Last weekend — after nearly driving myself to madness — I finished off my second novel (as I crowed about in undignified fashion below!) and on Tuesday, signed it to a new, rather cool publisher called Perfect Edge Books.
Yep, it goes without saying that I’m still over-the-moon at the present time, if somewhat exhausted, and to celebrate I quaffed a little saké.
Just a smidgeon, I promise.
Which brings me in a celebratory mood to this month’s Flash in Japan over @ Forces of Geek, and thereby to one of my favourite Japanese myths - which also revolves around saké, as all the good ones do.
I actually did the research on this subject a few years back, for an article on nihonshu (saké) in the pages of the late, lamented magazine Geek Monthly.
That was how I stumbled upon the tale of a monster with a taste for the hard stuff, especially rice wine.
In my new novel, One Hundred Years of Vicissitude, I decided to nick some bits of my old research and stick them into the story, albeit padded out with dialogue, and (hopefully) a bit more fun.
The monster myth was one of them.
So, let’s jump straight into the unedited, raw manuscript I just finished - there might be a typo or two at this stage.
Today I picked up the flier for Macross Frontier ~Sayonara no Tsubasa~.
I always hate it when they put those fancy squiggly things like "~" in titles, as it just looks twee, but aside from that inconsequential complaint the movie will hit screens across Japan from 26 February 2011.
The subtitle Sayonara no Tsubasa has been roughly translated in recent press statements as "The Wings of Goodbye", whatever precisely that means.
It's the sequel to last year's Macross Frontier ~Itsuwari no Utahime~ (more squiggling action, which actually does look better in Japanese: マクロスF ～イツワリノウタヒメ～).
That movie was directed by Shōji Kawamori (河森正治), previously the mechanical designer on Mamoru Oshii's Ghost in the Shell and Patlabor 2; he also acted in Oshii's Tachigui: The Amazing Lives of the Fast Food Grifters, created the original Macross Frontier manga - and apparently was responsible for the initial toy designs in the late '70s for the Transformers' Optimus Prime.
More importantly, Kuwamori was the creator, production supervisor, mechanical designer and writer of the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross (超時空要塞マクロス, Chōjikū Yōsai Makurosu) TV series, a 1982-83 sci-fi melodrama of the finest sort that, according to Kawamori, depicts "a love triangle against the backdrop of great battles" during the first Human-alien war.
And really that tells you enough - it's an awesome romp that has mecha action wrapped up with base human emotions like jealousy, rivalry and anger.
I loved it when I stumbled across it (on VHS) back in Australia in the early '90s.
Even better, however, Kuwamori also co-directed the ground-breaking Macross Plus (マクロスプラス) in 1994 - with Shinichiro Watanabe (Cowboy Bebop) - thereby creating a slab of absolutely essential anime.
Whether the new movie lives up to these original yarns is yet to be seen (obviously, since it hasn't even screened) but until the unveiling in February they have the website here for more pics/info... in Japanese.
In the meantime here's the bloody brilliant old trailer for Macross Plus; it used to feature on most of the 1990s videos released by Manga Entertainment in Australia (now better known as Madman).
Yesterday I went to Mikasa Park - and much as that may sound like the Japanese equivalent of a song penned by Jimmy Webb, it's in fact a stately space by the seaside in Yokosuka, located right next the U.S. naval base there.
A previous resident of Yokosuka was William Adams, the inspiration for the British hero John Blackthorne in James Clavell's tome Shōgun, back in the 17th century; he was more recently channeled by Richard Chamberlain in the 1980 TV miniseries.
It was also in the southern part of Yokosuka in the mid 1850s that Commodore Matthew Perry arrived with his fleet of Black Ships, to force the opening of diplomatic and trade relations between Japan and the United States.
Almost one hundred years later American occupation forces landed at Yokosuka (on 30 August 1945, after the surrender of Japan) and the naval base has been used by the US Navy since then.
Yokosuka crops up as the locality of the Sega video game Shenmue, as well as being blown up in the futuristic tactical RPG Front Mission 3.
Director Imamura Shohei set his 1961 film Pigs and Battleships (豚と軍艦) in Yokosuka, and the place was the location of climactic fisticuffs in the Godzilla film Terror of Mechagodzilla (メカゴジラの逆襲, 1975).
But the real reason I went down there was for an exceptionally big ship.
The Mikasa is a pre-dreadnought battleship ordered from Britain by Japan in 1898 and took three years to complete, at the cost of £880,000 (¥8.8 million). Upon arrival in these waters the ship ended up becoming the flagship of Admiral Heihachiro Togo, Commander-in-Chief of the Japanese Grand Fleet during the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905).
Named after Mount Mikasa in Nara, the Mikasa is in fact the last pre-dreadnought ship in the world, a survivor of the Russian conflict, running aground in fog in 1921, decommissioning later that year, retirement as a memorial ship in 1926, bombing in World War 2, and extensive dismantling during Japan's demilitarization thereafter.
Restoration work, in conjunction with the U.S. Navy, brought the old lady back to life and she was opened to the public in 1961. Now it's a nifty museum with its own cinema, models, paintings and documents, many of the compartments look as they did in Togo's time, and there're some hilarious mannequins "manning" cannons.
The main guns (seen above with a ring-in, unsuspecting live bystander to get a gist of their size) had a range of 10 kilometres and fired projectiles weighing 400 kilograms. It took 40 people to operate them, surrounded by armour weighing in at around 50 tons.
The ship was the major setting for Nihonkai Daikaisen: Umi Yukaba (1983) - variously known in English as Battle of the Japan Sea and Battle Anthem, it tells the story of a young musician assigned to Mikasa’s shipboard band, and depicts the Battle of Tsushima Straits in 1905.
At Tsushima the Mikasa led the combined Japanese fleet into one of the most decisive naval battles in history - almost annihilating their Russian foes.
The movie starred the great Toshiro Mifune as Admiral Togo; it was directed by Toshio Masuda, who helped make Tora! Tora! Tora! in 1970 as well working on the anime Space Battleship Yamato series - and was involved as the producer on its 2009 reboot Rebirth Yamato.
There's also an NHK drama called Sakanoue no Kumo, screened last year, which portrays a rapidly modernizing Meiji Japan (1867-1915) and has extensive location and press shots around the Mikasa.
But the best find of this little expedition was the Admiraali Export Beer with Admiral Togo's face on it (see first picture above), which I'm partaking of now as I write these words.
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.
There’s some doubt that you soon will, given that the title’s initially short run on Japanese national broadcaster NHK in 2006 generated such a hugely positive response from critics and TV viewers alike that it prompted production company Aniplex to generate a new batch the following year - but it's since seemingly disappeared so far as I know, save for the occasional rerun.
Which is sad because, while ostensibly aimed at kids no taller than most people’s kneecaps, Polta is such a gamely surreal romp that it comes across as deliriously upbeat and gloriously quirky all at once - due in no small shrift to the original character designs by Ryoji Arai, a man rightly considered the best kids’ book artist in Japan right now and a winner of the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award in this field.
I recently got to interview Arai and will be running with that non-fireside chat shortly on this site.
But now to veer wildy back to this TV series for now: It's narrated by actor Hidetaka Yoshioka (a veteran of Japan’s exceptionally long-running Tora-san movies, and the 2006 Japanese Academy Award-winner for Best Actor in Always) and a superb, off-kilter score has been rendered by Tomoko Kataoka, a member of Instant Cytron.
The bonus surprise here?
That the animator and director of Polta is one Toshikatsu Wada. While his moniker may currently be less renowned than those of Arai, Yoshioka and Kataoka, this is very likely to change.
At the 2006 10th Japan Media Arts Festival, Polta was a runner-up in the Animation Division to Mamoru Hosoda’s The Girl Who Leapt Through Time - a movie cited by many Japanese critics as the best animation to emerge from this country last year, despite stiff competition from Satoshi Kon's Paprika and Tekkon Kinkreet.
None of those other movies made the cut at the festival, but Polta did - and it received a coveted prize for excellence along the way.
In giving the award, the festival organizers were obviously smitten: “This is, without doubt, a masterpiece,” they waxed lyrical on their website.
“[No] previous animation has previously achieved a feeling as relaxing, heart-warming and cozy as this work… Wada’s outstanding technique reminds of the sharp, avant-garde edge of Norman McLaren and Břetislav Pojar... he is an exceptional animator.”
In a short statement upon acceptance of the award, Ryoji Arai paid similar homage to Wada. “I would like to give my heart-felt applause to the director, who successfully captured and animated the hand-made quality of the original individual elements of this story.”
Wada, born in 1966, was nourished as a wee tacker on a steady diet of Lupin III (“Especially Hayao Miyazaki’s Castle of Cagliostro,” he interjects), and Tex Avery’s 1950s cartoon Deputy Droopy. But he is in fact a relative newcomer to making animation.
“I was 30 years old when I started,” he advises. “I was attracted by director Tadanari Okamoto’s work, and this encouraged me to enter a production company making short films - then the direct trigger was buying an Amiga.”
For NHK, Wada made a show titled Bip and Bap, a comedy-action series of 5-minute episodes (like Polta) that told the yarn of two detectives and their archenemy burglar.
Already his signature-style was starting to emerge.
“It’s the classic paper-cutting cutout technique, with 3DCG computer software,” Wada says. “I’m also using Light Wave 3D, gouache and watercolor paper.”
Before the collaboration with Ryoji Arai on Polta, Wada was “Doing script, continuity, direction and animation all by myself, but for this series I’ve done the animation with two other staff-members, since Polta was our first extended TV series.”
Wada’s animated cutout approach and Arai’s deliberately naïve-style imagery work together in brilliant synchronicity in the new show, and there’s some truly innovative 2D cut-up techniques reinvented as a three-dimensional aesthetic.
Polta relates the tale of the laid back, itinerant package-delivering central character, his trusted steed (the guitar-strumming donkey Roba-Roba, who Wada says is his favorite character), and a cluster of escapades involving fugitive hot-air balloons, crazed soccer-playing penguins, a talking bus with a penchant for fishing, and a girl - Accel, who just so happens to have a head of helicopter hair.
“In Arai's pictures, there’s a unique half-three-dimensional perspective,” Wada suggests, perhaps alluding to the characters’ personas as well.
“I thought the paper-cutting technique matches that rather well. Also, I found it was easy to understand the personalities of characters, and that they moved around in the background space seemingly without permission, or any real rules of reality - and so I didn't have to think so much as director.”
A taste of the future indeed. Just a pity this particular series seems to have been forgotten before its time.
Back in 2008, for Anime Insider mag, I interviewed series producer Hiroyuki Birukawa and director Masamitsu Hidaka about the title; since that mag's now defunct, I'm guessing there's no problem sharing it here since FUNimation over in the US this month released the DVD box-set of the first 12 episodes.
Ask veteran Pokémon director, Hidaka, about his involvement helming the Gonzo series, Linebarrels of Iron (鉄のラインバレル, Kurogane no Rainbareru) and his response comes across as excited as it is free-wheeling.
“The story within the original comic consisted of exciting battle scenes and the fascinating stories of each character,” he explains. “So, I’ve placed a special value on those points when creating the animation version. I’m always trying to work out how I can showcase the cool and coquettish mecha battle scenes - both by employing a sharp sense of speed and presence, and by including contemplative action scenes in the animation. And while I’m aiming high for the twin ideals of beautiful and cool, it’s still, beneath it all, cute mecha-anime! I just hope you enjoy it, and that it’s fun for fans to watch.”
In most celluloid productions it’s the director who dreams, creates the art, and has his head in the clouds. The producer is the grounded financier who stabilizes the ship, handles the organizational side of things, and sees the big picture a little clearer. They’re often also the people who see the production through - from a scrap of note-paper to the screen version.
So it seems with Linebarrels of Iron series producer, Hiroyuki Birukawa, who has been with this particular anime title since Day One.
“I know the chief editor of the monthly magazine, Champion Red, published by Akita Shoten here in Japan,” Birukawa informs me.
“He and I have known each other for quite a long time, and one day he showed me the latest manga they did - and it was Linebarrels of Iron. The moment I saw that sample comic, I knew that this was something I wanted to create as an animation, and asked them for the rights to create it.”
Birukawa previously dabbled with another famous Gonzo production, Last Exile, and is quite clearly the man to talk to when you want a concise explanation of the storyline behind the studio’s new series.
“The main character, Kouichi Hayase, was an ordinary kid in high school, who was constantly teased but had a dream of someday becoming a hero,” recounts Birukawa, with the heroic patience of a man perhaps used to dealing with less focused types.
“The first cool point of this anime may be how this character develops through many events, including a parting with good friends, to become a true hero. The second cool point is the mecha action. As you may have seen in the past, all 3D robot-action scenes always had a rectilinear movement, which was quite unreal. The director, Hidaka-san, and I have talked about this quite extensively - and we’ve gone back to how 2D robot-action scenes were shown, in order to include that point within our 3D robot-action scenes for Linebarrels of Iron.”
Birukawa’s fascinating lesson, which threatens to put this writer out of a job, is far from over. He has more about the new series that he’s keen to share - and enlighten us with along the way.
“If you’ve seen the series trailer, Linebarrel strikes a particular pose, before stabbing ARMA, the enemy robot. It’s like kabuki, wherein you adopt one pose before you give it movement.
"We actually call it tame in Japanese. We believe tame and kire - fast action moves after tame - are the most important points when showing cool mecha action. And Hidaka is a pro at robot action.
“Also luckily for the 3D action scenes, we have Itano-san [Ichiro Itano, the director of Blassreiter and veteran planner of The Super Dimension Fortress Macross], who is fantastic at checking these kind of scenes and translating them into action.”
Adding to the superlative mecha developments is the teamwork involved in the series structure, scripts, and ideas.
“The creative producer, Goro Taniguchi, has so many excellent ideas about the animation he wants to include, while Kiyoko Yoshimura is fantastic at including these, as well as expressing character descriptions in the story.”
Despite his professional nature and assured eye on the whole production, you can almost see Birukawa blush when it comes to talking up his favourite character in the series.
“It’s Emi Kizaki,” he admits. “She is cute, sexy, and also smart! There’s a Japanese slang word, tsundere [meaning a volatile personality that ends up being good-willed] and she has that perfect tsundere factor...”
This news has been floating round for a bit but I've been waiting for more concrete info and images: Takashi Miike will this year be releasing his remake of 13 Assassins (Jûsan-nin no shikaku), the one-time 1963 B-movie jidaigeki drama (directed by Eiichi Kudo) which these days has a far better reputation and starred Kô Nishimura - a veteran of several movies by Akira Kurosawa.
The new version is now up on imdb.com but is a little threadbare in the details (the synopsis there says simply "A group of assassins come together for a suicide mission to kill an evil lord"); it looks like the stars are going to be Koji Yakusho, who shone in the original Japanese version of Shall We Dance as well as in Babel, and Yusuke Iseya - who I all-too-briefly met on the set of Jiro Shirasu last year.
Yep, Miike - responsible for some insanely cool, odd, and witheringly gory cinema over the past 15 years - is doing a samurai period film.
I pinched this outline of the show from Wikipedia and just tweaked it a bit (hey, it's new year's day; I wanna go relax with the family!):
The program divides the most popular music artists of the year into competing teams of red and white. The "red" team (akagumi) is composed of all female artists, while the "white" team (shirogumi) is all male. Last night the men's team, led by SMAP's Masahiro Nakai, somehow trounced the women's team fronted by actress Yukie Nakama.
The honor of performing on Kōhaku is strictly by invitation, so only the most successful J-Pop artists and enka singers can perform.
In addition to the actual music performances, the costumes, hair-styles, makeup, dancing, and lighting are also important. Even today, a performance on Kōhaku is said to be a big highlight in a singer's career because of the show's large reach.
Anyway, the show finishes around 11:40 pm... then we had to watch these people banging a massive bell 108 times at a Buddhist temple (something called during Joya no Kane) to see out the old year - apparently according to Buddhist beliefs 108 is the number of passions and desires entrapping us in the cycle of suffering and reincarnation. So, the 108 bell chimes symbolize the purification from the 108 delusions and sufferings accumulated in the past year.
The Lupin III franchise, created by legendary manga artist Monkey Punch, had been around for 12 years in comic book form, and a TV series since 1971, when occasional episode director Hayao Miyazaki (Spirited Away) helmed this feature-lengther.
The character of Lupin III just so happens to be the great nephew of Arsène Lupin, the daring gentleman thief and detective – a kind of Gallic Sherlock Holmes – created in 1905 by Maurice LeBlanc. He featured in a rash of French flicks in the silent era.
His descendant is an equally enigmatic thief who speaks fluent Japanese (or differing degrees of American English depending on the dub), with an insatiable appetite for food along with an overt weakness for women - including the femme fatale of the series, Fujiko Mine. Meanwhile he’s aided and abetted by his trusty cohorts Jigen and Goemon, in pursuit of some hilarious heists.
Rupan Sansei: Kariosutoro no Shiro (The Castle Of Cagliostro, 1979) is the highlight of a sensational series, and it’s due as much to the assured touch of Miyazaki as it is the enigmatic cast of characters involved in the story. This time Lupin bites off more than he can chew when he tries to rescue a damsel in distress and comes up against the sinister Count of Cagliostro and an international counterfeiting syndicate.
Any fans of subsequent Miyazaki romps like Castle In The Sky, Crimson Pig, My Neighbor Totoro and Spirited Away will find germinating elements from all of those movies at play here.
Incidentally, the late, great Yasuo Yamada, who voiced Lupin, had a habit of also dubbing Clint Eastwood’s dulcet tones in the Japanese versions of everything from Rawhide to The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly - and he even turned up to play Omawari-san in Panda! Go, Panda! (see last entry).
