japanamerica

When Katsuhiro Otomo (Akira), Mamoru Oshii (Ghost in the Shell) and Shinichiro Watanabe (Cowboy Bebop) show up in the same small venue in the same small city on the Sea of Japan--magic happenstances. I was invited to attend the first annual Niigata International Animation Festival and I'm glad I went. My take below. New Niigata film festival brings out the big names in anime Roland Kelts JAPAN TIMES column CULTURE SMASH It’s no secret that Japan loves animation. Despite being a marginalized medium elsewhere, animation in Japan regularly tops the domestic box office, earning billions of yen for films made without movie stars and on relatively low budgets. Of Japan’s 10 highest-grossing movies ever, seven are animated. But there’s a hitch: six of those top seven titles are homegrown. Animation produced elsewhere, aside from the occasional old-school Disney blockbuster like “Frozen,” rarely gets seen in Japan, let alone embraced by moviegoers. Like short-grain white rice and unagi (fr...

When American country meets Japanese anime The Japan Times 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 Kurosaw...

'Cannon Busters': Bending anime rules in all the right ways The Japan Times South Bronx, New York native LeSean Thomas is making anime in Tokyo partly owing to a mistake.  In the early ’90s he bought a video cassette of what he thought was “Akira” but turned out to be a behind-the-scenes “production report”  documenting the film’s creation. Instead of returning it, Thomas watched it every day. When he saw director Katsuhiro Otomo and his team working through the night at their cramped desks, he thought: That’s what I want to do. More than 20 years later, Thomas, now 43, has become an anime showrunner with “Cannon Busters,” a 12-episode series based on his 2005 comic book of the same name and rendered by Tokyo animation studio Satelight Inc. The multinational project was created by an American, co-financed by Britain’s Manga Entertainment Ltd. and Taiwan’s Nada Holdings Inc., produced by a Japanese studio and released on major U.S. and Chinese streaming portal...

Defining the Heisei Era: When anime and manga went global The Heisei Era commenced after two gods fell in rapid succession. The first, Emperor Hirohito, was no longer officially a god, having repudiated his quasi-divine status under the terms of Japan’s surrender in World War II, but he remained god-like in stature. His January death in 1989 at age 87 signaled the end of a Showa past both turbulent and glorious. It drew global attention from the world’s leaders and media, but had been widely anticipated in Japan. The other fell just one month later, in February, and his death shocked the nation. Osamu Tezuka, the beloved “god of manga,” died of stomach cancer at the age of 60. News of his declining health had been kept secret, as was then customary in Japan. Tezuka was a prolific workaholic and omnipresent television personality. He was also a licensed physician. Almost no one expected his sudden passing. The two deaths would augur a new life for Japan’s twin pop cultu...

My thanks to the Embassy of Japan, Canada; the Ottawa International Animation Festival; Prof. Tom Keirstead, and a sell-out audience in Canada's capital city. [Photos courtesy Ryo Tokunaga, Embassy of Japan, Canada]