Tonight, while out on our balcony, I saw a raccoon dog, called tanuki (狸) over here, crossing the road 20 metres above the ground on an electricity cable... in the middle of Tokyo.
This isn't the first time. I also saw one around the corner a few months back, though most of my Japanese mates poo-hoo the thought since we live just 15 minutes by train from Shibuya. Others say tanuki do in fact live here in the city because it's warmer and there's more food, and I'm pretty sure I know what I saw.
For me these are the coolest critters, when you grow up (like I did) back in Australia with possums and their guttural noises, though I know raccoons are just as disregarded by many North Americans.
Still, they're better than squirrels. Having been bitten by a particularly cute squirrel in Central Park, one that looked like a hand-puppet but was actually an evil little tyrant, I think I have a good grasp on the comparison.
Here in Japan the local raccoon dog is historically regarded a little differently. For starters the wild tanuki has disproportionately large testicles, a feature that has inspired humorous exaggeration in artistic depictions.
In old stories (and some more recent brethren) they're reputed to be mischievous and jolly, a master of disguise and shapeshifting, but somewhat gullible and absent-minded.
For starters there's the yarn "Kachi-kachi Yama" which features a tanuki that wallops an old lady and then serves up her to the unsuspecting husband as soup.
Even as Studio Ghibli made a surprising flop that year with Gedo Senki (Tales from Earthsea), 2006 was a highly competitive year for Japanese anime thanks to Madhouse’s double-treat Paprika (directed by the great Satoshi Kon) and Toki o Kakeru Shōjo (The Girl Who Leapt Through Time), helmed by one-time Ghibli reject and current anime wunderkind Mamoru Hosoda.
But to be completely honest, a little-heralded feature by an unknown foreign director stole the entire 12 months’ viewing pleasure when it screened at the Tokyo International Film Festival that October.
One of the causes for the subversive impact of this movie, Tekkonkinkreet, was its sound track – it gloriously debunked the Japanese practice of using a J-Pop band, Joe Hisaishi, and/or a rising Japanese teenage pretty face chanteuse doing the score, or even opting (as in the cases of Appleseed and the Ergo Proxy TV series) for a famous international DJ-cum-band, like Radiohead, on the opening and/or closing titles.
Tekkonkinkreet (鉄コン筋クリート) instead boasts a stunningly experimental sound track: no surprise, really, when you consider that it’s been composed by eclectic British duo Ed Handley and Andy Turner – aka Plaid, a one-time backing band for Björk.
Yet while Plaid is known to people who’re into improvisational electronic music, as well as open-minded patrons of European digital-art festivals – not to mention journalists writing about music distant from the mainstream – they’re otherwise not famous at all.
Still, “I'm a huge fan of Plaid,” admitted Michael Arias, the director of Tekkonkinkreet, when I interviewed him back in 2006.
If Arias’ moniker doesn’t sound as Japanese as it should, that’s because he’s an expat American. “I’ve actually been here in Tokyo for 15 years, which is probably longer than most of my co-workers have lived in this city,” he said.
And while Tekkonkinkreet was Arias’ feature movie directorial debut, he’s hardly a novice. Before moving to Japan, and since, he has been involved in tweaking the CG on movies as far a field as James Cameron’s The Abyss, David Cronenberg’s M. Butterfly, and the Coen brothers’ The Hudsucker Proxy.
Arias also produced, helped supervise, and worked on the CGI for 'Beyond', the best segment of the Matrix animation off-shoot The Animatrix, as well as on another of the segments, “Second Renaissance”, back in 2003.
His lack of notoriety is surprising, given the fact that this film was a hugely innovative anime putsch produced by Studio 4°C – the junta behind Katsuhiro Otomo, Koji Morimoto, and Satoshi Kon’s collaborative movie Memories (1995), Otomo and Tensai Okamura’s Stink Bomb (1995) and Morimoto’s Eikyuu Kazoku (Eternal Family, 1997/98).
Masahiko Kubo and Chie Uratani, who were the joint animation directors here, worked on Trigun and Hayao Miyazaki movies respectively, and art director Shinji Kimura previously cut his teeth on ‘80s anime classics like Otomo’s Akira and Mamoru Oshii’s Tenshi no Tamago (Angel’s Egg).
Behind the scenes there’s been another pivotal 'crew' member: the guiding influence, support and inspiration of Studio 4°C’s resident enfant terrible, Koji Morimoto.
“I’m not sure that I’ll ever be able to muster that kind of energy again!” Arias confessed four years ago. And he kind of hasn’t, aside from the live-action movie Heaven’s Door (2009).
“At the time I had an incredibly talented and supportive crew working with me. A lot of effort and emotion went into each frame of the movie, and I’m enormously proud of what we achieved.”
Like the people behind the score (Plaid) Tekkonkinkreet is certainly inventive in tone and style; Pokémon this movie most certainly is not.
As it turns out, despite its innovative artistic bent, Tekkonkinkreet – like most Japanese anime – comes from that most traditional of anime source materials: manga. In this case it’s based on the comic created back in 1994 by Taiyo Matsumoto, the man also responsible for Ping Pong.
“I’ve been enamored since I first read it, about 10 years ago,” Arias said at the time of production. “It really speaks to me in so many ways.”
As in the original story, the movie relates the exploits of two enigmatic street-kids named Black and White – as well as the pivotal emotional relationship between them – and it’s set in a retro-futuristic Asian city that looks like Tokyo... but possibly isn’t.
“When I read it years ago, I thought no one could film Tekkonkinkreet, but the movie really took me to new places,” says experimental musician Kana Masaki.
In the words of the film’s director, these kids (our ad hoc heroes) are pitched in mortal combat not only against the local yakuza crime-lords, but “an extraterrestrial real estate mogul who plans to turn the town into an amusement park and ultimately dominate the world.”
“It’s a simple story,” Arias mused.
“I think it appeals on a universal level, but I really don’t think I’ve ever seen any other movie quite like it – animated or not.”
Despite detractors I think that Tekkonkinkreet is one of the finest anime outings ever produced; quite possibly the over-the-time action quotient helps.
It's hard to believe it's been 25 years since Hayao Miyazaki founded Studio Ghibli, straight after releasing their landmark epic Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (alias 風の谷のナウシカ, Kaze no Tani no Naushika, 1984).
While Nausicaä was groundbreaking stuff in and of itself, Miyazaki - the animator/director behind it - later set about with Ghibli to change completely the way in which we perceive animation, via the release of Spirited Away (千と千尋の神隠し, Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi) in 2001.
But if you really want to look at the heritage behind the latest Studio Ghibli international offering – Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea (崖の上のポニョ, Gake no Ue no Ponyo), out now in Australia and North America even though it was actually released in Japan almost two years ago – you need to funnel short-attention-spans back beyond Spirited Away.
There were a bevy of equally vital Miyazaki/Ghibli offerings sandwiched between 1984 and 2001, often with a pinch or two of their hallmark moments of freestyle genre-defying, refreshing humour, and an implicit disarming madness.
All these movies are a gem within their own right, each and every one laden with legions of fans pushing this or that as the Holy Grail of Ghibli anime.
For some, My Neighbour Totoro(となりのトトロ, Tonari no Totoro, 1988) stands highest among these and I'd probably pipe up in their favour.
While nowhere near as thematically complex as Spirited Away or Nausicaä – the titular character here indulges in lots of top-flying, snoozing and cat bus travel – the real stars of this Miyazaki flick are four-year-old Mei and her older sister Satsuki, along with the idyllic Japanese rural backdrop that the animator/director seems to believe has been lost.
The other Miyazaki movies are equal treats in completely diverse ways. Think action and adventure in Castle in the Sky (天空の城ラピュタ, Tenku no Shiro Laputa, 1986), witches and adolescence in Kiki's Delivery Service (魔女の宅急便, Majo no Takkyubin, 1989), flying pigs and anti-fascism in Porco Rosso (紅の豚, Kurenai no Buta, 1992), environmentalism in Princess Mononoke(もののけ姫, Mononoke-hime, 1997), and just about everything else in Howl's Moving Castle (ハウルの動く城, Hauru no Ugoku Shiro, 2004).
Despite being now aged 69 (his birthday was in January), and having threatened to retire several times over in the past decade, Miyazaki continues to be the international golden boy of Japanese animation thanks to a belated Oscar in 2004 for Best Animated Feature (for Spirited Away) – and for this "latest" movie, Ponyo, which was an entrant in the Venice Film Festival and was officially submitted for nomination at the next Oscars (but missed out in favour of American fare like Pixar's Up, Coraline and Disney's The Princess and the Frog).
There's also a new Ghibli movie in the works. Called The Borrower Arrietty (借りぐらしのアリエッティ, Karigurashi no Arrietty), it's set for release in July - although this time directed by Hiromasa Yonebayashi rather than Miyazaki. Yonebayashi previously did Key Animation on Spirited Away, Howl's Moving Castle and Ponyo.
With this latest romp Miyazaki has here seen fit to reinvent his vision once again through the wondrous eyes of children. In this case those eyes belong to a changeling young fish-girl, the Ponyo of the title, who goes AWOL from her dad's underwater lair to explore the big wide world but ends up instead stranded in a small fishing village where five-year-old Sosuke lives.
Already the ages should give you the gist of what to expect, with the wealth of imagination owned by a five-year-old allowing Miyazaki open slather to create a freewheeling visual platform for the madcap rush that ensues, during which mistaken vengeance, metamorphosis, manic driving, extinct fish and Noah-type floods all take a role.
It's a far a simpler story-telling technique at play here that owes much more to My Neighbour Totoro than to Spirited Away.
Even so, Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea comes across as a visually stunning interpretation of the archetypal fairy tale ("The Little Mermaid"), recast within a Miyazakian dimension that recalls all the best elements of the director's earlier films (especially, for me, Panda! Go, Panda!), along with a bubbling positivity that's been infectious enough to wear down even movie reviewers with a penchant for the cynical.
Ponyo in her human form also bears an unerring resemblance to my 4-year-old daughter Cocoa, so she won me over in no time.
No wonder that the film was released on more screens than any other domestic movie when it was released in Japan in 2008, nor that it took in excess of $150 million at the Japanese box office.
You have to rear-vision yourself way back to 1972 to see where it all really began, 27 years ago with the anime crafted by a young Hayao Miyazaki (then aged 31) and his mentor, director Isao Takahata.
Thirteen years later the duo would found Studio Ghibli (just after releasing their landmark epic, Kaze no Tani no Naushika, or Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, in 1984), and later still change the way we perceive animation with the release of Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi (Spirited Away) in 2001.
But if you really want to look at the heritage behind the most recent Studio Ghibli offering Gake no Ue no Ponyo (Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea, which has finally hit the Western world through its English dub) along with next year's Karigurashi no Arrietty (The Borrower Arrietty, directed by Ghibli animator Hiromasa Yonebayashi), you need to channel your attentions back beyond Spirited Away and further in time to the early '70s, back to a little show called Panda! Go Panda! and then wonder... Is this the most insane anime ever made?
Well, perhaps not; there was a sequel (Panda! Go Panda!: Rainy Day Circus), released the following year. And, really, you have to watch them both back-to-back for the real lunacy to sink in.
The original press release from distributors Toho was clue enough. “Mimiko lives with her grandmother beside a bamboo grove,” it reported in suitably stilted English. “One day Mimiko's grandmother goes away for a while, leaving Mimiko to herself. A baby panda appears in the garden along with its father, Papa Panda. Mimiko asks if Mr. Panda could be her father too, and he agrees.”
And that’s it. No further warning. Nothing.
In truth, after one viewing you’ll come away convinced that Mimiko is better described as Pippi Longstocking after having sucked up too much caffeine, while Papa Panda is a psychotic prototype-critter for Miyazaki’s later cherished title character from Tonari no Totoro (My Neighbour Totoro, 1988).
