This week began with two Oscar wins with an anime/manga connection. La Maison en Petit Cubes won the Best Animated Short, while Departures (Okuribito), won Best Foreign Film. Albeit not as widely celebrated in the fan community, the film release of Okuribito was preceded by a manga adaptation in Big Comic Superior magazine, which I covered in issue 49 of Neo last year:
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Schoolgirl Milky Crisis is published today in the United States, three mystifying days ahead of the British release date. But since the book was printed there, I don’t suppose it does any harm to let the Americans at it before the British.
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I tried to say it politely. The Japanese author had spelt two names wrong, misdated a crucial release, and assigned a famous quote to the wrong director. For no extra charge, I had footnoted those problems on the translation and sent it off.
A curt missive arrived from Big Anime Company telling me to put the mistakes back in. It turned out that the author was someone’s uncle and very high up in the company. He’d thought that “TENTACLY YUM YUM BYATCH” was the perfect tagline to use on the box for a U-rated fairy tale about a girl and a pony. And nobody was going to tell him that he was wrong.
It’s a symptom of a disease that many people don’t even know they’ve caught. I call it the Blu-ray Blues and it’s taken five years to take hold. Because, you see, now we can fit 30 languages on a single disc, it makes sense for it to be a single release, mastered in Japan. In theory, this is great news for anime. In practise, however, right now there are a dozen people in Tokyo offices saying that foreigners are stupid and don’t know how to sell anime. If anime has not lived up to the unrealistic sales predictions of its marketers, then someone must surely be to blame, and the blame traditionally falls on anyone who isn’t Japanese. If the Japanese only get to micromanage every part of the business themselves, surely international sales will suddenly go through the roof?
There are people who think they can do a whole lot better if they just run everything out of Japan. But that brings an irresistible temptation to treat the rest of the world in the same way that Japan is treated. That means much less material on each disc, and sold at a higher price. It means attempts by PR personnel to censor magazine articles. And while it might mean better control of translation, in my experience so far it has merely meant that an entire echelon of useless stuffed shirts have been able to fiddle with localisation.
These people are known as the Window Tribe. The guys passed over in promotion who are just marking time in the office. Fiddling with foreign deals is their sole pleasure, because they can do it without attracting attention on their home turf. Once, they were only able to dicker with contracts or haggle over royalties. With localisation now based in Japan, those self-same ditherers will have a new opportunity to justify their jobs, by offering their worthless opinions on translation.
There have been a lot of lay-offs in the anime business this year, and they have largely come from the gaijin middlemen – the human buffer zone between you and the Japanese corporations. They were the ones who shook your hand at conventions, and they were the ones who tried to make sure that scripts, taglines and extras were not… well, laughably inappropriate. And they were the first up against the wall when the Blu-ray revolution came.
I hope this all works out, really I do. Because there is a very real risk that the centralisation of the anime business back in Japan will actually hurt it far more than it helps.
Jonathan Clements is the author of Schoolgirl Milky Crisis: Adventures in the Anime and Manga Trade. This article first appeared in NEO magazine #51, 2008.
In the year that Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai was scooping up accolades in the English-speaking world, it was passed over in Japanese awards lists in favour of another film. It was Keisuke Kinoshita’s unapologetically sentimental 24 Eyes that walked away with the Kinema Junpo award for Best Film of 1954 – a decision that endures today as a yardstick of the difference between foreign critics and the interests of the average Japanese moviegoer.
This article first appeared in Newtype USA magazine in July 2007.
This article first appeared in NEO magazine #16, 2006.
This article originally appeared in Newtype USA magazine in August 2003. I have always felt a trifle guilty for not previously acknowledging Carl Gustav Horn, from whom I’m pretty sure I stole the “T-shirt” comment.
The Big Name Toy Company designed everything from the ground up, creating toys and cartoons in tandem. They had me working on six concepts for a TV series, that would be whittled down to three, then two, then one single idea that would be taken to the central office. There, it would compete with ideas from six other offices around the world, until the company put maybe a billion dollars factory time, animation, and advertising behind a single winning concept. They planned four years ahead. The toys in your stores this Christmas? They were decided in 2002.
I got to see The Book, a giant tome of psychology reports some six inches thick, containing what amounted to racial profiling of children around the world. Children in South America were more likely to play outside, German kids liked mechanical things earlier, and so on. When I turned to the Japanese section, two words jumped out at me: “Solitary Play”.
I started hearing a strange little tango song in my head, a Japanese novelty hit from 1999 about three dumplings on a stick. It began as a joke by commercial director Masahiko Sato, but for some reason it took off. Kids liked the catchy tune, but the main audience for it was the parents. The single sold more than three million copies in Japan, and before long, an anime followed. It, too, was only little — three-minute inserts as part of the series Watch With Mother. But The Dumpling Brothers anime ran for five years, only coming to an end in 2004. Let’s put that in perspective — an anime for the fan audience is considered a roaring success if it lasts for five months.
The Dumpling Brothers caught the mood of the time. Japan doesn’t have a draconian one-child policy, but sometimes capitalism can exercise its own constraints. Single offspring are increasingly common, and that severely limits family dynamics. After two generations of belt-tightening and downsizing, fewer Japanese children have brothers or sisters. Moreover, they are increasingly less likely to have any uncles, aunts or cousins. Much of the interest in The Dumpling Brothers seemed born of parental nostalgia, looking back to when they had siblings to play with, and with a sense of regret that their own children would never have the same experience.
The same period saw I Love Bubu Chacha, an anime series about a boy who discovers that dead pets and circus animals have been reincarnated as his toys. The only ‘human’ friend he has is a neighborhood girl who pretends to be his sister, although she is actually a ghost. The viewers who watched these shows as children are now old enough to buy Angel Tales.
Some modern anime seem made specifically for viewers that are not part of any community; solitary shut-ins with few if any friends. But anime toys have always been ready to fill the breach, and to exert pester-power on a workaday dad returning home to his nuclear family, and searching for a way to buy his kid’s affections. You hear it several times a day in anime for children.
“My father gave me a robot. My father gave me a robot. My father gave me a robot.”
Jonathan Clements is the author of Schoolgirl Milky Crisis: Adventures in the Anime and Manga Trade. This article first appeared in Newtype USA in 2006.
This article first appeared in Newtype USA in October 2007.
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