Animation Night 188: Gisaburo Sugii and his cat films

originally posted at https://canmom.tumblr.com/post/761108...

Let me introduce you to a fellow.

Gisaburō Sugii, born 1940, is one of the oldest school animators still working in the industry. His early filmography is something like a history of anime, or at least MushiPro: he started on Hakujaden [AN149] (where he did inbetweens), but he was one of the leaders of the Toei exodus over the rubbish working conditions and union busting (Sugii’s close friend Rintarō was among the first to follow him), especially when Tezuka appeared on the animation scene with a place to land.

So from the earliest days of Astro Boy/Tetsuwan Atom, Sugii was a core Tezuka guy. (Thanks as ever to Matteo Watzky for presenting such detailed histories in English!) He helped clean up Tezuka’s rough animations in an early form of the layout system, moving to his own satellite studio, worked on all sorts of projects. In fact, we saw a number of them when we watched Tezuka’s short fims on Animation Night 83. For example, Sugii animated the moth in Tales of a Street Corner.

Before too long, Astro Boy was wrapping up, and the time came for Sugii to direct his own series: this was Goku no Daibōken and in the words of Matteo Watzky, it represented “a complete and unconditional rejection of everything Mushi - or rather Tezuka - had done so far” - gags over story, extremely limited animation. Adapting Tezuka’s manga version of Journey to the West, the project had some rather grand ambitions:

It was rather in the writing and direction. Sugii was extremely ambitious: not only did he want to do a complete break with what Mushi had done before, he wanted to broaden the general “animation culture” in Japan [14]. He therefore focused entirely on the gags, trying to make them all as absurd as possible and breaking all sense of narrative continuity. This was the reason he had chosen Boku no Songoku in the first place: the road trip structure made it possible to completely change the setting each episode and make things different each time [15]. He refused to compromise on anything and was an extremely harsh director: he himself admitted how many conflicts he had with scriptwriters and storyboarders, whose work he kept rejecting until it had lost any semblance of sense or continuity [16].

Goku no Daibōken’s story touches on another major figure of anime history: Osamu Dezaki (AN95) appears here as an episode director, though you’d likely not recognise his work - he closely followed his mentor Sugii’s wacky style. Unfortunately, the show did not really do much to broaden anything, and was pretty roundly rejected by audiences, and even Tezuka himself publicly said it was too avant-garde and needed to change and the show ended up a sore memory for everyone involved.

But Sugii did not quit, and continued to work with the increasingly ailing Mushi Pro up through Belladonna of Sadness (AN69). This last-ditch effort was not enough to save the troubled studio (a story told elsewhere, check Watzky’s articles for a very detailed version) and MushiPro went under. So, coming into the 70s, Sugii left the anime industry to go travelling.

But not forever.

Now, let me introduce you to a book.

Night on the Galactic Railroad (銀河鉄道の夜, Ginga Tetsudō no Yoru) - written in 1927, and published posthumously in 1934 - is a classic Japanese fantasy novel by Kenji Miyazawa in which two boys go on a strange journey across the galaxy. It soon becomes apparent that the train that the boys ride on is kind of a psychopomp train. It has that fascinating blend of early science and odd religious overtones you often get in novels from the early 20th Century, with such themes as the difference between Buddhist and Christian ideas of heaven, as well as all sorts of odd adventures.

It does not star anthropomorphic cats. But then again, it doesn’t say anywhere that its characters aren’t anthropomorphic cats, right? If you’re Gisaburō Sugii, that’s enough!

In the early 80s, Sugii returned to Group TAC, a studio largely consisting of former MushiPro staff, full of memories of travel. He started out directing adaptations of the baseball manga Nine, but soon he ended up directing an cataptation of Night on the Galactic Railroad, which came out in 1985.

Jokes aside, the book is deliberately ambiguous about what its characters look like, so Sugii came up with the cat thing as a way to preserve Miyazawa’s intent. His approach to direction heavily emphasises the landscape, embedding the characters in dark spaces that reflect their feelings and build the generally omnious mood as they journey into death. And it works! The result is a film widely regarded as a classic by those who’ve seen it.

One notable feature is the film’s fascination with the constructed language Esperanto, among the earliest aspiring universal languages. The film features all kinds of Esperanto text and an esperanto subtitle track, and even has an alternative Esperanto title, Nokto de la Galaksia Fervojo. This was a fascination of Miyazawa’s, though I don’t believe it features in the novel particularly prominently, but Sugii evidently wanted that to be part of the tribute…

In the wake of that, Sugii… went back to directing sports anime, this time the series Touch about Tennis, as well as a number of other projects including a Street Fighter film in 1994. He didn’t abandon literary subjects though, adapting the Genji Monogatari, a foundational work of Japanese lit, in 1987 - though I can find little more about this adaptation. He even directed a Lupin III film! But none of those films are about cats, so we’re gonna skip right over them.

In 2012, Sugii - now 72! - returned to books and cats with The Life of Budori Gusuko, adapting another novel by Miyazawa - this time at MushiPro successor Tezuka Productions. The animation is certainly more elaborate…

The film follows abandoned child Budori Gusuko in a world frozen by strange storms. Left to fend for himself, Budori’s problems mulitply as his sister his kidnapped, leading him on a journey into dreams as he tries to get to the bottom of all of it.

The story is notable for anticipating the idea of the greenhouse effect, albeit in a way that rings rather odd in the context of present climate change. It generally doesn’t seem to be viewed quite as favourably as Galactic Railroad but it’s too good a thematic pairing not to do, so tonight the plan is to watch both films! Elaborate old weird anime, we’re so back. And not a boob in sight, so twitch should chill out.

post-viewing comments

I will write more on these films tomorrow but briefly.

Night on the Galactic Railroad was very good, dreamlike in a good way, fantastic art direction and mood. Bit of a higher Christianity quotient than I expected, not quite sure what is up with that.

Budori Gusuko was… yeah that film was a total mess, my friend was right to warn me so. Like Railroad, the plot consists of a series of loosely connected vignettes, not unlike a picaresque; unlike Railroad, they don’t seem to cohere into any clear thematic structure, with Budori just kind of meandering through the plot without motivation to speak of. I mentioned his sister getting kidnapped by a wizard, but… he doesn’t actually We checked out some parts of the 1994 animated adaptation, which is much more straightforward, and some of the choices in Sugii’s version are… strange, to say the least. I’ll write more about it tomorrow.

One big aspect of both films that I missed when doing the writeup earlier is that Sugii is not responsible for the idea of adapting these stories with anthropomorphic cats - rather, there is an intermediate step in the adaptation chain, that being the manga of Hiroshi Masumara. Masumara seems like a fascinating character: his main work consists of stories about a utopian country of anthro cats and humans called Atagoul, which seems like a kind of lifelong passion project. Here’s a sample of what it looks like:

Masumara is a huge fan of Kenji Miyazawa and adapted many of his stories to manga, naturally introducing the anthro cat element since that is kind of his whole thing. These anthro cat designs formed the basis for Railroad, and following the success of that film, led to two more adaptations of Masumara’s manga adaptations of Miyazawa’s stories.

The designs in Budori Gusuko are actually near-identical in many cases to designs in Railroad. Perhaps Masumara has a similar system to Tezuka’s ‘star system’, where he reuses character designs in different stories? But perhaps they just wanted to visually reference the earlier film as much as possible. I am not familiar enough with Masumara’s manga to be able to say which elements are due to Sugii, and which ones are established in the manga.

I’ll discuss more specifics about the films soon; for now I must sleep. Thanks for tuning in if you did, I love digging up this kinda stuff and I hope everyone had a good time, even with the jank of Budori Gusuko!