Miho Utsuse
A major subplot of Key the Metal Idol (1994) involves the attempt by Key to change from a robot into a real girl. Her dying grandfather/inventor told her that the change would require the energy of thirty thousand friends. She decides that the best way to harvest such energy is to become an idol singer. The reigning queen of idol singers at the time, however, is Miho Utsuse. She has it all: monstrous stage shows with elaborate theatrical set pieces, a fan-club run by the boyfriend of Key’s homegirl Sakura, sellout stadium shows. Key attends one such show and (borrowing a gesture more often seen performed by Tuxedo Mask in Sailor Moon) stabs Miho in the chest with a rose, stopping the concert.
Key had realized what the viewer was just beginning to guess: that Miho Utsuse is no longer a real singer. In an inversion of Key’s quest to move from robot to human, the onstage Miho was an android, linked to the mind of the real Miho, now a wrung-out, exhausted prisoner of the war-profiteer industrialist Ajo. She’s been driven so hard that, lately, another idol singer–wannabe has had to fill in: Beniko Komori, an aggressive young redhead who favors a harder-edged musical sound and leather dominatrix stage costumes. In the final battle, Key comes into her own and literally blows Beniko off the stage with a single note. When Key finally does meet Miho, it’s in the very last scene of the series. Key the Metal Idol draws much of its plot from the whole starmaker machinery behind the idol singer, and it’s not a pretty picture.
Mimu Emilton
Idol Project, the vehicle in which Mimu appears, was originally a computer-based role-playing game, and has now spawned three anime videos. Mimu enters a competition at the Starland Festival that puts all her abilities to the test: kids in trouble that need rescuing, stages that collapse, ninja crows that attack the stage, space aliens that hijack the competition. The entire thing, unlike Key the Metal Idol, is played pretty much for laughs. In this universe, a would-be idol singer just needs a kind heart, a pretty smile, a large dream, and a good sense of rhythm. And cute. Lotsa cute.
Princess Minerva/Cutey Kamen
Princess Minerva is strictly for laughs, an OAV that’s a parody of sword and sorcery stories as well as idol singing. Princess Minerva finds life so boring that she sponsors a talent contest, the winner of which gets to be Minerva’s bodyguard. However, she can’t resist entering her own competition as Cutey Kamen, a double tribute to Go Nagai heroines (Cutey Honey and Kekko Kamen). However, while the android Cutey Honey could convince people that she was a rock singer, Cutey Kamen has a godawful voice and sings to the accompaniment of a mechanical German band.
Onpu Segawa
Ojamajo Doremi was a four-year anime series in Japan, which also included two films, a thirteen-episode side story, and a manga adaptation. Translated into English as Magical DoReMi, only the first season was broadcast on American television. The series focuses on grade school girls who are apprentice witches, and have to perfect their magic as well as keep up with their schoolwork. The main witch is Doremi Harukaze. She’s a classic Magical Girl: energetic, clumsy, and rash at times but with a good heart. Her catchphrase: “I’m the world’s unluckiest pretty girl.”
During the first season, which premiered in 1999 and was directed in part by Junichi Sato (who directed Sailor Moon), another witch-in-training joins her class: Onpu Segawa,10 who at age eight is already a popular, prominent, and very cute idol singer, as was her mother before her. She seems friendly and polite, but not without problems. When asked to write her name on the blackboard before the obligatory speech of introduction, she draws a flowery autograph-style signature; the teacher tells her to rewrite it. Preparing to audition for a movie role, she goes to look for a room away from her new classmates, although saying it’s “nothing personal.” There are also worries that Onpu’s magical mentor Ruka, is the rival of Doremi’s mentor Rika.
In the end, Onpu sides with her classmates even at the risk of sacrificing herself. In the very last episode, with the witches and their friends graduating from sixth grade and about to scatter to junior high school, Onpu thanks Doremi for her friendship, telling her that if she hadn’t met Doremi “I would have become just another spoiled idol singer.” This is a surprisingly blunt admission that show business isn’t all happy music and screaming fans.
Mitsuki Koyama
From 2002 to 2004 Arina Tanemura created the shojo manga Full Moon o Sagashite (Searching for the Full Moon). It was popular enough to be animated for one year, yet the subject matter has little or nothing in common with most of the manga and anime that center around animated idol singers in the genre. It was one of several titles that mixed idol singing with Magical Girls; this one, however, added cancer and suicide to the mix.
Like many young girls, the orphan Mitsuki Koyama dreams of becoming an idol singer, but the dream is interrupted by a tumor growing on her vocal cords. She has difficulty sustaining her breathing, much less holding a note. All this is on top of her grandmother’s hostility toward singing, for reasons which are only explained later.
One day she sees two animals, a cat and a rabbit, holding a conversation, which includes the information that Mitsuki will die in a year’s time. These two are actually death spirits (shinigami) from the Pediatrics Division of the afterlife, and the cat, Takuto, has a proposition for Mitsuki. If she agrees at the end of one year to go quietly to the spirit world, having had the chance to reach her goal, Takuto would enable her to transform into Fullmoon,11 a teenager with no cancer but a fantastic singing voice.
This doesn’t mean the end of the trauma and tragedy. Mitsuki had a crush on a childhood friend named Eichi Sakurai, who wanted to become an astronaut. However, Eichi died. Mitsuki transfers her emotions to Takuto. For his part, Takuto had once been lead singer of a rock band that included Mitsuki’s doctor and father. Like Mitsuki, Takuto had to quit singing when he developed throat cancer; in the manga, he committed suicide by jumping off the hospital roof, which turned him into a shinigami. (In the anime, he went into a coma after a motorcycle accident and falls in love with Mitsuki).
Minky Momo
Granted, we only see her as an idol singer in the finale of Minky Momo: La Ronde in My Dream (aka Magical Princess Gigi and the Fountain of Youth, 1985) and then it’s her teenaged magical manifestation that takes the stage. She’s a hit, but when Minky Momo comes back onstage as a child, nobody recognizes her.
Hummingbirds
Following Japan’s surrender to the United States in 1945, the Japanese constitution was rewritten to define its military as strictly a self-defense force. This neutralized the military’s ability to make global mischief, but it also left it with time on its hands. This series asks the question, why not just combine the jobs of fighter pilot and idol singer? They wouldn’t have much to do anyway, except fly around the country giving public relations concerts.
Needless to say, the winning musical group isn’t exactly the Spice Girls. The Hummingbirds are a quintet of sisters, ranging in age from eight to eighteen, and (of course) cute. They occasionally fight off enemies, but see more action against competing bands trying to steal their contracts. The 1993 OAV proved popular enough to spawn several sequels.
Mima Kirigoe
Perfect Blue (1997) shows us the very dark side of idol singing, based on a novel by Yoshikazu Takeuchi. When we see Mima for the first time, it’s her last performance as lead singer of the pop idol trio Cham. She’s been thinking of a career move away from upbeat tunes, lacy baby-doll costumes and small but devoted crowds. She wants to break into acting, but going that route means racy photo sessions and a part in a controversial television series called Double Bind, an elaborate tale of an idol singer whose mind starts falling apart. Then, a website shows up on the Internet in which the old idol-singer Mima persona repudiates her new acting persona, and when dead bodies start piling up, Mima starts losing the distinction between life and art. Thanks to the skills of first-time director Satoshi Kon, so do the rest of us.12
Dick Saucer of Dragon Half
A
male idol singer for a change, in one of the funniest anime ever, Dragon Half. The title refers to Mink, whose mother was a dragon, and whose father, a knight, decided to marry the dragon rather than fight it. Their daughter may have wings and a tail and be able to breathe fire, but she also has a crush on a hunky human idol singer with an extremely weak voice; he seems to need his microphone more than most. Unfortunately for Mink, he’s also a dragon-hunting knight.
There’s no possible way to take this OAV or its manga seriously; the gags are nonstop and outrageous, from Tom-and-Jerry slapstick to bizarre wordplay (Mink’s father dismissing the idol singer as “Dick Sausage”); and the characters shift into and out of “super-deformed” caricature mode in the blink of an eye. To top it all, there’s the show’s equally deformed theme, a song about omelets sung to the tune of the final movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7. You have to hear this one to believe it.
1. Jeff Yang and Claudine Ko, “Idolsingers” in Yang et al., Eastern Standard Time: A Guide to Asian Influence on American Culture from Astro Boy to Zen Buddhism (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), 265.
2. Speaking of radio, the decentralized nature of Japanese media means that radio is still a major performance platform. A number of anime series were later adapted as radio dramas, some of which have been issued on CDs known as “drama disks.”
3. By the way, that’s a hint to a key plot point in Evangelion.
4. It’s not uncommon for women to perform the voices of young boy animated characters, both in Japan and the United States. Yet the fact that the berserk Dilandau of Escaflowne is voiced by a woman is actually a clue to one of that story’s bigger surprises.
5. The song is also revived for an episode of Utena, in which Nanami, sister of the Student Council President, becomes convinced she has laid an egg and prepares for motherhood.
6. As does one of Kanno’s lyricists, an otherwise unknown author named Françoise Robin. Several webpages have suggested that Robin and Kanno are one and the same person.
7. Listen to Sondheim’s best-known song, “Send In the Clowns,” as clusters of four notes.
8. Please note: this list does not include rock singers like Priss in Bubblegum Crisis or Cutey Honey. Their performances do not include the baggage of the idol singer, and they don’t make a career out of being cute.
9. In 1996, science-fiction author William Gibson published Idoru, about a Japanese software idol singer, Rei Toei, and the teenage fan who travels halfway around the world to find her, Chia Pet McKenzie. This book about the future is also an excellent look at Japanese pop culture in the present.
10. There were already a lot of musical references in a series whose heroine was named DoReMi and with seasons named “sharp” and “flat.” In addition to being an idol singer, Onpu is a flutist. The word “onpu” refers to the use of musical notes in a text message, suggesting that the speech is either sung or at least cheerful.
11. The kanji that make up the name Mitsuki means “full moon.”
12. This was his directorial debut, but Kon came up through the ranks, working with Katsuhiro Otomo on anime such as Memories and Roujin Z.
It’s Not Easy Being Green: Nature in Anime
We’ve already seen pop-culture Japan as a land of balancing acts: public/private, business/pleasure, duty/desire. What happens when the split is nature/technology, a dichotomy of global proportions?
Do you know that our word for “nature” is of quite recent coinage? It is scarcely a hundred years old. We have never developed a sinister view of technology, Mr. Laney. It is an aspect of the natural, of oneness.
—from Idoru by William Gibson
We hear the laments all too often on both sides of the Pacific. There are fewer and fewer green spaces left. Children will grow up never having known expanses of countryside. Wilderness should be preserved. And it will be—maybe next year.
Anime has a lot of idealism to offer, but not much of it gets translated into practical commitment. At least Hayao Miyazaki, having celebrated the Japanese countryside of a few decades ago in My Neighbor Totoro (1988) and many other films, has started buying up tracts of rural land to preserve for those who would respect and enjoy a non-urban way of life. He has his work cut out for him.
There’s always been a price to pay for progress. In the medieval Japan of Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke (1997), forests had to be cleared and the trees burned for charcoal; iron sand had to be dug out of the earth. Just as these actions scarred the land, the movie presents two teenagers who were personally scarred by this advance in technology. Prince Ashitaka, from an isolated tribe in the east, was infected by a monstrous boar he killed. The boar became a monster because it wasshot by a bullet—one of the first fruit of the new technology. In seeking the source of the bullet, he meets San, a feral child who, on behalf of her guardian wolves and other spirits of nature, wages war on the polluting humans. It finally takes the Earth spirit, the source of all life, the Shishigami, to bring about a truce between the two warring sides.
Studio Ghibli has done other films on the theme of civilization having separated itself from nature. Pompoko (written and directed by Miyazaki’s longtime collaborator and studio partner Isao Takahata; 1994) tries to reconcile animal and human civilizations by focusing on a group of tanuki: legendary raccoon-like animals with magical powers. These tanuki (who in this movie look a little too much like members of the Care Bears™ toy line) create images of fantastic monsters and even take on human form in an attempt (unsuccessful, as it turns out) to stop civilization from encroaching onto their forest. Miyazaki’s first masterpiece, Kaze no Tani no Nausicaä (Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, 1984), gave us a world blighted first by war, then by pestilence in the form of gigantic insects and toxic jungles. Only the title character is able to discover that nature is slowly healing itself, with the help of the very insects that the humans are trying to destroy.
Another Takahata film, Omoide Poroporo (Remembering Drop by Drop, usually translated as Only Yesterday; 1991) is a fascinating (if sometimes dizzying) series of memories that connect Taeko, an “office lady” in 1982, with her experience of being ten years old in 1966. She remembers her childhood while taking a sabbatical in the country at a small farm that grows flowers to produce a specific red dye. While not precisely natural, this farm life is pastoral, and very different from Tokyo—different enough so that Taeko is tempted to leave Tokyo for the farm. Even Ghibli’s 1995 music video On Your Mark contrasts the hostage angel’s urban captivity with the wide open spaces.
When Professor Kusakaba in Miyazaki’s My Neighbor Totoro moves his daughters to a country house, he wants to be closer to the sanatorium where his wife is recovering from tuberculosis. The house, however, has another feature that connects the area to beneficial natural forces: there is a large camphor tree nearby. This tree, called “king of the forest,” is already venerated by the locals in the Shinto manner, with a paper rope (called a shimenawa) wrapped around the trunk. Of course, such a mighty tree is an ideal home for a Totoro.
Ayako Katsuzaki of the Ghost Hunt manga/anime was brought up near a large camphor tree. The fact that she held conversations withthe tree spirit as a child confirmed her abilities as a miko, which she did not exercise until she was older. Her history as a miko is uneven, which she blames on the urban landscape depriving the trees of their spirits and turning them into “mummies.” In one case at a country restaurant, however, Ayako is able to summon tree spirits to counter malevolent ghosts and put them to rest.
In the final episodes of the anime of Rumiko Takahashi’s InuYasha, the villainous Naraku casts one dying spell on Kagome. She gets swallowed up by the Shikon Jewel, and brought back to the modern world, living out her life as if she’d never traveled back through time and met InuYasha and the others. The well that communicated between the two worlds is gone as well. She accepts all of this until she realizes that the sacred tree on the temple grounds is no longer scarred; it’s missing the marks of the arrows that pinned Inu
Yasha to the tree for fifty years after he was tricked into killing Kikyo. Touching the tree awakens Kagome, which leads her to confront the cursed jewel. There’s even an example of a sacred tree from a Magical Girl series aimed at a juvenile audience. Futari wa Pretty Cure Splash Star (We Are Pretty Cure Splash Star) was a year-long TV series broadcast in 2006–2007, plus an animated feature film. The heroes include Saki Hyuuga, a junior high school athlete, athletic and cheerful (best summed up by the Japanese word “genki”), good at softball and not much else. Her sidekick is Mai Misho; the child of scientists (her father is an astronomer and they live in an observatory), she is more inclined toward art. Years earlier, the two had met following strange flying lights toward the so-called Sky Tree outside of town. They meet again in junior high school.
Pretty Cure Splash Star is a sort-of sequel to Futari wa Pretty Cure, which ran for two years, included two feature films, and had no Sky Tree. There were also four other sequels taking place in very different worlds. Only the most recent of these sequels, Heartcatch Pretty Cure!, begun in February 2010, returns to the image of a large tree; in this case, a noble but shy fourteen-year-old Tsubomi Hanasaki dreams of a flowering tree. The flowers are wilting, however, and fairies die as the blossoms die. Elsewhere in the dream, two figures battle over the Tree of Hearts.
In anime, nature is often depicted as double-edged, although the same could be said for the city as a place of both delights and dangers. An animated feature from the Tatsunoko studio dubbed into English and released in 1984 as Enchanted Journey features Glicko, a pet chipmunk who learns that his real home is the forest. Anxious to find it, he escapes the city, picks up some pointers and a traveling companion at the zoo, and makes his way home. The natural predators he encounters along the way are downright demonic, but the beauty of the countryside keeps him going.
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