In the 1980s, some of the best designers working in the Japanese animation industry worked at ARTMIC. The Kichijoji-based design studio wasn’t a traditional animation studio; instead, they’d work up plans and designs for an OAV, film or TV series and shop the idea around to sponsors and animation studios. Operating from 1978 to 1997, ARTMIC was home to artists like Kenichi Sonada and Shinji Aramaki and had a hand in some of the most definitive OAV titles of the 1980s. Bubblegum Crisis, Riding Bean, Megazone 23, and non-OAV titles like Genesis Climber MOSPEADA, the American TV series Photon and VHS laser game products for Captain Power were but a few of the titles ARTMIC staff worked on. In 1992, they made 25-minute parody OAV titled Scramble Wars.
Some time ago I found myself unable to see a premiere of Takashi Miike’s recent live-action remake of the 70s Yatterman cartoon on account of fangirl overload. In that article, I said that if I didn’t catch it then, that it would be at least a year before I got another chance. And as it turns out, Yatterman ran at this year’s New York Asian Film Fest. So now, a year later, we can finally get down to business.
It’s inevitable that we compare this movie to the Wachowskis’ adaptation of Speed Racer, which adapted its target so faithfully that everybody hated it. The approach is similar, but Yatterman doesn’t have the tremendous effects budget that the Speed Racer movie used to transform itself into some kind of new age over-cartoon. Rather than being more cartoon than cartoon, Yatterman sticks to the spirit and the letter of the original: it’s a silly kid’s cartoon with a little toilet humor. Just replace “toilet” with “Miike".
For the vast majority of its history, Studio Ghibli has been a two-man show. Recent years have seen new directors like Goro Miyazaki (2006’s disaster Tales from Earthsea) and Hiromasa Yonebayashi (last month’s reportedly excellent The Borrower Arrietty), but Ghibli’s filmography is essentially a long list of films directed by either Hayao Miyazaki or Isao Takahata.
This isn’t a complaint: these two directors have an amazing track record, but considering their ever-advancing ages and ever-receding Metacritic scores, one wonders whether Ghibli has begun to find new blood with enough haste.
A few years ago, there was a mini-trend for stories that directly addressed the lives of manga/anime fans. Genshiken was the gentle one showing otaku lead eccentric, but essentially happy, lives, Welcome to the NHK was the depressing one full of miserable people, and Densha Otoko was the ridiculous magical-girlfriend fairy tale targeting people who desperately wanted to believe it was real. Peepo Choo is what happens when the preferred Western otaku fantasy — The Japan That Loved Me — collides with a screaming exploitation film fantasy of nonstop sex and killing.
It might come as something of a shock to novice Japtoon fans, but there was a time when Koichi Mashimo, the founder of one-time Production IG subsidiary Bee Train and director of every single miserable animated installment of the .hack//talentless multimedia franchise, was capable of producing entertaining television. Before he started making the exact same show about girls with guns and lesbian innuendo set to a Yuki Kaijura soundtrack every other year, proving what a bad idea an animated version of Blade of the Immortal was, and finally hitting rock-bottom working on porn game adaptations, Mashimo managed to turn out several surprisingly watchable pieces of animated entertainment: two episodes of Dominion: Tank Police, Dirty Pair: Project Eden, and tonight’s featured programme: The Irresponsible Captain Tylor.
As if our lackluster coverage of FanimeCon 2010 on Otaku USA Magazine’s website wasn’t enough, I went ahead and posted the rest of my photos from the convention on our tumblr.
“Going to an anime convention is just like being in war, because it’s long prolonged stretches of boredom punctuated by brief moments of extreme terror.”