“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.
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.
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.
“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.
Somewhat to my surprise, the eBook edition of Anime: A History (Second Edition) has sneaked out into stores two weeks ahead of the paper version’s 7th September street date.
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.
“If a background is really good, it’s taken for granted —viewers can ignore it and just immerse themselves in the world of the movie,” he said. “If it’s bad, they can’t help noticing it, and lose their concentration. When we remember the good times in our lives, we always remember the background as beautiful, even if we didn’t pay much attention to it at the time. That is the kind of realistic beauty that I want to depict.”
Over at All the Anime, my obituary for the scenic artist Nizo Yamamoto.
“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.
