Sunday January 6, 2008
Animelting pot, anyone?
Will the participation of Americans herald the dawn of multiculturalism in anime production?
By ROLAND KELTS
IT’S tempting to liken the anime industry to Hollywood, but one crucial distinction is that Hollywood products bear the names of ethnically diverse creators: Spielberg, Lucas, Scorsese, Lee, Tarantino and Woo, to name a few. But what Americans call manga or anime is decidedly Japanese: Miyazaki, Tezuka, Anno, Oshii, Urasawa, Aramaki.
Or at least it has been.
You can now add Arias and Weintraub to the list, working alongside Tanaka, Kimura, Matsumoto and others. Michael Arias is an American director, Anthony Weintraub an American screenwriter. Eiko Tanaka is a veteran anime producer, Shinji Kimura an art director, and Taiyo Matsumoto a manga writer and artist.
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Tekkon Kinkreet revolves around two street kids and their antics. |
I’m not alone, of course. Tekkon premiered worldwide at the Berlin International Film Festival in Germany, and in North America at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, winning critical acclaim in several languages, including Japanese.
(Tekkon Kinkreet is the story of two street kids of vastly contrasting characters in a retro-futuristic metropolis called Takaramachi or Treasure Town. It also features an ensemble cast of crazed alien assassins and other surreal characters.)
Tekkon has just been released in the United States on DVD and Blu-Ray, and the applause continues to grow. One American reviewer of the DVD called it “an inspiring piece of cinema ... pure and simple, with no other qualifiers needed”.
Back when I started the research for my book, Japanamerica, Arias’ and Tanaka’s names were already cropping up. When I approached them, they generously gave me a tour of their Studio 4C, my first look at the labour-intensive processes of making anime magic. That they did so amid the harried months leading to Tekkon’s completion made me even more grateful.
Extras on the US DVD release include a behind-the-scenes documentary of the film’s creation. At one point, the crew views an early cut that fails to meet expectations. Their desolation is heartbreaking – even scary. “What should we do?” a despondent Arias asks Tanaka.
“What are you talking about?” she replies. “You can only go forward from here. Keep your head up.”
Arias calls Tanaka “the ultimate den mother and counsellor, at times just telling me to pull my head out of my a** and make things happen”.
Arias has lived in Japan for 17 years, communicates fluently and is raising a family in Tokyo. All evidence points to his immersion in the culture, not just the anime industry. Still, the stereotype of Japan’s anime producers as insular, cloistered and sealed off to foreigners was not what Tekkon screenwriter Weintraub encountered when he arrived in 2001. “I found the openness with which people treated me in Japan refreshing,” he tells me from New York, where he runs a film production company with his wife. He says everyone he encountered “treated me the same as they would any writer”.
Afro Samurai, an anime feature based on the manga created by Takashi Okazaki and produced by Gonzo Digimation Holdings, opened in Japanese cinemas in late October. It was first released as a US TV series on the Spike cable channel, with Samuel L. Jackson in two voice roles and a soundtrack by the RZA, hip-hop veteran of Wu Tang Clan.
The recently released US DVD package includes scenes of Jackson hamming it up with a grinning Okazaki.
“There is no reason to think of anime in such narrow terms, as solely Japanese,” says Weintraub. “If an American can bring something to a project, then so be it. And the same goes for an African or a Russian.”
Yet the presence of American names in Tekkon did ruffle some feathers – though not in Japan, the presumably more provincial and isolationist of the two nations. Instead, criticism came in barbed terms from American otaku.
On one US-based, anime-focused website, for example, a reviewer heaped praise on the manga and the studio, then proceeded to single out the director and the screenwriter as the two weak points hobbling an otherwise worthy film. In other words: The Americans screwed it up.
“I was totally shocked to read that in the American fan press,” recalls Arias. “I think I was seen as some kind of invader penetrating the anime world, so the film just couldn’t be any good. In Japan, the question of authenticity didn’t even arise. It just wasn’t part of the discussion.
“I have no problem with someone saying the movie sucks or is badly directed,” he adds. “But a lot of the stuff went way beyond that.”
Are anime features with multicultural names in their credits the future of Japan’s pop culture juggernaut? And will American otaku embrace them?
Who knows? But if they’re as good as Tekkon, I’ll take them. – The Daily Yomiuri / Asia News Network
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