“After a tie in the first-round voting between two films, votes swung 5:1 for Fortune Favours Lady Nikuko, for its density of plot and incident, the heart and realism with which it addressed its blue-collar environment, and its quirky willingness to indulge in flights of animated fancy. The jury felt that, of all the works in competition this year, it best succeeded at being the film it was trying to be.”

This year’s Scotland Loves Anime jury prize, the “Golden Partridge”, controversially went not to the favourite, Mamoru Hosoda’s Belle, but to the slice-of-life dramedy, Ayumu Watanabe’s Fortune Favours Lady Nikuko. Over at All the Anime, the new podcast features Meghan Ellis, Claire Forrest and Suzanne Reilly discussing their deliberations in depth.

Or you can watch it on Youtube.

Gutted I can’t be at the UK premiere of Mamoru Hosoda’s Belle at the London Film Festival tomorrow, although I will be at its Edinburgh screening next week in both personal and avatar form, interviewing the director via Zoom for the post-film Q&A. Topics include animating under covid conditions, the importance of Disney’s Beauty & the Beast in his own artistic inspirations, and what kind of crappy cartoons a world-class animator’s kids force him to watch at home.

In the meantime, you can read my article about the film here at the All the Anime website.

“Hosoda’s own mother died shortly before he completed Summer Wars, after a long illness that lasted for eight years. Her shadow loomed over his next film, Wolf Children, and indeed over Mirai, which examined the degree to which a child could relate to a dead grandparent. Belle, too, obsesses over a lost mother, but also over the opportunities of a digital age.”

This weekend I am mainly here, introducing a bunch of films, wrangling a jury, and shovelling my face with Sichuan food. Today alone it was four films with the jury, and introducing another four for the punters.

The Glasgow Film Theatre is playing host to another Scotland Loves Anime after a year’s imposed covid lockout. Tomorrow I have a podcast to record, three more films to introduce, and then a sleeper to the south to shoot a pilot. Apart from that, not too busy.

Japanese Cinema in the Digital Age deftly avoids the error of many other works on the subject, by realising that ‘digital’ technology does not merely apply to production. Digitisation has affected everything from the ease with which cinemas can add extra screens, to the access of fans to obscure movies, to, well, me telling you this. If you are reading this, you are two clicks away from buying Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano’s book for yourself, an immense change to modern consumption, whereas previous generations would have had to resort to a long tramp down to the library or bookstore.

One of her five chapters is devoted entirely to Japanese animation, in recognition of its vital role in taking Japanese culture to the rest of the world. She fixes her focus on several intriguing creators, in particular Makoto Shinkai, whose Voices of a Distant Star, made in his lounge, distributed by internet mail order, is surely the epitome of the digital transformation. But she also examines Koji Yamamura, the Oscar-nominated animator whose short films constantly re-assert a ‘Japanese’ quality, seemingly with an eye on the international market, as well as Mamoru Oshii, not for his big-name anime movies like Sky Crawlers, but for his experimental hybrid film Amazing Lives of the Fast-Food Grifters.

Wada-Marciano is intrigued by the modern buzzword ‘transnational’, but unlike many of her colleagues, she does not blindly accept it as an example of a Japanese culture taking the world by storm, but rather as an element within a global culture. This attitude is particularly noteworthy in her other chapters, in which she delves into Japanese film abroad, including an entire chapter on J-horror, and its relationship to the rise of the DVD. Here, she engages with the simple fact that so-called V-cinema broke the log-jam of films awaiting a theatrical release, freeing young creators to experiment in what used to be called B-movies, but also confronting consumers with alternate entertainments. Some, she points out, such as the chilling Ring, were arguably even better viewed in your home, on the TV, where some of the more iconic moments might have had a greater, more immediate impact. More importantly for anime, DVD allowed what she calls a preservation of ‘cultural authenticity’, allowing for the presence of Japanese-language tracks, even on DVDs that would largely be watched by dub fans.

If I have any quibbles about the book, it is that it is merely the opening preamble of a much larger, longer argument for the impact of digitisation. Wada-Marciano makes a strong case for considering ‘industrial strategies’ rather than the usual guff about fan receptions and subcultures, but seemingly lacks the space to truly dive feet-first into what that might mean. In the case of anime, for example, digitisation has been part of industrial discourse since as early as 1974, when Toei first began consultations on a computerised production system. Digital storage, computerised camera tracking, Avid editing and scanned images have all formed a major part of anime’s development, as has the sudden immediacy afforded to overseas subcontractors by the invention of the ISDN, and the simple ability of online fans to gripe, moan and proselytise to each other about new shows. Most notable among such omissions is any mention of Celsys, the company whose RETAS Pro animation software has become an industry standard, and arguably as influential a template for style and art as Tezuka’s limited animation revolution in the 1960s. Nor is there much discussion of what Ramon Lobato calls the ‘informal economies’ of piracy and torrenting, which have had a world-shattering, and possibly terminal effect on Japanese cultural production, even as they carry it to more viewers.

But it’s unfair to dwell on the things that aren’t in a book when there is so much of value between its pages, not the least its insightful discussion of the live-action Initial D movie, a ‘Chinese’ film made in Japan for the largely Cantonese-speaking overseas market, based on a Japanese manga and anime, but tied just as heavily into the consumption of customisable cars for boy-racers. If that’s not ‘transnational’, I don’t know what is.

Jonathan Clements is the author of Anime: A History. This review first appeared on the now-defunct Manga Entertainment blog in September 2013.

“Unlike Shirobako, which prides itself on a realistic depiction of the nuts and bolts of making an animated film, Pompo is more interested in creating the impression of working on live-action movies. It approaches film-making with a relentless, infectious optimism, almost as if a bunch of downtrodden, underpaid Japanese animators have fixated on Nyallywood as an idealised dream factory, where true talent wins through, the show-runners (well, most of them) can spot a rookie’s potential in the raw and train them for success, and everybody gets their just desserts.”

Over at All the Anime, I write up Pompo the Cinephile, a film that glorifies B-movies, from the man who made that thing about the robot sharks.

Time was, back in the eighties, when anime cels were literally regarded as industrial waste. Some, it was true, were “banked” to use on later episodes of the same show, but when a show was over, they were thrown away. Thanks to increasingly strict laws on plastics and polymers, they had to be expensively disposed of, leading to one notorious incident in which a studio was caught burying their old cels in a hole in the backyard.

Anime cels were pointless fragments of an image, the building blocks of filming, their purpose fulfilled the moment they were composited together and photographed to make a particular frame of actual animation. When Carl Macek asked for all the old cels from Akira, the film-makers gleefully threw them into a shipping container and packed them off to California, as if they’d just sold him London Bridge. But Macek also ran an art gallery, and he saw the value of cels as industrial artwork, and as freebies he could give away with the Akira VHS, in order to encourage people not to settle for pirate copies.

And so, there is a certain irony in this month’s news that an anime cel, which would have once been something the studio literally couldn’t give away, has sold for a record-breaking price of 26.4 million yen – that’s £173,625.00 to you.

The online auction in Japan became headline news for the smug-factor it is sure to instil in any fan with a couple of souvenir cels. But, of course, it’s never that simple. Because the cel in question is an image from My Neighbour Totoro, and Miyazaki is such a notorious control freak that it, like all the other cels, is liable to be touched by his own hand. Heritage Auctions (HA.com) have hosted a number of similarly high-value sales in the last few weeks, including other iconic images from Akira and Studio Ghibli works – all titles sure to be known in the mainstream and to retain their value.

Then again, there’s another irony, since this month’s anime news also features a spat over at Mappa regarding the super-low pay now being offered to animators as the studio scrambles for as much of that Netflix dosh as possible. Yesteryear’s anime is being valued ever higher. Today’s barely pays a living wage.

Jonathan Clements is the author of Anime: A History. This article first appeared in NEO #211, 2021.

It is a matter of honour – the young Lord Naritsugu (Goro Inagaki) has a terrible reputation for rape, murder and unspeakable cruelty. But he is a relative of the Shogun, and hence beyond the reach of the law. Behind the scenes, twelve loyal samurai assemble to mete out justice off the books. They are led by Shinzaemon (Koji Yakusho), an aging samurai who knows there is little chance that he will return alive from his mission. But he still accepts his fate, in a gleefully suicidal rush for glory that sees his dirty dozen plotting a fiendish ambush, ending with an explosive 45-minute battle scene.

Twelve…? There might be twelve samurai, but there is a bonus extra to make up the baker’s dozen – mountain man Kiga (Yusuke Iseya), a grubby force of nature who offers to lead the men on a decisive short-cut, as long as there is money it for him.

In a refreshing change from the norm, these samurai are the masters of their own fate. They willingly embrace dirty tricks and battlefield engineering, and never stoop to blaming their deceptions on non-existent ninja. There are sly nods to earlier samurai stories – not merely the rain-soaked struggles of Kurosawa, but the flame-maddened cattle of the Tale of the Heike, and mid-air arrow cutting of many a Japanese fireside saga. Miike plays to unexpected strengths, including a marvellous score by his long-term collaborator Koji Endo, and punchy sound design, not just on swords and arrows, but on horse’s hooves on muddy roads and the thump of socked feet on mansion floorboards.

13 Assassins is not based on a true story, although it is inspired by true events – not the least the infamous misbehaviour of the historical Lord Naritsugu, who became lord of a feudal domain while still a teenager, and seems to have let the power go to his head. There is also a suspicion among some Japanese historians that the sudden, unexplained death of the historical Naritsugu smelled of a Shogunal cover-up. But 13 Assassins is also steeped in unquestionably real issues from the twilight years of the samurai. This is not a fairytale Japan of geisha and cherry blossoms; it’s an unfamiliar, alien place where a smile means distress and the triple hollyhock emblem of the Shogun is a sign of fearsome repression. Takashi Miike’s samurai throw dice in the company of tattooed gangsters and rheumy-eyed, pockmarked whores. It has been two centuries since Japan’s last full-scale war, leaving many of the samurai class swordsmen in name only. As one of the assassins notes: they have had nothing but books and plays to tell them how battle really was, and the reality comes as an exhilarating, deathly shock.

With nobody for the samurai to fight but each other, stern codes of honour and obligation are supposed to keep them in check, but have instead led to scheming and corruption. Miike’s film, like the 1963 original directed by Eiichi Kudo and indeed like Mamoru Oshii’s Sky Crawlers, is a film made for a generation that has grown up without war or danger, repulsed but also oddly hypnotised by the spectacle of violence.

Miike’s samurai are trapped in a poisonous system that kills all attempts at reform. It confines its characters in the traditional stand-offs between duty and honour, and in the endless arguments about loyalty that define every period of samurai history. In doing so, 13 Assassins can be seen as a Japanese variant on Apocalypto: a glimpse of the last, rotten days of a dying regime, shortly before unwelcome Europeans toppled the old order for better or worse. It is set in 1844, the year that the King of the Netherlands wrote an ominous letter to his unseen Japanese allies, warning them that the world was changing fast. Japan was no longer a year away by sailing ship; it was within reach of ever-faster, coal-fired steamships. In 1851, Herman Melville would predict in Moby Dick that the American demand for coaling stations and markets would smash open the gates to that “double-bolted land” of Japan.

The Shogun Ieyoshi, whose honour the 13 Assassins give their lives to preserve, would lay dying in 1853 as the infamous “Black Ships” of Commodore Matthew Perry dropped anchor in Japanese waters and demanded an end to Japan’s centuries of isolation. The Shogunate fell soon afterwards.

Jonathan Clements is the author of A Brief History of the Samurai. This article first appeared on the now-defunct Manga Entertainment website in April 2011.

It was a good day at Central Park Media. After several months of sneaking around and clandestine meetings, they sent in the heavies. A bunch of New York policemen and a lawyer from CPM kicked in the door of a warehouse to find thousands upon thousands of VHS tapes, stacked from floor to ceiling. Many were CPM anime products. All were pirated.

Quite by accident, I was talking to one of CPM’s staff back in 1999 when the news broke, which meant I got to hear the euphoria and excitement close at hand. Jeff the marketing guy confided to me that this was by no means the first time they had uncovered such a duplication ring. They just hadn’t told anyone. Following negative publicity in the late twentieth century, when any anime industry initiative to crack down on criminals was met with internet bleating and self-entitled trolling, the US anime business had, ironically, begun to conduct its piracy enforcement below the radar. The seizure of thousands of dollars’ worth of counterfeit tapes was a matter of private celebration, but it was not widely reported.

Piracy, as Ramon Lobato notes in his book Shadow Economies of Cinema, is as old as cinema itself, with Georges Melies’ Voyage to the Moon (1902) widely ripped off all over the world. But nobody has devoted quite the attention or academic rigour to piracy as Lobato. Lobato doesn’t merely rehash tired arguments of ownership and access, industry’s speculative (and to him “dubious”) logic of loss or fandom’s recurring doctrine of lapse; he provides hard data and persuasive models about those areas of the film world that are usually ignored. His interest is not merely in illegal activities in the film business, but in completely legal elements that rarely get any attention. He notes that 59% of the American film market alone is “straight-to-video”, arguing that while much of this material might be crap, it’s still relevant, and forms the “invisible bulk” of the global industry. As they might say on the street – traditional film distribution is the 1%, but that leaves 99% of other stuff, that doesn’t get the newspaper coverage or the academic examination. It doesn’t qualify for the Oscars and it doesn’t get reviewed in Sight & Sound. But its fans love it just the same. Or at least endure it.

In fact, as Lobato argues, “informal” networks (legal and illegal) can offer distribution of films and subjects outside the mainstream – for ethnic minorities otherwise unserved, for interests not quite mainstream enough, and… well, anime. Bleach and Naruto are heavy hitters in modern UK anime, but neither of them is actually on British television. The hundreds of thousands of discs they have shifted have been largely “invisible” to the TV-watchers of Britain, even though both were “television serials” in their native Japan. If you’re a British fan of these shows, you are watching another culture’s television below your own culture’s radar. You’re part of what Lobato calls “informal distribution.”

Statistics, of course, can be misleading. If we take just two films from the US market, we can soon see why. Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira did very nicely for itself on American cinema screens, generating a million dollars for Streamline Pictures. But Pixar’s Toy Story did a million dollars’ business every week, for six months. Lobato’s argument that something like Akira is just as important as Toy Story will be welcome news to anime fans, although straightforward financial statistics tell us that Akira’s footprint in the marketplace is nowhere as big as Toy Story’s. But sometimes that doesn’t matter. Of the cinema-goers who loved Akira. 100,000 of them came back and bought it on tape. And Carl Macek, who claimed that Akira was once one of the most pirated tapes ever, fought back against the thieves with added value, giving away a free cel with every purchase. Ironically, the cels had been earmarked for disposal by Akira’s production company – regarded as industrial waste in Japan, they were bonus assets in the American market.

Sometimes, the formal networks still have the big bucks, although not always, as the shadowy returns from pornography seem to suggest. Film scholars like to write about the legitimate institutions, at least in part because some of them, at least, can provide actual data. Pirates don’t pay tax or publish their sales figures, and legitimate media companies are not above massaging the figures, bigging up their sales to journalists and underplaying them to the taxman. All of which makes Lobato’s book a deeply helpful account of how the shadow economy of film actually works.

Lobato notes that the phenomenon we call “piracy” has many different flavours, and investigates the implications of them all: piracy as free enterprise, as theft, as authorship, as free speech, as resistance, and as access. All of these modes have come up over the last twenty years in discussion of anime, used as justifications by criminals and consumers alike. In the case of Central Park Media’s take-down, this wasn’t a couple of students with linked video recorders. The pirates they busted were a massive industrial operation that also extended to a shadow-line of distribution. Men hawking bogus wares would drive to remote service stations and video stores, representing themselves as the legal salesmen for a number of video companies. The mom-and-pop store owners would take them at their word and buy tapes to rent out locally, unaware that they were actually buying stolen goods. Criminal money was efficiently laundered in these hand-shake deals, with the store owners assuming that the tapes they were selling were entirely legitimate.

And so, when an ex-girlfriend gleefully reported that she found one of my anime translations on sale in Botswana, my first thought was not a happy one. Did they even speak English in Botswana? (Apparently, they did) Or was my name still visible on the box because a video pirate had copied the cover without understanding its meaning? Piracy is big business, but it’s only part of Lobato’s shadow economy, which also incorporates discussions of torrenting, downloads, cam copies, video hosting and cyberlockers. And jackrabbiting, which is apparently the term for what those travelling salesmen were doing – passing off illegal access as legal access, a practice that has also been prevalent in cinema since its earliest days. Back in olden times, it ran to outlying cinema owners putting on screenings of films without telling the distributors, and thereby relieving them of their legitimate cut.

During the Gulf War, two UK anime companies made a habit of sending free tapes out to army bases – Kiseki had ex-military men on staff who wanted to do their mates a favour; Manga Entertainment just wanted to do something for the troops. It tells you something about how good-intentioned this was that neither company ever tried to make marketing capital out of it. They just did it; once again, behind the scenes, below the radar, not part of the ongoing public conversation with fans. I have no idea what all the paratroopers and snipers made of Ghost in the Shell. The mind boggles. Anyway, inevitably, some of these cassettes ended up in the wrong hands, and contributed to a thriving piracy business in the Middle East. A couple of years later, a baffled producer from Manga Entertainment showed me the weirdest fan letter he’d ever seen, from a viewer in Iran asking where he could buy legitimate tapes, as the quality of the pirate videos he’d been watching was awful. It’s anecdotes like these that the industry largely avoids mentioning, because rhetorically, it suggests that a preview medium, even an illegal one, can help establish legitimate sales. However, current research suggests there is only a fractional, barely relevant increase in likely sales from free previews versus an unknown quantity of lost sales through theft, which means “free” media has to find some other means of getting its income — from toy tie-ins, or collector’s editions, or…. something. The flipside, of course, is that if consumers stop being consumers altogether, and just leech, it makes a product impossible to manufacture at a profit. As the late Noboru Ishiguro once noted, if absolutely nobody (fans, TV stations, video stores, whoever) will pay for anime, anime companies won’t make it any more.

Lobato places piracy as just part of “informal film distribution”, a model of the film world that cheekily and productively turns everything on its head. What if, Lobato asks, “traditional” cinema is the exception, and most of the film business might be said to operate in rental stores and on laptops? Not merely here, but in Mexican slums and Nigerian souks? Lobato argues that traditional institutions of film, such as cinema theatres and film studios are accorded a form of “epistemological authority”, but that there is no reason not to treat “informal” distribution networks with the same importance. After all, as one wag put it, if you’re going straight-to-video, you’re either on the way up or on the way down. That obscure 1980s “straight-to-video” cartoon, Warriors of the Wind, was a legal release, yet is treated like toxic waste by its director, who fashioned it as a bespoke, theatrical feature, only to see the informal economy turn it into bargain-bin junk. Then again, that director, Hayao Miyazaki, would eventually win an Oscar, so might arguably be said to have had the last laugh.

In a recent interview with Colony Drop, I said that Studio Ghibli’s absence from English video distribution for much of the 1990s might have been a blessing in disguise. Miyazaki was so incensed by the butchering of Nausicaa into Warriors of the Wind, that he made it impossible for anyone but a real film studio to afford the rights to his subsequent movies. As a result, his later films were arguably spared similar desultory treatment, and not permitted to wither and die in the hands of the “wrong” distributor. But that’s the kind of backwards reasoning that Lobato encourages. Can there be advantages to informal distribution, even if, as in the case of Miyazaki’s (entirely justifiable) decade-long strop, they are structuring absences that are only valuable in hindsight?

Lobato’s book doesn’t mention anime all that much, but so much of what he has to say is directly relevant to countless fights and spats at conventions, in podcasts and online, between anime fans and the industry that wants their money. Lobato challenges people who write about film to think about films as objects of distribution, not merely as texts to be appreciated. In doing so, he opens up all sorts of cans of worms about the way that films get made. And he tells some fantastic stories; such as the tale of Spike Lee, who decided to take enforcement into his own hands after the release of Malcolm X, by wandering the streets of Harlem with a baseball bat, looking for pirate vendors.

Shadow Economies of Cinema is a fascinating book that will help place anime in its historical context, not only as part of a medium hidden in the shadows of the mainstream, but also as the innocent victim of a “black and grey” economy run by spivs, shysters and thieves. I don’t agree with everything Lobato says, but possibly he doesn’t either — he is honourably careful to present both sides of every story, however unpalatable. He makes some very good cases about copyright enclosures and the fact that there can be such a thing as “too much” formality, literally making it impossible for consumers to legally buy the products they want. It’s a fascinating distribution- and exhibition-led study of modern media, with much relevance to the anime world.

Jonathan Clements is the author of Anime: A History. This article originally appeared on the Manga Entertainment blog in March 2012, and is reprinted here after that site’s disappearance.