The new issue of Salon Futura is up online, and features a chunky interview with Leiji Matsumoto, the creator of Captain Harlock, Queen Emeraldas and Space Battleship Yamato.
Also in this issue: an interview with Alistair Reynolds, stuff on fantasy and steampunk, and a review of Johanna Sinisalo’s Birdbrain.
Bit of housekeeping in this month’s Pulse column: I’d like to take the chance to knock another misconception on the head before a whole new generation start using it as gospel truth. Somewhere back in the mists of time, probably in a press release from the early 1990s, someone made the inadvisable claim that anime were all based on manga. I guess it was an attempt to inextricably link two buzz-words in a breathless twofer. Even though anyone with half a brain must surely realise that it can’t be true, I still regularly have to deal with journalists who think it is a fact. Sadly, this assumption has wormed its way into several academic publications as well. Of course, anime and manga will always enjoy a strong affinity, but the idea manga forms the foundation of the anime business has not been supported by the facts since the late 1960s.
So, for the record. In the early days of anime, many cartoons were indeed based on local comics. In 1963, the year of the broadcast of Astro Boy, 100% of anime were based on manga. But even by the year I was born, 1971, I estimate that only half of all the anime on TV were based on Japanese comics. The rest were ideas concocted in a hurry at boozy lunches, or ripped off from pre-existing works, such as the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen. Ten years later, amid a bunch of toy tie-ins and adaptations of famous children’s stories, the number had dropped still further, to something like a third.
These days, manga have enjoyed something of a resurgence. Last year, 46% of anime were based on manga. That’s by far the largest sector, against 19% based on novels, 17% based on computer games, and 15% created entirely out of nothing. That just leaves 3% of “other”, which could be anything. If Hollywood can base Pirates of the Caribbean on a theme park ride, then anime can be inspired by mascots, chocolate bars and political satire if it so desires.
Just because you know that there is a manga with the same title as your favourite anime, it doesn’t follow that the anime was based on it. Many manga are merely created to advertise a particular show, and to encourage younger readers to seek it out in the first place. Similarly, ever since the 1990s, many manga have been conceived purely as marketing tools, part of a “multi-media” spread designed to sell the comic. Yes, technically, Sailor Moon was “based on” a manga, but the Sailor Moon manga was steered and influenced heavily by shadowy figures preparing the franchise for broadcast, not for publication.
Needless to say, that still leaves lots of areas open to misunderstandings. One wonders, for example, how many of the “novels” that inspire anime productions are actually “light novels”, in other words, individually published novellas, often insanely dialogue heavy and seemingly intended less for textual printing than for reading on a mobile phone. (Many of them, in fact, appear to have been written on one, too).
You may be wondering what difference it all makes. I, for one, think it’s healthy to remember that Japanese animation has just as rich a field of inspiration as any culture’s cartoons. If the general public think that anime can only stem from comics, they will have greater trouble understanding its fancier inspirations: the works of Alexandre Dumas, for example, or the novels of Yasutaka Tsutsui, or, well… the Bible.
This article first appeared in NEO #78, 2010.
This article is now available on the Manga Entertainment blog, here.
Kihachiro Kawamoto, who died on 23rd August, was a world away from what most fans consider to be “anime”, and had conspicuously little to do with the cel-based industry that dominated Japanese animation in the twentieth century. Kawamoto made his living on what he called “horrible” jobs in advertising, while scraping together a little money so that he could make art films in his spare time. While Osamu Tezuka was charming the media and dominating the airwaves, Kawamoto was renting out town halls so he could show his short films to passers-by. But when Tezuka died in 1989, it was Kawamoto who took over his chairmanship of the Japan Animation Association – a position he held for the next 21 years. His tenure served as a reminder of how truly broad the animation medium can be. In Kawamoto’s case, it embraced claymation, paper collages, stop-motion, and stop-motion’s distaff cousin: old-fashioned puppetry.
Dolls were Kawamoto’s first love. He wrote a magazine column about them during the US Occupation period, when young Japanese girls were forced to make do and mend with their worn-out toys. In the 1950s, he fell in with the maverick animator Tadahito Mochinaga, newly returned from China, where film had been in such short supply that he had taken to shooting puppet shows one frame at a time so as not to waste footage. This method, of course, turned Kawamoto’s dolls into stars, as part of the multiple award-winning Beer Through the Ages (1956) a 12-minute compilation of adverts celebrating the half centenary of the Asahi Brewery.
“Dolls are children’s toys, or things you dress up and display,” he told Jasper Sharp at Midnight Eye. “Puppets, or marionettes, are things that act. This is a crucial difference. There’s no such thing as doll animation.”
Kawamoto learned how to make such “dolls that act”, journeying to Czechoslovakia in the 1960s to study under the international master of puppets, Jiri Trnka. This was not as easy as it sounded – travel restrictions on the Japanese had only just been lifted in time for the Tokyo Olympics, and Kawamoto had to bend the truth by claiming to be coming to interview Trnka for a Japanese newspaper.
Under Trnka, Kawamoto began making his own short, stop-motion films, often influenced by Japanese mythology and theatre. He became renowned for his ability to use motion and posture to imply emotion in puppets whose expressions were otherwise unchanging. He remained resolutely small-scale, making films that scooped festival awards, but rarely travelled beyond the tiny circuit of festival aficionados. It is only in the last few years, with the release of a number of his shorts on the DVD Kihachiro Kawamoto Film Works, that a wider audience has stood the remotest chance of seeing his idiosyncratic, meticulous works of art.
In Japan in the 1980s, he became known as a puppeteer once more, producing two long-running adaptations of classics: The Romance of the Three Kingdoms and the Tale of the Heike. While foreign audiences were lapping up Akira and Legend of the Overfiend, Kawamoto’s puppet shows were all over Japanese telly. In 1990 he returned to Czechoslovakia to make Briar Rose, a darkly shaded reimagining of Sleeping Beauty. The culmination of his work came in the form of the feature-length stop-motion film, The Book of the Dead (2005), which finally brought him a degree of international recognition, scant years before his death.
Jonathan Clements is the author of Schoolgirl Milky Crisis: Adventures in the Anime and Manga Trade. This article first appeared in NEO #77, 2010.
Practical Archaeology.
Against the Clock.
Against the Law.
On Planet Raster, the history books and archives only go back 54 years. There are only a few stars in the sky, and a totalitarian government suppresses knowledge by splitting families, assigning random names, and ruthlessly hunting down evidence of the past. Benny Summerfield is arrested, shovel in hand, as she literally digs for clues.
Government inquisitors have mere hours to decide whether Benny is mad or a dangerous revolutionary. Archaeology is a crime, and the penalty is death. Chained to a desk, locked in a room, Benny must use her forbidden skills to talk her way to safety, before the executioners arrive.
All she wants to do is go home. But until she works out where and when she already is, Benny has no means of pointing herself in the right direction. The answers lay in whatever disaster befell planet Raster before the slate was wiped clean. Benny must delve into the forbidden past, into the events of Year Zero.
This article is now hosted on the Manga UK blog.
The creator of Astro Boy, Kimba the White Lion and… er… Cleopatra: Queen of Sex comes to life in this superb showcase and biography. Helen McCarthy pushes beyond the odious “Walt Disney of anime” label used by lazier writers, boldly stating that if we really must draw condescending cultural comparisons, Osamu Tezuka was also the Stan Lee, Tim Burton and Carl Sagan of his day. Similar challenging argument enlivens her in-depth account of Tezuka’s youth, his fascinating “star system” of recurring characters, and his transformation of the Japanese animation business with Astro Boy.
McCarthy artfully synthesises the work of earlier researchers who lack her populist splash and dash. Natsu Onoda Power might have more scandal, and Ada Palmer might have more rigour, but McCarthy has true passion for her subject, and is backed by a design team working with the full cooperation of the Tezuka estate. The result is a joy to behold – a large format, coffee table book with a glossy cover, a bound-in DVD, and pages that couldn’t be more lovingly engineered if they were pop-up. When discussing a creator whom everybody has heard of, but few really know, such illustration is crucial to appreciating just how important Tezuka was in the history of comics and cartoons. McCarthy keeps it up all the way to her provocative conclusion, in which she acknowledges Tezuka’s place in history, but also that the brightness of his achievement has exiled many other manga artists to the shadows.
Jonathan Clements is the author of Schoolgirl Milky Crisis: Adventures in the Anime and Manga Trade (now also available on Kindle). This review first appeared in SFX Total Anime #3, 2010.
True to their promise to review every volume in the Makers of the Modern World series, the international history journal H-Diplo gets around to my Wellington Koo book here. I’m not entirely sure why they are covering the series at all, as every review thus far seems to discover anew that the books are not intended for an academic audience. But considering the kickings dealt out to some other books in the series, I come away from this one with a sticky star.
The sister volume on Prince Saionji was reviewed a couple of months ago in H-Diplo, here. And you can find me ranting downblog about the film made about Koo’s days at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference.
Payut Ngaokrachang, who died on 27th May, started off drawing backgrounds for puppet shows touring the countryside in his native Thailand. He drifted into animation with Haed Mahasajan (1955), in which a traffic policeman swayed with the moves of a temple dancer, and eventually causes a pile-up when he is distracted by a passing woman’s loose dress.
Payut’s cartoon came to the attention of the US Information Service, a public relations agency set up by the Eisenhower administration to push the American way of life in opposition to Communism. USIS gave him a 10,000 baht bursary (about $400), and the chance to spend six months studying animation with either Disney in America or the recently established Toei in Japan. Payut chose the latter.
Along with “Mr Keith” from the US embassy, Payut hired Tokyo animators led by Taiji Yabushita to make a 14-minute colour cartoon, The New Adventures of Hanuman (1957). Intended for screening at the US embassy in Bangkok, Hanuman drew on the Indian myths of the titular white-faced Monkey God, but depicted him under attack by red-faced monkey invaders who rush out of the jungle. A metaphor for the red menace of Communism in South-East Asia, the film was unreleased in Japan, but nevertheless brought in funding that bolstered the infant anime industry.
Payut was soon back with more American money, this time from the South-East Asian Treaty Organisation, to fund The Bear and the Children (1960). A much more heavy-handed parable, it featured a hulking Soviet bear chasing a pig-tailed little girl, clearly intended to be Chinese. The evil bear goes on to pursue children wearing the national costumes of Thailand, the Philippines and Burma, who must unite to defeat it.
Yasuo Otsuka, then a rookie animator on the project, but destined one day to be a stalwart of Studio Ghibli, recalled in his autobiography the interminable meetings in a smoke-filled room between the Japanese, Payut and his American associates. A “Mr White” from the Tokyo embassy kept insisting on “reshoots”, seemingly unaware that the animators would have to go back to scratch on every scene he wanted changed.
Payut returned to Thailand, where he would make the first Thai cartoon feature, The Adventure of Sudsakorn (1979), made on a gruelling schedule that almost blinded him. In later life, he trained Thai animators subcontracting for foreign studios, and bewailed the rising domestic popularity of Japanese cartoons, lamenting that even his own granddaughter preferred them. In a strange turn of karma, he received money from the Japan Information Centre, yet another “cultural outreach” office, to make My Way (1992). This was a different kind of propaganda, posing as an anti-AIDS cartoon educating the youth of South-East Asia, but presumably attracting Japanese funding because of the consequences to Japanese sex-tourists if the disease continued to spread in the region.
Payut will be remembered as a giant of Thai cartooning, but his involvement behind the scenes of Japanese animation is a little-known element in his long and fruitful career.
Jonathan Clements is the author of Schoolgirl Milky Crisis: Adventures in the Anime and Manga Trade. This article first appeared in SFX Total Anime #3, 2010.
I’m pretty sure Ichiro Itano is going to punch me in the face.
It’s hard to tell, because I have a pair of opera glasses strapped to my head, the wrong way round, so that everything looks as if I am staring at it down the wrong end of a telescope. But in the round window of my vision, I very clearly see the director of Gantz, his hair tied back in a ponytail, his wiry muscles rippling under a khaki vest, hauling back his arm and then lurching right at me.
His fist speeds into view, looming huge in the frame. His arm seems to trail behind it for an impossible distance, while his hand blocks the entirety of my view. I stumble backwards, expecting a blow at any moment, but Itano has deliberately fallen a couple of inches short.
“Ha!” he says. “See? That’s what the world looks like if you’re the pilot of a giant robot! You’re looking through a viewscreen, you see. You’re not using your real eyes, you’re using a camera! And so, when we show a pilot’s-eye view in an anime show, we shoot it the way that a camera would see it!”
I lift the opera glasses gingerly and peer at him with my real eyes.
“That’s what an action director does!” he continues, enthusiastically. “He puts you inside the action. Inside it! Not observing, but participating. That’s why an anime director must always think outside the box. He must think himself into the places where no camera has been before.”
Yes, I say timidly. Which brings me back to my original question. Why exactly did you strap fifty fireworks to your motorbike?
Itano looks at me askance, as if wondering if I am dim.
“Well,” he says, “that was as many as I could fit. You know, some on the mud guards, some on the cowling, some on the –”
Yes, I say. I see that. But perhaps we are talking at cross-purposes about the meaning of “why”. Why did you do it?
“Oh,” he replies. “We’d been told that it was dangerous. So obviously, we decided to try it. I had my bike on the beach. And my friend had his, and we rode out a ways to give ourselves plenty of run-up, and then we charged each other. On the motorbikes.”
And then, I ventured meekly, you lit the fireworks?
“That’s right. They were all linked together with fuse cord, but I still had to light them. Did you know that a Zippo lighter is still windproof at eighty miles an hour? That’s really impressive, isn’t it?
“So anyway, I lit the fireworks, but they all kind of went off at once. There was this sudden, explosive cloud of smoke, and then there were rockets and firecrackers in my face, looping past me, around me… and it was really weird, sometimes they seemed to hang in space for a moment, as if they weren’t going anywhere. It was because I was still moving, along with them. Relative velocities, you see! Some were moving faster, others slower. And the smoke trails behind them billowed out in yet another direction, carried off by the wind, which was blowing in its own direction, nothing to do with the direction my bike was going. Or not going. Because I fell off. And I think my clothes were on fire by this point.
“So, you know… that’s a daft thing to do. Even if you’re twenty years old and drunk, it’s not recommended. The biking around on the beach is actually more fun than the actual fireworks… But I’m an artist. I put that experience to use. There was a storyboard on an anime show that had a pilot’s eye view of missiles coming towards him. And I said, you know what, that’s not what it looks like. It’s not so linear. I’ve been in the middle of a bunch of rockets going off, and they snake all around you. They don’t always go in the same direction! There are duds, and ones with unexpectedly high charges, and always smoke going in a direction you don’t expect. So I put all that in, and in the show we got this massive explosion of rockets and contrails. And it was pretty good!
“Not long after, Kazutaka Miyatake gives an interview to My Anime magazine, and he mentions this kind of shot, and says that it’s turning up all over anime. It’s turning up in Macross, of course. This kind of three-dimensional positioning within a salvo of rockets, and he calls it an ‘Itano Circus.’ Named after me, you see! How about that?
“Now, for my next trick, I shall re-enact the opening of Star Wars with nothing but a mobile phone…”
Jonathan Clements is the author of Schoolgirl Milky Crisis: Adventures in the Anime and Manga Trade. This article first appeared in SFX Total Anime #3, 2010.
