And you may ask yourself: “How did I get here?” Somehow I am at the Picture House Central, just off Piccadilly, for Scotland Loves Anime (London), the unwieldily titled experimental spin-off from SLA proper, that ships a bunch of this year’s films down south of the Wall.
Last night I conducted an onstage interview with Totto-chan director Shinnosuke Yakuwa about the fate of refugee Jewish musicians in wartime Japan, the colour palette for growing austerity, and his love of Charlie Chaplin — he’s off on a three-day pilgrimage to various sites from Chaplin’s life, starting with the former Trocadero restaurant off Piccadilly, where Chaplin once ate as a child, which is where we came in.
The SLA people are calling this a “soft launch”, wherein some of the elements of the Scottish festival — the films, the Audience Award, er…. me — run in London to see if there is a big enough market to make it a regular thing. So if you are at the Picture House today and enjoying yourself, be sure to tell your socials.
Explore a world from the hit anime of the same name, a world ruled by goblins, spirits, golems, and all types of strange creatures… but not humans, who were nearly persecuted to extinction for their reckless disregard of the natural world.
When a golem, a guardian of the forest chances across a young girl lost in the woods, he vows to take care of her… despite his life coming to an end. He must find other humans for her to live with, but in a world that despises them, is that even possible?
Yako Gureishi’s Somali and the Forest Spirit, translated by Motoko Tamamuro and me, and out soon from Titan Comics in manga form.
Festival director Andrew Partridge is seen here trying to run a triple-venue film event in two countries from a table in a cafe at a cinema. We’re coming to the end of the Edinburgh leg of Scotland Loves Anime, which has included a landmark event in which Japanese animation was running in all three screens of the Cameo cinema at the same time. We’ve had Naoko Yamada and Kensuke Ushio up onstage in Glasgow discussing 1980s UK electronica, and Maho Takagi from Comix Wave trying to explain why their studio’s relaxation room has a hammock and an open bar.
But there’s still another weekend to go, because Scotland Loves Anime is counter-intuitively in London from next Friday at the Picturehouse Central, just off Piccadilly, featuring a live interview with the director of Totto-chan: The Girl at the Window, me quizzing POPREQ, the impossibly young director of A Few Moments of Cheers over Skype, and all the films competing for the coveted Golden Partridge Award.
To my great surprise, three short stories that I wrote 20 years ago for the Judge Dredd Megazine have been reprinted in an anthology. I would have told you about this back in 2020, but the publishers never contacted me about it, and I only found out about it this weekend.
Which probably explains why their About the Author section was unimaginatively scraped from the internet, and concentrates on my scholarly work as a historian of the Far East, rather than, say, all the scripts I wrote for Judge Dredd.
Mr Bao has turned up in a long Mongol robe with a trilby perched incongruously on the top. He is here to talk about the intangible cultural heritage of Mongol epics, which he sings and talks through while playing a sihu.
The sihu is a fiddle-like instrument, like the erhu, with a soundbox at the base, a long shaft held perpendicularly, and four strings, played by a double-stringed bow so that two strings are sounding at any one time. Mr Bao’s performance includes a bunch of little tricks, adding vibrato by shaking the shaft rather than the strings, adding a drumbeat by clicking the edge of his bow on the soundbox while he fiddles, and flicking the strings to make them thrum. All the while he sings and yells through the story of Toqta-Temur, the last non-Muslim leader of the Golden Horde and the great-great-great grandson of Genghis Khan. Toqta spent a large part of his “reign” fighting off civil war with other Mongols and insurgencies by the peoples of Eastern Europe, which leaves plenty of time in his epic to talk about his attacks on the Russians his war with his cousin and former ally, Nogai, to whom he had once rashly given the Crimea.
Late in his reign, around 1304, he and his cousins accepted the authority of the grandson of Khubilai Khan, thereby restoring peace to the Mongol Empire that had, in fact, not been peaceful at all at any previous point. He declared war on Italian merchants in the Caucasus, and eventually married a weeping teenage bride, Maria Palaeologus, the daughter of the Byzantine Emperor. But none of us get much of the above, because Mr Bao is singing in Mongol.
Late in the day, we relocate to the Mandula music school, where a man called Mandula leads the Mandula band. It’s a proper hothouse for the musically gifted. Lessons start at half past seven each morning, with normal schooly-type stuff up to lunchtime. From one o’clock to half past eight each afternoon, the tuition is entirely musical. Mandula is something of a teddy boy, favouring a long purple coat and well-polished winkle-pickers, as well as an impressive mohican. He has something of the rock star about him, but has accreted an impressive array of students – a bunch of youths playing erhus and sihus, as well as a statuesque singing girl in a searingly white slinky dress and a Mongolian dildo hat, several drummers, a man who plays an instrument made from a string of sheep’s kneebones, and a gaggle of groupies. This last group seems to serve no actual purpose, but clutter up the practice hall, sneaking photographs of the camera crew on all occasions. I am sure that within a few weeks, framed pictures of the National Geographic crew will join those already on the wall of his students with various C-list celebrities, and/or clutching prizes for princely sums like £10.
We shoot them playing a 20-minute set that I wish I could have bought on CD, although sadly we will be unable to use the moment when Mandula got bored and decided to break into the Game of Thrones theme – music clearances.
I am really enjoying being with the Mongols. They are easy interviewees, talkative and friendly. One doesn’t feel that one is dealing with a hostile witness, but instead with someone who enjoys the attention and is keen to make a good impression. Mandula in particular, who has written a book of horse-head fiddle music and appeared several times on some sort of national show like China’s Got Talent, has got plenty to say for himself, and gamely tries to teach me how to do the droning Mongolian throat-singing called khöömi. It takes three months to learn, apparently, so there is not much hope of me getting it right in ten minutes, but there is plenty of fun footage of us growling at each other, bibbling our lips and impersonating goats.
Mandula then reveals that as well as leading a band of Mongols, he has attempted to integrate ancient and modern by combining khöömi with rapping. This seems too good to resist, and so the director asks him to give us a whirl. He throws his teddy boy coat behind him, where there is a minion poised ready to catch it, and launches into a beatboxing horror that sounds like a herd of goats falling down some stairs in an echo chamber.
The director gets us to finish by droning at each other: OOooooOOoooOOeeeh, OOowowooowowo, Errrrrrgle. I’ve had worse Wednesday nights.
Jonathan Clements is the author of A Brief History of China. These events featured in Route Awakening (S03E03), 2018.
Paavo Kannas (Tauno Palo) is an architect who is struggling to get work done at his interior design office, because of the “trouble” caused by all his beautiful female assistants. His friend Professor Thorelius (Urho Somersalmi) offers to provide him with a plain and efficient girl, but since this is Finland, has to work hard to make his student Hilkka (Brigit Konström) not look like a supermodel. Hair in a bun and a pair of spectacles produce the desired look [actually, they really don’t; she ends up looking exactly like Julia Sawalha, which works for me!], and Paavo settles in for a happy life with his new efficient underling.
Inevitably, Paavo runs into Hilkka while out on the town and she is not wearing her disguise. Not wishing to lose her job, she pretends to be Miss Pallero, a Karelian girl. Smitten with “Miss Pallero”, Paavo begins to suspect that Hilkka might be putting one over on him, and schemes to put her in a position where she has to take off her spectacles and let down her hair. Eventually, they come clean with one another about their feelings, and get married.
Wait! That’s not the end! We’re still only partway through, because now Hilkka is Mrs Kannas, getting increasingly annoyed at all the pretty young women who continue to flap around her husband. Hilkka drops in unannounced at one of Paavo’s workplaces, and believes that she sees him snogging the lady of the manor, Brita (Sirkka Sipilä). Meanwhile, it turns out that Professor Thorelius has plans on nabbing Hilkka for himself and is inviting her to meet his parents as if they are already courting.
Despite a looming divorce, Paavo and Hilkka must collaborate on a fast-track remodelling job, as the returning Finnish-American Makkonens (Aino Lohikoski and Jalmari Rinne, bellowing and code-switching like a pair of nutters) turn up making brash demands to have their Helsinki residence ready in a single day. The Makkonens reveal that they have only selected the Kannas company because it is run by a happily married couple, forcing Paavo and Hilkka to impersonate their younger, happier selves. Predictably, their feelings for each other are truly rekindled.
While I might jest about how difficult it is to find an unattractive Finnish woman, Marriage, Inc. actually began life as a Swedish play, adapted for the screen in 1941 as Så tuktas en äkta man (This is How to Discipline a Real Man). Seeing its potential, but presumably also realising that it needed to be fully localised, Suomen Filmiteollisuus’ Toivo Sarkka bought the rights, mothballed it from ever having a Finnish release, and instead commissioned his own remake, directed by Hannu Leminen and written by Turo Kartto, who drowned, aged 32, near Espoo shortly before the premiere.
Several moments in the film point to its wartime setting – Paavo mentions that the country is in “an exceptional situation”, and there are glimpses of blackout curtains, wood-fired cars and censored mail. In fact, the film was wrong-footed in production by the drafting of several of its intended crew, leading to a filming delay that required scripted scenes of winter activities to be hastily retooled for the summer. The filmmakers, however, do not seem to have been able to bring themselves to remove a dance sequence – dancing was frowned upon in wartime as an insult to the men at the front, but here seemed vital to move along the plot. The weirdest thing about it for me is the episodic structure, which feels less like a 102-minute feature and more like four TV episodes stitched together. The way that such formatting changes the narrative course makes this film seem strangely ahead of its time, aimed at the shorter attention-spans and quicker resolutions of a television audience, years before anyone in Finland even owned a television.
As also happened during the Winter War, the Finnish press seemed to have a mixed reaction to such fripperies, with some welcoming them as a light-hearted distraction in wartime, and others harrumphing at the very idea of making light of life in troubled times. Paula Talaskivi in the Helsingin Sanomat carefully negotiated these contradictory reactions, calling it flexible, witty and sure-footed, but also decrying “the illogicality, the lack of naturalism, and tasteless scenes…. Moreover, the whole story is not particularly suitable for our environment… In addition, the development of the events is so obvious that it is not very interesting.”
Birgit Konström’s acting is much broader than usual, as if she is playing to the cheap seats in a stadium rather than performing for an intimate camera. Nevertheless, Marriage, Inc. still made me laugh eight decades on, not the least for Tauno Palo’s double-take when a breathless lady customer starts thrusting her boobs under his flustered eyeballs, or the way that Konström feverishly begins rootling around in her handbag to avoid his gaze at the restaurant, and the unintelligibly bubbly Karelian accent she puts on to throw him off the scent.
The movie’s stand-out song “Shamppanjakuhertelua” (Champagne Party) notes the fact that the farce is playing out on both sides of the gender divide, pointing out that men and women can be as shallow as each other when it comes to only noticing surface appearances, and that “men can miss beauty / repelled by spectacles” a somewhat Finnish take on Dorothy Parker’s more concise turn of phrase: “Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses.”
Jonathan Clements is the author of A Short History of Finland. He is watching all the Finnish films, so you don’t have to.
When Yukino is sacrificed by his father to the all-powerful goddess Mitama, he prays that he can finally be without religion. He wakes up in a placid world free of faith and begins a new life there.
But when the truth is revealed that the ruling empire is purging and exploiting the citizens, Yukino must find his faith and summon Mitama to protect them!
Motoko Tamamuro and I translate Aoi Akashiro’s very silly religious satire Working for God in a Godless World, out soon from Titan Comics.
Rootport’s Cyberpunk Peach John is widely known in the manga world, mainly because it was the “first manga drawn by AI”. But at least in the near future, it may be edged out of official histories because nobody wants to get their hands dirty writing about it.
An editor gets in touch to say that he loves the two-page piece I’ve written about Cyberpunk Peach John, but that the comics history he is publishing will not be printing it.
The pseudonymous Rootport helpfully bulked out his debut work with an afterword about the perils of working with 2020s machine learning, supplying context and gossip about what we now called “promptives”. So there’s lots to talk about there, even in sense of being outdated before something’s even hit the shelves – Rootport was using a version of Midjourney that has already been superseded twice since he made his manga.
Cyberpunk Peach John is a fascinating proof-of-concept – a comic drawn by a machine while an irate programmer threw prompts at it in attempts to get it to keep the leading lady’s face on the right way round, and not to forget what the leading man looked like. Rootport relearned a bunch of tricks already common in the anime world, for decorating his characters with big, bold quirks and statements (pink hair, cat ears) to help hide the number of times that his characters slipped off-model.
But they weren’t his characters, were they? And they weren’t his models. A publisher seeking the rights to run images from a manga as part of a visual work (as opposed to fair comment for criticism and review) has to find someone to hand the cash to. They could, of course, pay an image fee to Rootport and his publishers, but lawyers coughed politely from the sidelines. Midjourney had based its designs on an unknown mish-mash of other peoples’ art, and the chance remained, however distant, that one of those people might pop up and say they’d been ripped off.
This is a problem that will have to be resolved sooner or later. Already, I see contract clauses in which authors and artists must indemnify their employers that no AI has been used in the generation of a copyright work. Last month, the Authors Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS) started polling its members about the possibility of a “Prompt” or “Learning” licence, which would pay a royalty to someone whose work was harvested for machine use. Until someone makes a ruling, however, at least one major publisher refuses to wade into AI image-use at all. And part of me thinks that’s a welcome stand to take.
Jonathan Clements is the author of Anime: A History. This article first appeared in NEO #243, 2024.
Awake before dawn so that the three-hour drive back to Lijiang still puts us there before breakfast, all the better to get a day out of it. But nobody knows what day to have. We need something Naxi-related and preferably fertility related, and the best Mack can rustle up is an afternoon masterclass in pictograms with Mr He, our favourite wizard. So we do some driving shots around Baisha and select a restaurant to charm so that we can use their upstairs room as a jury-rigged studio. We end up in a place that has its own micro-brewery, with predictable results.
Somewhat merrier, we set up for the wizard, who has come to teach me some of the Naxi pictograms – the world’s only living hieroglyphic script. We start with some simple ones like house, man, and family, and soon progress to more complex ones like the various words for animal or a particular kind of sacred mountain. I ask him how the Naxi handle modern inventions, and he takes a new piece of paper to show me the words for aeroplane, television and computer.
Fine, I say, you can draw an aeroplane. But what about the wizard down the road?
Oh, says Mr He, there’s a dongba council that rules on the correct way to draw new words. So we all draw them that way.
We finish up with him writing a sentence in hieroglyphics and asking me to translate it. It contains seven characters, only two of which he has taught me, so I have to wing it. The seventh is “home” and the sixth is a man on two lines, which I guess means “walk”. The second is river and the fourth looks almost exactly like the Chinese character for rice paddy, while the fifth is a man who appears to be carrying a bag.
“Crossing the river,” I say, “I harvest crops and return home.”
Not crops, he says, “corn”, but he is plainly impressed. But this is how I have been reading Chinese for twenty years. It wouldn’t be the first time I had to deduce meaning from a sentence with only two reference points.
Jonathan Clements is the author of A Brief History of China. These events featured in Route Awakening (S03E04), 2018.
The Official Schoolgirl Milky Crisis Blog 