Japanophile
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If you're Japanese or a student of the language and run a Mac, this is the magazine you'd buy. Maclife. If your browser is set with kanji then they're online here. |
Japanophile
If you're Japanese or a student of the language and run a Mac, this is the magazine you'd buy. Maclife. If your browser is set with kanji then they're online here.
The home page and logo calls it an Internet Voice magazine but although ALLES is about Japanese pop music and culture there's not much to listen to. I suspect a literal translation of 'Voice' is the reason, but there's still considerable English content here. In the current material you can find out what the Japanese Rap/HipHop scene is like, or dip into their archives for wider cultural items.
There's good film, animation, manga coverage (although the interview with Buichi Terasawa who featured in MM 10, has been removed with a note saying at the request of Teresawa-see below), there are interviews with a wrestler, musicians, a racing car driver and more.
I was pleased to find the interview with Mamoru Oshii, who was Animation Director on Ghost in the Shell (1995), available in Australia at many Video stores (distributed by Manga Video in Sydney). Oshii has created something quite different from the Akira image of manga animation, and dispite the American dubbed voices, there's moments of sensitivity and real physical emotion.
The story is set in the year 2029. To combat a world of advanced information network crime, the government has set up
the Shell Riot Squad, a supra-legal special force, whose leader and hero of the story, is a girl named Motoko Kusanagi, a cyborg whose body is almost entirely artificial. In the titillating opening sequence we see her nude body being created, but her role hends up with echoes of Sean Young's Rachael character in Blade Runner. By being a machine it questions what we mean 'to be human'.
Oshii has some intelligent things to say about the blend of
computer and hand drawn animation in the movie, and comments...
"Fundamentally, the animation creation process itself is very close to the digital approach. There is no actual event, everything must be devised and created. However, for animations, human manual work is far more precise and efficient. This, I believe, is because the special sense of rhythm that humans have is not programmed into software, and probably can't be."
The English content of ALLES will be worth checking for updates.
Etsuro Endo was at the Adobe Design Conference in Sydney and I've an interview with him coming up. His web pages don't give you more than the Photoshop wiz aspect of his work, but he showed some very sensitive work by his father at the show, and his own folio, although small, included some nice design work for The Newton Shop. The shop design, bags, and exterior are all vey slick and the twist is that it was started, and is owned by an Australian, Richard Northcott. Northcott apparently got sick of waiting for Apple to do a Japanese conversion of the Newton's character recognition and did his own. The shop is on the web at http://www.root.or.jp/newtonshop/
and Etsuro's pages are at http://www.edesign.com/
Buichi Terasawa has a web site where you can read weekly issues of a brand-new Terasawa story, Black Knight BAT. It's at www.softbank.co.jp/ilab/bat/ complete with ads for Symantec's Java Cafe, (my guess is that it's sponsored by Symantec's Internet Lab in Japan, it's on their site) and it should keep you distracted for days on a slow link. There's background MIDI and large Java animated panels that seemed pretty buggy (there was a warning) with Netscape 3 on Win95, but IE3 was better and I had no trouble as long as I didn't switch windows and kept the 'mouseover'.