The Condimental Op

by Andrez Bergen

  And absent here is one of the more hilarious characters from the earlier celluloid production, that of Dick Shawn’s flower-tossing Lorenzo St. DuBois, known as just plain ‘L.S.D.’ to his friends, who took on the stage role of Adolf Hitler and rendered him a hip-jive flower child with a swastika armband.

  This time around the honour to goose-step the boards for Germany goes to cross-dressing director Roger DeBris (debris, get it?), played by actor Gary Beach, who also camped it up in TV series like Queer As Folk and Will & Grace.

  Gay, it seems, has replaced flower power in the mind of Mel Brooks some three decades after he originally wrote and directed the yarn, this time with emphasis on the characters of DeBris and his catty, posturing partner, Carmen Ghia (Roger Bart), along with supporting characters modelled on the Village People.

  Brooks’ script is loaded with high-school-level sexual innuendo, vulgarity, occasionally offensive racial stereotypes, ageism and anything else he wants to bludgeon with a blunt instrument — all delivered with such banal exuberance and gusto it somehow works.

  Great for a bit of toe-tapping and a mild guffaw or three, The Producers may be set in the 1960s — but the superior 1968 version it’s not.

  I don’t know about you, but I’m a big fan of the majority of the stuff that’s been pushed through by Pixar, in particular The Incredibles, Monsters, Inc. and the Toy Story series.

  Cars, however, left me cold.

  This is the review I did in the Daily Yomiuri in 2006. Steve Jobs was still alive and kicking, Pixar was relatively independent of Disney, and Cars 2 nowhere near the horizon.

  Pixar’s Cars Stalls Mid-Race

  Ever since Steve Jobs rather presciently snapped up the former computer graphics division of Lucasfilm, Ltd., for a measly ten million dollars back in ‘86, Pixar has accelerated its winning streak in Hollywood animation stakes, against inconsistent competitors like DreamWorks.

  Last year was the studio’s most profitable to date, raking in fifteen times Jobs’ original investment — mostly on the back of The Incredibles (2004) and Finding Nemo (2003). This January, Pixar also scored the keys to the Magic Kingdom, via its merger with Disney.

  It’s been a mesmerizing ride.

  Throughout its twenty-year jaunt, through earlier hits like Toy Story (1995) and Monsters, Inc. (2001), Pixar’s strength has been not just its über-progressive eye for CG detailing, but the team’s sense of humour and flexibility with its intended target-audiences — an animated sortie by Pixar can appeal equally to preschool whippersnappers and grouchy retirees’ laugh quotas.

  The versatility of the studio’s subject matter over the years has also been enviable, Pixar proving itself as adept at lampooning cultural icons as it has been at unfurling cool characters for kids’ lunchboxes.

  On first impressions, with Pixar’s founding father, John Lasseter, back in the driver’s seat after a seven-year directorial hiatus, Cars has all the essential ingredients to create another sure-fire winner, chequered flag, lunchbox and all.

  But scrape beneath its waxed and polished exterior, and you may walk away a tad disappointed.

  Let’s start with the plot premise: Churlish, high-octane motor-racing rookie Lightning McQueen (Owen Wilson) sets the track afire and is all set to take the national championship before an accidental detour off Route 66 sets him in the slow-lane in a sleepy little hick town called Radiator Springs.

  There he realizes the error of his ways and becomes best buddies with a multicultural cross-section of motor vehicles bearing engines of gold; he also gets the chance to fall in love with someone aside from himself, and saves said town from obscurity.

  All in all, it’s a bit like Toy Story on wheels, filtered through a homogenized host of celluloid predecessors including City Slickers, U-Turn and Petticoat Junction.

  While at times quirky, mostly this yarn borders on pedestrian. Chances are it’s all the backseat drivers involved — Lasseter may have written and directed with Joe Ranft (who was tragically, if ironically, killed last year in an automobile accident), but there was scripting input from at least nine other people.

  The cast also struggles to turn over. Cars plunks 81-year-old veteran actor Paul Newman alongside the more comic-inclined Wilson, Michael Keaton, Cheech Marin, and Pixar regular John Ratzenberger (Hamm the Piggy Bank in Toy Story).

  Ratzenberger is side-tracked (as Mack the transport truck) until the final credits, Marin fills out a tired Latino stereotype, Keaton isn’t allowed driving time to develop his surly take on McQueen’s chief racing rival, and Wilson is unusually flat as the stock-car enfant terrible.

  It’s left to Newman to save the (spoken-word) day, but even his gravelly intonations — as Doc Hudson, the 1951 Hudson Hornet M.D. with a mysterious, racy past — aren’t quite up to the Herculean task here.

  Lasseter has confirmed that the character name of Lightning McQueen is in part a homage to the late, great Steve McQueen, the actor who pushed the driving envelope in movies like Bullitt and Le Mans; Newman himself has been a renowned car racing nut for years on end. Classic Pixar would’ve tweaked this angle for more than it was worth, yet all we get here is Lightning McQueen’s racing number (95) that is a mundane reference to the year Toy Story was released.

  There are some genuinely funny sequences here, like the tractor tipping, the closing-credits Ratzenberger rant, and the flying bugs which are, yes, VW Beetles. But these moments are fleeting and spaced far apart.

  Most surprising is the lack of depth in the personas — particularly since Pixar usually renders insightful character designs and personalities. This may be just animation, but colouring between the lines is essential.

  Luigi, the 1959 Fiat 500, and Fillmore, the 1960 Volkswagen Kombi van, offer cute asides, but visualizing central character Sally (voiced by Bonnie Hunt) as a 2002 Porsche 911 is a bland choice for the love interest. Wouldn’t a 1969 VW Karmann Ghia or a 1960 Volvo P1800S Sports qualify as far more sexy options, if we’re going to get all auto-erotic?

  For a studio following up on its two most internationally successful films, in its 20th anniversary year, Cars is Pixar’s least satisfying outing.

  Unless you reside in the heartland of the American Midwest, twiddle with V8 engines, listen to country music, smash the odd mailbox, vote for George W., have secret hankerings for reruns of The Beverley Hillbillies, or adore NASCAR racing — as Lasseter does — your attention span may start sputtering before you’ve completed the first lap.

  I’ll throw in one final movie review here, for a movie by Satoshi Kon.

  Kon was one of my favourite anime directors, a creative genius and lovely guy I had the opportunity to once interview. He died far too young at age 46.

  The man had a cheeky sense of humour undercutting an impressive vision and equally influenced fellow filmmakers Darren Aronofsky and Christopher Nolan.

  Kon’s Millennium Actress (2001) remains one of my favourite movies, holding quite the amount of sway over my novel One Hundred Years of Vicissitude, and in 2006 — four years before Kon passed away — I reviewed his last movie for the Daily Yomiuri.

  I loved the romp, even though I went to a screening here in Tokyo that was in Japanese, without the benefit of subtitles, and my grasp of the lingo was tenuous at best.

  Sometimes there is no language barrier.

  Sometimes.

  Paprika Spices Up the Anime Aesthetic

  The opening minutes of Paprika introduce the pivotal character of police detective Konakawa (voiced by Akio Otuska), and his recurring nightmare, which revolves around the spliced-and-looped discovery of a homicide victim.

  Director Satoshi Kon then undercuts this traumatic vignette with references to a roll call of Hollywood standards, like Roman Holiday, Cecil B. DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth, Tarzan the Ape Man, and Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train, all rolled up into one sweet dream-sequence.

  It additionally ushers in the titular character of this exposition.

  Paprika is exotic, su
per-powered, and a femme fatale with a Peter Pan streak. She also doesn’t exist.

  She’s the cerebral flip side of Dr. Atsuko Chiba (Megumi Hayashibara), the cold and austere head-honcho of a research team that’s developed a new gadget called the ‘DC Mini’.

  It’s a headset that enables Chiba to free-fall into patient’s psyche, hack into their dreams, and record the encounter; she does so under the guise of her far more liberated alter ego, and while the psychotherapeutic medicinal possibilities are an enticement, there’s obviously a more alluring impetus in Chiba’s case.

  Then, stage left, a bunch of DC Mini prototypes are stolen by a mysterious psycho-terrorist, and the unravelling of a sinister tangle of events leaves the fate of the world suspended in the balance.

  The movie dips precariously, not only between Chiba’s contradictory personas, but also between the twin realms of conscious reality, with its natural laws, and that of dreams — where those rules are remoulded or rejected entirely.

  There are moments here where you could misconstrue this yarn as a remake of Jennifer Lopez’s patchy turn-of-the-millennium vehicle The Cell, except that the original story for Paprika was penned in 1993 by Yasutaka Tsutsui, who created that other recent anime hit, Toki o Kakeru Shojo (aka The Girl Who Leapt Through Time).

  Kon himself previously helmed the anime movies Perfect Blue (1997), Millennium Actress (2001), and Tokyo Godfathers (2003); he worked closely with Koji Morimoto on the remarkable ‘Magnetic Rose’ segment of Katsuhiro Otomo’s anime omnibus Memories in 1995, and co-wrote the screenplay here.

  Kon and Tsutsui themselves voice two of the more enigmatic characters — the bartenders Mr. Jinnai and Mr. Kuga — and, even by anime standards, this one’s completely out there.

  Anybody familiar with outings by Kon, Morimoto, Hayao Miyazaki or Mamoru Oshii, would appreciate that anime bends the rules of moviemaking, and in Paprika it’s like Dr. Seuss has reworked the script and tweaked the visuals for Oshii’s thought-provoking Ghost in the Shell (1995).

  The film rates as the most mesmerizing animation long-player since Miyazaki’s Spirited Away five years ago, and Kon exhibits an equally playful willingness to pitchfork the texture of the more dramatic moments.

  Am I gushing yet?

  They’re not skimping in the voice actor stakes here — Hayashibara and Koichi Yamadera (Dr. Morio Osanai) previously lent their dulcet tones to two of the most iconographic of recent anime characters, Faye Valentine and Spike Spiegel, in Cowboy Bebop, while Otsuka voiced Batou in the Ghost in the Shell franchise.

  Add to this some stunning background art, peerless integration of 2-D and 3-D animation, and some wonderful character designs by Studio Ghibli regular Masashi Ando.

  But it’s obvious that Kon’s forte is in the surreal interaction of reality and dreams — which all too often drift into nightmares.

  The recurring motif of a parade of Japanese cultural knickknacks (some traditional, and others kitsch, from dancing Kewpie dolls and tin toys to marching sets of samurai armor, torii gates yanked right out of shrines, and the disturbing scaled-down Statue of Liberty from Odaiba) is downright superb.

  Next up, food.

  Like Homer J. Simpson, I seriously do love my fugu (blow fish). Simple as that. I don’t care if it can kill you, painfully.

  Probably why I devoted an entire chapter to the cuisine in One Hundred Years of Vicissitude.

  This genuflection was published in Geek magazine in 2009. And I just looked up genuflection in my thesaurus. Nice.

  I Want My Fugu!

  There’s a question on my mind, and it’s one I’ve mulled over for years, ever since Homer Simpson demanded fugu at a Japanese restaurant, that time when the sushi chef was out canoodling Ms. Krabappel on the backseat of her car.

  Cue assistant chef’s stressful splicing and dicing of the deflating delicacy.

  For those precious insular types without an operational TV who may’ve missed this episode, and double-up on the offence by having no access to Wikipedia or even a moth-eaten edition of the Encylopædia Britannica, fugu is the Japanese name for blowfish, and the majority of these fish have extremely high levels of a neurotoxin called tetrodotoxin in their ovaries, liver, intestines, gonads and skin.

  These little fellas, with a penchant for getting sizeable relatively quickly, in fact get honourable mention on both Wikipedia and in the Britannica for being the second most-poisonous vertebrates in the world. There’s also no antidote. That doesn’t seem to faze the Japanese, though — apparently some 10,000 tons are consumed here each year.

  When I first came over from Australia, I really had no choice but to play Homer and indulge in the expensive dish, and the best way to have fugu is sashimi-style, sliced exceptionally thin and raw, and served with a special dipping sauce called ponzu (a canny blend of citrus juice and soy sauce).

  You can also have it deep fried or conjured up in a nabe (hot pot), but for me it’s sensational as sashimi, combined with fugu hirezake: toasted fugu fin served in hot saké. It smells a wee bit fishy, but has quite the celebratory kick to it

  You can usually tell the fugu eateries by the huge storefront tanks full of the fish: Swimming, carousing, looking a little the worse-for-wear, and occasionally floating listlessly upside down.

  The allusion of those bottom-up types runs a little close to home when it comes to fugu.

  Both in fiction and reality the fish has had a huge impact on the culture of this country. While it’s the foodstuff of kings (but not the emperor, apparently), lauded in haiku, and all Japanese office workers with big annual bonuses aspire to tuck into the aquatic delight, there’s a hint of the morbid and suicidal involved, along with some mention of egos quashed. Fugu, while outrageously priced, is the Russian roulette of the wining and dining set — and fatality is, after all, the great leveller.

  Theatrical rumour has it that the flamboyant Chairman Kaga (played by actor Takeshi Kaga), of Iron Chef notoriety, died of fugu poisoning after the series ended in Japan, but kabuki star Bando Mitsugoro VIII really did die (of paralysis and asphyxi-ation) just hours after a stint in a Kyoto restaurant in 1975 — having thrown care to the winds, boasting invulnerability, and tossed down four of the fish’s highly-toxic livers.

  And then there’s that question I hinted at earlier, the one that’s followed me ever since I saw Homer carted off to hospital with suspected fugu poisoning.

  The origin of the fish’s consumption in Japan remains unclear —it definitely goes back centuries, and there’ve been possible fugu table scraps found in burial mounds that date back to the Jomon period, over 2,400 years ago.

  The question for me is this: Who were the very first people who decided to snack on this exceptionally unattractive fish, and how on earth did they work out which bits were OK for consumption, and which other parts would grant them slow, excruciating death?

  Were short straws involved? Furry dice? Some kind of class-system pecking order? Or just manic rounds of jan-ken-pon (rock-paper-scissors)?

  Personally, every time I eat fugu (which has actually been only twice), I canonize the experience — then spend the rest of the night fretting that I’ll die in my sleep, much like the unluckier pioneers of aquatic vertebratic cuisine before me.

  Back in February 2011, I worked with Francesco Prandoni at anime studio Production I.G, the people who did Ghost in the Shell and the anime sequence in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill: Vol. 1.

  Endeavouring to avoid the stilted, unnatural English subtitles that typically come with Japanese anime, they asked me to get on board and make them unnatural in my own special way, ‘ready’ to hit the festival circuit that year.

  This was for their new pet project Drawer Hobs.

  Fortunately for me, as this can be a painstaking process to get the timing right and the correct number of words on-screen at any particular time — without overloading the viewer — I loved the film.

  It was directed by Kazuchika Kise, who may not be so well known, but has a sensat
ional CV — think senior animator at I.G’s Studio 1, with credits including the two Patlabor movies helmed by Mamoru Oshii, along with Ghost in the Shell and its sequel Innocence.

  Kise was also involved in the production of Blood: The Last Vampire, Musashi: The Dream of the Last Samurai, and all the xxxHOLiC animated adaptations and he did character designs for the Blood: The Last Vampire spin-off, Blood-C.

  For Drawer Hobs, Kise conjured up the original story concept, which was then touched up by Daishiro Tanimura (Ghost Hound), and even the supercute character designs are also by Kise — in collaboration with Ryo Hirata (Oblivion Island).

  The surprising background art, which is often simple yet surprisingly effective, has been rendered by Hiromasa Ogura (Ghost in the Shell, Jin-Roh, Ghost Hound), and spot-on voice acting work comes from Mamiko Noto (Rin in Inuyasha) and Etsuko Kozakura (Tamama in Sgt. Frog).

  I decided to insert here a snippet of the to-and-fro email process that Francesco and I went through in order to get the subtitles done. Not sure it makes sense, but basically we tackled each subtitle according to the time-code.

  If you can locate this 24-minute joy, take a squizz.

  Subtitling The Drawer Hobs

  0021 01:02:12:05/01:02:15:07

  “Drawer” can’t be used singularly since there’s more than one drawer here, so we’d always have to use the plural. If you really prefer to keep it singular, we could go with “dresser” instead –but personally I don’t love the word, and I think it’s better to use “drawers” to match up with the title of the movie itself!

  0067 01:05:56:12/01:06:00:03

  “Furniture is not fixed with spurs” –unfortunately I thought straight away about cowboy spurs (wikipedia.org/wiki/Spur), and I think a lot of people might. I tried checking if “spur” is commonly used in America for earthquake safety, but only came up with a sharp, thorny growth on some animals’ legs.