Another month, another anime industry strop – this time with Aloha Higa actually suspending her own manga, Polar Bear Café, in protest at her treatment by her publishers. Her grievance is that she hasn’t seen a penny for the anime adaptation, and discovered that editors were signing off on approvals without even telling her.

To play devil’s advocate for a moment, there are a lot of manga artists who would love it if someone took away all the drudgery. She can get on with drawing the manga, and leave the “What colour hat works best” nonsense to some studio underling. Even so, that’s no excuse for discovering that one’s name is on a TV show before any money has hit the bank account.

Interestingly, one of her complaints is the sort of thing that might have easily been settled over a cup of tea and a slice of cake. Higa doesn’t like the fact that the anime version of her titular bear only has four fingers. This is, I am sure, a deliberate decision by the animators, dating back to received wisdom from the distant past, when Disney and Tezuka both agreed that in animation, four fingers looks like five at a glance, whereas five fingers looks like six. The animators could have probably demonstrated that for her, and she could have made her case the other way. But now it’s all gone sour, as she discovers that the animators have been assuming that she has approved scripts that she has never even seen.

Polar Bear Café may well be a one-note joke, but it belongs to Aloha Higa. It’s hers to do with as she pleases. And perhaps she fears, as do all creatives, that this might be her fifteen minutes in the spotlight. So if she wants to tell the anime company how to draw her characters; this might be the one time in her life when she gets to do that. Imagine how she’d feel if Polar Bear Café came and went on-air, before she had the chance to influence so much as a single brushstroke. So, good for her for giving her publishers the cold shoulder. The icy atmosphere led to a swift apology, and, hopefully a thaw in relations… [That’s enough – Ed.]

Jonathan Clements is the author of Schoolgirl Milky Crisis: Adventures in the Anime and Manga Trade. This article first appeared in NEO #101, 2012.

The Toei “Manga Matsuri” or “Cartoon Festivals” began in 1964, and lasted until the 1990s. At spring or summer vacations, kids would pile into their local cinema for a 200-minute programme of anime. There would be a movie re-edit of a TV series, and a couple of episodes from whichever shows were the flavour of the moment – a big deal in an age when many kids lacked colour tellies, and nobody had a video recorder. The Cartoon Festival, and its Toho rival, the “Champion Festival”, must have been welcome reliefs to hard-pressed parents, as at least they got rid of the rugrats for a few hours in the holidays. In the anime world, they were an ideal way of burning off all the dross lying around in the studio bins – aborted pilots and 15-minute apprentice pieces, shoved into the programmes like animated ballast. Every now and then, they also sneaked in something classier like Puss in Boots.

I’ve always found the Cartoon Festivals interesting because they turned anime into “events”. This wasn’t about watching TV with one eye while slurping your breakfast; it was a grand day out, and the chance to be fans together.

I was, however, a little baffled by the news that Toei was releasing the Cartoon Festival programmes on Japanese DVD this August. Historically, it’s fascinating: a chance to experience these forgotten moments of anime enjoyment just as the ten-year-olds of 1968 or 1970. Although probably in your own home, without 500 other screaming children making it difficult to hear anything. But in terms of straightforward entertainment, how many people do Toei really expect to fork out their £40 asking price? In some cases, it will literally be the only way you can get to see obscure cartoons like the 60-minute 30,000 Miles Under the Sea (1970) or the 25-minute Hitoribotchi (1969), designed to sell Toyota cars to squirrels. But is that really going to be enough to pull in the punters? I doubt we’ll see this in the UK, although it would be nice to give it a whirl… what about a one-night-only performance, including 1970s Japanese cinemas ads…?

Jonathan Clements is the author of Schoolgirl Milky Crisis: Adventures in the Anime and Manga Trade. This article first appeared in NEO #102, 2012.