Jonathan Clements's Blog, page 38

Habeas Corpus

To Belgium, where one of the most chilling stories in the manga world continues to bubble beneath the surface. In late September 2007, two walkers in the Brussels Forest district's Dudenpark investigated a strange smell. They stumbled across the mutilated remains of a human body and called the police.

The scene was cordoned off and forensics went to work. The body parts were catalogued and examined, and the police stumbled across something else. The two notes, scrawled in capital letters and mult

Back from Locarno

At last, I'm back from the Locarno Film Festival. Even though anime was only one of several strands, it still saw more incident than several conventions combined across ten-days of multiple screenings and events. There were hundreds of anime on show, including screenings of Summer Wars, Musashi: Dream of the Last Samurai and an open-air screening of Ponyo.

Meanwhile, Isao Takahata and Yoshiyuki Tomino arrived to pick up Golden Leopard Awards; the Pokémon people sent a massive entourage of Pikach

Instant Gratification

There's a new way of watching television. It's the one that doesn't involve television at all. TiVos and smart boxes have changed some viewing habits, while online downloading has completely turned them on their head. People have stopped trusting broadcasters and started making their own choices about what's going to be on the box on a weekday.

This has created a new phenomenon – binge viewing. Particularly with foreign shows that come to us after they've already aired, it's becoming that much ea

Selfish Genes

"Nowadays it is getting difficult to create cool, global science fiction. 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." — Kenji Kamiyama

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

Swiss Roles

Today I am in Switzerland, at the Locarno Film Festival, which has dedicated an entire strand of programming to Japanese animation. Specifically I am going to be talking onstage with film archivist Akira Tochigi about a subject close to my heart – the modern renaissance in pre-war anime and the problems of restoring old cartoons.

Ever since the last surviving copy of Momotaro's Divine Sea Warriors was uncovered in a warehouse in the 1980s, there have been periodic rediscoveries. Digital technolo

Legacy Code

Occupying my attention today in the time hoover of the interwebs, a discussion about the unreleased game based on Douglas Adams's Restaurant at the End of the Universe.

A man called Andy Baio somehow obtains a hard-drive containing the entire network server, games in development and in-house emails of a well-known game company called Infocom, dating from 1989. He compiles a fascinating document of "digital archaeology", outlining the collapse 20 years ago of The Restaurant at the End of the Unive

Shock Treatment

"Oh, you just wait!" she said. "Our exhibition has got all kinds of manga stuff in it. But the coolest part, the really amazing part, is an Adults Only bit. I mean, don't get me wrong, we understand that manga and anime cross over all kinds of genres and areas, and that there's manga for kiddies and manga about pets, and manga for old people as well. So we get that. But we also know that the adult stuff is part of the whole picture, and we don't want to leave that out."

So far, so good. The exhib

Curse of the Golden Age

The most evil woman in Chinese history or a medieval Cinderella? Jonathan Clements examines the life and films of Empress Wu.

The opulent, sumptuous world of China's Tang era (618-907 AD) saw an end to centuries of civil unrest, and great wealth arriving down the Silk Road from the west. The setting is a character in itself in modern epics like The House of Flying Daggers and The Curse of the Golden Flower. But the dynasty's most famous figure flourished in its early days, when a lone woman fough

Big Ideas

Sadly, it wasn't the first time I had been called in to translate from English to English. The Japanese producer had once spent three years at University College London and was fully fluent, but he wasn't quite getting through to the American producer. By the time I arrived they were talking at insanely cross-purposes.

The American thought he had the greatest idea ever: a samurai drama about a girl in Japan's medieval wars – a woman warrior in the midst of all the conflict, kicking arse and takin

Oh, Canada!

To Canada, where being an anime or manga fan has become an increasingly difficult enterprise over the last four years.

The origins of the problem, such as it is, lie back in 2005, when a man from Edmonton, Alberta was convicted of importing material depicting children committing sexual acts. Specifically, they were comics from Japan – so here we go again. He was put on the sex offenders' registry for five years, given a suspended sentence, 100 hours community service and fined $150. He had broken