”

The anime of his childhood, Imaishi claimed, inspired his sense of humour, often with sex and toilet jokes. “That was my rebellious feeling towards everything. When I started out, all this naughty stuff was torn down, anime was quite gentrified. But I think the anime I used to watch when I was a child were more sexy. Actually, I didn’t make anything sex-related when I was making my own indie things; I started doing it once I was in [the industry] because everything was torn down and I just wanted to do something different.” Notably, though, Promare tones down that side of Imaishi’s work greatly, though restraint is the last thing you think of when you’re watching the film. Perhaps that’s the deepest measure of how Imaishi has evolved – making a film that’s suitable for all ages, and keeping the madcap sensibility for which he’s beloved. Imaishi started in anime in the mid1990s. One of his first credits was at the Gainax studio on the original TV Evangelion, doing inbetween animation.

Soon he began making his own name in the industry for funny, fizzy, aggressively crazy animation work. A milestone for Imaishi, though not an “Imaishi” anime, was 2000’s FLCL (aka “Fooly Cooly”). Imaishi made multiple contributions to the series, both in storyboarding and animation. He didn’t create FLCL’s manic style, anime’s equivalent of a motormouth Robin

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Williams stand-up, but he revelled in it. Four years after FLCL, Imaishi made his director debut with Dead Leaves. It was a 52-minute film, made not by Gainax but Production I.G (which had collaborated on FLCL). It was the world’s introduction, not just to director Imaishi, but to filthy director Imaishi, incontinent director Imaishi. It starts with the amnesiac, delinquent heroes – a TV-headed man and a rainbow-eyed woman – joyriding through a city and blowing away armies of police. Then they’re sent to the moon and the rest of the film is a prison break punctuated by punch-ups, pooping, sex, more violence and monstrous developments arising from the sex.

Dead Leaves had very mixed reviews; the Anime Encyclopedia was especially damning.

But if Dead Leaves’ bombast was received as a vulgar fart, Gurren Lagann was a volcano.

Imaishi didn’t “originate” Gurren Lagann. It emerged out of development at Studio Gainax – yes, it’s worth stressing Gurren Lagann was

by Gainax, though the series is now closely identified with Trigger. After the first plans (by different staff) fell apart, the studio approached a writer called Kazuki Nakashima.

His respectable job was as a playwright, but he moonlighted in anime as well. In particular, Nakashima had given his services to Gainax on a 2004 video miniseries called Re: Cutie Honey, starring a saucy 1970s superheroine created by Go Nagai.Also involved on that series was Imaishi, who instantly found Nakashima’s writing appealing. When Imaishi heard Nakashima was on board Gainax’s new mecha show, he immediately offered to direct.

Later Imaishi would hail Nakashima as a writer capable of applying adult skills to the illogical humour that a primary schooler would have; creating something ridiculous,

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but intelligently ridiculous. Gurren Lagann came armed with wind-blown capes, muscular pouty poses and hammered-home nob gags. In Nakashima’s story, two young men, Kamina and Simon, drill their way out of their underground home and find a planet teeming with enemies driving robot monsters. Luckily our heroes pick up some mecha themselves, plus a curvy lady called Yoko and a caravan of allies, rising up the levels to bigger and bigger baddies. Kamina is a vainglorious jock, Simon a shrinking wimp, bolted together in the “manly combining” of their robot steeds. But will Yoko break them up, Beatles-style? Actually no – the show had a bigger shock in store.

Interviewed by the Forbes website, Imaishi made clear he saw Gurren Lagann as part of a venerable genere’s life-cycle. In anime of the 1970s and 1980s, heroes piloted mecha willingly and wholeheartedly. Evangelion tried to stop that; it revolves around the hero’s hatred of the mecha that he’s ordered to pilot. Imaishi, though, had had enough of tortured refusals. No-one needed order him into a robot. “From my standpoint, if someone asked me to pilot a mecha, I would, even if they said I wasn’t allowed to.”

Although Imaishi had grown up with Gundam, Gurren Lagann often recalls the crazier, more fantastical robot shows which preceded it; what mecha fans call the “super robot” anime, shaped by creators like Go Nagai. Imaishi suggests this reflects the influence of Nakashima; the writer was a fan of 1970s anime like Mazinger Z and Getter Robo, both Nagai creations. But Gurren Lagann also reflected Imaishi’s own cartoon humour. Just in the opening minutes, for example, Kamina and Simon ride a snorting stampede of “pig-moles” which piles up impossibly into a huge porcine tower, lifting our heroes aloft. It’s a fair measure of just how loose Gurren Lagann’s reality is going to be. Like

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the old “super robot” series, Gurren Lagann was broadcast on Japanese TV when children might have been watching, before 9pm. This was unusual in 2007, when most TV anime were already relegated to late at night. You might think Gainax had learned lessons when Evangelion, also shown in a mainstream time-slot, got into trouble with TV networks for having a (tasteful) bed scene between adults. Hardly – one of Gurren Lagann’s first episodes was a lewd bathhouse farce, which had to be censored for broadcast at the last minute. (Don’t worry, that doesn’t apply to the version on All4.)But unlike Dead Leaves, Gurren Lagann wasn’t just for laughs. It had an epic story, the kind of story that gets bigger and bigger and bigger, and characters that audiences rooted for and sometimes cried for. Imaishi and Nakashima weren’t scared of upsetting fans, but the fans didn’t resent them for it. Just check how high Gurren Lagann is ranked on the main anime fan websites, thirteen years after its TV debut.

Imaishi’s next Gainax series was without Nakashima. The idea came from another of Imaishi’s collaborators, Hiromi Wakabayashi.

Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt was more high-speed nonsense a la Dead Leaves, about a pair of fallen girl-angels who look like fallen Powerpuff Girls, zooming around on random missions. Like Dead Leaves, Panty & Stocking was most fun to watch in its chases, with characters shrieking and zagging across the frame. The next Imaishi anime was the first made at a new studio. In October 2011, Imaishi co-founded Studio Trigger. Wakabayashi told me that Gainax had been liberal in terms of creative freedom.

“Only Gainax would have done Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt, any other studio wouldn’t have done it. But the bosses at Gainax, the generation who had made The Wings of Honneamise, what they wanted to do was different from what we wanted to do. So rather than being safe, making what would make everybody happy, we thought we might want to do what we wanted, and be responsible for what we make. It was like a natural progression.”

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Two years after its founding, Trigger released a new TV epic, with Imaishi once again directing and Nakashima as the main writer. Kill la Kill had all the lunacy of Gurren Lagann; it starts with a teacher, who looks roughly the size of a dinosaur, crashing into a classroom. It also had much of the crudity of Panty & Stocking, with its heroine Ryoko bound up in an eye-watering vampiric sailor super-suit to battle authority.

Takeshi Honda, the master Japanese animator who drew Ryoko’s outrageous “transformation” scene, which looks like pole-dancing crossed with BDSM, said it embarrassed even him.

But Kill la Kill also had an energetic evolving story, fortified by strong twists, and with amusing satirical comments about the dangers of global clothes brands. (By Nakashima’s admission, this strand of the series was inspired by The Garments of Caean, a 1976 British novel by Barrington J. Bayley.) Some fans discerned deeper themes about society and identity in the show, even as Nakashima says his main inspirations included vintage Japanese exploitation flicks, the so-called “Pinky Violence” series released by the Toei studio. For the average reader, Kill la Kill is simply a Shonen Jump-style battle show with scantier costumes and more stupendous visuals. Following Kill la Kill, Imaishi had several director credits on smaller, gag-filled toons for Trigger. One of them, “Oval x Over” can be found on Anime Limited’s Pigtails collection.

Meanwhile Trigger has produced an impressive range of other anime, some helped along

by Imaishi, but mainly the work of younger directors. When I asked if Trigger had an underlying “style,” Wakabayashi played down the idea. “We don’t really think of genre or style as such. We just want to do what the directors or staffers want to make, what they find funny or interesting or exciting. As a result, there might be ‘our’ style, but it’s not something we’re actually aware of.” Yoh Yoshinori, who helped design mecha on Gurren Lagann, created the delightful Little Witch Academia. In his words, it was an experiment to “make something as interesting as Gurren Lagann and Kill la Kill

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©TRIGGER,Kazuki Nakashima/XFLAG

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without the extreme elements.” The result was family-friendly and hilarious; two original films were followed by a 25-part TV series, which can be found on Netflix. Imaishi himself storyboarded the eighth series episode, set in a zany dream world. Yoshinori is now directing the upcoming Trigger series BNA: Brand New Animal, which will apparently come to Netflix too.

Trigger’s first mecha epic was the contentious DARLING in the FRANXX, directed by Gurren Lagann’s character designer Atsushi Nishigori.

Trigger made it in collaboration with A-1 Pictures. More recently, SSSS.Gridman was an especially “meta” mecha series, set in what’s ostensibly the present day (but is it?), which pays fulsome tribute to Japan’s live-action tokusatsu effects series.

Trigger’s other work includes Kiznaiver, available from Anime Limited. Written by Mari Okada, it’s a winning drama about teenagers bound together by their pain. Meanwhile, other teens developed superpowers in Trigger’s series When Supernatural Battles Become Commonplace.

When Trigger finally released a major new anime directed by Imaishi, I reviewed it in Sight & Sound magazine. “Promare is full of crashing, exhausting battles between grinning, roaring men piloting robots the size of buildings. It’s a vehement statement of fannish

self-celebration, like the massing armies of costumed heroes in the finale of Avengers: Endgame… The artists’ love of the material can’t be faked. The visuals emphasise basic shapes – squares, triangles, the smoothly curving tracks of an elevator which bring dynamism to the stock scene where the villain explains his plot.

Together with a vibrantly stylised red-and-blue colour scheme, Promare’s aesthetic recalls a far artier animation, Hungary’s 1981 myth-fantasy feature Son of the White Mare.”By Imaishi’s own account, he and Nakashima had been wrestling with Promare’s story pretty much ever since Kill la Kill. They were “blocked” for years over what story to tell. Then they went out for a hamburger meal and resolved to serve up a “standard

delicious” work, in line with their usual style.

Promare’s producer Hiromi Wakabayashi calls the new film “a compilation of all of Imaishi’s works up until now.” That explains a great deal; and with the sex and toilet jokes left out, Promare could bring Imaishi to the widest audience yet.

Promare will be released in the UK by Anime Limited.

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GHIBLI CONFIDENTIAL Jonathan Clements on Steve Alpert’s tell-all account of life with Hayao Miyazaki

32 ©1997 Nibakari • GND

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sked to be the voice of an angry 900-pound, twelve-foot-tall wolf god, Gillian Anderson did pretty well and handled the recording session with considerable grace.” It’s all in a day’s work for Steve Alpert, the American executive hired to sell Studio Ghibli to the world. Originally part-released as a long-gone online diary, then published in a Japanese edition, Sharing a House with the Never-Ending Man: 15 Years at Studio Ghibli is his account of the wheeling and dealing behind the scenes at Japan’s most famous anime studio during those vital, game-changing years when it went global. It is an utterly priceless insider account, loaded with shouting matches, dastardly deals, moments of searing creative wisdom and fist-gnawing awkwardness.

Ghibli, and anime, will never look the same again.

Alpert won’t remember, but I dealt with him a couple of times myself when I was the editor of Manga Max magazine. He was unfailingly helpful and consummately professional, and not a bit like the gob-smacked, tongue-tied noob he describes here, trying not to stare down the cleavage of the silver-mini-skirted celeb sent to interview him for a late-night talk show.

Nor was he anything like the angry, affronted press liaison who can be found here delivering a four-storey slap with a view of the park to an arrogant journalist from the New York Times, who demands a next-day interview with “Haiyo Miyazawa” who made that film about the boy riding the giant tiger, or something. Despite speaking Japanese and having worked in Japan for many years, Alpert is thrust into a world with an argot all of its own. He listens in bafflement as animators try to work out the best colour for a forest deity, conducting their argument almost entirely in pigment numbers as if ordering in a 1970s Chinese restaurant. Like Inuit discussing snow, the Ghibli animators have multiple words for rain, depending on if they want a dara dara effect or a peko peko. Swiftly, he gains an appreciation for the level of subliminal detail that Miyazaki invests in his films – calling the reader’s 33

attention to the amount of effort that goes into creating a split-second shot of a crumbling roof tile.

Alpert has some golden advice for the pet gaijin in any company: “Don’t release your translation until you find out what it’s going to be used for.” He learns this the hard way when he’s asked to turn something into English, and only later discovers that the rough translation he dashed off has been sent straight to the printers. In discussing his travails as Ghibli’s go-to guy for translations, he reveals that it’s him who is at least partly responsible for Mononoke Hime going out with only half its title translated, leaving the word mononoke for “someone cleverer” to handle, only to discover that nobody had bothered. I contest his (and Miyazaki’s) claim that mononoke is untranslatable – back when it was announced, we had no trouble at Manga Mania magazine coming up with a bunch of possibilities. If you don’t want to trawl through the back issues, I’m happy to tell you what they were for a vast fee, but regardless, Alpert’s frustrations demonstrate all too well the invisible pressures at work. Fans, and critics, have their whole lives to pick at creative decisions – the people who make them all too often have to make a call in seconds, and get to spend the rest of their lives reading about their mistakes on the Internet. “And yes,” writes Alpert. “It does hurt.”He demonstrates with a six-syllable phrase from Princess Mononoke which, if properly unpacked in English, takes up to three times as long to say. And in a moment of surreal intercultural misunderstanding, he recalls the message he got from Disney about a plot point in Spirited Away, when someone steals a character’s seal, confusing a stamp with a semi-aquatic marine mammal.

On Laputa: Castle in the Sky, Alpert recounts the hassles over translating character names that, to him, seemed clearly to be Japanese stabs at the French pronunciation for Charles and Henri. “Disney’s translator,” writes Alpert 34

with admirable sarcasm, “who was a thirdgeneration Japanese-American and had never lived in Japan, and who also didn’t believe in asking questions, had decided the names were probably Chinese.” His answer to this, as befits someone from a management background, is to create a five-person committee in which seemingly nobody can actually do the whole part of the job. However, he writes: “Hayao Miyazaki can say something in Japanese, and five people hearing him say it will have five completely different ideas about what it was that he meant.

And none of them will be wrong.”

The amount of rewrites required, particularly for a fluent dub, often wrecks a translation so much that it can’t be pushed any further. Many anime fans are familiar with this problem from their experience of “dubtitling”, in which a subtitle script turns out not to translate the Japanese original, but what is said in the English dub. Alpert has to deal with this problem at an industrial level, particularly with those smaller language territories that will be translating not out of Japanese, but at one step removed, using the English script. Rather than deal with any more semantic drift, he organises “direct translations”, walking the process back a step so that Norwegian subtitlers can go through it all again, but with a closer appreciation of what the original may have meant.

The book’s unexpectedly clunky title trades, inevitably, on Alpert’s time with Hayao Miyazaki, and there are plenty of eye-popping anecdotes here, not the least Miyazaki’s occasional suggestion that the entire staff be laid off after each film in order to keep them keen – nobody ever works out if he is joking. We get to see Miyazaki’s staff trying to lure him away on press junkets by promising the swamps of Estonia and the architecture of Vienna, and a gruff Miyazaki trolling foreign journalists, giving half a dozen different answers to the same trite question.As any long-term Ghibli-watcher will know, the producer Toshio Suzuki has just as much of a role to play in the studio’s success. And Alpert

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is particularly good on Suzuki’s machinations behind the scenes, as he micro-manages the optics on Princess Mononoke, deliberately booking too few cinemas to make sure there were visibly long queues outside. And of course, the book includes that moment that Harvey Weinstein muses that Mononoke might benefit from a little trimming, and Suzuki presents him with a sword and the very clear message: “NO CUTS.” Generations of anime historians yet unborn will snicker at Alpert’s account of the contractual negotiations between Ghibli-owners Tokuma Shoten and Buena Vista-owners Disney, in which Yasuyoshi Tokuma turns up after discussions are supposedly over, and announces that he wants to throw out the whole deal and hammer it out, man-to-man with Michael O. Johnson, the executive who has come to Japan expecting to sign a done deal. Neither Tokuma nor Disney come out well in Alpert’s account – the Americans are presented as rude idiots, the Japanese as arrogant tossers, both of them intent on a futile dick-measuring contest, obscured by interpreters who literally lie about what is being said to stop things erupting into a fistfight. Japanese minions pretend to give Tokuma everything he wants, but walk it all back in the small print of their contract, which they know Tokuma will never read. Everything appears to have worked out, except Tokuma then breaks his own non-disclosure clause, and brags to the media about the size of the deal. This serves to attract the attention of the Japanese tax office, which refuses to believe that a company director could be working under the impression that his earnings are twice the size of what they actually are. You would hope that was the end of it all, but it’s only then, it seems, that people at Disney actually watch the package of films they have bought, and start to complain that there are guns in it, and raccoons with magic ball-sacks, and naked children in a bath with their dad.

Alpert confirms, as I have long suspected, that the distribution contract with Disney included the right not to release Ghibli films at all, effectively nobbling Disney’s biggest competitor.

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Mr Tokuma, it turns out, was the studio’s unexpected saviour, since one of the results of his Trump-ish tantrums was that Ghibli retained digital rights. As DVD became a viable form of home video, Ghibli was able to use it to leverage back the rights in the films that some at Disney were hoping to mothball.As with the Japanese original, much of the book is centred on the production and release of Princess Mononoke.

That was, of course, twenty years ago, so a lot has changed since, although I bet there are still film festivals out there that will put an inexperienced, first-time interpreter on the stage with a major director and hope she can wing it – a story that unfolds here like a slow-motion car-crash.

Anime films no longer have to be checked onto planes as stacks of canisters the size of a filing cabinet, but this is all to the good, as Alpert records issues that remain crucial to understanding the history of film. Alpert has a gift for the minutiae of media life, whether it’s the food on the table at the meeting or the confusion of giving an awards speech when blinded by Klieg lights. He reports on the 38

strange rituals of first-class travellers on Japan Air Lines, the egalitarian fawning of German press photographers who can’t afford to discover they missed out on someone who turned out to be famous, and that embarrassing moment when he accidentally grabbed Mira Nair’s boob. When Miyazaki refuses to go to Berlin if he only might win an award, Alpert is left to fly the company flag at the Golden Bears, despite not having the right shoes. He also reveals that Miyazaki doesn’t own his Oscar – like other modern winners, he only leases it from the Academy, to stop people from flogging off their awards for money.

While it is indeed churlish to offer any complaints about such an entertaining, gamechanging , explosive book, I will observe for the record that there aren’t really fifteen years manifest here. The book ends, more or less, with the 2000 funeral of Yasuyoshi Tokuma, although preceding chapters deal with the later release and success of Spirited Away. Chronology wavers a little, but that barely covers Alpert’s first five years at Ghibli, a studio that he did not leave for almost another decade. There is no discussion of

Ghibli’s years in the doldrums after Miyazaki’s (second) attempted retirement, what must have been major spats over the company’s legacy direction, the Ghibli museum, or Miyazaki’s return to animation with The Wind Rises.

Possibly, there are legal reasons – Alpert has left Ghibli now, and is presumably in witness protection somewhere after revealing the anime studio overtime drives are technically in breach of Japanese labour laws. Some of his stories gently redact names of people who might take umbrage, but others are open about the ghastly behaviour of named individuals. I presume that more recent happenings might require a grace period to elapse before he can say where the bodies are buried.

Maybe the years from Princess Mononoke to Spirited Away were Alpert’s heyday, and after that he was confined to dull box-ticking and accountancy. But I find that hard to believe – far more likely that he has another book in him, awaiting statues of limitations on all sorts of crimes against anime. I eagerly await a sequel that takes his career up to whatever it was that saw him leave the company around 2011, along

with how the company saw him off. Was there no parting handshake and a slap on the back, no Totoro carriage-clock and an invitation to the office Christmas party? Alpert just stops talking, as if he has been suddenly called away to answer his second or third phone, leaving the reader sitting in a notional conference room, wondering if this remarkable meeting is truly over.

In the midst of all of this, surrounded by toadies and flunkies, duelling cockswans and shouty executives, Hayao Miyazaki sends back his drink at a restaurant, telling the waiter that it is not the forty-year-old port that he ordered. The waiter insists that it is, but Miyazaki sticks to his guns, until a sheepish manager admits that they had, indeed, tried to fob him off with a cheaper variety. He remains the only one who is true of heart, in a Sea of Corruption.

Sharing a House with the Never-Ending Man: 15 Years at Studio Ghibli will be published this June

by Stone Bridge Press.

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PILLOW FIGHT Andrew Osmond has been treating his ears to the FLCL soundtrack.

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ne interesting thing about The Pillows, the alt-rock band which provided all the music for FLCL, is that its members didn’t think anime and music had much to do with each other. If you read about Japanese popculture, you learn about its obsession with the “media mix,” how a property can be an anime and a manga and a music album and a toy line, and much more besides. And it’s easy to think everyone in Japanese entertainment must know that, and be savvy to the opportunities in crossmedia. In The Pillows’ case, the band wasn’t.

In a 2018 video interview given to Adult Swim, vocalist Sawao Yamanaka was clear that FLCL’s director Kazuya Tsurumaki did all the running.

“I guess Tsurumaki liked our band. We had this song called ‘One Life.’” The 1997 single was included on The Pillows’ sixth album, Little Busters, which was especially popular; fans of The Pillows are called “Little Busters” in its honour.

According to Yamanaka, Tsurumaki asked The Pillows if the band could provide songs similar to ‘One Life’ for FLCL. “But we weren’t very familiar with the world of anime. I think that we were probably kind of rude to him… For us, our musical activities basically consisted of write music, make a CD, do a tour, and repeat every year. That’s what ‘rock band’ meant to us. So a tie-in, where our work would be used as a theme song or in a commercial, was pretty much a turnoff. We weren’t interested in that stuff. It usually comes with restrictions, you know?”The Pillows

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gave the FLCL director a completely different song from ‘One Life’ – ‘Ride On Shooting Star,’ which fans of the anime will know as FLCL’s end theme. The band reasoned they could pass on FLCL if Tsurumaki didn’t like the song. As it happened, the director did like it, and changed his plan for the end theme so he could use the song in the anime. Yamanaka thinks the song fitted FLCL because each of them lacked a throughline; their eccentricities meant they went together. In the end, all the FLCL music was provided by the Pillows. The band provided another new song for the anime, ‘I Think I Can.’ For the rest of the soundtrack, Gainax was able to use songs selected from the Pillows’ three most recent albums, Please Mr. Lostman, Little Busters and Runners High, all released in the late 1990s.

It’s a happy accident story, unlike the tales of collaborations and mutual fandom that often get played up in anime. For example, there are the epic-length collaborations between Makoto Shinkai and the band RADWIMPS (who worked together for 18 months on Your Name). Then there’s the way that the band Bump of Chicken loved the manga March Comes in Like a Lion and released songs based on it, years before it was turned into a TV anime in which those songs also appeared. The Pillows, though, was established and going its own way by the time anime came calling. The band had been formed in 1989 in Hokkaido. As well as Yamanaka on vocals, there was the guitarist Yoshiaki Manabe

© 2000 King Record Co., Ltd. Tokyo Japan © 1999 I.G/GAINAX/KGI

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and drummer Shinichiro Sato. Initially, there was a fourth member of the group, Kenji Ueda, who wrote songs with Yamanaka, but he left after their second album in 1992. The band’s name was reportedly inspired by a British indie compilation album, Pillows & Prayers. Indeed, the band claims to be heavily influenced by British pop, including the Beatles and the Jam. The Pillows even recorded its second album in England in the early 1990s. This pop video seems to be shot in Blighty, complete with the band enjoying tea on a beach. The Pillows also played live in Britain, but Yamanaka felt they weren’t well received. He also claimed to have turned down an offer to open for Oasis when they appeared in Japan, apparently just so he could say that The Pillows turned down that kind of offer. It’s certainly consistent with Yamanaka’s initial scepticism about FLCL.And after The Pillows gave its music to the anime?

“Our music got way more well-known than ever before,” Yamanaka said. That was especially true outside Japan where FLCL and its soundtrack became fan favourites; by the mid-2000s, The Pillows was touring America. Looks like there’s something to that media mix idea.

The FLCL soundtrack is available on vinyl, CD and digitally from Anime Limited

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PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS AN OLD MAN Andrew Osmond watches as Hayao Miyazaki retires... again.

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ever-Ending Man is a live-action documentary film about Hayao Miyazaki, and it starts with his “retirement” announcement in September 2013, after his “final” film, The Wind Rises. Those quote marks suggest how well he stuck to his word.

“I’ve caused quite a stir before by saying I’m quitting,” Miyazaki said, “so people don’t believe me. But this time, I mean it.”

For heaven’s sake, never, ever believe him. “All old directors say they’d rather make films than do anything else,” Miyazaki remarks in Never-Ending Man. “But I don’t want to make to make crap. I want to go somewhere new.”

Never-Ending Man covers a two-year period, from 2015 into 2016, in which we see Miyazaki going about his theoretical retirement. Funnily, that involves him coming into Ghibli every day and working very hard, even as he insists he’s just messing around. Most of the documentary is about his efforts to make a short ten-minute film, Boro the Caterpillar, and trying to realise his vision with CG animators. The last part of the documentary shows him deciding to make something else, something bigger, but we’ll get to that.

If you’ve seen the documentary The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness, which showed Miyazaki making Wind Rises and ended with his, ahem, resignation, then Never-Ending Man feels like the sequel. It has a different director, though, Kaku Arakawa; Dreams and Madness was directed by Mami Sunada.

But Never-Ending Man has its own arc, partly defined by the Boro project and Miyazaki’s efforts to bend the tools and algorithms of CG to create a fleshy, undulating caterpillar. More fundamentally, this is a Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man, well aware he’s only getting older. Miyazaki turns 74 at the start of this film; he’s 79 now.

NEVER-ENDING MAN: HAYAO MIYAZAKI © NHK, All Rights Reserved

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After the retirement announcement, the film cuts to 16 months later, and a snowfall outside the windows of Miyazaki’s “Aetelier Nibaraki” building near Ghibli. “Lots of snow,” Arakawa remarks. The documentarian is never seen on screen, like Sunada in Dreams and Madness.

The self-effacement feels respectful to Miyazaki, though Western viewers may hanker for a When Louis (Theroux) Met Hayao. “Lots of funerals, too, lately,” Miyazaki replies. “I hate it. They were all younger than me.” Later, he’s blunter. “People are dying who should have outlived me.”

Winter has come for Miyazaki. Mortality and ageing pervade the film. We see Miyazaki’s response to two deaths, that of Masako Shinohara, who’d worked with him for a half a century, and colour designer Michiyo Yasuda.

(The film ends before the passing of Isao Takahata in 2018.) But it’s not just deaths; even “young” acquaintances are getting old. Producer Toshio Suzuki is seven years Hayao’s junior, but we see him mention that his doctor told him to restrict his driving to an hour a day.

Miyazaki himself says his focus has gone. “If I concentrate like I once did, I suddenly get exhausted. I just fool around now.” Miyazaki has said such things for decades. Back in my 2008 Spirited Away book, I wrote, “Miyazaki’s wellpublicised ailments – failing eyesight, inflamed finger-joints, his constant complaints of falling energy – are part of his public persona, a morbid barometer of his career.”

The film constantly reminds us that Miyazaki’s words must come true in the end… but not yet.

More than once, we see the much younger Boro staff looking at the work that this old geezer is producing, stunned by the detail. We see the work, too, and they’re not just being polite.

The film also shows Miyazaki grappling with CG technology. Of course it’s figured in his films since Mononoke, but he hopes to take far greater advantage of it here. We see him enthused and excited by the earliest tests, then frustrated as the 46

CG animators can’t make Boro move and live as he wants.

Most of today’s anime studios and film-makers find balances between CG and hand-drawn techniques that satisfy them. You might extend that to a Hollywood director like Scorsese, almost the same age as Miyazaki, who accepted the imperfect overlay of CG in The Irishman as a way to “de-age” his top actors. Miyazaki is harder to please.

Although it’s not brought up in the film, Boro is something of a return to Nausicaa, Miyazaki’s opus of nearly 40 years ago, set in another world of bugs. That had giant creatures very like caterpillars, called Ohmu. In the Nausicaa film, the Ohmu’s segmented bodies were animated through extreme analogue means, by using overlapping pieces of card (presumably traced).

In the manga, Miyazaki drew hundreds of Ohmu himself, using that cutting-edge triumph of tech, the pencil.

Obviously, Miyazaki didn’t need CG animators to realise an insect world. He’d already directed a bug-based short for the Ghibli museum, 2006’s Monmon the Water Spider. Even nine years later, Miyazaki could surely have found enough traditional animators to draw ten minutes of Boro and his environment. Midway through Never-Ending Man, one of the CG artists looks at the drawings Miyazaki is making as guides (!), and confesses it might be faster to just draw the animation by hand. “I can’t draw a caterpillar with a pencil,” Miyazaki claims in a film which shows him doing just that, umpteen times over.

For that matter, Miyazaki didn’t even need animation to continue creating. Some fans, myself included, think his greatest work is in manga form. Miyazaki’s comments suggest he was drawn to CG precisely because it was (largely) new to him; and perhaps because younger animators were migrating there too. “Hayao likes young people,” Suzuki claims in the film. “They energise him. But what happens to the young people?

Working with him ages them.”

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That’s brutally demonstrated in one of the film’s most memorable scenes, which you may have already seen excerpted online. It’s when CG animators from another company turn up to show Miyazaki movement generated by A.I. Unfortunately, what’s been generated is a zombie creature whose flailing undulations parody what the director sought in Boro. Miyazaki’s response is to royally bollock the programmers; his outburst makes Alan Sugar on The Apprentice look like a cuddly Totoro.

There are other glimpses of the curmudgeonly Miyazaki, including an annoyed swipe at a certain Disney anthem of the 2010s. “It’s all about being yourself. But that’s terrible… Self-satisfied people are boring.” Later, Miyazaki mentions that some of his staff are going to see the latest Star Wars film. “They’ll all be bowled over and want to do Star Wars, not a caterpillar,” grumbles the director who made that modest slice of life film, Princess Mononoke.

Rather annoyingly, the film leaves the caterpillar story unfinished. We don’t see Boro completed; the film indicates that Miyazaki decides to use more hand-drawing, and his own animation at the end looking extremely like imagery from Nausicaa. However, Anime News Network reports that Boro’s caterpillars were still animated entirely in CG. The film debuted in March 2018 in the Ghibli Museum, which is the only venue that shows it; I haven’t seen it.

Instead, the last scenes of Never-Ending Man show Miyazaki, after all his troubles and frustrations with Boro…going up to Suzuki and saying he wants to make another feature film.

Suzuki asks what if Miyazaki dies right after finishing the storyboards; it goes unanswered.

Miyazaki’s plan is to finish the film in three years, before the Olympics. It looks as quaint now as George R.R. Martin saying he could end his Game of Thrones books before the TV version caught up. Still, at least a global pandemic has bought him another year.

The name of Miyazaki’s film isn’t mentioned in the documentary. Some reports wrongly claimed it was a feature-length expansion of 48

Boro the Caterpillar. In 2017 the feature’s title was announced as How Do You Live?, homaging a 1937 Japanese novel of the same name. In Suzuki’s book Mixing Work With Pleasure (specifically in a preface written in 2017 for the English-language edition), the producer describes the new film as “fantasy on a grand scale.” Little more was heard until December 2019, when Suzuki appeared on another Japanese documentary. He said that after three and a half years work, Miyazaki had finished 15% of the film, and was working at a rate of a minute a month.

For some fans, that’s enough to make them give up any hope of seeing the film finished, at least in Miyazaki’s lifetime. Yet Never-Ending Man offers grounds for hope. It shows how Boro was also moving at a hopelessly sluggish pace, until the problems to be fixed, the barriers broken. Or as Miyazaki shouts, “Let’s break out of this! We’ve been constipated too long!”

And the future of Ghibli? In Never-Ending Man, Suzuki takes the line it means nothing without Miyazaki. “If Hayao quits, it’s meaningless to have a production team.” There’s no hope of finding an heir. “I ate them all,” Miyazaki confesses; the line is cheekily juxtaposed with a glimpse of the alldevouring No-Face in Spirited Away.

Yet that’s before Miyazaki embarks on How Do You Live? By 2017, Suzuki was talking of Ghibli’s “mission” to continue making films. He was also announcing a new CG feature by Miyazaki’s most contentious heir, his son Goro. (This film’s current status is unclear.)

Miyazaki is frank about how he may not finish his own feature before it finishes him. “I’m prepared to die before it’s finished. I’d rather die that way than die doing nothing. To die with something to live for.” If that sounds too morbid, you might append comments that Miyazaki wrote decades ago, for a high-flying heroine in his manga Nausicaa. “I can hear a voice in my heart, all the time. Go forward, it tells me. So all I think of now is going forward, as far as I am able.”

Never-Ending Man is released in the UK by Anime Limited.

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HER STORY Helen McCarthy gets ready for Revolutionary Girl Utena

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rom the first episodes of the Revolutionary Girl Utena anime series, director Kunihiko Ikuhara delivers a format packed with new ideas and a number of classic riffs. As a girl, we are told, Utena lost her parents, but remembers being comforted by a gallant prince on a white horse. The impressionable child never forgot the prince’s kindness, and resolved when she grew up to become not a princess, but a prince... She joins the prestigious Otori Academy, the curviest tomboy to ever refuse to wear a sailor suit, and aspired to be an elite duellist. All she needs is a damsel in distress and opponents worthy of her steel.The long climb up to the duellists’ platform is repeated each time Utena goes to fight, echoing the launch sequences of Japanese giant robot shows; second time around there’s a magical girl-type costume change. The frequent bravura displays mask Ikuhara’s dives into a number of minor plotholes, and the constant stylistic chopping is visually akin to being on a boat on the high seas: you never know where the next new wave will take you. By the third episode the director has realised that, just because you can do anything you like in animation, you don’t have to. He starts to select the tricks that work for him (the shadow-play exposition sequences, for example) and discard the ones that don’t.

In 1997, as the shockwaves generated by Gainax’s mould-breaking TV series Evangelion began to die down, the Japanese animation magazines awoke to a world in which it was once again possible to put another set of characters on their covers and still sell magazines. They began to hunt for something to fill the void.

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It had to be something that looked completely different, but felt approximately the same at heart. That was not because the generation of Eva clones then springing up lacked the twisted inspiration or desperate drive of the original; the motive was much less complex.

Anime magazines sold themselves on their covers. Obviously, magazines want to carry the most popular series, but they also want to be the first to break the Next Big Thing, and to give a helping hand to the anime companies and their own balance sheets by drawing in new fans and keeping the existing ones interested.

To compete for customers’ attention, the Next Big Thing has to look as unlike the previous hit as possible.After Eva, anime needed something sexy, colourful, playful, with a different kind of tension. Along came Revolutionary Girl Utena, hitting Japanese TV like a breath of rose-scented air after the blood-soaked teenage torture garden that was Evangelion. Yet Utena carried its own blood spatter pattern, not from a robot weapon but from a blade buried in a girl’s heart.For months, Utena dominated the covers and lead features of the three major anime magazines – zappy Animedia, thoughtful Animage and the legendary Newtype, whose loyalty to the Gundam multiverse didn’t prevent it hyping new hits. Creepy, delusional adults didn’t dominate this show; teenagers drove the plot. Heroine Utena was nothing like Eva’s broken blossoms; she was cute, sexy, forthright and positive, convinced that someday her prince will come, determined that when he arrives he’ll find a comrade worthy of his respect. The story piled in girls, uniforms, swords, cross-dressing, neo-European settings, intrigue and romance in an elite boarding school beyond Harry Potter’s wildest dreams.

© 1997 BE-PAPAS/CHIHO SAITO/SHOGAKUKAN • SHOKAKU • TV TOKYO

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Revolutionary Girl Utena had it all: looks, style and a great media buzz. Its media buzz came largely from the fact that it looked so fresh.

Pop stars are made of this – but those that last deliver something beyond a new look, especially in today’s media market. Magazine covers are passé now, even in Japan, where the market for print has shrunk in each of the past fifteen years.

Most fans consume their images on small screens where the grandiose has to fit in the palm of your hand. The whole idea of the independent, self-determined female is under attack. What does Utena have to offer in the era of mobile phones, #GamerGate and #MeToo?The anime market, like all media, renews itself by attracting new consumers. Its classics are soon forgotten, given lip service but rarely watched. There had been robot mega-hits before Eva, there had been cross-dressing fighting females before Utena, but new fans stumbling across old shows on YouTube or in a convention screening room complained of slow, creaky yawn-fests. A hit show with respectable old-school roots – a classic storyline, a writer’s or director’s pedigree, a link to earlier success – needs a new angle of attack on a market that’s increasingly hard to penetrate.

In a Western context it sounds completely counter-intuitive that the way Utena developed, let alone the way to celebrate its 20th anniversary and speak to a new generation, was through the medium of the musical. In Britain and America, musicals are rarely seen by anyone under twenty unless they’re Disney-based. Yet Japanese audiences have flocked to musicals based on their favourite anime and manga for decades.The first ever stage musical based on manga opened in 1974. The Takarazuka Theatre Troupe presented Riyoko Ikeda’s epic The Rose of Versailles, the story of a crossdressing sword-fighting girl at the court of France around the time of the Revolution. (Yes, the Utena connection is screamingly obvious: cross-dressing girls, swords, elite European settings.) The Takarazuka troupe, founded in 1913 to attract customers to the resort town of Takarazuka, is unique. It presents lavish song and dance epics with all roles played by young

women. Utena’s plot antecedents go back to one of Takarazuka’s uberfans, manga superstar Osamu Tezuka, a childhood resident of the town.

His 1953 cross-dressing girl sword-fighter manga Princess Knight was his homage to Takarazuka.

Princess Knight in turn inspired The Rose of Versailles, later presented on the Takarazuka stage. Both manga inspired Utena. In December 1997 Utena, now a TV hit, came home to her musical extravaganza roots. A “Takarazukastyle” all-female production production of Revolutionary Girl Utena The Musical Comedy, directed by Yuji Mitsuya, premiered in Tokyo’s Hakuhinkan Theatre. Retired Takarazukienne Yuu Daiki played cross-dressing sword-fighting heroine Utena. In 1989’s Takarazuka production of The Rose of Versailles: Fersen & Marie Anoinette, Yuu played cross-dressing swordfighting heroine Oscar. Self-reference couldn’t get more post-modern.

Two further musicals followed rapidly, from production companies Gesshoku Kagekidan in 1999 and Fantasy Adventure in 2000. The 20th anniversary Utena musical, Bud of the White Rose (pictured) opened in 2018 and adapted the Student Council arc from the original anime. The production was supervised by Kunihiko Ikuhara, although the writer-director was experienced musical hand Kotaro Yoshitani.

The pair followed this in 2019 with RGU: Blooming Rose of Deepest Black, based on the Black Rose arc. The fossil record is clear: Utena is rooted deep in Japanese musical theatre.The entertainment market and the media that deliver its product have both changed radically since the turn of the millennium. Rose of Versailles was already twenty years old when Utena made her TV debut. Western distributors played up the tenuous connection with Bandai’s mass-market merchandise generator Sailor Moon, whose power in both the Japanese and the American markets was a known commodity. Advertised as from “the team who brought you Sailor Moon”, Utena boasted neither Sailor Moon’s creator Naoko Takeuchi, nor its original director Junichi Sato. It does feature one of Sailor Moon’s 53

series directors, Kunihiko Ikuhara, but if we’re looking for roots, maybe we should look outside anime altogether.Utena’s framing and cutting are reminiscent of a wide range of comedy and sitcom stereotypes dating as far back as the title cards and cut-out frames of movies from the 1920s. The motivations of its characters also flirt with traditional Americana. Some characters resonate with old-school assumptions about the role of women drawn from American media of the 1950s and 1960s. These assumptions were brought to Japan with the Occupying forces after World War II and continued as America continued to infiltrate Japanese culture.

Most new Utena viewers will miss their resonances altogether, but their cumulative influence is considerable.

Yet Utena skirts these dangerous waters with considerable skill, never throwing out the female-empowerment baby despite loading the bathwater with old-school tropes. Its characters are genuinely engaging, their diva-in-overdrive or downtrodden attributes and high-contrast worldviews the eternal takeaway of teen dramas.

Its more reflective moments are as cleverly engineered as stealth bombers. Its extravagant set-pieces give an object lesson in mainlining straight to the visual cortex.

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The links to Western visual culture are especially interesting in the context of Japan’s nascent theatre trend, 2.5Dimension Musical Theatre, usually known as 2.5D. Taking the outrageous extravagance of Takarazuka and the primal energy of the original kabuki theatre, 2.5D layers on video projection, lighting and music, mixes in ancient production techniques, and adapts its stories from currently popular anime, manga and video games. It aims to pull in young audiences who would not normally venture into a theatre, and is doing its utmost to be internationally viable, with occasional shows in Asia, the USA and Europe and innovative theatre glasses offering subtitles in four languages. The term and concept originated with producer Makoto Masuda in 2014, although it has echoes of sideshow spectacles from a hundred years earlier, like the rensageki drama that mixed cinema and theatre. In 2017, the most recent year for which I have data, there were 171 2.5D productions in Japan, many of them using techniques learned not only from the ancient and modern stage but from the framing and cutting of late 20th century anime such as Utena. They played to over 2.2 million theatregoers.

Sub-plots revolve around around the main strands of Utena’s search for her prince and the shadowy political motives of the secret

organisation End of the World. The timing of character revelations is subtly excellent. Utena’s klutzy pal starts out stupid, then displays unexpected strength of character. Just when you’re annoyed enough to slap passive damselin-distress Anthy, a UFO-catcher prize for the top gun of Otori Academy, she displays hidden humour and strength. Utena herself faces internal conflict, betrays and is betrayed.

Her struggles with herself, with her friends and classmates are more terrifying than merely duelling with an enemy. In an alternate world chillingly predictive of the modern Internet, despite the fact that it communicates by letter, hidden identities and false motives are used to crush the brave and dominate the unwary.

Anyone can be brought down by failings they thought hidden. This year’s favourite is next year’s forgotten loser.

There are some wonderfully observed cameos of playground life and pre-teen romantic fantasy. At least one of the writers on this team knows how teenagers think and dream.

Today, demonstrations of gossip as a weapon of aggression read like disturbing predictions of the misogyny of 21st century social media. The main hetero “romances” are chillingly accurate predictions of the way many men today stalk and brutalise women both off and online, cheered on by a yapping chorus of nameless idiots.For me, the most interesting of Utena’s plot strands

cement the work as a brilliant (though probably accidental) piece of predictive text. Can the ideals of innocence defeat an opponent who uses the cynical privilege of adulthood? And what happens to a girl who devotes her life to becoming what most men fear – competition?If we look at the current climate of ferocious backlash against any women who resist or protest inequality – at #Gamergate, at #MeToo, at the regular online trolling of women with opinions, at the number of people who hide behind online tags to proclaim themselves against social justice – Utena’s world of young women attacked and abused by men and betrayed by other women is as devastatingly real as the alienation and abandonment of young people played out as a giant robot show in Evangelion.

From its prehistory through its growth out of anime and musicals, the evolution of the revolution in Utena has turned into a reality more chilling, and more convincing, than we could have anticipated in 1997.

Revolutionary Girl Utena will be released on UK Blu-ray by Anime Limited.

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MANGA: RYUKO

By Shelley Pallis

“T

he Middle East is great,” chuckles an evil gangster in Eldo Yoshimizu’s manga Ryuko. “It smells of blood all the time. You’ll love it.” There are a bunch of opportunities to be had as the Soviet Union collapses, and cartels from former Communist states duke it out over surplus arms, artificial revolutions and the copious profits from international drugs deals. But that’s all in the past... or is it?

Ryuko leaps ahead to the present-day, as Tokyo gangsters fight to hold onto their turf after an incursion of Chinese rivals. The inheritors of the Black Dragons syndicate are locked in a turf war with the Yajima gang, over businesses both legal and illegal, while the Chinese Triads sneak up on them both. A bunch of long-standing vendettas reach bloody resolution on the streets of Tokyo, but as the bodies pile up, we start to realise that we are watching the end of a long,

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long cycle of retribution, that chases its origins back a generation or more.The icy-cool Ryuko is the uncrowned queen of Japanese gangland, a free agent exiled from the underworld after murdering her own father. “You don’t take power with justice,” we see him boasting to her in yet another flashback. “You take it by winning.” Former gang-boss Garyu doesn’t have time for adopting strays or doing right by old friends. He just wants to get out while the going’s good, shutting down his gun-running operation to Central Asia just ahead of the coup that’s going to ruin everything. But his daughter Ryuko is cut from a different cloth, a ruthless businesswoman with a sense of loyalty and honour so overwhelming that she is prepared to kill him over it. By the time she finds out it was a misunderstanding and she didn’t have all the facts, she has already kicked off another round of violent retributions.

© Tsutomu Nihei, KODANSHA/BLAME! Production Committee

Long-term manga fans may discern something of an old-school element in Ryuko, evocative not only of the Chinatown warfare of Crying Freeman, but the vengeful beauties of many a work by the late Kazuo Koike. Nowhere is this more notable than in one of the opening set-pieces – a prolonged heist crying out for a big-budget Hollywood remake, in which two scantily clad beauties hijack a train somewhere in the former Soviet Union. They are Ryuko’s wayward step-daughters, Valer and Sasori, taking teen rebellion to noisy, explosive heights after childhoods spent amidst guns and gangsters.

This is conspicuous criminal consumption – the spoils of the illicit drugs and arms trades have given gangster syndicates the reach and power of small countries, along with operatic vendettas to match. But in a masterful condensation of grand, wide-screen drama into small, intimate motivations, Yoshimizu tracks his unwieldy, sprawling drama back to the events of just a

couple of days in the distant past – a 1990s coup in a forgotten republic; a promise made to an old friend, and a chance encounter on a dusty road. The impact of these events spirals gradually out of control in the years that follow, until they erupt into car chases and gunplay on the streets of contemporary Tokyo.

Amid flashbacks, flash-forwards and revisits, we come to understand that Ryuko is trapped in the middle of a karmic whirlwind. Revelations in the second volume, in English allude to the Dharma Seals of Buddhist scripture, and take the storyline all the way back to invasion of China by the Manchus in 1644, when secret societies became the last redoubt of Chinese heroism.

That’s merely the latest in a series of moments where Yoshimizu backtracks in his own story, as if suddenly remembering something he really ought to have mentioned before. Some readers may find this to be an intriguing, nested form 57

of oriental story-telling – an Arabian Nights-feel in which no tale is quite over before another has begun to take its place. A cynic might think that Yoshimizu, a newcomer to the manga form, is making things up as he goes.

Sometimes it’s hard to keep track of all the heroines on offer. There’s not just Ryuko herself, the unflappable empress of the yakuza subculture, there’s Valer, her adopted daughter (the orphaned daughter of a Middle Eastern despot), and Sasori, her other adopted daughter (described as “nothing but a ghetto bitch”), and Tatiana the Russian assassin who moonlights as a stripper (and turns out to be a general’s daughter)... It’s as if Yoshizaki develops an artist’s crush on each new poster-girl in a cowboy hat and hot-pants – an affection that lasts long enough for a chapter of unclothed combat and booby action, only for her to fall by the wayside as a new heroine grabs his attention. Certainly, by the later chapters, the cast of Ryuko starts to look awfully crowded – there’s at least one, possibly two gun-toting, bike-riding leading ladies who could probably be dropped without losing the drama. But as Yoshimizu’s biography in this lurid, visceral translation from Titan Comics freely admits, it’s the pictures that came first, and his story is something of an afterthought, bolted onto his improvised imagery of beautiful femmes fatales, and his elaborate saga of the deeds of the dead returning to haunt the lives of the living.

Ryuko, volume 1, by Eldo Yoshimizu is published by Titan Comics.

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© KOKOSAKE PROJECT

THE WORD GIRL Jonathan Clements reads the book of The Night is Short, Walk on Girl

“S

enpai” adores the Dark-Haired Girl hopelessly. She has no idea. So he follows her around, for a whole year, hoping she will notice him. He tells you his story, but she also tells you hers, as they are slowly brought together in a magical city that once spent a thousand years as the centre of the world. They, like everyone else in the Japanese city of Kyoto, are gate-crashers at a never-ending party, browsers in a bookshop where everything is connected, mere mortals wondering if there is any way they can avoid an inevitable tornado of surprised fish dropping out of the sky. I used to live in Kyoto; it is a bit like that.Author Tomihiko Morimi is famously enamoured with Kyoto, but The Night is Short, Walk on Girl has to be the pinnacle of his adoration, a book-length love letter to the city, told through the reveries of a couple who are seemingly meant for each other. Before long, the Dark-Haired Girl is cavorting in magic-realist glee with a menagerie of characters who claim to be crow-demons, who might be fallen Zen monks, who are connected in some phasing, Gaiman-esque way to a faery-realm that overlaps the human world.

Meanwhile, someone has stolen our hero’s pants.

In terms of speech, there is little difference between the two characters. They are both diffident prisoners of social obligation, searching for some little, private moment of rebellion. This is either a subtle, romantic indicator that they are kindred spirits, or the mark of an author who can only write in one voice. Fortunately, both Morimi’s narrators are charming innocents, taking their first steps into an adult world that comes laden with wonderful promise. Is there really a secretive cabal of smut collectors in the Kyoto shadows? Could there be a God of Used

Book Fairs? How do you placate the God of Colds?In recent years, many a script doctor has sneered at the idea that a female character is “pretty but doesn’t know it” – what was once a short-hand for womanly confidence has become a much-derided cliché of sophomoric dude-bro writing. But our nameless protagonist begins the very first tale by recusing himself. He is not the protagonist. This is not his story. That, he claims, belongs to Her in all her glory, and he is merely a dumbstruck worshipper, enraptured by everything about her.

Your mileage may vary. Neither our narrator nor the all-important Girl have names. She’s just the word Girl, the thing he wants, which, in the words of Scritti Politti, means that it’s “a name for what you lose, when it was never yours.” To be fair, she doesn’t give him a name, either, but people-watching, the act of many a flaneur, might be all right in Victorian novels, but carries with it in the woke 21st century an element of stalking. Our hero might think it’s perfectly benign to follow his love interest around town, but that’s the first chapter of either a romance or the story of a serial killer. He is a laconic, self-deprecating literary inheritor of Haruki Murakami, glumly sitting through a stranger’s wedding. He has a novelist’s yen for the romantic, observing newlyweds kissing, “unafraid of any gods”, and a modernist’s lack of interest in setting the scene – Morimi loves Kyoto with every fibre of his being, but his text largely expects the mere mention of place-names to fill in the pictures, as if everybody knows what Demachiyanagi looks like. It’s not the fault of translator Emily Balistrieri that Morimi expects nouns alone to carry a sense of place in

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©Tomohiko Morimi,KADOKAWA/NAKAME COMMITTEE

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many Kyoto settings – something, at least, that Masaaki Yuasa’s anime version could impart more effectively for foreign viewers. It is an editorial decision, and probably a wise one, not to add explicatory detail to the original prose, but if any book required some consideration of the implied reader, it was surely this. I was a little taken aback at the lack of footnotes or even an epilogue, pointing to some of the allusions dropped in Morimi’s text, not merely to his own other works, but to historical and mythical characters. When a character grabs a Daruma from a shelf, the reader is expected to know what a Daruma is – I know otaku readers fancy themselves as cultural sophisticates, but please cut the general public some slack! When Rihaku, the drunken king of Kyoto’s wainscot society, slurs the epigram that gives the book its title: “the night is short, walk on girl”, I wonder how many readers will have realised that his name is the Japanese pronunciation of the Chinese Li Bai, the famous Tang-dynasty poet and drunkard.

Chitoseya, the restaurant that seems to straddle Kyoto’s contending timelines like a party that never ends, literally means the Restaurant of a

Thousand Years, but you would need to be able to read Japanese to know that, and if you could read Japanese, you wouldn’t need this translation in the first place. I laughed out loud at a girl fronting a band belting out a song called “Piss Off, Benzaiten, you punk!” but I suspect I was probably on my own in a thousand-mile radius.

This is a book about the time your mate Dave got into a drinking competition with a man called Shakespeare in a pub by the Thames that seemed to be mainly populated by fairies. For a Japanese readership, it has all the resonances that we see modern fantasists aspiring to in the likes of Carnival Row or American Gods, but the Yen Press edition displays a remarkable confidence that the average reader will not require any help understanding that. The result is a joyful book that nevertheless needs to be read, at very least, in tandem with the vibrant anime version, and probably with an encyclopaedia somewhere close at hand. Is there a God of Encyclopaedias?

The Night is Short, Walk on Girl is available as a book from Yen Press, and as a film from Anime Limited.

TWO CLASSIC SERIES TWO STUNNING BLU-RAY STEELBOOKS

AVAILABLE FROM JUNE 1ST

SHINKAI ON STAGE Andrew Osmond talks to director Alexandra Rutter about adapting Makoto Shinkai’s film The Garden of Words in a new stage play by the British company Whole Hog Theatre, which will come to London as soon as it’s possible to get punters back into theatres.

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W

hy did you want to make a stage version of The Garden of Words?

I was so moved by the film. It deals with issues that are so important to explore in the ephemerality of theatre as well as on film. I felt the story could translate beautifully and powerfully to the stage. I wanted to challenge the stereotypes of what an anime is, and I’d never seen one that was so contemplative or with so realistic and honest a portrayal of Tokyo. I was also struck by the way the film expresses the nature of loneliness, especially in the age of social media and digitalised lives – which can create and compound feelings of isolation and anxiety as much as it can reassure and connect us.When we pitched this project we spoke to many London venues who were very interested but a bit confused about how an anime might translate to stage or have the emotional story to hold a theatre audience. I think the (nonfan) image of anime is that it largely deals with robots and science-fiction or is quite garish and not human-story based… but anime tells all sorts of stories. For that reason, I think The Garden of Words is a great choice for the stage.

The story is so simple, human and heartfelt.

We are all about challenging stereotypes, and bringing The Garden of Words to stage does this with regard to anime and Japan. We also want to make work that encourages a more diverse audience of people who might not normally come to the theatre. It’s a great opportunity to give a window on Japanese culture and Tokyo in particular. We’re going to be running in London at the time of the Tokyo Olympics, so if you can’t go to Tokyo…

What can you say about the process by which you contacted Comix Wave and got approval to make this play?

They knew of our work with Princess Mononoke [which Rutter and Whole Hog Theatre adapted in 2013, playing in London and Tokyo], and we took the same approach as we do with anything. We created a concept trailer which 65

gave a visual window on how this would look and feel as a stage adaptation. I proposed staging The Garden of Words about three and a half years ago, before Your Name was released. That’s really exciting; we feel blessed to have discovered Shinkai’s story then but to be able to work with it in a post-Your Name world where appreciation of Shinkai’s work has grown exponentially. I’m really excited to be working on something that’s more “classic Shinkai” and couldn’t be more grateful that the studio has given us permission.

Have you met Shinkai yet?

No, but we didn’t meet Miyazaki-san until after we did Princess Mononoke and this feels right to me; I’d like to earn it!

Can you say more about Nelke Planning, the Japanese production company with whom you are collaborating?

Nelke specialises in anime stage productions in Japan and has pioneered the 2.5D Musical Theatre genre. I would characterize that as somewhere between a Japanese pop idol concert and a western-style musical stage production, using a faithful adaptation style in which characters look as if they were plucked directly out of the animation, and specifically aimed at a Japanese audience. In contrast, what Nelke Planning and Whole Hog Theatre create together is a different style of anime on stage designed for both Japanese and Western audiences. It may have more changes in style, tone and character, rather than trying to accurately depict the original anime.

Has Nelke had input into the Garden of Words play?

They are funding the production, so they have had important input in various ways. But with regards to the creative work, they largely entrust this to us as they believe in our vision.

They are very supportive and really interested in seeing how we might approach it creatively 66

and indeed, sometimes differently from their other shows.

I think it’s really important, that it’s not just a British company in Britain adapting a Japanese piece; there’s a respected Japanese production team in Tokyo working together with us. They and their partnering companies will likely have more input in (the version of the play that will run in) Tokyo, as their expertise is in making work for Japanese people in the Japanese language. We very much value and respect that, but it’s a hugely collaborative process sharing different ways of approaching the play whilst respecting the original.

The first time you saw the film, did you identify with one character more than the other?

Yes, I really identified with Yukino, the female protagonist. It was interesting because I saw it almost as much from her perspective as I did from Takao’s, the boy, even though the film is very much told from his view, while she’s something of an enigma. I was really fascinated to explore her journey as much as his, and we hope to make it more of an even narrative, with both of them leading us through the story and getting to the heart of their loneliness.

The film opens with the boy going into the park; are you considering opening it differently?

Quite possibly. We threw a lot of ideas at the wall during our recent Research and Development (R&D) process to explore different ways to approach it. But yes, I have thought about opening it with Yukino, for example, giving you some context for who she is.

[Rutter explains the play’s content may also be derived from the novel that Shinkai wrote based on the film, which is not currently available in English.]

We hope that the play will explore at least three other characters. They’re Soichiro Ito (or Ito

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Sensei), Yukino’s ex-boyfriend and a teacher at Takao’s school; Shouko Aizawa, the girl who spreads rumours about Yukino; and Takao’s single mother. Of course, we are still in Research and Development so all of these ideas could change!

So your stage version will be longer than the film, and open it up?

Yes, that’s the idea. Fans of the film will still experience the film (story) pretty much intact, along with our interpretation of it, but then we also hope to explore the characters that you see in the book, all from Shinkai, which is fascinating.

The stage version of Princess Mononoke was performed in a very intimate space, which was important to the performance. Is that what you are aiming for with The Garden of Words as well?

Yes, that was one reason we chose Park Theatre’s Park200 for the premiere. I love the space and the intimacy that an audience on three sides brings. The Garden of Words deals with feelings of isolation despite being surrounded by people. Park Theatre felt like a perfect space to encapsulate this feeling for the audience, and allow them to enjoy every complexity and nuance up close. For the Princess Mononoke play, the audience feedback was that they loved how unexpectedly intimate it was and how it expanded out into the auditorium and immersed them within it. We hope to do something similar here. The Garden of Words is such a uniquely Japanese story with such global relevance, and it’s great to be in a theatre that embodies this in their reputation as a 5 star, neighbourhood theatre with global ambition. (Last year, the theatre staged the UK’s first British Vietnamese play).

When you adapted Princess Mononoke for the stage, you described realising how an image from the film could be adapted for the stage.

Did you have a similar eureka moment with The 68

Garden of Words?

Yes, the moment when Shinkai depicts a crow flying through the sky. I could imagine that crow representing all the things people want to achieve in their lives but feel they can’t; the threat of our potential, within a stage world where the crow and the garden are one big moving metaphor, a living painting.

Are you thinking of the play being largely centred round the park, like the film?

Yes. An early idea we are working with is to present the garden almost as a separate world, which is highly beautiful. The other spaces would be much more simple to create a stark contrast; the garden almost feels like a dream, while everywhere else reflects everyday mundanity. The garden is an escape for the characters because that’s where they connect with one another and find solace and feel understood, so it becomes even more beautiful to them than it really is. It would be great to try and capture the experience of the characters within the design.

Are you planning to make it a “universal” park setting, or a more specific park in Tokyo?

I really feel strongly about setting it in Tokyo, because I think that the cultural context is crucial to the characters’ whole experience. I also believe the themes are universal, regardless of where it is set, so there is no need to set it in a London or universal park to create familiarity.

The piece wants to celebrate our similarities as humans, despite being in such a different culture.

Are you going to represent specific elements of the park in some way, such as the little pavilion, the bridge, the pond?

We don’t have a confirmed design at this stage, but it would be great to nod to some that, especially as the location in the film is such a detailed portrayal of a real place. We do want the

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audience to feel like they are in that exact spot in Shinjuku, Tokyo. However, I would also think we need a fluid design that can change location seamlessly so that, as in the film, the locations and the weather (rain) even become part of the storytelling as much as the characters. We hope to create something that evokes a moving canvas upon which the animation of bodies, puppets, lighting and projection can paint a story. We’re exploring how to tell stories and express emotion through things like the design and movement, as much as the words. This is to reflect how, in the film, we hear so little of the conversations that happen and the characters never discuss anything “important,” but their interactions mean everything to them as people, and change them at pivotal moments in their lives. We want to explore the gaps in communication, what is not said, but is just as important.

Rain is so important in the film. What ideas do you have about getting the feeling of rain on the stage?

Lots! What will actually work best remains to be seen but we have discussed everything from creating the sound of rain live with the actors on stage, to using actual water at key moments.

And you can do some amazing things with an overhead projector, a bowl of water and some straws... Sound design and music will also be crucial of course. So much of the magic of a Shinkai film is in how he captures emotion in the animation of the weather and the natural environment, so we hope to reflect this just as strongly in the play.

Shinkai uses very fast shot-to-shot editing. Is there any way to do an equivalent of that on stage?

Oh yes, I think so. Clever combinations of bodies in space, a non-static set and projection can all create a sense of speed and time passing.

We came up with some wonderful and exciting stuff in R&D that we can’t wait to share. I think this combination can reflect the rhythm of the 70

montages from the film. We can create a space without actually having physical objects – for example, conveying a train by how people are moving. That’s the magic of theatre.

What can you say about the actors?

When we ran auditions for R&D process, we had a fantastic turnout; over two hundred people applied. We are specifically working with British performers of Japanese or East Asian heritage, or Japanese performers, in order to accurately reflect the Japanese characters. It’s really exciting to see so many new faces in that community.

One of the production’s aims is to encourage a diverse audience of not only regular theatregoers but anime fans, the London Japanese and the British East Asian communities too.

The show will run in Tokyo as well as London.

Will the Tokyo show have different actors?

The plan is there will be mostly if not entirely different actors (we hope to have at least some crossover in cast), because of the language change and because the production models are so different between the UK and Japanese industries. There will probably be some very well-known performers in the Tokyo show so watch out for that announcement! But in the UK, we will mainly be working with emerging artists, as is the remit of Whole Hog Theatre.

The shows are sister shows, so you’ll have the UK production in English with British-Japanese/ British-East Asian and Japanese cast, and the Tokyo show in Japanese with a Japanese cast.

The Garden of Words will be staged in London when conditions allow.

Photographs by and © Geoff Wilson.

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100% PERFECT SUNSHINE GIRL Jonathan Clements on some of the influences in Makoto Shinkai’s Weathering with You.

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©2019 TOHO CO., LTD. / CoMix Wave Films Inc. / STORY inc. / KADOKAWACORPORATION / East Japan Marketing & Communications, Inc. /voque ting co., ltd. / Lawson Entertainment, Inc.

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eenage runaway Hodaka (Kotaro Daigo) is living hand-to-mouth in Tokyo, writing for a tabloid newspaper about conspiracy theories and the occult. One magical story seems to come true, when burger-bar waitress Hina (Nana Mori) is revealed to have the ability to control the weather. For a short period, in a limited space around her, she is able to stop the rain, a skill that Hodaka soon puts to use in a bespoke service – for anyone planning a cook-out, wedding or sports meet, the weather no longer needs to be an unknown quantity.

Such guarantees, however, come with a heavy price…

The Japanese press notes for Weathering with You tell of Makoto Shinkai and his companions scrabbling around for an international title that encapsulated the themes of their film. One cannot help but wonder if one of the rejected names was 100% Perfect Sunshine Girl, a term much repeated in the film, and also recalling the 1961 Yoji Yamada film The Sunshine Girl (Shitamachi no Taiyo), which starred a young Chieko Baisho as a factory-worked in a deadend job, seeking to escape to a career as a singer.

The film launched the career of Baisho, who provides the voice of Weathering with You’s kindly grandmother nearly sixty years later.

But the term’s strongest resonance for Shinkai is surely that of “On Meeting the 100% Perfect Woman One Fine April Morning”, the 1981 short story by Haruki Murakami that echoes throughout much of Shinkai’s work.

Shinkai has made no secret of the heavy influence of Murakami, particularly in such films as 5cm per Second, which charts the many years and miles that separate two people who should have been together, right up until the moment when their eyes meet on opposite sides of a level crossing in Tokyo. He has acknowledged inadvertent similarities between Weathering with You and Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore (2002), which similarly features a runaway protagonist who is thrust into a series of magic-realist happenings.

Shinkai has long been concerned with the distance between people, and with their struggle to overcome barriers to true love – separated by time, by age, or by simple geography. Just as Murakami expanded his “100% Perfect” short story into the sprawling novel 1Q84 (2009), which featured childhood sweethearts separated by a split in universes, Shinkai hit the big time with Your Name (2016), in which a boy and a girl swap bodies, leaving messages for each other as they try to solve the mystery that has fallen them, which crosses space and, it transpires, time.

Notably, Your Name delivered a happy ending – after repeatedly leaving his endings ambiguous or his lovers not-quite-reunited, Shinkai ensured that everybody left the cinema with a smile.

In Weathering with You, he takes things a little further, gently musing whether the idea of love being able to change the world might prove dangerous in the wrong hands.

The inspiration for Weathering with You came from a single line. Shinkai wanted the character of Hodaka to say “I don’t care about the weather.

I’d rather have you.” He then plotted out a story that could lead to such a declaration, fixating on weather as the ultimate expression of his micro and macro concerns – a global system that nevertheless affects our lives, moods and decisions on an intimate, daily basis. But such an idea also provides Shinkai with an excuse to revisit many of his earlier obsessions – raindrops, clouds and rays of sunshine, elements that an animator can play with to his heart’s content.

Much of Weathering with You has been inspired by the response to Your Name. Shinkai has spoken of criticisms that the musical interludes in his films felt more like pop videos than integrated parts of the work – a concern he addressed here by collaborating with Yojiro Noda, lyricist for the group RADWIMPS, while the script was still in production. He has also spoken of his personal sense of responsibility – that his previous works had been smallscale entertainments aimed at an audience of hipsters and anime fans, but that Your Name’s 73

summer tent-pole status had taken it to a far wider audience than he was used to. Well aware that Weathering with You was sure to reach a similarly broad market, Shinkai announced a determination to do something more memorable with what for many Japanese ticketbuyers would be their default cinema experience of the year.

the deliberately contrary way he appears to have run his production, almost as if taunting the anime old guard with his attitude towards his staff. Whereas old-school anime is strewn with tales of ill-health and burn-out, Shinkai made a point of ordering organic bento boxes, and bussing in massage therapist and acupuncturist to keep his animators happy.

Shinkai was plainly unequipped for the fame that Your Name brought to him. He has spoken in interviews of being recognised in the street by enthusiastic fans, but also of overhearing people bad-mouthing his film in public. The reaction of some celebrity critics was particularly tough.

Hirokazu Kore-eda, director of the Oscarwinning Shoplifters, diplomatically commented that the film was packed with elements of a hit, “…perhaps too packed.” Yoshiyuki Tomino, the notoriously prickly creator of Gundam, declared that he doubted anyone would be watching Your Name in five years’ time.

There was a palpable rustle of excitement through the cinema at the film’s UK premiere in October 2019, at the moment when one of Hodaka and Hina’s clients is revealed as a leading character from Your Name. Another shows up in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-her cameo, working as a shop assistant; two more standing in a window, watching the rain with the child they discussed having at the end of the previous film. For any long-term Shinkai fans, such cameos introduce a tantalising prospect – that Your Name and Weathering with You are building blocks of an entire “Shinkai World”, weaving into a rich and overlapping tapestry of interlocking stories.

Unfortunately, as with an earlier cross-over character between Your Name and Shinkai’s earlier Garden of Words, chronology and geography don’t quite fit. His most avid fans wasted no time in tabulating on-screen dates and comments from the two films, essentially “proving” that the characters from Your Name

“I asked myself,” a wounded Shinkai told Matt Schley of the Japan Times, “should I make a film my critics will like, or should I make one they’ll hate even more?” The experience of a critical backlash left Shinkai more focussed, confrontational, and determined to tell a story with a greater impact. One also wonders about 74

could not, or should not have been in Tokyo at the time that Weathering with You took place.

Except, of course, there was a bit of jiggerypokery with alternate realities in the previous film, enough for this one to still offer a chance, however, remote, that all Shinkai’s star-crossed lovers get to watch the same Shinkai sky.

Shinkai describes Weathering with You as consciously part of our era – a recession-hit Japan depicted as seedier than his earlier middle-class idylls, an unforgiving and largely unfriendly Tokyo that recalls the memories of a younger, fresh-faced Shinkai, when he arrived from the Nagano mountains. In particular, he recreates his teenage memories of the famously squalid Kabukicho area of Tokyo, where the teenage Shinkai, new in town, found himself beset by preachers and pornographers.

He has spoken of how Tokyo for him began as an impersonal urban jungle, before he began to form memories and friendships that slowly transformed its mean streets into places of reverie and delight. His characters scrimp and save and gather their pennies; they knowingly trade in bargain-basement Forteana until Hina’s skill suddenly creates the prospect of powerful, magical traditions. They find themselves in a modern world that has largely forgotten the meaning, power and, indeed,

price of ancient sorceries. Such concerns have only made Shinkai’s ending controversial for many viewers – although he delivers precisely the love-conquers-all message that he has been edging towards in many earlier films, an earnest, heartfelt declaration of love brings with it a heavy burden on the rest of the world. Fandom has been divided whether the film’s treatment of weather makes it a film that addresses today’s climate crisis or dismisses it with a wave of the hand.

“There are people actually dying and there’s buildings crumbling and it was just something that moved me so much,” he noted in an interview with Kambole Campbell on the Polygon website. “It’s something I worry about so I wanted to incorporate that into my film, but also have the individual wishes of a boy contrasted with the wishes or the good of the community, and the conflict between that.”

Weathering With You will be released on UK Blu-ray

by Anime Limited late in the summer.

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GIRLFRIEND IN A COMA Eija Niskanen on Makoto Shinkai’s feature, The Place Promised in Our Early Days.

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Place Promised: © Makoto Shinkai / CoMix Wave Films

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akoto Shinkai, a 47-year old anime director, has built a notable career as a central figure of the post-Ghibli generation of anime directors. The difference is that Shinkai is not connected with any single studio name, but has built his profile by working alternatively alone, and later with a few other colleagues, mostly composer Tenmon. His favorite anime is Castle in the Sky by Hayao Miyazaki, and many reviewers have noted the Miyazaki-type of elements in Shinkai’s work.

In his early feature The Place Promised in Our Early Days, such influences might be seen in the quirky airplane the protagonists build in order to reach the mysterious Ezo Tower. Another well-known reference to previous masters is the poem read out in the film’s opening – it is by Kenji Miyazawa, author of Night Train to the Stars and The Life of Budori Gusuko.

Alternative Japanese post-war history has been the setting for several anime films, including the acclaimed Jin-Roh. In Place Promised, the setting is formed with reference to WWII, with a Japan that has been divided into two parts, with the main island Honshu and other southern-parts belonging to the U.S. zone and the northern-most island Hokkaido, here given its archaic name of Ezo, being part of the neverquite-spelled-out coalition called the Union, perhaps referring to the Soviet bloc. It is the late 1990s and the three teenage protagonists, two boys Hiroki and Takuya and the girl Sayuri, live out their high school days in Aomori, the most northern part of the U.S. zone of Japan. Over the Tsugaru Strait they can see Ezo and a mysterious tower rising up to the sky. The tower has been there since 1974 for a purpose not known on this side of the divide. For the three youngsters, this tower symbolizes something unreachable, a dream, a future possibility, and they make a promise to go there some day. Soon, however, Sayuri develops narcolepsy and is taken to Tokyo for hospital treatment. Three years pass and the two sectors are on the brink of war.

Hiroki is now in Tokyo, working for the U.S.

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Coalition government for a research project on parallel worlds that are somehow linked to the Ezo tower. He finds out that Sayuri is in a coma and contacts Takuya for help. Somehow Sayuri’s problems are also linked to the Ezo tower and Takuya and Hiroki start planning a way to save Sayuri, which would involve rebuilding a crashed airplane called the Bella Cielo (the Italian name being another nod to Ghibli). Takuya has gotten involved with the underground Uilta Liberation Army, and is promised a trip to Ezo with the group. Nostalgia for teenage days, a constant theme in Japanese anime and live films gets a beautiful realisation in Makoto Shinkai’s hands.

The anime actually features a double nostalgia: for Hiroki, Takuya and Sayuri to their schooldays of the beginning part of the film and for the viewer for the beautiful young idealism, the promise to be kept, and the deep friendship and youthful first love amongst the protagonists.

These themes get a wonderful visual realization with the depiction of Aomori scenery, during happy school days bathed in a beautiful evening light, and the later ones getting a more sinister threatening tone with the possibility of another war. The ending song “Kimi no Koe” by Ai Kawashima wraps up the emotional nuances of the story.

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THE DAY THAT ANIME CHANGED Jonathan Clements on the day that Gundam marked the start of a new era.

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e knew that there would be trouble when the 10,000 giveaway posters ran out. The crowd was already way too large to fit into the Shochiku Cinema, and risked spilling out into the street to block the traffic near Shinjuku station. One misplaced surge, thought Yoshiyuki Tomino, and the press would be reporting unruly thugs and broken bones, not the release of a sci-fi cartoon. He had to do something, and fast...Gundam’s original backer, the toy company Clover, declared it a failure.

The ratings were not impressive, barely scraping a 5% audience share, back when 5% was nothing to write home about. The complex storylines were thought to alienate many young viewers.

Not long after the first episode aired, 41 years ago on 7th April 1979, the sponsor called for radical changes, but the next six months were already largely locked in and coming down the pipeline. Clover cancelled the show with two months still to run of its contracted 52 weeks, and there it should have ended.

Gundam only started to take off in re-runs, after the Bandai company found success in July 1980 with 300-yen model kits, the GunPla, based on the show’s war machines. “It was,” wrote Toshio Okada, “not really Gundam that became a social phenomenon, but GunPla.” By the beginning of the 1980s, there were Gundam fan clubs in schools and colleges – a demonstrably older audience of model-making consumers was enjoying the show alongside the kids who were supposed to be watching it.

Gundam was a feature of nascent costuming culture; sequel shows began to continue its mix of drama and tragedy alongside relentless mecha product placement. In an attempt to

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capitalise on the new-found love for the show, its makers re-cut the original TV series into three movie-length features. The director, Yoshiyuki Tomino, promised to be on hand at the first film’s premiere, where he promised to make a “declaration of a new anime century” (anime shinseiki sengon), on 22nd February 1981.When Tomino’s plane got in from Osaka at nine in the previous evening, he faced a delegation from the Shochiku publicity department, reporting that 300 fans were already camping outside the cinema.“I get it now,” said someone. “Fans are amazing.” Tomino didn’t give it much thought.

He was half-expecting the hard-core to turn up early, and busied himself with the plan for the day, which would involve taking to the stage after lunchtime, and making his “proclamation of anime’s new century”. This was what the press releases had been promising, and it amounted to Tomino’s evangelistic challenge to the industry to accept what fandom had become, or was about to. It had been eighteen years since the broadcast of Osamu Tezuka’s Astro Boy. The kind of nutcases who were camping out overnight in Shinjuku had been kids then, but now they were on the cusp of adulthood. It was time, thought Tomino, that anime itself grew up, and admitted that there was an adult audience. He had watched them, he wrote in his memoirs, grow through the 1970s, from primary school to middle school, to high school. Now they were going off to college, and that was fated to change the kind of anime they wanted to see.

He would, of course, be proved right. The video era was only a couple of years away, and with it would come the technology to distribute more mature works direct to these newly adult

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consumers. College-age manga readers would soon thrill to Otomo’s Akira, and self-styled otaku would pile into 1980s sci-fi conventions, armed with tapes of their favourite shows. The video recorder, as the historian Yasuo Nagayama later wrote, was an invention tantamount to “time travel”, allowing enthusiastic viewers to share the thing they’d discovered with others for the first time. Within the decade, some of those very fans would be taking over the anime industry itself.

By the morning of the 22nd February, there were 2,000 fans at the east exit to Shinjuku station.

Tomino wryly observed that a TV director’s life was often lived hand-to-mouth, worrying about little more than the next meal, but here, outside a cinema for one of anime’s first big grown-up movie events, we were seeing the true power of television – its ability to attract an exponentially larger number of viewers. TV people had always been excluded from the movie world – now, suddenly, he saw that they had taken it over.

The posters were gone by 10am. By midday, Tomino estimated the numbers were pushing 15,000, which threatened to turn the event into a riot. Ever since the Anpo Protests over the controversial US-Japan Security Treaty (an event later referenced in the opening unrest of Akira), “public demonstrations” had been illegal around Shinjuku station. Enough Gundam fans had now gathered to risk attracting police attention, and Tomino fretted that an injury in the crowd could attract exactly the wrong kind of media attention.

His “new anime century” risked dying before it could even begin, with future events shut down as too dangerous.

The publicity people decided to start early in an attempt to quell the mob. Tomino tried to bellow out his thoughts in as clear a fashion as possible, although ever since, he has rued his lack of onthe-spot eloquence.“Sorry, but you are dummies,” he shouted, presumably in reference to the number of bodies needed to create a noticeable crowd. But then again, you never knew with Tomino. “We gathered you here to make a statement, to make all the grown-ups wonder 82

what so many young people want to say. And in fact, the statement we really want to make is not about Gundam at all! But Gundam is the name that has gathered you youngsters here today. We need the grown-ups to wonder what this Gundam is all about. We need them to understand what young, modern people, teenagers, are seriously thinking about, and grasp that by seeing Gundam for themselves, even once.”

Tomino spoke from the stage, but doubted anyone heard him. At 40 years of age, he already belonged to a different generation. Ultimately, the proclamation’s official delivery was read out by “the kids” themselves, two young students, who were both already intimately involved in Tomino’s new era of anime: Mamoru Nagano, the future creator of Five Star Stories, and Maria Kawamura, already a voice actress in several Tomino productions, fated to become the iconic Jung Freud of Gunbuster. Both had arrived dressed as Gundam characters, Char Aznable and Lalah Sun. It was, wrote Tomino in 1981, one of those “costume play” things, although he hadn’t really been paying attention at the time. A decade later, the couple would be married, with Tomino and his wife serving as official matchmakers.

The declaration might have been hurried and garbled, but it helped clear the crowd before they spilled blocked the traffic. It dispelled the incident before it could turn bad, but also ensured that it got noticed.“Was it good publicity?” wrote Tomino. “No kidding. Sometimes, in order to let society know that a new cultural phenomenon is emerging, there’s no choice but to do things the hard way.” A generation later, an article in the Asahi Shinbun described 22nd February 1981 as “the day that anime changed”, although a cynic might question the degree to which Tomino and his gang were reacting to the situation or knowingly shaping it. As his hurried address effectively admitted, it was less of an event than an event horizon, a critical mass of people, designed to attract attention purely for existing. I have never quite believed the numbers, noting that extant photographs certainly suggest a crowd in the thousands, but that the higher five-figure estimate is based solely on the exhaustion of the 83

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supply of free posters, and does not consider the possibility of greedy fanboys grabbing them by the handful. And besides, who brings 10,000 freebies to a screening that could barely hold a fraction of that number...? Nor was the Gundam “new century” event the last time that performatively poor crowd control at a premiere generated its own press – there would be, for example, similar drama later that year at the opening event for Sailor Suit & Machine Gun. Tomino had not been the only anime industry figure to notice a shift in viewer demographics – Tadao Nagahama, Noboru Ishiguro and Yoshinobu Nishizaki, to name but three, had also commented on the rise of the high-school-age fan in the 1970s, or at least were ready to claim that they had by the time I got around to reading their reminiscences. And Bandai itself had been arguably ahead of everyone’s game by getting in on Gundam with model kits for older hobbyists, before fandom even knew that was going to be a thing. Gundam’s success came in the wake of a similar astroturfing for its rival Space Cruiser Yamato, which had also been managed from behind the scenes by a producer mobilising fan labour: fly-posting, repeatedly requesting the theme song on radio stations, and managing staged “events” to encourage the media to report it as a cult success. But Tomino’s work was the most likely to appeal to the new, older age bracket. He had, after all, repeatedly come under fire in the 1970s for writing storylines that were too mature and hard-hitting in his kids’ shows, and in the new fans, he finally saw an audience that would finally get him. His time had come, although it would not be long before many of the fans that he appealed to were making their own works, often in reaction to the baseline that he had helped establish. One, indeed, even was named in a cheeky reference to his “declaration of a new century” event, Shinseiki Evangelion.

Tomino had become the self-declared prophet of a new age, but his new world order would belong to others.

The Gundam series, its movie reissue, and several of its sequels, are released in the UK by Anime Limited.

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WHY WE FIGHT Jonathan Clements on a new book about cartoons and conflict

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onna Kornhaber’s new book on animation and war begins with an electrifying account of an afternoon in 1899, when the Ladies Welfare Committee for Soldiers and Sailors staged the premiere of Arthur Melbourne-Cooper’s one-minute “Matches Appeal.” The Empire, in Leicester Square, was the venue at which the world’s first recorded screening of an animated film took place, with an animated advert in which Bryant & May promised to send a personalised box of matches to every British soldier fighting in the Boer War. But then she leaps into the future, to a winter’s day in Moscow in 1983, when a very different film received its premiere. Garri Bardin’s “Conflict” also features animated matchsticks, but was a very different presentation with a severe anti-war message.

These two moments in cinema history mark the broad parameters of Kornhaber’s Nightmares in the Dream Sanctuary, in which she investigates the relationship of animation and war, not merely as propaganda, but as protest, resistance and memorial. She is intrigued by the ways in which film can be used to tell outrageous lies about the acceptability of war, or to confront viewers with unwelcome truths about its costs, but also in which animation, in its plastic relation to reality, can prove ideally suited for depicting a world turned upside-down. She observes, for example, the ridiculous conceit of the end of Momotaro, Sacred Sailors (1945), that a Japan that was actually on the edge of starvation could have seriously considered a paratrooper invasion of the United States.

And she considers the contradiction in the widespread assumption that animation is a children’s medium, versus the idea that “the medium of Mickey Mouse” might have something to say about napalm and the Holocaust. Inevitably, this is a journey that takes her to Barefoot Gen and Grave of the Fireflies.

Although Kornhaber does name-check Japanese animation in her account, her work is more valuable for the non-Japanese obscurities it unearths, beginning with the In the Jungle There is Much to Do (1974), made in Uruguay

by Walter Tournier during a period of national

unrest, and Raymond Jeannin’s Nimbus Liberated (1944), in which the family of a much-loved French cartoon character is murdered by Mickey Mouse and sundry other Allied icons, flying a squadron of B-17s against Vichy France. Nor does she limit her study to overt propaganda and “war” animation, since she is also fascinated by the use of animation as a means of protest – Czech animators standing up to Stalin, for example, or the unknown creators whose The Extremists’ Game Destroys the Innocent (2015) imagined sectarian conflict within Islam as a savage game of human chess.

Kornhaber trains a sophisticated eye on the subtexts in wartime animation, such as the antiJapanese message that remained buried in the Wan brothers’ Chinese feature Princess Iron Fan (1943), even though by the time they finished it, they were living under Japanese occupation.

She also has an interesting approach to Kenzo Masaoka’s Cherry Blossoms (1945), a film that was banned by the US Occupation forces for evoking too many icons of WW2. Kornhaber ponders whether Masaoka was deliberately revisiting such imagery – including Mount Fuji as well as the titular sakura, now indelibly associated with kamikaze pilots – or if his animators were just so steeped in it after 15 years of war that it was second nature to them.

Later chapters include many similarly incisive considerations of everything from that time an unlicensed Mickey Mouse invaded Vietnam, to the wonderfully titled Pink Panzer, to animated works from Israel, India, the former Yugoslavia, and Africa. Persepolis and Waltz with Bashir both get a look-in, as does The Sinking of the Lusitania, in a provocative final chapter that considers the uses of “memorials” within the world of animation and war. It’s here, of course, that both Barefoot Gen and Grave of the Fireflies, two stand-out works in an otherwise mediocre sub-genre of commemorative WW2 anime, get their dues.

Nightmares in the Dream Sanctuary: War and the Animated Film by Donna Kornhaber is published by the University of Chicago Press.

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© 2015 Machiko Kyo/SHUEISHA, ITSV © Kazuto Nakazawa / Production I.G

B COOL Andrew Osmond on Kazuto Nakazawa’s euro noir

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arly in the Production I.G crime series B: The Beginning, it’s revealed that a mark resembling the letter “B”, left by an elusive vigilante at his killing grounds, consists of multiple symbols overlaid on each other.

Equally the anime feels like two, possibly even three different shows in messy but interesting collision.

A police team in a fictional, beautifully depicted European archipelago looks for patterns in random-seeming killings and terrorism. At times B feels like a straight cop/psycho thriller show, simulating live-action as Production I.G. shows often do. But the realistic scenes wrap around fantastically “anime” antics, as superhuman youths in luminous makeup and nonsense costumes zip round the landscape.

There’s hardboiled violence (stabbing, flaying, dismemberment), but there’s also a vein of rather British quirky character humour. The lead investigators are a perky (but not girly) young woman, Lily, and an introverted bearded sleuth, Keith Flick. Their idiot savant collaboration smacks of some live-action British TV series: Jonathan Creek or the Benedict Cumberbatch Sherlock. In one lovely scene, Lily tries to visualise the increasingly clotted mystery in B using a table’s worth of sweetbreads.

B: The Beginning’s other highlights range from a lightspeed blade duel in a Japanese temple to a suspenseful car surveillance sequence.

The show’s backstory involves terrible secret experiments, and a surrounding mythology with echoes of a previous Production I.G film, 009: Re Cyborg.

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Given that B: The Beginning was expressly made for worldwide distribution – in 2018, it premiered simultaneously in nearly 200 countries – you might think the series would start with the “softer” elements first and work up to the gritter stuff. Instead, the opening scene is in-your-face horror – a terrified young woman running in a straitjacket, fleeing through woods at midnight while bestial men prepare to make the kill. It’s so disturbing that it’s worth saying it’s not representative of the show as a whole – as hinted when the would-be murderers realise too late something’s hunting them.When B: The Beginning opened internationally, its biggest selling point was its world-famous studio, Production I.G. And indeed, B’s meticulously “real” background art (even as it depicts the imagined Ruritanian archipelago where the show takes place) is an I.G hallmark. “The first place that came up was an Italian town called Cremona,” explains creator-director Kazuto Nakazawa, “which isn’t really much of a tourist destination. It’s best known for making musical instruments, like violins. But we were also inspired by Cuba, where old cars are an everyday sight on the roads. There are many countries and towns with superior designs in the world, so I thought it would be interesting to mix them.”

Art Director Takanori Tanaka had worked previously on the studio’s gorgeous series Moribito – Guardian of the Spirit. In B, he was determined to put Nakazawa’s emphasis on dark shadows in the human psyche, into effect in the lighting. “I was conscious about natural light coming from the window,” he said, “and its reflection on the floor in daytime to express an unconscious warmth. But from the evening into the night, we suppressed the brightness, which made it seem too dark to actually work in real life. Instead, I emphasised the atmosphere – putting focus on the character even if it would be unrealistic.”Moreover, B is at least partly a police team procedural, a format which Production I.G has played with for decades, from Psycho-Pass to Ghost in the Shell, going back to Patlabor in the 1990s.

But perhaps looking at B as a Production I.G show is a red herring. Creator-director Kazuto Nakazawa has worked across a great many 90

different studios and styles. For a very different example of his work, check out Nakazawa’s 2008 comedy short film “Moondrive,” which is included in the anthology Genius Party and Beyond. The film is a shaggy-dog tale with humour akin to Hiroyuki Imaishi (Kill la Kill).

“There were many things I wanted to try,” Nakazawa noted. “There were a lot of things you could do in the olden days with TV series, which we’re not allowed to do now, so from the beginning, I kept saying to the producer that I wanted to try things I hadn’t done before. I wanted to do something, anything that showed what Japanese animation was capable of.”But notably, Nakazawa also crossed paths several times with Shinichiro Watanabe, including taking multiple credits on Watanabe’s 2004 Samurai Champloo. And one of the things which Watanabe is famous for is his genre-splicing, jamming together styles and scenes which a saner TV creator would see as wildly disparate.

The eccentric super-fighters in B have nothing on the “Pierrot Le Fou” assassin in Watanbe’s Cowboy Bebop, a human bouncing balloon hailing bullets.

And B: The Beginning has an even likelier lift from a different studio’s franchise. Keith Flick, the detective in the series, is voiced in Japanese

by Hiroaki Hirata. He’s the official dub voice of Johnny Depp, but Hirata is also well-known for voicing one of the most popular middle-aged characters in recent anime – superhero Wild Tiger, the floundering but gold-hearted star of the Tiger & Bunny franchise (returning to TV in 2022). Tiger was notable for being attractive and bearded, a very rare combo in anime. Now, look at Detective Flick’s proud black beard in B, listen to Tiger’s voice coming from his mouth, and tell us that’s just coincidence.

B the Beginning will be released in English by Anime Limited.

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PICK UP A PENGUIN Jonathan Clements on the book that inspired the Penguin Highway anime

“W

hen I was in third grade, I spent September and October researching square things.”

It is a typical statement from Aoyama, the super-serious pre-teen narrator of Tomihiko Morimi’s Penguin Highway. It is a statement of simple truth, but hints at statistical obsessions, an eidetic memory, and an inadvertent hint of recursive SF, recalling the inter-dimensional classic Flatland. Aoyama is an intensely inquisitive boy, determined to investigate all sorts of mysteries, unaware that his latest obsession is truly earth-shattering. Because he isn’t spending this summer thinking about square things, or boobs (life’s greatest mystery, he posits), or chess games, or Cambrian fossils.

He is trying to work out why his anonymous suburban hometown is over-run with penguins. It’s hard to miss the English-language publication of Penguin Highway – it’s been all

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over the advertising banners on Anime News Network like a rash, showing off the iconic cover image derived from Hiroyasu Ishida’s acclaimed anime adaptation. The publication of Andrew Cunningham’s translation of the original novel serves to demonstrate just how good and close an adaptation Ishida’s anime was. The anime sold itself, as does this book, on the cute look of its swarm of penguins, although like so much else in the story, they are really red herrings – outer manifestations of a far more complex phenomenon. Things are most definitely not as they seem, which is why an unreliable narrator is such a wonderful coup in Morimi’s gentle, hopeful novel.Aoyama’s over-assured narration is sustained for the whole book, a focussed, statistically minded series of factual statements – some true, some plainly not. But he is 100% sure about all of them, as if the autistic-spectrum narrator of The Curious Incident of the Dog in

the Night-Time suddenly had to contend with an influx of penguins. The similarities, in fact, with Mark Haddon’s best-seller, which was translated into Japanese by the SF publisher Hayakawa Shobo in 2003, are so close that one could almost believe Penguin Highway to be an exercise in Curious Incident fan fiction – although Morimi denies having read the book.

Like Haddon’s hero Christopher, Aoyama manages to be charmingly self-involved – a difficult trick for a narrator to pull off. But as the Lady in the Dentist’s Office observes, he’s still only a kid, so he gets a bit of wiggle room on what, for an older character, might be regarded as narcissistic behaviour. Aoyama is not quite as smart as he thinks he is, and there is a delight of discovery in the things on which he fixes his quirky attention. He sees, for example, that the children’s fathers do not get home until after dark, enduring long commutes away from the homes they supposedly love, and off-handedly observes how consumerism has turned the boxy shopping mall in town into an amusement park for late capitalism. Aoyama’s musings demonstrate how even our solid reality is frangible and plastic – the plan to build a railway station in his town, he observes, will effectively

bring the seaside closer.

There is an equal joy to be found at the things that Aoyama leaves out. “On the last day of school,” he writes, “we all went to the gym, listened to a speech from the principal, and then helped clean everything.” Aoyama makes no attempt to pay attention to what the principal actually said, since it is utterly immaterial to him. He has so much to think about, including time, black holes, and magnets.Aoyama’s selfconfidence allows the author to throw in some distracting feints – right from the start, his claim that the town he lives in did not exist before his arrival is enough to prompt the suspicion that Aoyama is himself a product of a pocket universe, and that perhaps not merely the penguins, but the town itself is an artificial construct. There are several more clues along such lines, scattered throughout the novel, but ultimately proving to be a false trail. Scattered with references to Lewis Carroll, Penguin Highway is a novel of first contact, in which neither side is equipped to communicate with the other. In Aoyama’s interactions with the Lady at the Dentist’s Officer we are being asked to watch two alien intelligences interact.

Aoyama is a unique intellect, but so is the Lady, 93

and neither of them has a particularly everyday, neurotypical perspective on life in Aoyama’s town.

Whereas the similar-plotted Arrival (based on Ted Chiang’s Story of Your Life) dealt with the successful establishment of communication, Penguin Highway artfully and realistically depicts humanity floundering in the earliest stages, like kids trying to make sense of the universe. The reader is lulled into sense of false superiority, snickering indulgently at Aoyama’s blinkered worldview, until it becomes plain that in the case of a technology so advanced that it is indistinguishable from magic-realism, we would all be clueless children. The book also includes an afterword by manga creator Moto Hagio, which depending on your perspective, is either a sophomoric summary of what you’ve just read, or a prolonged pastiche of Aoyama’s narrative style, stating the facts all over again in an odd enough way to create a sense of curiosity.

Hagio points to the deep and ultimately platonic romance at the heart of the book, that Aoyama’s love of learning has turned the Lady into a Muse, propelling him onto great things and a bright future. “When I read the last page of this boy’s story,” she writes, “I wanted to hug Aoyama and this book.”

Penguin Highway, translated by Andrew Cunningham, is out now from Yen Press. The animated film version is released by Anime Limited.

94 © 2018 Tomihiko Morimi, KADOKAWA / Penguin Highway Production Committee

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WHERE EVERYBODY KNOWS YOUR NAME Shelley Pallis tries a bar with a difference...

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he Ginza, which takes its name from the old silver mint that used to be there in samurai days, is one of the poshest parts of Tokyo – it’s the most expensive square on a Japanese Monopoly board, making it the equivalent of London’s Mayfair. And in Araki Joh’s 2004 manga Bartender, it’s the location of Eden Hall, a pokey, super-high-end cocktail bar.

Eden Hall is home to Ryu Sasakura, a Frenchtrained barman with an encyclopaedic knowledge of the drinks of the world. You take a seat, you tell him your troubles, and he’s sure to come up with the perfect drink to lift your mood. In the anime adaptation from director Masaki Watanabe, we see him offering advice and comfort to hoteliers, lawyers, a screenwriter, and... er... a specialist in computational fluid dynamics. No, it’s not quite Cheers, but it does

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sit at the end of a long tradition of stories in Japanese post-war pop culture that make food and drink the centre of the world.The gourmet manga were a feature of Japan’s affluent Bubble era, tied in to the rise of yuppie readers with a broader interest than the usual genres. Manga started to appear about chefs and cooks, often themed around weekly recipes to try at home.

Restaurant reviews started appearing in manga form, of everything from high-end restaurants to greasy-chopstick diners in the Tokyo slums.

In one of the big success stories that managed to be both progressive and sexist at the same time, Tochi Ueyama’s Cooking Papa featured a gruff, iron-jawed salaryman whose big secret was that his journalist wife was a hopeless cook, and that he made all the family meals.

Manga, of course, are knee-deep in workplace

AHARA/PUBLISHED BY KADOKAWA CORPORATION RKS/SAO MOVIE Project

© Araki Joh・Kenji Nagatomo/Shueisha・Bartender Production Committe

dramas, in which a fixed cast of regulars (in an airport, or at a bus station, or in a hospital...) deal with guest-stars that bring new plots to them. Kazuki Funatsu’s long-running Addicted to Curry, for example, focuses on the behindthe-scenes at a curry café, whereas Makazu Yamaguchi’s Adultery Canteen chronicles the sexual conquests of a travelling salesman who likes to sample far more than the local dishes.

And then there’s Chiran, by Santa Uonome, which is all about the women who run a canteen for WW2 kamikaze pilots. Because of the ease with which such stories can be adapted for liveaction drama (maybe not the kamikaze one, or the one about banging waitresses), they form a huge part of “real” Japanese television schedules, which is how we got a TV show about retired boxers running a cake shop (Antique Bakery).

It’s not hard to trace a path through Japanese

pop culture to Bartender. Mai Kenmei and Tadashi Kato’s 1985 manga The Chef married the workplace drama to the maverick troubleshooter of many a detective show – a genius cook who is able to salvage a swish corporate entertainment from whatever disaster of staffing and supplies is left in the kitchen. Such stories appeared in their manga form in the wealthy 1980s, and were resurrected as TV dorama entertainment in the cash-strapped 1990s. Only a handful clung on in the 21st century, and those that did tended to either be about simpler foods – recipes you could try at home, or super-highend food that was more like armchair tourism than a serious meal you could ever afford yourself.

Before he created Bartender, Araki Joh, worked with the artist Shinobu Kaitani on the 2006 97

manga Sommelier, in which a maverick winewaiter, a bit of a loose cannon, a man who doesn’t play by the book etc. etc., is hired by a troubled Tokyo bistro to add a bit of class.

One manga-turned-TV-show, Drops of God, by Tadashi Agi and Shu Okimoto, clung desperately to the connoisseur-conscious boom times, but in a recession-hit Japan where people couldn’t really afford the wine any more. Its protagonist, Kanzaki Shizuku, will not receive his inheritance from his deceased wine-critic father unless he successfully identifies and correctly describes thirteen incredibly posh wines, the twelve “apostles” and the titular grand prize, the “drops of god.”When you look at some of the other gourmet stories out there, Bartender stops looking quite so ridiculous. Far from being some sort of prolonged boozer’s apology, it is more like a medical drama, casting the titular barman in the role of a counsellor and physician – always there with an ear for people’s problems, and a bit of handy advice. The cocktails he dispenses are hence regarded more as works of art or exercises in medicinal tonics. In a sly nod 98

to Osamu Tezuka’s genius doctor Black Jack, who supposedly had the “hand of the gods”, barman Saskura has the “glass of the gods” – an ability to knock up the world’s best cocktails. He can also tell what you’re thinking just by looking at your hands on the bar.“It is a bartender’s job to observe the customers’ hands,” he says.

“Happy hands, discontented hands, angry hands, rejoicing hands, lying hands, pleading hands, and hands that wipe away tears… The hands reflect the state of mind.”

Bartender will be released in the UK by Anime Limited.

© BANDAI VISUAL / GAINAX All Rights Reserved.

ROYAL SPACE FORCE Jonathan Clements on some of the battles behind The Wings of Honneamise.

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obody knows who it was who walked into a Tokyo coffee shop, one summer day in 1984, and ordered a mix of Assam and Darjeeling, known in Japan as a Royal Milk Tea. But there was a cluster of earnest young men at the next table who overheard the words, and one of them suddenly looked up.“Royal Space Force,” said the 22-year-old Hiroyuki Yamaga, and his companions nodded and smiled. They had finally come up with a title for their animated film, the first professional venture by Gainax, the company they would set up six months later on Christmas Day. The collective of young fans had previously made a splash with their tonguein-cheek opening animations for the Daicon science fiction conventions. In a Japan that was scrambling to serve the new market for video cassettes, they had been propelled out of their amateur endeavours and handed the chance to make their own film.

Shigeru Watanabe, then a producer at Bandai,

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had championed their initial pitch, which contained within it a prolonged meditation on what was wrong with the anime world, in particular the newly stigmatised otaku, and how they planned to fix it:“If you look at the psychology of anime fans today, they don’t interact with society... Instead they surrender themselves to mecha and cute young girls. However, because these are things that don’t really exist— it just means that there isn’t actually any genuine interaction at work. They get frustrated, and then just go out looking for the next [anime] to give them a hit. If you examine this situation, you’ll see that deep-down, what these people really want is to get along with the real world. And we propose to deliver the kind of project that will encourage them to reconsider the society around them...”

There was a lot more along these lines, along with promises to invest the production with meticulous and intricate world-building.

Concept art included in the proposal included 30 water-colour images painted by Yoshiyuki

Sadamoto and Mahiro Maeda but, oddly, while there were details of the story, the characters didn’t yet have names.“I’m not sure what this is all about,” said Bandai’s CEO Makoto Yamashina when Watanabe brought him the proposal, “but that’s exactly why I like it.”

Shigeru Watanabe reported in the book Gainax Interviews that animator and designer Hideaki Anno had proudly showed the pilot footage to Hayao Miyazaki, who hated it. Miyazaki told him that on the basis of the material in the trailer, the film would have to be three hours long to cram everything in. While he may well have said that to Anno, his words to Watanabe were somewhat more encouraging, delivering a 50-minute screed about how Anno and his friends were “amateurs,” but that they had a special something and were worth a look.

Miyazaki would later say that the Gainax boys had swindled Bandai, putting together a pilot that was palpably influenced by his own Nausicaä, and then ditching much of the look of the material for something completely different, as soon as they had money in their hands. That’s not how Gainax described it, with Yamaga’s own writings on the subject explaining in great depth how he had spent a year carefully considering and reconsidering how the film should look, stripping away anything that felt too much like it resembled any fore-runners in the field. What

this meant, of course, was by time Gainax got to work on their project, the only promise it was still delivering on was the promise to be like nothing else.

Now it was the story of a world identifiably not our own, where a bunch of dead-end civil servants end up shunted into a government boondoggle that is never going to work – the creation of a “space force.” Deciding with a fannish fervour that many critics have identified as an allegory of Gainax themselves, they resolve to take their propaganda exercise counterintuitively seriously, and to actually try to put a man into space.

That man is destined to be Shirotsugh Lhadatt, played by Leo Morimoto, an actor who had previously provided the voice of Han Solo in the first two Star Wars films. Shirotsugh considers himself to be a failure, having been thwarted from his original hope of being a fighter pilot.

Through his relationship with Lequinni (Mitsuki Yayoi), a member of a religious cult, he comes to devote himself to his newfound cause, however unlikely it might seem. His character arc is thus presented as something of a leap of faith – Lequinni’s faith in him, his faith in his colleagues, and his colleagues’ faith in their mission. The ultimate test of faith is presented in the film’s explosive closing act, as the Royal Space Force scramble to launch Shirotsugh 101

into orbit to inspire peace and understanding, even as enemy soldiers are over-running the launch pad.I asked Hiroyuki Yamaga how it felt on the first day, standing in front of a crowd of expectant animators, all expecting him to tell them what to do. He shrugged and tinkered with his pipe.“They’re animators. They’re professionals. It’s their job to do what I tell them.

If I don’t like something, I am free to ask for changes. That’s my job. It’s much easier telling professional animators what to do, because they’re being paid to follow my orders. Like waiters,” he added with a cheeky smile, as more wine was put in front of him.

“The most difficult thing is telling amateurs what to do. After you’ve run a fanzine… After you’ve run a convention, when the only staff members are volunteers and everyone is there out of love, and your only means of control is charisma and pleading… After you’ve done that, running a bunch of movie professionals is a piece of cake.” The film had originally been intended as a relatively low-budget video release, costing 40 million yen, but at the height of Japan’s cash-rich Bubble economy, it accreted a bunch of investors determined to turn it into something bigger.

Yamaga would end up in charge of a theatrical film with a soundtrack partly composed by Ryuichi Sakamoto and a budget of 800 million yen, a sum so huge that it would be impossible for it to recoup its costs solely at the box office.

It had to sell in other territories; it had to have a long tail on video. “We were planning on calling it Royal Space Force,” wrote producer Toshio Okada in his memoirs, Testament, “but the sponsors suggested Wings of Lequinni. They didn’t think that Royal Space Force was sexy enough.”

It was Shigeru Watanabe who had to deliver the message, since as the main liaison he was caught in between Gainax and the Bandai money-men. It seems that he told Bandai that Wings of Lequinni would be fine, only for the animators to flip out.“The moment you call it Wings of Lequinni,” wrote Okada, “the whole story gets skewed. Lequinni becomes the main 102

character and this turns into her story... That’s what the audience would expect. We’d tried so hard to avoid creating any preconceptions, even to the extent of setting it in an entirely fictitious country, but the title itself would make it biased.

Our efforts would come to nothing. Most of all, we didn’t want to write about Lequinni, we wanted to write about Shirotsugh.”

The Wings business was leaking into the meetings from All Nippon Airways, the participation of which in the production committee had secured the right for the film to be screened on its aircraft. ANA wanted something with Wings in the title. Other committee members were hoping, rather lamely, for The Something of Something, because they hoped there would be some sort of resonance among the public with the earlier success of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. I don’t know what’s worse – the assumption that the public is that stupid, or the possibility that they really might be.

The Gainax creatives were furious with Watanabe, unaware of the brinkmanship he had been forced to get into. Bandai had, in Okada’s words, “got emotional,” and were threatening to take the project away and give it to a more cooperative studio. Since the project had been initiated by Gainax, it was unlikely that would have been legally possible, but rather than back away from an empty threat, producers instead suggested that it would be better all-round if they shut the whole thing down and wrote off the money that had been sunk into it so far. The only thing that stopped them, it turned out, that such a drastic decision would require the firing of a “responsible party,” and the CEO of Bandai had rashly agreed to be the representative manager. If Bandai’s board pulled the plug, they would have to sack their own boss.

Still fearful that the project was spiralling out of control, the money-men tried to reduce it in size. Although they had agreed to a twohour presentation, they now started arguing that the film needed to come in at 80 minutes, a punchier running time that would allow for 103

two extra screenings a day in cinemas. Okada himself ran the numbers, and conceded that a shorter film, playing over the usual three-week window, could make up to 50% more at the box office.“But we had written a script for a twohour film,” he pleaded. “We cut the content as much as we could merely to cram everything into 119 minutes and 58 seconds. By that stage, it was impossible to cut out another 40 minutes.”

In a dramatic confrontation with the board at Bandai, Okada announced that they might as well ask him to cut off his own arm. Years later, he sheepishly confided in his memoirs that he had been cruel to Shigeru Watanabe, his Bandai contact, and that Watanabe was left so exhausted and depressed by the production, that he had returned to his home town, unable to work for a year.“All creators are children,” wrote Okada.

“They want to do whatever they want, and that is how things should be. If something is new and interesting, everybody will profit from their creativity, so they feel, therefore that they are right. And that’s true, everybody will profit in the end. But what about the risks on the way?

What about the problems that come up partway through. Someone must take responsibility.

That’s a grown-up’s job. Someone has to be the grown-up.”I put the idea to Hiroyuki Yamaga but he seemed blissfully unaware of the eye-scratching producer battles outside his studio.“Oh,” he admitted, “there were the grownups, I suppose. The people who had to sign off on everything. The producers who’d put up the money. They left me to it largely, which is why I am still pleased with the film, but every now and then they insisted on some little tweak.”

Toshio Okada himself felt unsuited to the role.

A true “grown-up,” he mused would have lied to Gainax’s faces, or come up with some sort of compromise that displeased everybody equally.

Instead he stuck to his guns, and the backers backed off. He assumed that he had got what he wanted, but instead, his enemies within the production simply picked a new battleground.

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If they couldn’t fix the film itself to their liking, they would fix the advertising.Okada was shocked out of his complacency by the promotional materials, which were assembled by the Tohotowa corporation. In his memoirs, Okada damns the company with faint praise, conceding that they were “really good at selling sequels.” What he meant, it seems, was that he felt they were unprepared to sell anything original, and constantly needed to pretend that something was just like a film that already existed.

“So,” he wrote, “they concentrated on how to make Royal Space Force look like Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, which had just been a huge hit.” Someone – it was never revealed precisely who – came up with the odd decision that since Nausicaä had been all about insects, and since there was a young girl in Royal Space Force who had a pet insect, they should draw a giant version of that insect attacking the town.The first Okada found out about it was when he stumbled across the artist Yoshiyuki Sadamoto, diligently colouring a massive poster depicting a moment that wasn’t in the film, of the pet insect blown up to ludicrous size, stomping on buildings.

“Tohotowa asked us to draw it as test!” pleaded the producer Hiroaki Inoue. “We only have to draw it for them, so they can save face.”

Okada was furious, mainly because Royal Space Force was still in production, and if Sadamoto had been dragged away for three days to draw a poster, that meant three days of vital time he would be unable to put into the film. If Sadamoto had time to spare, he reasoned, he could put it to better use fixing some off-model artwork of Lequinni’s face, which had arrived from an overseas subcontractor. But he could also see what was coming.

“If a picture like this exists,” he fumed to Inoue, “they will use it, without a doubt.”With 20/20 hindsight, the film did just fine, released in March 1987 with a title designed to meet all the grown-ups’ demands – The

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Wings of Honneamise: Royal Space Force. The “Honneamise” part was a sop to Gainax, who refused to give in on the request to make Lequinni’s name part of the title, and instead suggested a made-up word that would ultimately be related to the country in which the film takes place.“It’s commonly believed that... it was a failure at the box office,” wrote Gainax’s manager Yasuhiro Takeda in his book The Notenki Memoirs. “But that’s completely untrue. It may not have been a huge hit, but it certainly wasn’t a flop.” In fact, Honneamise ran for longer in Japanese theatres than expected – although one wonders how many of the crowds were coming for it or for the film that ran alongside it on a double bill in many provincial theatres – Ewoks: The Battle for Endor. It would also eventually go into profit on a long tail of video sales, although that, too, brought its dangers.

“Producers can work on more than one film at a time,“ wrote Okada. “Directors can own their film even if they are poor for a moment. If a director makes a good film, it will pay off in the future. He might sound arrogant insisting that he’s right, but his reputation will ultimately bear it out. He will get a bigger job.“So, producers and directors can say ‘It’s okay if we don’t get paid.’ I’ve said that in the past. I’ve done that in the past. But they can only do that because they have savings, or friends who will help out, or something else to lean on. Compare that to the 99.9% of anime staff who are paid a salary. They only get paid for each piece they do, or scene, or day. You can’t ask them to push themselves too far.” Honneamise might have proved to be a slow-burning success, but the process that brought it to the scene would offer little help in helping Gainax manage their way through future projects. That, however, is another story...

The Wings of Honneamise is released on UK Blu-ray

by Anime Limited.

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STARDUST MEMORY

By Andrew Osmond

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G

undam 0083: Stardust Memory is a terrific “untold chapter” in the Gundam franchise, and an excellent way into Gundam for newbies. Stardust Memory is essentially one story, told over 13 half-hour episodes, with all-new characters, a compelling arc and production values which still look impressive today. Many of the other Gundam series run to around 50 parts each; anime fans who’ve grown up with today’s compact TV anime may find Stardust Memory more digestible. The series assumes you know a minimal amount of Gundam’s backstory, but we’ll fill you in on that in the next two paragraphs.

Most of that backstory was told in the opening spiel of the first Gundam TV series from 1979.

“It is the year 0079 of the Universal Century. Fifty years have passed since Earth began moving its population into gigantic orbiting space colonies…

The cluster of colonies furthest from the Earth proclaimed itself the Principality of Zeon and launched a war of independence against the Earth Federation. Initial fighting lasted over one month and saw both sides lose half their respective populations. People were horrified by the indescribable atrocities committed in the name of independence…”

Officially, the war lasted a year (it’s referred to as the One Year War) and ended with Zeon’s defeat. As Gundam fans know, the real conflict ground on for far longer. As its titular dateline indicates, Stardust Memory starts four years after the war, as two upgraded Gundams – giant combat machines piloted by human soldiers – are delivered to an army base in Australia.

The carrier craft delivering them is the good ship Albion, and on board is the new Gundams’ designer, Nina Purpleton. It’s her first time on Earth, having been born and raised on a lunar colony. Earth may have won the One Year War, but it left the planet scarred. Passing over ocean, the Albion’s captain tells Nina they’re over what was once Sydney; the Zeons sent a space colony crashing to Earth, with cataclysmic results.

Arriving at the army base, Nina encounters

a cute young test pilot called Kou Uraki, who seems barely more than a boy. He annoys her with his obsessive fascination with the Gundams, but there are other eyes on the big robots. That night, there’s a dramatic heist (the show calls it a “Gundamjack”) carried out by Zeon infiltrators, led by the dashingly honourable, decidedly manly Commander Gato. Gato steals one of the Gundam units; Uraki, who happens to be taking another peek at the robots, rushes to board the other. So Gato and Uraki have the first of many confrontations in the series.

Of course, Uraki is painfully outmatched in their first meeting, and ends up beaten and shamed; Gato treats his foe with crushing contempt.

Uraki’s part in the action seems over, as Gato escapes with the stolen Gundam… though now Nina seems more intrigued by Uraki and his evident skills. The rest of the series centres on Nina, Uraki and Gato, blending adventure with awkward romance (Uraki, of course, is the immature naif). To his own amazement, Uraki finds himself travelling to space as a key player in a conflict between Earth and Zeon that will reshape history.

You may find some sources claiming that Stardust Memory’s chief combatants, Uraki and Gato, are simple copies of the “star” characters of the earlier Gundam series, Amuro Ray and Char Aznable. But Stardust Memory is much more cunning than that. Certainly Uraki and Gato are set up in the first episodes to remind viewers of Amuro and Char; they even look broadly similar.

But as the story goes on, the differences between the characters grow obvious; for example, Gato operates by a quite different code from Char.

For his part, Uraki is given the kind of romantic storyline that Amuro never enjoyed (Amuro was fixated on a ghostly fantasy girl, far from the flesh-and-blood Nina!) Indeed, the relationship between the barely-adult Uraki and the womanly Nina offers a foreshadow of Makoto Shinkai’s Garden of Words. Nina has experience of relationships which Uraki lacks, and this colours their own relationship through the series. It also offers thematic justification for a story revelation 109

later on, which was reportedly controversial with fans. Perhaps the story points don’t add up satisfyingly, but thematically they heighten the sense of Uraki grappling with an adult world which he doesn’t fully understand till the last minutes. As is often the case in Gundam, there are odiously Neanderthal male attitudes to women on display – indeed, one pilot character seems to be nothing but such gross attitudes. Yet Nina and her big-built friend Mora are never infantilised like the women in trad American space opera (see old Star Trek). The way that the women are nonchalantly empowered is just as typical of old-school Gundam. Compared to some Gundam series, Stardust Memory is told mostly from one “side” – the perspective of Uraki and the Federation – but some of the most powerful moments come precisely when the show presents another point of view. The last episode, especially, sets out to scramble our sympathies.

Released in 1991-2, Stardust Memory was made for video, which may account for its production values being well above par for the TV Gundams of the time. The humans and mecha look physically dimensional, like those in the recent Akira. The characters are glamorously attractive, especially the impressively-coiffed Nina who recalls the Kelly McGillis character in Top Gun, in appearance if not personality. Some fans play 110

up the similarities between Stardust Memory and Top Gun; they do add a gloss, but they’re not what make the anime interesting. The character designs were by Toshihiro Kawamoto, who’d cut his teeth as an inbetweener on the original Gundam in 1979. He’d later be the character designer on Cowboy Bebop.

Moreover, the storyboard and unit director team included Bebop’s future creator-director, Shinichiro Watanabe himself. This was back when Watanabe was working his way up through the industry; he’d previously directed episodes of Armor Hunter Mellowlink, a hard-core military-mecha video spun off from the betterknown Votoms. Stardust Memory’s mechanical designs are credited to multiple artists, including Hajime Katoki who’d become a mainstay of the Gundam franchise, but there’s also a separate “Mechanical Styling” credit for Shoji Kawamori.

Yes, that Kawamori, famed co-creator of the rival Macross franchise, crossing over to help the enemy. As many anime fans know, Kawamori and Watanabe would unite a couple of years after Stardust Memory, when they would codirect Macross Plus. That would also be another glossy made-for-video update of an old “mecha” franchise, telling a compact story accessible to new viewers, with Top Gun vibes and a romantic centre. Incidentally, one of Watanabe’s fellow storyboarders on Stardust Memory was Kazuki

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Akane, who would later rework a Kawamori concept into a beloved fantasy with giant robots, Vision of Escaflowne. Akane would later direct Noein and, more recently, the baseball anime drama Stars Align.

Of Stardust Memory’s character, Ko was voiced in Japanese by Ryo Hirakawa, no stranger to epic space opera anime made for video. Hirakawa had played Reinhard in the epic Legend of the Galactic Heroes from 1988, though most fans will know him as Vegeta in the Dragon Ball franchise. Nina’s actor Rei Sakuma also had form in space opera, having played Kazumi (the “big sister” character) in Gunbuster. She was also everyone’s favourite witch’s cat Jiji in Kiki’s Delivery Service and Shampoo in Ranma, though most Japanese kids will know her as Batakaosan in Anpanman. As for Gato, he was voiced by Akio Otsuka in one his early anime roles; fans might have recognised him as Captain Nemo in Gainax’s Nadia: The Secret of the Blue Water. A few years after Stardust Memory, Otsuka would voice the hulking cyborg Batou in the first Ghost in the Shell film, a role he’d reprise many times.

to find new directions. While different titles tried a range of courses – including, eventually, the all-out reboot of 1995’s Gundam Wing – Stardust Memory found a particularly good niche.The whole Gundam franchise had started off with the original 1979 TV series. The next series, Zeta Gundam in 1985, had continued the story.

However, Zeta Gundam was set eight years after its predecessor (in the year 0087), depicting an Earth that had changed greatly in the interim.

Taking advantage of this, Stardust Memory was placed in the gap between the series, and its ending explains why Earth has changed so drastically by Zeta Gundam. Consequently, Stardust Memory doesn’t feel like a side-story, but rather a restored chapter of the larger Gundam story.

Gundam 0083: Stardust Memory is released on UK Blu-ray by Anime Limited.

Within Gundam’s franchise history, Stardust Memory was made during a transition. It was one of the Gundams made in the aftermath of the 1988 film Char’s Counterattack, which had retired the franchise’s “star” characters (including Amuro and Char) and left Gundam 111

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