In my previous post on the subject, as an explanation for why Jdrama trails so far behind anime in the international marketplace, I theorized that Jdrama has difficulty syncing the amount of story available with the amount of time available over the typical run of a television series.

I will now try applying Occam's razor to the question, which broadly holds that the simplest theory is usually the best.

Sturgeon's law states that 90 percent of everything is crap. Statisticians call this phenomenon the Pareto principle, also known as the 80/20 rule. In this case, 20 percent of the entertainment produced represents the 80 percent of the entertainment that's worth watching. The obvious solution, it would seem, is to just produce that 20 percent to start with.

The problem, as screenwriter William Goldman famously described Hollywood, is that "Nobody knows anything." The smartest people in the room can rarely predict what that 20 percent will be ahead of time.

Even when the majority of consumers of a product agree about what is objectively good, that consensus is not necessarily synonymous with what they all like or what they are all willing to pay for. Once you start dividing the entertainment pie into mediums, audiences, and genres, the slices that appeal to any one person are going to end up being pretty thin.

When it comes to anime, I generally avoid isekai and anything that involves people getting trapped inside video games. Battle shonen like Jujutsu Kaisen test my patience too. In other words, I steer clear of many of the most popular genres (though I did enjoy Reborn as a Vending Machine and Chainsaw Man, that flipped a bunch of worn out formulas on their heads).

And yet, even taking those genres off the table, there are enough titles left over every season that I still have to whittle down the list of new shows I want to watch. With distributors like Crunchyroll and Netflix buying everything that the anime industry puts out, the pie keeps growing and growing and those thin genre slices start getting pretty big all on their own.

As Miles Atherton points out, the anime pie is now so large that, with the exception of children's television, more anime series are produced every year than all of the animated television programs in the rest of the world combined.

The expanding audience encourages distributors to buy more content, and anime producers in Japan to make more content, and more talent to enter the field, which increases the odds that the audience will find something to keep them watching. It's the virtuous circle of art and commerce that rewards more with more. Also known as the Matthew effect.

Kdrama is now in the same place.

At this rate, unless a major player like Netflix begins buying content like crazy, I don't see Jdrama expanding outside a few streaming niches.

If Edo period dramas are your thing, Samurai vs Ninja has a whole website just for you. Rakuten Viki focuses on romance, but even Viki (a Japanese company) acquires ten times as much Kdrama as Jdrama. Jme TV is the only active player licensing content across the board. But it localizes almost nothing in its catalog, which places a hard cap on future growth.

In the meantime, anime keeps going from strength to strength if only on the strength of numbers alone.

Related posts

Anime reassessed (pacing matters)
Anime reassessed (culture matters)
Anime reassessed (numbers matter)

Labels: anime, business, japanese culture, japanese movie reviews, jdrama, jme, kdrama, samurai vs ninja, technology, viki

As with Index Librorum Prohibitorum, the title character of A Certain Magical Index, many of the seemingly farfetched religious references in the series are based on actual historical people and events.

For example, Stiyl Magnus and Kaori Kanzaki are members of Necessarius, the Special Forces sorcery squad of the Anglican Church.

Okay, that part is fiction.

Kaori Kanzaki is a former leader of the Amakusa Catholics, descendants of the "Hidden Christians" that preserved the faith after the disaster of the Shimabara Rebellion in 1637.

That last part is not.

Jesuit missionaries arrived in Japan in the 1540s in the company of Portuguese traders. They were followed by Franciscans and Dominicans under the aegis of Spain. During the latter half of the sixteenth century, they enjoyed the patronage of Oda Nobunaga, the first of the Three Great Unifiers of Japan during the Warring States period.

Nobunaga had no interest in Christianity per se, but he was very interested in the firearms provided by the Spanish and Portuguese. Christianity was also a useful political check on the Buddhist factions in Kyoto that were a constant thorn in his side.

Alas, several years after Nobunaga's assassination, Spanish conquistadores were caught saying the quiet part out loud and Christianity quickly fell out of favor with the powers that be. As Hisaki Amano explains,

A Spanish ship en route from the Philippines to Mexico suffered serious damage in a series of typhoons and drifted ashore in Tosa (modern-day Kochi Prefecture). Under interrogation, the ship's crew responded that Spain was a world power that dispatched missionaries to convert the local population before occupying the countries.

Nobunaga's successor, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, began persecuting Christians with a vengeance, culminating in the martyrdom of twenty-six priests and believers in Nagasaki in 1597. Under the Tokugawa shoguns, Christianity was outlawed. Especially after the Shimabara Rebellion, simply being a Christian was deemed a capital offense.

That legal status was not amended until the late nineteenth century.

The Shimabara Rebellion erupted in 1638 on the island of Kyushu. Nagasaki was once a major Portuguese trading port and Shimabara had the highest percentage of Christians in the country. The rebellion began as a peasant uprising, and was soon joined by Catholic Christians chafing under the heavy hand of local leaders and the shogunate.

Although the rebellion was not without cause and the governor of Shimabara was later executed for misrule and incompetence, such a direct challenge to the legitimacy of the Edo government could not go unanswered.

At the age of seventeen, Amakusa Shiro became the leader of the Japanese Roman Catholics in Shimabara. After a tortuous siege, Shogunate forces overran Hara Castle in 1639 and killed upwards of 37,000 rebels and sympathizers. But the Hidden Christians persevered until the anti-Christian edicts were removed two and a half centuries later.

This is a case where the winners wrote the history books, so Amakusa Shiro was made the villain. He is one of the bad guys in Makai Tensho, a 1967 fantasy novel by Futaro Yamada that has Amakusa Shiro rising from the grave to exact revenge on the shogunate.

Three movies have been made from the book, the most recent in 2003. The best known remains the 1981 version starring Sonny Chiba as Yagyu Jubei, a role he returned to often in samurai action series such as Shogun's Samurai. Overseas releases appended Samurai Reincarnation to the title.

Tubi has a generous selection of Sonny Chiba films and series, including a dubbed version of Samurai Reincarnation and half a season of Shogun's Samurai.

Over the past century, and certainly since 1945, the image of Christianity in Japan has been thoroughly rehabilitated. Christian style weddings (fake pastor included) have become all the rage. Former prime minister Aso Taro is a Catholic. And Christmas (along with Santa Claus) is now one of Japan's most popular unofficial holidays.

Along the way, as evident in series like A Certain Magical Index, Hellsing, and The Ancient Magus Bride, Christianity, and Catholicism in particular, became a rich source of dramatic material. Unconstrained by the usual cultural preoccupations, Japanese writers often push those religious tropes in quite unexpected directions.

Labels: anime, anime reviews, geography, japanese culture, japanese movie reviews, politics, religion

The rest of the movie aside, the first six minutes of The Great War of Archimedes (a literal translation) is worth watching for its recreation of the sinking of the Japanese battleship Yamato on April 7, 1945.

The most memorable scene in this segment has an anti-aircraft battery on the Yamato shooting down an American fighter, only to watch in stunned amazement as a PBY Catalina swoops in and scoops the fallen pilot out of the water.

It's like, "That is so not fair!"

The dark irony of the scene is surely intended, as the Yamato was dispatched to Okinawa on a suicide mission. Without air cover, it was destroyed along with its destroyer escorts soon after leaving the coastal waters of Kyushu.

The story then flashes back a decade to an Imperial Navy conference proposing the construction of the Yamato and turns into a movie about—accounting (do not trust movie posters to tell you what a movie is actually about).

The conference pits the Kantai Kessen faction led by Admiral Shigetaro Shimada against the carrier faction led by Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto. Convinced that Shimada has grossly underbid the project, Yamamoto recruits mathematics prodigy Tadashi Kai to come up with a more accurate cost estimate.

The middle third of the movie thus consists of Kai (promoted on the spot to lieutenant commander) and his aide, Ensign Shojiro Tanaka, desperately searching for some way to obtain the necessary data, while being obstructed at every turn by Shimada's henchmen and denied access even to the blueprints.

Along the way, Kai essentially figures out how to solve a Fermi problem, a method devised by the physicist Enrico Fermi for making accurate estimates about really big things using really small amounts of data. In this case, the really big thing is the largest battleship deployed by any navy in history.

Thus the title of the movie refers to Archimedes' principle, which describes the design of a vessel in terms of its displacement.

Actors Masaki Suda (Kai) and Tasuku Emoto (Tanaka) have reasonably good chemistry in what becomes a two-man play. It is based on the manga by Norifusa Mita. (That's the thing about manga. There is nothing unusual about a manga that is primarily a paeon to accounting and calculus in particular.)

Along the way, we also get lessons about how to cook the books and get your ridiculously low-ball contract approved by the government and still turn a profit.

But despite director Takashi Yamazaki's best efforts (he helmed the wonderful Always: Sunset on Third Street and the well-received war film Eternal Zero), there's not much in the way of dramatic tension. After all, if the Yamato didn't get built, it couldn't get sunk in the first scene.

Three Yamato-class battleships were ultimately constructed, the Yamato, Musashi, and the converted carrier Shinano. None of them survived the war, with the Shinano lasting a mere ten days after being commissioned.

Kai and Tanaka present their results to the conference in the nick of time (again, the dramatic tension is unconvincingly manufactured), proving that Shimada's proposed budget is utterly at odds with reality.

Of course, it proves a Pyrrhic victory. Shimada immediately switches gears and claims the official bid was purposely underestimated (by an order of magnitude) in order to mislead Japan's enemies. But then Kai points out a fatal flaw in the Yamato's design and again appears to have won the day.

This leads to the penultimate scene, the most interesting in the movie, in which Shimada (Isao Hashizume), recognizing Kai's genius, entices him to the dark side by offering an opportunity for existential atonement.

Shimada explains that he actually agrees with the carrier faction and fully expects the Yamato to become a sitting duck in any upcoming conflict. In the wake of an inevitable defeat, the sacrificial lamb bearing the historical name of Japan will show the way for Japan to leave its military past behind.

Frankly, it's a rhetorical reach, and even Hayao Miyazaki criticized Yamazaki for likewise imbuing the characters in Eternal Zero with sentimental but contemporary sensibilities. Though to play the devil's advocate, I think there is a constructive role for historical fiction as social commentary.

This fanciful historical revisionism does accurately capture what the Yamato became in the popular imagination of postwar Japan. Rather like the Titanic, its mention in any period piece now foreshadows both a heroic end and the inevitable doom that surely awaits such enormous displays of human folly.

The Yamato itself lives on most notably in Leiji Matsumoto's enormously influential Space Battleship Yamato franchise, in which the battleship is resurrected to save the human race from alien marauders. The first anime series debuted in 1974. Takashi Yamazaki directed the 2010 live-action movie.

The opening theme song for the 1974 series by Isao Sasaki has since become an instantly recognizable classic.


The Great War of Archimedes is currently streaming on Tubi.

Related links

Kantai Kessen
The Showa drama
The Great War of Archimedes
Star Blazers (2013 anime series)
Space Battleship Yamato (2010 live action movie)

Labels: history, japan, japanese culture, japanese movie reviews, movie reviews, movies about japan, streaming, tubi, ww2

The 1954 production of Godzilla, directed by Ishiro Honda, has a good deal in common with Bram Stoker's Dracula, published in 1897. Both are remembered today in terms of the sequels and spin-offs that followed, in the process spawning new genres that have almost nothing to do with the original productions.

In Dracula, the Scooby Gang of vampire hunters led by Van Helsing avail themselves of the latest weaponry and communications technology to defeat Count Dracula. In Godzilla, a team of scientists led by paleontologist Kyohei Yamane and troubled young chemist Daisuke Serizawa must defend Japan against this nuclear natural disaster.

Meanwhile, Emiko Yamane wants to break off her engagement to Serizawa so she can marry her true love, salvage ship operator Hideto Ogata. Given Serizawa's mad scientist personality, this is a understandable decision, and these shifting relationships figure into an important plot point (that has nothing to do with anybody fighting over a girl).

It will be Serizawa who provides the scientific solution that saves the day, not battling monsters or superhero antics.

Dracula and Godzilla are works of contemporary science fiction that would fit well into the oeuvre of Michael Crichton. The two titular antagonists are, in Buffy terms, the Big Bad. As Buffy fans well know, being the Big Bad is a supporting role whose ultimate purpose is to get dusted. That's exactly what happens to Dracula and Godzilla.

So if you want to bring them back for an encore, well, something fundamental will have to change. Making the Big Bad the main attraction completely changes the nature and focus of the fundamental conflict. For starters, a way larger-than-life character stomping all over the scenery in movie after movie is going to upstage the rest of the cast.

As the series progressed and Godzilla grew larger and larger than life, more overpowered Big Bads had to be invented to keep the over-the-top conflicts in proportion. This is unfortunately true of most superhero movies these days. Godzilla set the standard for the Big Bad modus operandi of massive urban vandalism.

The bigger story problem is that, having already reached the pinnacle of badness, the Big Bad has no place to go dramatically, which can't help but reveal the ridiculousness of the whole conceit. A common solution, as in the Dracula genre, is to hang a lampshade on the character and purposely play to the stereotypes with the requisite ironic nods.

Or while playing to the stereotypes, cast the Big Bad as an antihero, the enemy you know being preferable to the worse Big Bads you don't (yet). With a decent screenplay and a compelling character arc, a Big Bad can be transformed into an unreliable ally, as with Spike on Buffy. This is generally the direction Godzilla sequels ended up going.

Less a friend of the human race than an enemy of the all other monsters invading its territory, with not very much in the motivation department aside from sheer destructiveness.

Ishiro Honda's Godzilla soon spawned the tokusatsu (special effects) and kaiju (giant monster) genres. Famously featuring the guy in a rubber suit wrecking scale models of Japanese cities, this deliberately silly and self-referential approach was less concerned with dramatic depth and more about at getting everybody in on the joke.

The first Godzilla, by contrast, is a classic work of film noir, employing black and white cinematography suffused with light and shadow, along with rudimentary but effective mattes and composites, to create a spooky atmosphere of literally looming horror. Godzilla is a keenly-felt menace that most of the time is out of reach or out of sight.

The city-destroying rampage doesn't even commence until an hour in. Leaving a trail of destruction in its wake, Godzilla is more a force of nature, like a typhoon or an earthquake or a tsunami. Or a squadron of B-29s. The focus is less about the Big Bad than on how the affected human beings react to it. And how they conquer it with human ingenuity.

Related posts

Dracula
The big bad
Too super for their own good

Labels: books, history, japanese culture, japanese movie reviews, science fiction

In a society that progressed as rapidly as did Japan during the post-war period, films from the 1950s and early 1960s like those of Yasujiro Ozu preserve a point in time as it mostly was rather than how it is now remembered.

At the time, Hollywood produced some fine films in and about Japan too. Shot on location, a movie like House of Bamboo (with Robert Stack) captures the Tokyo cityscape before modernity swept that sepia-colored world away.

Equally deserving of attention are those entertainment vehicles that won little in the way of high-culture respect (and even less in terms of international attention), and yet created the tropes and types of popular culture that still resonate today.

Unlike the works of Yasujiro Ozu or Akira Kurosawa (such as High and Low, his 1963 police procedural), these movies have little value as artistic or as historical documents that strove for verisimilitude.

But they have great value as records of how the general public perceived the world around them, the ways in which they were willing to suspend their disbelief in order to imagine that social change in entertaining ways (still true of manga and anime today).

A great example of this is the clumsily titled (in English) Detective Bureau 2-3: Go to Hell Bastards! released by Nikkatsu Studios in January 1963.

The bad boy of the post-war Japanese movie business, Nikkatsu Studio avoided historical dramas and concentrated on low-budget comedies, teen melodramas, and actioners. Losing ground to television in the 1970s, Nikkatsu became synonymous with the "pink" genre.

But in 1963, though chock-a-block with armies of gun-wielding yakuza and a sky-high body count, Detective Bureau 2-3 (the "2-3" refers to protagonist's office number) isn't any more violent or explicit than Hollywood westerns of the 1950s.

Director Seijun Suzuki gives the film the look of a classic noir thriller. Joe Shishido (who appeared in six of Suzuki's films) is perfectly cast as a debonair detective who infiltrates the yakuza to expose a gun-running operation.

Featuring a sports car (that looks cool today), beautiful women, and heavies that could pass for Edward G. Robinson's cousins, plus the inventive use of what were then high-tech devices, Detective Bureau 2-3 had Miami Vice and Don Johnson beat by two decades.

Speaking of which, Miami Vice did an episode about the yakuza that wasn't half bad. But Don Johnson never wriggled out of tight situation with a song-and-dance routine that Fred Astaire could have choreographed.

Suzuki later got himself fired from Nikkatsu for making films that were so surreal and absurdist that they alienated Nikkatsu's core audience. When you're in the crowd-pleasing business, you do have to please the crowds.

In Detective Bureau 2-3 Suzuki and Shishido get the mix just right. Sporting a plot worthy of Chandler, it skirts the nihilism that came to typify the yakuza genre and supplies an upbeat ending. More upbeat than how the real world was dealing with the issue.

Robert Whiting recalls of the years leading up to the 1964 Tokyo Olympics in the Japan Times (his fascinating five-part account starts here),

House theft was rampant, narcotics use was endemic, and it was considered too dangerous to walk in public parks at night. Moreover, yakuza were everywhere, their numbers at an all-time high. There were also twice as many places to eat as New York and more bars per square kilometer than anywhere else in the world.

The 1964 Olympics initiated a crackdown that was more of an accommodation. It essentially decriminalized the yakuza. Unlike American gangsters, the big yakuza organizations are legal corporations, and the police prefer to regulate them as such.

Sort of the same argument for decriminalizing drugs: stay away from the hard stuff and don't shoot civilians and we won't look too closely at where the hard cash is really coming from.

Capturing the yakuza sub-culture at its apex, Detective Bureau 2-3 makes hanging with the bad guys look cool. And the bad guys look cruel but cool. As with the glamour of the Miami Vice underworld, this comic book view of the yakuza persists to this day.

Labels: japan, japanese movie reviews, law, movies, politics, social studies, sports, whiting

Speaking as I was last week of art about artists being artists, Miss Hokusai is a fine addition to the genre (click image to enlarge).


Based on the manga by the late Hinako Sugiura, the film is episodic in nature, with no real plot or even much in the way of character development. Told from the perspective of O-Ei, Hokusai's elder daughter and an accomplished painter in her own right, it is series of vignettes about Hokusai, his two daughters, and his apprentice, living and working in Edo (Tokyo) during the first half of the 19th century.

If there is a theme to the movie, it concerns the limits of technical ability alone to produce great art (here also meaning that people will pay to see it). The much fabled eccentricity of the creative type thus reflects the ongoing struggle to resolve that conflict ("good artists copy; great artists steal").

But the setting is the real story. These slices-of-life take place in the surreal Edo of the popular period drama, untroubled by politics or the impending collapse of the Tokugawa regime (mentioned in an afterword). As with the imaginations of the characters, it is infused with magical realism, the threads of folk tales and religious figures winding through the fabric of the scenes, sketches, and anecdotes.

The title of the movie in Japanese is Sarusuberi (百日紅) or "crepe myrtle." The flower symbolizes the subtle tragic arc that bridges the narrative, though the matter-of-fact tone of the presentation never threatens to overwhelm us with emotion. Rather, the movie invites us to watch and observe and examine it like a painting. Whatever sentiment you wish to bring to the subject is entirely up to you.

Miss Hokusai is like a slow stroll through a stately old museum (whose director is doing his best to make it more "accessible"). Nobody is going to clobber you over the head with ART, but if you wish to look, it's hanging on the walls all around you to see.


The soundtrack on the GKids DVD defaults to a pretty good English dub version.

Labels: anime, anime reviews, art, gkids, japan, japanese culture, japanese movie reviews, movie reviews, movies about japan

The 2011 biopic Admiral Yamamoto (Toei Pictures) focuses on the last decade of Yamamoto's life. But even at 140 minutes, it only skims the surface, a surface made all the thinner by telling a peripherally-related "homefront" story at the same time. The "fiction" in this "historical fiction" gets a good workout.

As for the "historical" part? That's pretty much fiction too.


To cite one technical detail, Yamamoto's plane was shot down near Bougainville in 1943. We're shown the version carried in the Japanese press, that has him dying elegiacally in the crash. In fact,  U.S. Naval Intelligence knew where he was and he was killed mid-air by a P-38 Lightning during its initial strafing run.

Well, call it "subjective" history. This shameless hagiography burnishes Yamamoto's reputation the same way Robert E. Lee's record was "rehabilitated" after the Civil War. As a military commander, Lee was less than he was cracked up to be. Like Lee, Yamamoto was a disaster at every offensive action he initiated.

But the buck stopped nowhere. However reluctant he might have been going in, Yamamoto pushed hard for the Pearl Harbor attack. And then with no carriers to hit, he refused to launch a necessary second wave to destroy the tank farms. Later in the film he declares Pearl Harbor a failure. Which it was, largely because of him.

The movie does show how the Doolittle Raid fueled Yamamoto's obsession with Midway (a welcome result entirely unintended). Forced to divide his forces to keep the Midway option alive, Coral Sea was a halfhearted effort the U.S. Navy was able to fight to a draw.

Then at Midway, Yamamoto failed to rein in Admiral Nagumo after the battle was lost for certain, and acquiesced to Rear Admiral Yamaguchi going down with his ship. No, you don't let experienced officers kill themselves after the enemy failed to do so.

Veteran actor Koji Yakusho (Shall We Dance) depicts Yamamoto as practically a spectator to the war he's waging. Director Izuru Narushima apparently wants us to associate "passive" and "detached" with "peaceful." Except depicting Yamamoto as a saint makes him as delusional as his ideological foes in the Imperial Army.

In real life, Yamamoto was anything but a bystander when it came to the war planning. In Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway, Jonathan Parshall and Anthony Tully recount that

In the midst of the Pearl Harbor debate, [Yamamoto] had let it be known that he and the entire staff of Combined Fleet were prepared to resign if his views were not confirmed. [Admiral] Nagano, given the choice between acquiescing or confronting his wayward subordinate, had backed down. In so doing, he essentially let Yamamoto hijack the Navy’s strategic planning process and place it under the purview of Combined Fleet.

Both McClellan¹ and MacArthur also thought themselves indispensable men. Lincoln and Truman let them know they weren't.

I subscribe to the theory that when the critical information fell into his hands, Admiral Nimitz might possibly have balked at killing Yamamoto for the same hypothetical reasons Lee would have balked at killing McClellan in 1862. Why eliminate your best asset?

At its heart, Admiral Yamamoto wants to be one of those old-fashioned, patriotic, big-screen blockbusters like The Sands of Iwo Jima (1949) and The Battle of Britain (1969) and Midway (1976). Those were movies that celebrated the "good war" and the "greatest generation" and starred every big-name actor under the sun.

(And to lend extra gravitas: John Wayne's Sergeant Stryker dies on the slopes of Mt. Suribachi in the last reel after the iconic flag raising. Charlton Heston's Captain Garth dies in the last reel ferrying a fighter from the sinking Yorktown. Alas, Yakusho's Yamamoto dies in the last reel amidst a "transfer of troops.")

Those earlier classics were made with the cooperation of the military branches, along with mothballed equipment pulled out of storage and plenty of repurposed newsreel footage. Admiral Yamamoto make good use of digital effects to create more convincing snapshots of Pearl Harbor, Midway, and the Solomons.

Unfortunately, live-action digital effects like this don't come cheap in Japan, where a "feature film" is "low budget" by Hollywood standards. So Admiral Yamamoto gives us maybe ten minutes of actual cinematic battles and two hours of actors pacing around soundstage sets.

It's on those sets that Teruyuki Kagawa steals every scene he's in as a fiery newspaper editor in the tradition of William Randolph Hearst: "You furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war." Then does a 180 when the war is lost. (John Dower notes in Embracing Defeat that this was a not uncommon phenomenon in 1945.)

The more interesting (perhaps unacceptably iconoclastic) story would have shown us the war from the point of view of Kagawa's newspaperman, who goes from hero worship to cynic, and yet concludes (as Jimmy Stewart is informed in The Man who Shot Liberty Valance), "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."

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1. Both McClellan and Yamamoto had great press and the affection of their subordinates. Both were enamored of elaborate battlefield strategies that promised the deliver a crushing blow to the outfoxed enemy (Parshall and Tully explore this failing at length). Both couldn't accept that "no plan survives the first shot." As a result, neither knew what to do next besides retreat. Unlike McClellan, Imperial Japan didn't have more capable officers waiting in the wings. Yamamoto was the basket in which they had placed all their eggs.

Labels: embracing defeat, history, japan, japanese movie reviews, movies about japan, ww2

The couple in question.

As I mentioned in my previous post about Kimi ni Todoke, two supporting characters, Chizuru and Ryu, are substantively more interesting than the main characters, Sawako and Shota. As for the latter two, ultimately there's not a whole lot of "there" there.

That's not an insurmountable problem in story like this (with so much else going on). But as Kate asks, "What on earth will they talk about for the rest of their lives if they can no longer talk about their growing romance?"

Pushing aside everything you know about the characters from the anime, the live-action movie makes this hard to ignore. On the plus side, it hits all the major plot points from the first season of the anime. The two-hour time constraint means much less angst to wade through.

But the deeper side-story about Ryu and Chizuru is reduced to about five minutes. Racing from conflict to conflict, the relationship among Sawako, Ayane and Chizuru--the true substance of the series--becomes a fait accompli rather than a nurtured and growing thing.

In the process, Shota ends up a conventional teen lead, little more than a "MacGuffin." That's Hollywood slang for "a plot device in the form of some goal, desired object, or other motivator that the protagonist pursues, often with little or no narrative explanation."

What separates formula romance from, say, Jane Austen, is giving the heroine a reason to want the hero aside from him being the closest available white knight. Aside from being a nice guy, nothing about Shota convinces us that he is desired for anything more than being desirable.

Even in the movie, we learn far more about Ryu than we ever do about Shota. (The movie actually adds more backstory about Sawako than is in the anime.)

As Sawako, Mikako Tabe, in turn, has to lean more heavily on affect than acting. Trying too hard to match the look of the anime forces her to compete with her hair in the early scenes. Her performance improves considerably when she can finally wear her hair up or back.

Even then, she has barely any material to work with, other than her character's odd personality. The movie unintentionally makes it obvious that here are two kids who really need to get themselves a life, something more substantive than pining for each other.

Sawako at least has her flower garden. I would have liked to see this used much more as an outer expression of her inner self. Make her a budding botanist.

Kimi ni Todoke is a good example of how animation can be the superior visual medium when so much of the subject matter is internal or subjective. Manga artist Karuho Shiina can draw what she wants us to see (hair, to start with), especially if she wants us to see a state of mind.

Sawako and Chizuru in super-deformed mode.

Manga and anime have rich repertoires of abstract effects and visual metaphors, such as the "super-deformed" style.⁽¹⁾ These effects don't interrupt the narrative and announce themselves precisely because they are drawn. We've already disassociated story from "reality."

Pixar has further proven the point with Inside Out.

I think a movie adaptation like Kimi ni Todoke would work better by addressing a far smaller slice of the original. A straightforward summation of events, however accurate, simply can't generate the same emotional Sturm und Drang.

They look and can play the parts.

The movie does get a few things exactly right: Haru Aoyama and Misako Renbutsu are perfectly cast as Ryu and Chizuru. There's the better movie to make: flip the point-of-view around and tell the story from their perspective. All the necessary material is already available.

Related posts

Kimi ni Todoke (anime manga)

Here is a useful guide to the dating scene in Japan.

Japan's “Love Confessing” Culture
What It's Like Dating A Japanese Girl
What It's Like Dating A Japanese Guy

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1. Although "super-deformed" is generally considered analogous to "chibi," I think it's more semantically useful to define "super-deformed" literally and "chibi" as a sub-category.

Labels: anime, japanese movie reviews, mikako tabe, movies, movies about japan, romance, social studies, thinking about writing

In Japan, physical media still rules the market. Resale price maintenance rules notwithstanding, paperback books cost about the same as in the U.S. and are better made. The page-turning part of the market remains highly competitive.

But physical electronic media? Here we find the kind of cartel that would make a Robber Baron proud. As a result, expect to pay two to three times or more in Japan for CDs, DVDs and Blu-ray discs.

CDs still account for 85 percent of album sales in Japan. As Monty Python would put it: Not dead yet! Clay Christensen be damned, the market will not be disrupted!

DRM-free MP3s are scarce on Amazon-Japan. But the times are a-changing, with entertainment behemoths like Sony gravitating to the walled garden of iTunes and its own proprietary formats. The Kindle is gaining ground with DRM ebooks that support right-to-left Unicode text.

The anime business is unique among IP exports in that it has a relatively large market in the U.S. Almost all anime DVDs sold in the U.S. preserve the original Japanese audio track (Appleseed: Alpha didn't). This leads to fears of reimportation.

The U.S. and Japan share the same Blu-ray region code, and region-free DVD players are ubiquitous outside the U.S.

Like the pharmaceutical business in the U.S., high prices at home support low prices abroad. Japanese distributors have at times tried pricing titles the same as in Japan. Most of the time: "Mr. Supply, meet Mr. Demand, and some very pissed-off fans."

In the case of Puella Magi Madoka Magica, though, the Japanese studio and distributors have held firm. A DVD "complete collection" that would usually go for $30-$40 dollars on Amazon is instead priced at $150. The "special edition" is twice that.

They are husbanding their hundred-million dollar franchise as a scarce resource, spacing out the spin-offs (such as Puella Magi Tart Magica, featuring Joan of Arc) rather than saturating the market.

They're certainly losing foreign sales, but I doubt those add up to more than a handful of percentage points. If they can sustain interest in the franchise, they can mine gold for decades.

To compare within the magical girl genre: Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha has so far produced three series, three theatrical releases, with a fourth series in the works. Pretty Cure has racked up twelve series and eleven theatrical releases.

But then why is Madoka Magica available on Yahoo View and Crunchyroll for free? Because streaming really does change everything, without causing undue harm to the "traditional" economic model in the home market.

The other variable in this equation is HDTV. HDTV means that pirates can record a perfect version of a program off-the-air. But they still have to subtitle it and move it onto download sites (and not get nabbed by the DMCA in the process).

By creating a subtitled version in-house and simulcasting it to U.S. distributors, Japanese animation studios get a jump on the pirates and collect licensing fees and ad dollars to boot. Justin Sevakis sums up the effects on piracy in only a few years:

It used to be that fans who wanted to keep up with the current shows on Japanese TV were utterly dependent on fansubs, but thanks to legitimate streaming, most fans don't bother with torrents anymore. Pirate traffic is way, way down.

Regional restrictions are easier with streaming, including locking out anonymous proxies. And capturing (lower-resolution) streaming video in real time is just too big of a pain for most people to bother with. But beware, IP owners, of restricting access just because it's easy:

Most downloaders, I'm guessing, live in countries where legal streams aren't yet available.

Granted, this is the new "long-tail" economy, with revenue not so much streaming in as accumulating in drips and drabs. Internet advertising remains a work in progress (the biggest beneficiary being Google). Low income, yes, but coupled with low costs and low risks.

Hulu and Crunchyroll also offer subscriptions (for set-top box access on Hulu; for set-top box, simulcast, HD, and commercial-free access on Crunchyroll). Crunchyroll reportedly has 400,000 paid subscribers, the kind of numbers that can generate "real money."

"Most of which goes right back to the industry," says Crunchyroll CEO Kun Gao. And that industry is gearing up for more, what with Netflix's entry into the Japanese market and SoftBank's purchase of DramaFever (a distributor of international streaming content).

Streaming works for the same reason book publishers are now keeping an iron grip on their still-producing back-lists. Over the entire span of the copyright, a mid-list book that brings in, say, a mere $1000 a year in ebook royalties will rake in more of that "real money."

Which is a good reason for writers to hold on tight to those rights instead. Because nothing goes out of print anymore. As Mark Coker analogizes it, "the income stream from a [self-published] ebook is akin to an annuity, and specifically a variable annuity."

Thanks to the scalability and efficiency of online retailing, the digital bits and bytes that comprise your ebook can happily occupy an online retailer's shelf forever if you let it. Your book is immortal. You always have another day to find your next readers. You harvest your income over time as the book sells.

That may well soon become true of all published media, if it isn't already.

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Family Gekijyo
Sink or stream
Crunchy Fun and the Yahoos

Labels: anime, business, crunchyroll, economics, hulu, japanese movie reviews, japanese tv, streaming

The "concept as plot" approach to storytelling works well enough if the story being told is kept short and simple. Because a concept, no matter how complex and compelling, isn't a plot.

Yet some ideas are so neat that you can fool an audience into treating them as if they were.

To a point. As Abraham Lincoln famously said, "You cannot fool all the people all the time."

That pretty much describes the arc of M. Night Shyamalan's career. He made getting fooled a heap of good spooky fun The Sixth Sense. But it went to his head and his movies got increasingly repetitive and self-important. Then the feeling was, "Fool me twice, shame on me."

The Matrix elevated "high-concept" to a half-billion dollar franchise by letting the audience in on the secret at the start. We do love a shared secret. But after dipping into the same conceptual well three times in a row, the water started to taste brackish.

Patema Inverted sets forth with one neat idea, and it's good for a hundred minutes of screen time (and not much more). There are enough loose ends at the end to justify a sequel, but a sequel would demand an actual plot. A concept is a told joke. We got it already.

Patema is the heroine, and the "inverted" (sakasama) means exactly that. In this quasi-dystopian future, there is an "above ground" tribe and a "below ground" tribe. Gravity works the opposite for each tribe.

The story about how this happened is covered in the first thirty seconds and then forgotten (until the end), which is a smart way to do it. When you're building on "concept" alone, don't belabor it. The more people think about it, the more holes they'll find.

There are enough holes in Patema Inverted to make a sieve (to start with, how the economy actually works), but out of sight, out of mind.

Otherwise, the one (annoying) flaw in the movie is that the "above ground" world is one of those by-the-numbers Orwellian societies ruled by one of those by-the-numbers cartoon villains, spouting off in religious terms without a religious context anywhere in sight.

(Shutting down inquiry by declaring curiosity a sin works in Scrapped Princess because it's couched in the framework of a powerful and pervasive medieval religious organization. There's none of that here.)

As a general rule, if you have to toss a dramatic foil into the mix in order to create actual conflict, there isn't any actual conflict. But if you do, make sure it's Hugo Weaving.

The backstory, brief as it is, suggests a better approach. The "dictator" should have been the last descendant of the scientists who caused the problem in the first place, desperate to hide the enormity of their error. Yes, scientists make mistakes and they have egos too.

Thus his interest in Patema's tribe: still trying to figure out what went wrong without revealing to anybody what they did wrong.

That aside, Patema Inverted is a fast-paced, fairly family-friendly (though not for acrophobes) exploration of a surprisingly deep philosophical idea. Director and writer Yasuhiro Yoshiura's clever use of perspective literally asks: "Which way is really up?"

In this case, as in so many, the answer all depends on where you happen to be standing.


A big shout-out to GKids, the U.S. distributor, which now also manages Studio Ghibli's back catalog. That includes the young-adult melodramas Ocean Waves and Only Yesterday, never before released in the U.S. (But still no date on the DVDs or streaming.)

Labels: anime, anime reviews, apocalyptic fiction, gkids, japanese movie reviews, movie reviews, science, science fiction

I've described the high-tech metal band DragonForce as a bunch of talented artists who take themselves seriously enough to create the best-crafted product they are capable of, but not so seriously that they spoil the product in the name of "art."

Appleseed: Alpha is a great illustration of that in a visual medium, pulpy entertainment done as well as could be expected on a reasonable budget (dirt cheap by comparable Hollywood standards) and delivered in a hyper-digital medium. It's earnest without becoming ponderous.


The setting is completely different from the previous movies and series. If anything, it owes more to The Road Warrior (with robots instead of biker dudes), and comes to a "Hulk smash!" conclusion: take out the bad guys and kill the mecha Godzilla to keep it out of the hands of the much badder guys.

The easy-peasy plot is a vast improvement over previous Appleseed efforts, that had such tangled narrative structures it was a miracle the villains could remember what they were supposed to do next. Here's a key to good quality schlock: don't over-complicate the premise and stick to what works.

Which ultimately does make Appleseed: Alpha more interesting for reasons other than the story.

To start with, it's a demonstration of how much digital animation technology has improved since Appleseed (2004). There's a scene in Appleseed: Alpha (2014) where my attention was drawn to Deunan's hair--down to the individual strands--shifting ever so slightly as she moved her head back and forth.

That kind of detail was impossible with Appleseed. As I described the state of budget digital animation back in 2004:

Hair is a bear to render digitally, so it's stylized the same chunky way it is in hand-drawn anime. Shading as well uses a limited palette. The resulting low-res digital characters seem caught in a flatland between two and three dimensions, appearing hand-drawn sometimes and like sophisticated marionettes at others.

Evidence that Moore's Law hasn't been repealed shows up in unlikely places, like the cost of rendering digital cartoons.

The backgrounds in Appleseed: Alpha often leap right over the "uncanny valley" straight into a world you could easily mistake for real. Human faces, however, remain firmly planted on the other side of the valley (granted, there are so few human faces in Alpha that it rarely spoils the effect).

As a result, in the emoting department, the human Deunan is upstaged by the cyborgs. Even Ms. Killer Robot (with her runway model moves) has more personality. Not having a face helps. All the rendering in the world still can't infuse a digital face with the same "soul" as hand-drawn animation.

Comparing the Deunan to Madoka (from Puella Magi Madoka Magica), for example, abstract art wins hands down over photorealism (though I'm still impressed by the hair).



Maybe the day is coming when we will increasingly risk losing ourselves in a computerized Matrix that is indistinguishable from what we once knew as "reality." But it isn't here yet, and like the self-aware AI that's supposed to be soon taking over the world, I seriously doubt that day will ever arrive.

Related posts

Appleseed
Appleseed: Ex Machina
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The "uncanny valley"

Labels: anime, anime reviews, apocalyptic fiction, japanese movie reviews, movie reviews, movies, robots, shirow, technology, uncanny valley

On the surface, The Wind Rises is a biopic about Jiro Horikoshi, the aviation engineer who designed the Mitsubishi Zero. That Hayao Miyazaki broached the subject at all earned him criticism in some quarters for not being sufficiently contrite about Japan's role in WWII.

This criticism is not only absurd, it is mostly tangential to the substance of the film. (Though Miyazaki is guilty of making it all look gorgeous.)

There are people who are simply opposed (selectively, of course) to depicting war in anything but Manichaean terms. To be sure, Clint Eastwood's Letters from Iwo Jima was too morally relativistic for my tastes, but this is not a narrative trap that Miyazaki stumbles into.

To start with, The Wind Rises isn't about the Zero at all, but instead follows the development of the Mitsubishi A5M. First flown in 1935, it shared its unique inverted gull wing design with the Junkers Ju-87 Stuka and later the Vought F4U Corsair.

And it's not really about that either.

The Wind Rises is about war primarily because of the time period. The movie mostly takes place during the 1920s and 1930s and reflects Miyazaki's ambivalence on the subject. The most indelible images are of the destruction visited upon Japan, and he isn't subtle about who is in the wrong.

Vacationing at a resort in Karuizawa, Horikoshi is drawn into a puzzling conversation with a mysterious German visitor by the name of Castorp (a character in The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann).

Castorp:	It is a nice night. Here ist der Zauberberg.
Horikoshi:	The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann. [Like many Japanese engineers, he'd spent time in Germany.]
Castorp:	Yes. A good place for forgetting. Make a war in China? Forget it. Make a puppet state in Manchuria? Forget it. Quit the League of Nations? Forget it. Make the world your enemy? Forget it. Japan will blow up. Germany will blow up, too.
Horikoshi:	Do you think Germany will go to war again?
Castorp:	Yes. They must be stopped.

Miyazaki's Castorp was perhaps inspired by Richard Sorge, a German journalist who worked in Japan as a double agent for the Soviet Union. One of the greatest spies of all time, he was also the greatest Cassandra, seeing his reports on Operation Barbarossa and Pearl Harbor ignored.

Castorp tells Horikoshi that the German aviation pioneer Hugo Junkers has run afoul of the Nazi government: "He bites the hands that feeds him. And he will lose. The Nazis are a gang of hoodlums."

This comparison to Horikoshi's "see no evil" approach to his work is made explicit in the parallel story of Horikoshi's romance with his wife Nahoko. The relationship blossoms as Horikoshi's airplane prototypes break apart and plummet to the ground one after the other.

Then at the moment of his technical triumph, she succumbs to tuberculosis. His success is rewarded with her death—the ultimate price of his obsession—as was Japan's in a few short years.

At its core, The Wind Rises is about moral compromise and the creative process (see, for example, the depiction of Werner Heisenberg in Copenhagen), told as a traditional "Showa drama."

"Showa" (the era name of Emperor Hirohito) here refers to period melodramas that take place during the first half of the 20th century. As in The Wind Rises, Showa dramas are often bracketed by Great Tokyo Earthquake in 1923 and the firebombing of Tokyo in March of 1945.

The former draws the curtain on "Taisho Democracy," the latter symbolizes the folly of WWII, after which life must be wrenched forth from the ashes. (A more optimistic sub-genre begins in 1945 with the Occupation and ends in 1964 with the Shinkansen and the Tokyo Olympics.)

So Miyazaki concludes his swan song following a familiar theatrical formula that brings us back to the beginning of his oeuvre.

The Wind Rises should be viewed in the context of his two great flying films: Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, the post-apocalyptic epic that founded Ghibli Studios, and Porco Rosso, his tribute to the "Lost Generation" of post-WWI aviators.


The aircraft that fill Horikoshi's dreams resemble Nausicaä's jet-powered glider, while bombers lumber through the sky (as they do in Nausicaä's world) and crash and burn. To fly is to live, but when flight is brought to the fight, the inevitably result is death and destruction.


Like Nausicaä, the protagonist of Porco Rosso only barely survived the aerial gauntlet and has paid the price. He is a Hemingwayesque fighter ace whose PTSD turned him—literally—into a pig (hence the title).


One day on patrol, he observes a band of silver far above him. Soaring skywards, he discovers an aviation graveyard in the sky, his friends and foes piloting their ghost planes in a great eternal round. They tell him that now is not his time to join them and he must return to the world below.

The Wind Rises concludes with the same visual metaphor, as a squadron of Zero fighters flies up to join that great sepulcher in the sky (and perhaps here, having announced his retirement, Miyazaki bids farewell to his body of work).

But this is not Horikoshi's time either. Accompanied by his spirit guide, the Italian aircraft designer Giovanni Caproni (playing the same role as Piccolo in Porco Rosso), he departs the aeronautical graveyard for a burning Tokyo that will, in time, rise once again.


The title of the movie comes from "The Graveyard By The Sea" by Paul Valéry: "Le vent se lève! . . . Il faut tenter de vivre! "The wind rises! . . . We must live!"

Because in 1945, that was the only thing left for the people of Japan to do.

Related posts

Twilight of the Zero
Miyazaki's European flying arc

Labels: anime reviews, history, japanese culture, japanese movie reviews, miyazaki, showa period, studio ghibli, technology, ww2

"The Great Passage" is the (fictional) name of an unabridged dictionary being created by the microscopic dictionary department in a large publishing firm.

The title of the movie in Japanese is Fune o Amu (舟を編む), which is even more obscure. It literally means "knitting together a boat," Japanese lexicographer's slang for compiling a dictionary.

The Japanese name of the dictionary is Daidokai (大渡海), literally "great sea voyage." Because a dictionary, the managing editor explains, is the ship by which readers navigate the vast sea of words that encompass life.

These people take words seriously.

Ryuhei Matsuda, who did very well as a roving talent agent in Amachan, plays against type as Majime Mitsuya, a clinically introverted linguist who gets chosen (practically at random) to replace a veteran editor at the onset of the project.


The not-uncommon name "Majime" is an Oscar Wilde-worthy pun, as it has the approximate meaning as "earnest" (or "Ernest").

Majime has been living by himself in a boarding house (plus a cat and the landlady), having taking over all the other rooms to store his books. And then the landlady's granddaughter (Aoi Miyazaki) moves in.

Aoi Miyazaki, who put in fine performances in Nana (also with Ryuhei Matsuda) and Atsuhime, is perfectly cast here, cute without being unrealistically pretty for the part.

You could be forgiven at this point for expecting a classic "geek gets the girl" story. However, that subplot is pretty much wrapped up in the first half.

This really is a movie about making a dictionary. The whole fifteen-year process. Collecting and collating the entries. The endless revisions. Looming deadlines and shrinking budgets. Frantic searches for missing entries.

It's a fascinating tale from start to finish. Granted, you have to love lexicography to enjoy this movie, which apparently some Japanese movie critics do.

"The Great Passage" won Best Picture at the 2013 Japan Academy Awards. Alas, right now, the only available DVD version with English subtitles is the region 3 (Chinese) release.

Amazon Prime picked up the streaming rights for the anime version in October 2016. Amazon Crossing published the English-language translation in 2017.

Labels: japanese, japanese movie reviews, language, personal favs, romance

Emperor (with Matthew Fox and Tommy Lee Jones) is a needlessly boring and unjustifiably self-important melodrama that misses the great thriller lurking right under its nose.

Early in the morning of August 15, 1945, a group of young Imperial Japanese Army officers attempted to forcibly prevent the Emperor's surrender address from being broadcast that afternoon.

It was an eerie repeat of the "February 26 [1936] Incident" (and even the Satsuma Rebellion in 1877), when a similar coup d'état was launched with the goal of "purging the government and military leadership of their factional rivals and ideological opponents."

The "August 15 Incident" ran out of steam when die-hard War Minister General Korechika Anami refused to lend his moral or material support (unlike Saigo Takamori back in 1877, whose participation ensured a lot more people dying for no reason).

The best cinematic account of the events of August 15 is Japan's Longest Day.

Kihachi Okamoto's 1967 docudrama (based on the book by Kazutoshi Hando), with Toshiro Mifune as General Anami, is rather too hagiographic about Hirohito's role. But it faithfully portrays the suicidal spasm of fanaticism that ended the war for good.

What makes it all the more fascinating is that, almost immediately following a "war without mercy," the war did indeed end for good, as John Dower lays out in detail in his history of the Occupation, Embracing Defeat.

Popular culture perhaps makes an even stronger argument. A number of surprisingly decent Hollywood movies with marquee stars were set in—and even made in—Japan not long after the end of the war.

• Tokyo Joe (1949, with Humphrey Bogart)
• House of Bamboo (1955, with Robert Ryan and Robert Stack)
• Teahouse of the August Moon (1956, with Marlon Brando, Glenn Ford, Eddie Albert, and Harry Morgan)
• Sayonara (1957, with Marlon Brando, Patricia Owens, James Garner, Miiko Taka, Red Buttons, and Ricardo Montalban!)
• Escapade in Japan (1957, with Jon Provost of Lassie fame)

Go for Broke! (1951, with Van Johnson) is about the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, composed of Japanese-Americans. They fought in Europe. It depicts the Nisei soldiers in a quite positive light. The screenplay was nominated for an Academy Award.

Then into the 1960s, we have:

• Cry for Happy (1961, with Glenn Ford, Donald O'Connor, and Miiko Taka)
• My Geisha (1962, with Shirley MacLaine, Yves Montand, and Edward G. Robinson)
• Walk, Don't Run (1966, with Cary Grant, Samantha Eggar, Jim Hutton, and Miiko Taka)
• You Only Live Twice (1967, with Sean Connery as James Bond)

You Only Live Twice canonized the silliest of modern stereotypes about Japan. Japanese audiences, though, were delighted with the whole thing. The same can be said about The Last Samurai, which is about as historically insightful as an old western B movie.

It seems a little Orientalism can be good for art. I'm sure Hollywood found the "exoticism" of Japan fascinating. But it was exactly this fascination that allowed them to take the non-exotic parts at face value, rather than filter them through their own biases.

Labels: embracing defeat, history, japanese movie reviews, movie reviews, movies about japan, showa period, ww2

With Tangled (2010) and now Frozen (2013), Disney's once floundering in-house animation studios have equaled and even exceeded the standard set by Pixar. Of course, with John Lasseter in charge of both, that may have become a distinction without a difference.

Nevertheless, while Pixar continues to project an aura of artistic sophistication unmatched by its competitors—perhaps reflecting the lingering influence of its founder—Disney Animation productions strike me as more broadly human in their dramatic appeal.

And certainly more broadly comedic. Many of the laugh-out-loud moments in Frozen come from the efforts of the snowman Olaf to literally keep himself together. He's a one-man Calvin & Hobbes running through the movie, totally hilarious in a somewhat disturbing way when you stop to think about it.


Humor of a more urbane sort is provided by Anna (the redhead) and Kristoff. Disney has again tapped into the snap, crackle and pop of the great screwball comedies. To be sure, Anna, Kristoff (and the reindeer) are a copy of Rapunzel, Flynn Rider (and the horse). Hey, with repartee like this, more of the same is fine by me.


But don't get too distracted. As with the magician's slight of hand, the fun and froth on the surface mask a surprising degree of moral complexity beneath. (Too many Pixar movies, by contrast, prove less profound than they look.)

Frozen dares to lead with a pair of antitheses, not only bad consequences springing from good intentions, but ill-intentioned people successfully pretending to be good. Tangled gives us one too, but the audience is in on the deception from the start (that Rapunzel's "mother" is evil).

The ingenious touch is Elsa's barn-burner of a power ballad, "Let it go." It sounds at first like an anthem for the self-esteem movement. Except that, by the end, it's become clear that Elsa "being herself" will kill her sister and destroy her kingdom with a Midas-like curse that turns everything she touches to ice.

Elsa doesn't need to "let it go." She badly needs to get over herself. That's what the movie is actually about.

To be fair, Elsa doesn't understand herself or her own abilities. As she and her world change, what she has to "let go" evolves too. She's not the only one. Anna needs to grow up. Fast. Falling in love with some random guy at first sight is a really bad idea, especially when it's just an excuse to get out of the house.

There's a great scene where Kristoff says, "Maybe your sister wants to be left alone," and Anna replies, "Nobody wants to be left alone." Ah, spoken like every clueless extrovert who's ever lived.

Prince Hans, the object of Anna's initial affection, is a fairly complex fairy tale antagonist, the stereotypical nice guy who isn't. Though it wasn't as big a gotcha as I thought it'd be. Nice guys don't chain up the queen in a dungeon. But isn't he simply "being himself" and looking out for his own self-interests?

With twelve older brothers, he probably has self-esteem issues too. Well, tough nuts, kid. That doesn't justify being an exploitative, homicidal jerk. I appreciated how unsentimentally the tables are turned on him in the end. No instantaneous change of heart or slap on the wrist after "lesson learned," thank goodness.

Speaking of changes of heart, the one other failing in the film (aside from the missing backstory explaining Elsa's "gift") is the same one I noticed in Tangled: rushing through the "emotional resolve" (Rapunzel's reunion with her parents is cut too short), especially when the denouement starts on such a great note.

After all, Elsa has just brought her sister back from the dead. A few moments of reflection, a little hesitation, some sisterly recognition and encouragement (the first song in the movie, "Do you want to build a snowman?" poignantly establishes the depth of their relationship), would make the payoff all the more profound.

The movie wouldn't have suffered for running 1:43 instead of 1:42. Or 1:44 to work the backstory into something sequel-worthy. (Is this a sex-linked recessive trait that doesn't express in males? That would make both her parents and her sister carriers. Fascinating.)

And one minor linguistic quibble. No, not the droll anachronisms scattered throughout the script. I love those. A mere one word in the lyrics. Specifically, the vagueness of the antecedent in "Let it go" bugs me. Let what go?

Granted, as noted, that vagueness does allow the meaning to adapt to an ever-shifting context. Still, I think the Japanese translation improves on the original with the phrase ari no mama ("[take me] as [I] am"). Takako Matsu delivers a bravura performance.


Here's the English version sung by Idina Menzel. Quibbles aside, she does very well as Elsa.


Oh, and stick through the credits to the very end. First for the "legal disclaimer" that comes right after "Production Babies" (get out your magnifying glass). And then the abominable snowman makes a curtain call.

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Labels: anime, criticism, fantasy, japanese movie reviews, language, magic, magical girl, personal favs

I've got a soft spot for feel-good, post-war Showa dramas that take place during the 1950s and early 1960s. Pure Horatio Alger stuff, an entire nation pulling itself up by the bootstraps. From up on Poppy Hill plays the heart strings with all the right chords.

Unlike most Ghibli films, From up on Poppy Hill has no surrealistic or fantasy elements. As a girl-meets-boy high school melodrama, it could be favorable compared with Whisper of the Heart, that takes place a generation later.

The story begins with Umi managing her grandmother's boarding house on a hill overlooking the Port of Yokohama. Her mother is doing post-doc work in the U.S. Her father was killed during the Korean War when his ship hit a mine, so she also watches after her brother and sister.

Upon meeting Shun, however, our super-competent protagonist is thrown for a bit of a loop.

Shun literally falls out of the sky while staging a publicity stunt in an effort to save the ramshackle old building that houses the high school's clubs from the wrecking ball. The delightful Ye Olde Curiosity Shop depictions of the clubhouse alone are worth watching the movie for.

Shun publishes the school paper, and had already caught Umi's attention with a haiku not-so subtly directed at her. Recruited to the cause along with her sister, Umi naturally devises a highly practical approach to the problem, which Shun quickly sees the wisdom in.

Halfway through the movie, however, the quiet pace of their high school romance is unsettled by a dramatic plot twist that revolves around Japan's peculiar family register system. (This particular plot twist is a not-uncommon one in Japanese melodramas.)

So now it's a race (some actual racing about does take place in the final act) to save the clubhouse and their relationship. But even then, nobody wigs out. Everybody's got his head screwed on right. Thankfully, even the grown-ups are grown up.

This backwards glance at the Japan of a half-century ago is certainly steeped in nostalgia. Though thinking about the Japan I experienced twenty years later, the cluttered, warmly-lit nooks and crannies of Tokyo and Yokohama at times looked awfully familiar to my eyes too.

I've bought croquette and tonkatsu at shops just like that.

From up on Poppy Hill is a gentle melodrama about good, decent, hardworking people. There's no reason for that to ever grow old.

The English script adaptation and dub are excellent, with Sarah Bolger and
Anton Yelchin (Chekov in Star Trek) in the leads, and featuring the voices of Chris Noth, Gillian Anderson, Jamie Lee Curtis, Beau Bridges, Bruce Dern, and a few lines from Ron Howard.


A note about the names: Umi (海) means "sea." Sora (空) means "sky." Riku (陸) means "land." Shun (俊) means "sagacious."

Labels: japanese movie reviews, miyazaki, personal favs, showa period, studio ghibli

Kate's discussion of the Elliots' spendthrift ways in Persuasion reminds me of Sir Walter's diametrical opposite (geographically and economically).

Abacus and Sword (which unfortunately doesn't seem to be available with subtitles) is a biopic about a Kaga province government accountant (Naoyuki Inoyama, played by Masato Sakai) in the mid-19th century.

Upon becoming the head of the household and taking over the family's finances, Naoyuki discovers that for decades his parents have been spending far beyond their means and institutes a strict austerity program.

Their neighbors got themselves into a similar fix and ended up having to abandon their estate and move into the tenements. With this harsh reality as a backdrop, Naoyuki convinces his family to retrench with a vengeance.

They sell off every luxury, their kimono and books, and even adopt a sparse diet. Naoyuki negotiates a no-interest loan with the lenders to cover the rest, pointing out that they'll be left worse off if he declares bankruptcy.

In one of the most endearing scenes (it's in the trailer), samurai families were expected to serve expensive fried snapper at the eldest son's coming-of-age ceremony. But they display pictures of the fish instead.

Not only Japan and the United States, but pretty much the entire planet could use more public servants as good at pinching pennies as Naoyuki Inoyama.

Labels: business, economics, history, japanese culture, japanese movie reviews, persuadable

I was finishing the final draft of Fox & Wolf when I read this review of Mamoru Hosoda's Okami Kodomo no Ame to Yuki ("The wolf children Ame and Yuki"). The similarities in the genre and even names caught my attention.

Yuki and Ami are fairly common names, though Ame is not. Hosoda's Yuki was born on a snowy day. My Yuki has a snow-white coat. Ami means "beautiful madder" (she's a red fox). Ame means "rain."

My Yuki was raised in the wilds of Hokkaido by her werewolf aunt. I imagine something along the lines of the short-lived 2001 CBS/SyFy fantasy series Wolf Lake, about a mountain town run by its werewolf inhabitants.

Yuki's mother and father also meet at college, though my Yuki's mother is the wolf, and her father is from an aristocratic family.

The plots are worlds apart. However, "as Yuki grows from pint-sized hellion to school-age girl, she decides she wants a more normal life" does describe my Yuki's character arc (though it's hardly a unique one).

In a sense, Okami Kodomo no Ame to Yuki explains what Ami's mom was trying to avoid by denying her daughter's fox nature. As a result, Ami doesn't confront the realities of her were-self until she runs into Yuki in high school.

Okami Kodomo no Ame to Yuki has been licensed by Funimation (no release date yet). Fox & Wolf is available now!


Hosoda previous two films, Summer Wars and The Girl who Leapt through Time, are also highly recommended.

Labels: fantasy, fox and wolf, funimation, hosoda, japan, japanese movie reviews, science fiction