Like its title, Astro Boy and Anime Come to the Americas: An Insider’s View of a Pop Culture Phenomenon is a game of two halves. The first is a riveting first-hand account of life in the broadcast media by the producer who stumbled from radio into television just in time to be part of the scramble for syndicated content in the 1960s. Fred Ladd (1927-2021) was a man with many irons in the fire, hacking together Eastern bloc hokum to make throwaway six-minute sci-fi serials, tinting monochrome movies to meet the demands of the gaping maw of colour television, and repurposing old wildlife documentaries to make cheapo jungle stories. He also carefully rewrote and cut up a black-and-white cartoon show from Japan, inadvertently becoming one of the pioneers of the modern anime business. This book is the closest thing we will get to his autobiography, and presents a gripping account of forgotten technologies and faded films.

More than aware of the cheap nature of the visuals, Ladd deliberately pepped up the soundscape on Astro Boy with traffic noises and offstage business in order to create a busier illusion of action – I don’t doubt this claim for a moment, but note that Astro Boy’s creator, Osamu Tezuka, said that he did similar things at the Japanese end: was this something that Tezuka learned from Ladd, like the idea to have lyrics to the Astro Boy theme? With a budget of $1800 per episode for dubbing, Ladd hothoused his staff until they could do an episode a day, running two projectors in tandem in order to scrape vital minutes when film would otherwise be loaded by union jobsworths while the actors wait. Ladd also saw Tokyo and Seoul for himself, delivering invaluable slice-of-life accounts of the Asian animation industry at home.

This was the age when foreign cartoons were so much ballast – often literally, since they were bartered in lieu of hard currency, which some foreign countries were unable to export, in return for American TV programming. We get Ladd’s first-hand perspectives of the birth of Gigantor, Battle of the Planets, Kimba the White Lion, and Marine Boy, each arriving in a chaotic whirl of meetings and negotiations, compromises and disasters, skulduggery and gazumping. Although modern anime fans might reel in horror at Ladd’s attitude towards the original Japanese, he was still a master of his craft, and a loving shepherd of these shows into their English-language forms. Like Carl Macek in the generation that followed, his invasive rewrites are what made the broadcast of the English versions even possible in the first place. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Ladd’s face-to-face crisis meeting with Osamu Tezuka himself, where he talks Astro Boy’s creator through the changes that have to be made in dubbing and editing in order to get around the American censor. Here we hear not only of the notorious unbroadcast episodes, but of several others that would have been banned without Ladd’s careful attention.

It’s fascinating to see Astro Boy’s story told from the American end of production, particularly in the form of US issues over censorship and technology, which would end up steering Tezuka’s production thousands of miles away. Ladd is a witty and lucid memorialist of anime’s first steps into foreign broadcast media, aided by his amanuensis Harvey Deneroff, who pops up occasionally to offer crucial notes on context. It’s Deneroff, one presumes, that we have to thank for many of the incisive asides that correct common fallacies about the international animation business, including the vital semantic distinction between Astro Boy’s widely reported sale to NBC, and its actual sale to the very different entity NBC Enterprises. Sometimes, however, one gets the feeling that genuine recollections have been spruced up with unwelcome trivia from doubtful sources. Someone, for example, has added the notion that Nippon Sunrise sprang up in the 1960s amid the first flush of Astro Boy’s success, which Ladd cannot possibly remember, since Sunrise wasn’t founded until 1972, after the collapse of Tezuka’s studio. Similarly, entertainingly lively accounts of certain events come with problematic dates – why does Ladd claim to be sorting out the first 12 episodes of Astro Boy in Japan in mid-1964, when they had surely already been broadcast in America almost a year earlier? And although there is much information in this book that will surprise readers even in Japan, the authors’ linguistic knowledge is wanting – throughout the text, they consistently fail to spell Astro Boy’s Japanese title correctly.

The book is published by McFarland & Company – an outfit with academic aspirations that even extend to the paperback cover price. But Ladd’s reminiscences are so essential to understanding the 1960s anime business, it is well worth it for those alone. Unfortunately, Ladd’s contribution appears to comprise a novella-length 100 pages, and Deneroff’s additions, while genuinely useful as a focus for Ladd’s early testimony, also bulk it out with pointless padding for the latter half of the book, seemingly salvaged from a bunch of old articles. Far from presenting an “insider’s view of a pop culture phenomenon”, the back-end is more like a baffled description from the sidelines, reeling off names and brief synopses of dozens of newer shows simply, it seems, because they are there. Present-day errors reach far greater proportions: The Girl Who Leapt Through Time is inexplicably included in a run-down of Korean films, and the outrageous claim is made that animation in Japan was “virtually dormant for almost half a century” after 1918. But this should not detract from the undeniable value of Ladd’s horse’s-mouth reminiscences, or Deneroff’s efforts in guiding them into print: an irreplaceable narrative of anime in the 1960s.

Jonathan Clements is the author of Anime: A History. This article originally appeared on the now-defunct Manga Entertainment website in November 2011, and is reprinted here following the news of Ladd’s death, aged 94.

Ryosuke Takahashi, in his own words.

“Osamu Tezuka was… well, ninety-nine percent of the time he was a nice guy. At Mushi Production he’d say to us: ‘You’re creatives! Go and create, draw your hearts’ desire.’ So we’d draw whatever we wanted and we’d be nearly finished, and then he’d say: ‘No! Do it again!’

“We worked so hard. There would be times when we wouldn’t even go home. But we all had footrests under our desks, and you could put your coat on it and use it as a pillow. There was one time when I crawled under my table, just to get a little nap. I opened my eyes, and saw that Tezuka was sleeping under the next desk.

“Tezuka was the life and soul of Mushi. Mushi without Tezuka was like North Korea without Kim Jong-il. It fell apart.

“I wasn’t there, though, not then. I’d fallen in with Juro Kara, a playwright who’d briefly worked at Mushi Production as a scriptwriter. But whenever Tezuka asked him to change something, he would just glare back at him, and after a while, I think Tezuka was scared of him.

“Anyway, Kara and his wife were also avant-garde theatre performers, and they would be onstage with a bunch of dancers, painted gold. After the show, they would all jump in the bath together and scrub each other down naked, to get all the paint off. I realised that if I joined the troupe, I would have to jump in the bath with all the actresses. So I volunteered for that and ended up on a European tour, although nothing came of it. By the time I got back to Japan, Mushi Production had collapsed.

“But it wasn’t long before other companies started up using people from the old studios. Most of the managers at the newly established Sunrise had been lower down the pecking order at Mushi. This meant they could learn from their former bosses’ mistakes.

“The Sunrise studio was founded by people who had been middle managers at Mushi, who’d seen what went wrong. At Mushi Production, the animators were on a salary; in a sense, it didn’t matter if they worked or not and many abused that system. A lot of them had no sense of loyalty; they’d be freelancing for Toei under the desks, and at Toei, they’d be freelancing for Mushi! At Sunrise, everyone got paid for what they did.

“You ask me what the difference was between Mushi and Sunrise. Largely, it was that Tezuka wasn’t there. He had a real faith in artists and animators. The trouble with artists and animators, is that they often don’t like to work! Artists weren’t salaried at Sunrise. They had to produce work in order to get paid, and that made a big difference. All the companies in the 1970s were set up, to some extent, in reaction to the failure of Mushi, but it was only Sunrise that perfected it.

“Toy tie-ins were important to them. They had Yoshiyuki Tomino working on Gundam. If Tomino is a star, then I’m… well, I guess I’m just a street lamp! They said to me: ‘Gundam has done well for us; we want something like Gundam, but different. We don’t much care what it’s about, just make sure there are robots in it!’

“Gundam had robots fighting, but they were in space. They didn’t really have to touch the ground. My earlier Fang of the Sun Dougram had robots fighting on the ground, but they were big, stompy, slow machines. For Armored Trooper Votoms, I wanted something faster. I made them smaller. I put skates on their feet. That wasn’t about budget; that was so they could really zip around. Then one of my animators suggested that we could get them to slalom, like they were skiing… and we were off!

“Of course, toys became even more important. In the 1990s, a lot of the founders of Sunrise were approaching retirement. In order to protect their staff, they sold their interests in the company to one of their clients: Bandai. It kept everyone out of trouble.

“The ‘Japanese’ animation business today sustains maybe seven thousand employees in Japan, but maybe another fourteen thousand outside it, in Vietnam, Taiwan, China and other places. I teach three days a week, at the Osaka University of Arts. I teach the students how to make entertainment animation. By which I mean commercial stuff. Not art-house cartoons, but animation that they can actually make a living on: anime that can actually help them survive! I don’t have time to write a book. I am sixty-eight years old and professors retire at seventy. Maybe then I’ll write down my experiences in the industry. Maybe…

“I’ve got a place in the countryside. It’s a little house out in the middle of nature. What do I do there? Absolutely nothing! Drink a little whisky, walk around dressed like a British gentleman… Play golf. I look out in the garden, and I think it could do with a little statuette of a nature spirit. A Moomin or something like that. Yes, I worked on The Moomins, too.

“Why did I do it? I did it to survive!”

Jonathan Clements is the author of Anime: A History. This article originally appeared on the now-defunct Manga Entertainment website in January 2012, and was based on Takahashi’s onstage interview at Scotland Loves Anime 2011.

This year sees the thirtieth anniversary of one of the most influential companies in the history of Japanese animation. Despite being a fundamental part of modern Japanese media, the name Celsys is largely unspoken among anime fans, unless those anime fans happen to be historians or professional animators.

Celsys was founded in May 1991 to make the digital animation software package that would come to be known as RETAS Pro. Within a year, timid animators working on a Fist of the North Star game at Toei would try out this “Revolutionary Engineering Total Animation System,” a basket of programs including Stylos, for creating digital “pencil” images, Traceman for in-betweening, Paintman for colouring and Core RETAS for integrating all the other elements. The Windows version also added Movie Edit Pro, which allowed for the addition of limited special effects.

RETAS was released at a watershed moment in the history of computing, as the falling costs of hardware made mass adoption of software a possibility. By 1997, Toei had begun phasing out its analogue animation units – Dr Slump and Spooky Kitaro, despite continuing to look like analogue animation, were soon created solely inside computers. As the Pokémon boom led to a surge in animation contracts, overseas studios were increasingly able to integrate their work down a phoneline, and multimedia operations were thrilled at the chance to have all their assets digitised from the outset.

Celsys’ own publicity has boasted that up to 90% of all modern anime “use RETAS Pro” in their production, although I suspect what that means is that they use RETAS Pro in part of their production. Some companies may work solely in RETAS, but others still just use it for Paintman these days. Regardless, the Celsys name is something you will find associated with vast numbers of modern anime, and as the price of the software dropped during the noughties from £4,000 to £240, suddenly the world was full of have-a-go-heroes like Makoto Shinkai, who’d worked out that you didn’t need a studio of 200 people anymore, you just needed a big desktop machine and lots of time. In 2013, even Sazae-san, the last anime to be made in the old-fashioned way, gave up and became an all-digital operation.

Celsys went on to be similarly ubiquitous in the worlds of e-book readers (CLIP STUDIO READER) and digital manga production (Manga Studio). In other words, their engine is chugging away behind almost all the electronic, streaming or downloadable light novels, cartoons and comics consumed in modern Japan. Happy birthday to them.

Jonathan Clements is the author of Anime: A History. This article first appeared in NEO #209, 2021.

“Mittsual, or Black Wolf Fever, is a deadly affliction passed on by canines. In Masashi Ando and Masayuki Miyaji’s anime feature, it is presented as something that is both magical and physical, a rising storm of black vapours that cloaks an onrush of rabid dogs. For two generations, it has broken out in repeated waves, leading to swift but largely palliative advances in medical knowledge among Zolian doctors. We see them at work, masked up and socially distanced, among the mass funeral pyres of a salt mine, where a mittsual outbreak has killed workers and guards alike.

“Entirely? No, not entirely. Someone has made it out alive, and in an impressive series of deductions like something out of Black Death CSI, Sae the tracker works out that it was a prisoner, who broke out of his cell and somehow clambered to freedom, despite suffering from an animal bite. A man is on the run, and if he is asymptomatic, his blood might form the basis for the long-hoped-for mittsual vaccine… all they have to do is find him.”

Over at All the Anime, I write up The Deer King, which has its UK premiere in Edinburgh this month.

“Aiyar is a professional outsider, adept at dropping into an entirely alien culture, and ready to grab hold of it with both hands. She is not some listless plus-one, wearing out a groove between Starbucks and the diplomatic compound, she is an accomplished flaneur and enthusiastic student, flinging herself into cultural pursuits and research.”

Over at All the Anime, I reveal Pallavi Aiyar’s just-published Orienting: An Indian in Japan.

“In an era when every single anime out of Japan seems to come attached to some sort of tourist initiative, it’s also lovely to see Osaka finally get its moment in the sun, with loving backgrounds that take the viewer through a year of four distinct seasons. Japan’s ‘second city’, its Glasgow or Birmingham if you will, Osaka itself has something of a chip on its shoulder, not as big as the bustling Tokyo, not as classy as the old-time capital Kyoto, which is so close to it that the two cities share a metro system. When Hayato off-handedly thanks Tsuneo with ‘O-kini‘ instead of ‘Arigato,’ it’s a tiny fist-bump for a dialect and an attitude that is so often sidelined in anime settings that are either all-Tokyo, all-the-time, or some obscure dormitory suburb that’s fronted enough cash to become the next ‘holy land’ for otaku visitors.”

Over at All the Anime, I write up the forthcoming cinema release of Josee, the Tiger and the Fish.

On several occasions in recent months, I have been approached by journalists demanding to have the meteoric success of Demon Slayer explained to them. The film has, after all, become the highest-grossing movie ever in Japan, taking just under 40 billion yen (£266 million) beating not only Spirited Away and Your Name, but Titanic and Frozen.

However, I refused to comment, on the grounds that I didn’t really know. I had some guesses, certainly, particularly regarding unique pandemic conditions. One imagines a weary Dad, on the one day that a family can actually go somewhere together saying: “All right, we can all go out today, but we are not sitting through the last Evangelion movie, and your sister doesn’t want to see Josee and the Tiger and the Fish, and your mother has already seen Fate/Grand Order: Divine Realm of The Round Table: Camelot- Wandering; Agateram twice, and besides, it takes so long to say the title that by the time we get our tickets, the film will be half over…”

And then there are the otaku. When reporting Japanese box office, particularly for anime, it is disingenuous to talk about ticket sales as if each has gone to an individual, because some of those tickets are being bought by the same guy – once for the lucky gonk, once for the giveaway poster, once for the action figure he will keep in its box. And with limited choice in Japanese cinemas, such merch speculators are out in force with more money to spend on a single film.

There has been some talk among pundits of some sort of unique synergy among voice-acting talent (nope), or music (not really). There has been some mildly persuasive commentary on the fact that the manga itself is popular with Japanese readers (yes… but that popular?), hitting some sort of spirit of the age.

But as to why Demon Slayer is the top of the Japanese box office, my honest answer is “I don’t know”. As the months go by, I realise now that I should have said so, in public, much earlier on. Someone should have stuck their hand up in December and said: “No idea, sorry. If we knew how this worked, we’d all be millionaires.”

Jonathan Clements is the author of Anime: A History. This article first appeared in NEO #208 (2021).