“‘Comparing a Japanese writer with Haruki Murakami is the laziest move a reviewer can make,’ noted Iain Maloney in the Japan Times, ‘but with Slow Boat, Hideo Furukawa leaves critics no choice.'”
Over at the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, I write up Hideo Furukawa, the post-modern author whose Inu-oh has just been announced as the next film project from Masaaki Yuasa.
“‘Les Castors du Roi’ [The King’s Beavers] (2011) features Europeans and First-Nations peoples slaughtering beavers, which, in a moment of uplift, are seen pleading for their lives and praying for a divine intercession that never comes. With deliberate provocation, it has been hung in the Montreal Musée des Beaux-arts at the entrance to a gallery of seventeenth-century artwork that celebrates Canada’s early days of trapping and hunting, and the taming of nature.”
Over at the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, I write up the absurd artwork of Kent Monkman, a year after running into his beaver holocaust in Montreal.
Stuffy processor Sakari Valtio (Aku Korhonen) disapproves of his daughter Ilona (Sirkka Sipilä), who covets a life onstage, and has taken to courting Aarne (Unto Salminen), a ridiculously hammy stage actor.
Kaarlo Angerkoski turns up in the role of “Kiinan Kalle” (China Charlie), a professor newly returned from Shanghai with a Song dynasty vase in a crate. Inevitably, his arrival becomes the catalyst for a bunch of misunderstandings, starting with Aarne’s co-star Irma (Kaisu Leppänen), who mistakes him for Dr Vartio and starts stripping for her examination. “I’m a professor of sociology!” he pleads, nobly covering his eyes. But Dr Valtio isn’t that smart, either, as proved when he tries to open his porcelain crate with a hammer. The Song dynasty vase (which looks like it cost about €10) becomes a second misunderstanding that the cast have to deal with, leaning on a theatre prop department to try and glue it back together before China Charlie notices.
With a title like that, if Takki ja liivit pois! were a British film, I would be expecting to at least see some boobs. But even the jovial exclamation mark is little solace when the fateful words “based on a play by Agapetus” appear on screen. Still, even a comedy without any laughs is liable to be a welcome break from all the worthy films celebrating the Finnish revolution and cocking a snook at the Russians in 1939. And director Jorma Nortimo gets off to a rip-roaring start with an opening shot that shows Ilona’s car driving through the streets of Helsinki, its badge reading “SF” as in the studio Suomen Filmiteollisuus, and its number-plate reading “A-22”, the designation for this movie in the studio catalogue. Such playful juxtapositions continue with the introduction of Aarne, who is shown locking lips with some floozy, only for the camera to pull back to reveal he is onstage, rehearsing a role.
Korhonen reprises his role from the stage version, and is remarkably naturalistic – director Nortimo even leaves in some sequences in which the surgeon and his daughter talk across each other, preserving a certain naturalness of tone. Other elements are conspicuously theatrical, such as Jacob Furman, a 12-year-old tap dancing prodigy, appearing in a brief cameo as a soft-shoe-shuffling telegram boy. He at least is supposed to be performatively noticeable; many other members of the supporting cast are just pretty terrible – a particular thumbs-down for Inna Ahti as Siiri the nurse, who seems permanently annoyed about something, quite possibly that she is only playing Siiri the nurse. Ahti was one of the girls inducted into the recently established Suomen Filmiteollisuus acting school, where she apparently seems to have learned very little. And one presumes that she is particularly sulky that her fellow student, Sirkka Sipilä has somehow snagged the lead role in this frippery.
The production retains the unnervingly extreme close-ups of actors addressing the camera which seems to be a staple of Suomen Filmiteollisuus adaptations from the stage. However, rather than the locked-off camera filming a stage production as if sitting in the audience in a theatre, Nortimo’s camera here leaps vivaciously between two-shots, close-ups and mains.
Whatever. It’s another unfunny Agapetus comedy, filmed somewhat creatively on limited sets, with only seven exterior scenes in the entire film, a reasonable way of cranking out something for the cinema-goers who don’t want to sit through the season’s anti-Russian agit-prop. And perhaps Suomen Filimiteollisuus was on to something, since this film performed above average at the box office, despite having been shunted off the production line like a proverbial sausage, while its fellow films that year ran way over budget.
The doctor falls for Irma the actress in a passionate scene backstage at the theatre, where the rest of the cast are performing some bizarre orientalist confection which involves Ilona giving herself Nosferatu eyebrows and cat-flick eye make-up which apparently “make her look Chinese.”
“Not in any way a sparkle of joy,” commented the reviewer in Uusi Suomi. “Perhaps my enthusiasm would have been greater if the film had been a bit livelier.”
Jonathan Clements is the author of An Armchair Traveller’s History of Finland.
“Despite his deeply-held faith, Father Jacob is a professional cynic, happy to write off supposed miracles as mundane mental illnesses or coincidences, but also ready to discount actual miracles as works of Satanic misdirection. Alternately regarded as too traditional and also as too progressive by his various enemies, his story is riddled with delicious paranoia, particularly in relation to his baleful superior Cardinal Bukovak, who is ambiguously presented as either a gruff, careerist bureaucrat or a Satanic agent, depending on one’s perception.”
Over at the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, I contribute several new entries, including an account of the career of the Japanese screenwriter and novelist Akinori Endo, as well as articles on Joe Ahearne’s two much-loved TV shows, Ultraviolet and Apparitions.
“Okuyama also pointedly includes every manga character you’ve ever seen with an eye-patch as a reminder that much of ‘visual impairment’ in Japanese comics is merely a costume affectation with little consideration of how it might affect the character that has it.”
Over at All the Anime, I review Yoshiko Okuyama’s Reframing Disability in Manga, which covers everything from blind swordsmen to deaf schoolgirls.
“Whereas Japanese animators had thrived during World War II on contracts for propaganda and instructional films, the immediate post-war period saw severe contraction in the industry. Female labourers conspicuously disappear from the story of Japanese animation in the 1940s as the menfolk returned home. Competition in the labour market was heightened not only by the return of demobbed soldiers and colonists from overseas, but by the influx of former employees of the Man’ei studio, in what had been Japanese-occupied Manchuria. The leading artists of wartime animation suffered attacks from two sides, as propagandists working in the field of ‘incitement to war’, and hence liable to prosecution, but also as suspected leftists as the Cold War began to bite.”
My recent article for Sight & Sound magazine about the post-war development of the Japanese animation industry has been put up on the magazine’s website.
“This is a wonderful book, exuberant and joyful, full of love for Japan but a deep appreciation of the sorts of links that get left out of popular accounts – political economies, human-interest stories and technological determinism. We do not merely get to experience the Sony Walkman through the eyes of its designers and the company chairman who just wanted to listen to music in public, but also through the eyes of Steve Jobs, who is fascinated by its miniaturisation and utility, and the ears of William Gibson, who discovers a “strange grandeur” to Vancouver as he walks around his city with a new and personalised soundtrack.”
Over at All the Anime, I review Matt Alt’s Pure Invention, a book about the material culture and stories behind some of the inventions that changed our times: the Walkman, the Game Boy, the karaoke machine, and anime…
“…”it recounts the efforts of Earth’s vampire aristocracy to repel an alien invasion, revealing at least some of the back-story to what appears to be Kikuchi’s magnum opus, a millennia-spanning conflict between Dracula and Cthulhu, glimpsed in mere fragments across a time abyss that only appears vast to mere mortals.”
“It surely did the franchise no harm that its unifying surtitle, written in a syllabary unintelligible to American lawyers as the word eirian, leapt out from bookshelves at passers-by who might have assumed it was a tie to the film Alien (1979). Yoshitaka Amano’s cover artwork might also be complicit in this subtle fakery, depicting the schooboy hero as an occasional lookalike of the actress Sigourney Weaver…”
Over at the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, I contribute a monstrously huge entry on the work of Hideyuki Kikuchi, creator of Wicked City, A Wind Named Amnesia, Vampire Hunter D, and many more.
“Hideaki Anno had proudly showed the pilot footage to Hayao Miyazaki, who hated it. Miyazaki told him that on the basis of the material in the trailer, the film would have to be three hours long to cram everything in…
“Miyazaki would later say that the Gainax boys had swindled Bandai, putting together a pilot that was palpably influenced by his own Nausicaä, and then ditching much of the look of the material for something completely different, as soon as they had money in their hands. That’s not how Gainax described it, with [Hiroyuki] Yamaga… explaining in great depth how he had spent a year carefully considering and reconsidering how the film should look, stripping away anything that felt too much like it resembled any fore-runners in the field. What this meant, of course, was by the time the time Gainax got to work on their project, the only promise it was still delivering on was the promise to be like nothing else.”
Over on the All the Anime blog, I write about the behind-the-scenes shenanigans on The Wings of Honneamise.
“At times, his speculations cleave so closely to the headlines of the day that they risk being parsed not as possible futures, but as fake news.”
Over at the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, I write up Ilkka Remes, the best-selling Finnish novelist of the last 20 years.
The Official Schoolgirl Milky Crisis Blog 