Kiyoshi Kobayashi, who died of pneumonia [in July], hated the term “voice actor.” He found it to be belittling and reductive, and insisted on describing himself on documentation and contracts as a plain actor. Despite this, a huge amount of his work was narration or dubbing, and he actively shunned the limelight, claiming that it was detrimental to his performances if people formed an image in their minds of the man who played them.
He started off in theatre, drifting into radio and television in the 1950s after he was approached to perform in an adaptation of The Caine Mutiny. A key player in the Izumiza theatre company, he devoted himself to television when the company folded in 1971.
His early roles included parts in Star of the Giants and Yokai Ningen Bem in the 1960s, but his true heyday was in the 1970s, when he began playing the sharpshooter Daisuke Jigen in the Lupin III series.
“I didn’t think it would become such a popular work,” he once said of Lupin III. “I thought at the start it would be just another job. But I was soon saying, I want to do this as much as possible.”
In fact, he would keep doing it for the rest of his life, remaining in the role of Daisuke Jigen throughout the TV series, films and TV specials. In 2011, when the decision was made to retire the original cast in favour of new blood, Kobayashi expected to be given his marching orders, but was kept on, being told that they couldn’t find anyone to replace him. He did not actually retire as Jigen until 2021, after over fifty years of service.
Jigen, of course, was not his only role. He appeared in many other anime, including stand-out performances in Space Adventure Cobra (Crystal Bowie), Death Note (Watari), and the Japanese dub of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (Splinter). But his true metier was live-action dubbing, in which he became the go-to guy for voicing Japanese versions of Lee Marvin and James Coburn and even, after the death of his Lupin co-star Yasuo Yamada, Clint Eastwood. If producers needed someone whose voice could send a shiver down the audience’s spine, be it Ming the Merciless in Flash Gordon, or Edward Teague (Keith Richards) in Pirates of the Caribbean, they made sure to make Kobayashi their first call.
When asked what his secret was with Jigen, he once confessed that it was the only role he ever played where he had never bothered to “act” at all. In everyday life, he said, “If I speak, it’s Jigen.”
Jonathan Clements is the author of Anime: A History. This article first appeared in NEO #223, 2022.
“Unlike the protagonist of Kyoto Stories, I was never invited as a bonus extra to a wife swappers’ party. Nobody quizzed me about the size of my genitals. I was never offered a bit-part in a B-movie where I had to dress up as a brothel-creeping American GI. At no point, in my teaching career, was I ushered into a room with two gangsters, and ordered to take them from zero to fluency in two months, or else.”
Over at All the Anime, I review ex-Ghibli employee Steve Alpert’s Kyoto Stories, a gleefully unreliable memoir about someone‘s student days.
The Wu sisters are in their seventies, and have a relatively posh house near the centre of the village, alongside their ramshackle dyeing studio. There, behind a door so low I practically have to limbo underneath it, they make Kam clothes by dipping cotton cloth into a mixture made from indigo leaves, collected from the riverside and soaked for three days to create a bluish soup. The clothes come out yellow, but oxidise almost immediately on contact with the air, turning a pale blue. The Wu sisters will dip and wash and dry and dip and wash and dry over and over for the next twenty days to get the right level of dark blue.
Other ingredients include cow skin, with hair still attached, which is boiled for gelatin, pig’s blood which can be used to form the red dye that turns the dark blue into black, and rice wine.
“You can drink it!” enthuses Wu Big Sister. “Go on, have a go! We already have!”
She titters playfully, and I realise that the Wu sisters have been knocking back some of their ingredients all morning. I join in, and then they start singing a song of Kam welcome, which apparently has to end with me downing a grubby Hello Kitty mug full of rice wine. They then reveal that nobody can leave their house until they, too, have downed a mug of wine, leaving the cameraman and the driver red-faced and somewhat the worse for wear.
The Wu Sisters, however, are ready for anything.
“Come on inside!” says Wu Little Sister. “We’re going to whack the cloth with the hammer to make it soft and shiny!” She proceeds to smack her cloth around with a mallet dangerously close to her fingers.
I try to leaven the shoot with comedy business, including a Jacques Tati masterpiece of idiocy as I attempt to get across the village square when it is carpeted with drying rice. I negotiate a maze of rice mats, and end up dangling from the side of a building and braining myself on a jutting joist. I also get to turn to camera with a straight face and say: “There’s nothing I enjoy more than a good pounding.”
“Russia has invaded Finland, the USA has recused itself, and only plucky France dares to send a naval squadron to the Baltic…This entire backstory, however, which would surely form the A-plot in any Hollywood action movie, is largely ignored. So, too, is any resolution of two other prospective plots – that jihadists have control of a military submarine, and that said submarine may have been sold to them in a CIA sting operation that went wrong.”
Tune in for me, as festival jury chairman, with Anime Limited’s Andy Hanley and this year’s guest curator Kambole Campbell, as we discuss the films at this year’s Scotland Loves Anime: Blue Thermal, Goodbye Don Glees, Tunnel to Summer Exit of Goodbyes and Break of Dawn. Spoilers galore, out of necessity.
The architectural movement I mention is the Metabolists.
Workshy layabouts Lapatossu (Aku Korhonen) and Vinski (Kaarlo Kartio) are reduced to reading recipe books to stave off hunger, when they suddenly find themselves inheriting a department store. They throw themselves into swindling the public by over-charging for material goods instead of their usual hustles, only to be plunged into a price war with Senttinen (Toppo Elonperä), the dastardly owner of the rival store across the street. Senttinen, meanwhile, hopes to seduce the innocent Kirsi (Laila Rihte) a woman who mistakenly believes that her beloved Erkki (Onni Korhonen) has been killed in the war.
The critic for the Helsingin Sanomat was unforgiving – noting that while there was indeed an actual plot, huge chunks of Tavaratalo Lapatossu & Vinski were devoted to bloated comedy sidebars, as well as two pointless musical interludes, common in Finnish film since the late 1930s. This seems a trifle unfair on theLapatossu franchise, both former instalments of which followed a similar pattern of letting Korhonen and Kaartio steamroller a series of comedy set-ups through the middle of an otherwise gormless romance among the supporting cast.
In fact, it’s the pointless comedy business that supplies the most memorable moments of this film, particularly in the opening reel, as Vinski pleads that they should find some work so they should not go hungry, only for Lapatossu to grimly intone that work is a serious business, as if his companion has just proposed strolling into Mordor. Lapatossu and Vinski capitalise on the locals’ love of lining up for bargains (Finns, as the saying goes, “will stand in line for a free bucket”), by creating a fake queue for a non-existent sale. They then make their way back down the line, selling their places in the queue, before announcing that the “sale” has ended before anyone can get in. Similarly, once they take over the store, they try to tart themselves up as salesman, resulting in a pair of camp toadies like the “Suits-You-Sir” tailors, ably assisted by Jacob Furman (last seen as a tap-dancing telegram boy in SF Parade) and a robot dancing instructor.
Whereas Lapatossu & Vinski in Olympic Fever (1939) clocked in at a surprisingly short running time, this sequel is bulked out by a far more cunning means, stretched to feature length in part by a long, rambling closing speech, as Lapatossu ties up the plot strands and leaves his store to the young couple. Director Toivo Särkkä shoots the whole address in a single take – Lapatossu is giving a prepared speech and so is even permitted a crib sheet in front of him – and tries to pull the wool over the audience’s eyes with occasional cutaways to the crowd plainly filmed at a different time. It’s a clever way to stretch out the film by eight minutes, but it is also a tediously Finnish way of doing so.
After the film’s opening in November 1940, there was a certain degree of excitable trilling in the press about the surname-less newcomer “Annakaarina” (in fact Kaarina Salonoja, who had been previously glimpsed in Have I Arrived in a Harem? and The Culprits? both in 1938), whose Karelian accent was a bit of over-the-border exotica for the Finns, not unlike Catherine Zeta-Jones going full-on Welsh. But despite an electrifying smile and killer cheekbones, she, like her co-star Laila Rihte, is somewhat defeated by frumpy austerity-era fashions and servant headscarves, and it doesn’t help that the script takes her ingénue role to breathless, Bible-thumping extremes. I confess I had a bit of trouble following the Karelian lines, which sounds like Finnish put through an Estonian wringer, but clearly the cast have much the same problem, too, with Vinski reduced to smiling and nodding at some of Hilma’s weirder vocabulary. The sudden presence of Karelian accents in Finland, of course, was a matter of some contemporary notice, with so many refugees from east Finland flooding into the country – a phenomenon also referenced in the same year’s Anu and Mikko and Foxtail in the Armpit.
The whole film is tinged with tragedy, starting with its matter-of-fact incorporation of the recent (and as it would turn out, ongoing) war into the romantic subplot. Erkki (Onni Korhonen) has lost his arm in the conflict, and mistakenly believes that his betrothed Kirsi (Laila Rihte) will no longer love him. Ihantala, the Karelian village where much of the action takes place, would prove to be the site of the apocalyptic battle of Tali-Ihantala four years after this film was released. It, along with 10% of the rest of pre-war Finland was trimmed off by the Soviets, drastically altering the shape of the map that forms this film’s opening shot. Today, as part of the lost lands of Karelia, it is the Russian town of Petrovka. And this would prove to be Kaarlo Kartio’s last film, since he would die before completing his next. Confined to character roles since his star turn in Scapegoat (1935), the Lapatossu films were his last chance to shine as a leading man. At least in this one he got the girl, if only for about half a minute.
That’s director Naoko Yamada and her entourage slipping not-entirely-invisibly through the streets of Edinburgh for the premiere of her new short film Garden of Remembrance at the Cameo cinema. We’ve spent a merry couple of days getting her thoughts on film about love, and loss, and the mess people leave when they went away, as well as cucumber horses, aubergine cows, the mystery of dog poo bins and the dilemma of Marmite.
I had an additional duty, thrust upon me when the lyrics for the title song, which itself forms the sole script of the movie, turned up untranslated in Scotland with only a couple of days to go before the premiere. So that was a a frenzied few hours as I wrestled with Lovely Summer Chan’s lyrics until they made sense in another language.
Both Yamada and I spent the day of the premiere ridiculously over-dressed, because we knew we wouldn’t have time to change clothes before the event began. Shortly after we were mistaken for a wedding party at the hotel, I showed her the translation of the lyrics and she started crying. Which hopefully was a a good sign.
I don’t expect your sympathy. Anime for you is a free choice. You find something to love and then you love it day after day, hour after hour. Modern technology has created binge fandom, consuming entire serials in marathon sessions. Some anime, like Gantz, seem tailored to this market, designed to be watched in real-time, without week-long gaps between episodes. Which is great, if you like it to begin with. Some anime, however, feel like you are trying to pull out your own teeth.
You can switch off. You can dismiss the awful Schoolgirl Milky Crisis and move on to something else, all memory gone of your wasted 25 minutes. I have to keep watching; it’s my job. Which is why I do my very best not to pull the term “classic” unless I’m really going to use it. A classic shouldn’t be some antique show the distributor acquired by accident and feels obliged to hype. It shouldn’t be some old has-been, shuffled onto a small screen where the age doesn’t show so badly. It should be something that stands the test of time. Something like Gunbuster.
For its wartime echoes and its maudlin pathos; for its superb voice-acting and peerless script; for its kamikaze students and its red-haired Russian bad girl; for the misleadingly dumb beginning, which lurches into a gripping space war drama; for all these things and more, Gunbuster is my favorite anime.
Gunbuster has shadowed me through every step of my career, all around the world. When I was at college in Japan, Gunbuster was the anime shown in Sociology as a discussion point on the Japanese school system. When I lectured on anime translation in Scotland, the US edition of Gunbuster was my object lesson in excellence; at an animation conference in Wales, I used it to demonstrate jiggling fan service at work; at a Norwegian film festival, it was my clip to demonstrate wartime analogies; at a Finnish convention, the last episode was used to show the power of black-and-white filmmaking. Ten years ago, Gunbuster was the litmus test of my independence, when, much as I adored it, I refused to work on a UK version that I disapproved of – missing footage, with pathetic extras and a poor transfer.
It was only a few years ago that a translator told me Tokyo audiences would simply not comprehend my references to Gunbuster. It was old news, he said. It was an obscure video show from the late 1980s, gone and forgotten. Now that the otaku generation are running the anime business, the latest edition of Gunbuster comes complete with scholarly sleeve notes calling it a landmark in anime history. Critic Ryusuke Hikawa argues that Gunbuster is the grandfather of much in modern anime – it has the passion of Evangelion, the yearning of Voices of a Distant Star, and the “fan service” and self-referentiality of Genshiken. It placed the token female of anime cliché front and center, cunningly twisting the traditions of girls’ entertainment for a new and unexpected purpose – entertaining boys.
Gunbuster has been hard to find for many years, tied up in rights issues. I’m glad it’s coming back. It feels like I’ve been waiting 12,000 years.
This article originally appeared in Newtype USA, October 2006. Jonathan Clements is the author of Anime: A History.
Alexander, I call to my son, but he does not respond.
Alexander, Iskander, Olixandu? Yalishanda, 亞歷山大. Usually, by the time I get to Mandarin, he is ready to acknowledge me, because Asia-History-Mountain-Great is the best variant of all, and the name by which he was known in China. So yes, of course, I was going to go to the Alexander: Making of a Myth exhibition at the British Library, where I was sure to like all the things that the Guardian reviewer hated.
The British Library exhibition, which collates multiple versions of the Alexander story, from an account’s report in cuneiform, to a letter he may have written to Aristotle, to the medieval Alexander romances, is fearless about following the myths of Alexander the Great into our age. So alongside the armour of King James I’s heir, Prince Henry Frederick, decorated with images of Alexander in India, there’s the called Reign: The Conqueror, putting Alexander in space, and the Bollywood epic called Porus, telling the story of his life from the point of view of the Indian king he fought against in the Punjab; Assassin’s Creed reimagining his tomb, and Deva, a Russian-born, Vietnam-based artist, imagining him snogging Bagoas. The British Library exhibition charts the legends of Alexander through medieval romances up to modern-day comics and movies.
Wu Meilun is an old lady in her seventies who has put on her posh Kam clothes to welcome us. Kam girls in the past would make their own costumes, and wear them on festival days to show off their skills to the mensfolk. Traditionally, Kam women would sit at their spinning wheels and spin into the night, with the old ladies retiring at around nine o’clock. The younger girls would then stick something called a “cat’s ear” onto their spinning wheel, so it suddenly started making a klickety-klack sound, advertising their presence to the local youths, who would pop over to chat them up, keep them company and “sing.” Spinning could then go on until the small hours, with occasional breaks for cups of tea, chat and “singing.”
“But that doesn’t go on any more,” sighs Meilun wistfully. Now everybody just vegs out in front of China’s Got Talent and looks at cat videos on their iPhones.
Meilun is here to show me how to make paper from citron bark, which she mashes up and mixes with natural gum, and spreads it out on frames to dry in the sun. I say citron bark, because that’s what the dictionary tells us it is, but the word in Chinese is goupi, which sadly also means dogfart. There is considerably merriment from the crew every time I get my tones wrong.
How long will it take to dry, I ask her.
Only two hours, she says.
We wait two hours. The paper is still wet. It turns out that the Kam of Dimen have as little appreciation of time as the Kam of Tang-an.
We can’t do any driving shots in the afternoon because Pan has taken the Buick into the hills to hunt wild boar. So instead we shoot a piece at the vending machines, in which I discuss the likelihood of me being suddenly overcome in the dead of night by the sudden desire for a toy sword, clockwork dinosaur or 50-pack of tampons, and rushing to the vending lobby to buy some.
“Let’s buy a plastic monkey!” I enthuse, feeding my five kuai into the machine to get myself a pointless monkey that lights up in the dark. Probably not a day we will win an award for.
The Official Schoolgirl Milky Crisis Blog 