My review of Keiichi Hara’s Colorful is now up on the Manga UK blog. It’s one of the most thoughtful and mature anime movies of recent years, and well worth a look if you are in any of the towns being visited by this year’s Japan Foundation tour.
Jeremy Graves is joined by Jerome Mazandarani, Andrew Hewson and Jonathan Clements for a run-down of what’s coming up and what’s going on, available to download now. Contains the phrases: “engine of Japanese oppression,” “invaded by bots,” “secret file from the chamber of balrogs” and “where do you think all the cocaine’s been hidden?”
00:00 The song that ruined Christmas.
01:30 Introductions all round, which turn out to be largely wrong.
03:50 Jerome paints a Yuletide picture, using only words.
04:20 Bad marketing ideas from Gatwick Express.
05:00 Round-up of the December releases. Jude Law, not appearing in anime near you any time, ever.
07:00 Confessions of slippage. Rounding off the year with Wolf Children. Check out the unboxing video.
09:00 The traditional Andrew Partridge baiting session, and tales of his odd fetish for ice cream. Other odd things you can buy in a Japanese convenience stores. The world’s greatest segue, ruined by everyone else.
11.00 Evangelion 3.0, coming in March. Controversy arising over The Wind Rises, Miyazaki’s best- and worst-reviewed film ever. Chinese reactions to Studio Ghibli, as demonstrated in Lifeweek magazine.
17:30 Looking back on 2013 – highlights including moustaches, conventions and stuff. The prospects for Attack on Titan, convention disasters, and the high road to Scotland.
29:00 “A Buddhist purple cat that never does anything and then dies.” Comments on judging films, with time out to discuss coalition politics and the Evening Standard awards.
34:45 The Kuroko basketball threats, and other scams and scandals arising in the Japanese media.
36:00 The perils of licensing sports anime. Hidden synergies in Summer Wars.
39:00 The nature of female fandom, and its long-overlooked presence in the history of anime (as noted by Paul Dini).
42:00 The Hell of Heidi: “We’ve created perfection, you morons!”
44:00 Jerome takes on Ofcom, and explains where all the pornography is hidden.
46:50 Godzilla, and re-enacting it in your living room.
49:20 Ask Manga UK. What pre-2000 anime do you think deserves an HD redo?
50:50 Giving credit where credit is due. Steve Kyte unmentioned on Firestorm, and Spike Lee’s response to an offended artist on Oldboy.
57:00 Which releases have surprised you in terms of 2013 sales?
59:00 Possible title issues with Tiger and Bunny.
59:30 Watching Manga UK releases on iTunes.
61:45 What effect will disintermediation have on your business model? Predictions for anime becoming a closed circle of consumption, less visible to the public.
67:50 The possibility of Jormungand appealing to al Qaeda.
70:00 Jerome explains content-driven marketing.
72:00 The legal tangle of the Macross licence.
75:00 Has there been an increase in Blu-ray sales this year? It is now cheaper to release stuff on Blu-ray than DVD! Who would have thought it?
78:30 The chances of a Manga UK modelling agency.
80:30 What’s coming up on Blu-ray in 2014.
81:30 Why can’t we have Celtic Frost back?
84:00 It’s the final QUEST-ion! Doodle-doo-doo… A few other surprises coming in 2014.
88:20 Anime: A History, and the trouble you might have getting one signed. Andrew thinks you should all see Nebraska. And Jerome confesses his love for Perfect Blue. And Saint Seiya: Brave Soldiers.
91:00 And with that, we’re out. Bye for this year.
The Podcast is available to download now HERE, or find it and an archive of previous shows at our iTunes page. For a detailed contents listing of previous podcasts, check out our Podcasts page.
Just in time for the season to be jolly, my novel Spartacus: Swords and Ashes is now available in Turkish.
One of the pleasures of long-haul flights is getting to mainline a bunch of movies that you wouldn’t otherwise stand a whelk’s chance of watching. Which is how, somewhere two miles above Novosibirsk, I found myself watching The Treasure of Lake Kaban, a completely bonkers movie set in Tatarstan.
The poster says it all, from the Lara Croft rip-off and the aspirant Bond, all the way to the irritating little dog. Ivan the Terrible scowls at the left – it is he, in flashback, who attacks Tatarstan’s capital, Kazan, causing the beautiful princess Soyembika to bury her greatest treasure in a secret location. Meanwhile, over on the right is an “American” carpet-bagger called, wait for it, Diana Jones.
The tagline shrugs: “Nyet vremeni obyasnyat” (There’s no time to explain). And apparently there isn’t, as a frustrated army doctor-turned-archaeologist, a nutjob who thinks he’s an alien, and a Russian navy conscript trying to find enough cash to buy out his commission, all converge on the small republic, where local colour amounts to a whole bunch of relics of Russian’s Mongol marchland – dances, cossacks, daggers, and most memorably in the gene pool, if the smouldering Elvira Ibragimova (that’s her in the shorts) is anything to go by.
The script, by Georgiy Kirvalidze and Dimitriy Terekhov, is based on ideas by three others – although there is such antic chaos in the movie that one might be forgiven that three completely different films were being made at once. There are allusions to many tourist sites in Kazan, and local legends such as the Zilat, the region’s own variant of the Loch Ness monster.
Played straight, there would have been plenty of majesty and scenery here to out-Dan Brown Dan Brown. But The Treasure of Lake Kaban plumps for madcap “comedy”, all pratfalls and kicks in the goolies, as wannabe rock star Kiril (Alex Sparrow, who is apparently something big in Russian X Factor) gurns and mugs his way around a series of monuments and sewers, trying and largely failing not to stare down the cavernous cleavages of his co-stars and nemesis. The result plays as if the Chuckle Brothers have been put in charge of the Da Vinci Code, with all that that implies.
Jonathan Clements is the author of An Armchair Traveller’s History of the Silk Road, which doesn’t have any monsters in it, but does have more belly dancing.
For readers in the UK, I shall be on Channel Four on Sunday 8th December at 8pm, as a talking head on New Secrets of the Terracotta Warriors. Lots of metallurgy fun, and possibly even the entertaining sight of me interviewing the man who discovered them — I don’t know, I haven’t seen it yet myself.
We had been hoping to get a reprint of my First Emperor of China book out in time for it, but that won’t be until 2014. But you can apparently pick up the original edition for a penny behind the link, so knock yourselves out. Photo courtesy of Two Chiefs.
You should definitely buy books as Christmas presents. In an age of Kindle binges, actual paper books are becoming unique luxuries.Which books, you say? Well, these, for starters:
Anime: A History — Out on the 6th so just in time for Christmas (in the UK… I doubt it will reach American readers in time), the British Film Institute’s landmark history of a century of animation in Japan, from the first appearances of foreign cartoons in Tokyo cinemas, through early innovators, wartime propaganda and the rise of TV “anime”, the video boom, the wave of foreign interest and Miyazaki’s Oscar, all the way to the shut-down of the analogue broadcast signal in 2012.
Modern China: All That Matters — China as the Chinese see it, a history of the People’s Republic since 1949 with special emphasis on the most crucial points and issues of the Mao years, the Deng years, the Hong Kong Handover, territorial and cultural issues, right up to the inauguration of Xi Jinping.
The Art of War — for the truly dangerous sister-in-law, the mad granny or the eccentric uncle who spends the whole dinner using peanuts in an attempt to explain how the Battle of Talas went, Sun Tzu’s original classic of military advice, newly translated in a no-nonsense, waffle-free edition.
Mannerheim — Now available in paperback, the unbelievable tale of the “last knight”, the Tsarist cavalry officer who fought against the Japanese in Manchuria, spent two years pretending to be a Swedish anthropologist while spying on the Chinese, and ended his career accidentally becoming the president of Finland. Battles, derring-do and malicious puppet shows.
Schoolgirl Milky Crisis — for the anime fan who thinks he or she know
s it all, a broad sweep of the anime, manga and Asian media worlds, including libellous accusations, misguided confessions, and things a whole bunch of people never wish they’d said within earshot. Why do anime studios hang onto a glove full of rancid custard? Is it possible to write a subtitle script without using the letter “Y”? These questions and more, in the book that this blog is the blog of. Oh yes.
Other books are available: about samurai, vikings, the life of a great scientist, emperors and empresses, and even touchy feely poems that don’t rhyme.
I’ve never met Mark Kermode, but often used to seen him at press screenings, his fifties-throwback quiff circling the pre-film drinks like a shark’s fin. And I’ve often read or watched him, of course, hectoring his co-host about the awfulness or lack thereof of some film or other, or babbling on immediately leaving a cinema, as a sort of experiment to see how his later, considered opinion measures up to his improvised first impressions. And my mum refers to him as That Lovely Mark Kermode, primarily because of something he once said comparing Casablanca and Silent Running.
Hatchet Job, Kermode’s latest book, is not a book of film reviews, but about film reviewing, charting the many odd situations and pressures on the professional critic. Anime only gets a passing mention, but readers of this blog will nevertheless be fascinated by the many practices of the modern movie world, all of which affect Japanese cartoons just as much as Hollywood blockbusters. What actually happens at a movie screening? Who gets to go, and why? Why do some films not get press-screened at all? What kind of difference do critics make? And in a world where so much is given away free, how much is a film review worth?
The book’s greatest achievement is the way it smuggles in an immense amount of posh, post-modern critical theory, without a single buzz-word, name-drop or citation. Like the best of Empire, Kermode puts a populist, accessible front on concepts that lesser authors turn into psychobabble. He mounts an argument for movie reviewing as a conversation, an ever-changing discourse about the film we’ve seen, wondering if it’s ever possible to even have a concrete opinion on a film when we keep changing as viewers. And so, indeed, does the film – Kermode lifts the lid on the infamous two versions of Fatal Attraction, where Japanese audiences got the original Madama Butterfly-inspired ending, whereas the rest of us had to contend with the KILL THE BITCH version cooked up to appease slack-jawed American test audiences. He recounts horror stories of critics who have had to change their minds, and debates the dubious value of being “first” with a review that one later regrets. In a world that so often focuses on production (making-ofs, staff interviews) or reception (what some people think of a film they have seen), he deftly and wittily discusses the often neglected areas of distribution and exhibition – such as how marketing can affect a movie’s performance, or what differences can accrue in a particular cinema on a particular day.
Hatchet Job is an account of two cultures. One is the movie-nerd discourse of “what we talk about when we talk about films”, in which Kermode covers not only the power of reviewers to bring people into cinemas, but also the silent sector of people who wait until after they have seen a film to read the reviews, in order to enter into a virtual “conversation” with a critic – for this very reason, I have been a subscriber not-reading the most recent Sight & Sound for the last 26 years. The other culture is that of movie-reviewers themselves, offering a rare insight into the traditions and protocols, the rituals and behaviours of breeds such as the lesser-spotted Kim Newman and the now-extinct Roger Ebert. This includes, although Kermode is too cunning to scare people off by using the word, a historiography of film writing, in which he charts the way that critics have redefined and reconceived their own role in the process of bringing a film to a viewer. His willingness to focus on the mechanics behind the scenes of distribution also leads to an intricate critique of the algorithms that decide which Amazon review you will see, and the underhand “vote-washing” undertaken by semi-pro critics who stand to be paid in freebies and sub-cultural capital if their reviews get lots of Likes. This is particularly interesting to Kermode (and to anyone who thinks about film) because of its implications as a “fake” conversation, as robots pretend to like the comments of other robots, while movie adverts quote enthusiastic reviews by sock-puppets.
Ever since Joe Queenan’s unforgettable stunt of Being Mickey Rourke For a Day, in which he only said or did things that he had seen Rourke do in films, modern film critics have often pepped things up with little comedy business, and Kermode is no exception. He includes the full text of his Twitter review of Prometheus, which, in a vain attempt to protect fanboys from spoilers, he wrote entirely in mathematical notation. He speculates about the prospects of hiring Rutger Hauer, in his role as the replicant Roy Batty from Blade Runner, to voice the late-train announcements for the 2:35 from Weymouth. And he offers an account of his short-lived brainwave, inspired by Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged in The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, to insult everyone whose film he hates, to their faces. He is winningly frank about the things he has learned from his own mistakes – the throwaway dismissal of a film that got him briefly blacklisted and; the absurd spy-movie acrobatics required to see Nixon early, which involves a trip on Eurostar and an argument in Franglais with a Gauloise-chuffing ticket gendarme, all so he can “watch a Welshman pretending to be an American, in English, with French subtitles.”
In addition to smuggling in elucidating jargon-free accounts of memory and commemoration, temporality, discursive genealogy and auteurism, Kermode alludes to the simple pleasure of movie-going, both as an excited participant in packed movie event, and as a lone explorer at a daytime matinee. I, too, have sat in the Odeon Leicester Square with a variety of audiences that have transformed my viewing experience, and not always for the better – the pair of eccentric millionaires (I can only assume they were eccentric millionaires) who paid £20 for a ticket and then talked all the way through Vantage Point. The two Polish prostitutes who decided the best way to get out of the rain was to sit through Apocalypto offering me sinful companionship. And Danny Boyle, director of Trainspotting who was in the same cinema as me watching Inglourious Basterds. I was immensely impressed to see that the would-be-Sir-if-he-hadn’t-said-no national treasure was not above avoiding the freebie screenings that come with BAFTA membership, and instead paying with his own money to see the new Tarantino with the rest of us.
No, I didn’t pester him with an actual conversation, either, but I did eavesdrop on his concise review, imparted to his companion as we left.
“Tee-hee-hee,” he chuckled. “Nazis!”
This review originally appeared on the Manga UK blog in October 2013, and is reshared here after the website was shut down in 2021 by its new owners at Funimation.
Anime Sols, established with the cooperation of a whole gaggle of anime studios, exploits all the best benefits of living in a digital age. A limited number of episodes of each anime show get streamed, for free, online with English subtitles. If you like what you see, you get to bid for a series of crowd-funding packages. Fully aware that these anime shows are of limited interest to a worldwide audience, Anime Sols sets its bar for success healthily low, with each serial’s block of episodes going to DVD as soon as they have a mere 1000 orders – this, in turn, exploits mastering houses’ new willingness to turn around small print-runs cheaply.
What could possibly go wrong? Well, as regular readers of this column will already know, it’s not necessarily that easy to get 1000 anime fans to put their money where their mouth is. As head honcho Sam Pinansky reported last month, Yatterman not only failed to get 1000 backers before its deadline on Anime Sols, but proved to be so unappealing that barely 40 people even watched it past the fourth episode!
Fandom was awash with recriminations – if only they’d picked a different show; if only fans could have bid from certain foreign territories (the UK, for example was excluded). But maybe people just weren’t that into Yatterman. Case closed. The project was cancelled, and the rights holders of Yatterman got a tiny reward – the chance to re-use those subtitles on a future Japan-only DVD release.
But Anime Sols is run by smart people, who were plainly disappointed but not undaunted. And I’d like to encourage everyone to regard Yatterman not as a failure, but as valuable data about anime’s appeal, or lack of it. It’s good, for the industry in general, for the Japanese to be confronted with how few people actually give a toss about some of their more obscure shows. And it’s good for fandom to be confronted with a put-up-or-shut-up ultimatum about making stuff happen. A few weeks later, Anime Sols offered Creamy Mami in the same way, and achieved its funding target with four days to spare.
Jonathan Clements is the author of Schoolgirl Milky Crisis: Adventures in the Anime and Manga Trade. This article first appeared in NEO #115, 2013.
Amazon is now listing my new book, Anime: A History, for sale in a few weeks in the US and in the UK. The contents and blurb are as follows:
Introduction: What Do We Talk About When We Talk About Anime?
1. Kid Deko’s New Picture Book: Early Cartoons in Japan 1912-21
2. The Film Factories: Animation Technique and Technology 1921-37
3. The Shadow Staff: Japanese Animation at War 1931-48
4. The Seeds of Anime: Japanese Animation Industries 1946-62
5. Dreams of Export: Toei Doga and MOM Production 1953-67
6. Warrior Business: Tezuka’s Anime Revolution in Context 1961-67
7. The Brown Screen: Trended Change in Japanese Animation 1966-83
8. The Third Medium: The Transformation of Ownership and Access 1977-96
9. The Pokemon Shock: Anime Goes Global 1984-97, 1997-2006
10. The Digital Engine: New Technologies and Animation 1983-2012
Epilogue: The End of Anime’s First Century
“Japanese animation is at the nexus of an international multimedia industry worth over $6.5 billion a year, linked to everything from manga to computer games, Pokémon and plushies. In this comprehensive guide, Jonathan Clements chronicles the production and reception history of the entire medium, from a handful of hobbyists in the 1910s to the Oscar-winning Spirited Away and beyond.
“Exploring the cultural and technological developments of the past century, Clements addresses issues of historiography within Japanese academic discourse and covers previously neglected topics such as wartime instructional animation and work-for-hire for American clients. Founded on the testimonies of industry professionals, and drawing on a myriad of Japanese-language documents, memoirs and books, Anime: A History illuminates the anime business from the inside – investigating its innovators, its unsung heroes and its controversies.”
I should also probably warn you that the BFI are only printing 1200 copies, so if you want to be sure to get hold of it, I advise you to pre-order. If it sells out on the day of release, it might be months before a second printing.
Yes, that appears to be a manga-style Mel Gibson, riding a giant mutant haggis. This Know Your Manga image is from last year, but it’s too good to waste.
The Official Schoolgirl Milky Crisis Blog 