This month [i.e. August — JC], the Studio Ghibli twitter feed excitably trills that the recording of the English language version of From Up On Poppy Hill has been completed, and that the “writers” are Karey Kirkpatrick and Patrick Mullen – thereby perpetuating one of the most irritating pretensions to afflict the anime localisation industry.

No, Kirkpatrick and Mullen did not “write” From Up On Poppy Hill. As I am pretty sure the studio is aware, it was written by a guy called Hayao Miyazaki and a woman called Keiko Niwa. Nor do I believe for a moment that Kirkpatrick and Mullen would be so gauche, so pompous or so plain dumb as to claim that they were the “writers” of someone else’s film, or so devious as to offer the semantic sophistry that they sort-of-kind-of “wrote” the English language version, as if that involved a similar degree of effort. Instead, I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt, and assume that they are innocents in all this, bigged up without their knowledge by a marketing department desperately clawing for a story to release and for gaijin faces to shove in front of the media, instead of all those pesky Japanese people who cost more in air-fare and inconveniently fail to speak English on press junkets.

For the last twenty years, there have been unscrupulous individuals in the anime business who have tried to accentuate the role of individuals whose function would, at best, be described elsewhere in the creative arts as merely editorial. I spent a large part of the late 1990s crossly correcting people who claimed that Neil Gaiman “translated” Princess Mononoke – another innocent victim, I am sure, caught up in a marketing machine that pushed him and Miyazaki for a Nebula Award, without actually acknowledging the translators who had done the real heavy lifting – in that case, probably Ian McWilliam and/or Steve Alpert. Claiming that someone who spends a day or two polishing dialogue is the “writer” of a script is an insult not only to the people who spent significantly longer wrestling meaning out of one of the world’s most difficult languages, but also to the people who wrote the script in the first place.

Jonathan Clements is the author of Schoolgirl Milky Crisis: Adventures in the Anime and Manga Trade. This article first appeared in NEO #104, 2012.

This month’s fun anime news – the removal of the Japanese language track from the American release of Persona 4. The reason can be found by anyone if they start poking around the sales figures for Japanese animation in its home market. The first episode of Persona 4 sold over 40,000 copies in Japan, but after that, sales settled down. Reading between the statistics, Persona 4 has about 6,000 Japanese fans who bought the whole set on DVD, and another 10,000 fans who bought it on Blu-ray. But owning the complete Japanese set of the first season would set you back £420 in Japan. That makes the English-language release about 80% cheaper, and puts the producers in deep fear of reverse-importing.

So far, there has been no indicator that the British release of Persona 4 will be similarly affected. Territorial lockout, once a bugbear for British fans, might turn out to be a saviour on this occasion, as UK Blu-rays are no longer in the same region as Japanese ones. However, if this becomes a general trend, the Japanese animation business risks shooting itself repeatedly in the foot.

There are several possible answers to this problem, none of which you are going to like. One would be to make everybody pay Japanese prices, which would kill off the UK Blu-ray business. Another would be to bring Japanese prices down to foreign levels, which would kill off many niche-interest anime serials. Leaving the Japanese language track off the foreign release, however, is not a solution, either. A sizeable chunk of foreign fandom likes anime because it is Japanese. For ten years, the dual audio tracks of DVDs have largely obscured this subset of fandom, but I, for one, have never bought a dubbed anime, except when the dub comes attached to a DVD I’m buying anyway.

Removing the Japanese-ness from a foreign anime release will scare off many buyers, but surely the Japanese already know this? Which leads me to suspect that foreign rights, in general, for some companies have become little more than a bait-and-switch con, designed not to sell the product, but to keep a studio’s “foreign rights” department looking busy. Japanese producers: say it isn’t so!

Jonathan Clements is the author of Schoolgirl Milky Crisis: Adventures in the Anime and Manga Trade. This article first appeared in NEO #103, 2012.

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.