Yui Hirasawa and her band mates of Hokago Tea-Time return in K-On!! this week. The second season of the music-driven comedy sees the girls progressing to their final year at high school and facing tough decisions over life, their music careers and (possibly) which cake to eat next.
However, given the band peddles the kind of energetic, inoffensive pop material that otaku lap up, Japan’s home-grown music industry may not be the best direction for any credible musician to take. Although manufactured bands are a decades-old global phenomenon – from The Monkees to One Direction, the Supremes to Girls Aloud – few countries approach the format in so commercial and exploitative a manner as Japan.
The phenomenon of ‘Idol Singers’ should be nothing new to anime fans – 1982’s Super Dimension Fortress Macross had aspiring songstress Lynn Minmay fend off an alien invasion with her peppy warbling, after all – but in the real world, the obsession and fetishisation of many young women often has disturbing elements.
Take AKB48, for instance. A veritable legion of fame-hungry young women gathered by producer Yasushi Akimoto, the ‘group’ is based primarily in the neon-lit streets Akihabara where the girls perform daily in a dedicated theatre. AKB48 currently boasts over 80 members, who are ranked both internally and by fans, with the most popular getting pushed into the spotlight. Ages range from 12 up to mid-20s, and promotion through the ranks is seen as a path to national success.
The songs themselves are both blandly formulaic and coyly sexualised – lyrics often contain coquettish allusions to cumbersome clothes and nascent teen desires – and naming any particular member of AKB48 is tricky for all but the most dedicated fans. The girls are deliberately chosen based on their ‘average’ looks in an effort to make them seem attainable to the primarily male fanbase, and everything about their lives is carefully marketed to the public. Essentially, the girls’ childhoods are commercialised to make them an aspirational product to older men.
The problem was brought into sharp focus in February this year, when member Minami Minegishi became internationally recognisable for all the wrong reasons. A streaming video, later made available on YouTube, showed the 21-year old singer weeping in contrite apology, begging fans for their forgiveness and her head shaven in repentance. Minegishi’s crime? Having a boyfriend.
Having been snapped by paparazzi leaving the apartment of Alan Shirahama, a member of boyband GENERATIONS, Minegishi was trotted out to the public as a shame-faced harlot, a betrayer of “the fans” and a poor influence on the younger members of AKB48. A founding member, Minegishi had been singing and dancing with Akimoto’s troupe since she was 12-years old. Now aged 20, she has grown up in the public eye, pushed as a sex symbol but never allowed anything close to an actual relationship or a real life.
The video makes for awkward viewing. Minegishi claims the decision to shave her head was her own, as was the video, but the orchestration of the move reeks of a planned publicity stunt. It’s also cruelly dehumanising, punishing the singer for wanting some small amount of privacy and personal time, while reinforcing to her followers that she is nothing more than merchandise for them. Tragically, Minegishi isn’t alone in her treatment – other AKB48 members such as Miki Saotome, Rino Sashihara and Yuka Masuda have previously been ‘demoted’ to lower tiers, hidden away in regional spin-off groups or fired entirely for similar boyfriend-based infractions. Alan Shirahama, it bears mentioning, has suffered no fallout from the incident – at the very least a double-standard of Japan’s music industry, at worst a reminder of the nation’s lingering sexism and misogyny.
Minegishi has faded from public view since that February video, no doubt waiting for it all to blow over and her hair to grow back. Having suffered demotion to trainee status, she will have to work her way back up the AKB48 ranks, at least if she wants to maintain her popstar lifestyle and have any hope of a career beyond the group. In the meantime, fans of J-pop in general and AKB48 in particular could well do with evaluating the monstrous mechanism they’re supporting with their ‘fandom’, and how shows like K-On!! give a sadly unrealistic portrayal of musical aspirations in Japan.
K-On, season two, part one, is out now on UK DVD from Manga Entertainment. Nobody has had to shave their head.
Helen McCarthy on the hidden connections between Hellsing and… well, everything else.
Since its first appearance in 1997 Kota Hirano’s Hellsing manga and its anime spin-offs have used the Dracula story to examine Japanese issues through a re-imagined Britain. They also draw on world popular culture to embed Hellsing in a shared global mythology. The premise: that the vampire Dracula was not destroyed by Professor Van Helsing, but survived to serve the Prof’s descendants in England.
The head of the Hellsing family, Sir Integra Fairbrook Wingates Hellsing, has inherited the family name, the vampire-fighting tradition and, and the service of the vampire. Alucard is the chief weapon in her vampire-fighting secret organization, which is also called Hellsing. Van Helsing’s descendant is not the bride of Dracula – she’s his mistress, his feudal overlord, a virgin queen with a vampire in her service.
Feudal heredity is a key concept in Hellsing. Hellsing’s Britain is ruled by a female monarch, as the real country is – and as Japan might have been, but for the birth of a son to Prince Akishino in 2006. Ties of blood loyalty are as vital in the real world as in Hellsing.
The other central institution of English life in Hellsing is the Church of England. The war between Catholics and Protestants echoes Japan’s ancient struggles between incoming Buddhists and native Shinto priests. The great schism of Christianity was dragged back to prominence in the 20th century when the IRA bombed mainland Britain, and followers of Japan’s Aum Shinrikyo cult released poison gas on the Tokyo subway. In Hellsing both sides of the debate are presented as equally bloodthirsty and chaotic.
Hellsing also nods to the history of Britain’s politico-religious conflict through the Wild Geese, an elite mercenary fighting unit. Their name refers back to an Irish Catholic army that left its homeland for France following defeat by the Protestant King of England, though it is also the title of a 1970s film about honourable mercenaries betrayed by their masters. They are hired by the Hellsing organisation to replace soldiers slaughtered in a fight with two vampire crime-lord wannabes, the Valentine Brothers.
Disaffected youth are a common motif of the developed world. With options limited by rigid social or educational structures, or lack of money, the young have turned to violence to get status and purpose, sometimes disguising their behaviour as loyalty to an ideal. The Valentine boys could be any buddy movie pairing gone bad – the young, freaky, hyper guy and the more thoughtful, laid-back, reserved type. They want all the good things they see the rich enjoying. They’re willing to do anything to get them but somehow they don’t think that hard work and good behaviour is going to do it, so they get themselves artificially augmented.
Jonathan Clements reviews a new book on the prolific Takashi Miike
Tom Mes climbed aboard the Takashi Miike bandwagon early, arguing in his 2003 book Agitator that the poster-boy of straight-to-video schlock and shockers was much more than a journeyman director. Agitator itself was part of the message, a beautifully designed, heavily illustrated and weighty tome that still has pride of place on my shelves.
As Mes notes in his introduction to his latest book, the just-published Re-Agitator, even as his first Miikeathon was being published, the supposed maverick was getting selected for the Director’s Fortnight in Cannes, and while Miike has remained happily busy in the intervening years, his work has been increasingly highly regarded, even by those who once wrote him off. Audition already had a respectful following of chin-stroking cineaste apologists, and certain pundits (well, me) were pointing to Fudoh: The Next Generation as a triumph of manga adaptation, still rarely matched by other live-action attempts. The Bird People in China was a charming film that showed true versatility, and while Miike’s output remained somewhat scattergun, he really did seem to have done something for everyone, in a dizzying array of genres. And if you don’t like his latest movie… just wait a minute.
Miike’s sheer prolificity, and the relative ease with which his early bargain-bin output made it to foreign distributors, has created a momentum of its own, generating an archive of films ripe for academic dissection, many with elements that foreshadow his later, better-known works. Mes alludes to a growing number of student dissertations on Miike, for which this glossy collection of 35 essays will be a citational godsend.
As the subtitle “A Decade of Writing on Takashi Miike” makes clear, Re-Agitator collates whatever Mes has done Miike-wise in the last ten years, rather than whatever Miike has done himself. As a result, there are accounts of films already covered in the previous book, and a few regrettable omissions – I had really been looking forward to reading what Mes had to say about the bonkers Ace Attorney: The Movie, but with no DVD release abroad, nobody has yet paid Mes to put his thoughts down on paper. I confess to being a little crestfallen that Re-Agitator is not a sequel to the first book, going into similar depth about the thirty-odd films that Miike has made since 2002’s Deadly Outlaw: Rekka. My hopes, then, for close textual analyses of such recent oddities as the juvenile Ninja Kids, or the baffling K-tai Detective 7, have been dashed. But as Mes swiftly points out in his introduction, Agitator was a book of its time, written by an author who did not dare believe that anyone would ever get to see most of these films, and assuming that his account of them might be the only place their artistic heritage would be preserved in the English language.
A decade later, Miike’s works are not only well-represented on subtitled DVD in the West, but often with liner notes by Mes himself, many of which are collected in Re-Agitator. If you are interested in learning more about the guy who made Hara Kiri, then Re-Agitator is as good a place to start as you can hope for. The essays are often rather short, rarely taking up more than two pages, and eschew Agitator’s wordy plot synopses in favour of punchy, pithy assessments of each film within the context of Miike’s work as a whole. They jostle for space with witty accounts of adrenaline-fuelled film festival appearances and longer excursions into Miike’s use of sex, gore or violence.
The book is also lavishly illustrated on quality paper, with superb stills and production photographs, including a whole gallery of beautiful images from the set of Sukiyaki Western Django, donated by Miike’s long-time collaborator Christian Storms. Like Mes’s earlier book on Miike, it is shamefully gorgeous. I speak from bitter experience – the Japanese can be their own worst enemies when it comes to picture rights, and many a book on Japanese pop culture has been dragged, screaming, into text-only tedium by rights-holders who do not see the value in handing over decent images to plug their product. As with his other notable book on Shinya Tsukamoto, Mes goes the extra mile to put images on the pages, imparting a palpable classiness to Miike’s output.
Mes’s essays often assert that Miike has been misunderstood or misrepresented abroad, by both his supporters and detractors. It is interesting to read, for example, of the extended Japanese cut of his wonderful 13 Assassins, which Mes nobly argues is less high-brow, more scatological and humorous, and to my ears at least, somewhat less good than the acclaimed international version. There is an interview with the director himself about the ghostly Great Yokai War, and intriguing pieces on several Miike movies that I have never even heard of – it’s tough keeping up with them all.
The end result is a thing that borders on coffee-table beauty, although you might like to skip the foreword by the aforementioned Storms, which is by turns aggressive, defensive and condescending, and strikes an unnecessarily negative note at the beginning of an otherwise joyous book.
Re-Agitator: A Decade of Writing on Takashi Miike, by Tom Mes, is out now in hardback from FAB Press.
The seventh instalment in our character guide for Dragon Ball Z, filling you in on the heroes and villains to keep an eye on in the latest super-charged volume of the famous action epic!
Great Saiyaman. Soaring through the skies, righting wrongs and fighting crime – it’s the Great Saiyaman! Who is this masked hero though? None other than Goku’s first-born son, Gohan! In the years since his father’s sacrifice during the Cell Games, Gohan has done some growing up. Now in his teen years, he faces his greatest challenge yet: high school. With Earth in a rare period of peace, one mercifully lacking alien warlords or demonic martial artists set on conquest, the young warrior tries to build a normal life. Gohan’s good nature and incredible Saiyan powers mean he can’t ignore people in need though, so he crafts the Great Saiyaman identity to keep his secrets from his new friends.
Videl. Gohan’s attempts at secrecy don’t quite work out though – classmate Videl is immediately suspicious of his frequent absences and bruises matching the new superhero after his public battles. The daughter of Hercule Satan, Videl proves to actually be a competent fighter, unlike her father, and intelligent enough to quickly deduce Gohan’s identity. Although the relationship between the teenagers is initially frosty, they soon grow close. With Gohan’s help and some Saiyan-brand training, Videl’s own combat ability rapidly improves, granting her the abilities of chi-powered flight and incredible speed. Her name is an anagram of ‘devil’, playing on her father’s name.
Son Goten. Goten is Goku’s youngest son, born after the hero’s most recent death. The boy is the spitting image of his father at the same age, with identical hair and even a similar wardrobe – his gi lacks the ‘turtle’ kanji of Goku’s. His mother, Chi-Chi, is slightly less protective of him than she was of Gohan, possibly because Goten proves to be even stronger than his father or brother at the same age. His potential power level is so great that he achieves the Super Saiyan transformation at a mere seven years old! Mischievous but kind-hearted, Goten is also far more outgoing than Gohan was.
Young Trunks. Proof that children can often overlook their parents’ squabbles, Trunks is Vegeta and Bulma’s son and Goten’s best friend. Whereas the adult Trunks that first appeared in the Android Saga came from an apocalyptic future, the presently seven-year old Trunks was born into the ‘safe’ timeline where Dr. Gero’s mad plan was thwarted. As such, he gets to enjoy a normal childhood – at least, as normal as it gets for a human/Saiyan hybrid with fantastic strength. Although Vegeta is emotionally distant from his son to start with, Trunks’ prowess in battle soon wins him over. His friendship with Goten usually sees the pair caught up in trouble – but anything’s better than fighting off murderous androids!
Grand Kai. There’s one in every family – the older member that tries way too hard to stay ‘hip’ and ‘cool’. While you may be able to take your own relatives aside and give them a touch of fashion advice, it’s a bit harder to tell a guy who’s essentially a god to rein it in. Grand Kai oversees the four other Kais – including Goku’s mentor King Kai – who govern the quadrants of the Universe. Decked out in jeans, a ripped-sleeve denim jacket and a cool pair of shades, Grand Kai’s dress sense can be overlooked given his friendly demeanour. He eschews formality and treats the combatants of the Other World Tournament (what else do you expect Goku to be doing while he’s dead again?) as his own grandchildren.
Dragon Ball Z box set 7 is out on 13th May from Manga Entertainment.
“Oh no!” we hear you cry, “not another anime fight saga involving otherworldly warriors, ensouled weapons and cursed human souls, like Bleach.”But manga creator Atsushi Okubo and the Bones anime studio (Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood) are wise to that complaint. Soul Eater may certainly encroach on similar territory to Ichigo and co, but it puts its own witty, stylish spin on the material – especially when it comes to the style.
Soul Eater’s terrific graphic design has been justly praised, especially the ominously leering sun and moon that dominate Soul Eater’s world, making it cartoony on a cosmic level. Interviewed on this blog, Masahiko Minami of Bones explained it was always a priority to translate Okubo’s art to anime. “The first thing we thought about was how we could transfer the charm of the original manga onto the screen. Led by the director Takuya Igarashi, all the main staff brought together the things they pictured from the comics and we built them up one by one. It was more time-consuming than difficult.” The anime’s conceptual design is credited to Shinji Aramaki; which is quite a contrast to his better-known director’s credits on the CGI mecha films, Appleseed and Appleseed Ex Machina.
From its early episodes, Soul Eater is an ensemble show. Unlike Bleach or a comparable series such as Blue Exorcist, there’s no central male hero. Instead, the early episodes introduce us to three warriors. There’s the inevitable feisty schoolgirl, Maka, voiced in Japanese by debuting actress Chiaki Omigawa (you may recognise her voice from the recent Bodacious Space Pirates, in which she voices the heroine’s friend Mami). There’s an amusingly mouthy boy, Black Star, a ninja who feels suspiciously like a send-up of a certain other boy ninja in the anime universe. And then there’s Death the Kid, son of, well, Death, who has awesome powers but an unfortunate case of OCD – in one early battle, he rushes off in order to straighten a painting.
The trio attend the Death Weapon Meister Academy. It’s a mad giant wedding-cake of a magic kingdom-cum-fortress, overseen by the deceptively goofy-seeming Death. All of which makes Soul Eater a plausible missing link between Bleach and the later Blue Exorcist, which is also set in a supernatural school with a flamboyantly supernatural Headmaster. Each warrior, naturally, has his own weapon-cum-soulmate; they can adopt human form and are important characters in their own right.
For male viewers, the most, ahem, intriguing weapons may be Liz and Patty Thompson, two attractive sisters who double as Death Kid’s pistols (a notion that would be taken to extremes in the 2012 series Upotte!!). Another weapon who turns up down the line is Excalibur – yes, that Excalibur. He turns up in humanoid form with a top hat and walking stick, looking like an especially oddball Moomin or Rupert the Bear character – one whom many of Soul Eater’s cast would dearly love to thump.
Like a lot of anime, the show begins in excessively comedic style, acclimatising you to the eccentricities of its world before its plotlines start unrolling and you realise you’ve been lured in. As when Bones made its first adaptation of Fullmetal Alchemist, the anime “diverges” from the manga plot so it could wrap up in 51 episodes, all on Manga Entertainment’s Complete Series set. Okubo’s manga is still running, with 23 volumes to date and a spinoff strip, Soul Eater Not! starting in 2011.
Bones, of course, followed Fullmetal Alchemist with Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood, mopping up the manga plot it missed the first time round. Surely it’s occurred to the studio that Soul Eater is ripe for the same treatment? We may not have seen the last of Death Weapon Meister Academy…
Soul Eater is out now on UK DVD from Manga Entertainment.
Black Rock Shooter, like many anime, weaves fantasy round real life. In anime, schoolkids may pilot giant Evangelion units, or kill crooks with Death Notes, or leap heroically through time, but they still must fit all that between classes, exams and homework. Black Rock Shooter is a bold hybrid; part school drama about fraught female relationships, and part otherworld apocalypse thud’n’blunder starring supergirls with very big weapons.
In the “real” world, young Mato Kuori is just starting high school, together with her exuberant girl friend-since-the-sandbox Yuu. Quickly, they make new acquaintances, such as the domineering sports captain Arata, the kindly (well, kindly-seeming) school councillor Saya, and Yomi, a quiet, bookish girl who catches Mato’s attention. Even in reality, there’s plenty of intrigue. For example, Mato discovers that Yomi has a sinister wheelchair-bound companion called Kagari, who takes girlish nastiness to horrible extremes, and who seems to have a Baby Jane hold over Yomi…
However, Mato is also having dreams – of a world of cliffs and chasms and eyeballs in the sky, and female warriors with very familiar faces. Mato (voiced by the ever-busy Japanese actress Kana Hanazawa) seems to have an alter ego in this place, an agile fighter with an abbreviated outfit and serious firepower, who’s the Black Rock Shooter of the title.
Perhaps Mato’s dreams come from her reading too much. (Both she and Yomi adore a storybook in which a little bird flies through a universe of radiant emotions, though the tale takes a Grimm turn at the end.) Or maybe Mato has a troubled psyche… or, maybe, the warrior world is more real than that.
The eight-part TV series is part of a multimedia franchise, all stemming from a single picture of Black Rock Shooter by the artist Ryohei “Huke” Fuke. This also spawned figurines, video games, manga series (including a “chibi” four-panel strip called Black Rock-Chan!) and an anime OAV telling an alternative story. For its part, the TV series focuses on the real world rather than the fantasy – an emphasis that might have encouraged by its positioning in the famed “Noitanima” anime slot on Fuji TV (also home to shows like Eden of the East and Bunny Drop), which aspires to be female friendly.
The framing device of a young girl with strange dreams inevitably echoes Alice but also the Freudian horror film Company of Wolves, the classic 1950s British book Marianne Dreams (filmed as Paperhouse) and even Zack Snyder’s critically-maligned movie Sucker Punch. As an anime, Black Rock Shooter presents its fantasy sequences in a wild, freewheeling graphic style, which contrasts sharply with the show’s version of the “real” world; it’s somewhat similar to the approach taken by the time-travel anime Noein.
The real-world drama, meanwhile, concentrates on girls’ possessive friendships and insane jealousies – things anime has sometimes played for laughs (in Project A-ko, for example), but played for suspense and melodrama here, as if to undercut the fashionable moe image of idyllic girly friendships. It’s ironic, though, that Black Rock Shooter’s title song is sung by the ultimate in artificial female stars. No, your ears are not deceiving you – the singer is Hatsune Miku, performing a number by Supercell!
Black Rock Shooter, the Complete Series Collection is out on UK DVD from Manga Entertainment on 13th May.
Magical girls occupy an odd space in the anime world. Originally aimed at young girls, the colourful superheroes managed to find traction with viewers of all ages over the decades since Sally the Witch cast her first spell on viewers in 1966. However, one of the pleasant side-effects of attracting an older audience is the freedom it gives creators to experiment with the form. The result has been fan-favourite series such as Puella Magi Madoka Magica, which subvert the surface veneer of delicate girls in frilly dresses by exploring much darker themes. Penguin Drum is the latest show to toy with fans’ expectations, delivering a madcap fusion of life, death and mystic flightless birds, hatched from the mind of veteran magical girl director Kunihiko Ikuhara.
Ikuhara is a creator well-known for his experimental proclivities, and has been creating mature, challenging and thought-provoking ‘magical girl’ series for years. Of course, like most things relating to the modern magical girl, the Tokushima native’s career is inextricably linked to Sailor Moon. Having worked under original director Junichi Sato on Toei’s adaptation of Naoko Takeuchi’s genre-redefining manga, Ikuhara took over directorial duties from the second season, Sailor Moon R. He would helm the series for three years, covering the S and SuperS seasons, before stepping off the show, frustrated with the lack of creative control he was afforded.
Founding the creative agency Be-Papas in the wake of his departure from Toei, Ikuhara partnered with manga artist Chiho Saito to bring Revolutionary Girl Utena to both page and screen. An apocalyptic tale of destiny and reincarnation set in a decidedly unconventional boarding school, Utena touched on themes of obligation, freedom, lesbianism and transgenderism as the eponymous heroine – determined to become a prince, rather than a princess – fought to protect the ‘Rose Bride’ Anthy in a succession of bizarre sword duels. The series became extremely metaphysical, replete with allegories to mythology, while its visuals drew on shadow puppetry and traditional Japanese theatre as much as it did on Saito’s distinctive art style. Despite the 1997 vintage, Utena remains one of the most unusual magical girl series in terms of tone and style. Although its narrative is deliberately dense and potentially confusing, with events wholly open to interpretation, it’s clear the series provided Ikuhara with an avenue to explore his more challenging ideas.
Following Utena, Ikuhara took a step back from animation for a number of years. Literary and musical collaborations – including the manga The World Exists for Me with Saito and the novel/concept album Schell:Bullet with mecha designer and artist Mamoru Nagano – filled his creative slate, with only storyboard and guest director roles on series such as Aoi Hana and Soul Eater bringing him back to anime in brief bursts. It would take his creation of Penguin Drum, first aired in Japan in 2011, to bring him back into the fold.
The series follows the terminally ill Himari Takakura and her brothers Kanba and Shouma. When Himari finally passes after a visit to an aquarium, she is revived by a strange penguin hat. Empowered by the ‘Princess of the Crystal’, her life is extended, but only if the trio can find the mystic Penguindrum, though just what that is remains a mystery. Aided only by three invisible magic penguins – yes, really – the search forces the close-knit family to engage in stalking and burglary amongst other crimes, all while Kanba and Shouma face the possibility of losing their sister for good if they fail.
Penguindrum once again sees Ikuhara re-writing the rules of magical girl anime. Himari’s transformations are more akin to a spiritual possession than a super-powered metamorphosis, with the Princess forcing her host body into a penguin-themed idol with the fashion sense and personality of a dominatrix. There’s a level of darkness and desperation too, with the heroes forced to undertake some distinctly unheroic actions. Even the designs are intended to test viewers’ acceptance, with the assorted penguin paraphernalia bordering on the deliberately farcical. At its core though, Penguindrum is a fable of family and fraternity but the themes explored will make you see just how different a magical girl can be in the telling.
The first collection of Penguin Drum, containing episodes 1-12, is on sale now.
Andrew Osmond celebrates the anime legend Gisaburo Sugii
With the re-release of Street Fighter II: The Movie, let us sing the praises of its director Gisaburo Sugii, an extraordinary artist with an extraordinary career. One of his films was a fantasy called Night on the Galactic Railroad, about a boy on a fantastic journey to the edge of the universe. You could compare it to Sugii’s own journey. At 18, he found himself working on the film that would be the seed for the gigantic world of post-war anime. Over the next half century, he’s seen – and helped - the industry grow and mutate unimaginably. He’s taken on each new development with aplomb, from videogame tie-ins to CGI.
Today, Sugii represents anime’s living history, a heritage he proudly carries forward into the 2010s. He also represents its versatility; it’s hard to think of an anime professional who works on such a range of material. He’s made arty films based on literary classics. He’s made action smackdowns celebrating videogame franchises. He’s worked on cute animal films for kids, baseball sitcoms, erotic horrors. He’s the Steven Soderbergh of anime, or the Stanley Kubrick. While other anime directors – Miyazaki, Oshii, Kawajiri – have high-profile signature styles, it’s debatable if Sugii has a style at all. He’s just good.
Sugii was born in Shizuoka prefecture in 1940, left school at 16, and eventually found his way into animation. The film he worked on at 18 was Hakujaden, which you can read about here. It was made by Tokyo’s Toei studio in 1958, and often counted as the starting point for the post-war anime industry. The teenage Sugii worked alongside such youngsters as Rintaro, future director of Metropolis and X: The Movie, and Yasuo Otsuka, one of the most influential colleagues of Miyazaki and Takahata (he also co-directed the madcap Lupin III: The Mystery of Mamo).
After Hakujaden, Sugii worked on several productions related to Osamu Tezuka. In his early twenties, Sugii was one of the episode directors on the series often seen as the other starting point of post-war anime – Tezuka’s Astro Boy. Sugii served on several other Tezuka productions, including his celebrated art film Tales of a Street Corner (1962) and the rather more fun Cleopatra Queen of Sex (1970) – well, that was its American name!
Sugii, though, had a higher presence on a Tezuka TV adaptation, Dororo, on which he was series director. One of Tezuka’s darker tales, it’s a samurai-era drama in which a boy thief, Dororo, falls in with a cursed young man who’s lost his original body parts to demons, and now hunts them down. A live-action film version is on UK DVD, but here’s the opening credits to the TV anime, broadcast in 1969.
But Sugii was very able to work on lighter, more kiddie-friendly fare. Having already in-betweened on one Tezuka version of the “Monkey King” story – the 1960 film Saiyuki, known in America as Alakazam the Great – Sugii became the series director on a later 1967 TV show, called Goku no Daiboken in Japanese. In Italy, it was called The Monkey – Le grandi avventure di Goku, and here are the Italian credits…
By the 1970s, the contrasts between Sugii’s projects were getting even more extreme. On the dark side, he was animation director on the extraordinary Tragedy ofBelladonna (1973), made by Tezuka’s Mushi Production as a successor to CleopatraWhereas Cleopatra had been a goofy comedy with arty jokes, Belladonna was dead serious, a medieval phantasmagoria about a raped woman rebelling against God and patriarchy. It was a commercial flop, but what a flop! (Warning, the trailer below is NSFW.)
And then, for something completely different, Sugii’s debut as a feature film director, just a year after Belladonna, was… a Disneyesque musical version of Jack and the Beanstalk! Here’s the American trailer.
A decade later, after many other credits, Sugii managed to make a film somewhere in the middle of those extremes. Night on the Galactic Railroad isa “children’s” film that’s also a work of art. Based on a novella by the author and poet Kenji Miyazawa (1896 – 1933), it tells of a boy, Giovanni, atop a starlit hill. Down from the heavens comes a cosmic train, and Giovanni boards, finding his friend and classmate Campanella already a passenger. (Ah, but why is he a passenger?) Adding a further touch of surrealism, both Giovanni and Campanella are drawn as cats.
The boys’ cosmic journey takes in shining celestial crosses ringing with “Hallelujah” choruses, a Pliocene coastline, a puckish birdcatcher snatching herons from heaven, and a terrifying Black Hole. The film is an uncompromisingly stately, poetic and haunting meditation on Miyazawa’s text (a study staple in Japan), with the melodic transcendence of one of the best scores to ever grace an anime. The composer was Haruomi Hosono, a sometime bandmate of Ryuichi Sakamoto.
Sugii worked on many other anime, with an extended stint on the mid-1980s baseball saga Touch. With his track-record, it seems almost predictable that he could go on to adapt high Japanese literature and a massively popular Capcom fighting videogame. The former was The Tale of Genji (1987), from a portion of the thousand year-old Japanese novel. The latter was, of course, Street Fighter II: The Movie.
Some people would treat a spinoff from a hugely popular brand as an excuse to slum it. After all, if the name sells the film, what does it matter if the film is shoddy? And surely a director who’d worked on arthouse fare like Belladonna and Tale of Genji would be hoity-toity about adapting a videogame?
Not a bit of it. Sugii threw himself into Street Fighter II: The Movie with a gusto to satisfy the game’s biggest fans. Certainly, it made up for the appalling live-action version featuring Jean-Claude Van Damme and Kylie Minogue. Only in animation could huge men hurl each other through the air so tirelessly (the brawls were supervised by a real fight co-ordinator, Shinichi Shoji).
The Anime Encyclopedia argues that, of all Sugii’s films, Street Fighter is the most influential. It showed film-makers how a videogame adaptation should be done. The functional plot is fine-tuned to deliver the maximum smackdowns, instantly recognisable from the arcade screen but interpreted through high-quality, classical animation. Sugii juggles twelve characters, finding a story for them that works, putting them on different sides, adding a mind-control subplot so even friends fight... and adding a shower scene for the girl fighter. Street Fighter sets a template followed by most other game adaptations in anime (Tekken, Toshinden et al), meaning Sugii organised an entire sub-genre, whether he meant to or not.
Sugii also directed a TV version of the game (Street Fighter II V) but his more recent credits are as eclectic as ever. He hasn’t lost sight of children’s entertainment, making Arashi no Yoru ni (aka On a Stormy Night) about the strange cross-species friendship between a wolf and a goat. Sugii also revisited his classic Night on the Galactic Railroad. His recent feature, The Life of Gusco Budori was made as a response to the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, with a protagonist (drawn once more as a cat) in a world of disasters. The film adapts another Miyazawa story, bringing back many of Railroad’s animated ‘actors,’ as you can see if you compare the trailers.
Sugii has also embraced CGI. One of his newest works is an all-CGI feature for children - Little Ghostly Adventures of Tofu Boy, returning to the samurai/supernatural milieu of Dororo, more than forty years earlier. The techniques may look new… But after fifty years in the business, Sugii knows more than most of us that nothing is really new under the sun.
Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie is released on Blu-ray in the UK by Manga Entertainment on 13th May.
Andrew Osmond has been there, done that, and bought the T-shirt.
Of the anime titles turned into T-shirts by Uniqlo, One Pieceis the biggest – the reigning king of all the anime and manga franchises, pretty much unchallenged in the 16 years since Eiichiro Oda began the manga, and 14 since Toei Animation started animating it. But perhaps Uniqlo would have turned One Piece into a line of shirts even if the saga hadn’t been a world hit. Just look at those pirate designs – brash, cartoony, uncompromising. There’s no whiff of a committee, no hint of a five-year product plan reliant on changing a heroine’s hair colour (or deepening her cleavage). It just helps that the pictures are as commercial when they move as they are when they’re a cool static graphic in a manga, or on the front of a T-shirt.
One Piece shows history repeats with a twist. Fist of the North Star – made by the same studio as One Piece, Toei Animation – was aimed at a wide demographic, including kids, in Japan, but ran into controversy when it was aimed at kids in France. “In terms of censorship, the west is much more strict than Japan, in terms of children’s programming,” said Hidenori Oyama of Toei Animation. “One Piece features a violent gang and bloodshed; censorship means it will not be chosen for children’s viewing.”
As many One Piece fans know, there was a notorious attempt to make a child-friendly American version of the show, by the company 4Kids Entertainment. As with Fist of the North Star in France, it seems the American buyers simply didn’t really look at the show before buying the licence for a “hot” property. They also didn’t consider that a show about pirates might feature guns, and blades, and bleeding, and death. (Oh, and smoking. And alcohol…)
Anyone interested in what happened is recommended to a podcast on the Anime News Network website where Mark Kirk of 4Kids Entertainment is flambéed by fans, even though One Piece didn’t happen on his watch and he can only offer a “non-official take” on events. The real meat is at 35 minutes onwards, although there’s an enlightening account of America’s censorship rules before that. It’s great fun, but as you listen to the grilling, reflect that 4Kids had to choose between outraged fans battering their keyboards, and the prospect of angry legislators and politicians. As Kirk points out, 4Kids wasn’t making its One Piece for the anime fan cognoscenti, but for kids. Along with the Fist of theNorth Star row in France, Kirk might have pointed to One Piece’s own reception in Indonesia. There, the show was lambasted by the country’s Broadcasting Commission for “violence and blood,” “sensual looking women” and close-ups of “women’s body parts.”
4Kids soon cancelled its version of One Piece as a misconceived purchase, though it’s immortalised in fan infamy. Yet that may be a sign of how standards have risen over the decades. It’s debatable if 4Kids’ One Piece is objectively any less “butchered” than, for example, Battle of the Planets (the 1970s treatment of Science Ninja Team Gatchaman) and look how that’s nostalgically remembered in Britain and America. Maybe the rehab of the 4Kids One Piece is still to come, as the years pass – though quite plausibly, Battle of the Planets just worked better in butchered form.
In any case, of course, the 4Kids One Piece is now history, as Funimation has taken over the property. The new Manga Entertainment releases of One Piece have the adventures of Monkey D. Luffy, the Straw Hat pirates and the good ship Thousand Sunny as they should be - bold, bloody and unexpurgated!
The first One Piece box is released by Manga Entertainment on 27th May.
Yui Hirasawa and her band mates of Hokago Tea-Time return in K-On!! this week. The second season of the music-driven comedy sees the girls progressing to their final year at high school and facing tough decisions over life, their music careers and (possibly) which cake to eat next.
