Did I say “person”? I meant “huge list of people, companies, and other assorted entities.” A picture of a manga character can involve a consortium of toy manufacturers, film distributors, TV broadcasters, banks, advertising firms, and, somewhere in there, the people who actually invented and drew the character in the first place. On more than one occasion the demands to have a stupidly long photo credit attached to the image (with certain firm names in SCREAMING CAPS for no reason, of course) have led us to give up on posting the image in the first place. “© Jiji” is fine; “© 2008 BANDAI CO. LTD., Toho Co. Ltd., HAKUHODO Inc., Fuji Television Network Inc., On and On and On. All Rights Reserved. In fact, don’t even look at this one.” is more lines of text than we want on our page. It gets to the point where it isn’t worth it.

Not sure why that's doubled up there.

Something that struck my eye a while back was this: Nibariki-GNDHDDTW. Ugh! But wait, that’s actually a rather page-layout-friendly thing the consortium in question has done for publishers like us. This page (in Japanese) had the explanation I needed:

• Nibariki = The company that handles rights issues for Miyazaki Hayao’s work. (This is housed in a cool-looking building south of the Chūō Line just east of Mitaka Station with a sod roof. The grass gets pretty crazy in the late autumn; I imagine it’s an eco-friendly structure. Click here for a Google Maps street view of it.)
• G = Studio Ghibli.
• N = Nippon Television.
• D = Dentsū Inc.
• H = Hakuhōdō DY Media Partners.
• D = The Walt Disney Company.
• D = Mitsubishi Corp. (My guess is that “D” comes from “diamond,” since the company’s name means “three diamonds.”)
• T = Toho Co.
• W = Wild Bunch (which appears to handle European distribution). Not included in all credits, but it’s in this gang at least part of the time.

If we had to spell all that out just to stick a picture of Ponyo into an article on Japanese cultural exports, we might have left her up to the readers’ imaginations instead. As ugly as the alphabet soup looks, it’s actually a relatively welcome option to have.

On the subject of these consortia, I recommend reading a post on Matt Alt’s blog titled “Risky Business.”

Fans tend to romanticize the anime world as one of unbridled creative freedom. The reality is a vicious cycle in which production committees not only dictate the content (as they will only fund the series they feel are solid investments) but keep the majority of the profits (as animation studios have traditionally only been paid a fixed sum, without royalties, for their work.) The vast majority of the men and women who actually create the stuff toil in poverty and obscurity, because they are at the absolute bottom of the food chain.

An excellent report linked there (PDF) is Capitalizing on Innovation: The Case of Japan. Distressing stuff about the Japanese anime industry begins on page 20.

That post is from 2009, but I only saw it today when he linked it from his “Project A” entry. The government has finally scrounged up some funds for animators in Japan as part of its loudly advertised “cool Japan” soft power push—just a few million yen, but it’s probably the first worthwhile spending in that entire misguided effort. Alt sounds the “underfunded creators” warning again:

In spite of what the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry would have you believe about “Cool Japan,” the anime industry is in serious trouble. Perhaps the biggest problem is that appallingly low salaries have hollowed out the talent pool to the point where even Academy Award winning directors like Hayao Miyazaki can’t pull together enough people to animate an entire film by hand anymore. But finally, it seems, the Japanese government has started putting their money where their mouth is.

Another good post of his covering some similar ground is “State of the Anime Industry 2009.” Um, just go stick him in your RSS reader. He’s worth the read.

A few coming up that I’m interested in seeing are There Will Be Blood and No Country for Old Men. I’m a huge fan of Cormac McCarthy (thanks to James for cluing me in to him many years ago). I must admit this is my least favorite of his books—with the possible exception of The Sunset Limited (Amazon page), but I haven’t gotten to that one yet, so no ranking there. But I’m interested to see what happens when this makes it to the screen in the hands of the actors and directors involved with this project.

(I never saw the 2000 adaptation of All the Pretty Horses, but I’ve never seen reviews of it that made me feel like I was missing out. Would be nice to see someone in Hollywood approach the entire Border Trilogy in a serious fashion.)

McCarthy’s page at IMDB says that not only The Road but Blood Meridian and Outer Dark are also in production now. I wonder about the possibility of doing a good transition to the screen with those two—particularly Blood Meridian, which features massive violence and supernaturally intelligent bald giants and such. However, Ridley Scott is listed as the director for it, so maybe there’s a chance we’ll see a compelling Judge Holden on our movie screens. For me, on my TV six months later.

Good information on Cormac McCarthy is available at this site.