Schoolgirl Milky Crisis

Jonathan Clements has provided us with a sampling of his new book about the anime industry entitled "Schoolgirl Milky Crisis".  Check it out...

Your Anime in Their Hands
The Less Glamorous End of the Anime Industry

The show was about a dorky boy who lives with half a dozen gorgeous women – an idea of such stunning originality that the marketing people decided to have a launch party for it. Just in case the chance to see Geek Gets Girls wasn’t attractive enough, they laid on some alcohol. It had the desired effect, particularly on the boozy journalist who cornered a suited Japanese producer, and was quizzing him about his culture.
“I LOVE YOU JAPANESE GUYS!” he bellowed. “I LOVE THAT THING YOU DO, WITH THE… WITH THE…”
He paused to belch loudly, and his victim smiled in pained politeness.
“THAT THING YOU DO, YOU KNOW?” continued the drunken hack. “WHERE YOU HIT EACH OTHER WITH STICKS.”
Maybe, I wondered, it was time for me to come to the rescue. Except someone else needed my help more urgently. The potted plant behind me was trying to start up a conversation.
“My boy!” it hissed with a Londo Mollari accent. “You have to help me!”
Crouching behind the rubber plant was Vlad, a video distributor of indeterminate European origin. I had recently signed up to translate a number of titles for him, but this was the first time we had met socially. I should have taken it as a hint.
“Hide me,” he whispered. “That girl over there… I left her in a hotel room in Cannes. I went out to get more champagne, and I never came back.”
“And?” I asked, wondering why this was that big a problem.
“That girl she’s talking to?” he said. “She’s the girl I left with.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll distract them, and you go for the door.”
“No! No, my boy!” he said. “I can’t! The girl at the door from the marketing peoples! She is the one I went with!”
I would soon discover that such relationship shrapnel was a common feature of Vlad’s life. It was the way he did business. If he couldn’t flirt with someone, he felt he wasn’t doing his job properly. Everything was always done at the very last minute, and had to involve a girl somewhere.
Not that I ever had direct proof. I never got to slink around Cannes like a louche lounge lizard, eyeing up the locals and haggling over anime rights at the film-buyers’ fair. Oh no, the closest I came to Vlad’s international jetset lifestyle was at two o’clock in the morning, when he insisted on driving out to a freezing cold airport. This was anime glamor at its most miserable.
“You stick with me, my boy, and life it will be great!” he chuckled as his BMW burned rubber towards the freight terminal. He was picking up a copy of Schoolgirl Milky Crisis, his latest anime acquisition. It was arriving on a late-night flight from Lufthansa, and we needed to meet it at the airport, for reasons Vlad never properly explained.
The two sleepy-eyed girls at the courier counter were surprised to see anyone at all. Vlad took it as a come-on.

“Hello babies!” he yelled enthusiastically. “I’m here for the film, yes? It has arrived?”

They blinked, perhaps hoping that he would disappear.

“I am,” he said suavely, leaning across the counter, “a film producer, you see. A film producer, honey! How about that?”

“That’s nice,” said one of the girls after a while.
“You like the jacket?” said Vlad, modelling his anorak for them. “You see it has the Japanese writing? This is my company name, yes. If you like it, you can have one. What are you, an XXL?”

The girls busied themselves looking for his package, thereby hoping to get rid of him.
“Here’s my card,” he added, slapping down three on the counter. “One for each of you, and one for a friend, okay babies?”

By now, I was lurking as far away from Vlad as humanly possible, but we were the only other people there. It was so obvious that I was With Him.

One girl plonked the Schoolgirl Milky Crisis master-tape on the counter in front of him with a scowl, proffering a docket for him to sign.

“Thanks babies,” he said, grabbing the tape and heading for the door. “And the mobile number’s on the back.”
Back in his BMW, he threw the tape at me, and drove us out of there with a squeal of tires.

“They want me,” he said. “It’s the whole Hollywood thing. You’ll see.”
At that moment, Hollywood had never felt further away.

“Okay my boy,” he said, keeping his eyes on the road. “You got eight hours to translate that puppy, and we subtitle it tonight. Oh, and can you try not to write a script that uses the letter ‘Y’. It’s fallen off my keyboard.”
I opened my mouth to protest, but his mobile began to ring. It was the girls from the freight terminal, seeing if he was for real.

“Hell-oo, babies!” he yelled excitedly into his phone. “I knew you couldn’t resist a movie mogul like me!”
He turned to me with a happy grin.
“I love my job!” he whispered.
(Newtype USA, December 2003)

 
Foley Moley
Hanging with the Sound Effects Guys

There was something distinctly odd about Goro. From the waist up, he was clad in the polo shirt-sleeves that are the unofficial uniform of Japanese animation, casual-but-not-casual. But he stood in the studio lobby wearing bizarre Hawaiian shorts, his bare feet and calves spattered with greyish mud. He also wore a manic grin, and carried, rather unsettlingly, a large mallet.

“Come on,” he said, “we’re doing the battle in the swamp.”
The studio making Schoolgirl Milky Crisis was spread out over several buildings in a Tokyo suburb. I’d rung three doorbells just to find the particular “annex” where Goro worked, a garage by a townhouse, across the road from the third-floor apartment that was the official business address. Goro was in the garage itself, the walls covered with egg-boxes to deaden the sound, the door obscured behind curtains of heavy polythene. Goro’s colleague Toji was watching TV while standing in a low bath ankle-deep in mud. A washing line hung above his head, from which was suspended a solitary lime-green rubber glove, which, I would later discover, was filled with week-old custard.
We watched in silence as he went for the next take, sloshing his feet in time with the silent movements of the anime girl onscreen. She waded through mud, but Toji supplied the sound, every trip and slide and scrape, until the red Recording light went off. There was total quiet for a perfectly timed two-second lead-out, and then there was a crackle from the overhead speaker.

“OK!” burbled a happy voice in Japanese. “You must be tired.” It was the default way of thanking a performer for a take well done, and Toji was off the hook.

The battle scene was next up for us, although the animators hadn’t finished it. Instead, an animated storyboard, mystifyingly referred to by the Japanese as a Leica reel, rolled across the screen in front of us, complete with swinging swords, axes clashing on shields, spears burying themselves in yielding flesh.
Goro and I were sent out to a large refrigerator in the studio kitchen, containing a half-drunk bottle of Calpis, some day-old noodles, and a dozen cabbages.

“Just crisp enough,” said Goro appreciatively, snatching the cabbages and passing them to me. When he saw me staring at him as if he gone mad, he grabbed a meat cleaver, placed a cabbage on the kitchen worktop, and stabbed down into it.
It made a satisfactory THAKK noise.

What? You thought they just got their sound effects from a CD? Sometimes, maybe, on the OAVs and the kiddie shows, but anime fans are too obsessive. They spot repeated sound effects. If you want quality, original audio in your anime, you’re going to have to do it the old-fashioned way, recording new sound effects one at a time. Goro and Toji, and people like them, pride themselves on their work, particularly when they get to play with guns. But the hand-to-hand combat can be just as much fun.

My initiation into the world of anime foley was almost complete. Next time, that could be me you hear smashing a cabbage with a mallet, or stabbing it with a kitchen knife. But they won’t be my feet you hear trudging through a swamp, I left that to the professionals. I thought I had got clean away, but they made me do at least one demonic SQUELCH. They said that everyone had to try the custard glove at least once.
(Newtype USA, July 2005)

 
Rise of the Robots
A Profile of Masamune Shirow

It’s the next step in Japanese animation, a high-tech hybrid that mixes the motion-capture of real-world actors with digital backgrounds. Anime finally meets the world of computer animation head on, in Appleseed, a movie that exploits its origins to the full by digitally treating its stars to look as if they are manga characters. Appleseed isn’t just a landmark in the history of Japanese animation, it’s a celebration of its creator. In 1985, it was Appleseed that first brought Masamune Shirow to the attention of the world. Twenty years on, it’s still doing it.

STAYING LOCAL
Shirow was born in November 1961, growing up in the progress-obsessed Japan that greeted the Tokyo Olympics. But he was nowhere near the capital – he grew up in Kobe, the port city in Japan’s Kansai region. Kansai is radically different from the Kanto plain over which Tokyo sprawls. The two regions can be as competitive and antagonistic as England and Scotland; Japan’s civil wars often divided on Kansai/Kanto lines, and by the end of the pre-modern era, Kansai was the Emperor’s land, Kanto the Shogun’s. It is often said, only partly in jest, that it is more likely for a Japanese person to marry a foreigner than it is for a Kansai boy and a Kanto girl to get together.

And Shirow was a typical Kansai boy, avoiding Tokyo like the plague. He stayed in Kansai for his education, studying oil painting at Osaka’s Fine Arts University before returning to his native Kobe to become an art teacher. By that point, he had already published his first fanzine work, a chapter of Black Magic in Atlas, an anthology he set up with a school friend.

Black Magic was a loosely linked collection of stories set on ancient Venus, an advanced society split into warring North and South factions in an allegorical Cold War. It shows Shirow the fanboy in full flow, indulging his dual obsessions for pretty, athletic girls and painstaking recreations of high-tech hardware.

“I don’t know why, but the heroes Japanese children first identify with in manga and animation all seem to be robots,” Shirow told Frederik L. Schodt. “This is true of characters like Doraemon or Arare [from Dr Slump], and many others. As a result, most people have implanted in their heads the idea that robots are all-powerful friends, or pals.” But Shirow’s robots weren’t all good. The strongest and most coherent chapter in Black Magic, “Booby Trap”, featured two battle robots going rogue. Typically for Shirow, it’s the female that’s more deadlier than the male, courtesy of her long “hair” that is really a heat-sink for her inner core.

Read any manga creator’s biography, and the next step is a cliché. This is the part where the bright young talent ups stakes for Tokyo. He gets a job as an assistant for a bigger name, learns his craft, and eventually publishes his first professional work in one of the big magazines. But Shirow didn’t play along. He stayed in Kobe. He continued working as a teacher, fiddling with his manga work as a hobby. He hit it off with a small local publisher, Seishinsha, and published his first professional (i.e. paid) work in 1985. It was a comic called Appleseed.

Shirow was separated from the Tokyo world by distance and his continued use of his fanzine pseudonym – his real name, Masanori Ota, was a closely guarded secret for many years. He also stayed with Seishinsha, enjoying the friendship and camaraderie afforded by the small press. With a strong background in fanzines, they also let him do whatever he wanted. The Black Magic series rolled along, its ultimate destination the destruction of all civilisation on Venus and the establishment of human society on Earth. But Shirow was already reworking his ideas into Appleseed, a tale that was not subject to the usual monthly or weekly serialisation of most manga, but which sprung haphazardly onto the market in fully-formed volumes.

BRAVE NEW WORLD
Like Black Magic, Appleseed featured a computer ruling an entire society, at odds with a group of artificial humans, or bioroids. In Black Magic, our sometime heroine was Duna Typhon, the daughter of the lead bioroid. In Appleseed, she becomes Deunan Knute, the daughter of the scientist who created the mega-city Olympus.

Some have confused Olympus with the many Neo-Tokyos that clutter modern anime, but it is actually supposed to be a city off the Western coast of Europe, somewhere near the Azores. Olympus is an artificial paradise, containing a mix of snooty bioroids and tainted human beings. There’s tension between the democrat faction, who think humans should have a say in how things are run, and the technocrats, who think that humans are an unwanted evolutionary throwback.

But Olympus has enemies outside as well. The old superpowers, America and Russia, still exist – the people described in Olympus as “terrorists” are actually agents of these enemy nations. There’s still another enemy and that’s the original programmers, some of whom have changed their mind. One in particular is Deunan’s dad, Carl.

Many anime centre around a child whose father gives them the ultimate toy – a giant robot to play with. Carl Knute has given Deunan a whole lot more than that. He’s created an entire society of cyborgs, some of whom share his own genetic material. But Carl is one of the conscientious objectors who’ve refused to become part of his new society. Olympus is populated by people who are almost like genetic step-sisters and step-brothers of Deunan, but by supporting the city, she isn’t sure whether she’s doing her father’s bidding or rebelling against him.

The tough soldier-girl Deunan, and her towering cyborg companion Briareos, are found in the Badlands after a global war, and taken to Olympus, where the city elders hope they will join the utopian society. Their liaison is Hitomi, a slight, dark-haired little thing who likes robots and starts snogging girls when she’s drunk – Shirow once famously said that he didn’t enjoy drawing naked men, the sole excuse for a number of lesbian scenes in his comics. Appleseed had girls, guns, and often outrageous political statements about what makes an ideal society – as with the later Ghost in the Shell, it was never all that clear whether Shirow was a right-wing philosopher, or a left-wing satirist who liked overstating the case for the opposition.

Whatever its creator’s politics, Appleseed was a hit. It scooped the Seiun Award (Japan’s Hugo) in 1986, and both it and Black Magic were rushed into production as anime. It also gained something that would be far more lucrative for Shirow, who at the time was still teaching art at night-school. His hard-SF attitude was exactly the kind of thing that Studio Proteus’s Toren Smith was looking for. Smith was in Japan hunting for titles to adapt for what he saw as an untapped niche – translated Japanese comics in America. Smith snapped up everything he could find by Shirow, ensuring that by the time Akira made Japanese comics famous, Studio Proteus was already sitting on the rights. When the manga boom of the 1990s kicked off, the works of Shirow were able to ride the coattails of Katsuhiro Otomo to international success.

APPLESEED (1988)
Akira also changed the rules. At the time that Appleseed went into production as an anime, a sci-fi cartoon was a cheap, straight-to-video affair. After Akira, everything else paled into insignificance, and the first Appleseed anime, directed by Kazuyoshi Katayama was left behind. The only place it received a cinema outing was in the West, where distributors pushed it into cinemas in order to ensure extra press coverage.

Appleseed lifted just part of the manga storyline, the events leading up to a revolution in Olympus, after which Deunan would find herself even more unsure of which side she should be on. Moreover, Shirow had nothing to do with it. Shirow’s manga are made for fun; this remains part of their appeal to this day. His foreign success had left him untouchable, his Kobe residence meant he mainly worked in complete isolation, without the stable of art assistants that Tokyo artists hire to speed up their work. As his later works, Dominion, Ghost in the Shell and Orion continued to enjoy success, he was simply unable to keep up with the massive demand for his work. The publication of new Shirow manga, in most cases still from the immensely proud Seishinsha, became rare events in the manga community. By the end of the 1990s, he seemed to spend more time creating single images – CD covers, book illustrations and portraits, than he did on his manga. He had stormed off the anime adaptation of Black Magic, after his comments on production had not been welcomed. Shirow’s involvement in other animated versions of his work would prove similarly problematic. The same fan status that had won him acclaim was simply not suited to a more corporate life.

His tinkering attitude, which kept him happily occupied missing deadlines and fiddling with digital illustration, was too risky a liability on the tight schedules of animation. Although his name continued to prove a bestseller, he was kept at arm’s length from the anime adaptations, his name on the credits merely a contractual obligation, rather than an indicator of hands-on involvement. Ever the fanboy, he noted to one set of producers that he had learned something from playing Doom – that the future of animation lay in 3D environments around which a character could be made to move itself.
  “At the time,” he confesses wryly, “my comments were unusual.” It’s polite Japanese for unwelcome.

APPLESEED (2004)
Half a decade on, the world changed again. Digital animation was not only well-known, it was a fundamental part of all anime. With Shirow’s Ghost in the Shell finding new fame in a TV spin-off, the time was ripe to remake Appleseed, this time with 3D animation. In a radical step, producers did not choose someone with a background in computing, but director Shinji Aramaki, who had a long track record in conventional anime.

Their reasoning was based on the failure of Final Fantasy movie, after audiences had rejected its attempt to get too close to reality. Instead, the new Aramaki Appleseed would use full motion-capture, but treat it with Toon-Shading software to give everything a cartoonish look. The result would be a hybrid of live-action and animation, incorporating the strong points of Shirow’s wishes for digital backgrounds, alongside live actors – Ai Kobayashi, who voices Deunan, also functions as her own body double.

Where the original Appleseed anime jumped straight into the middle of the action, adapting the second book of the manga series, the remake elected to go back to the beginning. Thus, where the 1988 Katayama version kicks off with Deunan and Briareos on a police raid, the 2004 Aramaki version features a variant of the induction scene from volume one of the manga. It takes the time to introduce Deunan’s hand-to-mouth existence in the Badlands, but when we first see her, she is her on her own. It also accentuates a sub-plot only hinted at in the manga, that Deunan and Briareos had once been lovers, but that only tiny vestiges of their relationship have survived his mutilation and cyborg rehabilitation.

The Aramaki Appleseed has been a long time in coming, the result of successive manga drafts, an earlier animated version, and twenty years of Masamune Shirow’s rise to fame as a pre-eminent creator. It would never have existed without its forerunners, Black Magic and Ghost in the Shell, nor, probably, would the original story have ever survived unscathed the unforgiving editors in Tokyo. Appleseed is a culmination of its creator’s love of changes in technology, and of the sudden, world-altering interest in Japanese comics than sprang up in the 1990s, but also of strange real-world coincidences, like the geographical factors that kept Masamune Shirow out of the Tokyo system, down in his own Newport City, tinkering with computers for the hell of it.
(NEO #10, 2005)