2chan.us

At school, not wanting to drive home in my long break between meeting my advisor and a film screening cause of rush hour. Therefore, this hastily-done silly translation of a spreadsheet some 2cher made of various popularity rankings for summer season anime. Any questions should be answered by the notes, but if not, just post a comment! Click for large, obviously. Oh, and Stolen from Yunakiti, just like all the cool guys do.

Last year, I was sitting in a lecture hall in Kyoto Seika university, I believe at a guest lecture Takekuma Kentaro was giving, when the speaker mentioned a radio show that featured anime director Mamoru Oshii grilling Ghibli producer Suzuki Toshio on Ponyo. I forgot about it for a bit, until all the buzz about the US release of Ponyo started heating up. I soon discovered that the radio show this conversation took place on, Suzuki Toshio no Ghibli Asemamire was available for free online! The episode in question is the August 2008 broadcast, “Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea vs The Sky Crawlers.’ An mp3 was available for download on the site from here (next to 2008/8/12), and I also discovered a unofficial transcript of the conversation on this blog, so I used these resources to create an unauthorized fan translation of this radio show. If you can, I suggest listening to the radio show alongside the transcript in order to hear more of the emotion in their voices, but that is obviously optional. A dvd of over 40 hours of the radio show is also available for purchase.

The often-heated but always-friendly conversation touches a number of subjects, from Ponyo and The Sky Crawlers, to the state of the Japanese animation industry and the fate of hand-drawn animation. I hope you find it as interesting as I found it, and as usual, please don’t hesitate to contact me through comments or email with any corrections, suggestions, or questions. Also, if you are a rights holder of any of the materials that I have translated and would like the material taken down, again, please contact me through the email address found on the sidebar.

Suzuki: Have you seen [the new] Indiana Jones?
Oshii: No.
S: You should see it. Basically, it’s present-day Harrison Ford playing Indiana Jones, and about his grown-up son that he had when he was messing around with women in the past, right? So, I was wondering, why is it that everyone’s making movies these days about parents and children? Look, Miya-san is doing it, you’re doing it… If I wanted to sound like a critic, I’d look at you three and say that what’s interesting is that your movies are in the sky and in the ocean… They’re in unexplored territory.
O: That’s right.
S: So then, what’s here and now doesn’t matter to you. That’s what I found interesting. Don’t you think?
O: That’s standard, patented Suzuki Toshio sophistry of the highest order.
All: (Bursts out laughing)
O: Tell me what you personally found interesting, okay?
S: I was just thinking. It was a thought.
O: A thought? Isn’t it obvious that someone getting older is going to make stories about parents and children?
S: Yes, that’s exactly it! Miya-san is 67, right? And Spielberg is 62, 63?
O: Around 63.
S: Right? And Oshii-san, you’re 58?
O: 57!
(laughter)
Staff: So that one gets a rise out of him! (laughter)
S: So, all of you are working with the same theme, you see? The details between each film might be different, of course. But still, it surprised me. And what I was thinking was, whether your stories are in the sky, or in the ocean, or in uncharted lands, they’re all the same thing. They’re all about the afterlife.
O: Well, that’s inevitable.
S: Huh?
O: If you’re older than 50 and making movies that don’t deal with the afterlife in some way, something’s off about you.
S: Yes, yes, yes. (Impressed)
O: I saw Ponyo the other day and figured something out. I realized, “Oh, Suzuki Toshio had absolutely nothing to do with this movie,” and I was certain about it.
Staff: Absolutely nothing? (strained laughter)
O: That was a 100 percent Miya-san movie.
S: Well, it really is Miya-san’s movie.
(more…)

In case you still remember kransom’s posts, you might think this is some kind of insightful and highly detailed blog. Unfortunately, you’re actually thinking of all the other ones on the sidebar.

Sayonara, Zetsubou Sensei vol. 2 is a cool manga, you should read it. If you’ve already watched it, it pretty much covers all the same jokes, but personally I don’t care about that.

Faust vol. 2 doesn’t have Kara no Kyoukai in it. I guess everyone hated it so much in the last one that it’s gone now? I haven’t actually read this one yet, but Omo covered vol1 pretty well.

Gakuen Alice has a really unfortunate DVD cover but you should watch it if you like that kind of thing.

I haven’t done anything recently except play Umineko (which is more or less brilliant) so maybe this blog and that other blog will stay dead for a while.

Quick translator’s/blogger’s introduction, hopefully shorter than the one to the previous translation of the outline for the lecture given before this one, Why is the Manga Version of Nausicaa So Hard to Read by Kentaro Takekuma, best known in America for Even a Monkey can Draw Manga This lecture was originally given at Kyoto Seika University on 2008/12/18, and the blog post of these outlines can be found here and here.

Formatting for this one will probably be a little sloppier since this won’t be used as a translation/writing sample for school, but I’ll do my best to stay consistent with (Firstname) (Lastname) with names, no capitals this time. I don’t really have much else to add to this, other than that hearing this lecture got me to go down to Mandarake and buy up a bunch of Otomo’s short story collections, which were all engrossing.

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The Space Between Anime and Manga
Outline for the lecture series given at Kyoto Seika University
#5: Katsuhiro Otomo, the Anti-“Story” Author
Lecturer: Kentaro Takekuma

The State of Manga During the 70s and 80s

Katsuhiro Otomo debuted as an author in the early 1970s. I’d like to begin by trying to give some structure to the state of manga from his debut in the early 1970s to the early 1980s. The manga world during this time was going through an incredible period of change, which we may never see the likes of again. To try to sum it up briefly:

*Gekiga enjoys its period of full maturity thanks to the rise of Seinen magazines (Big Comic, Manga Action, Young Comic, etc)

*Circulation of Shonen Sunday and Shonen Magazine drops severely, due to the oil price shock, seinen magazines attracting their older readers, and emerging shonen magazines such as Shonen Champion, Shonen Jump and others taking their younger readers.
– The next generation of manga magazines begins at this time.

*The shoujo manga boom begins, attracting male readers alongside female.
– Central to this boom were the female authors in the “Year 24 Group” such as Keiko Takemiya-sensei.

*The first Comic Market is held in 1975.

*Magazines targeting a hardcore audience, such as Manga Shonen and Manga Kisoutengai begin to be launched one after the other, starting around 1977. (The anime boom starts during this period, as well.)

These trends in the manga world, from gekiga to shoujo manga, as well as the creation of fan-targeted magazines, which Comiket and the anime boom both tied into, all combined to form a base for the manga and otaku culture we have today.

Katsuhiro Otomo’s Traits as an Illustrator

As he didn’t attract much attention until relatively late in his career, it is often mistakenly thought that Otomo didn’t begin drawing until the end of the 1970s, but in fact, Otomo debuted in 1973. He began submitting works to Shonen Sunday and COM in the early 1970s, and his real debut work was “Juusei” (“Gunshot”), published in the August 1973 issue of Weekly Manga Action Zoukan. In the following years, he published more short works at a leisurely pace, and began to attract attention from other professional manga artists as well as manga fanatics in the mid-1970s.

The reason Otomo didn’t attract much attention at first was a combination of his extremely low output and a popular conception that his stories and art were plain. Of course, even these earliest works are of unusually high quality, clearly displaying his talent while deviating from the trends of mainstream manga of the time. However, Otomo’s scripts during this period very intentionally avoid and reject climaxes, which would understandably cause his works to be buried under the passionate, intense manga that was prevalent during the period.

We can view these early Otomo works, with their subdued art and scripts, as the antithesis to gekiga, which was at the height of its popularity during this time. Though gekiga can be seen as the antithesis to Tezuka-style manga itself, as it attempts to introduce a new level of realism to manga, Otomo’s manga does not attempt to return to a Tezuka-like style. Instead, it inherits the tradition of realistic art that the gekiga movement started, while boldly rejecting the expressionistic techniques that gekiga developed (panel frames extending beyond the page, super-dense motion lines, manga symbols (tl note: manpu, basically the sweatdrops and forehead veins we all know and love), standardized poses during action scenes, and so on).

I imagine that Otomo must have considered the realism of these techniques and concluded that they weren’t realistic at all. By removing all the conventions that readers had come to expect in manga, Otomo achieves his own level of realism, creating a feeling similar to that of, say, the one felt when watching Takeshi Kitano’s early films.

This aim towards realism extends to a large number of Otomo’s early works where he intentionally does not draw “money shots.” Such flashy scenes must have been thought of as unrealistic to him. Looking back on his work from a present-day standpoint, though, it’s shocking to now see how Otomo’s doctrinally anticlimactic output perfectly captured the mood of the 1970s.

If we look at the 60s as a period of politics and rebellion, as symbolized by the student movement, then the 1970s were a period of societal lethargy, born from the stall in the student movement and the end of the post-war economic miracle. Many young men and women during this period not only felt directionless, but had to worry about even having a roof over their heads from day to day. Whether it was Marxism, Free Love, or Indian spiritualism, young peoples’ values seemed to become more self-centered and introverted.

Finding himself in the center of this group, Otomo realistically drew the daily idleness of the lives of high school and college students. While on occasion he dealt with extraordinary themes like violence and rape, he drew these without traditionally-used “money shots” or a general eye towards making his manga as stylish as possible, but rather depicted these events from an extremely objective viewpoint. For example, when someone gets shot in Otomo’s manga, we don’t see the shooter in a generic pose, a closeup of the gun’s barrel, or the moment that the bullet is in flight. Instead, Otomo draws our attention to a man-shaped thing falling to the ground. Instead of drawing a cool, set pose after one person shoots another, Otomo prefers showing the uncertainty and shamefulness of the act, and it is this sort of realism that caused Otomo to go unnoticed and unacclaimed for so long.

Otomo began using a mapping pen fairly early in his career. In gekiga works of the time, characters were drawn with the dynamic lines of a G-pen, and the mapping pen was used in a supplementary fashion, drawing scenery and action lines. However, Otomo drew everything in the thin, lean lines of a mapping pen, giving equal weight to both character and scenery. While this is the source of the sense of objectivity seen in Otomo’s manga, this technique was an unthinkable one in the world of gekiga until this point, as drawing in this manner would normally just elicit the reaction that “the characters don’t stand out.”

While Otomo used a lot of filled inking in his earliest works, the darkness of his earlier works begins to fade as time goes on, and he begins to use large areas of white space in both character and setting shots. Again, his panel layout was very orthodox, avoiding overly formal techniques such as extending panel frames to beyond the page, and he used very few manpu. We could say that the defining characteristic of Otomo’s work during this period is that it was “anti-manga style,” and was instead similar to the real-life image.

It’s been said that Otomo’s 1970s manga were the first time that a Japanese person was drawn with an Asian face in manga. (“Okasu”, 1976)

One could say that another one of Otomo’s “inventions” was his way of depicting Japanese characters with Asian facial characteristics, such as almond-shaped eyes and a low nose. For example, in Takao Saito’s manga, a character like Golgo may be Asian according to the story, but looks nothing like an Asian man. Again, Otomo’s blunt objectivity brought about a new kind of realism to an aspect of manga that had previously been dominated by manga’s “lie” of characters depicted in a borderless way. This too is a kind of realism that could only have been established in the 70s.

The “Anti-Story” Seen in “NOTHING WILL BE AS IT WAS”

I’d like to present Otomo’s 1977 “NOTHING WILL BE AS IT WAS” as good example of a work that exhibits the defining characteristics of 70’s Otomo. This work is about a man who, after unthinkingly killing his friend during an argument in his room, is faced with the problem of disposing of his friend’s corpse, followed by his eventual dismembering and “disposal” of the body.

This work completely does without aspects of a murder case that a criminal drama would depict, such as the killer’s motive or methods. In the very first panel of the story, we see a closeup of a dead body lying on the floor of an apartment room, and from there all we see is the main character’s disposal of his friend’s corpse in a detailed but disinterested way. In the end, we don’t even see the consequences of the crime. The only thing we do see is the main character’s neighbors thinking that he’s acting suspicious, but not a single thing about the discovery of the crime or the character’s arrest.

“NOTHING WILL BE AS IT WAS”, from 1977. Unable to cut through fat, the main character has to keep heating his hand saw in order to dismember his friend. This seems so real you might begin to wonder if the author has had experience killing a man himself.

In other words, this work is like a simulation of what a person would do if they had inadvertently killed a person in their apartment. Otomo simply wanted to depict the difficulty in dismembering a corpse in one’s own apartment, and ethical themes such as how the murder came to happen, the protagonist’s feelings of guilt, or the main character’s fate after his crime is discovered are completely absent. The author simply does not seem interested in “typical stories” like that.

We can also see Otomo’s “anti-story tendencies” in the irregularities of the story in works such as his 1976 “Okasu” or the 1977 “Uchuu Patrol Shigema”. While the plots of these works would normally not be enough to base a manga on, Otomo’s artistic and directorial skills, based upon his thorough devotion to realism, make these works possible.

Otomo in the 1970s was able to use his exceptional artistic talent to demolish the idea of the “story”. By bringing his story down to the same level as his art, any sort of moral messages could be excluded. This could be called the defining element of the early Otomo’s style of realism.

Turning the “background” into the main character

The incredibly famous scene from “Fire Ball” (1979), where the main character, reduced to bones and organs, rises from the operating table. This one nightmarish panel fixed the path for all of Otomo’s later works.

Katsuhiro Otomo first gained public attention after the publication of his 1979 “Fire Ball.” This is the work where Otomo’s sci-fi side, which could only be seen in small glimpses in his previous short works, came into maturity. It was also the prototype for his later work AKIRA. The protagonists of the story are a pair of brothers living in a future world controlled by a computer. While each were living their own separate lives, the older brother a policeman and the younger brother an anti-establishment activist, the giant, society-domineering computer discovers that the older brother has psychic talents, and vivisects him for research purposes. Meanwhile, the younger brother attempts to destroy the computer, but is discovered shortly before he is able to, and is shot to death. At that moment, he telepathically calls out to his older brother, who is then being analyzed by the computer, causing his psychic abilities to manifest themselves. He rises off of the table, his body nothing but bones and organs, and begins to use his terrifyingly incredible powers to destroy the city.

The surreal image of the older brother rising from the operating table was sensual and overwhelming, and coupled with his outstanding art, was the topic of much discussion at the time. This work also marks the moment that Otomo, who had previously intentionally avoided climaxes, created a work with a flashy climax, and the mix of objectivity and visual flashiness that Otomo realized in this work was perfected in his later works such as Kibun wa Mou Sensou (written by Yahagi Toshihiko) and Domu.

While the plot of “Domu”, a work where a senile man and young girl have a psychic battle set in an enormous apartment complex, is certainly a unique one, Otomo’s successful depiction of the innate strange eeriness of the work’s urban setting is what elevates it to a masterpiece of modern horror. The inorganic way in which each individual within the apartments is implanted inside it is perfectly matched to Otomo’s objective style, and it could even be said that the real main character of this work is the apartment complex itself. Otomo’s manga gives its characters and its backgrounds equal prominence, and with Domu he successfully created an exceptionally unique work within manga where background (the scenery) is given the lead role. This style comes into full bloom in his later work AKIRA.

AKIRA, which began serialization in Young Magazine in 1982, along with its anime adaptation, brought worldwide fame to Otomo.

Katsuhiro Otomo, the Filmmaker

Looking at Otomo’s work through the lens of manga history, his works could be seen as ones which exemplify one style of “film-like manga”. (it could also be said that while his literary style differs from Tezuka’s, Otomo’s made a return to Tezuka’s cinematic style in other ways) His extreme attention to the “objectivity” of his drawings led to the restrained uniformity of the thickness of his pen strokes and the exclusion of mangaesque techniques such as manpu wherever possible. However, he　ultimately expresses and treats time in paper 2d media in a very manga-like way.

You can get a good idea of Otomo’s orientation towards live action film in a manga such as “San Bergs Hill no Omoide”. In the work’s climactic shootout, you may be reminded of the action direction of one of Otomo’s favorite directors, Sam Peckinpah. Peckinpah’s frequent usage of many quick cuts, as well as slow motion during important scenes, can be seen beautifully expressed in Otomo’s onomatopoeia-free pages full of many small panels. Of course, while this technique is cinematic in a way, it is at the same time something that could only be expressed through manga. If you get a chance, compare this work to Peckinpah’s masterpiece The Wild Bunch. I think you’ll find it very interesting.

Eventually, the cinematically-inclined Otomo was naturally steered towards creating films himself. As a long-time movie fan, Otomo had made self-produced films since his school years, and had been still creating films such as Jiyuu wo Warera Ni while working as a manga-ka. What finally got him into animation was his being hired as the character designer for Rin Taro’s 1983 Harmageddon, produced by Kadokawa Pictures.

Otomo’s work on this movie stretched far beyond his given position of character designer, as he became a major contributor to many sides of the film’s production, submitting setting concept art and imageboards. He was also able to meet many talented staff while working on the film, and thus the door to becoming an anime creator was opened to him. Otomo’s maiden work was “The Order to Stop Construction” (written by Taku Mayumura, 1987), one part of Kadokawa’s omnibus Neo-Tokyo. This work is so incredibly well made that it’s shocking to think that it’s Otomo’s directorial debut. Otomo’s visual technique of the “background as main character” in this work slowly corroding the characters of the anime is perfected in his feature-length AKIRA, a film that stunned both live-action and animation filmmakers around the world.

Otomo has distanced himself from manga in recent years, and has been working primarily as a filmmaker since the late 80s, and while he’s made many exceptional films, I doubt that I’m the only one out there who hopes that Otomo will once again return to making manga.

Futakoi Alternative is the anime adaption of “Pinball, 1973” by Haruki Murakami a schizophrenic 2005 slice-of-life/loli twin moe/yakuza/action/Snatch homage/multi-episode Giant Robo reference anime by schizophrenic studio ufotable. It’s awesome, you should watch it. The end.

the best episode (also the second-to-last episode)

I’d actually started watching this in 2005 but stopped at the low point, around episode 9 – I didn’t understand why it was suddenly about a terrorist squid – but now that I finished it I don’t think that was too bad. That wasn’t actually a drop in quality in the show itself, but the script constantly changes genres and the one from “drama” to “fake Imagawa show” took a while.

Unfortunately I think that’s doomed it over here – the middle part is a long slice-of-life show of the kind nobody around here wants to buy or watch, which probably means a lot of people wouldn’t sit through it even if they did like all the rest. Although ufotable did try to make an even more Western-style show and ended up with the boring and still weirdly otakuish Coyote Ragtime Show, so maybe it’s just as well?

Also please post if you got my joke in the first paragraph without looking it up.

This is what people in the far off land of 2003 thought was a good idea:

Also, when I went to check the release date on anidb, I was informed that AXP aren’t pirates, but “provide free previews” to “spread knowledge of anime.” Thanks, anidb, I’m glad nobody uses you anymore.

Translator/blogger’s Introduction: This is another post in what will hopefully be a more regular series of translations of articles by Japanese bloggers and thinkers on manga, anime, and all of those sorts of visual culture that we enjoy so much. There’s a huge amount of interesting material available out there that’s quite unfortunately out of reach to a large part of non-Japanese fandom, and I hope that these posts help out in building the bridge between the English and Japanese-speaking ‘spheres. I was delighted to see a positive response to my first translation, a post by Tamagomago-san on the 3rd opening of Goku Zetsubou Sensei, and would like to thank everyone who commented on the errors in my translation. Again, if you notice any errors in my translation or if you have any comments/questions on this post, I appreciate every single one.

On to the article. This post is a translation of a post by Takekuma Kentaro (probably best known in the states for co-authoring Even a Monkey can Draw Manga) on his blog Takekuma Memo. This post (split in two parts, part 1 and part 2) was taken from the detailed handout given at one of his series of lectures at Kyoto Seika University with the collective title “The Space Between Anime and Manga,” and the subtitle of this specific lecture was “Why is the Manga Version of ‘Nausicaa’ So Hard to Read?” I was lucky enough to be able to attend this lecture, as well as the final two lectures in the series, which I hope to translate in the near future. I was also fortunate enough to obtain permission from Takekuma-sensei to translate his post, an allowance I am very grateful for. Some notes about formatting: I’ve tried to preserve the original formatting in a form that wouldn’t result in mojibake the average person’s browser, so I’ve gone with *s for circles and indents for arrows, both markers of the flow of the lecture in the original handout. Also, please keep in mind that this is a translation of a handout, and thus may require some level of independent thought in order to figure out what the author is getting at. Once again, I appreciate any and all comments, so please feel free. Happy reading!

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The Space Between Anime and Manga
Outline for the lecture series given at Kyoto Seika University
#4: Why is the Manga Version of Nausicaa So Hard to Read?
Lecturer: Kentaro TAKEKUMA

[A] The Complex Relationship Between Osamu TEZUKA and Hayao MIYAZAKI.

* Many publications ran memorial features on Osamu TEZUKA upon his death in 1989, and while most experts and insiders would memorialize him in these articles, Hayao MIYAZAKI, while acknowledging Tezuka’s achievements as a manga author, criticized him harshly with regards to his activities within the field of animation, leaving many around the world dumbfounded.

     â€œBut as far as animation—I say this believing that on this topic alone I have the right, and also some duty to say this—Everything that Tezuka-san had spoken about or advocated was wrong.” (“Tezuka Osamu ni ‘Kami no Te’ wo Mita Toki, Boku wa Kare to Ketsubetsu shita ”. Miyazaki, Hayao. Comicbox, May 1989)

     Miyazaki sharply criticized Tezuka by saying that he believed that as an animator, Tezuka was a “Novice” and an “Unskilled Enthusiast”, but that despite this he was able to use his fame as a manga author to create his own anime company which then began to produce television anime, severely warping the direction of the Japanese animation industry.

     On the other hand, Miyazaki also admitted that he once admired Tezuka as a manga author and had hoped to become a manga author himself. Thus, one can see that some elements of Miyazaki’s ambivalence about Tezuka are very deep-rooted. As for Tezuka, despite being an individual who held strong rivalries towards other authors, surprisingly, he never said anything in public about Miyazaki.

     Anime historian Nobuyuki TSUGATA writes in detail about this matter in his books Nihon Animeeshon no Chikara (The Power of Japanese Animation) and Anime Sakka toshite no Tezuka Osamu (Tezuka Osamu, the Anime Creator) (both published by NTT.) Based on information he gathered through individuals who knew Tezuka personally, Tsugata reasons that Tezuka’s silence was caused by an over-awareness of Miyazaki. Tsugata bases this on the idea introduced by Kei ISHIZAKA that Miyazaki, with Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (Kaze no Tani no Nausicaa), had accomplished what Tezuka had wished to do with anime. That is, Miyazaki created a masterful feature-length animated film which had both a grand story as well as grand themes similar to what Tezuka had successfully created in his manga, and shocked Tezuka by doing it first.

[B] His Early Days of Trying to Become a Manga Artist

* Hayao Miyazaki was born in 1941 (Showa 16) in Tokyo. His father was an executive in the aerospace industry, and he was born into an affluent family where he could be exposed to manga and other stories from a young age. Similar to Osamu Tezuka, born in 1928 (Showa 3), he was blessed with an upbringing that would allow him to immerse himself in his interests and hobbies.

  Fukushima Tetsuji’s “Sabaku no Maoh (The Devil of the Desert)” (1949-1956)

     Fukushima Tetsuji’s “Sabaku no Maoh.” Miyazaki was in love with this illustrated story (e-monogatari) during his youth. The “Levitation Stone” in Laputa was based upon a similar item in this story.

     Miyazaki was a Tezuka fan, and later wrote in an essay that during his high school years, he lost faith in his own talent as a manga author and burned all of the manga he had drawn up to that point. He says that he realized that if he simply copied Tezuka, he would never be able to become a better manga author than him. (Nihon Eiga no Genzai, Iwanami Shoten)

The illustrated story that Miyazaki seralized under the pen name Akitsu Saburo during his days at Toei Doga, “Sabaku no Tami” (The Desert Tribe). (1969-1970.)

     After Miyazaki became an animator, he serialized one manga, “Sabaku no Tami,” under the pen name Akitsu Saburo for Shonen Shojo Shinbun (Boys’ and Girls’ Newspaper), published by Akahata (the newspaper of the Japanese Communist Party). Though this does have some (manga-style) defined panels, this is an illustrated story, and acts as both an homage to “Sabaku no Maoh” as well as a prototype for The Journey of Shuna (Shuna no Tabi) and Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind.

     The illustrated story (“e-monogatari”) is a medium that was very popular after the war, but is now a nearly lost art. Art and story are written by the same individual, but unlike manga, the words and pictures are clearly separated. This medium cannot be ignored when thinking about Miyazaki’s manga.

[C] The Newly Recruited Animator with Directorial Aspirations

* In 1958, Miyazaki saw the Toei Doga film The Tale of the White Serpent (Hakuja-den), Japan’s first color feature-length animated movie, and decided to become an animator. After being hired by Toei, he discovered the Soviet production The Snow Queen as well as the French The King and the Mockingbird, and realized that styles of animation other than the Disney style existed. Here he met director Isao TAKAHATA and animators Yasuji MORI and Yasuo OOTSUKA, all of whom strongly motivated him.

     Miyazaki worked on Gulliver’s Travels Beyond the Moon (Garibaa no Uchuu Ryokou, dir Yoshio KURODA) in 1965, soon after entering the company. While he was responsible for the in-between animation for the film’s final scene, he made strong suggestions to key animator Shun NAGASAWA and the film’s director Kuroda, and eventually the ending of the film was changed. In this new ending, Gulliver and the protagonist Ted, while visiting the Robot Planet, discover that inside the cracked body of the Robot Princess lives a human princess.

     It’s hard to figure out what would make the director accept such a major reversal of the story that had been planned up until that point. While it would not be unusual for an animator to be fired over an incident like this, Miyazaki on the other hand managed to have his changes accepted by the project’s core staff. From this incident, we can see that his skill overwhelmed those around him, even from his earliest days as an animator, and that even in these days he had strong directorial aspirations.

     While working voluntarily on Isao Takahata’s directorial debut Hols, Prince of the Sun (Taiyou no Ouji Horusu no Daibouken), Miyazaki offered a huge number of setting illustrations, and was credited with the position of “scene design” in the film, a title that was newly created specifically for his work in the film. Essentially taking the position of “animation producer” in the place of Takahata, who could not draw, one could call Hols the starting point of Miyazaki’s career.

* Miyazaki begins freelancing in 1971, and together with Takahata who had recently left Toei after taking the responsibility for Hols‘s poor box office performance, he turns his endeavors to television anime such as Lupin III and Heidi, Girl of the Alps (Alps no Shoujo Haiji).

[D]His Discouraging Directorial Premiere and the Trying Days that Followed

* Miyazaki directed his first television anime, Future Boy Conan (Mirai Shounen Konan) in 1978, and his first animated film, Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro (Lupin III Kariosutoro no Shiro) in 1979. While this film is considered a masterpiece today, it did not perform well financially at the time, and he was unable to create an anime film for several years afterwards.

     During this period, he worked on the second season of the Lupin III television series, and in the final episode, “Saraba, Itoshiki Rupan yo” (“Farewell, Dear Lupin,”) he bases a number of scenes on the Fleischer Brothers’ Superman series, paying homage to an animation series he had seen as a child.

     During this difficult period for Miyazaki, he creates a draft for a work called Mononoke Hime (a different work from the film he later created) as well as a large number of setting boards and other materials for Totoro. This is a textbook example of one’s direction in life being determined by what they do during times of adversity.

[E]: Miyazaki’s Turning Point: Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind’s Manga Serialization and Anime Adaptation

  Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind’s first volume, Tokuma Shoten.

*The event that began Miyazaki’s climb out of this difficult period was his meeting the Animage editor Toshio SUZUKI. Suzuki asked Miyazaki, “If you can’t make anime, then please draw manga.”

     Miyazaki, having not drawn pictures with a pen for over ten years since making “Sabaku no Tami” (Miyazaki’s keyframes and imageboards were mostly done in pencil and light paint) expressed his anxiety about this fact to Suzuki, who replied, “We can print your manga even if it’s drawn in pencil.”

     At this point, Suzuki thinks that if the manga does well, then it could open the door to an anime adaptation which he could have Miyazaki direct.

     Suzuki’s expectations were on target, and the Nausicaa manga performed well, which led to plans for an anime adaptation. According to the accounts of those working on Nausicaa at the time, Miyazaki, who had received another chance, and possibly his last chance, to direct an anime, furiously devoted himself to his work like a man with nothing left to lose.

     Miyazaki put the Nausicaa manga on hiatus to focus on anime production, and though he resumed the manga during later stages of anime production, the manga of Nausicaa took a full 12 years to complete, beginning serialization in 1982 and ending in 1994.

     In the end, Miyazaki, a man who is foremost thought of as an animator, takes an opposite stance in this matter from the man he admired, Osamu Tezuka. Tezuka, who since his young days wished to create anime, first became successful as a manga author, then used his position as a manga author to create anime productions. However, Tezuka, unlike Miyazaki Hayao or Katsuhiro OOTOMO, could never completely stop creating manga in order to focus wholly on anime production. That Tezuka, the man who revolutionized story manga, ended his career as an anime creator as a man who was never particularly considered remarkable could be due to the fact that he could never quit his “side business” of being a manga author.

Part 2

[F] On the Nausicaa Manga Being “Hard to Read”

* These days, the manga version of Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind is established as a masterpiece of story manga. The themes and setting of Nausicaa are strongly influenced by the American author Frank Herbert’s ecological science-fiction masterpiece Dune. Dune shocked readers at the time with its detailed description of a distant planet, describing aspects of the planet from its culture and history to even its geography and ecosystem, constructing an entire detailed fictional world. Not to be outdone by Herbert, Miyazaki created a similarly detailed world in Nausicaa, except through the visual medium of manga.

     As the story progresses, more and more of Miyazaki’s speculative thoughts and political beliefs, as well as his contrasting despair and hopes for mankind, were tackled head-on, creating a masterwork that displayed much of Miyazaki’s “core” as an author. The manga’s early themes of utopian socialism and idealism based upon environmentalist beliefs changed during the manga’s 12-year serialization, ending in what can only be called an acrobatic performance, leaping from thoughts of despair to ones of hope for human civilization. As a story manga, it is a work whose grand plot rivals that of Tezuka’s Phoenix (Hi no Tori.)

     When looking through Miyazaki’s oeuvre, the Nausicaa manga has more themes in common with his later Princess Mononoke (Mononoke Hime) than its anime adaptation. Though Princess Mononoke is even called “Nausicaa Part 2” by fans and critics, I feel that it tries to fit too many subjects and themes into its 2 hour and 15 minute running time, and while it was highly commercially successful, that as a work of film, it was difficult to digest everything that it presented.

* Incidentally, when I first read the Nausicaa manga in 1982, I was left speechless by its themes and the level of detail of its world, but at the same time, I was surprised at how “hard to read” it was. Of course, this is a subjective opinion, and I believe that how hard or easy a certain work is to read depends on the reader. However, I feel that must be at least some who share my view.

[G] Why I Feel Nausicaa is “Hard to Read”

Page 48 from volume 1 of Nausicaa, released in 1983 (serialization began in 1982). Each individual panel is too complete, and the characters and background are drawn with lines of equal thickness. This leads to the characters not standing out. While as a work of illustration, it is of extremely high quality, that and the difficulty of a given manga to read are two separate subjects.

     (1): Though this is in some part the fault of the manga being drawn in pencil, the characters aren’t drawn in distinct “heavy lines.” The standard theory when creating manga states that one should draw characters with thick, defined lines (heavy lines), and the background with a thin pen such as a mapping pen, causing the characters to stand out from the backgrounds. Drawing the characters and backgrounds with the same quality of line, (often even leaving no space between the two) the characters often seem to get buried in the background.

     2: The individual panels are too “complete” as illustrations. This is only true for each singular frame (panel), and there isn’t enough of an attempt to connect one frame to the next, or to guide the reader in following the flow of the manga.

     3: The characters’ faces are roughly the same size in every panel. Nausicaa utilizes many different kinds of panels, vertical, horizontal, oblique, large, small, and so on. This is not too different from the average manga, but the problem lies in the fact that the size of the characters in each panel stays roughly the same, meaning there is little variation in the scale of each panel. Nausicaa’s large panels do not feature characters, but rather depict finely detailed depictions of scenery.

     Taking this into consideration, one must conclude that, as a character-driven story manga, Nausicaa uses very few techniques that draw the reader’s eye to its characters.

     However, this work is a human drama that aims to depict the relations between its various characters. For that reason, the objectives of the narrative and the content and composition of the manga’s images do not match up.

     This discord that we see in the Nausicaa manga is not present in any way in Nausicaa the anime. (In the anime, the characters stand out as you would expect them to.)

* Film is shaped through the control of each scene’s length via the process of editing. In contrast, manga controls “time” through arranging the layout of the pages for the reader. This process is what we call “panel layout.”

     Manga is different from film (anime) in that one cannot directly control time. Through the differing layout, shape, and size of each panel, one can guide the reader’s gaze, and create a false sense of time. When reading the early volumes of Nausicaa, one can see Miyazaki struggling to transfer filmic “time” to manga “time” within the organization of the panels, an aspect of these volumes which I find very interesting.

     The technical irregularities seen in the Nausicaa manga are faults often seen when animators or illustrators unfamiliar with panel layout try to create manga. What happens with these individuals’ manga is that the composition of each individual frame is too complete.

 Page 196 of the final volume, released in 1995. In the middle of the long side-to-side panel four rows from the top, there is a close-up of Nausicaa’s face. The background in this panel is simply a concentration of straight lines, forcefully drawing the reader’s attention to Nausicaa’s face. Panel composition like this is rare in the earlier volumes of Nausicaa. It’s possible to argue that through the course of the manga’s serialization, Miyazaki understood how to layout manga panels.

     However, regarding Nausicaa’s seventh volume, released twelve years after volume one, I would like to note that the panel composition becomes remarkably easier to read. The flow from panel to panel becomes more natural, and its characters become far easier to identify when flipping from page to page, as the scale which the characters are depicted is effectively varied. One of Tezuka Osamu’s great accomplishments was his ability to naturally guide the reader’s gaze through the panels of his stories, and in the end, Miyazaki seems to have been able to master this skill as well.

[H] How the Image is Treated in Miyazaki’s Anime

* Putting manga aside and looking at Miyazaki’s “main business,” animation, we enter a medium in which Miyazaki has been a master of since his earliest days. Usually the first topic to come up when talking about Miyazaki’s anime is the mental ease and pleasure that comes with watching his films, a result of the works’ editing and pacing.

     Good examples of this are the escape scenes from the triangle tower in Future Boy Conan (where Conan escapes with the robots, then where he falls from the tower while holding Lana in his arms). In both of these scenes, Miyazaki’s techniques challenge our common expectations of the standard escape sequence which we have come to anticipate in popcorn entertainment, while also acting as exciting scenes on their own.

* Another trait common to Miyazaki’s anime is the extraordinary sense of his “treatment of pictorial space.” I once tried my hand at interviewing Miyazaki, and a thing that struck me was the strength of his desire for his viewers to be able to personally feel a sense of “space” in the worlds that he creates. For Miyazaki, whether it is live-action or animated film, conveying “a sense of space” to the viewer is a serious and difficult task.

     Miyazaki brought up a Japanese film, Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, as a good example of a film that illustrates the importance of this sort of space. In the middle of the main street of the film’s town is a watchtower, and two of the city’s powers confront each other, one on each side of the tower. The main character, a ronin played by Toshirou MIFUNE, supports neither side, and climbs the tower to spectate the encounter from a bird’s eye view.
“But you know, as the film proceeds, the audience stops being able to tell which side is which.” Miyazaki said. He went on to say that viewing the two forces “from a flattened perspective causes a sense of confusion.” But, in the manga of Nausicaa, the relative positions and distance between of the Valley of the Wind and Tolmekia never seem clear to the reader, despite Miyazaki going so far as to include maps to help them in this regard. Hearing Miyazaki, who had such difficulty conveying this sense of space in the manga, talk about his fixation on the audience’s “sense of space” surprised me.

     Miyazaki pays a lot of attention in his own works to the acts of rising and falling. On the topic of vertical movement as opposed to movement on a flat plane, Miyazaki said “the viewer intuitively understands the acts of climbing and falling.” “Film is the depiction of motion and movement, and the forms of movement that are most intuitive to a viewer are falling and flying.”

     The level of attention Miyazaki pays to the physiological response of his viewers must surely be one of the reasons that he has risen to such a prominent position as an entertainer. I know of no other filmmakers who so thoroughly work with the “space” of their settings and the “movement” of their characters.

[I] Miyazaki’s Anime as Slaves to Depiction

* Tezuka Osamu is an author of stories. To put it very bluntly, he always works towards the goal of “allowing the reader to understand the story.” Thus, the way I see Tezuka’s works, the artwork and characters are “slaves to the story.”

* Takahata Isao is a Slave to Production. Takahata, unable to draw, strives to create drama between his characters through his direction. Hilda, from Hols, Prince of the Sun is at once a human girl and the younger sister of a demon. Her human side and demon side are constantly in inner turmoil. How does one depict a character constantly undergoing this difficult personal struggle? In pondering this question, Takahata discovered that such a person would simply remain expressionless.

     In order to depict the fierce inner struggle of an expressionless character, directorial strength, not pictorial strength, is more important.

* Miyazaki Hayao is a Slave to Depiction. Miyazaki has the ability to take a scene which would look boring if read on paper and turn it into a grand spectacle. A good example of this would be the opening scene of My Neighbor Totoro (Tonari no Totoro), where he devotes a full ten minutes to a sequence in which Satsuki and Mei move to their new house.

     How many other filmmakers on this planet exist who would spend this much time dragging out a scene which gives background information to the rest of the film and little else? The viewers explore the house alongside Satsuki and Mei, and in the process fully understand the “space” of their new house. At the same time, we gain a sense of empathy for the characters and are drawn into their world. (I imagine that had Tezuka or Takahata directed this scene, it would have been wrapped up in all of thirty to sixty seconds.)

     Another scene that could only have been created by Miyazaki is the sequence in Spirited Away (Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi) where a sludge-like monster comes in to take a bath. The charm of this scene would be difficult to describe in a planning document or a script, but Miyazaki, the animator-turned-director, was able to create this scene without having to subject it to a production process that involved the written word. This is an ability that only a very specific kind of director holds.

I just finished watching Shangri-La, which features among many other things:

• moe main character getting released from jail (possibly moe jail) and changing into a school uniform (there are no schools)
• M.M.C. running away from her education on how to become the leader of her city’s government/moe mafia/eco-terrorist group
• a secret organization whose members include C.C. and a few hundred identical men wearing sweater vests
• a child princess who gets carried on her sedan chair to watch a live fire sniper rifle test
• 5 minutes straight of nonsense conversation (featuring a child hacker with a teddy bear named Pudding) about how carbon credits are a scam exploiting the poor
• military officers who send out expeditions entirely so they can shoot random civilians
• a crossdresser who fights by flirting with men so they immediately drop their weapons and run away in fear

All that and I still can’t figure out if it’s a joke or not.

Now, there’s a lot of stuff confusing the issue here. For one thing, it’s made by Studio GONZO, who somehow managed to make a great-looking show with one of their worst plots yet in the middle of collapsing. Except for a few shows they constantly do stupid completely serious sci-fi and mess it up; there’s no reason to have any faith in them.

The other problem is that it’s a political show, and I don’t think anything about anime politics ever makes sense. Even ignoring regular stuff like how slavery is legal (why didn’t Hisui or Kanon ever go to school aaaargh), I can still read possibly reputable people (even if they did like Index) saying they look forward to Ride-Back’s political themes, and then find out that the plot involves college students fighting against the GLOBAL GOVERNMENT PLAN. Who are terrorists who took over the world. Using motorcycles that can punch people. And I didn’t even bother with Library War, which features two opposing military forces who get their budgets from the same people.

Wait, I forgot what my point was. Anyway, I think I’m going to retreat and rewatch Gunbuster, where the men were men and the script occasionally referenced things from other cultures. Those scenes where they did push-ups in their giant robots were totally serious, OK.

<> the shangri-la girl is in moe prison
<> her prison uniform is a seifuku
< Nakar> "You've been sentenced for crimes against good characterization. How do you plead?" "uguu~" "LOCK HER UP AND THROW AWAY THE KEY."
<> this is even more gonzo than linebarrels
<> next they'll make another season of glass fleet

So remember that list of unsourced rumors i posted about earlier from 2ch that just happens to be incredibly accurate? Welp, guess what showed up on the 2ch thread that everyone gets their news from?

I mean there is definitely a good chance that 10,000 hours, pixels, etc, but honestly, even if this is fabricated, Railgun anime almost seems like a given at this point, no?

I wasn’t going to post this originally since it seemed too out there, but now that Hagaren’s cast has changed I feel marginally more comfortable posting these completely unsourced rumors from a random 2ch post, many of which have already, by pure chance, come true! via yunakiti since I am a busy adult with no time to actually read 2ch

Munto will be 9 episodes long â—‹
Basquash getting aired on 10 channels across Japan, is 2 seasons long â—‹
Strike Witches S2 in 2010, based on the light novel â—‹
April Haruhi airing will be a mix of season 1 and season 2, aired in chronological order
Shangri-La will be 2 seasons long
Asura Cryin’ will be 2 seasons, one in Spring, one in Fall
Seitokai no Ichizon airing in July â—‹
Omamori Himari getting an anime adaptation ○　(this, Seitokai, and SW s2 were posted in late January)
Railgun getting an anime in 2010
The Final Negima OAD won’t be produced by SHAFT (? i might be reading this wrong)
Mangrove doing Seiken no Katanakaji
Many changed voice actors for the new season of Hagaren â—‹
Wolf and Spice s2 in July, 12 eps in all â—‹

I guess we have to sit back and see how this pans out! Maybe it’s all part of Kadokawa’s master plan. even this very blog post.