Japanese film and the political right

[Michael Badzik]

Sylvia Chong wrote:

> >Or perhaps this is a result of the hollowing out of the Japanese 
filmgoing
> >audience in the seventies, with the audience becoming much younger, and
> >its older members much more likely to be male. The sort of audience
> >usually offered up cute animals and cartoon characters for its younger
> >members, nudity and guns for the older ones, and neither one thought to
> >need a lot of character development. Manga or not, the stories were
> >destined to become less complex in this scenario.
> 
> I wonder if it is fair to characterize the turn from "depth" and "realism"
> in Japanese cinema as necessarily a degeneration of quality, or even, as I
> think is being implied, weakening recent films or anime's capacity for a
> being "political."

I agree. In fact, I offered the alternate explanation (above, first 
paragraph) in large part because - and I have spent a good deal of time 
thinking about this lately  - I can find no inherent reason why manga 
cannot be the basis of a good film. While there appear to be more critical 
misses than hits with manga-based film and television works, one of my 
all-time favorite pieces of Japanese television was a show based on 
some manga stories of Tsuge Yoshiharu (_Akai Hana_, NHK, 1976, 
directed by Sasaki Shouichirou). I would love to hear other comments on 
the problems of taking manga to film.

> Popular culture, being popular, is susceptible to the charge of being 
> complicit with the dominant values in a society, but one can read 
> these text very creatively if one tries. I don't just mean critics, but 
> the consumers as well.

Yes, this is exactly what I pointed out a little while back in the "Satchi" 
thread. The consumers can be quite sophisticated in how they approach 
things, more so than they are usually given credit for. And in many cases 
they understand how to read a genre (or format, or medium) better than 
a lot of the non-participating critics.

Michael Badzik
mike at vena.com