Anime Explosion! Page 28

  Anime was on the verge of going international in a big way when Windaria came out. The year was 1986, two years before Akira. Nothing in American animation existed then, or perhaps exists now, to compare to Windaria. In its breadth of story and scope of ideas, this anime feature is actually closer to Western epics such as David Lean’s Doctor Zhivago than to anything produced by Walt Disney.

  Isu’s Story

  Windaria is a continent (or possibly an entire world) where the small village of Saki (simply called the Valley in the English dub) borders an inland sea. The humble farmers of Saki are concerned about the growing talk of war between Paro (the Shadowlands) and Itha (Lunaria). The two rulers are angry at each other and eager for battle, while their respective children know that a war would shatter their secret love. The peasant Isu, however, gets caught up as a cat’s-paw in the growing hostilities. . . .

  For those of the post-Pokémon generation, Windaria looks decidedly old-school. For its time, though, it was state of the art, and its creators had solid pedigrees even then. Director Kunihiko Yuyama began with television, creating animation for the series Magical Princess Minky Momo, The Three Musketeers, and GoShogun. He’s gone on to work on Leda: Fantastic Adventures of Yohko, Wedding Peach, And So the Summer Began(the second movie based on Kimagure Orange Road), and Slayers. He’s even directed a two-part hentai comedy titled Weather Report Girl. His most-seen work, though, is Pokémon; he’s worked on television episodes as well as films.

  Windaria is based on a novel by Keisuke Fujikawa. It’s not surprising that it lends itself to animation, since Fujikawa has also been involved with anime for years. His TV anime resume includes Uchu Senkan Yamato, Cat’s Eye (a TV series about female cat burglars), and several Go Nagai projects, including one of the earliest giant-robot shows, Grandizer. At the other end of the scale, he’s also written for the Godzilla-silly kids show Ultraman.

  Fujikawa’s novel, read over the beginning and ending as narration, suggests the memoirs of Isu, now an old man approaching death. In the anime, however, we begin with Isu’s funeral, even as we hear his voice declare that he almost annihilated all of Windaria, and that he has spent the last decades of his life atoning for what he’s done. The look of the characters is decidedly Caucasian, and the whole thing is set in a quasimedieval past (although with mecha and firearms). However, there are a number of points—from the essential to the trivial—that clearly signal the movie’s Japanese roots.

  1. The Tree of Life

  This is another movie that, like My Neighbor Totoro and Gall Force: Earth Chapter I, holds a gigantic tree as an object of respect, even of worship. According to the farming peasants of Saki, this tree is said to have the power to bring pleasant memories to those sheltered by it. Although the tree grows on the border between the two lands, it is big enough to survive the war between Paro and Itha; because it grows on the border between the two lands, it could not avoid the war. It survives in better shape than the people of Saki.

  The tree also symbolizes the purity of nature, as we learn that the war is in great part about water. We briefly meet one resident of Saki, who was driven mad by drinking tainted water from Paro, and are told that in earlier times Itha shared its access to pure water from the inland sea with Paro, but that the access has been limited as tensions grew. Saki, home of the tree, has neither the tainted waters of Paro nor the human-controlled waters of Itha (which is built on land reclaimed from the inland sea and survives only through an elaborate system of locks and dams). So this is yet another case of an anime carrying asubtle pro-green message, quite compatible with Shinto’s emphasis on nature and on purity.

  2. Daikon

  Two of Saki’s peasants are Isu and his wife Marin (Alan and Marie in the dub). They grow vegetables to sell in Itha’s marketplace. We see them growing tomatoes and lettuce, which aren’t exactly culturally specific. However, we also see Isu harvesting a distinctly Japanese vegetable: the daikon. A member of the radish family, the daikon resembles a large white carrot, and can grow to weigh a whopping fifty pounds!

  The appearance of a daikon cues a Japanese audience that the people of Saki are rather like Japanese, because they grow a quintessentially Japanese vegetable. You know who to cheer for even before the plot gets rolling in earnest.

  3. Shinju

  We’ve already noted a very Japanese plot device in Windaria. Paro’s Prince Ahanas and Itha’s Princess Jill (Roland and Veronica in the dub) have been lovers since before the movie begins. They have to sneak away from their respective kingdoms, though, to meet on a stone bridge that borders the two lands. They resolve to resist the war fever growing between the two countries.

  Although Paro’s technology includes machine guns and flying machines, the couple are hampered in their love by having carrier pigeons as their most sophisticated communications medium. In an early scene, we even see Isu take the message from one bird, read it aloud to his fellow peasants, then re-attach it. It’s no surprise that the death of one of these birds helps propel the plot.

  Both Ahanas and Jill promise to heed the dying wishes of their parents, before realizing that those wishes require them to wage war on each other. This is, therefore, more than just the conflict of giri and ninjo, duty and desire. They are responsible for whole kingdoms, and can no more ignore the political consequences of their love than Hamlet could ignore the implications of his ghost/father’s wishes. Hamlet, after all, wasn’t just avenging the death of his father: he was expected to kill a king.

  It’s an altogether impossible situation, and Jill knows it. When they meet on the bridge for the last time, Jill (who had earlier—and playfully—stolen Ahanas’s pistol without his knowledge) shoots Ahanas withhis own gun. He lives long enough to tell Jill “I love you” one last time. We then see her raise the gun to her own head. . . . The camera pulls back to a long shot, so we see only the bridge. We hear a shot, a splash, and know exactly what happened.

  The word, shinju, by the way, doesn’t mean death or suicide. The Chinese characters literally mean “center of the heart” and refer to the sincerity of the people committing suicide—“people” because shinju usually involves a pact between two or more people killing themselves as a form of protest.

  4. The Dragon Kingdom

  This is more an allusion than a direct reference, but it’s something a Japanese audience would pick up on. Isu receives a commission from a shadowy figure (actually a courtier from Paro) promising wealth and power in exchange for carrying out a few tasks. After he does, Isu abandons his wife for a life of drunken debauchery at the court of Paro. The only thing that shakes him loose is an assassination attempt. He sneaks out of the kingdom and returns to Saki, only to find that the war between Paro and Itha had spilled over even into his pastoral valley.

  This is similar to the legend of Urashima Taro, a Japanese folktale that appears in a number of variants.1 In the classic version, the forty-year-old fisherman Urashima Taro abandons his mother and his village to visit the undersea Dragon Kingdom. Finding this kingdom isn’t his idea. In some versions of the story, Urashima has simply taken his boat too far out; his nets pull in a huge turtle with a five-colored shell that turns into the Sea Princess Otohime. A version from Okinawa has Urashima rescue a small turtle that is being stoned, kicked, and otherwise tormented by thoughtless children. A few days after Urashima returns the small turtle to the sea, he’s visited by a huge turtle that invites him under the sea.

  In the glorious Dragon Kingdom Urashima is greeted by Sea Princess Otohime, who has fallen in love with the man from the land. She invites him to a marvelous dinner, after which she invites him to her bed. Urashima dallies with Otohime and her ladies-in-waiting for what he believes is three years. When he returns to his village, however, he finds that fifty years have passed, and everyone he knew, including his mother, is either dead or changed beyond recognition.

  Other cultures have similar tales, of course. Swiss poet Charles Ramuz wrote a similar story, in which a soldier tempted by the
Devil took a three-day pass, only to find that he had been away from his unit for three years. (This became part of Igor Stravinsky’s classic musical drama, L’Histoire du Soldat.) In America, “Rip Van Winkle” is one of the best-known stories by Washington Irving. It tells of a man who, having fun with supernatural beings, ends up sleeping for twenty years instead of one night.

  Of course, each culture would be most familiar with its own variation on this theme. Isu’s dalliance, escape, and homecoming would read like Rip Van Winkle to us, but would remind Japanese of Urashima Taro.2

  5. The Phoenix

  The movie opens, as mentioned above, at Isu’s funeral. This is the first time we see what is apparently an unremarkable occurrence on Windaria. A large bird, seemingly made of glowing red light, rises from the body and soars out over the inland sea. This happens several times in the anime, and usually involves the birds flying toward some strange flying machine that crosses the horizon from time to time. Perhaps the ship is symbolic of the enlightenment that Isu wrote he spent most of a long lifetime trying to achieve.

  Despite its swallow-like tail, the bird spirit suggests nothing so much as the best-known bird in Japanese pop culture: the phoenix of Osamu Tezuka. Although his manga Hi no Tori spanned the last twenty of his forty years as a cartoonist, the meaning of Dr. Tezuka’s bird is consistent: it “symbolizes human existence that transcends good and evil.”3 It would be too simplistic to say that the spirit-bird only means that the dead have transcended the concerns of the living with questions of good and evil. This entire story is about the ultimate meaning-lessness of this duality. Was Paro wrong in waging war against Itha? Was Itha wrong in withholding fresh water from Paro? Was Isu wrong in wanting to seek fame and fortune, even if it meant forsaking his wife and helping to start a war? The last question would seem to be the easiest to answer, since Isu spends the rest of his life working to rebuild Windaria after the disastrous war. But would he have tried to rebuild Windaria if he hadn’t caused its destruction? Perhaps it was the only way his soul could have achieved enlightenment. The simple answer, of course, is that there are no simple answers, on Earth or in Windaria.

  Popular culture, alas, is ephemeral; very much here today, only to be gone tomorrow. A decade ago, before nihilistic mecha-oriented works like Akira caught the attention of animation buffs beyond Japan, Windaria was a striking example of the art as well as a heartfelt plea for peace. It’s hard to find now, but it’s still a brilliant piece of art. And its message of the uselessness of war has never been more timely.

  6. Water

  This hardly seems Japan-specific: water is a biological necessity for every plant and animal on Earth. Water, however, has great significance in the Shinto religion. Shinto shrines keep a tsukubai, a stone basin of water, so that worshippers can rinse their hands and mouth. The earliest Shinto shrines were usually built near a river, a spring, or a waterfall. These fresh-water sources would be sought out for geographical as well as sacred reasons: the Japanese islands are surrounded by undrinkable sea water, so fresh-water sources are literally matters of life and death, for Japan as well as for Paro and Itha.

  1. Keigo Seki, trans. Robert J. Adams, Folktales of Japan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 111.

  2. There’s an especially touching use of this story in Cowboy Bebop. As the episode “Speak Like A Child” begins, Jet Black is telling Ed the story of Urashima Taro. They’re interrupted by the delivery of, of all things, an ancient Betamax videotape. Once they find a machine to play it on (which involves them meeting a VCR otaku), they find that it is a tape of Faye Valentine, made when she was only thirteen years old. (The severely injured Faye had been cryonically suspended for over fifty years until her injuries could be healed.) The jaded and cynical adult Faye watches her wide-eyed adolescent self literally cheer her on from decades in the past. In the later episode “Hard Luck Woman,” the Urashima Taro connection becomes explicit as Faye meets one of her old classmates—now a withered old woman in a wheelchair.

  3. Hidemi Kakuta, trans. Keiko Katsuya, Catalogue of the Osamu Tezuka Exhibition (Tokyo: Asahi Shimbun, 1990), 244.

  The Wings of Honnêamise: Tora-san in Space

  The first film from the Gainax studio features a nobody as the hero—a nobody who makes you look through the sky, past the weather, and into what is possible . . .

  American fans of anime and manga these days tend to be young. They weren’t around in the dizzying decade for manned space flight that began in 1961 when the Soviet Union put cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin into orbit and ended in 1969 when Apollo 11 landed on the moon. For some, the space race was an extension of the terrestrial Cold War between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.—those who were rocketed into space were seen as “single-combat warriors” playing out a greater geopolitical game as well as daring to take one of humankind’s riskiest voyages.1 The Wings of Honnêamise, the first fruit of Studio Gainax, has a very different premise. What if a nation planned for space travel before the technology was ready? What if the best kind of rocketry they could manage was a half-baked contraption that wasn’t much better than a Wright brothers prototype? And what if the space explorers of that country were treated not as national heroes but as a national joke—a bunch of misfits, losers, and slackers unfit for “real” flying?

  The roots of Studio Gainax actually go back about a decade before The Wings of Honnêamise. In August 1981 science-fiction fans in the Osaka area got together at a convention known as Daicon 3.2 The convention opened with a five-minute piece of animation produced by some college art students, most of whom had never worked in the medium before (at least, according to the Gainax website; it’s also said that the nucleus of Gainax met while working on the Macross series).3 By the following autumn, however, they had produced three works under the name General Products (which was also the name of a sci-fi store they had started). For Daicon 4, they again produced a five-minute animation clip that surprised its audience with its technical brilliance. By the next month, these amateur animators were making ambitious plans to expand their work into a full-scale production called Royal Space Force. But large-scale animation required money, which required incorporation; Gainax was founded in December 1984 specifically to make Royal Space Force, which was later renamed The Wings of Honnêamise.

  The 1987 film was written and directed by Hiroyuki Yamaga, who has since gone on to become president of Gainax.4 The score was by one of the biggest names in Japanese rock music, Ryuichi Sakamoto. Also big was the budget: a record-setting eight billion yen, supplied by the Bandai toy company.

  This film follows the Royal Space Force career of an Everyman, Shirotsugu “Shiro” Lhadatt. However, for all practical purposes, we can call him Tora-san.

  The Traveling Salesman

  The Tora-san live-action movies can be found in the Guinness Book of World Records as the longest series of motion pictures centered around a single character: “a tubby, middle-aged man dressed like a pre-war market salesman: a loud, chequered suit, a woolen waistband, an undershirt, wooden sandals and a shabby hat.”5 That character is Torajiro Kuruma, known affectionately as Tora-san, a traveling salesman with a dubious track record. He never seems to succeed, from the first film Otoko wa Tsurai yo (It’s Tough Being a Man) to the last, at anything—at least, as society counts success. He’s sentimental, but he’s also got the cunning of a thief. He has a quick temper, but he also has a love for life and almost infinite compassion. His only “home base” is with his parents and his married sister’s family. Even though his brief encounters may help other people, he never seems to benefit, and just keeps moving on, like a Japanese version of another cinema icon, Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp.

  The plots for all of the Tora-san films are a formula, summed up by John Paul Catton: “Tora-san arrives in some remote Japanese town, fixing to charm the locals out of their cash. Tora-san meets a local maiden and falls in love. Tora-san finds himself on the brink of marriage and gets cold feet. Tora-san abandons his scheme and heads back
to his sister’s house in Shibamata, Tokyo, and ponders the errors of his ways while getting pickled in sake.”6 Tora-san was first brought to life on the screen in 1969 by Kiyoshi Atsumi, whose death in August 1996 at age sixty-eight finally broke the string of films at forty-eight. With a track record like that, it’s safe to say that Tora-san touched something essential and immediate in the Japanese movie-going public. Donald Richie wrote in his obituary for Atsumi:

  Coming from the working-class area of Shibamata in downtown Tokyo, Tora-san was a common man who always tried hard and fell flat. It was the fall that was funny, but what kept people coming back was his naive goodness. . . . To Japanese who grew up with Tora-san, the loss was personal. It was also a sign that tradition was dying. Though the real Shibamata had for years not resembled the cozy film version, the vision of a perfect hometown persisted because it was needed in a country in flux. Now that Tora-san is dead, a part of Japan seems gone as well.7

  That hidden (but not altogether missing) part is certainly not the drive for excellence, the quest to compete in the global economic arena with the major Western powers. It’s a more peaceful drive, linked to the human comedy. It is senryu rather than haiku, with both types of verse following the same seventeen-syllable count, but with the former commenting on the human condition while the latter looks at the natural world. Tora-san is all about falling, then rising up and persisting nonetheless. He’s all about the reassurance that life, despite large or small calamities, will go on.

  It’s Tough Being an Astronaut

  And now we are ready to meet Shiro Lhadatt, his fellow pilots, and his “family.” In the opening narration, Shiro tells the audience that he is just an average guy. His grades in school and his scores on military tests put him squarely in the middle of the pack. For once, we have an anime hero with no superpowers, no magical talismans, and not even much determination or ganbaru spirit. Shiro’s only childhood dream was flying, but that was denied him when he didn’t qualify for the Navy, where the jets were. Instead, he ends up in Honneamise’s Royal Space Force.