Your starter for ten: where are you likely to find the biographer of Confucius, the senior editor of Nature magazine, the vicar of Finedon, and an award-winning photographer?
Yes, that’s me on the Leeds team in this year’s Christmas University Challenge, alongside TV’s Henry Gee, former Communard Richard Coles, and Mongol-herding filmmaker Timothy Allen. I just hope there’s a question about Eurovision, or I’m in trouble. [Time Travel Footnote: There wasn’t]. 23rd December, 19:30, BBC2.
As noted by the Asahi Shinbun, anime passed a grim milestone in September when its last two representative serials faded from primetime. Doraemon and Crayon Shin-chan, once heavy-hitters of the early evening schedule, are now pulling audience shares that struggle to hit 7%, which has caused them to be shunted aside this October. They will now air on Saturdays, leaving the primetime weekday slot for, I don’t know, inane panel shows and something about a cat that drives trains.
The news sits at the nexus of a whole bunch of metadata and statistics, tied up in part with technological shifts and the changing demographics of Japan. Time was, when the average Japanese nuclear family had two school-age kids who needed to be distracted on the single television in the lounge. Now, they are more likely to have just one child, halving the number of hours a TV is liable to be turned to children’s entertainment. And that notional Japanese child, certainly by his or her teenage years, is liable to have a TV and/or a computer screen, and a video-compatible phone.
And while this is probably a tad academic and nerdy, even for NEO, I feel obliged to point out that primetime is still keeping animation companies busy – there are logos and idents, eye-catches and adverts, a vast number of which not only require animation, but pay substantially better second-per-second than a 22-minute cartoon. We should also remember that the anime that you enjoy – your Death Note and your Ghost in the Shell and the like, have never been part of primetime. Most of the shows that score high with a foreign audience tend to air in Japan late at night, in the graveyard slot, when nobody is watching. The otaku audience has not been served by primetime since the last century.
So don’t cry for the “loss” of anime from primetime. This is an accountant’s decision, to do with who is liable to be watching at those hours, and what advertising space is most lucratively sold for them. I was sitting in the departure lounge at Narita airport last month, and the primetime adverts that assailed me were for writing a will, retirement homes, and a commercial for Tokyo Gas. Then again, the latter featured pop star Kyoko Fukada, dressed as devil-girl Lum and singing a pastiche of the Urusei Yatsura theme song. Anime isn’t gone just yet.
Jonathan Clements is the author of Anime: A History. This article first appeared in NEO #194, 2019.
“… it’s all totally worth it as long as the end result is Kirsten Dunst, dressed as a schoolgirl witch, singing ‘Turning Japanese’ (a song about wanking), while dancing down a Tokyo street. ‘No sex,’ as she points out, ‘no drugs, no wine, no women, no fun, no sin, no you, no wonder it’s dark.'”
Over at All the Anime, I review the new book by Patrick W. Galbraith.
Up on the All the Anime blog, my take on Makoto Shinkai’s Weathering with You.
“Shinkai was plainly unequipped for the fame that Your Name brought to him. He has spoken in interviews of being recognised in the street by enthusiastic fans, but also of overhearing people bad-mouthing his film in public. The reaction of some celebrity critics was particularly tough. Hirokazu Kore-eda, director of the Oscar-winning Shoplifters, diplomatically commented that the film was packed with elements of a hit, ‘…perhaps too packed.’ Yoshiyuki Tomino, the notoriously prickly creator of Gundam, declared that he doubted anyone would be watching Your Name in five years’ time.”
“I asked myself,” a wounded Shinkai told Matt Schley of the Japan Times, “should I make a film my critics will like, or should I make one they’ll hate even more?”
Over at All the Anime, I review Niigata University’s free publication on archiving Japanese animation materials, with special reference to their test case, The Wings of Honneamise.
“Other elements of the book include Dario Lolli on history and technology in Honneamise, Jaqueline Berndt on the history of overseas anime/manga exhibitions (written before the British Museum’s recent triumph), a revealing interview with Hiroyuki Yamaga about the financial underpinnings of Gainax and his own struggles with creating the characters, and Kim Joon Yang asking what archived materials can tell us about anime. He delves deep into some of the directions on storyboards, noting that, say, a Star Wars inspiration is far more arguable in an analysis if we have the director’s own scrawl in the margins, reading ‘Make this like that scene in Star Wars!'”
Cobbler’s son Esko (Unto Salminen) is excited about his forthcoming wedding to Kreeta (Ester Toivonen), but even as he delivers a monologue to thin air in his father Topias’s forest shack, he is clearly a few logs short of a sauna. Esko is a simpleton, kind-hearted but hapless, and his parents are trying to marry him off quickly before their foster daughter Jaana (Laila Rihte) gets hitched and qualifies for a long-coveted inheritance – I have no idea why the inheritance is contingent on two unrelated people racing to get married, but that’s the least of this film’s problems. Jaana has eyes for Risto (Vilho Ruuskanen, one of the worst actors I have ever seen), and the race is on to get to the church on time.
Originally written in Finnish by Aleksis Kivi, the stage version of Nummisuutarit won a national award in 1865, setting it up as one of the early examples of Finnish entertainment for the Finns, as opposed to art and literature forced on them in Swedish or Russian. I suspect that its pioneering role in Finnish-language drama left local audiences rather more forgiving of its clunky plot, but Toivo Särkkä’s dramatization for Suomen Filmiteollisuus does itself no favours by clinging to the small sets of the stage play without exploiting much of the potential of the camera. Instead, he acknowledges the power of cinema simply by zooming in on the leads’ faces while they declaim their lines. As the money-grabbing parents, Aku Korhonen and Siiri Angerkoski do their best with thin material, but it is difficult to love a “comedy” that derives its humour from the confusions of a retarded man and the lick-spittling greed of a pair of social climbers.
Aku Korhonen, however, steals every scene he is in, with Särkkä’s camera lingering lovingly on the gentle, sincere love he has for his son. Times change, and there was presumably nothing untoward about the characterisation of Esko as some sort of Holy Fool. Drunken old men witter about their plans for trading in young women, while as Septeus the sacristan, Eino Jurkka blunders through all the scenes wearing a ridiculous top hat like the king of the Oompa Lumpas. This, however, is not the most laughable headgear on show, since Ester Toivonen dons a massive spangly crown for her wedding (not to Esko, as it scandalously turns out), transforming herself into a human chandelier for a large chunk of the film.
I presume that the whole thing is supposed to be a celebration of Finnish culture and country life, but the whole thing seems like a ham-fisted school play, not the least when the big wedding scene turns out to be a half-hearted dance sequence to the music of an off-key fiddler.
All’s well, after an interminable series of delays, that ends well, with Jaana’s dad Niko (Yrjö Tuominen) turning out not to have been lost at sea after all, but blundering his way on a drunken journey (everybody is drunk) from Turku to Hämeenlinna. If this were the only artefact of Finnish culture to survive the apocalypse, you would be forgiven for thinking that Finland was a dismal backwater populated by addled old alcoholics and sulky ingénues, where the main topic of interest was who was going to marry whom, or who they really should have been marrying. It is difficult to imagine anyone liking this film, even the people who made it. What a load of cobblers.
Jonathan Clements is the author of An Armchair Traveller’s History of Finland.
“Her most representative work in this mode is surely ‘Talisman’ …, in which an outsider in a European city muses on the reason, presumed religious or magical, why so many women have mutilated their earlobes in order to wear earrings.”
Over at the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, I write an entry on Yoko Tawada, whose Last Children of Tokyo I reviewed here.
“Hideaki Anno scoffs at the notion that otaku culture has been truly accepted by the Japanese mainstream…His words certainly seem to echo a certain sense one often gets in the Japanese media, that besuited presenters on NHK are gingerly making enthusiastic noises about weeb phenomena they despise.” Over at All the Anime, I review Mark Schilling’s new book.
Roxy Simons is first to publish a review of my Brief History of China, out now from Tuttle.
“A Brief History of China deftly explores the global super-power’s past, examining its shifting cultures and competing ideals to create an enthralling read from start to finish. Instead of only telling the stories of the champions, curated to their own advantage to ‘fix’ any unfavourable events, Clements takes China’s history back to its diverse human core, immersing booklovers in a vast cast of characters and a gripping narrative, effortlessly easy to enjoy.”
A nice little tactic by Tuttle’s sales force. Rather than leave it to their reps to explain to booksellers why they should stock my new book (available now in the US and the UK), they hand them an iPad and I tell them myself.
The Official Schoolgirl Milky Crisis Blog 