Category Archives: News

Anime Syndrome

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The big names of the anime world might be old duffers today, but they all started frightfully young. Osamu Tezuka told everyone he was 36 when Astro Boy was released, but he was lying. In fact, he was only 34 – the result of teen years spent lying about his age so that people would take him seriously. The anime business needs its workers to be young and energetic, otherwise they can’t keep up with the pace.

When Astro Boy’s cut-price animation style shook the industry in 1963, the grand old men at Toei Animation went searching for a staffer who could produce TV animation at a similar rate. None of the old-timers thought it was possible; only Sadao Tsukioka, then in his early twenties, was young enough and gullible enough to think it could be done. Which is how he became the director of Ken the Wolf Boy.

Tsukioka’s recruitment was part of a larger, industry-wide grab for staff, which also snapped up Hayao Miyazaki, Gisaburo Sugii, Rintaro, Yoshiyuki Tomino, and many other future anime directors. Studio shills lurked outside Toei Animation trying to lure staff to work for other studios. And at Tezuka’s company, Mushi Production, the animators in one office were all caught with freelance Toei work hidden under their desks.

One of the reasons we saw a huge rise in industry deaths in 2010 is that the anime business itself quadrupled in size fifty years ago. If you were a young kid of 23 in the year that Astro Boy came out, you’re going to be 70 now, which is why so many seem to be dying off at once. However, that doesn’t explain everything, because some of this year’s deaths have been significantly younger. Directors Satoshi Kon and Umanosuke Iida, both of whom passed away this year, were only in their forties. What’s going on?

Animation is an unforgiving lifestyle. Crunch times demand 20-hour days under harsh conditions. Nobody animates at the full 24 frames per second, so everything is already compromised and can benefit from a bit of extra tinkering. There is always something that could be improved just a little bit, which means it is never possible to just stop and proclaim that something is as good as it will ever be. There is literally no hope that your work will be perfect, and meanwhile you are working odd hours, living off instant noodles, and not getting any exercise. Nor is this anything new. During production on Kimba the White Lion, the animator Yoshinori Rachi dropped dead of a duodenal ulcer, aged 24. “Without a doubt,” wrote the director Eiichi Yamamoto, “he was killed by work on television animation.”

It was Yasuji Mori who first gave a name to compromised immune systems born of chainsmoking, lack of sleep and bodyclocks thrown off-kilter. He called it Anime Syndrome, and he saw it all over the 1960s business. Peer back into the war years and there are still more tales of nervous exhaustion, and long convalescences that treat a production completion party like a remission from some terrible affliction. Anime has always been a tough master, as has peer pressure. That little cough, that little twinge, are all things that the animators put off dealing with. You can see the doctor tomorrow…. Next week… When this episode is done…


Jonathan Clements is the author of Schoolgirl Milky Crisis: Adventures in the Anime and Manga Trade. This article first appeared in NEO #80, 2010.

The Complete Schoolgirl Milky Crisis Index

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It has come to my attention that the Kindle version of Schoolgirl Milky Crisis omits the book’s infamous index. Oh, all you digipeople are so smart with your searchy buttons, you think you don’t need an index! Well, the SMC index was my little tribute to Joe Queenan and came in for particular praise from many reviewers… and hopefully not because it just meant that the book was almost over. Here it is in full.

100 Greatest Cartoons, 266

119, 327

2001: A Space Odyssey, 34

2046, 107-8

300, 162

8-Man, 258

A Da, 140, 145, 146

A.Li.Ce, 96, 370

abandon, lemming-like, 275

Accidental Death of an Anarchist, 65

actors, bitchiness of, 62; bizarre whims of, 267; control of, 53; in cupboards, 53; ideal conditions for, 235-6; questionable dedication of, 10, 65, 235; drinking habits of, 56; pets of, 57; poor quality of, 334; resemblance to shop dummies of, 335; residuals of, 209; smell of, 54; shitty life of, 59

ADV Films, 98, 277

Affleck, Ben, 261

afros, desirability on samurai of, 265 Continue reading →

60 Years Ago: Mannerheim's Last Battle

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From Mannerheim: President, Soldier, Spy by Jonathan Clements, available now in the UK and in the US.

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Mannerheim began his eighties still talking of responsibility and struggle. As he saw it, Finland still ran the risk of drifting irrevocably too far to the left, and he was determined to hold this off by the last means available to him – writing his memoirs.

‘Was it not my duty,’ he wrote, ‘now that the West seemed to have forgotten the gallant Finnish people, to communicate to all our friends near and far what I knew about its indomitable battle for all that a nation holds sacred, and had not my countrymen a right to hear my interpretation of the causes that had led to the position where Finland now stood?’

His decision was unsurprising, but also unwelcome to some of his successors. Mannerheim’s avowed intent was to educate the Cold War world about recent Finnish history, but his memoirs were sure to attract the attention of readers back home. President Paasikivi, in particular, fretted that his illustrious predecessor would write a tell-all book that was sure to land Finland in hot water with the Soviet Union, with which relations were still strained. Mannerheim did exactly as Paasikivi had feared but was steered into being less forceful in his published comments on Bolshevism and ‘Reds’, and also in his attitude towards the Swedes. In private, Paasikivi grumbled that if he paid heed to every one of the field marshal’s grim warnings then everyone in Finland might as well walk into the forest with a pistol and shoot themselves in the forehead.

Despite the politicians’ concerns, Mannerheim was left to write his memoirs in peace with the help of a small staff of assistants. He seems to have originally planned on doing so in Kirkniemi, a manor house he had bought in what is now the Helsinki suburbs, but continued ill health lured him out of Finland to Switzerland in the late 1940s. ‘If on this earth there is a place to be found which is dedicated to forgetting,’ he wrote to a friend, ‘it is Switzerland, with all the convenience which makes life easy, hotels, communications, order, food and the beauty of the landscape, but above all, the mountains, the Alps which give the impression of being somewhere in the atmosphere, above the clouds, between earth and sky.’ Mannerheim also observed that Switzerland, unlike so many other parts of Europe, had been spared the damage and destruction of the war – it was, in many ways for him, a reminder of the lost Europe of his younger days.

His circle of true friends, always small, dwindled predictably in old age. ‘I begin to see only graves around me,’ he commented, although his dry melancholy was economical with the truth. In fact, he spent much time in the company of a new lady companion, the elegant Countess Gertrud Arco-Valley. Some 30 years his junior, the divorcee countess was a friend of Mannerheim’s younger daughter and was often seen accompanying him on his travels.

Mannerheim spent increasing amounts of time in hospital, troubled in particular by stomach and intestine problems. A perforated ulcer nearly killed him in 1946, and kidney stones and haemorrhages laid him low in 1948. He began to lose weight drastically, and is noticeably thin and frail in the photographs of him at the clinic in Val-Mont, Switzerland, where he both took spa treatments and continued to work on his memoirs.

In early 1951, Mannerheim was hospitalised again in Lausanne with a distended abdomen, and had emergency surgery for a blocked intestine. It was, he joked with his surgeon, his last battle, and one that he was likely to lose. He said his goodbyes to those around him on 27 January, and fell into a sleep from which he never awoke. His heart stopped half an hour before midnight, although in Finland’s time zone it was already the following morning – the anniversary of his decisive strike against the Reds in the Finnish Civil War of 1918.

Public Lending Right

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A little later than usual, the Public Lending Right sent me last week a statement of the number of times that my books have been taken out of British libraries. As I explained last year, many civilised countries have a scheme like this, whereby authors are reimbursed by the state if libraries loan out their books. This year, my finances are enriched to the tune of 6.25 pence per loan.

Here are the JC top ten library loans for 2010:

  1. Confucius: A Biography (hardback and paperback combined).
  2. Beijing: The Biography of a City.
  3. Wu.
  4. Chinese Life.
  5. A Brief History of the Vikings.
  6. A Brief History of the Samurai.
  7. The First Emperor of China (hardback and paperback combined).
  8. Marco Polo.
  9. The Pirate King (in paperback as Coxinga).
  10. Darwin’s Notebook.

Regular readers will note that there is a new entry, straight in at the number 6 slot, for a book that was only published a couple of months before the year’s deadline – we can perhaps expect the samurai to go further up the charts next year. Meanwhile, all the manga translations have dropped out — does this mean that Bloomsbury’s Ironfist Chinmi books are finally succumbing to wear and tear after 15 years, or simply that this year’s sampled libraries didn’t have so many comics on their shelves to begin with?

Twelve years ago, I wrote a little children’s book under a pseudonym in a matter of days — I think it took me no more than a long weekend. It has since been reprinted several times, by three different English-language publishers, and translated into some very rare languages, including Moldovan and Malay. Ever since, it has consistently generated a full 25% of my annual library royalties. There’s no predicting what book will be the one that makes one’s fortune. Not that this book makes me a fortune, but it puts a smile on my face every year when I discover another legion of people have checked it out of their local library.

Salon Futura #5

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The latest issue of Salon Futura is up online with a lovely Judith Clute cover, and includes a large review-article from me about Ranpo Edogawa, the “Fiend with Twenty Faces” and the remake thereof, just released in the UK as K20: Legend of the Black Mask.

Also in this issue: Paul Cornell interviewed and Paolo Bacigalupi profiled, Judith Clute interviewed, Jon Courtnay Grimwood… interviewed; more interviews than you can shake a stick at.

Plus Sam Jordison on Venice, and editor Cheryl Morgan with a rant on “genre”.

The Italian Job

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Online now, an interview with me by Armando Rotondi of the Italian webzine Asia Express, in which we get into imitable violence, the Western canon of Eastern animation, and the threat, or lack thereof presented to Japanese animation by the nascent industries of Korea and China.

Also check out their reviews of Schoolgirl Milky Crisis (“un libro esplosivo”), The Anime Encyclopedia (“davvero mirabile in tutto”), and The Dorama Encyclopedia (“un testo essenziale”).

In other news, I discover that my second Vikings book is now available in Italian.

My Book of the Year

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My reading this year has been all over the place, from The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet to a new book on Mannerheim, to a literary biography of Arthur Conan Doyle, and oodles of Japanese-language books about the animation business.

In the meantime, among the dozens of books I read this year, there have been a few stand-out successes. I began the year nose-deep in Massimo Soumaré’s Japan in Five Ancient Chinese Chronicles, a superb survey of the occurences of the term “Land of the Rising Sun” (and indeed “Hairy Dwarves of Wa”) in mainland dynastic chronicles. Jamie Bisher’s White Terror: Cossack Warlords of the Trans-Siberian, is a gripping documentary history of the last survivors of Tsarist Russia as they fought a losing battle across Asia, along the length of a railway line that terminated in Vladivostok. It may form part of a book I am supposed to be writing next year, so it was a wonderful resource. I can’t get enough of the White Russians, which added bonus excitement to my reading of Martin Booth’s Gweilo: Memories of a Hong Kong Childhood. I stumbled across Booth while Googling him as the original author of the George Clooney vehicle The American. But I stayed for Gweilo, in particular for its reminiscences of the “Queen of Kowloon”, a senile, opium-addled vagrant in 1950s Hong Kong, who seemed to have once been a beautiful Tsarist duchess. Meanwhile, an interest in blockade runners (don’t ask) led me to Eric Graham’s Clyde Built: Blockade Runners, Cruisers and Armored Rams of the American Civil War, which retells the North-South conflict from the point of view of the Scottish shipbuilders and profiteers whose tricked-out steamers were smuggling supplies into the South from Bermuda.

But my 2010 Book of the Year was another part of my Scottish haul from ten days at the Scotland Loves Anime film festival. It’s Scott-Land: The Man Who Invented a Nation by Stuart Kelly, a biography and “thanatography” of Sir Walter Scott. There are other books about Scott, but they all too often skirt around the issue that his books are unreadable. Kelly is a happily hostile witness to his subject, intrigued by the career and output of an author who was a global celebrity during his own lifetime, to the extent that his Edinburgh monument is still the largest memorial to an author anywhere in the world. And yet Scott today is largely unread, confined to the bargain bin of literary history, his works written off as risible whimsy, his style dismissed as florid and twee. That’s where the thanatography comes in, with Kelly charting the fame and fortune of Scott after his death, with his works forming fundamental building blocks of the Scottish national identity, and indeed that of America – did you know that “Hail to the Chief” began as a song from an unauthorised musical, based on a Scott book about Highland bandits?

Kelly’s book opens a fascinating window on the bestsellers of yesteryear, treating Scott as the tin-eared, ham-fisted, yet inexplicably popular Dan Brown of his day, as well as a cunning literary wheeler-dealer, whose ownership of his publisher’s printing company allowed him to double-dip from his books’ profits. Literary biography is fast becoming my favourite genre, as I unwind from writing my own books by reading about other people writing theirs. On which note, thanks to one publication being six months late, another being six months early, and a third being bang on time, I ended up publishing three books in the calendar year 2010: A Brief History of the Samurai, Admiral Togo: Nelson of the East, and A Brief History of Khubilai Khan. You’ll have to keep busy with those, because for the first time in a decade, I won’t be publishing a single book next calendar year. But there’s already something on the slate for 2012, and for 2013, too, which seems far off in the future, even though I am already working on it. Other projects may slot in in the interim. In fact, one of the things that kept me busy in 2010 was the writing of large-scale proposals for big book projects for publication in 2014. See, planning ahead: no news on those yet, but why should there be when publishers wouldn’t need delivery for another two years? If I were really smart, I would buy up 50% of a printing company, like Walter Scott.

Then again, Scott ended up losing his shirt. Maybe I should invest in print-on-demand instead…

2010: The Year in Anime Books

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After so many positive responses to the round-up of anime reading last year, I thought I would continue with a brief precis of some of the anime books I have encountered in the ensuing twelve months.

Largely overlooked in Anglophone anime studies was Hu Tze-yue’s Frames of Anime: Culture and Image-Building from Hong Kong University Press. For those who have read Hu’s essay on Hakujaden in the journal Animation, this is more of the same, extending her conclusions out of the Toei era and into the careers of Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata. Meanwhile, Toshie Takahashi made a valuable contribution to studies of TV in general with Audience Studies: A Japanese Perspective, which has given me some great ideas about the history of early anime on television. Andrew Osmond placed anime in an international context with his 100 Animated Feature Films for the British Film Insititute. Phaidon’s Manga Impact was actually a book about anime, which says it all.

There were two excellent articles on Grave of the Fireflies and Space Cruiser Yamato, to be found in Stahl and Williams’ Imag(in)ing the War in Japan: Representing and Responding to Trauma in Postwar Literature and Film. This year I also caught up with Ian Condry’s 2009 essay ‘Anime Creativity: Characters and Premises in the Quest for Cool Japan’ in Theory, Culture & Society, worth noting here because it seems to be a fragment of a book-length work in progress. The same issue included Marc Steinberg’s ‘Anytime, Anywhere: Tetsuwan Atomu Stickers and the Emergence of Character Merchandizing,’ continuing to ensure that the Astro Boy era is one of the best documented in anime studies. Mechademia put out another strong volume. Oh, and Schoolgirl Milky Crisis came out on the Kindle.

The 2006 Clements and McCarthy Anime Encyclopedia remains the largest and most comprehensive book in English about Japanese animation. However, if you can read Japanese, there is now an even bigger tome to bend your shelves, the 1000-page Stingray/Nichigai Associates Dictionary of Animation Works: the biggest book ever written on the subject. It’s an odd work with rather short entries, omitting running times, for example, and concentrating instead on the origins of the anime discussed. This makes it an indispensable resource for anyone documenting the source material from which anime is made, as it lists the Japanese editions of Moomin books, the Bible and obscure children’s classics. It also covers non-Japanese animation, with a total of over 6000 little entries. But I can’t help wishing that it spent more time discussing the anime themselves, rather than vast bibliographies of the books related to them — a massive multi-volume list, for example, of Richard Burton’s Arabian Nights translation, in order to point to the origins of Tezuka’s 1001 Nights. Still, very handy, even at the astronomical cover price of $175.

In Japan, this year has been quiet in terms of big new books on the anime industry, although Toshio Okada got in just under the wire with his new warts-and-all memoir, Testament. This year, I have instead been reading many older books on anime history, including memoirs by Shinichi Suzuki, Yasuo Otsuka, Ryuichi Yokoyama, Tadahito Mochinaga, and Yoshiyuki Tomino. Meatiest among them was Eiichi Yamamoto’s tell-all confessional, The Rise and Fall of Mushi Pro (1989). Written as Tezuka lay dying, it is a detailed analysis of the period from the early 1960s to the early 1970s, from the beginning of production on Tales from a Street Corner, up to the collapse of the studio in the wake of Tragedy of Belladonna. One wonders, perhaps, if now that Yoshinobu Nishizaki is dead, Yamamoto will write a sequel about the troubled 1970s in the anime world, during which he worked for Nishizaki on the Yamato series.

I also found much of interest in Nobuyuki Tsugata’s 2007 study Japan’s First Animation Creator: Kitayama Seitar?, a book which pieces together vital pieces of the anime puzzle from the 1920s and 1930s. Tsugata is the best author in the world on anime history matters, and this book is an amazing detective story. So little early animation survives that Tsugata has to piece together Kitayama’s career from old magazine articles, wall charts enhanced and enlarged from the background of staff photographs, and odd sources such as the proceedings of the Federation of Japanese Dentists.

In the interests of leaving better testimonials for the Tsugatas of the future, the Madhouse studio continues to preserve production details and interviews of its newest films in its own rather pricey series. The Plus Madhouse series of creator-specific books have proved to be a mixed bag. Some, such as the volume on Rintaro (Shigeyuki Hayashi), fill in vital historical and personal gaps in our knowledge of the industry. Others… don’t, and risk diluting the brand by becoming little more than puff pieces for someone’s latest film.