Two months after this column (NEO #232) covered the lack of marketing material for Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron, suddenly we are overwhelmed with press images.
I am not a fly on the wall of US meetings, but I can well imagine that GKIDS went to Ghibli and said “Okay lads, you’ve had your fun, but the American press is going to get super-tired with only having one publicity image. You’d better give us something sharpish, or we’re not going to have any publicity at all.”
Ghibli have come back with pictures that are fated to become iconic anime posters, with titles like Girl Buttering Toast, Old Ladies Looking at Tins, Man with Giant Moustache and Bunch of Happy Blob Things.
No harm done. Boy and the Heron is a box office success in Japan, and some coverage is even (gasp!) revealing its plot, which I think should be a new game of trying to explain a Miyazaki film badly. “It’s Back to the Future retold with a castle full of man-eating parakeets.” Or “it’s about a man inside a heron, but not in a dodgy way.” And in turn, this makes it possible to do Art books and illustrated chapters, and film guides and so on.
Magazines like NEO have some pictures they can hang their Boy and the Heron puff-pieces on for now. But Ghibli-level obstructionism is increasingly being felt behind the scenes, on the collectors’ editions that risk becoming a lot less collectable. Some readers may already know that many years ago, Ghibli refused to allow Optimum to put a commentary track on Spirited Away because they don’t care for third-party opinions (in this case, mine) on official releases. That’s fair enough, and is their right, but experiences over the last year or so have suggested that other extras are getting increasingly hard to approve.
I don’t just mean in the anime world. Last month, a licensor refused to allow an article to be added a manga volume explaining some of the intricate folkloric references it contained. This was, apparently, because the contract specified that the work had to appear in English exactly as it had been in Japan, with no extra material, even though it would make no sense to non-Japanese people.
I sense that a lot of these proclamations are coming from licensors who are trying to make their own lives easier, like the person who refused to allow me to write a book-length freebie for a well-known anime because she didn’t want to have to read it all.
She asked if I could write less. Be less extra. Which means you get less extras.
Jonathan Clements is the author of Anime: A History. This article first appeared in NEO #234, 2023.
“Ran is a ‘Child of Impurity’, a warrior with the power to exorcise monsters, but only by taking on their curses himself. As a result, he is a toxic figure, shunned by the villagers he defends, doomed to a short life-span when the accumulated poisons eventually overwhelm him. And he has acquired a travelling companion, the perky young bard Torue, who sees in Ran the perfect material for a song cycle. Bereft of inspiration, she hopes to follow him around until a ‘story’ presents itself.” Shelley Pallis, All the Anime.
A nice review up early for Yusuke Osawa’s Poetry of Ran, out today from Titan Manga, and translated by Motoko Tamamuro and me.
After a giant kaiju threaten to destroy Japan, the guardian spirits of the nation, known as ‘Yokai’ appear before the young boy Kei… They tell him he is the descendant of the legendary monster slayer Watanabe no Tsuna, and may be the only person who can stop the catastrophe. Great Yokai War Guardians is the epic manga adaptation of the hit movie!
Out today from Titan Manga, the first volume of Yusuke Watanabe and Sanami Suzuki’s manga based on the film, The Great Yokai War. The English script was translated by Motoko Tamamuro and I wrote a translator’s afterword in the hope of explaining some of the weirdness, but it was not included in the book, so here it is instead below:
A “night parade of one hundred demons” is a popular theme in Japanese folklore. There is a belief that supernatural beings march through the street at night and anyone who encounters them will perish if they do not have religious protection. Often, these beings are referred to as yokai, a name deriving ultimately from the first and last characters of the Chinese yao-mo-gui-guai (“phantoms-monsters-ghosts-apparitions”) – a catch-all title first used in the middle ages to refer to supernatural creatures.
There are two major schools of thoughts regarding the yokai. One is that they are all gods and those that have lost their respect and status have become regarded as demons. Another is that both yokai and gods have existed from the dawn of time, but that those that gain worshippers are upgraded as gods.
The centrepiece of the first volume of Sanami Suzuki’s manga Great Yokai War: Guardians is not a scene of apocalyptic urban destruction, but a grand conference of all the world’s apparitions, spirits and supernatural beings, playfully and punningly named with a combination of the terms yami (shadow) and summit – a Yammit. At this Shadow Council, we see a who’s-who of monsters, including a Gorgon, Dracula and Cyclops, familiar to Western readers.
But who is Backbeard? Is he some sort of piratic misprint? An eye in the middle of a dark circle, from which a bunch of tentacle-like limbs branch out, he is, in fact, a Japanese creation, first appearing in a 1965 manga by Yukihiko Kitagawa and Yoshio Okazaki. By 1966, he had been co-opted by Shigeru Mizuki’s Spooky Ooky Kitaro in Shonen Magazine, now introduced as the commander-in-chief of all American monsters. Often an adversary – he makes several attempts to invade Japan in the course of Mizuki’s stories – he appears here as a craven foreign dignitary, trying to make a swift buck on the back of Japan’s latest media obsession with the supernatural.
Backbeard in fact, was supposedly killed off in an early issue of the Kitaro manga, but kept returning because Mizuki found his unique appearance so compelling. He is immortalised today in one of the bronze plaques that decorate Mizuki’s home town of Sakaiminato, a permanent addition to Japan’s own mythology of monsters.
Shigeru Mizuki (1922-2015) is a crucial figure in the history of Japanese ghosts and monsters, not only cataloguing folktales from all around Japan, but inventing many of them himself. His works have become so ingrained in the Japanese psyche that one often has to go to his own publications, such as the magisterial Compendium of Japanese Yokai (1994) to work out which ones are his, and which ones belong to the nation.
It’s through the works of Mizuki that Japanese children often first encounter Nurarihyon, the old man who invites himself into your home and takes charge; Yuki-onna, the temptress who waits in the snows to entice passing travellers; the one-eyed, one-legged Ippon-datara that trample-hops onto people on one day of the year; or the zashiki-warashi urchins that haunt storage spaces. Here, we see them all banding together at a peace summit… sorry, yammit, in order to discuss a terrible tectonic event.
The silly humans think it’s just a natural disaster, but it’s really a mass haunting, of all the sea creatures who died during the forming of Japan millions of years ago. In the wake of the Tohoku earthquake of 2011, it is one of many media allusions to Japan’s modern traumas, leavened with a grand monster party, and a pre-teen hero who can save the day.
In an early scene, we see the young boys getting a fortune from a temple kiosk. Omikuji or fortune telling is common in Japanese temples and shrines. Worshippers draw a stick with a number on it and then open a drawer to find the paper with that number on it. In this manga, they draw a stick with the unlikely number 8 million (八百万). Traditionally the Japanese believe a god resides in everything and the expression ‘8 million gods’ means a myriad of various gods that exist in this world. What it signifies in this scene is that the protagonist ‘wins’ all the gods, but as far as he is concerned, all he is getting is the short end of the stick.
Grand Yokai War: Guardians ran in Shonen Ace magazine in December 2020, a few months ahead of the 2021 release of the film of the same name, itself a sequel to a 2005 movie that was based on a novel by Hiroshi Aramata, itself inspired by the multiple monster works of the 1960s. By this point, it is impossible to work out who came up with what, although the Daiei-Kadokawa conglomerate did its best by roping in as many creators as possible as producers. Sanami Suzuki’s manga retains the central motif of a young Japanese boy who discovers that he is the distant descendant of Watanabe no Tsuna (953-1025), the medieval samurai who wielded a sword with the ominous name Onikirimaru (the Demon Slayer).
The manga alludes to a popular legend that modern-day Watanabe family members do not take part in the Setsubun cleansing festival, in which each February Japanese households cast beans into the air to banish demons. Watanabes, it is said, have no fear of demons entering their houses, and need not bother, although tellingly, this story appears only to have arisen in the last few years. Could this, too, be a modern media myth, already sinking into the common ownership of Japanese folklore…?
“At the time of his death in 1993, Booth was already famous for having written one of the best-ever books about travelling in Japan, The Roads to Sata (1985)… With a degree of nerdish delight, I discovered that This Great Stage of Fools has an entire section of anime reviews, with Booth according the creators of the 1970s and 1980s a degree of respect that he refused to grant the purveyors of V-cinema.”
Over at All the Anime, I write up a posthumous collection of journalism by Alan Booth.
Here’s a stealthy bit of data that sneaked out recently – from the 20th June, Amazon announced an increase in printing prices for most of its print-on-demand books, offering authors the choice between upping their cover prices or taking the hit in their royalties. Amazon was reacting to ever-climbing prices of making books, as printworks shut down, logistics firms increase transport prices, and the cost of paper goes ever up.
It’s not just tomatoes and whatnot affected by covid constrictions and Ukrainian upsets. These increased costs are impacting everything that gets printed, and that includes DVD sleeves and collectors’ booklets. Particularly in the UK, where including an on-disc video extra like a commentary or Making-Of incurs punitive extra certification costs, collectors’ booklets have formed an important niche within bonus materials. That’s where you get the interview with the director; the storyboards; the Easter eggs. But I already hear whispers of companies cutting back on the size of their bonus booklets, or even giving up on them altogether.
Meanwhile, this year’s Annecy animation festival in France tried to make light of the absence of a print brochure. The Annecy brochure used to be a handy souvenir item, but this year it was taken online, supposedly for the convenience of punters, but actually to avoid paying 40% more for initiation costs.
Two of my most recent books were written under the radar, so to speak, given away as bonus extras as part of Blu-ray boxes. Some of you, I hope, were super-pleased to discover that your copy of Momotaro Sacred Sailors came with my 120-page book about its director – one of a tiny handful of full-length anime director biographies to be found in English. Others hopefully enjoyed the chance to read Future Boy Conan: Miyazaki’s Directorial Debut, a chunky 88-page monograph co-authored with NEO’s Andrew Osmond. Ironically, although such items were intended to add value to Blu-ray releases, they often went unmentioned (and unseen) by reviewers who stuck to describing the contents of the discs themselves.
Such scrimping worries me, of course, because I’m often paid to write the text that appears in these booklets. Hand-on-heart, some of my best writing in recent years has turned up in places like Arrow’s Shawscope box set, where punters might only encounter it when idly flipping through the extras. But if we’re on a slippery slope towards no extras, then we also risk a world where there’s nothing collectible at all to which a “collector’s edition” can be attached. In that case, all we have left is bare-bones releases, which itself is a drift towards no physical media at all.
Jonathan Clements is the author of Anime: A History. This article first appeared in NEO #233, 2023.
“He likens his writing on Brunton to kintsugi – that Japanese art of taking broken pottery and repairing it with flashes of alluring gold.”
Over at All the Anime, I write up Iain Maloney’s The Japan Lights, in which he travels in the footsteps of the Scot who built two dozen lighthouses in Meiji-era Japan.
And in my final duty as jury chairman this year I’m appearing on the Scotland Loves Anime podcast to discuss the films in competition with three of the jury members. The jury picked Yoshimi Itazu’s enchanting The Concierge for the Golden Partridge Award, but we now know, after the close of voting last night, that the audiences in Glasgow and Edinburgh instead preferred Yuzuru Tachikawa’s jazz odyssey Blue Giant.
“Tezuka had been absolutely crystal clear about his opposition to seeing the story animated. In championing the production, Rintaro was less tipping his hat to Tezuka than flipping him the finger.”
Over at All the Anime, I delve into the behind-the-scenes politics of “Osamu Tezuka’s” Metropolis, screening next month at Scotland Loves Anime.
“Anime: A History remains an essential text for anyone searching for a deeper understanding of why anime is the way it is, historically and commercially, and the latest edition does far more than simply updating the material; the changes constitute multiple novel areas of study. “
First review up online of my 2nd edition Anime: A History, from Zoe Crombie at Lancaster University.
“Masataka Taketsuru… ended up in late 1918 at the University of Glasgow, where he studied organic chemistry under Thomas Stewart Patterson, before seeking work experience at distilleries in Campbeltown, Strathspey and Bo’ness. He also fell in love with Jessie “Rita” Cowan, a doctor’s daughter from Kirkintilloch, who he met after she asked him to teach her younger brother judo. The couple were married in 1920, shortly before they left for Japan, where Rita had promised to help her new husband make ‘real whisky.'”
Over All the Anime, I investigate Japan’s relationship with whisky, in relation to the new anime film Komada: A Whisky Family, showing at Scotland Loves Anime in November.
The Official Schoolgirl Milky Crisis Blog 