Jonathan Clements's Blog, page 23

The Enemies of Thor

From A Brief History of the Vikings by Jonathan Clements, available in the UK and in the US.

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There were a number of ungodlike enemies with which the Viking deities found themselves in conflict. A major group of rivals, for example, are the Jotnar, or Giants, a race whose names often contain elements of shifty duplicity, cunning, and braggadocio. If the Jotnar were a race supplanted by proto-Scandinavians, then we might even guess at their original home, Jotunheim, in south central Norway. The Jotnar are despicable to Norse eyes, violent and uncontrollable, creatures of the mountains, formidable foes, yet whose females are often regarded as desirable brides – a conqueror's view of the conquered. A leading adversary of the Jotnar is Thor himself, whose legends contain many hints that associate him as an unwelcome guest in the Jotunheim region. His mother, for a start, is a giantess herself, Fjörgynn, a mistress of Odin. In an area where goat herding is a paramount local industry, we find that Thor quarrels with his neighbours over deaths of his flock. He rides in a chariot pulled by goats, and is sometimes referred to as Oku-thorr, the Charioteer ­– in both Old Norse and Sámi, the words for thunder and a wheeled vehicle are punningly similar.

In Lapland, some shamanic drums show a male figure bearing a hammer in one hand and a swastika (thunderbolt) in the other, said to be Horagalles, the Norse Thor-Karl, or 'old man Thor'. One of the most famous stories of Thor tells of his fight with a giant who leaves a piece of stone permanently embedded in his head. This may be a reference to a ritual at sacred sites of Thor, involving the striking of flint. In other words, with his red hair and beard, and his mastery of lightning, Thor may have been a fire god, whose trials in myth are allegories of the kindling of sacred fires, and the smiting of foes.

Other races in the Viking mythos can be seen as similarly conquered peoples, associated in the Viking mind with a native mastery of the local woodlands and hills. Such peoples are the huldufólk, the 'hidden folk' identified in different parts of Scandinavia by different names, and ultimately combined by later writers to form a menagerie of supernatural creatures. The álfar or elves, for example, and their dark cousins the dvergar, or dwarves. Both are occasional allies of the gods, the dwarves renowned for their skills in metalwork, the elves as occasional bedmates and tormentors. At no point during the Viking age was there any implication of diminutive size in either of these races – their role as the 'little people' of later centuries is thought to have been a function of the suppression of old religions with the onset of Christianity.

Thinking Like an Anime Writer

Attendees at the Glasgow Youth Film Festival in February 2011 can expect to be harangued, tormented and cajoled at a morning workshop on the way that Japanese animation scripts are put together, and how Western cartoon companies try to copy them.

Why do they all have such big eyes? What's with the hot spring episode… and could you do better..? Yes, it's the return of the notorious Jonathan Clements storylining lab, as seen at Screen Academy Wales, the Irish Film Institute and various other dumbstruck venues.

If you are a teenager with nothing better to do in Glasgow on a Sunday, now's your chance to sign up for the industry experience that has been likened to a rollercoaster ride through shattered dreams and management madness , variously described as "illuminating", "life-changing" and "better than the guy we had last week."

Jonathan Clements is the author of Schoolgirl Milky Crisis: Adventures in the Anime and Manga Trade. Now also available on the Kindle.

Salon Futura #4

The new issue of Salon Futura is up online, and features a chunky interview with Leiji Matsumoto, the creator of Captain Harlock, Queen Emeraldas and Space Battleship Yamato.

Also in this issue: an interview with Alistair Reynolds, stuff on fantasy and steampunk, and a review of Johanna Sinisalo's Birdbrain.

Source Material

Bit of housekeeping in this month's Pulse column: I'd like to take the chance to knock another misconception on the head before a whole new generation start using it as gospel truth. Somewhere back in the mists of time, probably in a press release from the early 1990s, someone made the inadvisable claim that anime were all based on manga. I guess it was an attempt to inextricably link two buzz-words in a breathless twofer. Even though anyone with half a brain must surely realise that it can't be true, I still regularly have to deal with journalists who think it is a fact. Sadly, this assumption has wormed its way into several academic publications as well. Of course, anime and manga will always enjoy a strong affinity, but the idea manga forms the foundation of the anime business has not been supported by the facts since the late 1960s.

So, for the record. In the early days of anime, many cartoons were indeed based on local comics. In 1963, the year of the broadcast of Astro Boy, 100% of anime were based on manga. But even by the year I was born, 1971, I estimate that only half of all the anime on TV were based on Japanese comics. The rest were ideas concocted in a hurry at boozy lunches, or ripped off from pre-existing works, such as the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen. Ten years later, amid a bunch of toy tie-ins and adaptations of famous children's stories, the number had dropped still further, to something like a third.

These days, manga have enjoyed something of a resurgence. Last year, 46% of anime were based on manga. That's by far the largest sector, against 19% based on novels, 17% based on computer games, and 15% created entirely out of nothing. That just leaves 3% of "other", which could be anything. If Hollywood can base Pirates of the Caribbean on a theme park ride, then anime can be inspired by mascots, chocolate bars and political satire if it so desires.

Just because you know that there is a manga with the same title as your favourite anime, it doesn't follow that the anime was based on it. Many manga are merely created to advertise a particular show, and to encourage younger readers to seek it out in the first place. Similarly, ever since the 1990s, many manga have been conceived purely as marketing tools, part of a "multi-media" spread designed to sell the comic. Yes, technically, Sailor Moon was "based on" a manga, but the Sailor Moon manga was steered and influenced heavily by shadowy figures preparing the franchise for broadcast, not for publication.

Needless to say, that still leaves lots of areas open to misunderstandings. One wonders, for example, how many of the "novels" that inspire anime productions are actually "light novels", in other words, individually published novellas, often insanely dialogue heavy and seemingly intended less for textual printing than for reading on a mobile phone. (Many of them, in fact, appear to have been written on one, too).

You may be wondering what difference it all makes. I, for one, think it's healthy to remember that Japanese animation has just as rich a field of inspiration as any culture's cartoons. If the general public think that anime can only stem from comics, they will have greater trouble understanding its fancier inspirations: the works of Alexandre Dumas, for example, or the novels of Yasutaka Tsutsui, or, well… the Bible.

This article first appeared in NEO #78, 2010.

Selfish Genes

"Nowadays it is getting difficult to create cool, global science fiction," says director Kenji Kamiyama. "It is because reality has surpassed the future we imagined. Cool SF stories turn up just before the big bang of a new social infrastructure. This time, it was the Internet. Ghost in the Shell was the forerunner and a favourite."

The issue of an aging population first appeared in Japanese science fiction in the early 1990s. Katsuhiro Otomo's Roujin-Z satirised the use of robots to care for the elderly, but around the same time in the original Ghost in the Shell manga, Masamune Shirow was depicting old people literally left out on trash heaps.

Solid State Society returns to one of Ghost in the Shell's most important themes – the nature of the human spirit in a wired world. Directed and co-written by the Stand Alone Complex TV serial's Kenji Kamiyama, it considers the possibility that human beings are temporary growths like leaves on trees, fated to fade and die while the real organism, society itself, lives on. It is a provocative and unsettling premise, reducing human beings to consumers and customers, mere cogs in a much larger system, which is only interested in them for as long as they are productive.

In Solid State Society, children are in short supply, while the burdensome population of retirees is increasing. Furthermore, the very technology that was supposed to make the future a paradise of easy living is keeping people alive for inconveniently extended periods, leading to Solid State Society's "Kifu Aged" – pensioners on life-support machines, regarded by a brutal society as parasites.

Children played a crucial part in the rise of mass entertainment. Television and the post-war birthrate created the largest juvenile audience Japan had ever seen, numbers that boosted the ratings for children's programming so high that anime became a viable and a welcome local product. Those same children became the industrious workers whose savings kick-started Japan's economic miracle, and the harassed yuppies that presided over the bubble economy of the 1980s. Japan's children were its greatest resource in the late 20th century, but with old age they risk turning into a new liability. The Western world faces a similar problem, but Japan will see it first.

Older Japanese are threatened with retirement in a land where there are simply not enough young, able-bodied adults to fund pension schemes. Nor are there large, old-fashioned extended families to support them. Japan never had an official one-child policy like China, but high housing prices and a high cost of living encouraged many families to stay small. A large group of modern Japanese children has grown up without brothers or sisters, aunts or uncles, or cousins. Modern anime reflects this friendless generation, most notably in the children's show Bubu Chacha, in which a lonely child hangs out with local ghosts.

The Ghost in the Shell series has always mixed tantalising real-world issues with a science fictional spin, and Solid State Society is no exception. To a Japanese audience, it resonates even closer to home. One reason for Japan's population predicament is its obstructive attitude towards immigration; "Japanese-ness" is not a matter of one's place of birth or chosen allegiance, but a racially defined characteristic that is all but impossible for a foreigner to acquire. Even ethnic Koreans, some of whose families have resided in Japan for centuries, attended Japanese schools and speak no other language but Japanese, are still regarded as foreigners. Thus, when Solid State Society's Motoko Kusanagi speaks off-handedly of a "Refugee Naturalisation Act", she points to a chilling sign of a future Japan in a state of crisis – opening its doors to Chinese, Indonesians and other outland ethnicities. The suspects faced by Section 9 in Solid State Society have bafflingly monosyllabic names that sound alien to Japanese ears; they are blamed for Japan's ills, but Japan desperately needs them to stay and support its economy. Foreigners are infecting Japan like a virus, altering it forever. They bring new hope, but also new tensions, and for Section 9, new crimes.

Solid State Society also taps into modern Japanese paranoia about potential enemies, particularly North Korea, the rogue state with a nuclear programme and a scandalous history of abducting Japanese citizens for use in espionage – not a creation of science fiction, but a documented fact. Between 1977 and 1983, as many as 80 Japanese missing persons cases are rumoured to have been North Korean espionage kidnappings, although Pyongyang has only admitted to a dozen. The youngest was just thirteen years old at the time of her abduction.

Solid State Society cunningly whips up a political standoff between the past and the future, asking if it is right for the old-timers (which, in 2034, means us) to dictate what their grandchildren do, and how they should behave. It shares some trends with modern green politics, which asks how as-yet unborn generations will regard us, and true to the spirit of earlier incarnations of the anime, it takes such things to extremes. "The message," reveals director Kamiyama, "is one of reclaiming a society in which people are aware of and considerate towards each other.

Jonathan Clements is the author of Schoolgirl Milky Crisis: Adventures in the Anime and Manga Trade. Ghost in the Shell: Solid State Society, is released on Blu-Ray in the US on 7th December. This article first appeared as the sleeve notes to the UK release from Manga Entertainment.

Kihachiro Kawamoto 1925-2010

Kihachiro Kawamoto, who died on 23rd August, was a world away from what most fans consider to be "anime", and had conspicuously little to do with the cel-based industry that dominated Japanese animation in the twentieth century. Kawamoto made his living on what he called "horrible" jobs in advertising, while scraping together a little money so that he could make art films in his spare time. While Osamu Tezuka was charming the media and dominating the airwaves, Kawamoto was renting out town halls so he could show his short films to passers-by. But when Tezuka died in 1989, it was Kawamoto who took over his chairmanship of the Japan Animation Association – a position he held for the next 21 years. His tenure served as a reminder of how truly broad the animation medium can be. In Kawamoto's case, it embraced claymation, paper collages, stop-motion, and stop-motion's distaff cousin: old-fashioned puppetry.

Dolls were Kawamoto's first love. He wrote a magazine column about them during the US Occupation period, when young Japanese girls were forced to make do and mend with their worn-out toys. In the 1950s, he fell in with the maverick animator Tadahito Mochinaga, newly returned from China, where film had been in such short supply that he had taken to shooting puppet shows one frame at a time so as not to waste footage. This method, of course, turned Kawamoto's dolls into stars, as part of the multiple award-winning Beer Through the Ages (1956) a 12-minute compilation of adverts celebrating the half centenary of the Asahi Brewery.

"Dolls are children's toys, or things you dress up and display," he told Jasper Sharp at Midnight Eye. "Puppets, or marionettes, are things that act. This is a crucial difference. There's no such thing as doll animation."

Kawamoto learned how to make such "dolls that act", journeying to Czechoslovakia in the 1960s to study under the international master of puppets, Jiri Trnka. This was not as easy as it sounded – travel restrictions on the Japanese had only just been lifted in time for the Tokyo Olympics, and Kawamoto had to bend the truth by claiming to be coming to interview Trnka for a Japanese newspaper.

Under Trnka, Kawamoto began making his own short, stop-motion films, often influenced by Japanese mythology and theatre. He became renowned for his ability to use motion and posture to imply emotion in puppets whose expressions were otherwise unchanging. He remained resolutely small-scale, making films that scooped festival awards, but rarely travelled beyond the tiny circuit of festival aficionados. It is only in the last few years, with the release of a number of his shorts on the DVD Kihachiro Kawamoto Film Works, that a wider audience has stood the remotest chance of seeing his idiosyncratic, meticulous works of art.

In Japan in the 1980s, he became known as a puppeteer once more, producing two long-running adaptations of classics: The Romance of the Three Kingdoms and the Tale of the Heike. While foreign audiences were lapping up Akira and Legend of the Overfiend, Kawamoto's puppet shows were all over Japanese telly. In 1990 he returned to Czechoslovakia to make Briar Rose, a darkly shaded reimagining of Sleeping Beauty. The culmination of his work came in the form of the feature-length stop-motion film, The Book of the Dead (2005), which finally brought him a degree of international recognition, scant years before his death.

Jonathan Clements is the author of Schoolgirl Milky Crisis: Adventures in the Anime and Manga Trade. This article first appeared in NEO #77, 2010.

Umanosuke Iida 1961-2010

Animator Umanosuke Iida, who died last week, was born as plain Tsutomu Iida on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido. It was his fellow animator Hirotsugu Kawasaki, the future director of Spriggan, who started calling him Umanosuke, in honour of his apparent resemblance to a character of the same name in the comic series 1, 2, Sanshiro. Somehow the name stuck, and appeared on most of his animation credits from Nausicaä of the Valley of Wind onwards.

The multitalented Iida was equally at home working with both pictures and words. He penned the straight-to-video remakes of Go Nagai's Devilman and created the storyline for Mighty Space Miners. In a joke that got a little out of hand, he credited himself on the latter work by literally transposing the kanji of his name into English, as Horceman Lunchfield (Uma-no-suke Ii-da). This gag backfired in the English-speaking world, where several reviewers assumed that Lunchfield was an obscure, eccentric American sci-fi author, and nobody dared admit they had never heard of him.

"The anime's based on the books by Lunchfield," one pundit off-handedly told me, as if we were both supposed to know who Lunchfield was – you know, that guy who was a guest at Somethingcon with Asimov and Heinlein. This meme persisted for a decade in foreign fandom before the Anime Encyclopedia outed Iida as the inadvertent culprit.

In 1996, he took over the directing duties on Mobile Suit Gundam: The 08th MS Team, after the original director Takeyuki Kanda was killed in a car crash. In the 21st century, Iida's best known role was arguably as the chief director on the fan-favourite Hellsing (2001), based on the manga by Kouta Hirano. A distaff sequel of sorts to Dracula, it featured a modern-day secret society that protects the British Isles from any paranormal, supernatural or undead threats, and often does so through the volatile means of its own house vampire. He also directed the post-apocalyptic drowned-world series Tideline Blue (2005), based on an idea by Satoru Ozawa, the creator of Blue Submarine No. 6.

In recent years, Iida's work has been less directorial than artistic, as he moved back into storyboards. These shot-by-shot comic-style walkthroughs of a film's scenes are a powerful factor in any anime's success, and Iida's handiwork can be seen in shows as diverse as Cowboy Bebop, Shangri La and Birdy the Mighty: Decode.

His website offers information about his career, and has threatened for the last two years to also upload details about his hobbies. The page's promise that such non-anime activities are "coming soon" now takes on a melancholy quality as an already bad year notches up yet another anime industry death. Iida was 49.

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

The Art of Osamu Tezuka: God of Manga

The creator of Astro Boy, Kimba the White Lion and… er… Cleopatra: Queen of Sex comes to life in this superb showcase and biography. Helen McCarthy pushes beyond the odious "Walt Disney of anime" label used by lazier writers, boldly stating that if we really must draw condescending cultural comparisons, Osamu Tezuka was also the Stan Lee, Tim Burton and Carl Sagan of his day. Similar challenging argument enlivens her in-depth account of Tezuka's youth, his fascinating "star system" of recurring characters, and his transformation of the Japanese animation business with Astro Boy.

McCarthy artfully synthesises the work of earlier researchers who lack her populist splash and dash. Natsu Onoda Power might have more scandal, and Ada Palmer might have more rigour, but McCarthy has true passion for her subject, and is backed by a design team working with the full cooperation of the Tezuka estate. The result is a joy to behold – a large format, coffee table book with a glossy cover, a bound-in DVD, and pages that couldn't be more lovingly engineered if they were pop-up. When discussing a creator whom everybody has heard of, but few really know, such illustration is crucial to appreciating just how important Tezuka was in the history of comics and cartoons. McCarthy keeps it up all the way to her provocative conclusion, in which she acknowledges Tezuka's place in history, but also that the brightness of his achievement has exiled many other manga artists to the shadows.

Jonathan Clements is the author of Schoolgirl Milky Crisis: Adventures in the Anime and Manga Trade (now also available on Kindle). This review first appeared in SFX Total Anime #3, 2010.

Koo d'Etat

True to their promise to review every volume in the Makers of the Modern World series, the international history journal H-Diplo gets around to my Wellington Koo book here. I'm not entirely sure why they are covering the series at all, as every review thus far seems to discover anew that the books are not intended for an academic audience. But considering the kickings dealt out to some other books in the series, I come away from this one with a sticky star.

The sister volume on Prince Saionji was reviewed a couple of months ago in H-Diplo, here. And you can find me ranting downblog about the film made about Koo's days at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference.

Payut Ngaokrachang 1929-2010

Payut Ngaokrachang, who died on 27th May, started off drawing backgrounds for puppet shows touring the countryside in his native Thailand. He drifted into animation with Haed Mahasajan (1955), in which a traffic policeman swayed with the moves of a temple dancer, and eventually causes a pile-up when he is distracted by a passing woman's loose dress.

Payut's cartoon came to the attention of the US Information Service, a public relations agency set up by the Eisenhower administration to push the American way of life in opposition to Communism. USIS gave him a 10,000 baht bursary (about $400), and the chance to spend six months studying animation with either Disney in America or the recently established Toei in Japan. Payut chose the latter.

Along with "Mr Keith" from the US embassy, Payut hired Tokyo animators led by Taiji Yabushita to make a 14-minute colour cartoon, The New Adventures of Hanuman (1957). Intended for screening at the US embassy in Bangkok, Hanuman drew on the Indian myths of the titular white-faced Monkey God, but depicted him under attack by red-faced monkey invaders who rush out of the jungle. A metaphor for the red menace of Communism in South-East Asia, the film was unreleased in Japan, but nevertheless brought in funding that bolstered the infant anime industry.

Payut was soon back with more American money, this time from the South-East Asian Treaty Organisation, to fund The Bear and the Children (1960). A much more heavy-handed parable, it featured a hulking Soviet bear chasing a pig-tailed little girl, clearly intended to be Chinese. The evil bear goes on to pursue children wearing the national costumes of Thailand, the Philippines and Burma, who must unite to defeat it.

Yasuo Otsuka, then a rookie animator on the project, but destined one day to be a stalwart of Studio Ghibli, recalled in his autobiography the interminable meetings in a smoke-filled room between the Japanese, Payut and his American associates. A "Mr White" from the Tokyo embassy kept insisting on "reshoots", seemingly unaware that the animators would have to go back to scratch on every scene he wanted changed.

Payut returned to Thailand, where he would make the first Thai cartoon feature, The Adventure of Sudsakorn (1979), made on a gruelling schedule that almost blinded him. In later life, he trained Thai animators subcontracting for foreign studios, and bewailed the rising domestic popularity of Japanese cartoons, lamenting that even his own granddaughter preferred them. In a strange turn of karma, he received money from the Japan Information Centre, yet another "cultural outreach" office, to make My Way (1992). This was a different kind of propaganda, posing as an anti-AIDS cartoon educating the youth of South-East Asia, but presumably attracting Japanese funding because of the consequences to Japanese sex-tourists if the disease continued to spread in the region.

Payut will be remembered as a giant of Thai cartooning, but his involvement behind the scenes of Japanese animation is a little-known element in his long and fruitful career.

Jonathan Clements is the author of Schoolgirl Milky Crisis: Adventures in the Anime and Manga Trade. This article first appeared in SFX Total Anime #3, 2010.