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Cinema Scope with Andy Nelson takes you on a captivating journey through the ever-evolving landscape of film. Moreover, it offers a unique and engaging perspective on the art of cinema.
Welcome to CinemaScope where we animate the conversation around the vibrant action packed realms of cinema's genre landscapes. I'm Andy Nelson, your guide on this quest to bridge the film genres, subgenres, and movements. Today, we're diving into the captivating world of anime, a medium that has become so influential and distinct that it warrants its own place in the conversation. While not a genre or movement in the strictest sense, anime has carved out a unique identity with its diverse storytelling, stunning visuals, and ability to captivate audiences worldwide. From the early days of Japan's first color animated feature to the groundbreaking works that have redefined the art form, we'll explore the key elements that make anime stand out.
Andy:Join us as we uncover the origins, evolutions, and global impact of this beloved medium. Now before I introduce my guests, I just wanna talk about membership quickly. CinemaScope is a part of the Next Real family of film podcasts. And that family of shows is supported through membership from people like you. Members get early access to ad free episodes, not to mention extended episodes.
Andy:In fact, on this show, you normally only hear us discussing 5 films, but members get to hear us discussing 5 additional films to enrich their understanding of the genre. For this special episode, however, I'm releasing conversation about all 10 films to everyone. That's right. You're getting a little taste of what it's like being a member. So see what you think.
Andy:And if you're interested, head to true story dot f m slash join to learn more about becoming a member. It's just $5 a month or $55 a year. Now joining me for this conversation, I have 2 wonderful guests that I'm so excited to have here to talk about anime. So when I introduce you, tell us a little bit about yourself, how you discovered anime, and what made you fall in love with it. Let's start with, Andrea Horbinsky.
Andy:Hey, Andrea.
Andrea:Hey. How's it going?
Andy:Fantastic. Thanks for being here.
Andrea:Thanks. I'm excited. I'm an independent scholar. I work, actually, mostly on the history of manga, and my book on the history of manga is hopefully coming out from, University of California Press, next year called Mangas Global Century. But anime came from manga, so I I do discuss anime in the book and its origins and the way it continued to relate to manga since it, emerged in the sixties.
Andrea:As for how I got into anime, I was in high school, and I watched, Outlaw Star on Toonami and a show called Revolutionary Girl Utena in my, high school anime club. Utena had girls with swords, and both of them had serial stories as opposed to American cartoons, which just, you know, had sort of endless iterations of the characters doing one off plots. I was very into both of these things. And I started watching anime, got really into it, decided I would go to a college where I could study Japanese, and learn a living language. At that point, I'd really only mostly studied Latin and ancient Greek.
Andrea:And through various pathways, the rest is history. And here I am.
Andy:And here you are. Fantastic. Well, we're thrilled to have you, being a part of this discussion. And Reyna Dennison. Hello.
Reyna:Hi. Great to be here. Thank you for having me on.
Andy:Absolutely.
Reyna:To answer your questions very similar to Andrea, I grew up in the states originally. And so I grew up watching anime without knowing that's what I was doing. So things like g force or battle of the planets were on my weekly Saturday morning cartoons. And so, you know, I grew up kind of steeped in anime without knowing that's what it was. Then my family moved back to the UK, and I grew up here.
Reyna:And a friend introduced me to this really weird cartoon he'd found called Akira. And so from there, the rest is kind of history for me. I went down and found as much anime as I could find, and I've been studying Japanese as a consequence of that and really studying anime ever since.
Andy:Oh, that is fantastic. You know, for me, yeah, I very similar. Like, growing up, I was watching these things, like Voltron
Reyna:Oh, yeah.
Andy:Robotech. And then when I was in high school, the college, near where I lived had a a film program like many do, and they played a film called Lensman Oh. Which which we went and saw. And I just totally fell in love with that, and it was just such a fun film to watch. And I think of the scope of anime films, it's not necessarily, like, one of the upper echelon.
Andy:But still, as a kid, as a young person, it just was something that felt a little different than all the Disney stuff I'd be seeing. And I'm I'm certainly a fan of the Disney animation too, but this was something new. And I think that's what I really enjoyed about it. So let's jump into this discussion because I guess the first question for both of you is what is anime? Is it just simply Japanese animation, or is there actually something more to it?
Andrea:Oh, boy.
Reyna:Would you like to try and check the, like, one hundred? It's a big quest
Andrea:It's a big question. Yeah. Yeah. I think in some ways, it has either a very simple answer or an endless and the series of complicated answers. I think the easiest way to find it is animation that's made in Japan.
Andrea:But what made in Japan means is actually really complicated. Anime has been outsourcing aspects of production to various other countries since the sixties, not long after TV anime started with Astro Boy, just as American animation also outsources labor to other cheaper countries. In fact, rank and base, a lot of their animation work with the puppets was outsourced to Japan in the fifties. Other labor for other animated shows was also outsourced to Japan in those years. Now it's more likely to be Taiwan or Vietnam.
Andrea:So animation in general is sort of hard to pin down. But I think in terms of made in Japan, I tend to define it as, like, the creative staff being in Japan, creative control being in Japan to a greater or lesser extent, which I think, for my taste, cuts out movies like The Last Unicorn, which, you know, was was mostly made in Japan. But, again, creative control was was in the states. A lot of times, people mean anime, especially outside of Japan, they tend to talk about movies and TV as being the same category. I think a lot of times, actually, they're they're quite different, but, of course, there's a lot of crossover.
Andrea:What has made anime anime is the emergence of of TV anime in 63 with Astro Boy or Tetsuwanitambu. Because Tezuka and his employees at Studio Tezuka Productions, they they had so little money, and Tezuka made some choices that made them get less money than they needed to get it on air. They wound up employing a whole hodgepodge of labor saving and animation saving techniques, which I think really established the look of anime, a lot of its sort of distinctive stylistic aspects. That was the show was a huge hit and immediately launched several copycats, and then that evolved into the genre we know now. Those stylistic sort of quirks and practices became elements of the genre.
Andrea:And manga aiga, you know, cartoon films, animated films were influenced by that, and people started crossing between them as some of the directors who the films we're talking about today did. So so, yeah, I think you have to you have to look at TV, and you have to look at where creative control is.
Reyna:My first book, anime, a critical introduction, was all about what is anime and what are its genres. So I I think I came to very similar conclusions to Andrea's, but there are histories and lineages that come into this that are worth mentioning as well. So toey dog or toey animation that Andrea was just kind of referring back to is the home in Japan in the fifties sixties of the manga. And it's what trains Hayao Miyazaki and his cell taka hata and other famous animators who then leave that studio and go off into the TV industry as it's blossoming in terms of cartoon or anime in the 19 seventies eighties. So we get a kind of, I suppose, industrial starting point for a lot of anime in toy animation that then kind of spreads really quickly.
Reyna:And even someone like Tezuka worked with toy briefly before starting his own company, mushy pro. So there's lots of connections back to toy, and their aim was to make animation in the style of Disney full animation. But then as time went on and the budgets got tighter, they started finding workarounds. And the same as with Tezuka and Mushipro needing to make animation cheaply and finding those cost cutting and cost saving measures that would allow the impression of movement without full animation movement. There's a similar thing happening there.
Reyna:And what I love now is that that's become anime's aesthetic. It's an aesthetic of choice now. So as much as most animation in Japan is now made on computers and you can put the camera anywhere in a scene and have it gliding around. Komatsu no Yaiba's fight scenes are a great example of that. At the same time, as there's that, you will also still, like, in early sequences of attack on Titan, get moments of stillness and what are called tomiae or still shots, which are hallmarks of the anime style.
Reyna:So there's something that goes from necessity into aesthetics over the course of, you know, 60, 70 years of animation in Japan, which I absolutely love. But I think Andrea is right as well. Anime in Japan is not the only kind of animation. There's stop motion, puppetry. There is a vast tradition of independent and artistic animation being made in Japan as well.
Reyna:The kind of joy of anime is it's one aspect of Japanese animation, but it's the dominant one. And it's one that has been from that starting point with, Tetsuya Natomu in the 19 sixties has kind of blossomed into a whole range of genres, styles, market segments that it's trying to feed into as well.
Andy:I'm glad you both kind of mentioned the TV aspect because I don't think it's a complete conversation about anime without really talking about how much TV is part of all of that. But as a film podcast, we're specifically just talking about the films. But, absolutely, the TV elements are core to really understanding fully everything going on with anime. In fact, one of the films we're talking about is really, like, the last two episodes of an entire series. Right?
Andy:So there's a lot of flow, ebb and flow going kind of between TV and film in anime.
Reyna:Yeah. I mean, just to jump in there. Absolutely. Yes. There is.
Reyna:You get long running series of TV anime that are on for decades at a time. So something like 1 piece is a great example. And in between the breaks in the television show, you'll often get what's called a or a theatrical version movie.
Andrea:Mhmm.
Reyna:So even the TV is making films happen in Japan for anime.
Andy:And then I read, like, we're also gonna be talking about Macross, Do You Remember Love, and I was reading about that. And one of the later versions of that actually takes that as a movie within the world of the story as something that is a movie that everybody loves watching. I was like, that's meta at such an interesting level. I enjoy it.
Andrea:Yeah. I love that because, like, it it tells the story of of the Macross series, like, differently because, obviously, it's only 2 hours. But it was so popular, and everybody loved it so much. They're like, well, we're just gonna keep it canonical somehow. It's the movie version of of the TV show in the universe.
Andrea:Great.
Andy:That is so funny. But another point you mentioned is that animation style, how they allowed for those stiller moments to essentially make it more affordable as far as the animation goes. Much like, I suppose, you could say,
Andrea:the Disney animation in the sixties when they're
Andy:using the photocopying technique, finding these ways to
Andrea:do animation more cheaply. But then,
Andy:how that became such an interesting part of anime. And you can see that in a lot of the films. And I think it allows for characters to think and and to be pensive and to be, like, pondering the world or whatever. And we have that through a number of these where we're seeing a character just sitting, looking, and just thinking. And as humans, we're watching them as a human or whatever the character might be on screen, and we're thinking about all the emotions they're they're going through, the thoughts in their heads and everything.
Andy:But, really, as far as the technique goes, it's just a still image that we're staring at for how many seconds. And it's it's kind of fascinating that they're using it that way. That's definitely a key characteristic of anime. Are there other key points? Maybe some storytelling techniques or any other elements about the kind of the art style?
Andy:Certainly, themes, different things that, kind of come across a number of different anime?
Andrea:I think, historically, one thing to be aware of is the use of the vocal effects. The vocal effects are one of the ways that, for example, on on Astro Boy, Tetsuya Motamu, they really stretched very limited animation to make it feel more dynamic by getting the voice actors to just sort of do these exaggerated effects. That act ultimately descends from Kami Shibai, which was paper street theater in Japan in the fifties and also in the thirties before the war. A lot of people who were doing it in the thirties had been silent film narrators who were put out of a job by talkies. So when it was revived in the fifties was at that point, it was mostly returning veterans from the war who were performing for children at street corners with these cardboard paper theaters and sliding images on cardboard to create dramatic effects and doing, again, this vocal performance.
Andrea:That, I think, is a huge influence on anime. At one point, people called Astro Boy Electric Kamishibai, and that's been a huge thing as well. And and anime notably also, with some exceptions, like Akira actually. But with exceptions like that, anime actually mostly post records the vocals. So whereas most American animation as, the actors do the voice track first and they animate to the voice track to, eliminate lip flap, that costs money.
Andrea:So anime doesn't do it. So, the voice actors are usually performing at the end, and they'll have either rough cuts or the finished episodes or movies to perform to.
Andy:Interesting.
Andrea:So that is the thing I think makes anime distinctive. I would also say and we're see we'll see this in the movies we talk about too, the emergence of music music as, like, a huge meaning bearing part of the film, not just in the form of, like, orchestral stupors, which you would see in White Serpent or earlier films. But in the eighties, especially actually with Macross, music really starts to become a huge part of the score. They mix it higher. It takes over the dialogue at several points.
Andrea:And, you know, you see in films like Macross, Ghost in the Shell, Akira, where the music oftentimes is just sort of overwhelming and and really is telling you what to feel in these sort of long moments where very little else is happening. And that, I think, is also a huge aspect of anime that makes it pretty unique in a lot of ways.
Andy:Yeah. A lot of interesting points. Reina, do you have, any additional elements that you think are kind of key characteristics?
Reyna:So I mentioned the the Tomier, the still shots that are quite common. Other really common tropes are partial movement patterns. So just moving one part of the body, maybe just the mouth opening and closing in an otherwise still frame, backgrounds with background characters not moving. So limited movement is is a really common phenomenon within anime. You see that less in the films because the films tend to have higher budgets.
Reyna:Yeah. So we might we not might not be talking about that quite so much, but it's a dominant trope within anime. The other thing I think that's worth pointing to is the emergence in more over the last 3 decades or so of of house styles for different studios.
Andy:Oh, interesting.
Reyna:Depending on the the techniques and technologies being used in studios, they often have very different looking films. So Madhouse that worked so much with Satoshi Kon has a very particular look in the the kinda nineties early 2000. Something like production IG is a real the the makers of Ghost in the Shell is a really good example. They work quite quickly with computer technologies and really lent into those technologies within the production, which means they have a character look that's quite distinctive where they have these huge eyes, but they tend to be quite unemotional looking eyes. So they look almost dead end in some ways rather than having the big glowing stars in them, like you get in quite a lot of anime or girls anime.
Reyna:So there's there's a really interesting set of styles that come through. Studio Ghibli, obviously, refining and working through the kind of Toei style of animation. But, also, if you look at now studios that are run by famous authors, so you get people like Makoto Shinkai has a particular style of animation, and he's working with a studio consistently now to produce that style of animation for each of his movies. So we're getting a a set of distinctive looks to anime as well. I think the sound point is really good.
Reyna:There's a whole industry of voice acting in Japan that sits alongside anime where you would train for several years to learn particular kinds of anime voice.
Andy:Oh, really?
Reyna:Yeah. Yeah. And in that, you will also potentially find singing stars and crossing over to do the stars are now starting to do live readings. They do, some of them do musical performances alongside working in anime as well. So that balance between kind of trained voice actors in anime is really interesting.
Reyna:And, of course, Studio Ghibli, my my favorite studio, of course, is because I've just finished a book called Studio Ghibli in Industrial History. That studio always does the opposite to what everyone else is doing. So they don't work with trained voice actors. They work with normal actors or with children of appropriate ages. And they also do vocal recording in a different way.
Reyna:They have their own voice recording studio, so they work very closely. And the compositions with Joe Hisaishi for studio Ghibli films are really distinct as well. Studio Ghibli is the gift that keeps on giving because it's always doing something unique within the industry. Some, you know, each film they make is different to previous ones within anime, I think. So it's an interesting company.
Andy:That's yeah. It's a really interesting point too because, like, as I watch I mean, I've seen a number of films from a number of the directors that we're gonna be talking about. But I guess in my head, and maybe this is just, you know, partly coming out from from my perspective over here, like, I I haven't seen maybe as many or I don't associate it with the studio. I kind of always associate it with the director. Like, Satoshi Kohn definitely feels like there's a look there.
Andy:Hayao Miyazaki feels like there's a look there. And I I wasn't associating that with the studio, but that's actually a really interesting angle. And I suppose, in some capacity, you could almost look at something like the universal horror films or something and find Yeah. Like, there there are these ways that a studio could help define what a particular thing was. And that's actually interesting about, anime that I hadn't realized before.
Andy:There's a big part, obviously, all of these coming from Japan, a big element that is a connection to the culture. We see that a lot in, you know, a lot of atomic imagery and and kind of that sort of thing. But is that I don't know if that's really kind of a a key characteristic, or is that just something that's kind of ended up flowing through a lot of the thinking and and some of the themes in these stories. Because it's it's certainly, you can you can see elements of it there. I mean, it's not in everything, but it's in a lot and in different ways than you necessarily would imagine.
Andy:And it's not necessarily atomic. It's just mass destruction in some capacity and an asteroid hitting the earth, you you go, things like that. Does that kind of fall into a realm of being a key characteristic? Or is that just something that, you know, having lived through something so, devastating and traumatic that just is it's kind of natural to be woven in.
Reyna:Japan is a place that has suffered a range of disasters, natural and man made over the course of its history. And these are typically reflected in and through its film culture, not just in anime, but throughout its film culture. There is the cinema, which is some atomic bomb survivor cinema. We see this in the anime as well as in things like Akira kind of more kind of loosely reflected through that film. So those atomic images are there through a lot of Japanese cinema.
Reyna:Anyone who's watched Takashi Miike's dead or alive knows the ending of that film is redolent with those kinds of images as well. I think science fiction in anime carries a lot of that history because it often reflects questions of war, you know, space special ship Yamato, for example, and others have these refractions of war and reflections on war. Some of which are like in summer wars about rebuilding a sense of Japanese national unity to defeat common enemies, be they new and AI related or older and kinda more about the breakdown of Japanese society and culture. But you also see other things reflected. I think the asteroid in your name is a good example of that.
Reyna:Not least because Makoto Shinkai has talked about how some of his films over the last 10, 15 years, including Suzume, have been about reflecting on the 2011 disaster, triple disaster in Japan. So depending on the film, it might be a different iteration or a different variant on a theme.
Andrea:The the atomic bombings were one disaster. And it wasn't just the atomic bombings, but also, you know, the fire bombing of majors almost every major city in Japan, including Tokyo and Osaka and Kobe. That was hugely impactful on everybody who survived one way or another. And a lot of them who were children then did become, you know, creative professionals in manga and then anime as well. Akira actually is an interesting example because the movie tweaks it to be more directly commenting on the atomic.
Andrea:In the manga, the first Akira event in was it 87 or 88? It's a different date. But in the movie, it's the same date as the Trinity test, July 16th, which is a deliberate choice. So I I don't know. I would also say too, yeah, you I think you have to watch the last sort of 12 years of anime at this point as as a reflection of of 311.
Andrea:It's in most obviously, but it's in other people too. I mean, you mentioned some rewards. Belle, for example, is kind of a a redoing of some rewards, but in a cynical post 311 register. I think it's very interesting to compare the the exam the response of, like, the state authorities to the problems in those movies, for example. But yeah.
Andrea:Yeah. I would say I mean and even, you know, a recent Miyazaki film like Kaze Tachi Nu, The Wind Rises, that has the 1923 Great Kanto earthquake in it, which was the disaster of its day. So it's not like the atomic bombing was the first No. The first time Japan dealt with this kind of thing for unfortunately.
Andy:And just for clarity for people listening, when you're referencing 311, what is that specifically?
Andrea:The 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami and nuclear disaster, Fukushima, which is why I think Reyna mentioned they called it the triple disaster. That was huge, hugely impactful and still is. Mhmm.
Andy:Yeah. And and I think anytime people go through something like that, it's it's obviously going to be reflected in their art. And I think that's what we see for sure. Let's take a step back before we start talking about these films. We we've got a a list of 10 films that really kind of we could explore the evolution of anime through them.
Andy:But before we get into our first film, let's talk about, really, kind of how we got to this place. What were the influences going on in in Japanese society that kind of helped shape the development of anime in those early years, those early stages leading up to that that 1958 film, which was kind of a a milestone being the first color anime, feature release?
Reyna:Multiple starting points, I would say. You had a long history of animation in Japan going back to the very earliest days of animation. So early 1900, but a set of people, a set of different filmmakers, 3 3 or 4 of them around 1917, 1918, all rushing to be the 1st theatrically distributed animation in Japan. And from there, anime kind of or animation in Japan kind of moves in in drips and drabs. The war is one really big influence on the creation of anime.
Reyna:The need for propagandistic imagery, things like Momotaro is is a good there was a series of films featuring him as a character, and they were propaganda films for Japan in the 2nd World War. So war, unfortunately, helps. But then off the back of war, we get bigger companies starting to take an interest. So Toei is one of the big film studios in Japan, and they start to absorb other companies and have an animation division. And so that's where we start to see the capacity to make bigger, longer, more technically complex kinds of animation.
Reyna:Then you have the influence of the Chinese animation industry as well. Things like princess iron fan from, animated movies from China were becoming quite influential as well. And Disney, of course, is a major influence. Yeah. And manga, which is the source.
Reyna:I'm sure Andrew can tell us much more about manga's influence on the animation industry, though.
Andrea:I think in a lot of ways, sort of the origin point for what we see in the fifties starts in the thirties. Disney cartoons as well as Felix the Cat. Felix the Cat was a huge hit in Japan until Mickey sort of overtook him in the thirties. People start making what's called manga aiga at the time. So cartoon films, principally popular manga characters, like Nora Kuro got animated.
Andrea:So and and Seo Mitsio, who actually directed, one of the Momotaro films during the war, he directed at least one of the, the Nora Kuro films in the thirties. So in the thirties and and sort of early forties until kind of the the full nationalization of animation, there were these, like, tiny studios making sort of shorter films. I think the Nora Curl films are, like, 1 or 2 reels, so pretty short. After the war, there were a lot of animators and maybe not so many jobs. And labor conditions were also becoming kind of a a long standing issue.
Andrea:Unions at the animation studios went on strike. There are all these conflicts. Those strikes led to sort of work stoppages and and pauses. So one thing you see in the in the fifties is actually a lot of people leaving animation for manga and other aspects of publishing because they they they needed to eat. Sei Yamisio wound up, illustrating children's books for the rest of his career because he just couldn't take the uncertainty.
Andrea:Other people who were huge in manga, Fukui Eiji, who died very young, but was a contemporary and a rival of Tezuka. He had started as an animator. So that's part of also how you get the evolution of manga into a sort of more animation style, which then, by the sixties, becomes animated again and re influences everything. But but yeah. And and the labor disputes actually continue into the sixties.
Andrea:There's photos of Miyazaki leading his colleagues on strike at Toei in the sixties as a young animator. So I think that's one thing that to keep in mind. But yeah. And and a lot of those Chinese animations, you know, some of them were actually had Japanese people who'd stayed in China working on them, and and some of them were then expelled as the Maoist regime got stronger and then had to come back and keep working in capitalist Japan. Yeah.
Andrea:And, again, the influence of of Disney is is very huge. You know, people watched top secret, trusted animators were allowed to watch a compensated print of Fantasia during the war. So you can see it in the in the Momotaro movies even though it wasn't officially distributed in Japan until the post war period. But, yeah, a lot people were watching Disney films. And and Toei, they really wanted to be the Japanese Disney and do do Disney in Japan.
Andrea:So that's the ambition behind something like hakajaden.
Andy:I I think I read that they were trying to be the Disney of the east as they had quoted, which is interesting. Hakujaden, let's jump into this now. This was 1958, Kazuhisa Takenouchi, directed. It's interesting. It's got a lot of different English names depending on on how the translation.
Andy:The White Snake Enchantress, Legend of the White Snake, Panda and the Magic Serpent, all sorts of things. It's certainly interesting. It's based on a Chinese tale of the of the White Snake. I found that to be, interesting. And I reading about it, it's I I guess, Japan was working to trying to strike a tone of reconciliation with their neighbor and and chose to tell this story.
Andy:And I I find that to be an interesting element of this. It's a story about a young man. He falls in love with a white a white snake spirit disguised as a woman, and then they they have to navigate challenges from both realms. Their bonds are tested. He has a few pets, a panda and a red panda who, after she gets taken, they go to try to find her and it builds to a wonderful climax.
Andy:This is a film. It had an American dub version and kind of recut version that was released in the States shortly after its Japanese release. And that's the version that's streaming, and that's the version I first watched. And I was like, oh, well, okay. I'm not sure what's going on here.
Andy:Luckily, I found out that this film had been restored. It's not available, but some people have put it on YouTube. And so then I rewatched the, restored version of the original cut, and it was glorious. It was much more much more, interesting and engaging experience. This, but, again, the first film here, this film, I mean, it's it's kind of demonstrating the possibilities for what they could do.
Andy:What why does this stand out as something, like, really special in the world of anime?
Andrea:I'm struck by the animation quality. The sequence with the dragon puppet, it's obviously extremely 2 d, but it looks like 3 d at times. So I think you can see the ways in which the Toei people were really starting to get pretty good. I mean, they'd they'd been good before, but, you know, they were reaching a new heights. I'd also say, I think one of the more interesting things about the movie is actually, the reaction of of people who saw it.
Andrea:For example, Miyazaki, saw this. He was he's about 20 years old at the time, maybe a little older. And and afterwards, he was like, I was in love with Bai Niang. Like, straight up. And so he really has these feelings for this character, which and if you read what he wrote, it's like, this is Moe.
Andrea:Miyazaki was inventing Moe, which is ironic because he hates otaku culture. You know? And he wasn't the only person to have sort of this emotional reaction to characters or, you know, sort of nonhuman objects in the ta at the time. But but yeah. So I I found myself because of that focusing on on Bai Niang.
Andrea:And, yeah, I I thought it was interesting, like, how she is sort of becomes, like, the protagonist by the end. She's she's the one who's trying to save her lover, but I can't remember his name. Xin Shang or something like that. Xin Shang? Yeah.
Andrea:Right. But yeah. You know, she she's the one who's fighting the monk at the end. That's interesting. And I think you can also sort of see, like, the ghost of ideas there that will again, it might be a little bit of a stretch, but, like, Miyazaki's heroines are very famously, you know, the protagonist of their films.
Andrea:And I think you can kinda see the roots of that with Bai Niang here.
Reyna:Yeah. I would wholeheartedly agree with all of that, for sure. I think there's lots in this movie that would become notable later on as well. So it sets a standard that Toei has been held to for a long time, I think. But it's also a movie that is very much a hybrid of what's going on in all the things we were just talking about.
Reyna:So you get the the comedy animal sidekicks, which are very Disney in in essence. But you have the kind of the history and legend and tradition that comes from China and is very much a reflection of films like princess iron fan from China. So all the things we were just saying about history are here in this movie. And it's also, you know, famously the starting point for famous animators like Miyazaki, but also, I think, Rintaro. Yeah.
Reyna:The famous anime director had his first job as an in betweener on this movie. So there's there's these great sort of industry stories as well as kind of aesthetic stories and mixing going on here. For me, I I love the fact that this is also variously translated and has 1,000 like, it feels like dozens of versions. And some of them are musical, and some of them aren't. And some of them have these great sequences in them that they're then cut out in others.
Reyna:It's I think for me, it's a great movie for us to start with because it shows what happens to animated movies as they travel. And animation is really often suffers from these kinds of of issues where as it travels, it's reinterpreted by different cultures in different ways, given new voice overs, cut, censored, have has bits added sometimes. And I I think this movie, of all the movies we're talking about today, really does show its own history and its variants and versions. So it's a great place to start just from that perspective. Miyazaki would complain about people cutting down his movie into the warriors of the wind, but he has that that movie has nothing on what happened.
Reyna:How could John as it traveled the world, I think.
Andy:Now that American dub that I first watched, I mean, clearly, they were targeting American children because they take that sequence of panda and the red panda later when they're doing the little dance, right around the dragon when they, put on the dragon costume. They put that right up front. Like, that's how the film starts with the credits and everything, very different opening. And then we see it again later. So, clearly, they were really tapping into, this is a film for kids.
Andy:We need to make sure these these these two characters are really prominent throughout. And it was really reflects how people thought of animation. You know?
Reyna:Yeah. But Andrea's right as well. There are elements of the what they're doing with the animation in this movie that are just phenomenal for the time. You know, that dragon sequence stood out for me, the puppet dragon sequence.
Andy:The battle when when she's fighting the monk in the sky. Yeah.
Reyna:Yeah. No. Anytime she's flying, it's beautiful and amazing.
Andy:That was a really beautiful film. I'm I I had never seen it before, and I'm really, really glad to have seen it, but definitely watch Japanese restored version Yeah. On YouTube because that's the
Andrea:way it works. Dailymotion. I found it on Dailymotion. Oh, nice. Okay.
Andy:Good to know.
Andrea:I loaded up the streaming service, and I saw the chop suey font in the credits, and I was like, nope. We're out. You're probably be available somewhere else. Exactly. Actually, that I wonder.
Andrea:I haven't looked into this at all, but I wonder if there was some attempt to obfuscate the fact that it was Japanese in the states at the time and sort of pretend it was Chinese given the Chinese subject matter.
Andy:Interesting.
Andrea:Possibly because, you know, that might have been better received in the states at that point, given the recent war history.
Andy:Right. Right.
Andrea:I haven't looked into that at all, but but that's certainly something I wonder about.
Andy:Yeah. No. That's an interesting point for sure. We're gonna take a jump from 58 all the way up to 1984. We're skipping a lot of history, but we're jumping to, Hayao Miyazaki now with Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind.
Andy:It's considered a Studio Ghibli film even though it's not a Studio Ghibli film. It's it's kind of, like, right on the edge there, but it's often thrown into packages when they're selling it as, you know, the films from the studio. This is the story of Princess Nausicaa. She's it's a postapocalyptic world. She becomes caught between several warring factions, as an ecological disaster looms.
Andy:She happens to have the ability to kind of communicate with these insects and and kind of understand them, these giant, giant insects. And she works to restore balance and kind of prevent destruction, global destruction, which we certainly have some visions of here. This is such a fascinating film, and it's definitely introducing some other elements of it. And, you know, it's not Miyazaki's first film, but there's kind of a steampunk sensibility with it that is being created here. From where we had started in 58 to here, like, what's the jump in anime that that we're seeing happen over the course of time?
Reyna:Well, interestingly, Andrea mentioned The Last Unicorn a minute ago. This is the same studio that is making this movie. It's top craft studio.
Andy:That's funny.
Andrea:What happened in animation is that TV animation had become a major thing. So So it was it was called Terry b manga, TV manga, TV cartoons until, sort of the mid to late seventies when a couple of films, Space Battleship Yamato being one of the major ones, really sort of started creating the notion of TV anime as, like, a distinctive kind of thing, as opposed to a animated offshoot of manga. And anime fans really began identifying as such as sort of creating their own kind of subculture within sort of larger media fandoms in Japan. When Miyazaki had, you know, worked at Toei, he had gone into TV animation. He did a really great, show called Sherlock Hound and several others in the seventies as well as did a movie, a loop in the third movie, which is a very famous animated and and manga franchise, Castle of Calliastro.
Andrea:That was also hugely influential on manga fan cultures for various reasons. But so yeah. By 84, the Japanese animation industry is is much bigger than it was in 58. And there's a lot more studios involved. And there's a lot more money, which I think you could see in Nausicaa for sure.
Andrea:And also, I mean, interestingly enough, this is it's based on a manga that that Miyazaki did. The manga is is different than the than the film wound up being too in interesting ways.
Reyna:This movie came about because Miyazaki was drawing and writing the Naoshka manga for, it was being serialized in a new anime magazine called animage, which was edited by Toshio Suzuki who worked for Tokuma Publishing. Tokuma was like the other big publishing conglomerates at the time, like Kadokawa, looking to move into film production as a way of, you know, spreading spreading its its conglomeration through Japan and creating early forms of what we now call media mix. So it was interested in taking its properties from one medium to another, and Naushka as a proprietary thing they owned became a really good animation they could adapt. They worked with Top Craft Studio to do this, which is the biggest studio in Japan at the time. The only one they felt could actually cope with an epic story as big as Miyazaki's vision for Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind.
Reyna:It's a really interesting production because it brings together not just the people at Top Craft at the time, but also people that Miyazaki and Takahata had previously worked with in television animation. So they they brought in a lot of people to help get this movie finished who would then, some of them, go with them on to form Studio Ghibli. It's kind of a starting and kind of pre Studio Ghibli, experience for many of them. It's produced by Isao Takahata. So it's not just Miyazaki's movie, but it's also Isao Takahata's film as well.
Reyna:Takahata was very influential in the music side of things for this movie. And okay. So my favorite like, I love this movie on so many levels. It's a great adaptation, but it it is Andrea is completely right. It does diverge quite a lot, particularly away from the manga as the movie goes on.
Reyna:The endings of the movie and the manga are quite different and distinct from one another. And that turns out to be a typical Miyazaki adaptation practice. He loves no matter what he's adapting, he always starts quite faithful and then ends up somewhere different from the book by the end of the production. With Nashka of the valley of the wind, we also see that early element of Miyazaki's environmentalism as a major theme. And here we get That's
Andy:a big one. Yeah.
Reyna:Yeah. That we get that sense of the nuclear holocaust being ranged against the power of nature to recuperate mother earth. So you get a bit of back and forth between humanity and the natural world in that set of themes and images. It's got the strong central female character in Nausicaa who is a princess of her people, and then after her father dies becomes a somewhat messianic figure for her people. But it's a really interesting film because like the manga, it is full of complex, fully characterized individuals who aren't just, you know, stereotyped or representative of a group.
Reyna:They are really thought through characters with their own arcs in the movie. It's also a movie that has in it some of the tensions that were brewing in anime culture at the time. So, in this movie, they brought in animators including people like Hideaki Anno, who would then go off and form the Gainax studio and and make Neon Genesis Evangelion. But in that, we get this tension between the people who had been trained industrially through places like Toei and the rising fan culture that were teaching themselves to animate that were kind of emerging as animators out of other less traditional means. And that's really fascinating because throughout the seventies and into the eighties, you also get the rise of that Otaku culture in Japan and the rise of fandom more generally.
Reyna:Like, by the time we get to, there have been massive cultural events around anime, and particularly around anime films with people queuing around city blocks to go watch, the Gundam film and having major major kind of public events about anime. So the first fan gatherings are happening, the first Otaku conventions are happening. So this movie almost comes at the perfect moment to become a hit because Nausica feeds into those kinds of sci fi fantasy themes, but at the same time, there's a growing fan base for anime more generally. So that really helps it as well. So it's a massive hit when it comes out.
Reyna:And just one final note, Sherlock hound was such a big hit that when it was out in cinemas that when they released Moscow of the valley of the wind in cinemas in Japan, it was with an episode of Sherlock hound. So it was packaged together as a kind of, you know, you like Sherlock hound, come and see this other film. You know? So it's this really interesting back and forth again between TV anime and the the film world of anime.
Andrea:I want GKIDS to license the restored versions of Sherlock hound for for license, at least in the states. But worldwide would be even better. Sherlock hound is is really great. Yeah. I mean, I would I would second all that.
Andrea:Animeage, of course, was one of the key early anime magazines that was creating and cementing anime fandom. And at this stage too, it was very much sort of much more insidery and fans talking directly to creators, and they were also the same categories, like, with people like Anno Hideaki and and others. In the mid eighties, there's a shift with the anime magazines, like, Anime Age and Newtype, where they become much more sort of studios talk to fans, and that's it. Much more sort of promotional. But at this stage, they were much more creating a dialogue amongst anime fans and and creating this idea of anime fandom.
Andrea:So and I and I think too, you know, Nausicaa is not as well known as, like, a otaku heart throb character as Clarisse in Halley Ostrow, but she definitely has some of the same aesthetics of kind of those characters who appealed to Lilycon fans at the time. So, yeah, it's definitely even though, again, Miyazaki has always been very vocally against anime anime fandom of that kind and and doesn't consider his films anime in this in that sense. You know, he he was part of those developments. And and, yeah, and I think the fact that it was also Takahata's origin point in a lot of ways is also really important to keep in mind. Or indeed, he didn't watch any of his films, but he made some really great ones, especially if you like crying.
Andrea:So
Reyna:reference side reference to Grave of the Fireflies, I presume. Yeah. Yeah.
Andrea:You take that movie once about every 10 years.
Andy:That's that was a tough one. That is a tough one for sure.
Reyna:But it's a
Andrea:beautiful movie. I saw Blac
Reyna:A Child at the end of Princess Kaguya as well, which is just gorgeous.
Andrea:Yeah. Yeah. Karma is not yeah. And the last the last fully hand drawn movie in Japan, probably.
Andy:That's a stunning one. Absolutely. As far as this one, the the kind of the steampunk elements, some I've I've read some, like, dieselpunk elements. Is this the starting point for a lot of that sort of element that we'll end up seeing, even spreading outside of anime? Or or had it just taken something that had been existing and kind of explored with explored it in different ways?
Reyna:I mean, the sci fi genre is doing a variety of these of of variants of these kinds of aesthetics. The Miyazaki steampunk thing is interesting though. Yeah. So there's there's a whole process in this movie called the harmony process. There's one woman who basically comes from Tatsunoko Pro into Ghibli, and she creates this way of animating that is taking surface level cells, cutting out segments, and then articulating them like puppets.
Reyna:And so they're painted with background paints, so they're made to articulate move. So the distinctive movement of the oom that kinda goes back and forth, this is her invention for this company. And so she's she's the reason there's a a lot more detail in some of the foregrounds characters because they have those they're not having to, like, repaint the image over and over again. They can just articulate the puppet so it can be more detailed and varied. The digitized version of this is what they're using to make Howl's Moving Castle move later on in Studio Ghibli.
Andy:Well, and it speaks to the point we had earlier about kind of finding cost cutting ways to do it. You're not having to redraw it every time. You're just moving the pieces around. It's definitely noticeable in the ohms as you're watching them kind of move because, I mean, it gives them that shell aspect. You know, the the shell itself doesn't move, but each shell moves next to the other shelves.
Andrea:It makes them feel very organic.
Andy:Yeah. Absolutely.
Reyna:Her name is, Naoko Takaya. Sorry. It took me a while to track that down, but there's a couple of YouTube videos with one of the ex members of Gainax talking about it that you can still see online.
Andy:Gotcha. Well, we go from Anausica, which kind of, you know, we we're seeing some of Miyazaki and his, environmental themes. We're seeing kind of the steampunk origins, some of these other techniques that they're doing. And now we're gonna move into Macross, Do You Remember Love 1984, by Shoji Kawamori and Noboru Ishiguro. We we wanted to make sure we had a film that kind of dealt with the mecca and these ships.
Andy:We talked about Space Battleship Yamato as a possibility, but opted for this one because it also includes the musical element, which I think is such an interesting addition to this. And as something we've already mentioned this. This came from a series that they then said, well, let's retell the story but compress it into a 2 hour film. And that's what we get here. Amidst an intergalactic war, this story is a a love triangle, that we follow between a pilot, a singer, and an officer.
Andy:And as this conflict reaches the climax, music and love become key to humanity's survival. And there's mecca in it. There's romance. There's music. It's very influential.
Andy:It was a real fun film. I had never seen this or any of these films from the series, but I had a great time watching this. And, as a fan of things like Voltron, Robo Tech when I was a kid, this totally fit into that mecca style of animation. How does this one kind of reflect the way that we were starting to move into some of these, like, mecha sci fi sorts of elements that started in anime? Was it things like Star Wars that kind of started shifting into these space operas?
Andy:Or or where was the shift?
Andrea:Giant robots have been part of anime since the sixties. But one of the 3 the first three anime, Astro Boy was the first, and there was 2 others in 63. And one of them was about giant robots.
Reyna:Yeah. I think one of them was called giant robo in English. Yeah. Yeah.
Andrea:Yeah. In in the seventies, you mentioned Yamato and Star Wars, and they were actually, came out within about 6 months of each other.
Andy:Oh, okay.
Andrea:The space battleship Yamato movie and then the, Japanese, release of Star Wars. So this became known 78 became known as the year of science fiction. And that really was what touched off the emergence of anime fandom as separate from manga fandom. They were still gathering it at manga taikais, like, comic kit or whatever, but it is becoming more and more sort of its own thing. And Makaras, this is part of a TV series that becomes a franchise that's still going strong, and there's still always the element of the love triangle and the intergalactic war and, the music.
Andrea:And, if you liked this one, most of the mock crosses actually come to Disney Plus, sometime this year, I believe. Oh, wow. Okay. This one.
Reyna:I think
Andrea:this yes. They have announced it. But I think do you remember love and SDF mock cross, the TV series? I think those are excluded because, the word is that the studio is still trying to shop, adaptation rights to Hollywood. It's like, well, if you want people to adapt it, you should have it on Disney plus so you can see that it's good.
Andrea:But yeah. And as we mentioned, anime fan cultures, people lined up around the block overnight for this movie too. So and actually, speaking of studio Gainax, they make a self parody movie later on in called Otaku no Video. And they parody people lining up for this movie in that movie. So it's it's very sort of self referential.
Andrea:And, again, we mentioned the theme of, you know, ecological destruction. They do, in this movie, visit Earth and find that it's been completely laid to waste. So that's an element that I think you caught yours up again. But yeah. I mean, I it's been a long time since I've seen this movie, and I I'd sort of forgotten how much gender plays a role.
Andrea:The alien race that they're fighting is, like, divided into male and female, and they, like, fight each other and don't interact. And there's a lot of sort of stuff with the male protagonist and his superior officer love interest and their colleagues and and gender relations there. Some of it kind of ishy from a contemporary perspective. In some ways, comments about, you know, gender relations within the seventies. Yeah.
Andrea:I didn't need that.
Andy:Yeah. Yeah.
Andrea:But, yeah, I mean, I think it's really the space battles are great. The music is still really great. Lin Minh May is the singer character. She's explicitly Chinese, Japanese, which is interesting. And and the music is really cool.
Andrea:I mean, also, like, it's very eighties. So if you were wondering what, like, Japanese pop in the eighties was like, here you go. Like, it really it works really well in the film. It's interesting too. Like, just no.
Andrea:The conceit is that this is it's this survivorship of 50,000 people, but, like, they're living, like, a sort of normal eighties life on this ship in some ways. And then she's talking about, like, oh, this is my first concert. Like, I'm gonna record my first album, and you're like, girl, there are 50,000 humans left, and this is what you're doing, apparently. So it's interesting.
Andy:We still need our entertainment.
Andrea:It's it's very distantly removed, but, like, idol anime has become a huge thing in the past sort of 10 to 15 years. And and you can see again the roots of that here, you know. It works it works pretty well the first time. So
Reyna:I would second all that again because it's a perfect encapsulation of what's going on in this movie. What you also see here is a range of different genres coming together for the first time. It's like a genre mash up, this movie. So you have the meta elements, but you and the space battles, but you also have little inklings of of eighties pop, like, literal idol pop culture coming through from live action. You get, influenced from the tokusatsu, the special effects genre, which, you know, kind of starts out of things like the the suit mason and Godzilla.
Reyna:But then by the time you get to the seventies eighties, you get these long running live action special effects shows with, you know, it's kind of where Power Rangers comes from and all of that sort of stuff stuff as well. And that's, like, just edging its way into the teams in anime with some of the setups for the teams. But here, what we're getting, I think, more than that is the influence of the kind of special effects sequences from some of those tokusatsu shows. So it's it's a proper genre mash up, and I love every second of it for that reason. Because you can see them appealing to the different audiences for popular culture in Japan through this film.
Reyna:And you you can only do that in anime. You could only push all of those things together in anime. You couldn't make this work in any other medium.
Andy:It is a lot of fun. A lot of fun. And, you know, just in the scope of animation also, just speaking to the action choreography, like, it's it's thrilling to see some of the sequences when they're, fighting in space. Like, they they do a a solid job of creating this world and making something really exciting. And I just I have a penchant for, spaceships that transform.
Andy:Anyway, that's always a lot of fun a lot of fun to watch in these.
Reyna:Once wrote about the Japanese version of Spider Man where, of course, Spider Man has his own proper transforming robot spaceship because Yeah. In Japan, he would need it.
Andrea:Exactly. He's
Reyna:fighting these giant kite monsters. You know, it's this stuff is all the way through eighties seventies culture in Japan, and I love I love that we're seeing it here in the transform transformations, which is, to be serious for a moment, is something animation does. I think metamorphosis and transformation is something animation does better than any other medium. It's why special effects often leans on animation in those moments of transformation.
Andy:Yeah.
Reyna:You know, you can see them playing to the strengths of animation in those sequences in this movie.
Andrea:Yeah. You mentioned the action sequences. This this movie, I think, is one of the first places where people start to really specialize in that kind of animation. Later on, you'll get you'll see people credited as doing just, like, the weapon redesign or just the fight scene choreography or just the mecha design. So and and that kind of thing.
Andrea:One part of otaku culture that emerges in this era is is the VCR. And using the VCR to go frame by frame and also to, like, pour over the list of credits at the end of shows and movies. And thanks to that sort of ability to to watch and go back and to go frame by frame, otaku anime fans really start to follow sort of below the line or below the top credit creative professionals in a way that I think is, again, pretty pretty unique to anime fan cultures.
Andy:Yeah.
Andrea:More recently, you know, the Pretty Cure TV series had, like, the fight coordinator from Gundam. So a lot of Gundam fans watched it because they're like, well, I loved his fight scenes. I'll watch this show about, you know, magical girls with music fighting, whatever. So so that kind of thing is enabled by by this attention to detail.
Andy:Really interesting. That's fascinating. And it'll be interesting to see the evolution of this style when we get to something like Evangelion, where we're still dealing with kind of the the world of mecha and giant robots and and the way things kind of shift and everything. Before we get there, we've got a few more films. And the next is, one of my favorite films.
Andy:We're going back to Miyazaki, and we're gonna, chat for a few minutes about My Neighbor Totoro. 2 young girls who, move with their father to the country to be close to the hospital where their mother is ill. While there, aside from just exploring and being children, we really see how they befriend these forest spirits, particularly Totoro, and they embark on some adventures, they learn about family, friendship, nature, all these wonderful things. Absolutely timeless film, just one of my absolute favorites. Let's talk about Totoro for a little bit and the shift where Miyazaki was kind of going in his career at this point.
Reyna:This is Miyazaki's second film for Studio Ghibli. It's made as part of a double bill with Isao Takahata's film, Grave of the Fireflies. That's a double bill for
Andrea:you guys.
Andy:That's a Yeah. Tough one to watch back to back.
Reyna:Yeah. So this this is a really beautifully made film again. It's got beautiful natural imagery of a kind of forgotten show while you're in 19 fifties past of Japan. It's got the lovely kind of nods backwards to what Japan was like in the 19 fifties. These kind of modern, but also on the edge of modernity spaces in the film where the girls and their father, Satsuki Mei and their father moved to an old house and it's being opened up.
Reyna:It's in this countryside setting so they can be near to their mother who's in hospital with tuberculosis. And so, you have this kind of pastoral setting and the become a way of for the children to connect with the natural world around them and the and to deal with the shift in locations. But at the same time, it's about at times, it's about the opening up of the landscape and the possibilities of nature and magic to work together which is quite interesting. There's a scene in the film where the father takes his daughters to pay homage to to go and pay, respects at a local shrine. And the shrine is based around, the tree in which Totoro lives.
Reyna:So there's a real kind of back and forth between traditional Shinto animistic representation in the film, but also the possibilities for magic beyond Shinto because the were just invented creatures here, and and it is the origin of everybody's favorite cat in animation, the cat bug. So, like, there's there's a lot going on in this movie in terms of fantasy, but it is really carefully layered over a history that was real in Japan and a kind of lost nostalgic tradition for living in certain ways in Japan. Maki Kofutaki, who's one of the key animators and one of the women of Ghibli, has talked about how there's a sequence in where you have little tadpoles in a pond. She talks about that having been a really fond memory of hers from childhood when she would go outside of her house in the countryside, and they would just have little pools that were there because of the rainy season. But then how she grew up, Japan was modernizing and everything was concreted over, and that became a lost childhood experience.
Reyna:And she wanted to put it back in the movie as an as a pan to Japanese lost natural landscapes. So there's loads of little details in it that are actually drawn from memory, from the animators, from the reality of living in Japan. And then layered on top of that, you have these beautiful, amazing, fantastical creatures.
Andrea:It's a really it's a really great movie. I hadn't seen it in a long time. I'd sort of forgotten there's only 3 Totoro. Like Yeah. You know?
Reyna:You go to
Andrea:the Ghibli Museum, you go anywhere in Japan, and there's endless Totoro. But there's only there's only 3 of them. Yeah. There's small, medium, and large in in the movie, which I had completely forgotten. It's it's interesting because, like, again, we've talked a bit about how Miyazaki doesn't like the chocolate culture.
Andrea:And and Ghibli claims to be, like, sort of more thoughtful in their merchandising, but it's like, well, there's a lot of going on here. Yeah.
Reyna:I wanted to just like, that is so right. But, the latest Ghibli park that they've just opened in Nagakute City is really interesting because they basically have a little hillside that you walk up to put to see the the wood Totoro sculpture at the top which is kinda based on what this is based on. But what they've done is actually put a stall next to that totaro that looks like a Shinto shrine stall. And everything they sell there is kind of based on that link between religious practice and Ghibli, which is the most overt statement about that movie and its connections to Japan and animism that I've ever seen. It's fascinating.
Andrea:I mean, I also think part of the trend of, like, anime pilgrimages and and shrines and temples, especially shrines latching themselves onto anime as a way to bring in money. So that's fascinating. I haven't been to Ghibli Park yet, but I will go and I will ride the cat bus at 1,000 yen up her pop. I will only ride it one way. But, I mean, this was always the complaint about the Ghibli Museum was that only children could go on the cat bus
Reyna:in the
Andy:Oh, yes. In the Ghibli Museum. Interesting.
Andrea:You know, horrible. So for those of us who are only young at heart.
Andy:Yeah. Right. Right. Right.
Andrea:But yeah. I mean, it's it's a great movie. I was I was also again, like, I hadn't watched it in a long time. I was like, my god. The mom has TB.
Andrea:Like, that's something that went away in the sixties after Japan had national health care. Like, suddenly people stopped getting TV and they stopped dying of it. Yeah. It is very much, like, sort of probably late fifties ish. You know?
Andrea:Like, they've still they're hauling out their massive radio. You know? They're still doing telegrams. One thing I was thinking about when I was watching at this time was how, like, for people who were, like, sort of in their thirties watching a movie or older, you know, so, like, the parents of the children in the theater, it would have been very nostalgic for them and for their childhoods. And Miyazaki too.
Andrea:I mean, he was a little older than that, but very much already a lost experience by the eighties when, as you said, everything has been concrete and over.
Andy:Well, to that end, I mean, there is an interesting element, and I wonder if this is part of the kind of this evolution of anime that we're talking about. I mean, some of these previous films we've talked about, I mean, you can see them being fine for kids to watch. But this one feels, I guess, in American rating system parlance, the most g rated of the films that we've been talking about. You know? I mean, sure, she still has TB, but it it feels much more appropriate, I guess, I'll just say, for younger audiences.
Andy:You know, some of the earlier films that we've been watching and certainly some of the later ones, they definitely don't seem necessarily, like, children friendly. Is this one is is this a trend that we start seeing in anime that, I don't know, maybe it it's part of what Studio Ghibli is, working toward?
Reyna:I mean, you get the rise of anime pornography when you get the rise of VHS. So there are genres aimed at every age group in anime. There are, of course, anime that are aimed at children's well. Is one of the longest running of those. Very much g rated, very much kid friendly, or usually, anyway.
Andrea:I think there's a higher tolerance for sort of scatological and and mildly risque humor and stuff aimed at children in Japan.
Reyna:Oh, crayon shin chan is
Andrea:Crayon. Yeah. That's the one I was thinking of. It's crayon shin chan. Yeah.
Andrea:I mean, that's that's a good question. I think in some ways, the the actual difference is is in the seventies eighties is the rise of stuff that was aimed at adults in animation.
Andy:Oh, okay.
Andrea:Like Macross, like Akira as we're as we're gonna see next Ghost in the Shell, of course. I mean, it was still sort of socially weird to be sort of older than college age and and explicitly, like, I like animation, at least not not amongst anime fans. But there were certainly a lot of people who fit that bill at that at this point, and they become a market that companies want to capture. So Miyazaki in some ways is sort of resisting that in Ghibli. I was also remembering too, like, actually, when I was learning Japanese in college, like, we watched clips from this film Yeah.
Andrea:Like, to learn like, we like Japanese cultural practices, like, the the mixed bathing with the with the dad and the kids. And I think we also learned about, like, taking off your shoes and saying, like, or, like, or, you know, when you leave.
Reyna:Yeah. No. I mean, it's interesting you talk about this as g rated because a few years ago, there was an Internet meme that went around about question whether or not the were death gods or shinning out. Yeah. Just watch the movie all the way to the end is the answer to that one.
Reyna:No, they are not. Susan Nibbier in her book, Miyazaki World, does a fabulous take down of that idea just looking at where it starts, but also then tracing it through the movie and saying, like, these these are the ways in which you know this isn't true. Like, they are genuinely helpful spirits.
Andrea:You know,
Reyna:that is the that is what they're doing here. But I do I do think that kind of reinterpretation over time has been so fascinating to watch, seeing how even the movies that are g rated that are anime are complex in ways that invite these kinds of speculations from fans. Right?
Andy:Well and, yeah, when you're think when you've seen some of these other films and you're, like, maybe reaching to try finding a little more in something like this, I can see that. Let's take a shift. Same year, but we're definitely going the direction that I was just talking about. It's certainly something that's a little darker here. We're talking about Akira, Kazuhiro Otomo's film.
Andy:This is, dystopian Neo Tokyo. We've got this fantastic biker gang, and one of them comes into contact with these people called Espers that kind of ends up giving them telekinetic abilities. The government, this shadowy organization, everybody's kind of out to figure out, like, to catch this person because everything his ability starts spiraling out of control. His friend is trying to help him and save him. And, of course, he is drawn ever closer to the Akira project.
Andy:As I was researching this, I saw that the Akira slide, which we see on the motorcycle actually is a thing, and it came from this. And I didn't realize that I mean, I remember it from the film, but I didn't put 2 and 2 together that actually kind of came from this film. But, I mean, talk about something that, you know, certainly has the atomic imagery, definitely is influencing the cyberpunk genre in anime. Outside of anime, it's it's definitely a thing that we see. And it's really a new themes of destruction, rebuilding, kind of just oh, there are so many things going on here.
Andrea:Oh, man. This movie is just so stupendous. I remembered it being stupendous. But, again, watching it, you're just, like, amazed. And it's it's really something too to watch something where you're like, so much came from this.
Andrea:There's Ghost of the Shell. There's The Matrix. There's all this other stuff around the world that really came from this movie. But I think, interestingly, actually, you mentioned the Akira slide. That comes from Miyazaki.
Andy:Oh, really?
Andrea:Kachiro Tomo actually, learned storyboarding by watching repeatedly on the VCR the last 2 within the third episodes that, Miyazaki did after he'd done Kale Astro. And he complained bitterly about this effort. He complains bitterly about a lot of things. But so so the Akira slide is actually in those episodes. I think it's Zenigata who does it, but it's reversed.
Andrea:So so I think this is one thing to sort of keep in mind is that Otomo had had been a mangaka. He he did still do manga after this to some extent, but he was adapting his own manga Akira at the time, which was already hugely popular. It's different than the film, both in in terms of the way the plot develops, but, also, I think in some ways, the sort of political implications are kind of interestingly opposite between the movie and the manga. But in the movie, you know, you have this postmodern sort of destroyed Tokyo, but it's also 2019, and they're preparing to host the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, which is another thing. You're like, wow.
Andrea:Wow. Alright then. And even though it is sort of Neo Tokyo and they've reclaimed all this land in Tokyo Bay, they think there's also ways in which it's very much straight up the eighties in Japan. The military officers is ranting about, like, decadent consumerism all the time, and you're like, and and corruption of politicians. And you're like, oh, yeah.
Andrea:It's the eighties. But, yeah, Oh, Tom Oh, Tomo had directed a short film before this, which, again, he learned storyboarding from watching those Miyazaki, Lupin episodes. So there's so there's this sort of interesting sort of hidden lineage there. So you wouldn't connect Akira and and Ghibli, but they do they do have a connection. And, yeah, I mean, it's just every everything comes from Akira in in so many ways.
Andy:Very influential.
Andrea:And it really is it it really is just a great movie. And I think also too one thing that I was struck again this by watching this time. Hey, the female revolutionary activist, who becomes this medium who channels the powers of the espers, the grotesque kindergarten as one character calls them, which is a really great line. She actually I think a lot of people watching would have been reminded of of the Japanese Red Army and Fusako Shigenobu, its leader. A lot of their slogans are on the flags that people are waving in the activism and rioting scenes.
Andrea:And as much as it's Japan in the eighties, I think those scenes are straight out of the student movement in the late 19 sixties and early 19 seventies, which was quite violent in some respects. So I think, you know, again, for people watching, it would have been very familiar in that way, in a way that I think other audiences outside Japan wouldn't have had that context. But, yeah, like, watching it again, I was like, oh, yeah. It's the sixties, the way they're fighting the government and rioting over over tax increases and stuff. So so, yeah, like, it has this very strong sci fi element, but it also has this sort of local context as well, which I think you don't need to know to enjoy the film, but definitely adds other layers when you do.
Reyna:This is one of the movies that makes anime fully visible internationally. It's it's got a proper cinematic release around the world. I think when I was tracing it, some of the earliest reviews are from Australia, then goes over to America. And it gets this really big has this really big impact because, of course, 19 eighties America, most animation that is coming through cinemas is for children. You know?
Reyna:So straight up, it's it's a very different proposition to a lot of what's being seen in animation at the time. Makes anime visible in a way, I think, that is really important for anime, and you get a kind of follow-up in that with ghost in the shell later on. But the fact that it's sci fi, the fact that it's cyberpunk, the fact that it's dystopian is really important to it being taken so seriously. And I think Akira really did set out animations, Japanese animation stall for the international community of of animation scholars and animation fans writ large because it showed different ways of engaging with mature themes that weren't just about anime pornography, but were about really kind of adult political ideological storytelling as well. So it's such an important watershed moment in that regard.
Andy:It really speaks to, I mean, what Guillermo del Toro said recently when he won his Oscar for, Pinocchio is that animation is a medium. It's not just a thing that's just for kids. Like, it's just a way you can a tool you can use to tell your story. And I think that's an interesting element in our conversation, specifically about anime. While it is a term that we use to kind of blanket a lot of these types of things, I mean, we're talking about a lot of different genres here.
Reyna:Oh, yeah.
Andy:And some definitely are more 4 quadrant films, I guess, we could just say in in studio parlance. And some feel much more targeted, like, to the r rated, much more, intense sorts of crowds. And it's adult thinking. Like, there's a lot of themes and complex elements going on in the story. It's fascinating.
Reyna:For sure.
Andy:And that holds true for the next one, Ghost in the Shell, 1995. Mamoru Oshii made this film. And the story in the future, there's this cybernetic enhancements that people get. There's this very talented cyborg agent. They're investigating this hacker known as the Puppet Master as she's going through this process, confronting questions about consciousness and humanity in this world that's getting increasingly technological, also based on a manga that's definitely kind of blurring some lines between humanity and technology.
Andy:It's I mean, it's it's kind of this classic cyberpunk film. On rewatch, I just was taken by how complex a lot of the philosophical questions that it's asking are. Coming from Akira, especially, like, moving into this, where how has how have things shifted here?
Andrea:Akira made people be on lookout for the next Akira. And Manga Entertainment, the US distribution company, was really pushing to try to find another big hit like that. So they actually joined the production committee for this film and got Oshii the money to do it. He had done a couple of, I think, 1 or 2 smaller films before this, but this was his sort of big break. And it did do fairly well both in Japan and the States, enough that he, you know, attributes the fact that he had a career afterwards to it.
Andrea:Even though I think this is a high watermark in terms of commercial appeal and also in terms of the philosophy not sort of overwhelming everything else in the movies. So it is interesting if you if you watch the credits. You do see Manga Entertainment, and I think Adam Frayne was the executive producer who was credited in that. So that's like a I think I don't know if it was a truly a first, but it was certainly a milestone that Americans were involved in this. But Oshii says that he still had complete creative control, which I think some people would say, like, oh, it was always for Americans, but it's it's very clearly not for Americans per se.
Andrea:It's kind of aimed at that same adult audience. I was struck this time by how short it is. Ghost in Shell has become a franchise, and in some ways, I think, actually, I like standalone complex anime best. And that's sort of what I tend to think of when I think of Ghost in the Shell as opposed to the movies. But, yeah, it's quite short, but, like, again, quite impactful.
Andrea:The music is quite quite something. I was also struck by the ways in which, like, they don't ever supposedly say that it's Tokyo, but it's clearly Tokyo. But it's like, why is the Kowloon Walled City here? Why is this, like, late early eighties Hong Kong wet market here? In what world would Japan ever allow refugees in?
Andrea:Like, come on now. So in some respects, that seems to be, like, even more of a cyberpunk fantasy than the major and her cyborg body that keeps getting recreated, you know, in in ways I think. It's quite disturbing, actually, some of the scenes of, like, people getting shot and then also bodies getting disassembled and reassembled. And the way in which the puppet master can hack people is also, I think, pretty creepily done. And then the ending is just like, bam.
Andrea:I think, oh, she had a very strong vision, and and he attained it.
Reyna:And the philosophical side of this movie is entirely intentional for anybody who hasn't seen it before. There is a heavy amount of quoting of Nietzsche and Heidegger and a bunch of other European philosophers. And it's really in the second movie, innocence that comes along a bit later, I think it's it's even more obvious there that there's some hefty Christian coding going on. So there's definitely a kind of international impulse behind this movie, which picks up on that. Is it Kowloon Bay?
Reyna:Is it Hong Kong? Is it Tokyo? Like, where is this set?
Andy:Yeah.
Reyna:It's really important that I think it's in this other place because it's intentionally asking us to think about othering the self. Like, what is what is the nature of the ghost in the machine? And, you know, not to be too trite about it. But ghost in the shell is an almost perfect movie for the current moment. Like, it is all about generative AI and the possibilities of generative AI and the the limits of the self in relation to AI.
Reyna:But, also, I think in terms of our moment right now, as we all walk around with mobile phones and we're all kind of using technologies to interact all the time, there are questions there about where we end and others begin that are beginning to be really pertinent in a way that this movie presages entirely. It's it's working through philosophically and, I think, culturally through some of those ideas around technology, the self, and the possibilities for technology going forward. And, again, animation is the perfect place to do this. You can deconstruct the female body down to its component parts using animation. You can have an animated character who is female in a really emphatic way, but then is also robot whose arms deconstructed the slightest provocation, it seems to me, in this movie.
Reyna:There's real moments in this movie of of gravitas and of humanity within this. And I think Motoko Kusanagi is one of the perfect cyborg female characters in cinema. She is both the core of this movie and its protagonist, but also a a kind of questioning center to the film because she is thinking about who she is in relation to technology all the way through and battle her second or her partner and others are questioning who she is through the movie. And the different forms she takes in the movie become really significant to understanding the self in relation to AI, I think, in ways that are predicting and playing with questions of philosophy and technology. It that were pertinent at the time, but so much more so even now.
Andy:Yeah. Right. Really relevant today. Yeah. The pairing of these films, Akira 2, Ghost in the Shell, and then our next film that we're gonna talk about, The End of Evangelion.
Andy:This is the last two episodes, essentially, redone of the, Neon Genesis Evangelion animated series. This is largely episodes 2526 recreated because a lot of people were confused by the direction that the the show ended because it it definitely felt a little more avant garde in some ways. And so this was a different way to take the ending. I mean, I can imagine stepping into this not having seen the series that it might be a little challenging.
Reyna:A little?
Andy:Yeah. A little. Yeah. But this it's an interesting trend. And, I mean, we can see that even with Ghost in the Shell where they redid some of it with CG to do some new stuff and rereleased it as Ghost in the Shell 2 point o.
Andy:I don't know how like, I I was looking at the Evangelion. It's like Evangelion 1.11, you know, 3.3, like, all of these different re reversionings of the Evangelion story. But this is a really fascinating film. I actually watched this with my or the the series a while back with my son. The story, it's a a a cast that's you know, there there's this apocalyptic event happening.
Andy:They have these these Evangelions, these Evas, these giant robots that they can pair with, essentially, and get into to fight these beings that come down that they have to battle over a period of time. I watched it with my son. It was a little over his head, a little adult for him. He's 13, but he also really connected with it. And now he's just always, always on crunchyroll watching watching shows left and right.
Andy:Like, he's I think he's completely taken by anime. He's drawing anime. I and this show really kind of clicked things into a place for him. And while he's a little adult, it's just it was a I think a a really interesting stepping stone for him in in his growing his interests. But going back to my original point about, like, the this arbitrary pairing of these 3 films back to back to back, there is an interesting evolution that we're seeing in kind of the way technology and this future view of society looks.
Andy:And this film takes a really fascinating direction, especially coming after Ghost in the Shell. We're seeing very existential themes, very psychological exploration of these characters. That's quite powerful, and it's a really interesting ending. I mean, both endings are interesting, but it's certainly this one, I think, is is pretty interesting. What are what are your thoughts on this and kind of Evangelion as a whole?
Reyna:Oh, boy.
Andy:Pretty smart. We're here for
Andrea:hours. Yeah. End of Evangelion is extremely psychological, but it's actually much more action oriented and comprehensible than the original two final episodes of the show. For those who don't know, Gainax was literally running out of money as they were finishing Eva, the the series. So in the final two episodes, you're seeing them animating, like, on fours, just stretching the repetitive and the money saving techniques as as far as they will go to try to have enough money to get an episode that they can broadcast.
Andrea:And people hated it. People completely didn't know what was happening. I tend to think that it's easier to understand the TV series ending after you've seen End of Evangelion, but people they were broadcast in the opposite order. So people had no idea what's going on. Anno got death threats.
Andrea:Oh, jeez. But it was, you know, it was also hugely popular. And so there was enough support amongst the other production committee sponsors to go back and give them more money to make the film, which I think, along with the death and rebirth edit of the TV episodes, which was shown in theaters as well, you know, as a sort of synopsis movie of the first 24 episodes, that really cemented Eva as a phenomenon.
Andy:Well, there's a lot of religious imagery in this one that yeah. I I feel like we haven't necessarily run into as much religious imagery in any of these films. And we I mean, just having talked about Ghost in the Shell, certainly, we have the philosophical angle, but, suddenly, we're also getting thrust a lot of this religious, imagery, a lot of crosses, things like that that speak to some of the the idea of humanity and spirituality and kind of these themes that it's exploring.
Andrea:Yeah. I mean, even Neon Genesis Evangelion, like, is Greek, new gospel of the the rebirth or whatever. And it's not just Christian themes. Like, there's also Kabbalah, the EVA series, and Unit 0 1 make, like, the Kabbalah diagram in the sky at one point in in this film, which I think is sort of Anno's kind of privilege as a Japanese person who is not native to these to these things. He can sort of pick and choose and include stuff that he thinks seems cool and relevant without much regard to how it holds together in its original context.
Andrea:And at the end, like, oh, we have Adam and Eve and Lilith again. But Lilith and Eve are kind of switched. I was struck again watching it this time. Yui is like, oh, don't worry. Everything that has a will will recohere out of the primordial goo.
Reyna:You know?
Andrea:I don't know, Yui. I'm not seeing it. You know? At the end at the end, like, the movie got a lot of slack in some quarters for being very pessimistic. But it to me, I don't think it really seems pessimistic until the final line when Asuka is, like, disgusting, and then it ends.
Andrea:And you're like, aw, crap. If you haven't seen the the rebuild movies, I think I would recommend them. I went back and sort of redid the story with with money all the way through, which
Andy:Interesting.
Andrea:Have the first time. I I think the 4th film in that is the 3rd and 4th films in particular are very different from the show and the first two movies. I think in some ways, there it's more conventional, but also, like, more satisfying. It explains the characters at much greater depth in some ways. And it's an interesting way to to regard the story.
Andrea:But I don't think it will ever have the same impact as as the original and this movie did.
Reyna:I would I would agree with that. I think what you lose in the re the the kind of CGI, you know, reflected movies that Anna's been doing over the last few years is a lot of the humor that was in the original TV show, which was really fun to watch. It made it really fun to watch. Yeah. The penguin has a much reducible, I think, as we get the remakes.
Reyna:I think there's also some really interesting things going on. You know, this is you're right. It's almost Oedipal. There's a family complex Greek tragedy in here. But at its heart, this is a teen show.
Reyna:This is properly aimed at teenagers. And this show and its success and its fandom that has lasted for so long, I think are why we still have shows like Attack on Titan now. That's the same impulse that drives Eva is driving the fandom around Attack on Titan. There's a there's a a vicious nihilism in it at times with the unmaking of people and unmaking of humanity, but also with a real sense of teenagers feeling stuck in a particular moment in time. And I think that goes back to 19 nineties Japan, the end of the bubble economy.
Reyna:You've had the attack quite recently on the Tokyo's underground, which has sent shock waves through Japanese culture. But just the the kind of rising youth unrest as well again in the 19 nineties, which is finding an outlet through popular culture and things like Evangelion. And it's it's interesting because you get it's animators like like Anno who are coming out of the fandom into animation as an industry who seem to be driving a lot of that in Japanese animation. And, again, TV animation is then becoming film animation, and film animation has got this interesting relationship narratively back to the story where film is making things more grandiose. Technically, you know, often aesthetically more more beauteous, more movement, but there is that shift in genres at the same time that goes from the kind of moving genre map of the TV show into something much more kinda serious for the film here in Evangelion that's really interesting.
Reyna:And that's what seems to be retained is the tone of the movies going, although different, as they go into
Andrea:the rebuild series. Yeah. I mean, it it is a giant robot show, but, like, the giant robots are really freaking creepy. Like, they're extremely organic. They bleed.
Andrea:And the strict battery limit, you know, which plays a role in in the final episode in in this movie, that psychological aspect does, I think, influence a lot of later anime. And, I mean, and the stuff about gender too. There's many, many later robot anime which take that on in in various ways, some of which are downright aggressive. Yeah. That that youth unrest, and the sense of things, that nihilism, I think economic conditions in Japan haven't really changed meaningfully very much.
Andrea:Real incomes have been flat for 30 years. So I think that's part of what has sort of fueled the same like, the repeat of those motifs in in pop culture is the fact that things are still not great in a lot of ways. But, yeah, there there is a humor to many elements of of the TV series, which I think is not in the movies, and it's not in the rebuilds, unfortunately.
Andy:But it's I mean, it's it's a fascinating story. And you're right. It's like, there is this this element of I mean, we're following teenagers who are being recruited to to pilot these Evas. And, you know, watching Shinji grow up to be this warrior, but also just trying to figure out himself as this isolated teenager. I mean, it's it's really kind of it's quite powerful in in his depiction.
Andrea:Does he grow up?
Andy:Well yeah. Right. He always is having these issues with his father Yeah. And just kind of like that. He's kind of so stuck in some of those elements.
Andy:It's
Andrea:You can't not mention Gendo. The the archetypal anime bad dad. You know, I was watching the Pluto anime on Netflix recently and, like, they gave doctor Tenma, who's maybe the original anime bad dad, they gave him the the gendo glasses shot just in case you hadn't gotten that he's a bad dad. You know? Right.
Andrea:Right. So in that respect, it's it's hugely influential. I think as well, the turn towards sort of alternate universes and parallel universes, I think, is prefigured here, not directly in the show, but, well, in I think it's episode 24 where there's, like, the school AU. Mhmm. That became a sort of own spin off thing that was merchandised.
Andrea:And AUs, I think, from this point on, become sort of increasingly, like, official and merchandised throughout the medium mix. So and, like, Eva went places with merchandising that had not been gone before, like canned bread. And it it lives on in pachinko machines too. So it's and you still see people, like, just doing spontaneous Eva memes on on Twitter. Even now, people just quoting quoting the show and getting a huge response because it's still so current.
Reyna:So massively popular as cosplay still.
Andy:Oh, yeah.
Reyna:And still, there are like, last time I was in Japan, there are still shops in Tokyo selling exclusively even
Andrea:Oh, wow. That
Andy:Yeah. That popular. That's amazing.
Andrea:Yeah. And and I I mean, Rey and and Oscar, especially Rey, were also, like became huge character archetypes as well. I think Oscar's kind of the original tsundere in some ways. You know? But, yeah, like, it just can't be overstated, the impact it had on on later anime.
Andy:Yeah. You know, definitely with these teen characters, it's fascinating and the kind of the way that it it it it taps into pop culture. The next film we're gonna talk about, Satoshi Kon's Paprika. Satoshi Kon certainly has tapped into pop culture. I mean, Perfect Blue has the pop star and everything.
Andy:This film, though, it's it's tapping into, kind of this whole idea of technologies, and we're kind of going back to technology and everything. And and here we have, you know, we were mentioning as we were, prepping for this kinda the ideas that Christopher Nolan pulled from this as far as, like, being able to go into people's dreams. Like, the idea is that there's this device where therapists can enter patients' dreams to kind of help them as they're counseling. However, it gets stolen. And, so this brilliant therapist has to navigate, as the film progresses, increasingly blurring lines between reality and the dream world to figure out who the culprit is and to capture, that person.
Andy:And over the course of it, her character becomes Paprika, this character, as she goes into these dream states. And what a fascinating film. You know, I love all 4 of Satoshi Kon's films. This one is just beautiful in in its depiction of the dream world and how everything is kind of exploring. But we're, again, we're going back to this idea of these a lot of these psychological themes.
Andy:We're pushing the boundaries, certainly, of anime, storytelling here as the dreams kind of explode into the real world. But I think that is important at this point to kinda talk about, like, how we're starting to see as especially over the next few films we're gonna be talking about. We're seeing a shift in the filmmakers and the style of films and what anime is doing. How does this one play for the 2 of you?
Andrea:Would you believe it only cost $2,500,000? Crazy.
Andy:Wow.
Andrea:Or or or less.
Andy:There's a lot of things moving on the screens in those dreams. Yeah.
Andrea:Yeah. Khan was not necessarily well liked in the industry. He had a reputation for being very sort of acid tongued. So his his movies never really got kind of the success that I think most people would agree they deserved, at least in Japan. You know, he made Perfect Blue, and then he was a he got the funding to make Tokyo Godfathers because, like, one superfan of Perfect Blue was a producer.
Andrea:So he was always operating on these shoestring budgets. And he he developed the technique of doing extremely detailed storyboards, like, the most detailed storyboards probably ever. Because then he would do all the storyboards, and then they could just you know, he would do layout, he would design, he'd do many other aspects of the film in the storyboards. So you could go from that to the animation very easily. And, also, I think in all of his films, but especially Perfect Blue and and this one, again, like, there's just reusing shots over and over in ways that work.
Andrea:You know, in Perfect Blue, it it illustrates a sort of psychological breakdown between reality and her mental distress. But here, it's, you know, reality versus dreams, which are also movies. They say explicitly very early on in the movie that, like, dreams are movies, which I think, for me, was one of the pleasures of sort of going back and and watching this film. At one point tries to say that dreams are like the Internet. And it's like, no.
Andrea:Dreams are not like the Internet, especially not like the Internet as it is now. And and not really like the Internet as it was then either. But but dreams are like movies and and the figure of the cop who I'd completely forgotten about, and the way the move the movie ends with him going to see a movie again after having experienced a psychological brat post mop is passed.
Reyna:That is a Satoshi Kon trope right from the get go, right from Perfect Blue. He's making films that are about the permeability of screens, about windows as reflections, about TV shows, about reflecting, like, people acting in TV shows having that impact on their their mental health, but their everyday lives, to, Millennium Actress where he's he's literally got an actress going back through memory of making films to her own memories, you know, and there's a permeability between memory and film there again. You know, so here, he's kind of refined that idea one more time for the sake of science fiction. And in doing so, invoke some really interesting things. So in this movie, you get a which is a night parade of demons, but done in a dream form where it's toys instead of demons.
Reyna:There's fascinating ways where he's taking traditional Japanese arts and culture and repurposing them at the same time as he's making permeable screens that people are passing through and in and out of the credit sequence for this movie alone is well worth a proper thinking about. Because in it, you get this lovely sequence in which sometimes paprika is really paprika. Sometimes she's a projection of paprika that people can see or not see. So it's this wonderful back and forth and playful approach to the audience and our expectations of the character and what she should and should not be able to do. And, again, you can't do this outside of animation as well as it works in animation.
Reyna:Kon was somebody, for all that he might be not popular in the anime industry, I think you're absolutely right, Andrea. He was very much known for put rubbing people up the wrong way, should we say. But he was also really good at what animation does that no other medium can do as well. You know, so he's he's playing with the animation form here in a way that's really interesting. I think the other thing he does, again, throughout his his set of films, that he made was playing with questions of performed selfhood versus interior selfhood.
Reyna:And that you're right. That that moment with, Konakawa, the detective at the end where he's made peace with his past, and he comes out and walks past, movie posters for Satoshi Kon's other movies. It's just a Yeah. It's like and I've made I've made the piece with my own past, and there's a poster in there in the mix, which I think isn't one of his, and I think was supposed to be his next movie. So there's even a a presaging of what he was thinking about doing next in the film.
Reyna:So there's it's a wonderful kind of encapsulation of him as a director is Paprika, I think.
Andy:Yeah.
Reyna:It's also got some of the most disturbing scenes I've ever seen in animation. The idea of the body being something you can unzip
Andrea:Mhmm. Yeah.
Reyna:Or mutilate is is a really there's some really graphic, psychologically horrible scenes in this movie that are really powerful because they are about gender and they are about vulnerability when we're dreaming. And that is really some of the most disturbing scenes I've seen in anime for a long time or in this movie, but they're also rendered
Andrea:in
Reyna:a way that is a purposeful use of those tropes in the storytelling, which is also really interesting because often when we see those kind of more graphic sequences, they're not connected to storytelling. And here, they absolutely are key to what the story is trying to put at put across for us.
Andy:Yeah. The next film we have on our list, Summer Wars 2009, made by Mamoru Hosoda. This film, I hadn't seen it before. A little tricky to track down, but it's a fascinating film, and I wasn't sure where it was gonna go because we start with this high school student who has to it's one of these movies where he has to, you know, pose as a a boyfriend for this girl as who's going back to her family's house on a trip. But in the process of all of the kind of the what seems kind of like romcom antics in the process of this, there's this powerful AI that, this high school student accidentally unleashes on the world with this this online platform, and it starts wreaking havoc.
Andy:And then he and this girl and her family end up working together to stop it. And it just it never was going in a direction I expected, and I had such a great time with this film. I mean, it just it was such a surprise, And, I absolutely loved it. So again, moving into the way that technology is ever shifting, and we see that consistently over all of these, we're really getting into the idea of these virtual worlds, these online platforms that people can enter and the dangers of them. I mean, it's it really is it does feel like the next step in in the evolution of what we're watching here.
Reyna:Welcome to the Isekai or the the other world. Yes.
Andy:Yeah. Yeah.
Andrea:It is really interesting the way that that Hosoda sort of envisions what we would now call the metaverse maybe, but, like, the metaverse is not like this. 2nd life was not like that.
Reyna:No. You
Andrea:know, in in animation, it can be way more than it is in in the real world. Maybe in some ways, people who are trying to make the metaverse a thing, like, this is what they want it to be, you know, but it's it's not there yet. That's not clear that it ever will be, at least in our lifetimes. But yeah. I mean, I I love this movie.
Andrea:I think it's probably my favorite, Hosoda. But just the way the protagonist goes back to Nagano to this, like, ancient family, and there's this running joke where they're always talking about how they fought the Tokugawa and lost. And every time, like, they have more soldiers in the story, you know, and the ways in which, like, you see sort of old and new Japan and also, like, the genders within the family sort of come together at the end to beat the AI using traditional Japanese card game, which the girl who is the scion of the family who brings the guy along to pretend to be her boyfriend for her great grandmother who's turning 90. You know, she's the one who, plays the card game against the AI and and wins. So I I do think, you know, I was watching it and I was like, oh, they couldn't have made this after 311 because, you know, at the end, there's a meteor strike, but it's okay.
Andrea:It just makes an own sense bring next to their house or not a meteor, a satellite. And the ways in which, like, public services are shown to work and to help people Mhmm. I think which were exposed as being that's entirely fictional during that disaster and subsequent disasters like the recent Noto earthquake. So I I it does have this kind of exuberance of the time, even though, like, in some ways, it's very old now. Like, the cousin who went to America has a smartphone and everybody else is still using flip phones because smartphones were still, like, brand new in Japan at the time.
Andrea:So it is sort of of its moment in in ways that I didn't notice at the time when I first watched it.
Reyna:I mean, I I watched this movie in Japan when it first came out. I I was I remember sitting in a cinema, and it was amazing. And, you know, the lights went down. The first thing it does is welcome to Oz. And I was like, I'm sold.
Reyna:This is great. You know? But the way it plays with the idea of computer technology is fascinating. So the the irony that runs through this movie is really great as well. So the the evil AI is called love machine.
Reyna:Like
Andrea:Yes.
Reyna:And it's it's very so it's a very interesting moment in Japanese history. This so it's the first time, I think, since the second World War finished that you get a party other than the main Japanese political party in charge, and it's for all of a couple of years, but this is in that moment of flux. So the movie has a kind of soft nationalism to it. A kind of let's work together, let's pull together as a nation and a people, and I think that's what Andrea very much is picking up on. You know, the the family and the Jinuichi family are, like, really important as a network that is it's such an old family that it's a network that once the grandma starts reaching out, connects across Japan to every every part of the Japanese islands.
Reyna:You know, it's this wonderful bringing together of a a real local network of of family, friends, and connections, which is very traditional Japan. I think, in the face of a ominously carnivorous AI that is kind of sucking up and eating up the whole of the online world that is presented in Oz. So there's this really interesting thing happening there. I also love that it's mental arithmetic, and and the Kenji, so the main protagonist's ability to do maths in his head. It's just kind of
Andy:Very smart kid. Yeah.
Reyna:Speed, you know, that allows him to go up against an a generative AI again that is supposed to be on almost omnipotent. It's it's a really interesting thing. I love, again, the balance between tradition and futuristic technologies here. The use of hanafuda is is fantastic. And, again, if you wanna think about Japanese video games, there's a history of video games in this movie.
Reyna:So Hanafuda was the card game that Nintendo was famous for making before Nintendo made video games.
Andy:Oh.
Reyna:There's there's links there's little nods to people who know their compute in this movie all the way through. But I love that it's such a bamboozling game. The AI can't keep up with the girl that's used to playing it.
Andrea:So
Reyna:Natsuki does this great performance of the oddity, and of of than the rule breaking ruleiness of, Hanovero hard play. It's just wonderful. And I've gotta say, for me, there's some beautiful moments of computer animation in this movie. The uses of colored outlines that aren't just a typical black outline in the all space are absolutely gorgeous. And we see that again in Belle, I think.
Andy:Sure. Yeah. Right. Because we
Reyna:were talking about that before we came on, and we yeah. Belle is interesting for the way it kind of amps up some of the the beautiful aesthetics created for, Oz in summer wars. But I love the way this movie plays with the idea of traditional animation is the real. Oz is the fantastical other world that is online only. And so using those 2 really clear distinctive styles for these two worlds within the movie works really nicely for me.
Reyna:I think it's it's beautifully made film in that regard.
Andy:It's a it's a really smart way to blend the different animation styles. And, you know, animation has been evolving, certainly, and we definitely see that in anime. Just connecting to the point of the satellite and the kind of the destruction there, just as we, head into the last film in our discussion, Your Name, Makoto Shinkai's, film, This is another film that, you know, we're we're in this kind of magical realism sort of space. We've got a girl who lives in the country and a Tokyo boy. They end up swapping bodies when they, fall asleep, and then they're trying to navigate in each other's lives.
Andy:They end up forming this connection as they figure out what's going on even though they've never met. And then, of course, we get this shocking realization that happens. And that's the thing that, you know, as we find out what actually happened to her as he goes to meet her potentially and and and finds where this asteroid had hit and kind of taken out, wiped out her entire, community. And, it's a fascinating, fascinating film. Again, overall of the themes of everything we've been talking about, we're coming back to nature.
Andy:We're coming back to a sense of these different worlds that we're portraying, the country, the city, and, you know, devastation as people are are learning to deal with, something like this.
Andrea:I mean, it's it's a great movie. I love it. I saw it in the theater. I was living in Japan at the time, weeping like a child at the ending. It is very explicitly actually about 311.
Andrea:And that's tied it's it it comes in in the period of the comet that features, it's 1200 years, which is the length of time between earthquakes, between major earthquakes on the fault that caused the the great, October earthquake in 2011. And I think, arguably, too, you can say the the female protagonist is the scion of this shrine family that's been keeping the shrine and doing these rituals for all this time. But the grandmother says, you know, we don't actually know the meaning of these anymore because there was a fire 200 years ago. And you can connect that, I think, too to some of the sort of local knowledge that was ignored or or lost about, you know, the tsunami in 867. There were marker stones that showed that the waves went as high as they did, but people didn't believe them.
Andrea:So, yeah, it it is about sort of coming to terms with disaster and moving forward ahead of that. And I made a I made a kind of flippant remark that I think, like, Shinkai's 3 movies, like this one, Tangki No Po and Suzume are, like, denial, bargaining, and acceptance. And I'm not sure whether this one is is denial or bargaining because at the end, you know, through this strong sort of otherworldly connection that they forge, you know, they are able to save the day and rewrite the past and save the village. You know, the the people, not the physical village. You know, the people will wind up living in Tokyo.
Andrea:But, obviously, that's not how it is in real life.
Andy:Yeah.
Andrea:But I think that's that's part of the beauty the beauty of this movie. You know? Like, the idea that that love could save everybody And that, you know, these these two characters, they do manage to work it out, and they do manage to I mean, they have to get through to the girl's estranged father, who's the mayor. He was adopted into her family and then left when her mother died. So there's sort of this all this kind of backstory, but it it does work.
Andrea:And I think that's that's part of why it was so popular. You know? It had this story that that people wanted to be true. And plus the music, like Radwimps, they did great. So and they continue to work with Oshii.
Andrea:They're they're in Susan May too. So not Oshii. Shinkai.
Reyna:This is a movie that the more you dig into it, particularly in Japanese, the more it keeps giving you back. There's an idea of, Musubi tying in the movie that runs like a thread, like, literally, which means tying, but it runs as a thread through the whole film from the the weaving that has been done by the women of the shrine right through to the red you get the the kind of red thread of destiny that ties Taki and, Miki together through the movie. And you get this kind of play with words all the way through the film, which is about layers and tying and connection that is very deliberately worked through the story. So even I think the town is called something like Itomori or thread town.
Andrea:Yeah. Yeah. Itonomori. Itonomori.
Reyna:Yeah. It's it's very so the whole film is playing with this idea of connection and tying, which is it's really interesting the more you start thinking about those ties, the ties that bind, and what's going on between these characters and how they interact with one another even though they're it's very kind of the lake house with, like, not being in the same place at the same time.
Andy:Right.
Reyna:Yeah. So there's things here that are utterly generic, like the body swap comedy, like the kind of generic makeup of the movie. But then what I think Makoto Shinkai does that's so interesting is he works through themes of his own that actively do make it all tie together, Sorry to coin a phrase, but make it tie together really neatly. And I agree with you. I think this is it's almost like he's going in the wrong order because this is very much a bargaining.
Reyna:This is like, we can make we can remake the past here if only we get our time travel correct.
Andrea:Well, I mean, the thing about grief is that, like, actually, the stages can happen in any order.
Reyna:So And you're but I think you're right. I mean, the theme of doorways that's in the next one, which I've just forgotten the name of Susumae.
Andrea:Susumae is doorways.
Reyna:Yeah. That's the doorways, which is that is very much about acceptance, I think.
Andrea:And it and it depicts 311 directly Yeah. Which this one this one and Tenki no Koe did not.
Reyna:Yeah. No. So Tenki no Koe is really interesting because that's much more environmentalist, and that one seems to be way more about denial. That one, like, we just refuse to, like, engage with this.
Andrea:You know? I actually really dislike Tangi No Ko because of the way the message shakes out. I think it I think you can easily read it as, like, climate denialism. And I I actually almost walked out during the credits, which is, like, a huge thing to do. I was in Japan again, and, like, in Japan, you sit through the end of the credits, and I was like, no.
Andrea:I'm out. Like Wow. Show. I'm like of course, everybody there thought I was just a clueless foreigner, but I was like, I know what I'm doing. I know that I'm walking out in disgust.
Andy:That was funny. And that's that's weathering with you in the as it was released over here in the states that you're talking about. Yeah. Yeah.
Reyna:But, again, in weathering with you, what you do get is this repeated use of Shinto shrines as other spaces where magic is possible and things can happen that are out of the ordinary and out. So you could tie that right back to Totoro again. You know, there's these there are these connections to Japanese Shinto, which is an animistic tradition that are about attempting, at least on one level or or another, to engage with Japan's history, its traditions, its and and maybe a nostalgia for a past that no longer exists as well. My favorite parts of this movie though are the uses of language and the way, in in your name that they're writing messages to each other on their hands
Andrea:and
Reyna:using their mobile phones to send messages to each other. I think there's some really lovely kind of interactive play there that isn't about computers, even though the whole thing is made on computers. It's not done that way. It's it's made to very playfully think about different different ways of representing their relationship, whether it's physical writing, or computer or, like, phone writing, or reaching across, you know, vortices and and time to connect with one another. And I I I can see why this has been such a popular movie, but I think, as well as the music being great, the other thing that was really important for this movie and has become increasingly important to Japanese anime over the last 10, 15 years is its almost touristic perfection and vision of Japan itself.
Reyna:This movie was literally sponsored by some of the tourist organizations in Japan
Andy:Oh, really?
Reyna:Show off the local local settings as, beautiful places that you won't wanna go and visit.
Andrea:You can search steps on Google Maps, and it'll show you the exact steps they're on at the end of the movie. The the realism of locations and bringing local boosting organizations into anime production has been a huge thing. And that has in turn, as we mentioned before, boosted the the promotion of, like, anime characters at shrines and temples. You can get, like, anime character goods at certain places that are related to certain shows because the shrines and temples also need money to survive. That's certainly become a thing that's been huge in anime.
Andrea:And, I mean, given that Japan itself is increasingly oriented towards tourism as a economic, growth area, I don't see that ending Mhmm. For any time soon.
Reyna:No. In fact, it's expanding into AR and, like, so augmented reality stuff so you can use your mobile phone, geolocate yourself at a particular place and have the anime character that appeared in your favorite show behind you in the location where it was made and you'll take pictures of yourself with them. You know, this
Andy:stuff is
Reyna:becoming increasingly popular. Yeah. And I think it's been this is something that, obviously, Makoto Shinkai used to get funding for your name, but it's also, I think, a a sign of the times very much. So there might be more, like, other worlds and or or coming up in anime, and that might have become a genre in its own right, but at the same time, very specific references to real places are becoming important too. And it used to be in manga that you'd have, like, a book with photos, and then you could copy the photos into the backgrounds of your manga.
Reyna:Now it feels like we're almost doing that in anime as well.
Andrea:Yeah. I watched Belle, and I was like, I think this is Shikoku. And then I was like, it is Shikoku. I'm right. You know?
Andrea:Or, like, you know, Tenki no Ko. He lives in the, like, tropical islands of Tokyo, which are, like, not well known. And, Suzume, you know, she starts in Miyazaki, and then she goes to Shikoku and then Kobe and then Tokyo and then up to Tohoku area. You know, again, these very specific locations.
Andy:That's interesting. Yeah. Something else that I I think I can't remember who mentioned it when we in our, you know, online chats as we were gearing up for this, that Shinkai may also represents kind of a a step in anime where it's there it shows that he, as a director, is kind of influenced by a lot of the stuff that's coming out of Hollywood and kinda like that sort of shift. Like, we're seeing this story, perhaps one of the reasons that it also kind of was a big success internationally is because of some of those elements that that he's incorporating into the the way that he tells his stories.
Andrea:Yeah. I think if you look at the reception of some of his other movies, like, Hoshio o Kodomo, children who chase lost voices from, I think, from deep below is how it's translated, or Place Promised in Our Early Days. I I like both of them a lot. I particularly like Hoshio O'okodemo, again, weeping in the theater. But, yeah, those ones, I think, are are sort of more particular and and didn't travel as well.
Andrea:I think he's really, in the last couple of films, sort of unlocked the way ways in which Japan present Japan in a way that, like, again, is very is very local and local centric, but, like, makes it relatable, you know, to to watchers around the world.
Reyna:And that's causing a ripple effect of interest in him and his way of telling stories. I literally, last summer, went to a theater adaptation of the in the garden of words, which was done in in London. Interesting. So there are these kind of offshoots now where it's not just Studio Ghibli that's getting theatrical applications. They're starting
Andrea:to
Reyna:come out for other other makers, but Shinkai is one of them. I think that point about internationalization in anime has always been there though. The, you know, from the blue haired girls and, you know, green haired girls right through to an alien characters to the kind of ambiguous European other worlds of Hayao Miyazaki's films. There there has always been a a kind of tangential, at least, relevance of the international. It just manifests in different ways in different kinds of movies.
Reyna:But with Shinkai, I think you're right. In your name, he was very openly borrowing from Hollywood rom coms and and also body swap comedies. So there's that really interesting genre history there where he's not necessarily playing up to what we would think of as the normal genres of anime, but he does so in a way that he thoroughly localizes those ideas into an anime style aesthetic and set of themes that he's running through those the last at least the last four movies he's made.
Andrea:I'm so history killed when I first heard about the movie. I was like, oh, is he remaking the super hit radio drama of the same name from the fifties?
Reyna:No. No.
Andy:That would be interesting, though. That would be interesting. Yeah. Well, you know, as we wrap up our conversation, I mean, it's clear from exploring kind of this evolution of anime over the decades that, there's been a lot of variety of genres used within anime in itself. But as closing this up, how has its influence on other genres in cinema and other mediums really kind of contributed to this place?
Andy:And, you know, I'm always talking about this family tree of cinema and all of these different genres as these different offshoots and everything. But how has, kind of all of it with the influence that we've been talking about, how has it contributed to where it fits into this big family tree?
Reyna:One of the things you've picked up on repeatedly as we've been talking about these movies are intersections between anime's interpretations of genres from around the world. Be it sci fi, be it romance and comedy. Like, the localized versions of that and how they work then internationally to inspire other filmmakers and other genres is really important. There's definitely a feedback loop here between anime genres and other forms of genre. But I think there's kind of 2 things I would raise there is really important.
Reyna:Because anime has been outsourcing to Asia for such a long time now, you're starting to see anime style being done by companies across Asia. I mean, the studio mirror, Andrea, that's doing all the Voltron remakes and stuff for DreamWorks?
Andrea:I believe so. Yeah.
Reyna:Yeah. So you're starting to see that anime inflected style appearing even in American remakes. And it's usually via companies that have done a lot of outsourcing work in the past or have come up through that kind of outsourcing work. So anime style, very much like manga style being adapted locally around the world is starting to become more of a thing now, I think, than it has been in the past. And then the second thing I would just say in terms of genre, anime, I think, has become is is wonderfully indiscreet.
Reyna:So a lot of the kind of genre shifts we're seeing at the moment are because anime is interacting with other mediums in particular video games. So there's been a lot of interplay between video games and anime of late. I'll be really interested to see when that starts to kind of get picked up on and used in other places. I think, you know, very much like we're seeing at the moment, a whole raft of podcast inspired TV hits, TV show hits. We may start seeing some of these kinds of adaptations, but there are still real efforts being made to get live action adaptations of anime and manga hits to be successful around the world.
Reyna:Many of which are missing the mark. I look new death note. You know, you know, but some of them like 1 piece are starting to break through a little bit and get a bit more love from fans. So I'd be interested to see over the next 10 years or so if that's if that ever succeeds in a regular way as a kind of accepted form of adaptation into live action. I'm not sure it will.
Reyna:I think what we get in anime or manga to anime to live action in Japan is much more of the kind of really successful ones or ones that don't fit into those mainstream genres. They aren't based on the big hits. So something like, well, Sakuran, the beautiful film that was made by Mika Inagawa a few years ago is based on a manga by Moyoco Anno who was married to Hideaki Anno. Fabulous manga, fabulous, beautifully designed kind of answer to memoirs of a geisha, made into this brilliant kind of pop art almost version of a live action movie. It takes someone like that to come along and interpret the manga into their own vision and have a kind of vision that works alongside it.
Reyna:For me to get it to really, really speak to audiences. But it you know, we shall see. It's an interesting
Andy:Yeah. Right. Right.
Reyna:Future, perhaps. Yeah.
Andrea:Yeah. I mean, I think the video game's point is is very important. Shinkai, actually, I think started in video games, before he made anime. Yeah. So he's sort of an early figure in that.
Andrea:And, of course, video games were influenced by by manga very early on in their development at Nintendo. So there's, again, this kind of mutual influencing. I think this thing I would point out about this sort of adaptation drive in Hollywood and also this the live action and then also the anime adaptation of other titles is that these are sort of part of the overproduction crisis in anime, especially TV anime. There's a lot of shows. People want more and more shows.
Andrea:International buyers want more and more shows, you know, to feed the streaming law. And people in the industry are getting extremely burned out. Jujutsu Kaisen, for example, the second season has been notorious for the animators going on Twitter and basically saying, like, I wanna die. This is it's an unlivable. And that's that's sort of the at the extreme end, but it's definitely becoming more and more of a thing.
Andrea:So one of the reasons that, you know, Hollywood Studios are looking to studios outside Japan for their adaptations is, again, because of the overproduction crisis. So that also too is sort of driving the adaptation of anime aesthetics in a very sort of negative way, kind of. It's positive for the people in Studio Mir. But but yeah. So I think the the overproduction crisis is real and hasn't really been dealt with.
Andy:That's that's all across Hollywood.
Andrea:Yeah. It's been talked about, but it you know, anime is in the fortunate position of of having a lot of people want it now, but they want it too fast. And so that's making real problems for people in the industry, which is no longer no longer unionized, to a great extent. That was sort of the result of these sixties labor battles was that there are very few full time employees and and most animators are freelancers. That, I think, is something that will eventually come to a head and something will have to change.
Andrea:But but how and and why, you know, has yet to be found out. But but yeah. I think in the meantime, you know, anime continues to be extremely popular. Studios around the world continue to want a piece of it in various forms, and I think that's only going to continue. Because it is it does have this, I think, unique power in a in a in a way that, you know, we've talked here about the the blending of genres and the blending of techniques.
Andrea:You know, for whatever reason in in Japanese animation in the industry, people are way more open to that as opposed to, like I think in in places like Hollywood, I think there's sort of much more, like, receive wisdom about what does and doesn't work until until it gets to a creative creative rep, which I think is kind of where we are now with places like Pixar, for example. And, eventually, I think if they can survive, they'll break out of it just like Disney did, you know, in the end of the eighties and then enter the the new golden age. But
Andy:It's all ebbs and flows. Right?
Andrea:Yeah. But anime, I think, has has managed to again, and partly that's just because they keep producing so much stuff.
Reyna:One of the reasons why anime has such a a freer version of genre mixing, it goes to Andrew's point about it coming from manga, and the fact that genres are defined by audience and age groups rather, like, so and so boys and girls rather than by a particular set of content identifiers. So there is a lot more scope to play in when you think about just what is gonna be popular with boys this year. You know, or what's gonna be popular with girls, and you can really mix and match and play with genres in those kinds of circumstances.
Andrea:Yeah. And and the great variety of of manga for adults in the in the seinen genre, which, means young men, but it's basically for everybody who is an an adult woman. There's an incalculable variety in that genre driven partly by by manga fandom. And so, you know, there's this wealth of, like, weird, kooky ideas that people can keep adapting from. And, you know, it's been shown to work as a manga and, you know, they can they can make it work as an anime.
Andrea:So they so anime does have this reservoir to draw on in the thing in the form of manga and the form of other media in Japan, webtoons, for example, you know, as as places to go for content to adapt, which I think has helped keep it fresh for sure.
Reyna:And if those streamers are so desperate for content, as we've noted today, there are it's quite hard to get hold of some of these texts.
Andrea:I know. They can
Reyna:make it easier for fans by licensing these movies.
Andrea:Summer wars was not on streaming. Macross, hakujaden, only the bad version.
Reyna:You know?
Andrea:Yeah. Like
Andy:Yeah.
Andrea:There's definitely there's more they could get. Like, go go get it. Yeah. Right. Right.
Andrea:Right.
Andy:Yeah. Well, Andrea, Reyna, it has been such a delightful conversation with the 2 of you exploring anime, walking through the evolution and the changes of it, and really thinking about it as a genre or a type of arm in the family cinematic family tree that fits a lot of genres within. Thank you so much for being here and being part of this conversation. Before we take off, do you have, either of you have anything you wanna plug? Andrea, do you have any any place that, you want people to go, look at what you're up to?
Andrea:People can check out my website. I just started a newsletter. I will be doing more stuff as, hopefully, the book comes out next year. So, yeah, thank you.
Andy:Absolutely. And we'll make sure links are in the show notes for everybody so you can check there. Reina, how about you?
Reyna:I don't think I said earlier, but I'm a professor here at the University of Bristol in the UK. If people wanna get in touch, I'm pretty easy to find. My email's on the website. And just to say again, thank you, Andy, for having us on. It's so great to have anime featured
Andrea:on your podcast. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you.
Andy:It's been a thrill. I really appreciate it. Before we close, I want to remind you that this special episode was designed for all of our listeners to enjoy regardless of their membership status. Normally, our members get access to exclusive bonus content exploring more films, early episode releases, and an ad free listening experience. If you enjoyed this episode and want to support the show while getting access to these perks, I encourage you to visit true story dot f m slash join to explore our membership options.
Andy:Your support helps us continue creating content that dives deep into the films and movements we're passionate about sharing with you. Next month, we'll venture into the raw unfiltered world of Mumblecore. We'll explore how this low budget, high intimacy movement stripped away the artifice of traditional filmmaking to reveal the unvarnished truths of everyday life. From naturalistic performances to improvised dialogue, we'll discover how Mumblecore's DIY aesthetics and honest portrayals of human relationships breathed new life into independent cinema. Join us as we navigate the profound emotional depths of this fiercely authentic movement.
Andy:Thanks for joining us on CinemaScope, part of the True Story FM Entertainment Podcast Network. Music by Orcus and Macarum. Find us in the entire Next Reel family of film podcasts at true story dot f m. Follow us on social media at the next reel, and please rate and review us if your podcast app allows. As we part ways, remember, your cinematic journey never ends.
Andy:Stay curious.