from www.smh.com.au...
Animation nation
It is a realm with engineered people and no limits. And it's reshaping global pop culture. Deborah Cameron examines the billion-dollar anime phenomenon.
Sex, they insist with absolute courtesy, is what it's about. Violence, too. Look at history and you see war, look at life and you see sex. Be honest. It's what we want; we're programmed that way.
For these two Japanese men, rated among the world's most influential animated filmmakers, sex and violence are inescapable.
Tokyo-based producer Mitsuhisa Ishikawa and director Mamoru Oshii prevail over an animated world where "people" are re-engineered. Not necessarily reborn as robots, but biologically altered to be more obedient, less moral and more unfeeling. The bodies are harder as well and, handily, they can be rebuilt from spare parts and recharged when the arms get wrenched off in fights or the chest cavity explodes.
Dark doesn't begin to describe the worst bits of these movies. And yet Ishikawa, the son of rice farmers, talks of restraint. He test-screens his movies on his daughters, who are 15 and 8. "I would never ever produce works that I cannot show to my girls," he says. "That's my policy."
Certainly, the influence of Japanese animation filmmakers runs deep. Anime, as it's known, has emerged as one of Japan's most visible cultural exports. In 2002, royalties from worldwide sales of anime, video games, films, art, music and fashion contributed $US12.5 billion ($17.1 billion) to the Japanese economy.
In fact, according to research published this year by the Tokyo-based Marubeni Research Institute, 60 per cent of the world's animation output comes from Japan. Think of Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh!, Digimon, Powerpuff Girls and all the rest, then throw in the world's stockpile of Game Boys, Playstations and Xboxes.
Animation - at least that made with an adult audience in mind - has become a big drawcard at film festivals and international retrospectives, of which the Japanese Film Festival in late Sydney next month is just one. But the interest in anime isn't confined to cinema screens. Next month a special DVD containing all 51 episodes of the classic Astroboy series from the 1980s will be released in Australia.
Opening in Sydney early next month is an exhibition focused on the Japanese animation studio Production IG. The exhibition, Revolutionising Anime: IG's pursuit of ultra-realistic fantasy, is being staged by the Japan Foundation and will feature original anime cells, digital images and storyboards from Production IG's films.
And for serious cultural endorsement, it is hard to go past the Booker Prize winner Peter Carey, who writes about anime in his new book. In Wrong About Japan, Carey's encounter with anime is part of the subtext of a meditation on his relationship with his 12-year-old son, Charley.
From Mamoru Oshii's animated film Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence.
Mamoru Oshii, in his films about hyper-modern societies, including the highly successful Ghost in the Shell series, is an arbiter of a world of boundless technology. Thoughts arrive telepathically, the brains and bodies of cyborgs recharge from the mains socket, their muscles and tendons look like fibre-optic cable.
The tug is always to be more graphic, to use bigger special effects, to make it startle, Oshii says. Imagination is his opponent and he's always wrestling it back. Yet, privately, Oshii has retreated to an earlier time. He has no mobile phone, no email account, not even a wristwatch. It delights him. For the rest of us, however, it's too late. Infatuated with our computers, electronic organisers, mobile phones, internet favourites and junk email, and in relationships with the digitised voices that answer our phones, we are well on the way to cyborg citizenship. Depressed? Wait, there's more.
"There is a very tiny difference between whether those tools are inside of your body or outside it," Oshii says. "Really, it doesn't matter. You have already become part of the machine; you have become a device."
Ishikawa thinks that Oshii, who keeps a basset hound and always includes one in his films, would be happier as a dog. "Not right," Oshii says, "but, for sure, life would be simpler." And then, as he tilts his head and scratches it, he wonders aloud about the ears and tail. Momentarily, it looks like he might change his mind.
It is all a bit surreal inside the world of Japanese animation. Given the power of a team of animators (often up to 30 people to work on one character) and computers the size of office buildings to drive the design along, truly anything is possible. Got an inkling of yourself as a cyborg? Plug in. Want to be a dog? Just bark.
Almost without seeking the role, Japan has found itself cast as a counterweight to the United States, the traditional powerhouse of popular culture. "In fact, from pop music to consumer electronics, architecture to fashion and food to art, Japan has far greater cultural influence now than it had in the 1980s, when it was an economic superpower," wrote the Washington journalist Douglas McCray in his influential essay "Gross national cool", published in Foreign Policy magazine last year.
The handful of big Japanese studios to have found themselves at the forefront are there without much marketing effort of their own. And now with money sloshing in from Hollywood, it is an international mainstream phenomenon.
At the Venice Film Festival last month, Japan's biggest and most successful film company, Studio Ghibli, scored a standing ovation for its latest movie, Howl's Moving Castle, scheduled for release in Australia next year. The film's director, Hayao Miyazaki, won a technical-achievement award and is being spoken of as a contender for an Academy award next year. His first Oscar came in 2002 for Spirited Away, a feature-length animation.
When Oshii's film Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence was screened at Cannes this year, it followed the success of the first movie in the series, Ghost in the Shell, which in 1998 surprised everyone by becoming the biggest-selling video in the US.
Conventional filmmakers have found it impossible to ignore the trend. Quentin Tarantino included a long animated sequence in Kill Bill and the groundbreaking film The Matrix was anime-inspired, as was James Cameron's Dark Angel. Not surprising, then, that major Hollywood studios including Disney, Steven Spielberg's DreamWorks and Pixar are involved with investments, collaborative deals and distribution arrangements.
Anime first appeared on TV in Japan around 1960 and started gathering a wider audience about 15 years ago. But the origins go back further. To see where it really started, a short Tokyo train ride is recommended.
Between catnaps, passengers eyes drift to advertisements strung in groups, like neat rows of flags, from the carriage roof. Livening up the pitch everywhere are cartoon characters. Credit-card firms, sake brewers, off-the-plan real estate brokers, pharmaceutical manufacturers, face cream companies, everyone actually, uses them.
The elements of anime itself - fast-moving plots, a world spelled out in plain old good and evil, easily digested in small bites - can be traced from the comic book, known in Japan as manga, which comes in dozens of themes from murder mysteries to tender romances, warrior robot wars and explicit porn. And even before that, to the centuries-old tradition of wood-block printing, which combines artistic interpretation and precisely rendered drawing with a sense of graphic design that looks modern and alive even today. Transferred to film, anime entered a new zone.
While it can easily match the pace and brilliance of Hollywood, its producers have nowhere near the glitz or the ego. There is no bus to take you on an MGM-style backlot tour.
Production IG, for example, which made Ghost in the Shell and the animation for Kill Bill, has its head-quarters on a backstreet. There are so many bicycles lined up under the veranda and parked inside the front door in the small lobby that it looks like a pitstop on a triathlon course.
On the top floor, Mitsuhisa Ishikawa, the president and chief executive of Production IG, who last year was a finalist in the Ernst & Young World Entrepreneur of the Year contest, describes how he fought and beat Disney and Studio Ghibli for top billing on a recent collaboration. But Ishikawa would prefer to say it another way. Making a flat line through the air with his finger, he says: "We sit on the same level."
As business executives go in conservative Japan, he is unusual. First, and fittingly, he is quite animated, and he waves his hands and cranks up the pitch of his voice during the most telling parts of his stories.
As a filmmaker, particularly with Oshii as the director, Ishikawa has had to suppress at times strong reservations about whether audiences would be interested in what they made. Without fail, he says, the preview screenings always leave him deeply nervous that his latest film will be a flop. Oshii is the confident one.
A couple of days later, Oshii is sitting across the table smoking the third of what will be seven cigarettes in an hour. He's describing the way it works in an animation studio. Unusually for an anime director, Oshii does not draw. Instead, he conveys his ideas - some of them weirdly complex and abstract - to illustrators who bring them to life. The characters and the turns in the plot all start inside his head.
The "star" of the cast of Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence was distilled from the work of 30 animators, all separately drawing the Oshii vision.
"I had to unify them," he says, rubbing his eyebrows at the memory of it. Understandable, then, that Innocence took four years to make.
In that infinite process, the director's skill is to control the story-lines and inject discipline into the studio.
The greatest modern advance of filmmaking - digitisation - has added anarchy as animators continually dip back into the film, fiddling and refining frames. They won't let go, e complains. No one ever shouts "Cut!". And on a film set where actors never tire or flounce off to their trailers, the animators keep going.
So when it comes to the question about which is harder to make, Oshii, who has also directed live action films, is emphatic: "An anime character is much more difficult than a living actor."
Revolutionising Anime: IG's pursuit of ultra-realistic fantasy opens on November 4 at the Japan Foundation's gallery at Chifley Plaza in the city.
The 2004 Japanese Film Festival opens on November 29 at the Dendy Opera Quays cinemas. The Animania festival runs this weekend at Sydney Town Hall.
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