From Cardiff With Love

FROM CARDIFF WITH LOVE

The Slow Decline of the UK's anime industry.

There's a mistaken perception with many English-speaking anime consumers that an anime's first stop on the road to a foreign audience is the United States; but what if I told you that over one hundred of the titles at your local Blockbuster were actually dubbed on the other side of the Atlantic?

Anime like Legend of Arislan, Mad Bull 34, Angel Cop, Return of the Overfiend, Zeoraima, Odin and several of the Lupin III movies were produced in Britain in the early days of the industry, and for a brief period, trade in dubs and subs flew back and forth between Europe and the United States. Many of industry giant Manga Entertainment's earlier dubbed works were produced with British and expatriate American and Canadian actors working in studios in London, and Cardiff in Wales - eagle-eyed viewers might notice names like Garrick Hagon, who played Luke Skywalker's ill-fated best friend Biggs Darklighter in Star Wars, and Peter Marrinker, seen in genre flicks Judge Dredd as Judge Esposito and as the captain of the titular starship in Event Horizon. But more than this, there is also a pocket of dubbed and subtitled anime that have never seen the light of day outside the United Kingdom; some of them, like Ushio & Tora, Catgirl Nuku-Nuku, Grey: Digital Target, Sol Bianca and Devil Hunter Yohko, have since been translated again by American distributors for American audiences, but ask for shows like Slow Step, Hummingbirds or The Sensualist from any US store and all you'll get are blank looks.

By a concert of right-place, right-time, right-guy-for-the-job, the majority of these works were translated by one man, writer-translator Jonathan Clements, who harbors a love-hate relationship with these early works and has a has a collection of 'production hell' horror stories that curl the hair; "There was one subtitling job I had when they asked me to type titles straight into a computer, but then asked me if I really needed the letter 'Y'. It would, they said, be really neat if I could try and write the script without using it, because the letter had fallen off the keyboard... How many other video companies work on the just-in-time-system? We met the master tape off the plane at the airport on the Friday night. I had Saturday to translate it, and we were in the studio on Sunday. The review copies were run out overnight and posted out on Monday morning. The upshot of it all was that I had to write the script in a tenth of the usual time, and that I was forced to watch it minced by a manually-placed subtitling system on an antique Amiga..."

In a few cases, the British labels that fielded these unseen in America titles and several others existed very briefly during the boom years after the release of Akira, and their production practices were often shoe-string to say the least. Tape output was very limited, but the material they produced not only catered to the staples of the Western anime audience (science-fiction, action and comedy) but also crossed over into genres that had never been touched by an animated title Anime has its' share of 'soap opera' storylines threaded through shows like Tenchi et al, but the first pure-bred soap to hit video was the five-part Slow Step. Subtitled by Western Connection, this gentle adaptation of Misturu Adachi's manga spun a comic-romantic web around teen softball queen Minatsu and the dilemma she faces in choosing a man; there's no aliens or demons or magic here (unless you count that ol' black magic called love...), just the kind of material that wouldn't look amiss in any daytime drama slot; it's a shame then that Slow Step was pitched a foul ball by poor marketing. Clements notes the "paltry number of copies" released into the British market, and comments "If you have a copy of Slow Step, you've got a collector's item."

A world away from soft-hearted love stories, The Cockpit has the honor of being the first anime 'war movie' (in the most literal sense) released in English; subtitled by Kiseki Films, this version of Leji Matsumoto's seminal military manga series showcased a triptych of tales, helmed by three well-known directors - Studio Madhouse's Yoshiaki Kawajiri, and mecha experts Takashi Imanishi and Ryosuke Takahashi. "Slipstream" featured a German air ace questioning his loyalty to a Reich about to use the atom bomb, "Sonic Boom Squadron" followed the fate of a kamikaze pilot and "Knight of the Iron Dragon" told the tale of a motorcycle courier trying to complete his last mission in the face of an overwhelming enemy advance; Clements is fond of his work in this overlooked, excellent drama. "Most of the anime I translated that hasn't already made it to America is material that Americans can live without. The exceptions are The Cockpit and, to a lesser extent, Hummingbirds." he notes. "I had an ongoing feud with Kiseki's subtitling company over the insane changes they made to my scripts purely to prove that they were worth the money they were paid. On The Cockpit, they changed the Zero-Sen fighter plane's name to 'Zero-Zen', presumably because it sounded more 'foreign', and even altered the date of the Hiroshima bombing...I think they moved it to some time in 1956!"

Clements' other favorite title, Hummingbirds, was a unique comic mix borrowing equally from ideas behind shows like Airbats 801 TTS and the classic Thunderbirds puppet show, about a team of idol singers hired on as the air force's spokes-pilots - from the creator of Irresponsible Captain Tylor, Taira Yoshioka, this Western Connection sub was packed with bubblegum pop tunes, cute girls and jet planes. "Of all the material I've done, the rhyming subtitles for the songs in Hummingbirds remains one of my favourites." Jonathan recalls, although he laments the loss of the ending theme 'Rainbow Forces' to an editing screw-up. Western Connection were also responsible for subtitling the Ushio & Tora series (including the CD Theatre 'super-deformed' spin-off never released in America), the arcade game-inspired Salamander, SF stories Samurai Gold and Ladius, and the arty erotica of The Sensualist.

"Salamander was my first encounter with the dreaded spotting list." says Clements. "Instead of sending an ADR (automated dialogue replacement) script, Konami sent the masters over 'ready- -translated'. There were several pages missing, which I had to improvise from repeated audio playback." The three-part series was noted for featuring character designs by Macross' Haruhiko Mikimoto, but the lame story added very little to the original game's concept of a side-scrolling shoot-'em-up. "The science in the plot meant considerable reliance on technical terms, none of which the writer of the spotting list quite understood. I had to rewrite 'room for the keeping of frozen bodies' as 'cryogenics chamber', and 'going around and down' as 'orbital decay'. If I wasn't watching, Western Connection used to just dump the spotting lists onto the screen without any rewrite..."

Another title that rose and set briefly in the UK's short summer of original anime was the dubbed version of the SF action-comedy KO Century Beast Warriors, from the creators of NG Knight Lamune & 40. "(The casting director) thought the script would be about eight pages long, and when it arrived it was 150 pages of hand-written Japanese." says Clements. "Beast Warriors was a dreadful flop for all sorts of reasons." Personal bias aside (this reporter was one of the voice cast - Click Here to learn more), Beast Warriors was the first and only attempt by Paradox Films to break into the anime market; once again, low budgets and poor publicity in a marketplace dominated by Manga Entertainment failed to make it a hit. Like many of its kin, Beast Warriors was hampered by a company with a fast-buck mindset and poor commitment to the material; a fatal combination that consigned them all, flawed gems and turkeys alike, to the netherworld of video limbo. The series was later picked up and re-dubbed by an American studio in 2003.

With small independents such as Western Connection, Paradox and other labels like East2West and Crusader finally crashing and burning in the anime flurry of the mid-Nineties, the market stabilized, with Manga Entertainment continuing to dominate the European theater and making major in-roads into the American industry. Manga's remaining UK competitor, Kiseki Films, slowed its' anime sales to a trickle, finally buying in progressively more infrequent releases from US companies. As the Millennium approaches, Europe's strength as a source of translated anime has waned and been replaced by a more globalist , if Americentric, industry. Gone are days of Urusei Yatsura, Dirty Pair and Mobile Suit Gundam on French and Italian television, past is Britain's ICA-championed release of Akira, replaced instead by an environment where money from Europe and America can fund anime blockbusters like Ghost in the Shell, and bring high-concept dramatic features like Perfect Blue to multiplexes instead of niche-market video stores.

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