In January, unnamed members of a production committee demanded that the US distributor Funimation postpone further simulcasts of the Fractale anime until such time as the show was not being pirated on the internet. In other words, as a special reward for paying all that money for the rights to Fractale, Funimation was now lumbered with an open-endedly Sisyphean task akin to ending all crime and bringing peace to the Middle East.

A production committee is a multi-headed hydra of differing interests in a media title, often including a manga author, a comics publisher, the bloke whose factory makes the plushies, someone who supplies the music, and so on. On a good day, a production committee means that everyone spreads the risk and the profits of a film or TV show. On a bad day, it can mean a vast army of cooks fussing over the broth with contradictory directives; witness, for example the forty-six (count ’em!) different names on the production committee for K20: Legend of the Mask. You know how difficult it is to get three friends to agree on where to eat? Now imagine that you have to get consensus from a crowd of several dozen, including eight vegetarians, five people who hate curry, three devout Muslims, Aunt Mabel (who “won’t eat foreign food”) and a Shetland pony called Colin.

Production committees can also mean a number of hangers-on, relatives, spouses, and clueless lawyers representing estates or preoccupied members. I can only assume that the Fractale request came from similar interests – possibly the kind of person who doesn’t know what the internet actually is, and who assumed that all “piracy” could be stopped by sending a SWAT team around to arrest a lone man with an eye-patch who cackles over a computer somewhere in Arizona. We can, at least, thank our lucky stars that someone explained to the offending committee members that simulcasts actually slap piracy down, and in the case of Fractale, gave an illegal version a window for success of less than sixty minutes, before good hearted fans could watch the real thing, legally, for themselves.

Meanwhile, Japanese academic Tatsuo Tanaka has recently published a discussion paper that the Fractale committee would do well to read. In it, he argues the common-sense case that fans benefit from a preview medium, and that it is folly to expect someone to pay £30 to buy a show they have never seen, merely because it has a girl in a miniskirt on the cover with big eyes and spiky hair. Access to legal streaming, clips and trailers helps customers make an informed choice about how to spend their money. They are more likely to spend their money on something they like, and hence come back to buy more if it.

Crucially, however, Tanaka is talking about legal streaming. Companies and creators have the moral right to decide how and when to give away free samples. That decision does not rest with pirates and thieves, no matter what self-righteous defences they might spout. Hence, sadly, the Fractale committee had the moral right to be as counter-productively idiotic with their franchise as they wanted, but thankfully someone talked them round before they could do untold damage to their own show.

Jonathan Clements is the author of Schoolgirl Milky Crisis: Adventures in the Anime and Manga Trade. This article first appeared in NEO #83, 2011.

A couple of years ago, the British magazine 3D World asked me to list my pet hates in Japanese computer animation. This is what I sent them:

1. Over-long beauty passes. “We’ve rendered that spaceship, let’s watch it trundle past for just a few more seconds…and a few more.” The modern equivalent of the agonisingly long freeze frame.

2. Faceless robot minions. “Design one, design them all.” A common temptation in all cartoons ever since Disney perfected “Xerox animation” for 101 Dalmations. But it just makes everything feel like a video game.

3, Any excuse for hovering off the ground. “That way, we don’t have to touch it.” Many Japanese cartoons make a virtue out of floaty contact, plumping for hovercars, weightlessness and psychic powers to keep from worrying about how feet interact with surfaces, and hands with objects.

4. Flat lifeless humans amid vibrant, dynamic machines. Humans are the tough part, so why not ignore them? It doesn’t help that the Uncanny Valley encourages modern animators to make their human characters less realistic, choosing instead to use “Toon-Shading” styling to make them look like big-eyed, spikey-haired manga moppets.

5. A cavalier disregard for physics. “We’ve got planes that fly backwards!” After all that effort in modelling reality, some bright spark just ignores it anyway for impossible leaps, and incredible feats of strength. As in overblown live action SFX, it just reminds the viewer that none of this is really happening.

Jonathan Clements is the author of Schoolgirl Milky Crisis: Adventures in the Anime and Manga Trade.

The “location hunt” is the greatest boondoggle in the anime world. These tax-deductible research trips have sent animators all over the world to soak up local colour and amass materials to add a note of realism to their works. For Katsuhiro Otomo’s Steam Boy, photographers clambered over London and Manchester, snapping Victorian-era buildings. For Laputa, Hayao Miyazaki cut a strange dash as the lone Japanese tourist in the Welsh valleys. For Macross Plus, Ichiro Itano and Shoji Kawamori duelled in the air in surplus US military jets. For Gunsmith Cats, the entire crew appears to have gone mad in Chicago at shooting ranges and strip clubs. It’s a dirty job, but someone has to do it.

The oddest location hunt known has to have been be the one experienced by Tadahito Mochinaga in 1944, when he was commissioned to make the propaganda cartoon Fuku-chan’s Submarine. His brief was no weirder than that of many modern anime producers: a fun little singsong kids’ film, that also promoted the Japanese Navy. Because the Navy was paying for it, he was sent off to the navy base at Kure to see a real submarine up close.

Unknown to Mochinaga, he’d been booked into the Iwata Inn, a frequent haunt of kamikaze pilots on their last night of freedom. Mochinaga presumably kept quiet about his cartoon mission, but the waitresses misinterpreted this as a sign of shyness or patriotic reticence. That night, the happily married Mochinaga found two of them snuggling under his duvet for a patriotic send-off, and had to shoo them away.

The following day, he and his production crew were taken down to the docks and aboard submarine I-157, where they were plied with whisky in the captain’s cabin, and treated as officers by the trainee crew. They squeezed through the narrow hatches, and experienced the claustrophobic, stuffy longeurs of a dive.

Fuku-chan’s Submarine, like many other wartime anime, mixed cartoonish antics with oddly exacting replications of life in the military. A scene in which the crew snatch up flying fish from the deck and grill them for dinner was based on Mochinaga’s own observations when I-157 surfaced in the Inland Sea. The fish are incorporated into a prolonged kitchen scene, which proved to be the most popular moment of the movie, not for its peppy accompanying tune, but for the simple presence of provisions onscreen. Wartime Japan was already suffering from severe shortages – even as he made Fuku-chan’s Submarine, Mochinaga lost his morning taxi because there was no longer any petrol, and several staff members were conscripted. Food was running low; grocery stores stocked nothing but tea and curry powder, and Mochinaga was subsisting on a single bowl of porridge a day. He poured his personal longing for a sumptuous banquet into the submarine kitchen scene, and his audiences devoured it hungrily.

I say that Mochinaga had the weirdest trip, although I only know about it because he wrote about it in his memoirs. But his colleague Mitsuyo Seo, who would make the legendary Momotaro’s Divine Sea Warriors the following year, seemed to have an awfully good understanding of what was involved in jumping out of a plane. Did Seo actually grab some sky with Japanese paratroopers in 1945, all for the sake of his art…? Sadly, Seo never wrote an autobiography, so perhaps we’ll never know.

Jonathan Clements is the author of Schoolgirl Milky Crisis: Adventures in the Anime and Manga Trade. This article first appeared in NEO #82, 2011.

It’s been twenty years since Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira changed the way the UK watched Japanese cartoons. After 1991, a Japanese origin became something to be trumpeted: a selling point. But could that all be about to change again?

My usual haunts aren’t there any more; old-fashioned browsing is becoming a thing of the past. Tower Records has gone. The Virgin megastores have gone. The HMV-Waterstones-Fopp conglomerate is now practically a UK monopoly, and still struggling. Fearing the worst, some video companies are losing the art of finding out what their audience wants. Or rather, they still have an audience. But it isn’t me any more.

Perhaps we have passed a tipping point. Some of the new blurbs can’t be bothered to tell me about directors I might like, or actors I follow. Far better, it seems, to come up with a new, zappy title, hide the word “subtitled”, and hope it shifts from the bargain shelves in Sainsbury’s. Bang Rajan 2 has been retitled Blood of Warriors: Sacred Ground, because that way it doesn’t sound like a Thai sequel. Pacific Battleship Yamato has sneaked out in the UK with the “Yamato” part rendered in smaller type, as if afraid of scaring people off. R-Point has just been re-released as Ghosts of War, with its Korean origins carefully shunted into the shadows. It seems that it really is more profitable to take a DVD downmarket to appeal to impulse buyers in the supermarkets.

This brutally realist approach essentially gives up on specialist audiences. Terrifyingly, it even seems to make sound business sense. The sales figures for these films compare very favourably with those for bespoke, arty editions targeted at “fans”. The number of customers who will actively seek out a Kong Su-chang film, or ask for R-Point by name is greatly outweighed by the number of passing shoppers who will say: “Cool! Zombie Soldiers!” (Even if there aren’t any zombies in R-Point). The nature of the sales pitch has been reframed from cognoscenti to ignoramuses: less marketing, more downmarketing.

Japanese animation has been here before. Anime pre-Akira endured thirty years with rewritten soundtracks, altered storylines and dumbed-down titles. That was the age of the Hidden Imports, when you could see anime on TV, but only shoved unceremoniously in the kiddie cartoon slots. If companies stop caring about consumers who care, then they stop advertising in specialist magazines. If they start categorising not by directors and stars, but by nothing but broad genres (“WAR!”, “GHOSTS!”), we could lose the kind of tagging data that makes it possible for Amazon to know you might like a particular movie. They could give up on DVD extras, because the new audience won’t want a commentary or a making-of.

Look to live-action for a scary glimpse of anime’s possible future. Are we on the brink of a new Dark Age? Back to the bargain bins…?

My article on Mamoru Hosoda’s Summer Wars is now being hosted over at the Manga UK blog.