I’ve also had a great relationship with Production I.G over the past six years or so thanks, chiefly, to Francesco Prandoni at the International Operations division.
We’d done stuff together before on Tokyo Marble Chocolate and Mamoru Oshii’s Assault Girls, and two months ago, just before the earthquake kicked this country in the stomach, I had the absolute pleasure of working again with Francesco on the English subtitles for a brand new anime feature from Production I.G.
It’s called Drawer Hobs (Tansuwarashi たんすわらし in Japanese), and what it lacks in the action/mecha quotient the story more than makes up for with a playful sense of humour and a refreshing, quirky and whimsical look at contemporary life in this city – giving even more clarity post-tremblor.
Plus it has a range of oddbod kids that reside in a chest of drawers and do such offbeat chores as checking earthquake safety (ironic), cooking up feasts, drinking beer, and wild girls’ makeovers.
But the power here is not just in the visual content or the surreal nature of the yarn – both of which are superb, by the way. It’s the real people involved here who take the venture into lofty territory.
You can read more about I.G's plans for world domination @ Forces Of Geek.
Just got this rather brilliant news from my insider at Production I.G here in Tokyo: there's going to be another take on the Blood anime franchise.
According to the teaser press-release notes I received, Blood-C is a creative collaboration between Production I.G (the people behind anime classics Ghost in the Shell and the original Blood: The Last Vampire) and all-girl artist group CLAMP (they did the original manga of Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle and xxxHOLiC) - supervised by Junichi Fujisaku, one of the key people who developed the original concept for Blood: The Last Vampire (2000) and later directed the spin-off TV series Blood+ (2005).
This baby's slated as a TV series that'll be aired in Japan on MBS/TBS starting from July 2011 (see here), and also a theatrical feature film set for 2012.
The TV series will be directed by Tsutomu Mizushima, who helmed the xxxHOLiC - A Midsummer Night’s Dream feature film, based on CLAMP’s manga and also produced by Production I.G.
Anyway, enough cheating off the promotional notes. I'll let you know more when I do, but in the meantime I'm pretty darned excited about this.
I love my I.G.
This (below) was the trailer for the 2000 original.
If the image (left) doesn't grab you straight away, take my word for it - as cheap as it sometimes is.
This was was an interesting series. I always love my Production I.G stuff, and it's great to see it getting the attention it deserves outside Japan.
The complete first season was released overseas towards the end of last year by FUNimation Entertainment in the USA, and it's also out through my fave chaps at Madman in Australia.
I did an interview with the series' character designer and chief animation director, Toku Okubo, back in 2009 for the late Geek Monthly magazine, and it went something like this (well, actually, a lot like this since I just cut and pasted):
Sans Wikipedia, you’d be forgiven for not immediately guessing when the Sengoku Period took place.
So let’s indulge in a quickie history lesson here.
Also known as the Warring States era, the Sengoku Period covers a time of dramatic political and military flip-flop that gripped then-divided Japan, from the middle of the 15th century to the beginning of the 17th, when shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu took charge.
Think something akin to the barbarity of Europe’s Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648), minus the religious hogwash but with occasional earthquakes added into the mix, and you may begin to get an accurate picture.
357 years, two months and six days after the peace treaty that ended the European equivalent of complete chaos (in other words, on July 21, 2005, just to save you wearing down your fingers), Japanese videogame producer Capcom - the makers of similarly rough-and-tumble games like Street Fighter, Captain Commando and Resident Evil - released Sengoku Basara (戦国BASARA, aka Devil Kings) for PlayStation 2.
Obviously the game’s specifics revolved around the mayhem of the Warring States period, and it starred three real-life historical warlords as the central cast: Sanada Yukimura (once dubbed the #1 warrior in Japan), Date Masamune (nicknamed the One-Eyed Dragon, for obvious reasons.), Takeda Shingen (the Tiger of Kai), and Oda Nobunaga (the Devil King himself), a man who conquered much of Japan before committing seppuku in 1582.
Given the ever-popular combination of the slice-and-dice action format with samurai iconography (it sold 1.2 million units in Japan alone), this baby was always destined to reach screens other than PCs, and play on machines dedicated away from games - which is where veteran anime studio Production I.G (of Ghost in the Shell franchise fame) became involved.
Their resultant series, released on TVs here in Japan from April [2009], is not directly based on dusty facts from antiquity, but sets its sights on “paying homage to history” - which gives them plenty of leeway to be creative, especially in the character stakes.
Think contemporary brooding flair and surly, somewhat streetwise youth-culture antics that rest at home in the 21st century living room, rather than the blank, honor-bound rural rigidity probably present four centuries ago.
“It also has a high-octane story arc and fantastic action throughout the whole series,” assesses character designer and chief animation director, Toku Okubo. “I think we’ve created a whole new genre that didn’t exist before!”
While this is Okubo’s first major foray into character design, he previously worked on key animation on Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, as well as on the Ghost in the Shell TV series and Immortal Grand Prix, and was the animation director on several episodes of Blood+.
Also on board for the I.G ride is director Itsuro Kawasaki, who helmed the Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle movie and did episode directing chores on Ghost in the Shell and Noir on TV. Scripting the armoured descent into anarchy is Yasuyuki Muto, responsible for the movie Afro Samurai: Resurrection, costume romp Le Chevalier D’Eon, and ninja-actioner Basilisk.
Okubo’s own involvement, however, had quite unusual origins.
“Everything started when the producer, Tetsuya Nakatake, held an in-house competition to establish the character designer for this new series. I‘d worked as a key animator many times, but never designed the characters for any project thus far. I thought this was going to be a good opportunity, and I took on the challenge.”
Luckily for us he was successful, as the character designs here are sensational - although Okubo is keen to pass around the plaudits.
“Each artist added his personal touch in creating the spectacular animation for each character’s fighting technique,” he raves.
“And the background art is beautiful. It perfectly matches with the colour palette used for the characters, and this gives a distinctive realism to the animation as a whole.”
The action here is as vital as the rapidly changing story and the range of unique characters involved, and Okubo is quick to make his pick of the cream of the crop of historical figures at play in the series.
“Takeda Shingen,” he blurts out. “He’s a real dandy, and he can fill the screen by just being there.”
With Okubo himself doing all the cast compositions, Shingen most certainly does - it helps when your own design god goes to bat for you.
Here's the opening montage to the series; you'll have to pick up and watch the rest:
It could be that Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade (人狼, 1999) is one of the most underrated anime offerings of all – a situation no one into the more adult leanings of the medium should ascribe to since there’s tons of action and sizable armaments involved.
Kiddie stuff this most certainly is not, and with equally big gun anime production houses Production I.G and Bandai Visual working together here (along with one Mamoru Oshii), there was never any real doubt about the grown-up nature of this material or the quality of the animation.
Down in Australia there’s a very nice edition available through the cool cats at Madman Entertainment.
Add to the guns and action a tall, dark, silent-type protagonist, a mysterious terrorist organization femme fatale, government-condoned death squads, post-modern German WW2 helmets, gasmasks, full-on body armour, and – hidden amidst all this – some overt references to the Little Red Riding Hood fairy tale.
Penned by Mamoru Oshii (Ghost In The Shell, Sky Crawlers), as part of his Kerberos saga, the alternate reality late ‘50s story underpins Oshii’s earlier live-action film Stray Dog (1991) – a movie which starred actor Yoshikatsu Fujiki, and who here returns to voice our hero Kazuki Fuse.
Fujiki also starred in Oshii’s more recent live-action movie Assault Girls (2009), and his presence is all the more reason that you should watch the movie in the original Japanese dub (with English subtitles) rather than opting for the easy-listening local lingo.
The depth of talent involved in the production is something guaranteed to rock the socks off any anime admirer.
Kenji Kamiyama (later the director of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex) worked as sequence/animation director, the character designs (based on director Hiroyuki Okiura’s originals) were embellished on by Tetsuya Nishio (a key animator on Millennium Actress and FLCL) and the superb music is composed by Hajime Mizoguchi – one of Japan’s leading musicians in the ‘80s, and Yoko Kanno’s ex-hubbie; Kanno herself moonlights as the pianist here.
Many people are still waiting for the director, Okiura, to helm his next movie.
He was just 33 when Jin-Roh was released, yet while he’s also worked on key animation and character designs for Akira, Ghost in the Shell, Blood: The Last Vampire, Patlabor 2, Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence and Magnetic Rose, the shame is that the man hasn’t offered up another movie in over a decade.
When that does happen I probably won't be the first to report on it – there are rumours afoot – but in the meantime back-tracking to his 1999 singular classic is well worth the ride.
“Jin-Roh is one of the most stunning movies I’ve ever experienced, period,” says independent film-maker Toshiaki Yamashite. “Each time I watch it I walk away with more. It’s a work of genius.”
Amidst all the angst and bullets it’s a typical Oshii-style yarn: mind-boggling and ultimately mind-blowing stuff, with Fuse himself striking a note as anime’s most elusive male lead.
What other nation in the world annihilates its own capital as much as Japan tends to?
Think of all the times Tokyo's been trashed, caned, victimized and atomized - from the big bang at the beginning of Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira (1988) to nearly every single Godzilla flick etched out by Japan's workhorse production house Toho Co.
Both the manga and the first anime interpretation of Ghost in the Shell(攻殻機動隊, Kokaku Kidotai) continued this trend, setting the scene some time after World War 5.
The twist here was that Tokyo was a city that had revived itself and embraced a slick, somewhat violent sci-fi futurism. Yet while the manga pages drawn by Masamune Shirow were also quirky, a good chuckle and occasionally hentai (perverted), the first anime movie of Ghost in the Shell, released in 1995, was darker, a tad more cerebral and the most innovative post-cyberpunk anime since Akira.
Some, like me, say it’s even better.
Ostensibly the story of a public security anti-terrorist squad (Section 9) coming to grips with an unknown force who is "ghost-hacking" into cyborgs' brains and souls, Ghost in the Shell drifted into a philosophical treatise on the nature of humanity and its relationship with technology.
If any one movie was responsible for impacting upon the latent psyches of the Warchowski brothers before they produced The Matrix, this was it.
The movie may have been drafted by manga-ka Shirow and co-scripted by Kazunori Ito, but the director here was one Mamoru Oshii.
While Hayao Miyazaki (of Spirited Away, Ponyo and The Castle of Cagoliostro notoriety) juxtaposes concerns with the environment over a strange blend of whimsy, humour, adversity and triumph of the spirit, Oshii's films are often dark, bleak and caustic with a resounding reliance upon technology; even so there is humour here if you look closely enough.
“I've always liked humorous movies and gags,” Oshii told me in 2006 for an interview in the Daily Yoimiuri after he unveiled the zany Amazing Lives of the Fast Food Grifters.
“But in Japan it seems that the audience prefers serious movies. I'd love to make a big budget comedy movie, but the current Japanese film industry would hardly allow such a project.”
What Oshii and Miyazaki do share is a predilection for tales in which there is no specifically "bad" character – even the perceived villains often struggle for something they think is right.
But whereas in Miyazaki's realm this means good intentions, in Oshii's it's a need to know the unknown, to succeed at any costs, and often inspired by baser qualities. In Ghost in the Shell and its equally powerful sequel Innocence (2004) Oshii is at the height of these subversive, mind-bending powers. They’re as as visually stunning as they are philosophically bewildering. After all, characters in Oshii’s movies have a hankering for citing Jean-Paul Sartre as much as they proffer up obscure references from the Old Testament.
“I think that Innocence will remain a movie understood by a very limited number of people,” Oshii said back in 2004 when I interviewed him about the sequel.
Even so he had the benefit of two superb scores by Kenji Kawai for both movies.
“I haven't thought about using any other composer but Kenji," Oshii confided in a tone that was somewhat reverential.
“I like the Ghost in the Shell movies basically because I like sci-fi animation,” says DJ/producer Ko Kimura. “The story behind Ghost in the Shell is really intriguing and the graphics are gorgeous – if you see it a second or third time, you'll find new facets within the two movies again and again. For its graphics I’d say Innocence is one of the best anime movies made in Japan.”
Renowned fellow Japanese DJs Tatsuya Oe (aka Captain Funk) and Jin Hiyama agree.
“The first Ghost in the Shell may be an old movie, but this is our future, our world. Innocence took it further: we taste life but have no choices,” Hiyama muses. “I think this has always been my own theme too.”
“Ghost in the Shell is the magnum opus of my master Mamoru Oshii,” anime director Kenji Kamiyama quipped in deferential fashion when I asked him for his favourite movies a couple of years back.
“The first Ghost in the Shell movie is the movie that depicted the big bang of that new infrastructure that we now know as the Internet, from an almost prophetic standpoint,” Kamiyama explains, “and for this reason it should be regarded as a monument in the whole sci-fi genre.”
Right before it made its debut at the 20th Tokyo International Film Festival 3 years ago, Tokyo Marble Chocolatewhipped up a wee bit of a local cinematic feeding frenzy and sold out all seats to the show within one day. I know, 'cos I missed out on that screening.
It's no surprise, really, when you take into account the caliber of talent and the subtle ingenuity behind this two-part animated sensory banquet masquerading as a contemporary Japanese love story.
While that might sound kind'a sappy or dangerously teary, think again - you can tuck away the Kleenex. EMO territory this waffling blog ne'er will touch or at least never ever actually admit to.
Besides, the director is Naoyoshi Shiotani, who previously worked on Blood+ and did the key animation for The Prince of Tennis.
Even more impressive is that fact that the anime production studio behind the experiment is Production I.G, famously responsible for the animated sequences in Kill Bill: Vol. 1, and Mamoru Oshii's superlative Ghost in the Shell movies.
Scripted into an appropriately love-lorn recipe by Masaya Ozaki, Tokyo Marble Chocolate's pre-baked inspiration was cooked up by two resident BMG Japan musicians (Japanese rapper and hip hop artist SEAMO, a.k.a. Naoki Takada, and J-Pop duo Sukima Switch, lesser known as Takuya Ohashi and Shintaro Tokita), and the brew put together to celebrate the 20th anniversary of BMG – just after I.G had celebrated its own double-decade.
“It's a bittersweet love story,” Shiotani told me back when he'd just made the 2-part feature, prior to winning the award.
At that time I was involved in the English translation of the subtitles with Production I.G, but these do not grace the Japanese DVD release of Tokyo Marble Chocolate - unfortunately there're no English subs on same, and the depressing news is I'm one of the few with a DVD-R of the version that was screened - with the finished English subtitles - at SICAF.
The story, a deceptively simple one at that, revolves around two protagonists named Yudai and Chizuru who are involved in one very bizarre love triangle.
“It's one story told twice, meaning that you see the events from Yudai's perspective, and you can follow the very same story seen from Chizuru's eyes in the second chapter. Despite the fact that the two characters are standing in the same place at the same time, what they see and what they feel turns to be quite different. I wanted to show all that.”
This is set to be the couple's first Christmas together, yet the duo end up spending it stressfully apart - thanks in no small part to a hyperactive miniature donkey wearing a nappy (or diapers, as the Yanks call 'em).
“It's probably the most funny and absurd creature appearing in the movie," Shiotani admitted. And he's absolutely right – it's brilliant.
I like Shiotani. When I was doing a story on the Japanese all-consuming fad for hanami(cherry blossom viewing) parties a few years back, he was the most down to earth and amusing respondent.
In March or April, depending on when precisely the nation's cherry blossoms (sakura) decide to unfurl, millions of people unfurl their own blankets in crammed public spaces, ostensibly there to watch the delicate, snow-like shower of flowers. Yeah, right. Mostly they want to catch up with friends, impress the boss, drink vast quantities of sake, carouse, get drunk, sing, and be raucous in exceptionally un-Japanese ways.
These parties often stretch from daytime into the night (when the name is changed to yozakura), and lanterns hung up to drink by and warble prolific.
“We Japanese enjoy the different feelings and peculiarities of each and every season,” Shiotani deadpanned.
“In spring, we have fun under full-blossomed cherry trees, eating and drinking and romping around with our friends. And the sake you drink, surrounded by pink cherry petals dancing in the air, is somehow tastier than usual. In Japanese, we have even coined the word, hanamizake – which refers to the sake you sip under the cherry trees. Then, of course, you need to be careful not to quaff too much booze...”
That opening paragraph has left me a little breathless (my kingdom for a stray full stop), so here's where I pass on the baton.
"There’s nothing in animation that can be described as ‘easy’. Directing, drawing, design... These are very different roles that require different skills; therefore I could hardly establish which one is the most challenging," Shiotani told me in a recent interview we undertook, to be published in Impact mag over in the UK in a couple of months' time.
"However, I must admit that I’m probably still uncomfortable with character designing. Once Ishikawa-san [Production I.G’s president and CEO Mitsuhisa Ishikawa] told me that the human characters I design are too unique, and they’d fit only in an art movie."
Shiotani's exact involvement in Oblivion Island (ホッタラケの島 ～遥と魔法の鏡～) is not all that clear - he's been listed alternatively as unit director, animation director and character designer of the stuffed toy sheep character Cotton – so what other input exactly did he have in this movie?
"My role can be described as ‘animation director’," he suggests.
"Shinsuke Sato, the director of this movie, has come from live action film making, so my role was to adapt and expand his ideas into the animation medium. I joined the production when the script was almost completed, so the first step was to share with Sato-san our mutual vision.
"A movie director may not necessarily be present in the studio all the time, so I also had the role to supervise the animation team. Sato-san and I had long brainstorming sessions in order to be sure that I would proceed in the direction he envisioned, and that he agreed on what I had in mind; we exchanged ideas on everything – like how to make the story more gripping and compelling? How should the characters look? What should the island be like? And so on.
"I added most of the action scenes you see in the second half of the movie, but I won’t list them here, as I don’t want to spoil it for people who haven’t seen the film. I can only say that what Cotton does in the second half of the movie was not in the original script! Most of all I convinced Sato-san to add the scene when Haruka and Teo watch the memories inside the mirror, and when I saw the final result I was glad I’d been so persistent.
"I also made rough concept designs for the island, as I wanted it to fit with the story concept, and I designed Cotton – the younger Haruka’s toy stuffed animal. After all these modifications I drew the storyboard, a tool that can be described as the movie blueprint, and from there I had meetings with each section of the crew. We decided the lighting and camera angle for each scene, how the characters were supposed to move, the visual effects, the colours, and so on.
"But apart from being the supervisor, I also had a very important job to do: since the island’s conceptual design was fundamental to the project, I was determined to keep the same style and atmosphere in each scene. This, however, ended up with me drawing the background art boards – the reference drawings used by the background artists – for about 1000 scenes. When everybody in the studio left I was still at my desk drawing, sometimes till the next morning... So, you see, I did a wide variety of things for this movie."
Shiotani shrugs.
Cotton himself is a super-cute soft toy that cannot only do song-and-dance numbers, but can ride to the rescue of our heroine even after being torn in half. What's the inspiration behind his concept and character?
"Cotton’s the stuffed animal everybody had when he or she was a kid. I wanted everyone in the audience to relate with and overlap his/her personal childhood memories the very instant Cotton appears on screen. His role in the movie is the answer to the question: if a toy could be given the opportunity to move and talk, what would he say?
"He’s a neglected childhood treasure who has the chance to meet up again with his owner, the very person that left him lying around and eventually forgot him. Within the context of the movie’s main themes, Cotton is one of the most emblematic characters," the character designer suggests.
"I wanted him to be cute in his appearance and movements, so I went through a process of trial and error – and I concluded that he would look cuter if I did not change his facial expression. The risk was to have a very creepy doll, so I came up with the idea of using buttons for the eyes."
Going back for a moment to Tokyo Marble Chocolate (東京マーブルチョコレート), the movie was awarded the Grand Prize in the feature film category at the 12th annual Seoul International Cartoon and Animation Festival (SICAF) in 2008.
I worked with Francesco Prandoni from Production I.G on the English subtitles for T.M.C., and two years later I'm still curious as to where Shiotani got the inspired idea of the manic mini donkey-in-a-nappy...
"I must confess that I’m particularly happy with the success of this little, devilish character because, to tell the truth, when I first presented ‘him’ to the other staff I got a mixed reception, both regarding his look and the way he moved," remembers the director.
"The idea for the mini donkey comes from a fashion magazine I had at the time; there was this picture of a model walking in the park of a big city... with a donkey. The donkey had this misty look in his eyes that somehow struck my imagination, so everything started from that photo. I re-sized the donkey to make him a pet that you could keep at home, and then added the diaper while thinking about those pet owners who force animals living in big cities to wear baby-like garments."
He laughed at that point.
"The diaper also helped me with giving him a stronger personality and more colour, as donkeys are just grey and I wanted a fairy-like creature. At a first look, you don’t know whether you should laugh at or be scared of this mischievous beast! But he’s a character you learn to understand and appreciate once you spend time with him."
The rest of this lengthy chat will feature in Impact magazine shortly.
It’s official: Midway through 2009, one in seven citizens of Japan had heard of Star Trek.
I know this, because I finished personally quizzing 60-odd people round then for an article that popped up in the late lamented Geek Monthly to coincide with the late May release of J.J. Abrams' Star Trek reboot here in Japan; these are the stats I conjured up from those loose discussions.
The margin of error was open to contention, since I interviewed people only in Tokyo, my test subjects were limited to students of English, techno DJs and musicians, or creative anime types, and the age group stretched from 18 to 72.
The one-in-seven figure is itself a stretch, since two inclusions in the ‘yes’ category confused Star Trek for Star Wars. One time when I asked the ongoing question - “Have you heard of Star Trek?” - my tipping-the-scales 72-year-old English student declared “Of course!" ...thence proceeded to enact a rather sprite air-lightsabre cut-and-thrust routine.
It isn’t as if Japanese television consumption has been limited to only jidaigeki samurai dramas, or home-grown animated sci-fi romps like Mobile Suit Gundam.
Most of the 35 to 45 age-bracket grew up on Gerry and Sylvia Anderson’s British-made futurist marionette romp, Thunderbirds, in the 1970s.
Even when I arrived in this country eight years ago, Thunderbirds was still playing on NHK at primetime Sunday evenings. The week I sneaked through Customs, it was the turn of the episode ‘Cry Wolf’, set in Australia; for about an hour after, I had to explain to my Japanese hosts precisely why someone fresh off the boat from Melbourne didn’t sound like the outback butchers of pronunciation Thunderbirds had portrayed.
Then there’s the George Lucas factor.
Given that it’s based in large part on a classic Japanese movie (Kurosawa's Kakushi-toride no san-akunin, aka The Hidden Fortress) that starred the late, great Toshiro Mifune at his formidable best, it should be no wonder that the Japanese fell in love with Star Wars when it was (finally) released in Japan, midway through 1978.
But they seem to have completely missed the boat when it comes to the various TV series of Star Trek stretching from 1966 to 2005, and don’t even tarry with the 10 cinematic offerings before this year's reboot.
We’re not talking just your Joe Average salaryman or office lady here. I also interviewed techno luminary Ken Ishii, and he was a member of the Thank-God-There’s-At-Least-One-In-Seven Party.
Even so, Ishii echoed an ongoing issue for most Japanese.
“Of course I’ve seen Star Trek, but I never was careful with the different titles and series - so I don’t know which is which,” he admits.
“As you know if you live in Japan for a while, they tend to put a Japanese title on major Hollywood films, so we can hardly remember the original English titles, especially for the ones I watched when I was a child.”
Fellow Tokyo musician Toshiyuki Yasuda put it more frankly - “Sorry, I don't know much about Star Trek. All I can remember is a bald head” - while Tatsuya Oe, who produces under the alias of Captain Funk and is considered one of the city’s top DJs, found himself apologizing.
“Actually, I don’t have much knowledge about Star Trek, though I do like it,” he explains.
“Here in Japan, we could say that Star Trek got the short end of the stick because they lost the chance for focused TV broadcasting in the 1960s and ‘70s. Moreover, people got more familiar with the series after Star Wars fever hit Japan, so they were even misunderstood as a kind of pale imitation, at least around the time of my childhood. According to Japanese Wiki, video games of Star Trek seem to have been more popular.”
In terms of his own experience, Oe referred back to Jean-Luc Picard and crew, instead of my own favourite - James T. Kirk.
“I sometimes watched Next Generation on TV, and Geordi La Forge was very impressive and cool when I saw him first - he reminds me of ‘80s future electro-funk, like Midnight Star,” he reports.
Even so, Oe did manage to cite the influence of Classic Trek, albeit from unusual quarters: “Leonard Nimoy appeared on a certain TV commercial here in Japan.”
That was for Teijin - a textile and pharmaceutical company (teijin.co.jp).
Think the artistic types at Production I.G, the animation studio behind Ghost in the Shell, should be more in the know when it comes to matters Trek? Well, I’ll confess to that kind of inkling having crossed my own mind, but you can hit delete right about now.
“Star Trek doesn’t sound too popular here,” says Francesco Prandoni, our man at I.G, when I bounce the subject off him. “They’re all Kamen Rider freaks around me.”
Our contact at fellow anime studio, Gonzo (Afro Samurai), proved far more fruitful in this instance.
“Star Trek?” laughs Kaz Haruna, at the production company’s International Division in Tokyo. “How did you know I was such a huge Trek geek? Of course I know the movie is coming out; it may be the most anticipated one for me this year!”
30-year-old Haruna quickly shapes up as the jewel in the Trek Japan crown; the fount of Starfleet know-how that could reboot my own otherwise listless task.
“I remember watching reruns of the original series when I was a kid, but what really got me interested in the whole franchise was Next Generation, which I watched in real time,” he gushes, and it’s not long before I idolize every single word.
Thank god someone in this city knows Trek, and doesn’t believe that Kirk likes to bulls-eye womp rats.
“Although it had its moments, the start of the show was not that great,” Haruna continues with great gusto. Now I know for sure he’s seen the Next Gen series.
“I think I even stopped watching around the second season. But from the third season, it really became a high-quality show, and I was hooked. The ships and gadgetry were always something to drool over, but what really grabbed me was the balance of sci-fi, action, and drama, not to mention all the moral and human problems the crew faced. It gave a kid a lot to think about.”
When it came to favorite characters, Haruna is also quick on the uptake, like Captain Kirk with his trusty flip-communicator.
“I’d have to say Jean-Luc Picard. He’s supposed to have a French background, but Patrick Stewart is so English. So many breaks in his office with a cup of Earl Grey! Really, though, his balance of wit and bravery always got me excited. Sometimes as gung-ho and daring as Kirk, but always with an air of intelligence and class.”
Then the truth seeped out: Haruna had spent 19 of his 30 years living in America, and suddenly there’s just so much less wonder as to why he knows his Star Trek from his Star Wars.
While that piece of news may have shaded the gloss of my personal revelation just a tad, it did effectively introduce a new angle, one that I’d like to believe dawned on me in that split second, but more likely bludgeoned me about the head later on.
The angle? That Haruna has the unique cross-cultural insight a Johnny-come-lately expat like me could never hope to grasp, even after 96 months in the country.
“Having lived in both Japan and the United States,” our Gonzo rep muses, seemingly reveling in his new role, “it’s evident that Star Trek has had a much bigger cultural impact in the States. One of Star Trek’s biggest philosophical views was that there was no racism in the future. The crew of the Enterprise consisted of officers from all races, some not even human. In these terms, the way the show influenced Japan - which is not as culturally diverse as the US - was completely different, and somewhat minimal.”
Then comes the twist.
“What I think it did do is get into the minds of the sci-fi and electronics people, because you can see facets of Trek designs everywhere, from cell phones to monitor screens. Almost every bridge design for any kind of spaceship seen in Japanese anime - and that American kids are watching right now on Adult Swim, Cartoon Network, and crunchyroll.com - looks very, very familiar...”
