“A pair of sloths are comparing handbags; a raccoon is trying perfume; a pig is buying lipstick; a lion is thinking about getting some aftershave. On Akino’s first day at work, she is rebuffed by a rabbit who doesn’t want her help, and then accidentally steps on a duck. We’ve all been there.”
Over at All the Anime, I discuss Yoshimi Itazu’s The Concierge at Hokkyoku Department Store, which has its UK premiere at Scotland Loves Anime in November.
The Chinese director seems oddly solicitous with me today. I think he has worked out that although I appear to be lurking, silently like an idiot, at the edge of all negotiations, when my time comes, I am ready to go. It makes a huge difference to him, when his crew take two hours to set up a shot, that I can get it done in five minutes.
We end the day down on the rocky coast at Qingdao, catching the sunset behind the old colonial buildings from the days of the German concession, and across the shining buildings of the modern city. The film-makers are somewhat demob-happy after thirteen hours at work (in fact, the day starts at 0530 and I do not get to type this in a hotel until 2345), and we giggle at the sight of the sound crew trying to lug their hostess trolley across three hundred yards of boulders.
Jiuqing the producer dips her hands into a rock pool and shows me what she has caught.
“I have a shrimp,” she says, before carefully returning the small creature to its home.
The A-crew and the B-crew both have their respective cameras pointed in different directions. The C-crew with the drone lurk in the van, secure in the knowledge that it is too windy for them to fly their machine, particularly after its sojourn in a temple tree-top for two hours.
Our American producer, Mitch, is very impressed with Jiuqing, a lithe girl whose job as assistant director extends to keeping everybody on schedule, fixing and refixing our hotels and breakfasts and routes to location, and chivvying everybody along. During the long drive to the Qingdao beach, when he isn’t trying to teach Ruby the Interpreter how to sing Goodbye Ruby Tuesday, he discusses with Jiuqing the various options for the days ahead, and tells me that he suspects she will be managing a film company sooner rather than later. He is particularly impressed when he asks a question about a particular location, and she has a picture of the beach there in live time, within minutes.
“We have a D-crew,” she confesses. “They’re the clean-up men. They tail behind or go up ahead and snatch the sunsets and time-lapses we don’t have time for, or the magic-hour dawn material we can’t get to. They’re the ghost crew. We’re not supposed to admit they exist, but they are shooting everything we only remember to do after we’ve got back on the bus.”
And so we perch on the rocks in the wind as the sun sets over Qingdao. Someone has the bright idea of positioning a couple of marine items in the foreground on the rocks, as the sun sets behind them, and Jiuqing dashes off excitedly, returning with her hands gently cupped over two critters.
“I HAVE CRABS!” she shouts to the world.
Jonathan Clements is the author of A Brief History of China. These events occurred during the filming of Shandong: Land of Confucius (2018).
Spirits and magic are everywhere in the streets of Edinburgh – if only you dare to see it! Dive into this heartfelt manga about a witch and her apprentice as they try to find their place in a world that hates their very existence.
The last in a long line of Witches of the Black Wood, Marie Blackwood lives a quiet life in Edinburgh – away from the scrutiny of the Church. But when the Church thrusts 13-year-old Theo into her hands for safekeeping, Marie suddenly gains the responsibility not just of taking care of a teenager – but protecting the world, and Theo himself, from the amazing power that lives inside of him.
Out now from Titan Manga, John Tarachine’s Witch of Thistle Castle, with an English script translated by Motoko Tamamuro and me. Over at All the Anime, a Scottish-based blog, there’s already much love for it’s magical Edinburgh. Although not for the landscape-format front cover to the first volume, which even I find annoying.
On his way to the engineers’ club masquerade ball, Volmari (Leo Lahteenmäki) wanders into a deserted museum and is locked inside. Spooking the janitor, he escapes into the street wearing a suit of armour, where he is arrested by the police, who think he is Armand (Lauri Kyöstilä), a trumpet player from the circus, who is out on a drunken binge while also inexplicably wearing a suit of armour.
Purportedly “high” jinks ensue, as a man in a suit of armour who may or may not be Volmari, cavorts on the dancefloor with Volmari’s would-be girlfriend Raili (Laila Rihte), only to be fondled by Bertha (Siiri Angerkoski), the circus’s singer, who wants “Armand” for herself. The armour turns into the film’s McGuffin, with Armand brow-beaten into handing his own suit “back” to the museum, while Volmari has to buy his own suit back to sneak it back into the museum, only to freak out when he finds Armand’s suit has already been “returned” in its place.
This blog has noted before how unfunny the “comedies” of Agapetus can be, and it seems that the Finns were finally bold enough to mention this themselves. Leading man Lahteenmäki himself would later describe it as a childish “emergency” project designed to fill cinemas in wartime, and Toini Aaltonen in Suomen Sosiaaldemokraati archly praised Suomen Filmiteollisuus for “adding to the number of bad Finnish films.” Olavi Vesterdahl in Aamulehti warned that Finnish cinema might be approaching an unsustainable tipping point of disappointed audiences, and that Tottinen Torvensoittaja was so bad it was almost impossible to review, “a pointless, aimless meander, with a hard-to-see plot and almost nothing worth watching.” The press reserved particular ire for the closing dream sequence, which numerous journalists familiar with the original 1933 novel correctly identified as nothing but filler designed to bulk out a script that had jettisoned an earlier part of the story – a boat trip that was presumably discarded due to the likely expense.
When shown on Finnish television in 1992, Antti Lindkvist in Katso magazine derided it as “a completely thoughtless car-crash that belongs among the weakest products of Finnish cinema.” Yes, Antti, but did you like it?
Remarkably, none of the reviewers seem to have mentioned the thing that renders this film truly toxic to modern audiences. The use of the term “black” (mustalainen) to mean “gipsy” in Finnish also rather obscures what I suspect to be the real reason for the absence of this film from the online Elonet repository – Siiri Angerkoski is not playing a gipsy, but a negro singer in outrageous blackface make-up, which might have been all right in Finland in 1941, but cause for torches and pitchforks outside the cinema today.
This is the last Finnish film to bear the name of Kaarlo Kartio in the credits; he was supposed to play Armand, but died before filming could commence, although presumably the credits were already printed and nobody could be bothered to change them.
Jonathan Clements is the author of A Short History of Finland. He is watching all the Finnish films, so you don’t have to.
In case you’re wondering, it never gets old. It’s been thirty years since I opened the package containing my first book, and it’s just as exciting to open a package containing my umpteenth. Anime: A History is particularly dear to me because it was built around my doctorate, and represents the culmination of probably thirty years in and around the anime industry.
At 430+ pages, the 2023 edition is twice the size of its predecessor.
I fretted that everyone asked if they would prefer it to be in full-colour throughout just nodded and said that sounded nice, instead of considering what that would do to the price. But Bloomsbury assured me that they would keep the cover price down, and indeed they did.
Here and there in the earlier chapters, there are little shunts and upgrades, such as the saga of Chappy the Space Squirrel, the Nagasaki Flag Incident, and Justin Sevakis on the horrors of digipaint.
And then there are three new chapters, focussing on new developments in the anime industry.
Keidanren, the Japanese business association, is muscling in on the manga business, with an enthusiastic report suggesting that manga should become a cornerstone of Japanese economic policy, and that Japan should aim to quadruple its manga exports within ten years.
Pundit and scholar Roland Kelts has already pointed out that this could be less of a case of the Japanese waking up to manga (to which they are already awake), but of a generation of public officials who have grown up in the 1990s, and hence lack any of their predecessors’ qualms about pop culture – long-term readers all of Slam Dunk and Demon Slayer.
Bolstered by… something, manga sales in the US have gone up 171% in the last year, quite possibly as a result of the ease of access offered by online sales, and an increased acceptance of e-books after a two-year pandemic. A cynic might suggest that the US comics market was less manga’s to win than it was DC’s and Marvel’s to lose, and that manga are flourishing in an environment short on much interesting competition, irrelevant to many Zennials.
I am more sceptical about the nature of this four-fold expansion, which has all the bold, nation-building gumption of one of Chairman Mao’s grand national projects. It’s true enough that there are a few areas of the world that have yet to be saturated with manga and anime, and there might be a little bit of a push there. But it’s also true that, as reported in this column (NEO #215), the translation business is almost at breaking point. Streamers are snatching so many translators, and squeezing so tightly on margins, that there already aren’t enough to go around. And funnily enough, a lot of people don’t like to put in the hours on a four-year degree just to earn McDonald’s money.
So, who’s going to do it? One could suggest that a bunch of this expansion will have to creatively frack away at what’s already been done, such as, for example, using the English language as a “pivot” and translating the English version of the Doraemon manga into Swahili or Polish. Or you could look at the ominous website of Mantra, a Japanese start-up offering machine-translated manga services using artificial intelligence.
And yes, we are back to another of our age’s recurring topics – the rise of AI, which we’ve already seen poking at the jobs of animators (NEO #227) and voice actors (NEO #229). Translators, too…? You’d better hope that readers are safe from digital competition…
Jonathan Clements is the author of Anime: A History. This article first appeared in NEO #231, 2023.
Everybody on the crew has a job that is as tough as mine, in their own little field, and everybody just gets on with doing it, from Little Fish, the whippet-thin soundman with his little hostess trolley of nobs and dials, to Boomer, who balances his fluffy boom mike on his head, to our angry driver Hooty, who is only happy when honking at any car in the vicinity. We’re still not sure what some of the crew do. The man who took my bag at Jinan station was called Li Tao, but I haven’t seen him since, so I assume he is part of the Ghost Crew. And there is an elegant lady we call Purple, because of her punky hair rinse, whose name tag reveals her job title as GL8. It turns out that she is the driver for the advance team, part of our crew who arrive in every location an hour ahead of any general call-up time, ready to smooth feathers and buy sandwiches.
We all have lanyards bearing a bright yellow laminated card, giving our names and positions. I always keep mine on when we reach a new location, because the security guards have often been told to wave through anyone displaying such credentials, and it saves me being mistaken for an American tourist.
Today we suddenly gained a new Drone Team, the former Drone Team having been fired for crashing their drone into a tree. We catch the ferry across the water to Changdao, Long Island, the first of the island chain that the modern Chinese tourist board has sneakily rebranded as the Isles of the Immortals. They are not the Isles of the Immortals; nobody knows where the Isles of the Immortals actually were, but now everybody with Google Maps thinks I am an idiot when I say this, because clearly they are here, near the Immortals Theme Park, and somewhere on the Immortals Island Cruise.
The ferry takes half an hour, most of which is the three-point turn required to get it out of the harbour. Honestly, I’ve taken longer in the past getting across the QE2 bridge. On the Changdao shoreline, we rustle up a fisherman, Mr Lin, who will poke around some clam pots or something. I don’t know because I am surplus to requirements, and I know the last thing that the director needs is a spare body in the fishing boat getting in the way.
The next crew member to disappear is Hooty, who walks straight into the sharp edge of a restaurant sign at lunch. The director comes out of the toilet to find the room in chaos and blood spattered across the floor, and lets out a long sigh.
We clamber into three souped-up speedboats for the short, nerve-wracking hop to Shrine Island, home to a temple to Mazu the Goddess of the Sea. It is a dilapidated disappointment, literally signposted as a “third-rate cultural monument”, and lacking the Goddess of the Sea gift shop where I had hoped to spend a bunch of the money still in my wallet.
For a day that began at 0530, I don’t stand on my mark before 1600, when the tired crew finally get around to pointing the cameras at me to ask a couple of questions of Mr Lin the fisherman, like why do you pray to Mazu? I also deliver my 20-second speech about the historical origins of the Goddess of the Sea, which goes like this:
“The legend says that she was a fisherman’s daughter, Lin Moniang, the Silent Girl. The villagers believed that she could heal the sick, see the future and even make it rain, but she seems to have thought her main duty was to protect her brothers’ fishing boats. She would put on a bright red dress, carry a lantern and stand on the clifftops like a human lighthouse, guiding them home at night. One evening, one of the boats didn’t return, and she thought it was her fault. She was last seen wading, weeping into the sea… and then the boat returned, although she never did. Since that day, Chinese sailors and fisherman have prayed to Mazu for protection.”
We’re supposed to record my speech for the end of the show here as well, except we are losing the light, and the speedboat captains want to get home for dinner. So that’s now been bumped to another day, and since we have missed the last ferry back to the mainland tonight, I am typing this to you in a third-rate Chinese hotel room, where the staff complain all the way up the stairs about how heavy our luggage is, even though they’re the ones who have a hotel with no elevator.
0630 call tomorrow, and I am in bed at nine. Such luxury.
Jonathan Clements is the author of A Brief History of China. These events occurred during the filming of Shandong: Land of Confucius (2018).
“I remember cryptic asides at the occasional Manga Entertainment pub lunch, about ‘that guy with the money in the brown paper envelopes,’ an unnamed figure who somehow diddled Terasawa and several investors out of a fortune. Terasawa himself was crushed and dejected by the experience, having spent six months labouring over storyboards, and now with nothing to show for it.”
Over at All the Anime, I write an obituary for the manga artist Buichi Terasawa.
“One day, in the future, you or your cyborg descendant is going to walk into your home after a hard day doing space things and say: ‘I want to see The Seven Samurai, but I want them all to be badgers working for Nicole Kidman.’ And Siri will ask you: ‘Do you want to press the anime filter?'”
Over at the Anime News Network, Andrew Osmond interviews me about the last ten years in anime history.
“I have counted through the images in this sequence, and there are no more than 50 of them. If you were running them through a camera as limited animation, in the style of Astro Boy, then they would take about six seconds, but here they have been judiciously stretched over almost a minute. And these are not cheap little sketches, they are beautifully detailed drawings, and the subject matter is exploding worlds, to the extent that they’re almost saying the human eye can’t really comprehend this, so we are going crude.”
Over at All the Anime, I write about just some of the Easter eggs in the final episode of Gunbuster.
The Official Schoolgirl Milky Crisis Blog 