To America, where Robert Woodhead and Natsumi Ueki, owners of the fan favourite video label AnimEigo, announce that they are selling their company and retiring. This would usually be where fandom clutches its pearls in horror and starts bemoaning the fate of a good company snapped up by some conglomerate, but this time the buyer seems ideally suited.

Founded in 1988, AnimEigo were the people who first brought Urusei Yatsura, Bubblegum Crisis and Otaku no Video to the west, initially as a subs-only boutique distributor – their titles first made it to the UK under the aegis of their sub-licensee, Anime Projects.

Justin Sevakis, whose disc-mastering company Media OCD is responsible for many of the Blu-ray presentations that eventually show up in the UK, has offered to take AnimEigo off its owners’ hands, kiting it along for another generation. Somewhat appropriately, the story broke on Anime News Network, the website that Sevakis founded back in his student days, long since sold on to other owners. The deal was done some time ago, but the parties involved first wanted to do a grand tour of all the anime companies in Japan, introducing the new boss and pleading for the change in ownership not to shut down contracts that dealt specifically with Woodhead and Ueki, rather than whoever it was that would take over their company.

So, this is no leveraged buyout or corporate takeover. Instead, it’s two much-loved fans-turned-pro, gently handing their company over to another fan-turned-pro, and sticking around to ease the transition along.

Sevakis announces that he intends to continue the AnimEigo policy of crowd-sourcing bespoke collectors’ editions of niche titles. Woodhead and Ueki will guide him through to the completion of whatever projects they had underway at the time of the sale, but I suspect that once Sevakis is fully in charge, the acquisition of his own distributor is sure to tempt him with new prospects. If you suddenly found yourself with a Blu-ray label, what would your dream acquisitions be…?

Of course, it might also Turn Him to the Dark Side. Watch out for the sudden appearance of a Mirror-Universe goatee, and a sudden desire to dub everything with silly voices and swearing. I suspect, however, that AnimEigo is in safe hands, and this is one acquisition that fandom won’t decry as the worst evarrr.

Jonathan Clements is the author of Anime: A History. This article first appeared in NEO #239, 2024.

To Wajima, on Japan’s remote Noto peninsula, where the earthquake on 1st January, caused a short-circuit, or an upturned stove, or something to catch alight, creating a fire that levelled 50,000 square metres of the city. The fire destroyed part of the Asaichi historic area, which included the Go Nagai Wonderland Museum. Once the centrepiece of a series of street-based art installations celebrating the creator of Kekko Kamen, Devilman, Cutey Honey, Mazinger Z and Getter Robo, it is now a burned-out hulk.

This isn’t the first disaster to befall a manga creator and certainly won’t be the last. The Shotaro Ishinomori museum in Ishinomaki, for example, was totally wrecked by the 2011 tsunami, but reopened a year later. In that case, the museum had been deliberately designed to be tsunami resistant, with an eight-metre high central hall, and a policy of only storing original artwork and valuable items on the upper floors. So, when a massive gyre of floodwaters and debris smashed through the doors, it only ruined the reception area and the gift shop.

Fire, of course, is not so forgiving. In the case of manga artist Mitsuteru Yokoyama, the fire that killed him, sparked by a dropped cigarette, also swept through the personal archives that he kept in his home office, destroying countless original pieces by one of 1950s manga’s most influential creators.

A statement put out by Go Nagai’s production company, Dynamic Planning, puts a brave face on the Wajima disaster, expressing concern for the people and economy of the town, and shrugging off the lost artwork as something that he can always “draw again.” That’s not the sound of a man who expects to cash in a massive insurance policy – more likely a philanthropist signalling to his home town that he won’t be suing them for the lost paintings he lent to them.

Nagai’s thoughts were with the relatives of the 70 Wajima residents who died as a result of the tsunami and fire, and the likelihood that the loss of the museum and its location will be a damaging blow to local tourism. He wasn’t that bothered about a few old paintings, which was a sweet and noble thing for him to say. Considering that a single piece of Go Nagai artwork can fetch up to $1,800 at auction, particularly in the Francophone world where he is still be loved for “Goldorak” (UFO Robo Grendizer), maybe now is a good time to rustle up a few more for a charity auction?

Jonathan Clements is the author of Anime: A History. This article first appeared in NEO #238, 2024.

From the mid-1980s onwards, Inomata was the queen of the sci-fi bookshelves, with her cover imagery dominating works including Alien Cop by Mariko Ohara, Leda by Kaoru Kurimoto, and KLAN by Yoshiki Tanaka. “Each time I have to draw,” she said, “I just read the novel, follow my own instincts, and all of the sudden the images come out. I don’t think about it again afterwards.”

Over at All the Anime, I write up the life of the illustrator Mutsumi Inomata.

“Translator Olivia Plowman delivers an eloquent, mannered text like Downton Abbey with dragons, adding to the believability of Naturu’s weird world. Throughout the novel, I was left with an odd sense of anticipatory excitement, less about the book itself, than about the wonderful anime it could surely become.”

Over at All the Anime, I review Takasugi Naturu’s Marriage, Divorce and Beyond.

For viewers looking to find out more beyond the surface of the Netflix series Shogun, there’s a bunch of books from your friendly neighbourhood historian that can help you out. For a sense of how the Shogun fits into the world of the samurai, try A Brief History of the Samurai, selected by the Japan Times as part of its Essential Reading for Japanophiles.

For a sense of how the samurai fit into the overall history of their homeland, there’s A Brief History of Japan. “…a compact, exciting, eye-opening vision of Japan’s entire history. The people and events that shaped Japan over millennia are all covered here. What makes this such a stand-out book on Japan is its humor. Clements injects his book with humorous observations and anecdotes that add so much humanity to an otherwise dry and exhaustingly lengthy topic. This is a history book painted with color and vibrancy.” ―Tokyo Weekender.

For the story of the rise and fall of Christianity in Japan, and its explosive end in a revolt led by a teenage messiah, there’s Christ’s Samurai: The True Story of the Shimabara Rebellion, “…a concise and lucid account of a unique period in Japan’s history ― Japan Times.

And for an in-depth analysis of the twilight of the samurai, and how their 800-year reign impacted upon the world in the twentieth century, there’s Japan at War in the Pacific: The Rise and Fall of the Japanese Empire in Asia, 1868-1945, “…a lucid history of the rise and fall of militarism in Japan” ― New York Journal of Books.

“I have transitioned into a new animal.”

No, not radiation. Not the struggles of war and the agonies of constant trauma, transforming into a rampaging, city-stomping beast. Because that would be the trailer for a Godzilla movie, and those words are spoken by Beyoncé Knowles in the advert for her concert movie Renaissance. And both of them are fighting for space on IMAX screens.

Takashi Yamazaki’s Godzilla Minus One is a stark reboot of the monster franchise, playing upon the idea that Japan in 1945 has already been reduced to “zero”, and that an attack by an unstoppable beast just makes everything so bad that we go into negative numbers. But whereas Minus One hit many cinemas outside Japan at the beginning of December, its UK release waited a critical couple of weeks, in a business decision that might end up benefiting absolutely everybody.

The UK has 52 IMAX screens, while Ireland has another two, with the majority of the screens being part of Cineworld/Odeon cinemas. That’s substantially less than the United States of America, where presumably Godzilla Minus One and Renaissance would be able to jostle for audience attention without wrecking the theatres.

I put the question to Anna Francis at Minus One’s UK distributor, Anime Limited, who conceded that Beyoncé’s Renaissance had already been booked into a number of IMAX screens before Godzilla began clambering out of the sea to smash stuff. But Beyoncé, she states, “was only part of the picture… the main reason was that we wanted to avoid the busier film period at the start of December.”

So, it’s not that the King of Monsters was scared of going head-to-head with Queen Bey, more like the presence of multiple distractions as the holiday season got going. Instead, Minus One got its UK release on 15th December, gaining a fortnight’s respite before yet another monster blockbuster landed in cinemas on Boxing Day: Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron.

But wait a minute, Minus One dropped on 1st December not just in the USA, but also in Canada, France, Italy, Spain, Poland, Australia, New Zealand and even Belgium. Could it be that all those places were confident there was no cross-over, whereas British audiences demonstrated an equal love for both the Big G and the Big B that had to be accommodated? At least they are spared a Barbenheimer decision…

Jonathan Clements is the author of Anime: A History. This article first appeared in NEO #237, 2024.

“The ability to buy into the ‘ownership’ of a new anime while it is being made can save a canny investor hundreds of thousands of dollars at the distribution end.”

Over at Variety, Mark Schilling interviews me about the pitfalls of international animation co-productions between Japan and other Asian countries — a good chance for me to quote from the China chapter added to the second edition of my Anime: A History.

Jonathan Clements var ikke helt så tweedklædt og stiff upper lip en brite, som jeg havde forestillet mig. Han var tværtimod en utroligt imødekommende herre i T-shirt og med gråt strithår. [“Jonathan Clements was not quite as tweed-clad and stiff-upper-lip a Brit as I had imagined. On the contrary, he was an incredibly welcoming gentleman in a T-shirt and with gray stubble.”]

This is why you should always dress up for Zoom conferences. Over at Zetland, I discuss Hayao Miyazaki and Pippi Longstocking, as part of Marie Carsten Pedersen’s beautiful article about what Totoro means to her. Well worth a read (and a listen), even if you need Google Translate to navigate the Danish.