What You're Missing: WakakoZaké

Why you might like WakakoZaké ワカコ酒 (Wakako Zake).  There are actually plenty of reviews of this title out there now, but I hope to spread the word that this one is indeed worth it.

When in the course of human events, sometimes we find our own tastes have changed, and something else is required to reach expected levels of enjoyment.  Much as once you reach a certain age jazz music stops sounding like shit and you can't really listen to Blink 182 anymore, sometimes you can't really enjoy an anime series where "high school students do X," or "giant robots, giant giants, too-many ninjas, giant ninja boobies, etc" or just about any stuff that you really need to be in high school to like.  So if you find yourself in such a situation, if you actually like Yokohama Shopping Log (go google it, I know you're gonna), then the series Wakako Zaké is going to be something you probably will enjoy.

In this Mameshiba for the real world, we follow Wakako Murasaki, a single working woman in Tokyo who takes joy in the little things of small eating establishments and the pairing of their specialties with the perfect accompanying libations.  The small moments of decision and quiet reflections featured, undertaken by one living all alone in a big city and after working in a world where your efforts might be futile, culminate in finding that singular space and time when everything comes together for a feeling that can only be depicted as; "Pushuuuuu~ :) "

For anyone who has an interest in slice-of-life type stories or is interested in Japanese cuisine, this is going to be a fun watch for you.  There's really no story line here, and the episodes simply revolve around whatever Wakako decides to order that day.  The episodes themselves are quite short, and clock in at something like two minutes each. Much like the moment of zen (or "pushuuuuu~" as one might put it) they are fleeting, and so the value they bring to your day is all the more important.

One of the reasons I can personally connect with this is that when I lived in Tokyo, I did exactly this kind of thing, looking for out-of the-way places in the middle of Shinjuku and ordering something more indigenous.  There are a few tricks to finding a good place like this.
1) Are they insanely crowded at lunch?  Then it's good stuff.
2) When you go in there, is everyone eating the same thing despite an extensive menu?  Hint; Order that.
3) Does the place not have a menu and only serve one dish for lunch and one for dinner?  That's gonna be a good place.
4) Does it smell so good it makes you feel like you haven't eaten in 3 days? That's the place.
That's pretty much it, in terms of picking a spot. When you're on vacation try it out.  But a few things you should know:
-No big groups.  Seriously these places aren't built for that.
-They're not gonna speak English so don't expect them to.
-If it's crowded, eat everything on your plate and leave immediately. Not kidding, some places have rules like this posted on their walls.
-Cash only.
Happy Hunting.

Never know what you'll find.  (Photo courtesy of ME bitches!)

The ultra simplistic style of character design is actually helpful for this series.  The simple facial features and expressions create the perfect canvas to convey feelings and sensations that can't be explicitly articulated with dialogue alone.  There's something a certain kind of face says that no amount of words in the world could ever hope to.  It is momentary, vaporous, and fleeting; qualities without which would make this series just a boring food-show and not something much, much more.

 A thousand words.

Losing some of this quality, but no less enjoyable is the live action version of this show.  I don't know if it was because it just performed better, or because it's much cheaper to make, but the live action version seems to have more episodes.  To any otaku out there who would normally eschew live-action fare, I would say that if you like the animated version of this, then the live-action is most certainly worth a shot. 

Wakako Zaké

So when the Sword Art is offline, when you really don't care what's going on in Ouran High School or whatever, and when you're out of episodes of Dragon Maid to watch, go sit down with some edamame and some Junmai Ginjo, fire up the Crunchyroll, and sit back to enjoy an anime about the little things that make life worth living.  Wakako Zaké

What You’re Missing: Shiko Funjatta

A review of the live-action film シコふんじゃった! -or- Sumo Do, Sumo Don't.

The Japanese title sounds like "Shiko-fun-jatta"...which is a linguistic in-joke that someone thought was best approximated by the hideous English title "Sumo Do, Sumo Don't" translation. Yes it's kind of horrible, and no, you can't think of anything better. Seriously, what else can you call it. When you realize that a translator's job is to get a point across without necessarily literally translating every word verbatim one can only throw up your hands and take it as it is. Ok so now that that's out of the way, we can get down to business.



This award-winning comedy film from 1992, directed by Masayuki Suo (famous for his later work "Shall we Dance") features actor Masahiro Motoki, actress Misa Shimizu (also of Shall we Dance), and the gaijin Robert Hoffman, who almost never speaks any lines and has never been in anything else before or since as far as I can tell. It also prominently features Japanese actor and comedian Naoto Takenaka, who anime fans might recognize as the voice of Shiki from One-Piece, and from appearing in various advertisements that dot the subways and train stations of Japan.

He's on the left there.
Remember kids, the best financial advice always comes from Japanese comedians.

The film follows the story about a floundering college sumo team and student Shuhei Yamamoto (Motoki), forced into the position of joining the team or failing to graduate on time, missing out on the job that awaits him. The rest of the rag-tag Sumo team has more or less joined it of their own will, but they have also brought along their own baggage. Shuhei has never wrestled before, foriegn student George Smiley is consistently disqualified for refusing to properly wear his mawashi, and team captain Aoki Tomio (Takenaka) talks a big game, but due to nervousness he suffers from psychosomatic irritable bowel syndrome forcing him to forfeit every match he's in with a frantic dash for the toilet.

Needless to say, the film is full of lighthearted human drama and interactions reaching an emotional crescendo in the form of a sumo tournament. Love is found, personal daemons are conquered, and everyone grows better from the experience. I don't really want to give away what happens, but I can assure you that the Hollywood formula blandness where every loose end is tied up with as much audience focus group pleasing-points as possible, has not contaminated this very Japanese cinematic masterpiece.

If you have seen the film PingPong, you're in for a slightly similar ride, but Shiko Funjatta doesn't tell the story of a meteoric rise of someone in a world full of intense people being intense about a sport as does Ping Pong. It is actually a bit better at drawing in the audience, with the "fish out of water" quality of the main character jumping feet-first into the world of Sumo, creating an extra foothold that the audience can latch on to in order to get more involved in the world created here.

Finally, unlike the previous film we looked at (Happy Flight), this title is perfect for practicing those Japanese language skills and is a great study aid, since the dialogue is very similar to things that normal people say in every-day situations, where as Happy Flight has a bit more technical terminology particular to the world of aviation. If you are studying/learning Japanese, give this one a try without subtitles and see what happens.



Sumo Do Sumo Don't

The Japanese Region 2 NTSC DVD version does not have subtitles in any language other than Japanese but it's easy enough to follow, and again, the added Japanese subtitling makes this a great language study-aid. It's available at CD Japan for ...well about what Japanese usually DVDs cost. Book-Off might have it as well for quite a lot less.

DVD label Madman Entertainment released a Region 4 PAL DVD version (Australia) which is still available for sale online and does indeed have English subtitles.

Happy hunting.

What You’re Missing: Happy Flight Review

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Welcome to a new segment where The Angry Otaku features “things Japanese” that aren’t necessarily anime. Way back when I was still a little bitty Otaku, when the internet consisted of BBSs accessed via 2400 baud, and VHS was king, I was in the early stages of anime fandom so to speak. There in those stages, there’s always a period where a fan is in the “if it’s not anime, I don’t care” mode of media consumption. Kaiju, martial arts, chambara, drama, ...you name it, if it was live action, I didn’t care.

Fortunately I was able to grow out of that, and it is in the hopes of widening the range of Japanese popular entertainment consumed by AmerOtakus, that this new monthly segment was created. Look for "What You're Missing" on the last Monday of every month here... at least until I get tired of doing it.

Happy Flight

Whole movie.

A great “gateway” production for anime fans that are not too open to live action, Happy Flight is a 2008 comedy from director Shinobu Yaguchi, known to American Otaku audiences through titles like Water Boys and Swing Girls. The film follows the inner workings of both airplane and airport, revolving around All Nippon Airways flight 1980, a 747 going from Japan to Hawaii.

Opening with quick introductions of the various characters through a montage where we bounce around locations like a ball in a pinball machine, the film quickly sets the overall lighthearted tone through scenes featuring some intra-company rivalry between cabin crew and ground staff, as well as the trepidations our main characters feel as they enter their first day on new assignments for ANA. On board the flight, the film doubles character juxtaposition by pairing the two “fish out of water” main characters off of their supervisors, who have tough reputations and come off as strict, stoic, and humorless. First with the newly promoted pilot Kazuhiro Suzuki (Seiichi Tanabe) being evaluated on his first flight as Captain by the extremely serious and deadpan evaluator Captain Harada (Saburo Tokito), and second with the enthusiastic new flight attendant Etsuko Saito (Haruka Ayase), whose excitement soon fades after a prompt chewing out by her new boss, the notoriously strict Reiko Yamazaki (Shinobu Terajima). However their confidence and ability to work under pressure are soon put to the test, when ANA flight 1980 encounters serious problems after takeoff. Needing to return to Japan, the plane turns around only to face a vicious typhoon which stands between the now crippled plane and the safety of the runway.

Happy Flight dedicates quite a bit of itself to the people of often overlooked airport supporting functions. From trainee mechanics, to air traffic controllers, from the ticket agents, to the guy who keeps birds away from the runway, the film introduces you to each one as their humanity emerges in the course of their stressful jobs. These are that types of characters who often get a one dimensional treatment in other films, but in Happy Flight, the receive a well-deserved second dimension. Although some may argue that doing so creates the unintended consequence of making three-dimensional characters into two-dimensional ones, the film itself is not hurt by this. But unlike other movies featuring airplanes, Happy Flight doesn’t need three-dimensional characters, as it doesn’t take itself too seriously like Flight Plan, nor does it aim to be the campy schlock of Airplane. The film sits in the perfect balance between funny and still believable, and works perfectly with the character depth it reaches, because each group of characters operates within their own bubble. The pilots never interact with the mechanics, who go through a desperate search through the hangar on their own time to ensure that flight 1980 is not suffering from what could be a fatal engine problem. The airport ground staff, led by the "calm under pressure" Masaharu Takahashi (played by veteran actor Ittoku Kishibe), go through the stressful ordeal of guiding a 747 to a safe runway in the middle of a typhoon, but never even see the flight attendants who must keep the passengers safe and calm during the same ordeal. In this way, the film sets up an orbital matrix of character groups, completely separated from each other but all revolving around the same central nucleus, in this case the critically wounded ANA flight 1980.

The Japanese work ethic is very into principles of knowledge-creation management, and in this feel-good film, there are plenty of examples of how the junior staff have their confidence boosted through hands-on experience under the watchful guidance of their more seasoned supervisors. There are a lot of hidden meanings and social constructs present in Happy Flight which are nowhere to be found in American cinema, and the active knowledge creation each character goes through is the perhaps the strongest one of these.

American anime fans will quickly feel right at home watching this movie, as the cast and direction amplify the types of humor and emotional situations often reserved for comedic titles. Love, loss, goofy sidekicks, deadpan personalities in tense situations, and even a few physical gags, are all pleasantly spaced throughout this relatively short (100min) romp thought a day in the life of a Japanese airport in crisis-mode. Anime fans will also recognize some cast members like Seiichi Tanabe who has voiced characters in Tramps Like Us and Twin Spica and has played Issei Tomine in the Drops of God adaptation. Also from Japanese TV, comedian Kami Hiraiwa and actress Tomoko Tabata team up to form the very “Pinky & The Brain” style team of ANA ticket agents.

Pinky, are you pondering what I'm pondering?
I think so Brain, but last time we ran out of baggage claim stickers and dolphin tranquilizers way too early.

Happy Flight has been accused of being corporate propaganda since it’s about an ANA flight and ANA staff who do ANA things in a movie made by ANA (did I mention ANA?). But for an American this just isn’t as true as it seems. Yes, the airline and all the characters come in a positive light, but it is still a very imperfect human one. The trappings, foibles, and emotional nuances that make us all real and all different are not hidden from the audience for fear of “hurting the brand.” Rather, they are shown directly to the audience as a vital part of each and every character, adding a very high degree of believability to the film. The fact that such a movie would never ever be made by the likes of guitar-breaking United, dog-killing Delta, or suck in your gut Southwest, is not lost on American audiences in the least. The genuine way that ANA portrays a much higher work ethic among its staff is a great and refreshing reminder to Americans that at one time, that kind of thing was possible and just might be possible again, and leave you with a smile on your face (at least until the next time the functionally retarded high school drop out from the TSA confiscates your diet Dr. Pepper and steals your watch, while fondling your balls).

Finally, because of recent events involving US Air 1545 (The Hudson River bird-strike landing) and the unfortunate fate of Air France 447 (freezing of the pitot tubes), this film will actually be easier to follow and better appreciated, as now most audiences will be familiar with the perils that the characters in the film face, from hearing about real life examples.

Happy Flight does a great job in porting over the type of theatrical mechanics present in most anime, to a live action medium without the need for heavy visual effects a-la Cutie Honey or Scott Pilgrim. Anime Conventions: this one should be on your video schedule if it isn't already.

You can find a subtitled copy of Happy Flight on Amazon.com, although I have no idea how legit that copy is (might be the Hong Kong release). The region 2 Japanese copies tend to be very pricey, with the Blue Ray special edition topping out at 72,000 yen which at today’s crappy exchange rate is about a million dollars US. This is a movie that you don’t need on Blue Ray though (there aren't any major effects which would benefit from it). The regular region-2 editions are (somewhat) cheaper, but it should be noted that some of them do not include English Subtitles. Give Bookoff a try if you are near one of their locations and bring your “must have” list, because they will probably have other things you want as well.

Oh, and of course you can always watch it at your seat if you’re on an ANA flight.

Helpful hints: What to look for on Japanese DVD labeling:

(Now this applies to anime as well) When shopping for Japanese market DVDs, most of the time it’s on the internet, where the various subtitle info and other specs are listed in a language that you can read. However, in the event you are browsing at a store in person (Kinokunia or Book Off for example), and you turn over the DVD case only to be met with a whole bunch of Kanji you can’t read, here is what to look for: The word is “Jimaku” 字幕　（じまく）“subtitles.” Now that’s half what you need to know, with the other half being “Eigo” 英語　which is (say it with me now) “English.” The reason this is important, is that often Japanese DVDs will have Japanese subtitles only, so just looking for字幕 without determining the language, can get you a DVD with nice crisp Japanese or Chinese subtitles and a look of confused disappointment across the faces of your friends. Let’s look at some examples:



Here’s the back of the Japanese release of Kill Bill (why the Japanese version? Because it’s not censored by the MPAA like the American release is). As you can see, there’s a pictogram that indicates 2 tracks of available subtitles. Let’s have a closer look:


Ok that top line is 日本語字幕; which is “Japanese Subtitles”, and I’ll bet you can guess what that second one is; 英語字幕 “English Subtitles” indeed. This doesn’t seem weird until you realize that the movie itself is in English and so they’re subtitling what the actors are already saying.

But moving on, just remember when buying Japanese DVDs, you want to look for “英語字幕” on the back, if you want to be sure you will be enjoying English subs. As for linguistic accuracy, some releases are better than others, with bigger budget larger releases more likely to offer this feature over smaller releases. Additionally, if you're looking at the back info and notice that the word "English" and "Subtitles" are spelled out just like that in Roman lettering, then there are significant chances are you are looking at a Hong Kong release.

Finally, a word on Region Coding. If you don't have a region-free player, then none of this matters to you anyway. I've owned one for so long, that when I bring DVDs to other people's houses I completely forget that they may not be able to play them. Buying a region free player is totally worth it, I have a Pioneer DV444 from codefreedvd.com, and it still works great after 10 years. The ability to watch any DVD I want, skipping the retarded FBI warning and being able to go straight to the menu without having to endure trailer after trailer is something I enjoy taking for granted, and so will you. You don't have to go for expensive options either. Chinese manufactures often spit out some no-name brands that aren't region locked and don't button-disable. Monitor some tech forums for when these hit your local Best Buy and you can pick one up for $40 or so.

Happy hunting.

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One may die: The Akira live action that never was

So the other may live.

Well it’s not that messianic, but it seems official that the Akira live action film is totally DOA as of a little while ago. I think I can participate in the collective sigh of relief with much of the movie watching community to know that “Akira” will not go the way of Speed Racer, Dragon Ball, and Street Fighter, and descend into the collective utter crap-fest that is the cinematic evolutionary branch of “Hollywood Re-make.” Such a feeling however, must be tinted with a shade of regret for what might have been. Could an Akira live action be a good movie? Sure it could. Would it have been? Almost assuredly not. The only way to make it a good movie, would be to re-make it, shot for shot, with as much of the original story intact as possible. What would have happened though, is the inevitable “new vision” or “updating” or “tweaking for a new audience” that would have run roughshod over any actual script/technical advisers they had on the project… if any. I could see an ending where some Caucasian looking Kaneda modding his motorcycle A-Team style with rockets controlled by a PSP or some shit, for a final showdown with Tetsuo who doesn’t have psychic powers or a disgruntled anti-social youth culture mind set, rather he’s been taken over by some A.I. which runs all of future-mega-tokyo-robot-land and slowly turns him into a cyborg which allows him to do shit like fling garbage trucks at Kaneda while rolling down a highway all i-Robot style as he rides on his future-bike to the center of the city to finally free his kidnapped love interest who was invented for the movie and is played by played by Kristin Kreuk. And they wonder why people don’t bother going to movies anymore. Thank you “Legend of Chun Li.”

But whenever the noodly appendage closes a door, the great Flying Spaghetti Monster opens a can of awesome somewhere else. Futurama is finally getting the Family Guy treatment and is getting some new episodes made. I like Futureama a lot, but after feeling so fucked over (not as bad as “who is Cartman’s Father fucked over, but fucked over none the less) by the Family Guy “DVD Movie” (that shit was so bad I actually gave it away in front of a Best Buy to prevent someone from buying it and wasting their own money), I didn’t get that into the Futurama “movies” even though they were cleaver, a fun watch, and animated just fine. But, I am happy about this new development and hoping for Hulu distribution, even though from here in Tokyo I have to keep going to new lengths just to get around Hulu’s international filtering bullshit (FYI it works better if you… wait, no they’ll probably find out about that just that much faster if I spill the beans here). I know what you’re thinking and don’t even start.

The resurrection of Futurama is a positive outcome of an otherwise dismal development of producers being terrified of new and creative ideas in Entertainment, aka “Hollywood is out of Ideas,” which is so awesome when you see smart new films like “The Hangover” beat total shiat like “Land of the Lost.” It’s not that I want to see movie theaters go away, but they are the single only collective group which still enables the MPAA and their stifiling of the creative process. Labels and studios would gladly leave those fuck-wads in the dust if theater box office receipts dipped low enough to make them less relevant. The fact that the MPAA is a private and not a government organization will allow movie makers to drop their participation in the “voluntary” rating system without a single bit of interference.

But the “out of ideas” disease is unfortunately in full swing here in the land of Otaku culture as well, as we get ready for more reboots. One which I am particularly loathe to see is the Azumanga Daioh manga republication. It’s the same story… drawn again. This time however the art is disturbing much more on the Yotsuba side of things. Now artists can get better and one look at the early atrocities of Kozuke Fujishima when compared to later works, show that this is an almost universally good thing (except for Rumiko Takahashi who has gotten worse, and Masamune Shiro who went from meh to awesome to crazy). Not in this case however, where the signature style of what made Azumanga Azumanga are gone, only to be replaced with what looks like lazy practice drawing. The notion that time and money are going into something we’ve seen before and not something new. You can see Azuma’s poor excuse about pulling a George Lucas on the series on his personal site here (Japanese). Look for the new and improved Azumanga Daioh anime to have the airgun replaced with a walkie talkie in the matsuri scene, and for the character of Tomoe to be played by Jar Jar Binks.

If it sells books then great, but if the story is the same and the art has less detail, then I’d rather have something I haven’t read before.

Countdown to the Tokyo Anime Fair

1 week from Today.

This year I will be at the TAF starting March 18. I like the TAF. I was once denied this in ’04 when the sleaze in charge of the NY office actually stole and hid my ticket that the board bought and paid for, so that he could go by himself in order to skip the fair and go to soapland. So I up and went to the Ingram show in Nashville on the same days… oh goody.

Anyway, I shall soon be reporting the goings on of the epicenter of all things anime. If anyone is interested in the exhibitor list, it can be found here. That’s a lot of booths to hit up in 2 days before the place gets really crowded after the general admission begins. This event is part showcase, part trade show, and part p.r. extravaganza, all designed to both show the world that anime is doing fine, and secretly find a way to stop the ever impending doom that is haunting the industry by finding this year’s holy grail full of money.

Stand by for some video and other kinds of stuff at あ!PoN. Should be some good stuff.

Oh,

According to an article I read in the last week of February in the daily Yomiuri, it would seem that there is going to be a live action version of Fruits Basket. Now this is more than what you think a live action would be, because this is actually a stage show. Now I don’t know if this is because of Fruits Basket director Akitaro Daiichi’s penchant for doing Chambara on stage (I don’t think he’s involved), but it does follow a Japanese tradition of sorts of bringing anime titles to the stage. While not exactly the same as the atrocious Disney musicals we are seeing on Broadway at the moment it does exemplify a kind of osmosis of how popular culture, entertainment, and fandom, all work. The membrane between what, by American otaku definitions, is anime and what is not anime in Japanese culture is a very busy two way street. The concept of what makes anime unique, is much more imbedded into the American market since there is a huge sprawling domestic creative landscape to compare it to. Such is not so in anime’s home stadium, where Hana Yori Dango or Maison Ikokku are still Hana Yori Dango and Maison Ikokku when made into a live action TV show.

It’s an all male cast. I will not be checking that out.

The Meme-ing of American Entertainment

You don’t have to make sense to make dollars.

The universe in which an otaku lives is often one of a perceived righteous insulation from the “Americrap” entertainment which makes the Japanese entertainment media look so appealing. There is a stage that every otaku either passes though or becomes permanently stuck in, which has a basic premise of “Japanese manga and anime are the better than anything else, so I don’t need to pay attention to American anything because it’s all crap.” This was once a sustainable idea, in that in no way were the two markets ever going to significantly interact with each other, however for about a decade that has not been the case.

The problem… one of the problems… one of the many problems in the process in which the previously stated otaku isolationist sentiment is being made an impossibility, is that the domestic market always seems to have just the right elements to bring the most unredeeming elements of each entertainment methodology together in massive commercial endeavors. The specific element that is having a particularly noticeable effect is the 2 second attention span.

Now the quick non-substintive way of deciding what to make a movie/TV series/toy line/etc by looking at a presentation package for 24 seconds and then making some sort of decision whilst uttering le catch phrase du jour is nothing new. What is new is that this laser beam of unintelligent arbitration of creative commercial entertainment is now slicing straight through that otaku bubble of insulation mentioned previously. We have now the evidence that this beam has simply increased in strength, in this ghastly piece of gloriously expensive reptilian anal spew:



It’s important to point out that Chow Yun-Fat is and shall forever be awesome. However like anyone involved in the actual filming of this impending crapfest, he was simply a person paid to do a job and anyone in this group can not be held responsible for this cinematic post-natal abortion. The responsibility is that of the executive producers and investors that greenlight this very idea. Caught up in the moment of flashy 1 minute sizzle videos of Aeon Flux, Speed Racer, or any other animation made Hollywood live action, the frenzy picked up Dragonball too. That frenzy was unabashedly unconcerned with anime, continuity, originality, or anything else that would be associated with cinematic integrity. No, all they were concerned about, and all they had time for before putting down millions of dollars to make a major motion picture, was “the energy” of the title, and there’s a word we can use for that; meme.

Like the Speed Racer production, this film will be generally regarded as a failure. It will probably be a financial failure for the cinema operaters (not the studios) and is already an artistic failure. However there is hardly an American now who has not gotten the message loud and clear that failure is often rewarded and is by no means an impediment to financial gain and the ability to further replicate such monuments to failure. The smug satisfaction that an anime fan can take in the failure of this film is quickly evaporated in the knowledge that every Hollywood adaptation of an anime have all been abysmal failures, and none of those will make a dent in the momentum of further efforts in the same vein. Hollywood will not save itself.

Working in show business makes an atheist out of you very quickly when confronted with things like this:

This is real. There is no god.

Go (away) Speed Racer, Go.

Yes, "Lost in Translation" really was terrible.

Much like the way they’ve taken total control of this country’s political process, the “old guard” of baby boomers who insist on doing things their antiquated way, will not let go of the entertainment empires that some of them so desperately hold on to in an attempt to convince themselves that they’re still relevant (or the notion that somehow they still don’t have enough money). At the same time in order to garner even a small modicum of success, younger players in the game are forced to play follow the leader and present creative empty calories as true cinematic work, either out of fear or greed (In Sophia's case however, she is just bad at it).

There’s a lot the American movie mechanism doesn’t know about Japan for that previously stated reason, they’re basically still stuck in decades past when it comes to what they think. Herein is a conundrum I am having then with reconciling the Speed Racer movie. Is it a blunt over-hyped Hollywood special effects blundering remake of a classic American TV show? Or is it actually a blunt over-hyped Hollywood special effects blundering remake of a Japanese Anime? Don’t kid yourself, because the answer to this question will only be known in the long term, as that long term will also be where the effects of said answer will be felt. “Anime” as a part of modern culture which has finally entrenched itself in American life, may just bee seen as only a tiny blip in cultural evolution by 2012, with Speed Racer part of the centerpiece of epic fail that destroyed its fragile foothold. Then again, this celluloid turd might not harm anime much and just go take its place in the ever growing group of shitty Hollywood remakes of TV shows (those shows were never really the way anyone remembers them, and the aforementioned old guard just likes to make them because it helps them feel relevant again, and hold on to their money by minimizing risk on something that's actually new. Could you imagine if someone today had tried to make the movie Alien in today's Hollywood? It would have been sidelined so fast by studio execs anxious to get Sigourney cast as Jane in a remake of The Jetsons alongside Will Ferrell as George and Lindsay Lohan as Judy, featuring cgi Scooby Doo as that stupid talking dog).

What the anime market doesn’t need right now are Hollywood remakes like this, and the disastrous results that they may bring. As with many things that come out of Hollywood, there is a right way and a wrong way to treat a property, but it is also important to remember that this difference between right and wrong rarely has any bearing on profitability, since the brain dead Uwe Boll is still out there making more money. It is hoped that the scenario of shitty movies being able to bring in any kind of profit will finally be behind us one day far in the future, BUT the anime market as it is now can not afford this to tarnish an already weak position, forcing anime back out of the American market back into obscurity. This scenario would make the entire scope of anime fandom in America just an asterisk in VH1’s undoubtedly already planned “I love the 00’s.”

We’ll have to hope for a few things if we really want to keep this market from shrinking back to the size it was at the beginning. The Speed Racer movie has to come and go, and the word “anime” should be distanced from it as much as possible. More importantly, we must hope that this does not usher in some morbid parade of the carcasses of truly good anime as remake after remake, starting with Voltron and going all the way through Lupan III and Ninja Scroll ending with a cinematic abortion that would be Michael Bay Presents: Ghost in the Shell. In the heyday of Anime as a consumer good, surviving such an onslaught might have been possible, but in these days of an anime market devalued by digital fansubs, it’s an economic execution with far reaching effects (no Michael, not those kind of “effects”).


-TAO