It was not until July of this year that Jan Scott-Frazier tardily returned to her first love of illustration. Confessing that she had not really attempted a picture for fifteen long years, she set about with modern tools, an XPPen Magic Drawing Pad and Clip Studio Paint, to create “Moonlit Beach,” the first of several of what would become her latest and last works of art.
“Of the artistic ‘manual’ jobs,” she confessed in her younger days, “I guess I liked background painting the most. It allows you to be very creative and is difficult but very mellow.”
Jan, who died on Tuesday, was a surprise hiring in the anime business. She was 22 in 1987, the year that she quit working at Radio Shack and headed off for Japan, where she became rarer than hen’s teeth – a gaijin in the anime business. She studied at the International Animation Institute, somehow being put in charge of teaching classes before she graduated, and was soon working for Noboru Ishiguro’s Artland studio on such shows as Locke the Superman, Bubblegum Crash and Shurato.
“I have worked,” she told Charles McCarter at EX magazine, “as an inbetweener, key animator (briefly), animation checker, cel painter, cell checker, Ink & Paint department chief, cameraman, background artist, production assistant, production manager, production coordinator, computer/digital systems consultant, ANIMO operator, teacher for most of those subjects, director’s assistant, producer and most recently director.” In particular she seemed to find herself working below the line on the so-called “flight films” – the piece-work assembled on behalf of anime companies by subcontractors overseas.
That was how she found herself in Hangzhou, China, as news started to break of tanks rolling into Tiananmen Square. She seemed doomed to live in interesting times.
“The company I was working with decided that it would turn into a revolution and wanted to get me out of the country. I was supposed to be on a chartered flight out of Nanjing to Taiwan and we raced to get to the airport on time. When we got into the city, we had to clear some junk off the road so we could drive our pickup truck through and some soldiers way down the street opened fire on us. It sounded like hornets flying past and I got showered with debris from the wall near me and got nicked by something hot. (Cinderblock? Wood? Bullets? Still don’t know.) I thought that it was all over for a minute. It was really scary!”
In search of somewhere safer to work on the likes of Moldiver, Genocyber and SWAT Kats, Jan was packed off to Bangkok to found her own studio, TAO Corporation. TAO made use of cheaper Thai labour to assemble colouring and inbetweening for foreign clients, but adventure still seemed to find her.
Trapped in the city in the midst of democracy riots, Jan sandbagged the doors shut and spent the next three days huddled in her office, with one eye on the internet and the other on the barricades, clutching a loaded Heckler & Koch MP5K and waiting for trouble. She personally reported that she did not find it as scary as her exit from Hangzhou “except for seeing some guys that had been shot in the head when we went out for groceries one morning.”
Jan was only in the anime-anime business for a decade or so, and I suspect may have outstayed her welcome with some companies through her naturally American bluntness. She was unforgiving about tin-eared writing in anime shows, and unafraid to point it out to her bosses when she thought they were going to look stupid. She hated the lazy diversions of fan service, fumed about characters with unlikely body language, fulminated about the cavalier attitude of anime heroes to collateral damage, and reserved particular ire for writers who just recycled stereotypes.
“Getting a cold from being wet is a traditional belief about health,” she explained to Jagi Lamplighter-Wright at Manga Max, “and although such cultural shorthand is inevitable it shows a lack of conscious thought on the part of the writer. I hate stories where the best of modern science cannot cure something but the old medicine woman comes and jiggles her charms and wipes the sickness out immediately. Well, except The Exorcist….”
Famously, she once quit one production on the spot when she saw a fax from the producer that used a racist slur. She would also mount unwelcome arguments about the effects of movie violence, which many of her producers were reluctant to consder.
“If you think about it,” she argued in Manga Max, “if TV did not influence the viewers, especially the kids, why would there be advertising, and why would advertisers spend so much and fight so hard to get good spots? We’re talking about only 30 seconds that influences a kid to push his parents into buying a product. So a 30-minute show has less influence? A game where the kid is totally immersed has less effect? That doesn’t make any sense at all.”
By the middle of the 1990s, Jan had sensed the way the wind was blowing and was moving into digital work, repping Cambridge Animation System’s Animo software and teaching animators how to use it. She loved the teaching but hated the schmoozing, saying that the only thing she despised more than the grind of inbetweening was false bonhomie of pitch meetings and sales conference. In collaboration with the artist Izumi Matsumoto she worked on Comic ON, a manga publication released on CD-ROM and one of 1994’s non-game computer best-sellers in Japan.
By 1995, she had moved on again, becoming the president of the American wing of Production I.G, working on a number of games such as Grandstream Saga and Kyoushin Senki, as well as the Panzer Dragoon video. As she had with Artland, Jan helped smooth the Japanese creatives communications in the English language, working as the uncredited translator of innumerable interviews and press notes. She was, however, aghast to discover that I.G had taken her very rough first draft of the script for Blood: The Last Vampire and gone into production with it.
By the turn of the century, she was working for Celsys USA on the next generation of its RETAS production system, working as a freelance director. I had my own magazine by then, and later an editorial job at All the Anime, and in both positions, I begged her to bring over her “Beyond TV Safety” column, a biting series of articles about her life and career, showcasing the anime business warts and all. I never quite understood why she wouldn’t take the gig – I wanted to fund her to write a book, one article at a time, which would set down all her crazy stories for posterity but for some reason she never agreed.
She was always a hit at conventions, and had an ease of dealing with voice actors that often made her a bridge between the chalk-and-cheese animation/acting communities in a convention green room. She was instrumental in the founding of the Voices For charity, and as her health worsened, plunging her into a spiralling series of crises amounting to a decade of complications from kidney failure, it was the voice-acting community that most conspicuously rallied around her with crowd-funding calls and charity drives to keep her alive.
Jan always thought the world needed more heroes, railing against the surfeit of “brats and anti-heroes” in entertainment, which she regarded as the creations of cynical film-makers foisted on credulous children.
“I think that’s fine for adult shows,” she said, “but I think that it’s important to have at least some shows with heroism for children to see. Adults often forget that children are experiencing all of this for the first time and that they haven’t become jaded and bored with such stories. I see kids who were raised on a TV diet of brats and anti-heroes and they’re just not as strong as the kids of 10 years ago. They’re lazy and soft.”
Jonathan Clements is the author of Anime: A History.
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