For all those of you who were disappointed that my Gunbuster commentary track was not included on the recent Blu-ray collectors’ edition, Justin Sevakis has uploaded the whole thing up onto YouTube. So you can sync it up at your leisure and hear me wittering for nearly three hours about my favourite anime.

“These terrible defeats showed up increasingly in the military dispatches as ‘shattered jewels’. It became media shorthand for a battle in which everybody dies, and the enemy is left with nothing but ruins and ashes.”

Over at All the Anime, I discuss some of the wartime allusions in Hideaki Anno’s Gunbuster.

“Jonathan,” said Mamoru Hosoda, “I wonder if you have ever heard of an anime called Gunbuster? Because there’s this scene in Gunbuster where the mecha comes out and stands with its arms folded on the prow of the ship, and that’s such a fantastic moment in anime, and that’s what I was trying to evoke with Belle on the back of that whale.”

Over at All the Anime, I fold my arms and wait for the alien hordes.

“The chorus of voices that sings ‘“’Gunbuster~~~!’”’ in the eycatch is actually a single man, overdubbed repeatedly to sound like a group of people. The voice is that of the composer, Kohei Tanaka, sneaking his way onto the audio as a bit of cost-cutting DIY.”

Over at All the Anime, I investigate Kohei Tanaka’s wonderful score for the Gunbuster series.

“Toren ended up living in a ‘room’ that was actually a walk-in closet that they had put a bed into. And during the time that he was there, the people of Gainax were working on Gunbuster, and decided that they needed a handsome love interest.”

Over at All the Anime, I explain the genesis of Gunbuster‘s love-interest, Smith Toren.

“A split-second shot of Japan from orbit, seen in the opening credits, actually shows the locations of all today’s nuclear power plants underwater, as if the nation has suffered a series of atomic disasters. When Okada mentioned this in a TV interview, it was mysteriously dropped from the eventual broadcast.”

Over at All the Anime, I reveal just some of the behind-the-scenes shenanigans on Gunbuster: Aim for the Top.

Toshio Suzuki has spent the last 20 years carefully steering late-era Studio Ghibli, a company that arguably cannot really function without the input of its three greats – Hayao Miyazaki, the late Isao Takahata, and Suzuki himself. In 2008, Suzuki appointed Disney Japan’s Koji Hoshino to take over as company president – a smart move, finding a man with world-class knowledge of running a cartoon company’s legacy.

But now Hoshino has resigned, claiming that the completion of Miyazaki’s How Do You Live?, is a good time to go, particularly since Hoshino’s going to be 67 in May. An alternative version of the story in the Japanese tabloids has Hoshino leaving under a cloud because his predecessor needed to “properly separate his public and private life.” Suzuki might have stepped down as president in 2008, but never quite went away, functioning instead as a general manager, whatever that means.

Suzuki, whose memoir of working at Ghibli carried the winning title Mixing Work with Pleasure, has been dishing out jobs to his Thai girlfriend Kanyada “May” Phatan. The two have allegedly been an item since she sold him some roadside chicken wings in 2013, after which Suzuki invested in her spa and restaurant. When those businesses went under, Suzuki steered Ghibli itself into authorising a Totoro café in Bangkok in 2018, May’s Garden House Restaurant, which shut down the following year just ahead of COVID.

Not to be deterred, Kanyada resurfaced as the mononymic photographer for The Ghibli Museum Story (2020), and for a book the same year of Toshio Suzuki quotations. She also writes a monthly poem for the Ghibli in-house magazine Neppu, and last month was feted at an Iwate exhibition of her photography, to tie in with a new, rather thin, compilation book.

In the era of Boris Johnson and Donald Trump, this barely moves the needle on the scandalometer. Some Ghibli staffers might bristle at the whiff of privilege, but it’s not like Suzuki hasn’t got form. He literally put a landscape gardener in charge of Tales from Earthsea because the guy was Hayao Miyazaki’s son. And nor is it all that unusual for people to get hired on the basis of personal connections, like that guy Roy Disney at Hoshino’s old company. Le Monde, of all places, fumed that Suzuki took the chance at the Iwate exhibition to “enjoy the hot springs with his girlfriend” which hardly seems like a crime.

If there’s any impropriety at work, it’ll be up to Hoshino’s replacement to clear it all up. That would be Toshio Suzuki, back as president after a 15-year absence.

Jonathan Clements is the author of Anime: A History. This article first appered in NEO #230, 2023.

“No matter which period you depict, as far as there is something that never changes, I think that will become a story about ‘now’.”

Over at All the Anime, I interview Reiko Yoshida, screenwriter of The House of the Lost on the Cape.

To America, where a group of high-profile voice actors, many with a firm footprint in the anime world, have declared war on artificial intelligences. Or rather, artificial intelligence’s meat masters, noting that many actors performing “voice performance replication work are unaware of or do not fully understand their rights regarding employment contracts.”

Vocal Variants, a pressure group including Yuri Lowenthal, Stephanie Sheh and Matt Waterson, outlined a set of simple demands and stipulations. The group aims to inform companies and actors, chiefly to warn actors off inadvertently signing away all their rights to exclusivity in their own voices.

Any voice actor with a significant body of work inadvertently creates an audio bank of their voice. This is particularly true in the gaming world, where actors are often less reciting a script than delivering “barks” and soundbites. Sakura Wars even made a big deal out of its audio component, for which the Japanese voice actresses recorded themselves saying all 100 syllables in the language, thereby allowing the audio software to address the (Japanese) player by name, and, in theory, to say anything the computer wanted.

Give an AI enough material to play with, and it can generate dialogue as if the actor is saying it themselves. It was Steve Blum, the voice of Cowboy Bebop’s Spike Spiegel, who first poked his head above the Twitter parapet to ask who had the right to make him say things he never said. It started up a social media storm that led to the formation of Vocal Variants, and its statement that voice actors were entitled to safe storage of their voices, clear stipulation of what those voices might be used for, approval on the use of their voices to generate synthetic dialogue, and appropriate payment for use.

Stephanie Sheh noted on Twitter that although many of the AI apps agree to take down unsanctioned audio files, the actors are often obliged to police them themselves, and often don’t even know their voice has been uploaded unless they join each specific app service.

“As AI/Synthetic voice work now covers much uncharted territory,” says the Vocal Variants website, “it’s imperative that we collaborate to create and amend laws and contracts to protect both laymen and professional performers against deep fakes, improper use and exploitation of recorded performances.”

Jonathan Clements is the author of Anime: A History. This article originally appeared in NEO #229, 2023. Since its publication, Vocal Variants has become a division of the National Association of Voice Actors.