Over at Kenny Smith’s Power of Three podcast, “the most lovely journalist in Britain” interviews me about Kingmaker, my unproduced script for the short-lived Richard E. Grant animated Doctor Who series, which was eventually put into production as the Paul McGann story Immortal Beloved for Big Finish.
I show up 40 minutes in, after Kenny has marshalled a bunch of readers to perform the original pitch, something that I haven’t even thought about for nearly twenty years. The interview takes in the story’s incredibly convoluted path to release, beginning with two men in a Brixton pub, trying to come up with a Strontium Dog script for Sanjeev Bhaskar, which somehow turns into Ian McNiece threatening to kill people, and Elspet Gray channelling my grandmother.
The details are up at lovesanimation.com for this year’s Scotland Loves Anime film festival, to be held in Glasgow, Edinburgh, and the very Scottish city of London. Guests include Takeshi Koike, who is not yet aware of how obsessed the festival director is with his Redline, Baku Kinoshita in town to talk about The Last Blossom, Yasuhiro Aoki onstage to talk about his ChaO, and Kenichiro Akimoto popping up to talk about All You Need is Kill. I shall be the master of ceremonies, jury chairman and onstage interviewer, as usual.
Although I aim to update this blog twice a week, things have slowed over the summer owing to the termination of several sources and the delay of several announcements. It’s been over a year since the All the Anime blog shut down original content, and several months since NEO closed, so there are no longer any new articles to point you at. I finally reached the end of my chronicle of shooting Route Awakening with National Geographic (or at least, all the days worth blogging about), so there is no longer a fortnightly account of behind-the-scenes shenanigans.
I have three recorded podcasts waiting to hit the ether, another book chapter waiting to be announced, two more DVD commentaries and several other foreign editions in the works. I will get some more posts up here when the chance arises, but for now, I am wading through the above pile of books, on a big new project, and I need to clear a thousand words of that each morning before I can get to anything else.
The relentlessly cheerful Corporal Möttönen (Einari Ketola) is wounded in the Winter War, shipping home for a chance to see his wife and three children, who are exhorted to run their home life with military discipline. By the time he returns to the front, he finds himself ordered to be the local liaison for the entertainment troupe – a mismatched band of malingerers, milksops and drama queens. After he improvises a ditty about Päivänkilo (Eero Eloranta), a man who has been excused active service because of his bad tummy, Möttönen is transferred to the entertainment unit itself, where Päivänkilo confesses that he is ashamed of his previous behaviour, and that he wants to be a real soldier.
After another bout of home leave (he always seems to be off again to see the missus and his three aggressively cute children), Möttönen is the master of ceremonies at a massive show, where his ability to improvise and pull replacement performers out of the audience turns it into a roaring success.
This historical blog of Finnish cinema is creaking with the weight of military comedies, including The Regiment’s Tribulation (1938), Kalle Kollala, Cavalryman (1939) and Serenade on a War Trumpet (1939). And the war has been very much on everybody’s mind for the last three years, either openly acknowledged or conspicuously avoided. But Niin se on, pojat is an altogether different phenomenon, sneaking out in the last week of 1942 as a vehicle for a man who had been turned into a star by the war itself.
Einar Ketola had appeared in several films we’ve covered, but never in such a big role that he has been worth mentioning before. But in a creative environment in which production was stalled, many forms of entertainment were literally forbidden, and cinemas were obliged to stack their programmes with re-runs of old hits like Lapatossu (1937), Ketola became a sudden star-of-the-moment. In the two years before this film was released, he somehow racked up over a thousand performances, not merely in provincial theatres and dance halls, but at hastily cobbled-together frontline stages and in hospital canteens, where his “wooden-leg” humour was a welcome distraction for wounded veterans. Corporal Möttönen was his most popular character, a good-hearted barrack-room comedian always prepared to see the sunny side, and ready to brush off any setbacks with his breezy catchphrase: “That’s how it is, boys!”
The Finnish press dismissed the film with little more than shrugs, noting that it was a thinly disguised excuse for a variety show in the vein of SF Parade (1940), stitched together with scenes that allowed Ketola to reprise his stand-up material. Some of the big stars of the day lend some weight, including an uncharacteristically smiley Regina Linnanheimo, who shines in a Hawaiian dance number – is she only ever cheerful when she’s in a black wig?
When the writer-star himself was already admitting in interviews that Möttönen was a wartime phenomenon that was unlikely to last long in peace, this film is a fascinating glimpse of a star that shone brightly for a brief moment. “Some watch and listen to him with pleasure,” sighed Olavi Vesterdahl in Aamulehti, “while others find him tedious when they see so much of him at once.”
Some reviewers objected to “tasteless” sequences ridiculing Josef Stalin – content that would become substantially more problematic after 1945. In the tense censorship environment that would cancel several wartime hits in order to avoid offending the Soviet Union, That’s How It Is, Boys! was shorn of ten minutes of footage, not merely regarding Stalin, but also lines in which Möttönen lent his support to the Nazi-inspired notion of a “Greater Finland” – a controversial issue even at the time, since many Finnish soldiers had joined up to defend their country, not invade someone else’s. Its star suffered an even worse fate, kicked out of the actors’ union on the pretext that his performances didn’t really count, and blacklisted from many Finnish theatres, on the grounds that he was a fascist sympathiser, and his presence on a playbill would draw dire consequences. His struggles even continued after retirement in 1969, when his right to a soldier’s pension was tied up for years in the reddest of red-tape delays.
Ketola’s crime, it seems, was being a massive propaganda success during the Continuation War, for which elements within the post-war administration were reluctant to forgive him. The story goes that he didn’t receive his pension until 1976, four years before his death, when President Kekkonen heard about his treatment, and heads rolled at the social security office.
Jonathan Clements is the author of A Short History of Finland. He is watching all the Finnish films so you don’t have to.
In the post this morning, my author’s copies of the compact, mass-market edition of Rebel Island, which throws in a couple of paragraphs about the presidential election, two pages of reviewer quotes, and a “NO A.I. SCRAPING” command in the indicia.
1981 was, at least in prevailing anime historical memory, a year dominated by science fiction and fantasy, which began with Tomino Yoshiyuki’s notorious “proclamation of a new anime century” (animeshinseiki sengon) at the premiere of the first Gundam film. And yet, Takahata Isao released Chie the Brat a bawdy, blue-collar, adult-focussed comedy of the Osaka underclass, a world removed from most other anime of its day, running counter to contemporary trends in directorial hiring, subject matter and media.
This chapter places Chie the Brat in the context of anime and media history, explaining its asides, cameos, and in-film references. The historicity of Chie makes it a vital point in the career of Takahata himself, as his first full-length feature since the box-office failure of Little Norse Prince (1968), and his reunion with Otsuka Yasuo and Kotabe Yoichi, with whom he had not worked together since Panda! Go Panda! (1972-3). It can be said to mark the end of his decade of TV exile, and the beginning of the gradual regrouping of the former Toei colleagues who would go on to form Studio Ghibli. Using testimonial evidence, from contemporary staff interviews and Otsuka’s memoirs, it places Chie in context as a refinement and continuation of Takahata’s personal kind of “psychological realism,” particularly in terms of his desire to remain faithful to the intent of an original author.
It has been something crazy like seven years since I was first approached about writing a book chapter for The Many Worlds of Takahata Isao, but it’s finally coming out from Hawaii University Press, including my piece on Chie the Brat.
As his mother prepares to set off with her newly adopted twins to a country retreat, young Olli Suominen causes an accident in the street and is consumed with guilt. He is propelled into a series of misadventures as he tries to make amends by getting the money together to buy a doll for an injured girl, befriending her brother Jaska (Kalevi Hartti) in the process, and findind a veritable partner in crime. The two boys become mixed up in the case of a missing envelope of money, go on the run to a relocation camp, but eventually are exonerated, and all is well that ends well. In a nod to the wartime austerity that can be seen permeating much of the film, the family maid Hilda (Siiri Angerkoski) announces that they are going to celebrate with real coffee.
After the success of the radio spin-off The Suominen Family (1941), the Suomen Filmiteollisuus studio rushed straight into a sequel, jettisoning any cast members who weren’t immediately available for a reprise, and parachuting in some previously unmentioned relatives or doppelgangers to hang onto the momentum. Considering that child star Lasse Pöysti was 14 when filming started and pushing 16 by the time the premiere arrived, they were lucky that he didn’t visible shoot up like a beanstalk between scenes.
Although filming began on Suomisen Ollin tempaus in May 1941, it was postponed for a year and only resumed in summer 1942. The opening night did not arrive until November 1942, making it a mini time-capsule of life around the outbreak of the Continuation War with the Soviet Union. There is an incredible amount of location work, wandering all over contemporary Helsinki, and filming in several real-life houses.
There is no overt reference to the conflict, but all sorts of incidental details in backgrounds, technology and clothing that make it clear when it was shot. Cars have wood-powered boilers, an allotment plot is referred to as a patriotic duty, and the hospital has visible shrapnel screens over its windows. Much like August Fixes Everything (1941), it also features prominent propaganda regarding the desirability of adopting war orphans, featuring a pair of twins that had, in real life, been adopted by director Orvo Saarikivi and his wife.
In a cunning ruse to make the middle-class Suominens more relatable, the film also focusses on a blue-collar family with the same surname. Jaska Suominen is the same age as Olli, but has already left school; his family grow crops in their yard to scrape up some additional nutrition, and all of the Suominens are in the same boat, no matter what their social position. With a surname that is already, as they say, “as Finnish as a wolverine,” it is a nice touch to add to a universal message. The chemistry between Jaska and Olli was so good that Kalevi Hartta returned in later films, starting with The Little Artists of the Suominen Household (1943), albeit in a different role as Olli’s best friend at school.
The Helsingin Sanomat’s unflappable Paula Talaskivi was won over by a film that she regarded as “almost a perfect match in its genre: a heartwarming, funny, refreshing and warmly presented piece about everyday life in the home of a Finnish family, mainly in the sphere of activity of its young offspring.” Olavi Vesterdahl similarly heaped on the praise in Aamulehti, calling it a “sorrow-buster” [murheentorjuja]. The rest of the Finnish press was similarly rapturous, bigging up the child actors as world class, and thanking the Suomen Filmiteollisuus studio for bringing the country a much-needed pick-me-up. With the hindsight of history, the broadcast of the film on television in 1986 was greeted with considerably greater reserve, as the critic for the Helsingin Sanomat grumbled that the desire to present a united front and a happy country resulted in a movie in which “all the problems solved themselves.”
To my twenty-first century eyes, it does seem awfully slow, with a minute at the beginning lost to an overture over a blank screen, and minute after minute of the Suominen family’s daily life as they faff around the kitchen and dither at the train station. But one imagines that such mundane scenes were a welcome tonic to many Finnish audiences in 1942, rather than the box-ticking filler they may appear to be today, as the director desperately tries to cram characters from the radio play into enough scenes to make them seem to have got their due.
Jonathan Clements is the author of A Short History of Finland. He is watching all the Finnish films so you don’t have to.
Mr Yuan is the baffled taxi driver I have commissioned to take me to the Shaolin Temple, who cannot believe his luck. Today he will make a whole £30 for driving me there and back from my hotel in Luoyang, although it’s a nail-biting journey for 90 minutes through awful smog, with only twenty feet of visibility. Giant coal trucks, overloaded to double their capacity, loom out of the gloom, along with buses, vans and tuk-tuks little better than tractors. All the vehicles have their hazard lights blinking, and it soon becomes clear that every time we overtake someone, we are on a winding mountain path with little between us and the plummet back into town. It doesn’t feel like we are heading up a mountain, although before long there are patches of snow on the ground.
The Shaolin Temple itself is a little above the smog, living in a time warp where it is still the Ming dynasty and where the sky is still blue. Founded in the late 5th century AD by an Indian monk, it has been burned to the ground several times, but always risen from the ashes. Its location was chosen because it is circled by other mountains, which appear to the credulous eye to form a silhouette of a reclining Buddha. Thanks to the fame of Shaolin kung fu, and also of Zen Buddhism, which began here with the monk Bodhidharma, it has a lot of money to spend, and is a massive hilltop complex, attended by kung fu high schools, as well as halls of residence for the 200 remaining monks, and temples and pagodas in memory of great Shaolin achievements.
It is here that Bodhidharma meditated so long in a cave that his shadow literally burned into the wall, and here that his would-be pupil Huike stood stoically outside the cave, waiting to be invited to study.
Bodhidharma had no interest in teaching him, even when he found Huike standing up to his knees in snow.
“I will teach you when it snows red,” he scoffed, only for Huike to pull out a knife and slash his own arm*, spraying the snow with his blood. It is here that the Buddhist phrase, “Standing in snow, the heart is revealed” comes from, which I think ought to be the motto of the Finnish Shorinji Kempo Association. (*English-language documentation says slashes his own arm OFF, one of many places where Shaolin myths get a bit weird).
My guide is Lisa Lau (although her business card says Lili Liu), and in keeping with the colour theme of the Shaolin temple, her puffa jacket is a holy orange. Her services are a hefty £30, for which she confesses she usually waits around all week for a single commission. The rest of the time, she works in marketing for the temple.
She talks about of the early life of Tang Taizong, first husband of Empress Wu, who was rescued from captivity as a young man by thirteen Shaolin monks, leading to the long-term association of the monastery with the Tang dynasty’s ruling family. We see a pagoda dedicated to Empress Wu’s mum, and many steles carved with details of Tang history and/or famous donations to the monastery. One is carved with the words So Doshin.
“Oh yes,” says Lisa, “that one’s from Japan.”
We walk on the lucky carved lotuses to the central hall, and see the training ground where the monks have stamped 48 bowl-shaped depressions in the cobbles from constant training, and the “Bachelor Tree” where monks practicing the Two Fingers of Death have poked holes into its bark. I drop in at the Forest of Pagodas, where the remains of dead monks are enshrined in multi-stepped columns, and then head off for the show.
Yes, there’s a show. Monks punching holes in things and each other, slapping around sticks and swords, and bending their legs around their head. Although the monks were very good at what they did, a lot of what they did was conjuring and sleight of hand, and didn’t have a whole lot to do with Shaolin. Nor, to be honest, did five minutes of time-wasting comedy business when audience members were brought up on stage and asked to go through several punchy kicking movements for the entertainment of everyone else.
On the way back, the smog has lifted a little. We rumble slowly through squalid hamlets of shacks and barns, piles of coal and stacks of rags. People in the street are selling mud-caked leeks and oranges. A sleek limousine coming down the mountain ploughs into a three-wheeled pick-up truck and sprays sparks across the road.
“Ooh-hoo!” breathes Mr Yuan, as he swerves around the accident. It is all he says for the whole trip.
Jonathan Clements is the author of A Brief History of the Martial Arts, and the narrator of the commentary track on Arrow Films’ Martial Arts of Shaolin.Photographs by Kati Clements.
The Official Schoolgirl Milky Crisis Blog 