Author Archives: ixarette

Due Diligence

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In Japan, where the concept was first invented, they were called the Money Tigers. In Finland they are the Lions. In Israel, the Sharks. We call them the Dragons, and their job is to audit the plans of would-be entrepreneurs in the Dragons’ Den. If Judge Judy isn’t on, I’m there, watching the way they pierce to the heart of bad ideas. And sometimes, for fun, I imagine what it would be like if someone tried to attract the Dragons to invest in the anime industry.
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Settling Down

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In Hotman, a former gang member tries to put his life in order to raise his four younger siblings – no surprise that the leading role of Enzo Takaya is taken by Takashi Sorimachi, still widely known for his role as a gangster-made-good in GTO. But Enzo doesn’t merely have to teach classes in fine art and chase around after his surrogate family, he also opens his door to find five-year-old Nanami (Nana Yamauchi). Her absent mother has left a note informing Enzo that he is the father. Enzo now has to contend with a fifth hungry mouth to feed, and one with a series of allergies and intolerances that force him to become an instant expert on organic produce and health food. It could only be based on a manga…
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Game On

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Nothing describes the Chinese transition into capitalism quite as well as the Beijing Olympic mascots. Five little critters swarm all over the Beijing merchandise, in a move that guarantees a Pokémon style supermarket sweep for any parents at the games. Oh yes, you’ll have to catch ’em all, and since there are five of them, that’s five times the foreign currency for Beijing. Behind the scenes, the multiple mascots might have been intended to prevent any single Chinese region from speaking for the whole. You can’t have just a panda, as that only means Sichuan to the Chinese. Can’t have just a swallow, as that’s the symbolic bird of the Beijing region. A fish is too Shanghainese. What about a big red personification of the Olympic flame? What about a politically-sensitive Tibetan antelope? What about all of the above, darting across the merchandise like a squad of colour-coded Power Rangers.
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Kung Fu Schoolgirls

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Anime schoolgirls are a distinctive breed. Lithe and long-limbed, these sailor-suited sirens are prone to demonic possession, often found with magical powers, and quite likely to be martial artists. Any resemblance to real-Japanese teenagers is purely coincidental. But then again, once in a while someone in the live-action world will wonder – just how difficult would it be to try this kind of story with real girls…?

Ever since she was bullied as a child, Mann (Jun Matsuda) has nurtured her own natural abilities in the martial arts. A few years of living abroad in Hong Kong and Thailand have allowed her to hone her skills in kickboxing, which come in handy on the tough streets of Shinjuku. Well, there’s tough and there’s tough. The bars and accessory shops are hardly mean streets, but it’s still the home turf of gangs of sailor-suited schoolgirls, and they’re fighting over their territory.

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The Notenki Memoirs

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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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Meet the Parents

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In the movies, life is planned out for you. You meet someone special, you fall in love, and then you live happily ever after. But while you might be able to choose the love of your life, you don’t have so much luck with their family. And in Japan, there’s less likelihood that you’ll be sharing a love-nest for two than moving in with your new in-laws. In manga and live-action drama, the Cinderella story often does not begin until after the wedding, when our pretty young heroine gets the man of her dreams, only to find herself an unpaid slave to a vindictive mother-in-law. This is the ever-growing dramatic genre of “in-law appeasement,” likely to expand further as Japan’s population grows and house prices soar ever higher – and The Curse is one of its more famous examples.
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Lost in Translation

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The top ten reasons why anime are “lost in translation”…

10: Lip Sync and Line Length
Lip Synchronisation, known in America as “fitting the flaps”, is a means of ensuring that the sound of the words being spoken matched the lip movements of the onscreen speaker. This can often lead to the addition of words on the spur of the moment in the dubbing studio – in erotic horror like Return of the Overfiend, this usually means the use of the F-word as a bonus adverb, adjective and noun! Subtitles normally suffer from the opposite problem – the deletion of parts of a script in order to make the lines fit a pre-determined length. Subtitlers must take into account not only the meaning of the line, but the reading speed of the average viewer…

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Nebulous Achievements

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It’s sweet of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) to award a Best Script Nebula to Howl’s Moving Castle, but hopefully the anime community will take it for what it is – a very belated recognition of a supreme talent. In my opinion, Howl is nowhere near Miyazaki at his best; it often plays like a committee’s attempt to reverse-engineer his greatest achievements. It’s more likely that Howl gets its award for being cosily familiar to the voters – one of those weird Japanese cartoons, but based on a book by an English-speaking author, and directed by that nice old man who made all those great movies in the 1990s that the voters mainly ignored. It is notable that the only anime to previously get a nomination from the SFWA were Princess Mononoke, which had Neil Gaiman credited for the script adaptation, and the subsequent Spirited Away, whose Oscar victory was inescapable. It is also notable that a large number of the SFWA voters are in Japan this month at the Yokohama Worldcon – perhaps they were booking their flights at the same time as they filled their ballots, and figured it couldn’t hurt.
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Remastering

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The idea behind a remake is based on the cold calculations of accountants. It’s known that half of the audience for Story X will come back to check out a sequel. That means, if Story X did big enough business, it’s worth knocking out a follow-up, just to grab the money. Hollywood is the most notorious offender of course, cranking out unnecessary sequels in which we get Another This, Son of That and Revenge of the Other. Manga do it, too. Sports stories take their heroes to the next championship level, martial arts stories bring on new opponents, and girls’ romances find a handy way to split up the lovers once more. In the case of Ironfist Chinmi, creator Takeshi Maekawa simply started renumbering the books – he declared that volume 36 of the old Chinmi was actually volume one of the “New Chinmi”, thereby hoping to attract new readers, even thought the story simply went on as before.
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