Back now from Dublin, where I’ve been at the Irish Film Institute Anime Weekend. Festivities kicked off for me before I was even off the plane, when my neighbour turned out to be a man from Ghana who wanted to know about intellectual property rights. On Saturday morning, I taught a workshop on the way that anime are constructed, with special reference to the Introduction to Anime Screenwriting by Jinzo Toriumi. This is just one of several books by old-school anime writers that are used to teach the next generation in Japan how it all works — they make for very illuminating discussions with an audience of marketers, curators and students curious about what makes anime tick.

The rest of the weekend was taken up with screenings, including the European premiere of Gundam Unicorn, and the Irish premieres of Summer Wars and Evangelion 2.0. I found myself on panels talking about, among other things, the career of Yusaku Matsuda, the uses of a naginata, the corporate structure of the Yomiuri Group, and the history of “breast dynamics” at Studio Gainax. And I found myself signing copies of the Anime Encyclopedia, Schoolgirl Milky Crisis, and even Beijing: The Biography of a City. In a very 21st century touch, I also got to sit in the bar and watch the Manga UK Twitter feed as Jerome Mazandarani explored Tokyo for the first time. Me in an Irish bar, reading live about the adventures of an Australian man on a Japanese toilet.

Meanwhile, Dublin was full of people who had come to watch rugby, which is apparently one of those mainstream situations where cosplay is considered acceptable, so although a number of anime fans had dressed up as cartoon characters, if I walked out of the cinema, I would find a street full of men in kilts and/or painted blue, to the extent that Temple Bar often looked like a low-budget sequel to Avatar.

15th February 2010 sees the UK premiere of the Gainax movie Evangelion 2.0 You Can (Not) Advance at the Glasgow Film Theatre. I shall be introducing it, although unlike the time I introduced Death and Rebirth in Oxford, I shall not be performing the finale solo using shadow puppetry and silly voices. There are all sorts of things going on the same day, as well, including a brief talk on anime censorship by a lady from the BBFC, and the UK premiere of the long-awaited Gentleman Broncos. Hopefully, the trains will be working by then.

WW2 has become a stripped-down fable of Star Wars proportions – a few brave heroes, taking on a force of terrifying evil against impossible odds. On the Good Side, the rag-tag hard-pressed Alliance. On the Bad Side, the dark empire, with its storm troopers and its nice uniforms. The good guys win, and the good guys are us.

This doesn’t work in Japan.
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Since so many English-language programmes are dubbed in Japan, the voice-acting industry is much better established than in the UK. This has led to an international variant on stunt casting, whereby certain actors can trade off the reputation of the Hollywood stars whose voices they replace. NHK has done a superb job of translating British sci-fi caper Doctor Who into Japanese, with former Fellowship of the Rings translator Katsushige Hirata handling the script, alongside a string of notables from the voice-acting world.
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It’s hard not to like Yasuhiro Takeda, the hapless nuclear physics student who repeated his second year at university five times before giving up. His reason, the passion for sci-fi that led him to run conventions, sell model kits, and eventually become General Manager and Producer for the Gainax company. This textual autobiography takes him from his failed student days, through his time as fanboy and amateur actor, right through the tax evasion calamity that dogged Gainax in the wake of Evangelion.

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We lived together for two years, I’ve known him for ten, he’s in his forties, and he’s never been interested in Japanese cartoons. Which was why I fell off my chair when a friend confessed to buying some anime last month.
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