Anime Explosion!

by Drazen, Patrick

  Chiyoko herself is caught between her mother and the studio when destiny decides the matter. Her path crosses that of a man: an artist, wounded and pursued by the police because of his leftist politics.2 Chiyoko helps him hide from the authorities in her family’s storage building; after a day or two, he takes off to meet up with friends in occupied Manchuria. Before he goes, he leaves a portrait of Chiyoko painted on the storeroom wall and accidentally drops an old key to “the most important thing there is.” He also leaves an infatuated teenage girl. She’s so taken by the anonymous fugitive that she agrees to sign up with Ginei Studios since they will be filming in Manchuria.

  The rest of the movie expands the geometry beyond the simple romantic triangle. Chiyoko is still infatuated by the painter but has no idea where he is; the son of Ginei’s main director sets about wooing and ultimately marrying Chiyoko, while Genya, starting at the bottom of the studio ladder, harbors a crush on Chiyoko but never speaks it. Then there’s Eiko, the actress who has to spend her career playing second fiddle to Chiyoko. All of these events, and many more, are illustrated by scenes from Chiyoko’s most famous movies, with story lines as far back as the Heian era, up to modern times, and every period in between (thus encompassing the millennium of the title). She grows as a person as well as an actress, from ingénue to romantic lead to “Japan’s Madonna.”

  The roles are based on classic (and less-than-classic) Japanese movie genres, from historical costume dramas to Godzilla-style rubber-suited monsters. A recurring fortune-telling witch (who, it is later hinted, may even be Chiyoko herself) seems to have stepped out of Throne of Blood, Akira Kurosawa’s version of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Then again, when she tries during the seventies to get to Manchuria once again to look for her beloved artist, she hitches a ride with a trucker whose vehicle is tricked out with chrome, lights, murals, and other things that make it resemble a rolling Pachinko machine. This references a genre series of B movies in Japan, torakku yaro (truck guys), about fictional drunken, womanizing long-haul drivers and the very real dekotora (decorated truck) subculture.

  In Millennium Actress, as in the later film Paprika, time is so fluid as to be almost meaningless; Chiyoko’s roles segue from medieval princess to a ninja, from a girl in a frilly Western gown to a lunar scientist in a space suit, often with no warning or logic at all. The viewer simply has to sit back, relax, and be amazed by Kon’s craft.

  A Baby You Can’t Refuse

  A complete shift in tone, although another homage to movies, came with Tokyo Godfathers. Kon and Murai wrote the screenplay as a variation on John Ford’s classic Western 3 Godfathers. While Ford’s film takes place in the Wild West, Kon’s title sets the film in modern Tokyo. While Millennium Actress takes place during one very eventful day, this film happens between Christmas and New Year’s Day. The overall plot is the same as Ford’s film: three misfits find a baby and have to take care of it.

  Ford’s misfits were three men; Kon’s group is more diverse. Gin is a homeless middle-aged alcoholic, a one-time star athlete (or so he says) until he retreated from a scandal into alcoholism. Hana is also middle-aged and homeless, but he’s a drag queen whose lover died. Then there’s Miyuki, a runaway teenage girl who helps the other two and in doing so avoids confronting her own family problems.

  The trio begins the movie on Christmas Eve at the Salvation Army, which offers food to the homeless. Hana goes back for seconds, joking about getting pregnant as a Christmas miracle and telling the server, “I’m eating for two.” The joke becomes real when they find a baby abandoned in a dumpster. They spend the movie, and the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day, finding a home for the infant while inadvertently sorting out their own lives along the way.

  Just as they help other people, despite being broke and homeless, they get some help themselves. The big aid comes at the climax, when Hana literally has to jump off the roof of a skyscraper to rescue the baby. It’s the night of New Year’s Eve and earlier we saw Hana and Miyuki praying at a Shinto shrine. Not only does Hana rescue the baby, but grabs onto a banner advertising a sale. When the banner comes loose, it looks very bad—until a strong gust of wind roars down the street and catches the banner, lowering Hana and the baby slowly to the ground. While this is happening, the camera looks down the street and finds the rising sun. This rescue, as the symbolism indicates, was brought about by no less than Amaterasu, the Shinto sun deity.

  Paranoia Agent

  A serial assailant is terrorizing the Musashino neighborhood of Tokyo. This is the home of Musashino Art Institute, where Kon was a student. The only television anime created by Kon, Paranoia Agent (2004), chronicles Shonen Bat (Bat Boy or, in English, Li’l Slugger) and his random attacks, and a mousy little illustrator named Tsukiko Sagi.

  Sagi works for a marketing company like Sanrio or San-X: Japanese corporations that create cartoon characters primarily for social communication. Japanese society is based, and has been for centuries, on on and giri, obligation and reciprocation respectively. When Valentine’s Day was first introduced to Japan in 1958, women were encouraged to give chocolate to their sweethearts. Unlike Christmas, when gifts are exchanged, Valentine’s Day created a one-way obligation. This was corrected in 1965 when Japan declared March 14 to be White Day (originally Marshmallow Day) so that men could finally return the favor and give something to the women. Examples of social communication in Japan are as well known as they are plentiful, the best known being the iconic doll Hello Kitty.

  Sagi strikes similar gold at the beginning of Paranoia Agent when she invents a big-eyed droopy-eared pink dog named Maromi. This cartoon canine is ubiquitous throughout the series, a phenomenal success. This leads to the first of two terrifying circumstances for Sagi: what does she do for an encore? Her bosses keep pushing her to duplicate the success of Maromi, but the more she tries to make lightning strike twice, the worse her creative block. One night, as she walks home, she’s attacked by a grade school boy with gold in-line skates, a bent gold baseball bat, and a red baseball cap. The two police who investigate the beating think there’s something suspicious about Sagi’s story. Then there’s another attack. . . .

  So begins the thirteen-week series, in which the attacks by Shonen Bat escalate, interweaving the various victims. In the end, after episodes that were stylistically unique every week, we learn what we’d suspected to be the truth: Shonen Bat, like Maromi, was invented by Sagi.

  * * *

  Having said all of that, something else struck me, which I at first thought was absurd, then obvious, then probably both:

  In the anime-within-an-anime in episode ten, we see the creation of an animated film featuring Maromi giving advice to a Little League baseball player. The boy wears an M on his cap; that probably means the town where he lives begins with an M. The M perhaps also stands for Maromi.

  However, since Maromi’s shadow in the series is Shonen Bat, and the boy in the anime-within-an-anime is literally a shonen batto (or “young man with a bat,” although a benign one instead of a serial assailant), I suspect that the cap acts on another level. The current generation of Japanese animators, after all, is an educated and savvy bunch. Kon certainly is, exhibit A being Millennium Actress, which evokes Japanese cinema from Throne of Blood to Godzilla, with stops along the way at Casablanca and Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey framing the film; exhibit B is Kon’s remake of John Ford’s remake of 3 Godfathers. Other examples appear in the next film by Kon, Paprika. Perhaps the boy’s cap is a “tip of the hat” to Fritz Lang’s movie about another serial killer: M. It seems outrageous until you remember that Lang himself appears as a character in the first Fullmetal Alchemist feature film. Whether intentionally or not, equating the innocent-looking young batter with “the vampire of Dusseldorf” (the nickname of Lang’s murderous pedophile) is not a stretch, but a chilling indication of Kon’s craft.

  Paprika

  One of 2010’s big summer Hollywood releases was Inception. Directed and written by Christopher Nolan (T
he Dark Knight), the effects-driven film was immediately hailed as (to quote one representative critic) “state-of-the-art noir” in which “a small band of intellectual adventurers . . . invade—and often share—the dreams of clients.”3

  Perhaps along the way to creating this screenplay, Nolan caught Kon’s Paprika. Released in 2006, with a screenplay by Kon and Seishi Minikami and based on a science fiction novel by Yasutaka Tsutsui (whose work provided the basis for another wonderful anime feature, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time), Paprika is about a small band of scientists who develop the DC Mini, a machine that can not only monitor people’s dreams, but also enter and alter them. Once an evildoer steals one of the prototypes, the unhinging of reality begins.

  Coincidence? I’m just saying.

  Like Millennium Actress and Paranoia Agent, Paprika draws on a host of Hollywood movies, from its circus opening (The Greatest Show On Earth) to Tarzan to Roman Holiday to X-Men (putting the Chairman of the research facility in a wheelchair was, frankly, overused even before Stephen Hawking began teaching at Cambridge in 1979). In the end, Paprika obeys no logic but its own as its dialogue and images become chaotically random.

  The main characters are at once familiar movie types yet interestingly different. Police Detective Konakawa is trying to solve a seemingly simple murder, until the walls start melting like plastic in an oven. The detective is led to the scientists who have developed and are testing the DC Mini: Kosaku Tokita, whose large puppy-dog eyes are matched in scale by the rest of his body (the first the audience sees of him is when he’s stuck in an elevator), Atsuko Chiba, and Torataro Shima. Dr. Tokita invented the machine, and its principal tester is Dr. Chiba, a film type from ‘50s sci-fi: the cold, cerebral, bespectacled, emotionless woman. When she appears in the dream world, however, she becomes Paprika: a vivacious spirit whose hair color provides her name. She’s quick, active, nimble, compassionate: all the things Doctor Chiba cannot allow herself to be outside of her dreams. Their boss, Dr. Shima, is attacked by the stolen device, nearly killing himself while dreaming that he is king of a land of dolls (from Japanese Daruma dolls to the Statue of Liberty) and walking appliances. His dialogue descends to lines like, “The sun during midday will light up the dark night.”

  Maybe this film inspired Christopher Nolan after all. I’m just saying.

  In the original, the voice of Paprika and Dr. Chiba were provided by Megumi Hayashibara (see part 1, chapter 13). Having semi-retired from idol singer and voice actress to wife and mother, she has limited herself to a few key projects per year. She must have known this movie would provide the role (or roles) of a lifetime, and she makes the most of it; her acting is so nuanced that it complements the subtitles even for non-speakers, bringing out the best in the roles. On the other hand, a pair of virtual bartenders in the dream world is voiced by director Satoshi Kon and novelist Yasutaka Tsutsui. Think of it as an Alfred Hitchcock homage.

  There can be differing opinions as to whether Paprika influenced Inception, but one scene is a clean and undeniable link: in the climactic dream sequence, when Paprika is trying to escape the chairman and his helper, she defies gravity by running across the wall instead of the floor. And this is an image that found its way into the dreamscape of Inception.

  I’m just saying . . .

  * * *

  Unfortunately, reality doesn’t always work out. On August 23, 2010, word spread on the Internet that Satoshi Kon had died at the age of 47. He was at work on a new project, a movie titled Yume-Miru Kikai (The Dream Machine).

  The last word on the subject came in a note from Kon himself:

  May 18 of this year, an unforgettable day. My wife and I received the following prognosis from a cardiologist at the Musashino Red Cross Hospital: The pancreatic cancer is terminal and has metastasized to the bone. You have at most a half year left. When I conveyed my concerns for Yume-Miru Kikai to [Studio Madhouse founder] Mr. [Masao] Maruyama, he said, “It’s fine. Don’t worry, we’ll do whatever it takes.” I cried. I cried aloud. With feelings of gratitude for all that is good in this world, I put down my pen. Well, I’ll be leaving now. Satoshi Kon

  1. A scene of the random trashed props at the studio includes a cherub statue, like the ones that attacked the crew in “Magnetic Rose.”

  2. Japan’s 1925 Peace Preservation Law was one of the most significant prewar laws. It outlawed offenses against the “kokutai” (which can be translated as “national character”), which encompassed all forms of leftist politics. Until the 1945 surrender, over 70,000 Japanese were arrested under the law but never tried.

  3. http://thepassionatemoviegoer.blogspot.com/2010/07/nolans-brillaint-crackpot-of-movie.html

  CLAMP: Women Unexpected

  Four coeds decide to have some fun with manga. They’ve had their fun for more than a quarter-century, and their best work just keeps getting better. A look at the artists known as CLAMP.

  In the immediate postwar years, almost all of the manga artists were men—even those whose works were published in girls’ and women’s magazines. The history of Japanese women writers is long and substantial, with the world’s oldest surviving novel (The Tale of Genji) written a thousand years ago by Lady Murasaki Shikibu. However, when literary pursuits were a hobby limited to the royal court, the role of a woman writer was very different from what it would be centuries later.

  By the beginning of the twentieth century, Western-style magazines were appearing in Japan. Some of these targeted women readers, but the contributors were a mix of men and women. One major writer, Nobuko Yoshiya, wrote women’s pieces that would help set the template for manga for girls and women, including romances of various flavors and mixed sexuality (see part 1, chapter 7). The postwar manga boom, however, featured male cartoonists who worked in a variety of magazines, including magazines for women: Shosuke Kurogane, Tetsuya Chiba, Shinji Wada, and the “big three” (Osamu Tezuka, Reiji Matsumoto, and Shotaro Ishinomori).

  The first woman cartoonist who had major success in manga was Machiko Hasegawa, whose daily gag strip Sazae-san, a domestic comedy that reads like a Japanese Blondie, ran for thirty years, and its animated version was equally long-lived. Other women artists who had major successes included Keiko Takemiya (whose Kaze to Ki no Uta [Song of Wind and Trees] was a major foundation work in the Boy Love genre), Ryoko Ikeda (known for the historical romance Rose of Versailles), and Moto Hagio (writer of They Were Eleven and other sexually ambiguous science fiction manga). One of the most successful mangaka of the past half century was Rumiko Takahashi, whose string of blockbuster successes includes Urusei Yatsura, Ranma ½, and InuYasha. Among the few women who can match this success (but have only one major hit to their names at present) are Hiromu Arakawa, creator of Fullmetal Alchemist (see part 2, chapter 15), Bisco Hatori (creator of Ouran High School Host Club), and Fruits Basket creator Natsuki Takaya.

  Among the most successful creators of manga and anime, for both male and female audiences, is a quartet of women. They branched out from being manga fans to dojinshi manga creators to artists in their own right, and for more than two decades they have created a highly diverse (and highly popular) group of characters. They work under personal pseudonyms but are known as a group as CLAMP.

  They Were Eleven (or Twelve)

  The nucleus of the group was three junior high school students and an assortment of friends who lived near Osaka. They met in the ‘80s on their own and at fan events in the metropolitan Osaka area (which happened about once a month). Calling themselves Clamp Cluster, they also tried their hand at dojinshi manga.

  Dojin is the Japanese word for “companion,” and dojinshi manga is actually a respected tradition. In the West, an amateur publishing a bootleg comic book using someone else’s characters would call down a flood of lawsuits alleging copyright infringement and theft of intellectual property. While dojinshi manga are no less illegal than the bootleg comic, they are tolerated for a variety of reasons. For one, the creators pay for their own publication and generally limit
themselves to a set number of issues of a particular title. If it sells out, that’s it. Second, the owners of the original manga cannot usually claim that the presence of dojinshi causes confusion, especially if the dojinshi features plotlines that the original artist would never touch. Third, and perhaps most important, the established manga publishers track dojinshi manga as a way of keeping an eye on up-and-coming talents. Dojinshi are accepted because they are seen as a “win-win” rather than as copyright infringement.

  This will be a survey of CLAMP’s major works. They’ve also produced idiosyncratic works of limited interest, such as art books, anthologies, or personal projects, such as Mokona’s extended essay on kimono. Still, they’ve contributed many great titles to anime and manga.

  Hindu Debut

  Clamp Cluster started with dojinshi manga of Saint Seiya, Masami Kurumada’s action shonen manga focusing on five young men, each of whom wears a distinctive suit of armor based on a constellation of stars, and their sworn crusade to protect the Olympian goddess Athena from the other Greco-Roman gods. These knights (the English title for the manga and anime is Knights of the Zodiac) are the embodiment of manly virtues, which may be why the CLAMP group created its dojinshi telling gay love stories. They also created dojinshi based on one of the most popular sports manga, Yoichi Takahashi’s soccer story Captain Tsubasa.

  By 1987, however, the group had decided to move beyond dojinshi and develop an original project. Called RG Veda, it was inspired, as the name suggests, by the Rigveda, Hindu prayers written in Sanskrit. The publisher Shinshokan asked for a treatment and rejected it; it reflected the inexperience of the group with working on a large-scale project. CLAMP reworked the material, Shinshokan accepted the second version, and the manga debuted in 1989.