Jonathan Clements's Blog, page 31

Blackout

With his ponytail and khaki vest, Ichiro Itano looks like a rock star. The man who once strapped fifty fireworks to his motorbike to "see what would happen", who once had a part-time job playing the Masked Rider in a department store theatre, is also one of the best animation action directors in the business. He taught for four years at the Yoyogi Animation College, and now he's facing down a class of eager students in Switzerland, demonstrating how to use wide angle lenses, how to shoot...

Tough Boy

Just when you thought it was safe, I dig up another of my song translations from the Pioneer anime CDs. This one is the theme from the second series of Fist of the North Star, for which i set myself the intellectual exercise of keeping all the Engrish lyrics in exactly the same place in my translation as they occurred in the original.  "Tough Boy", for so this song is called, is an interesting exercise. Even to the Japanese, it must have seemed impossibly dated — I was hired to translate it i...

Back on the Manga-go-round

Over on his website, Paul Gravett writes a cogent, well-reasoned article about what manga is not. Which leaves us with only one workable definition of what a manga actually is.

A manga is a Japanese comic. Anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to sell you something.

Inconvenient for the artist Joe Bloggs, who wants to sell you his How to Draw Manga book. Inconvenient for Large Corporation, that wants to sell you a book of non-Japanese comics with the word "manga" on the front. But...

Made in Wales

Back from Cardiff, where Skillset Screen Academy Wales invited me to teach my infamous workshop on Storylining in a Corporate Environment, pronounced on previous occasions as "life-changing", "instructive", "terrifying", and "better than the guy we had last week."

The venue was the swish multimedia Atrium building of the University of Glamorgan; the task, distilling a series of contradictory directives into an idea that would displease everybody equally. After initial instruction in the way...

A Brief History of the Samurai

My latest book, out now in the UK, and coming in May in the US — everything you always wanted to know about the samurai, but were too afraid of ritual disembowelment to ask.

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The samurai were the embodiment of the Japanese martial tradition. From humble beginnings as frontiersmen and border guards, they rose in power to become the true rulers of Japan, with an ideology based on military strategy and chilling battlefield aesthetics.

This new study includes their greatest battles and worst...

Sub vs Dublin

Back now from Dublin, where I've been at the Irish Film Institute Anime Weekend. Festivities kicked off for me before I was even off the plane, when my neighbour turned out to be a man from Ghana who wanted to know about intellectual property rights. On Saturday morning, I taught a workshop on the way that anime are constructed, with special reference to the Introduction to Anime Screenwriting by Jinzo Toriumi. This is just one of several books by old-school anime writers that are used to...

Afterlife

While statistics show that the size of the manga market has steadily decreased in Japan over the last decade, that doesn't necessarily mean that the Japanese are reading less manga. The figures only refer to new manga – serialised in magazines and bought in shops as graphic novel compilations. In the past, the vast size of the Japanese publishing industry was often over-estimated by pundits who counted the same title twice, once on its magazine publication, and once when it was reprinted in ...

The Song the Goddess Sings

Time for another visit to the translation archives. I've decided to put up more of my pre-Schoolgirl Milky Crisis works up online. Back in 1997, Pioneer hired me to translate the lyrics of some of the CDs they were selling in the UK market. The company already had a reputation for bilingual releases, although often English and Japanese versions of the same song were quite different in meaning. They asked me if I could come up with English versions of songs for the CD liner notes, so that...

Immortal Beloved

Two years ago, I did an interview with a fanzine called Finished Product about my (then) recent script for Doctor Who: Immortal Beloved. The fanzine is still in the works, but Kenny Smith, the editor has given me permission to print the interview here.

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Kenny Smith: Firstly, was the finished story the one you always intended to go with? Or did you have other story ideas? Were you asked to submit an outline, and how detailed was it?

Jonathan Clements: The story actually started out very...

Japan Sinks

(This is my review of Sakyo Komatsu's original SF novel, from Anime FX way back in 1995 when it was released in paperback suspiciously swiftly after the Kobe Earthquake. The latest movie remake, oddly retitled Sinking of Japan, is out this week in the UK from MVM).

Although the hardback version was first published a generation ago, Japan Sinks remains one of the few works of Japanese textual SF available in English. Now re-released this month by Kodansha, the book and translation make for...