Kentucky Country Music Star Sturgill Simpson goes all-out in Anime Netflix movie
When American country meets Japanese anime
The artists gathered at last month’s Tokyo premiere of “Sturgill Simpson Presents Sound & Fury” were as eclectic as the film they’d all made: a 41-minute anime music video set to an entire album by the Grammy-winning Sturgill Simpson, a country music singer-songwriter from Kentucky.
After the screening, delivered in 7.1 surround sound so rich it enveloped like an aural duvet, Japanese and American anime luminaries including Koji Morimoto (“Akira”), Michael Arias (“Tekkonkinkreet”), Masaru Matsumoto (“Appleseed Alpha”), Shinji Takagi (“Steamboy”), Arthell Isom (“Strike Witches”) and Henry Thurlow (“Tokyo Ghoul”) stood shoulder-to-shoulder beneath projected images of scenes from the omnibus project. Standing tallest among them was a squinting Simpson, just in from the U.S. and still, he confessed, addled by jet lag.
But the mash-up doesn’t end there. The film’s overarching storyline was inspired by Akira Kurosawa’s 1961 samurai classic “Yojimbo,” about a ronin warrior for hire. Junpei Mizusaki and his CG studio Kamikaze Douga of “Batman Ninja” fame directed it, with character designs by “Afro Samurai” manga artist Takashi (Bob) Okazaki.
What’s more, the music is miles away from the country-western of Merle Haggard. Its razor-edged electric guitar riffs and insistent beats are from a genre known as alt-country, or alternative country rock, with melodic echoes of the late J. J. Cale — if his songs were amped up through ZZ Top’s distorting fuzz boxes.
Simpson’s lyrics are depicted in the film as the wayward musings of a loner navigating a post-apocalyptic landscape. They invoke a punk nihilism and disgust with corruption (“It’s ‘F—— all y’all’ season, don’t give me a reason/ to watch your house burn to the ground.”) The 10 song-episodes are sometimes brutally violent and bloody, sometimes erotic, but also often arrestingly inventive. Morimoto’s collaboration with hair sculpture artist Hidenori Nishimura for the song “Mercury in Retrograde,” with its metamorphosing gears and snaking lines, is especially stunning.
It’s the kind of crossover, transcultural anime collaboration with high-end production values that would have been unthinkable five years ago. And, of course, it’s streaming on Netflix.
The use of Western music in anime soundtracks itself is nothing new and has an admirable lineage. Veteran critic and industry analyst Tadashi Sudo notes that the “Lupin III” television series brought jazz to the medium in the early 1970s, and in Shinichiro Watanabe’s classic “Cowboy Bebop,” jazz and blues-styled backdrops form a slyly comedic commentary on the characters’ noir space-cowboy escapades.
But Sudo says that “Sound & Fury,” with its co-produced characters, narrative and imagery built around a full album of songs by a single musician is a landmark culmination. “‘Sound & Fury’ emerges from that history,” he says, “but I think it’s the final form of such unusual combinations of Western music and anime. The fusion is wonderful, but even more important, this is a production where both Japanese and American staff took part in its total creation. That could only be realized with Netflix, because cultural diversity is one of its core values.”
While the film was completed in under a year (astonishing, given its scope), its gestation period was much longer — spanning two decades.
Simpson was stationed at Yokosuka Naval Base from 1997 to ’98. On days off, he would trawl Tokyo manga shops for anime VHS tapes and watch them on his ship. He got hooked on dark classics like “Akira” and years later, after returning to the States, “Attack on Titan.”
In 2012 he revisited Tokyo as a professional musician to shoot a music video for his song “Railroad of Sin” (now on YouTube) from his first album.
“It was back then that I first started talking with my friend Shunsuke (Ochiai, co-executive producer) about this crazy dream,” he says. “How cool would it be to make anime videos for a whole album? So when I made (‘Sound & Fury’), that was the plan from the beginning. And when Junpei (Mizusaki) heard the album and told me he wanted to animate every song, for lack of a better word, it felt like kismet.”
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The Japan Times
After the screening, delivered in 7.1 surround sound so rich it enveloped like an aural duvet, Japanese and American anime luminaries including Koji Morimoto (“Akira”), Michael Arias (“Tekkonkinkreet”), Masaru Matsumoto (“Appleseed Alpha”), Shinji Takagi (“Steamboy”), Arthell Isom (“Strike Witches”) and Henry Thurlow (“Tokyo Ghoul”) stood shoulder-to-shoulder beneath projected images of scenes from the omnibus project. Standing tallest among them was a squinting Simpson, just in from the U.S. and still, he confessed, addled by jet lag.
But the mash-up doesn’t end there. The film’s overarching storyline was inspired by Akira Kurosawa’s 1961 samurai classic “Yojimbo,” about a ronin warrior for hire. Junpei Mizusaki and his CG studio Kamikaze Douga of “Batman Ninja” fame directed it, with character designs by “Afro Samurai” manga artist Takashi (Bob) Okazaki.
What’s more, the music is miles away from the country-western of Merle Haggard. Its razor-edged electric guitar riffs and insistent beats are from a genre known as alt-country, or alternative country rock, with melodic echoes of the late J. J. Cale — if his songs were amped up through ZZ Top’s distorting fuzz boxes.
Clockwise from left: Takashi Okazaki, Arthell Isom, Henry Thurlow, Koji Morimoto, Sturgill Simpson, Michael Arias, Masaru Matsumoto and Junpei Mizusaki at the ‘Sturgill Simpson Presents Sound & Fury’ premiere in Tokyo on Dec. 13. | MITSURU HIROTA
It’s the kind of crossover, transcultural anime collaboration with high-end production values that would have been unthinkable five years ago. And, of course, it’s streaming on Netflix.
The use of Western music in anime soundtracks itself is nothing new and has an admirable lineage. Veteran critic and industry analyst Tadashi Sudo notes that the “Lupin III” television series brought jazz to the medium in the early 1970s, and in Shinichiro Watanabe’s classic “Cowboy Bebop,” jazz and blues-styled backdrops form a slyly comedic commentary on the characters’ noir space-cowboy escapades.
But Sudo says that “Sound & Fury,” with its co-produced characters, narrative and imagery built around a full album of songs by a single musician is a landmark culmination. “‘Sound & Fury’ emerges from that history,” he says, “but I think it’s the final form of such unusual combinations of Western music and anime. The fusion is wonderful, but even more important, this is a production where both Japanese and American staff took part in its total creation. That could only be realized with Netflix, because cultural diversity is one of its core values.”
While the film was completed in under a year (astonishing, given its scope), its gestation period was much longer — spanning two decades.
Simpson was stationed at Yokosuka Naval Base from 1997 to ’98. On days off, he would trawl Tokyo manga shops for anime VHS tapes and watch them on his ship. He got hooked on dark classics like “Akira” and years later, after returning to the States, “Attack on Titan.”
Haunting imagery: A scene from Koji Morimoto's sequence of the anime 'Sturgill Simpson Presents Sound & Fury,' which features Simpson's album 'Sound & Fury' as its soundtrack. | 2019 HIGH TOP MOUNTAIN FILMS, LLC / ELEKTRA RECORDS. STURGILL SIMPSON PRESENTS SOUND & FURY
In 2012 he revisited Tokyo as a professional musician to shoot a music video for his song “Railroad of Sin” (now on YouTube) from his first album.
“It was back then that I first started talking with my friend Shunsuke (Ochiai, co-executive producer) about this crazy dream,” he says. “How cool would it be to make anime videos for a whole album? So when I made (‘Sound & Fury’), that was the plan from the beginning. And when Junpei (Mizusaki) heard the album and told me he wanted to animate every song, for lack of a better word, it felt like kismet.”
Read>>
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