Tag Archives: obits

Yoshinobu Nishizaki 1934-2010

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Yoshinobu Nishizaki, who died today, was a colourful and controversial character in the anime world. Born as Hirofumi Nishizaki in the old samurai town of Aizu-Wakamatsu, he rebelled against his traditionalist family by founding a jazz club. By his late twenties, he had moved into music production, but suddenly switched careers to become an office manager for the “god of manga,” Osamu Tezuka.

Nishizaki claimed that he had fallen in love with Tezuka’s comics, particularly the future trilogy of Lost World, Next World, and Metropolis. Joining Tezuka’s studio, Mushi Production, Nishizaki threw himself into legal and operational work, and scored what he hoped would be a landmark success when he sold the rights of Tezuka’s Marvellous Melmo to a TV channel. However, ratings were a disaster for the series, which attempted to turn sex education into a kids’ comedy, and Nishizaki found himself taking the blame instead of the credit.

As Mushi Production drifted towards bankruptcy, Nishizaki came to resemble the first mate on a sinking ship. Industry gossip associated him not only with the departure of many animators, but with the disappearance of company property. When Mushi’s doors were shut for good, Nishizaki somehow sprang back into business as the owner of Anime Staff Room, a company that appeared to use talent and materials liberated from the beleaguered Mushi Production. Nishizaki even managed to walk away from Mushi with intellectual property. One of Nishizaki’s jobs at Mushi had been to register copyrights, and it appeared that although both Wansa-kun and Triton of the Sea bore Tezuka’s name as creator, their ownership had somehow been assigned to Nishizaki. Depending on who you talked to, Nishizaki was either a canny accomplice who dutifully kept Tezuka’s people working through a legal loophole, or a traitor who broke Tezuka’s heart.

The anime business suffered its worst crisis since WW2 at the turn of the 1970s, with multiple studio collapses, a change in the value of the yen, and a recession brought on by the rise in Middle Eastern oil prices. Nishizaki likened the period to “a winter struggling towards spring,” particularly after neither of his liberated properties recouped their production costs on broadcast. Tezuka, perhaps, had had the last laugh by not telling him a vital truth – that even Astro Boy had been produced at a loss, in the hope that merchandise and foreign sales would make up the shortfall. With no foreign sales forthcoming and reduced public interest in merchandise, Nishizaki was dead in the water.

But Nishizaki fought on. His most famous creation came in 1973, when he and two other Mushi refugees dreamt up a sci-fi quest narrative, Asteroid Ship Icarus, in which a crew of teenagers crewed a space vessel built within a hollowed-out asteroid. After the manga artist Leiji Matsumoto was brought in to refine the idea, this gradually transformed into Space Cruiser Yamato, in which a group of Japanese heroes embarked on a desperate mission across the cosmos, in a ship built from the hulk of a WW2 battleship. Eventually broadcast abroad as Star Blazers, the serial became a long-running franchise, and would eventually become the subject of a bitter court battle between Nishizaki and Matsumoto, as each claimed to be the true creator.

In the 1980s, Nishizaki changed his company name from Office Academy to Westcape Corporation (Japanese: “Nishi-zaki”), under which he became the executive producer of The Legend of the Overfiend, the first and most notorious of the “tits and tentacles” genre that repurposed animation for erotic horror. Despite soaring success in multiple foreign markets, not even the Overfiend could rescue Nishizaki’s fortunes, and he would file for bankruptcy in 1997.

Shortly afterwards, he was incarcerated for a potent cocktail of cumulative offences: he had been smuggling illegal firearms into Japan while already on bail for possession of narcotics. He consequently spent much of the first decade of the 21st century in prison, and only recently returned to form with a new animated Space Cruiser Yamato movie, Yamato Resurrection. Ever one to look for a gimmick, he infamously focus-tested the ending with an audience of fans.

When I wrote the biographical entry on Nishizaki for the Anime Encyclopedia, I commented that he could sometimes seem to be a one-hit wonder, constantly returning to the Yamato as his only trusted source of revenue, and becoming increasingly spiteful in his claim to own the idea. But I also suggested that Nishizaki’s greatest, as-yet untold story was his own autobiography: surely a tale fraught with enough scandal, drama and adventure for any TV series?

Nishizaki died as he lived, in a manner that was both odd and suspicious. The 75-year-old producer reportedly fell from a boat, itself called the Yamato, not far from the harbour of Chichijima in the Bonin Islands, about 150 miles north of Iwo Jima. It is difficult to imagine that he is really gone. There are sure to be several figures in the anime industry who surely wonder if this is not yet another larger-than-life chapter in his life, and if Nishizaki might not suddenly reappear next week leading a band of pirates, or having discovered the fountain of youth. Some might even suspect it is a last-ditch moneymaking scheme: an attempt to encourage old-time enemies to speak out against him, all the better to return from the grave armed with libel suits.

Still, as the news spreads through the Internet and it appears not to be a cruel hoax, we are left with the news that 2010, anime’s annus horribilis, has claimed yet another high profile figure. It is all the more ironic that Nishizaki should die at sea, even as the publicity machine gears up for the film that will now be surely seen as his final epitaph: the live-action Space Battleship Yamato movie that will have its official premiere on 12th December.

Unlike many anime figures, Nishizaki never published his autobiography. He did, however, write a brief memoir for the inaugural issue of My Anime magazine in 1981, in which he acknowledged that he was a volatile figure in the industry, but that his intentions had always been honourable.

“I have made many mistakes,” he admitted. “But I have no regrets.”

Jonathan Clements is the author of Schoolgirl Milky Crisis: Adventures in the Anime and Manga Trade.

Takeshi Shudo 1949-2010

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Takeshi Shudo, who died yesterday, was a scriptwriter on some of the best-known anime of modern times. After a stumbling start in scripting, he would eventually become the first recipient of a prestigious anime screenwriting award, and would go on to establish the dramatic voices of some of the most-watched anime characters of the early 21st century.

The son of an assistant prefectural governor, Shudo was born in Fukuoka, and spent his childhood in Sapporo, Nara and, eventually, Shibuya in Tokyo. His knowledge of this latter location would eventually be put to use in his scripts for Idol Angel Welcome Yoko (1990, Idol Tenshi Yokoso Yoko), in which a pop star masqueraded as an anime superheroine. But his road to anime was a rocky one, and encompassed a false start in live-action.

After flunking his first set of university entrance exams, the teenage Shudo picked up his sister’s copy of Scenario magazine, which intrigued him with its “how-to” articles on screenwriting. He was still only 19 years old in 1969 when he sold his first script, an episode of the long-running live-action ninja-cop TV show Oedo Dragnet, a.k.a. Oedo Untouchables. However, his script was pilloried, not least by Shudo himself, for its “surfeit of unconvincing emotions,” and no further work was forthcoming. He drifted through a number of sales jobs in Japan and Europe, before a meeting with the prominent screenwriter Fukiko Miyauchi gave him a second chance, writing “Sly Coyote”, an episode of the anime series Cartoon Folktales of the World (Manga Sekai Mukashi-banashi), broadcast on 18th November 1976.

After working on some other serials for Dax International, he moved to Tatsunoko Productions and then Ashi Pro (now known as Production Reed) in the 1980s, where he was an instrumental writer on several new serials. Although both Idiot Ninja (Sasuga Sarutobi) and I’ll Make a Habit of It! (Ch? Kuse ni Naris?) were based on works by manga creators, Shudo put his mark on them as lead screenwriter, coining catchphrases and the comedy business that would become his trademark. In 1983, his work on these shows and others would secure him the first Anime Grand Prix Screenwriting Award, an honour that would later be conferred on the likes of Kazunori It? and Hayao Miyazaki.

Shudo’s most enduring influence was arguably his creation of Fairy Princess Minky Momo, one of the first of the new generation of “magical girl” shows, refashioning the Japanese folktales of Momotar? for an audience of young girls. Particularly successful in France and Italy, where she is known as Princess Gigi, Momo was able to transform into an adult version of herself, taking on various jobs in the grown-up world. Other series that featured his work included Legend of the Galactic Heroes and Martian Successor Nadesico.

Shudo also worked as a novelist, largely on books spun off from anime shows. He wrote many of the Goshogun novels, nine volumes of the fantasy series Eternal Filena, and the first two books that novelised the Pokémon series. Pokémon was Shudo’s most identifiable work for modern audiences. As with his the successes of his youth, it was not his personal creation, but he still injected many recurring tropes and comedy elements that would come to define the series. He wrote the screenplay for Pokémon: The First Movie (1998), one of the best-selling anime videos of the decade in many territories, including the UK, where it sold over 360,000 copies.

On 28th October 2010, he collapsed in the smoking area of the JR Nara train station. He was rushed to hospital for emergency surgery, but died several hours later from a subarachnoid haemorrhage. At the time, he had been working for the companies Gonzo and Dogakobo on a new cheerleader “character project” called Cheer Figu!, although its precise nature (anime, computer game, manga?) remains unclear.

Shud?’s death deprives the anime world of yet another of its creators, in a year that has already taken the lives of several prominent figures. Moreover, it further diminishes the dwindling population of 20th century anime screenwriters. The Anime Grand Prix for Screenwriting was only awarded for seven years in the 1980s, and four of its recipients have already passed away, including Susumu Takaku (1933-2009) and Hiroyuki Hoshiyama (1944-2007).

Jonathan Clements is the author of Schoolgirl Milky Crisis: Adventures in the Anime and Manga Trade.

Carl Macek 1951-2010

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Robotech producer Carl Macek, who died of a heart attack on Saturday, was a divisive figure in anime fandom. If it ever hurt him, it was because he rejected the premise that he was not part of it himself. To his own mind, he was as big an anime fan as anybody else, someone who had put his career on the line to bring Japanese cartoons to America. He was the anime business’s inconvenient truth, the man who shrugged with a smile and said that it was fine if you wanted to make your show that way, although you’d only sell 300 copies. But if you did it his way, you’d sell half a million, and then he could give you the money to do whatever you wanted. He was the man who looked at a crucial scene in My Neighbor Totoro, and noticed that a next-stop sign was in Japanese, and hence unreadable to the new target audience of American children…

Years of arguing at conventions had given him a facetious catch-all slogan: “All anime is dubbed”. He meant that all anime is put together as a compromise, between producers’ odd peccadilloes, and directors’ priorities, animators’ talents and accountants’ possibilities. To Carl, a finished cartoon was still raw creative material, ethnocentrically compromised, in need of refashioning and (his word) finessing to fit the available confines of domestic media. He worked with what he had, both in terms of the anime itself, and the needs of the market for which he repurposed it. On My Neighbor Totoro, he added a line to the script, because the Catbus needed to tell its passengers where it was going.

Art was never finished, only abandoned, and Carl’s conscience was clear about what he did with it afterward. In a recurring irony, his work would often turn people into anime fans, who would then decide they hated him. We spent a weekend in each other’s company when he came to London for an awful media event. He hung around on the Anime UK stand where we were shilling for Beast Warriors, and called me “a born salesman”, which, from him, was a high compliment indeed. The subject came up of a new anime company on the block, and he accurately predicted its demise to the nearest week, based not on the quality of releases, but on flaws in its relationships with distributors and licensors. He didn’t need to see the figures, he only needed to spend ten minutes with the company director. That’s what was so great about Carl, he was usually right. That’s what was so terrible about Carl, he was usually right.

It was impossible not to like Carl. Even if you didn’t like his work (and I was often scathing), you’d find he was just as critical about it himself. He had us in stitches with his account of the goings-on behind the scenes on Saber Rider and the Star Sheriffs, encouraging me to start writing about anime as an industry in constant crisis, where art was not so much completed as salvaged from a vortex of chaos. It was in the weeks after meeting Carl that I wrote the first irreverent columns that would become Schoolgirl Milky Crisis.

His was a science of the possible, and the decisions he took over translating (or not translating) anime made him notorious in the anime world. But it made him successful in the film world, where he was even more at home. If you didn’t meet Carl, the chance is gone. But only three months before he died, he recorded a long interview with Anime News Network that perfectly captured his energy, his humour, and his indelible position in anime history. There is no better tribute to him.

In the first American dub of My Neighbor Totoro, he was the voice of the Catbus.