The body has long been an obsession with Shinya Tsukamoto. He has taken it over with metal viruses, in the two Tetsuo movies. He transformed it through violence in Tokyo Fist and Bullet Ballet. With his last film, A Snake of June, he announced that he was renouncing violence, but while Vital may be gentler in its execution, it is still very much a part of Tsukamoto’s corporeal corpus.

Where Tetsuo seemed to allude to J.G. Ballard’s Crash (1973), with its bodies distorted through meshing with metal, Vital seems to owe more to the same author’s Kindness of Women (1991), in which Ballard recounted the stirrings of his emotions as a medical student for the woman whose cadaver he was dissecting.

Vital also references the elusive Blue Bird of Happiness, both in the theme of its title song and in the tattoo of its ghostly female lead. Maurice Maeterlinck’s 1908 play is perhaps better known in Japan than in the UK, both through translations of the original, and its use in the late Hisashi Nozawa’s Blue Bird (1997), a TV drama series about a criminal on the run who finds refuge in the tropical island paradise of Saipan.

Tsukamoto’s actual inspirations for his film are more prosaic: a terrible back twinge that left him bedridden for days, and a chance viewing of Leonardo da Vinci’s anatomical sketchbooks. Tsukamoto first saw the books at the house of Alejandro Jodorowsky in 1992, where he had been perusing the director’s sketches for his abortive Dune project.

“I looked at many of da Vinci’s drawings,” he told biographer Tom Mes, “and I could really sense his curiosity for the interior of the human body.” Tsukamoto’s research took led him to witness actual hospital dissections, not with the ghoulish voyeurism one might expect from the director of Tetsuo, but with a curiously reverent respect.

For his film, he utilised both old and new talents. Leading man Tadanobu Asano is a familiar face in Japanese film, and previously appeared in Tsukamoto’s Gemini as a vengeful samurai. But Tsukamoto and Asano had also worked together as actors in the Quiet Days of Firemen, an obscure Japanese workplace-oriented movie from 1994. Asano welcomed the chance to work with Tsukamoto again, and was surprised to discover a personal association with the movie’s location. Sensing something familiar about the abandoned Yokohama hospital where Tsukamoto shot the bulk of his real-world footage, Asano called his own mother, to discover that the very same Aiji Centre had been the place of his own birth.

Asano’s female co-stars are less well-known as actresses. Tsukamoto cast the model Kiki for her vulpine eyes, and ballerina Nami Tsukamoto (no relation) for her homespun spontaneity and her ability to dance in the role of Ryoko. As an unknown in the film world, she was also less likely to voice complaints about her role, which would require a full-size cast to be made of her naked body.

Ryoko’s scenes are largely shot in a dream-world, for which Tsukamoto elected to use Japan’s southern island of Okinawa. Other islands are equally idyllic, but only Okinawa offers direct flights to Tokyo for a film unit working against the clock. The island was also the prime location for Takeshi Kitano’s Sonatine, and its use in Vital would lead Tsukamoto to take drastic steps in production. Regarding natural beauty as a crucial element of the film, Tsukamoto elected to shoot on 35mm, a lavish choice for the notoriously low-budget film-maker, and one which required an airtight seven-week shooting schedule to preserve the budget. To shorten the period of post-production, Tsukamoto used digital editing methods for the first time.

In Iron Man: The Cinema of Shinya Tsukamoto, the director discusses Vital as a continuation of his earlier work: “When I finished [it], I somehow felt refreshed, like I’d found a new environment for myself. In Tetsuo II, Tokyo Fist and Bullet Ballet, the protagonists hurt their own bodies trying to find out whether they are living in a dream. In Vital, the protagonist is confronted with a dead body and enters it. In the end, he crossed through the gate, from the agonised, suffocating life of the city; he emerges in the vast realms of nature. One day I would like to make a movie that would take me even further and deeper into nature, far away from that gate. For now, though, I would like to keep exploring just outside that gate, the way I did with Vital.”

This article was originally included in the sleeve notes of the 2006 release of Vital by Tartan Video.

On the original, terrestrial broadcast of Cowboy Bebop, the disgruntled production team signed off with the message: “This is not the end. You will see the real Cowboy Bebop someday.” Shinichiro Watanabe’s vision had been trammelled by a series of restrictions, including timid broadcasters still reeling from the 1997 Pokémon epilepsy incident, and a jumpy censorship regime hyper-sensitive after several widely publicised real-world incidents of supposedly media-inspired violence.

As this book recounts, Cowboy Bebop existed in two versions – the defanged, episodic 12-part light version as first seen on TV Tokyo, and the uncut, adult-focussed 26 episodes with a complete story arc and more mature content that was broadcast four months later on WOWOW. It’s this latter version that was exported abroad, most notably to the United States.

The Cartoon Network had been waiting for months. The Cartoon Network, in fact, had bought it purely on the strength of the opening credits, and in the words of producer Jason DeMarco, “didn’t even know what it was about.” As episodes began to drift in, channel buyers knew it was too racy for the daytime slots, and the arrival of Cowboy Bebop helped propel CN into creating a new late-night block of animation: Adult Swim. Cowboy Bebop closed out the first night’s broadcast, and stayed on the channel for over a decade.

If you were watching the Cartoon Network in the 2000s or the 2010s, at some point you were going to see Cowboy Bebop. You might only catch a single episode, but you’d be sure to remember it. With little merchandise to cash in, its US following was not immediately obvious. The ratings remained a trickle in the graveyard slot, but whereas the average terrestrial anime comes and goes in thirteen weeks, Cowboy Bebop lived on Adult Swim for thirteen years.

Watanabe’s vision was sufficiently retro to be future-proof. The animation didn’t suffer from shonky turn-of-the-century CG or Digipaint. The sci-fi diaspora was suitably diverse to weather changing attitudes. As each fresh crop of viewers identified as anime fans, Cowboy Bebop was one of their gateway anime, not just for them, but for the parents who asked what this anime thing was, and could be shown something that wasn’t cringeworthy.

Even within the industry in Japan it was widely understood that Cowboy Bebop was lightning in a bottle — a fantastic synergy of creative talent that you couldn’t explain with a spreadsheet and copy with a focus group. Cowboy Bebop wasn’t something that you could cynically recreate, and that’s part of its classic status, suffused with, as Yoko Kanno so memorably put it: “the smell of fermentation, like natto.”

This book delves into the whys and hows of such a phenomenon came about, and the nooks and crannies of its various spin-offs. It’s a fantastic account of a show that is now demonstrably older than its current crop of new fans on Netflix. It’s been a long wait, but Cowboy Bebop finally has a critical appraisal that delves deep into its inspirations and effects.

But enough from me. I think it’s time we blow this scene. Get everybody and the stuff together. Okay…

Jonathan Clements is the author of Anime: A History. This text forms the introduction to Satoru Stevenson’s new book 3, 2, 1, Let’s Jam: The Unofficial and Unauthorised Guide to the Original Cowboy Bebop.

For fans of epic fantasy and supernatural battles between gods and demons, this manga will take you on an epic quest, as the young boy Tsuchimaru acquires a powerful sword for a mysterious artisan and joins the gods to fight fiends himself.

In a time when gods and humans live and fight together the young boy Tsuchimaru was helpless, a mere child in the face of those mighty struggles… until a mysterious wandering artisan came by with a sword they had forged and gifted it to the child, enabling him to take up arms in the titanic conflict!

Out tomorrow from Titan Manga, volume one of Kishidashiki’s Sword of the Titans, a fantastically bonkers re-reading of ancient myths as borderline sci-fi, translated by Motoko Tamamuro and me.

Kiyomizu-dera, Kifune Shrine, and Adashino Nenbutsu-ji — to most these places are merely tourist hotspots in the busy city of Kyoto… but each is hiding a dark history, tales of ghosts and bloodshed! In this volume come and hear the true stories of these haunted places, and the creatures that lurk just out of sight…

Out tomorrow from Titan Manga, Yumeya’s Shadows of Kyoto, translated by Motoko Tamamuro and me.

To Japan, where the gaming company Cyber Agent has published its guidelines for employees using AI – a deliberate attempt, it seems, to establish rules and etiquette for a new age where machines do so much of the heavy lifting.

Employees at CyberAgent are forbidden from entering “existing works, author names, works, celebrities, or celebrity names into their prompts.” This amounts to a recognition that saying “I want Seven Samurai, but they’re all badgers led by Nicole Kidman” could be seen as an infringement of the copyright in Kurosawa’s movie, and the image rights of Keith Urban’s wife.

It was only last month (NEO #240) that this column was wringing its hands about the effect of machine translation in the world of subtitling and translation. But we’re back again, it seems, in record time, because so-called “artificial intelligence” works its way into so many parts of the production chain.

The company behind Darwin’s Game and Idoly Pride, CyberAgent has been extending its tentacles throughout modern media for some time, in a lucrative tie-up deal with Kadokawa, the establishment of an anime investment arm, and even the acquisition of a theatre company – live events, of course, being the one thing that can’t be cloned, pirated or replicated, forming an ever-growing sector of the anime-adjacent media mix.

This latest announcement represents an important inflection point in the history of AI in media, as it’s something of a line drawn in the sand. CyberAgent is effectively saying that it recognises machines can’t really come up with anything original, and while it’s happy to use them in various parts of the process, it is wary of wading too far into areas that are liable to be subject to legislation in future.

Even though an “image board”, what you might call a scrap book of magazine cuttings and tearsheets, is a commonplace artefact in creative industries, CyberAgent’s creators are forbidden from creating the digital equivalent. No copyrighted images; no photos of the actress that you’d like your lead to look like; no film poster from someone else’s company that sums up the mood you’re looking for. When they write the prompts for their machines, they have to keep things generic, which will keep the results generic.

It implies they’ll make use of AI for harmless backgrounds like “give me a mountain vista” or “a desert with a temple on a hill”, but nothing that might get them sued. Unless it looks like a famous painting of a desert with a temple on a hill…

Jonathan Clements is the author of Anime: A History. This article first appeared in NEO #241, 2024.

Kanzaki Rei is an avid gamer, but his debts are mounting up as the expensive medical treatments for his sister don’t come cheap… in a fit of desperation he follows a link in a mysterious email promising help only to find him transported into the dangerous world of his favourite videogame. For each boss he kills he earns money, keeping his sister safe, but he risks death with each confrontation!

Out tomorrow from Titan Manga, according to the trades, volume one of Hana Shinohara’s My Name is Zero, translated by Motoko Tamamuro and me.

“What we actually know about him could be written on the back of a beer mat.”

There’s been some kind of hooha in the gaming world regarding the appearance of Yasuke, the “African samurai” in the new Assassin’s Creed. Five years ago, on the All the Anime blog, I wrote up the work of historical reconstruction that was likely to have inspired his appearance.

No, you probably weren’t expecting a picture from Dune to grace the inner pages of NEO magazine. But it’s been on my mind a lot recently, because of the backstory, largely obscured in Denis Villeneuve’s version, of the Butlerian Jihad, an ancient war against artificial intelligences, inspired by the quote in the Dune universe’s pimped-up bible: “Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of the human mind.”

Artificial intelligence, or to be more correct, machine learning, is already seeping into many aspects of our lives, including anime. In this very magazine, (NEO #227), we reported on Yuhei Sakuragi’s reliance on “human fallback” to prompt his crowd animations into better realism, and on the developments at Mantra (NEO #231) to create an automated manga translator. Japanese animators are testing A.I. to replace inbetweeners, Midjourney has already drawn a whole comic for ROOTPORT, and now streamers are “testing” A.I. subtitling.

The thing is, the streaming world is already knee-deep in machine translation, whether the streamers admit it (or know it) or not. Time and again, watching mainstream telly, I’ve winced at auto-generated subs from English, that mishear dialogue and have gone uncorrected. Someone, no doubt, is being paid to edit such errors, but they, like the now-replaced human translators who have been ditched, isn’t being paid enough to give things more than a cursory glance. When even YouTube and Subtitle Edit have auto-translation options, who can blame a media corporation from wondering whether this will help them cut even more corners? As this column predicted in NEO #215, the expansion of streaming threatened to overwhelm human translators, making robot assistance an inevitability.

I remain resolutely analogue for now… until the day that my translation clients stop paying me a living wage, and I resort to robot minions.

Now, you might think this all sounds a little paranoid. It seems churlish to complain about robot labour when so many aspects of our lives are already delegated to machines. If you met your spouse through a match on Bumble; if you bought an anime Blu-ray that was recommended to you by an Amazon algorithm; if your last holiday was booked and steered by a travel app like Trip, then machines are already helping out in your daily life. Yesterday in the supermarket, I realised I didn’t know the local word for sourdough bread, and pulled out my phone to ask Siri.

“I don’t speak Finnish,” said Siri, apologetically. Which makes Finland the ideal place for humanity’s last stand.

Jonathan Clements is the author of Anime: A History. This article appeared in NEO #240, 2024.

Ayumu Mashiro has given up on his dream of being a hero and settled down into the mundane life of a police officer… until one day he transforms into the legendary villain known as Zero! Now a mysterious voice is guiding him as he’s thrown into the battle between good and evil!

Out today, I believe, from Titan Comics, the first volume of Kentaro Harada and Mikumo Seto’s Villain Actor, a very Japanese take on superheroes and conspiracies. Motoko Tamamuro and I worked on the English script.