PRA Declassified

It’s grand, it’s old and some say haunted but it’s proving to be a great place to work. In early November, we moved our studio over one hard slog of a weekend, to the old Glenside Hospital building, now known as Adelaide Studios pictured below.

Like something from a Harry Potter film stands our new home at Adelaide Studios. Photo courtesy of Tricia Watkinson for Adelaide Now.

The building, once Adelaide’s most revered mental health hospital (I saw first hand the old electro-shock therapy gear once used there on my first tour of the building), has received a $48 million facelift and fit-out. The new construction at the rear of the building holds two huge new sound stages and a Dolby Mixing Theatre amongst other expensive toys. Soon to be the site of a bunch of TV series and film productions taking place in the new facilities, the building is also home to the South Australian Film Corporation, a number of independent production companies, the Bigpond Adelaide Film Festival and now PRA.  NB. I apologise in advance to the other tenants for the state of the shared kitchen on level 1.

An Artists Impression of the Lunatic Asylum in 1890.

The building was known as the ‘Parkside Lunatic Asylum’ when it first opened in 1870 up til 1913. The fact that its name once had both the words ‘Lunatic’ and ‘Asylum’ in it is pretty impressive. I wonder when today’s terminology of ‘Mental Health Consumer’ will be considered politically incorrect?

Oh, and about the haunted thing… apart from a creepy sounding howling wind that happens every now and then caused by some open windows and unsealed office doors, we haven’t felt anything creepy at all. In fact, we’ve got twenty crew working across three bitchin’ projects right now so the place is buzzing with creative industriousness.  Haunted shmaunted!

It is a great place to be working and we look forward to sharing with you early in 2012 some of the work that’s being concocted within the one-metre thick walls of this beautiful structure here in Glenside.

Next week I am about to embark on a holiday to Europe with my girlfriend. The Cat Piano is playing at the Zebra Poetry Film Festival in Berlin too. While It’s not my first trip there, having been lucky enough to attend various animation festivals over the last five years, but it is my lengthiest stay. Whenever I am in Europe I feel this strange feeling of ‘coming home’ a familiarity and I wonder if this is because I live in a country settled by British and Europeans, and this lingering ancestral pull is wrapped up in that. The other part of me thinks it maybe a familiarity brought about by growing up reading European fairy tales and story books and watching old Disney Movies. Walt Disney who grew up in rural America, was said to be trying to re-capture the nostalgia he had for an old Europe that he had never knew. Maybe my acute case of Europhilia is because I was brought up on a diet of his films?

I then began to think about the world of Japanese animation and how over the years several have been set in picture perfect, enchanted European settings. This seems unusual and quirky at first but also a sentiment I could relate to as there is something comforting and dream-like about these settings. Many Japanese people seem to possess the same pre-occupation with a Europe of days gone by, a world untouched by technology and modernity. They thrive on the quaint ruritania and this has reached far into modern Japanese culture.

I immediately had images in my head of the beautiful alpine and Nordic backdrops from Howl’s Moving Castle (2004), TV series Heidi (1974) and one of my childhood favourite’s Belle & Sebastien (1981) set in the Pyrenees mountains of  France and Spain. Master of anime, Hayao Miyazaki worked on Heidi in the 1970s and the animation team apparently did a research tour to Switzerland to get accuracy in their artwork. He also began an adaptation of Pippi Longstocking and even travelled to Sweden to meet author Astrid Lindgren but the they were denied the rights to go ahead with the adaptation.

Here is the opening credits of HEIDI. Watch it and tell me if this doesn’t make you want to visit Switzerland and run through the green fields.

As a result of this popular cartoon re-telling of  Heidi, Jonathan Spyri’s 1880 classic, each year Japanese pilgrims make the journey from the overcrowded cities of Japan to the idealic and serene Swiss Alps. They visit the Swiss village of Maienfield, the setting of the story and mountain Zermatt that they recall in images from the show while posing for photographs with St. Bernards dogs, then eat sushi on bus tours while singing ‘Edeweiss’ in broken English. This reminded me of when I was in Canada’s charming Prince Edward Island and I witnessed throngs of Japanese tourists, flocking to see the hometown of Anne of Green Gables, another nostalgic story they are fond of.

Upon my first visit to Europe to the Annecy animation festival nestled at the base of the French and Swiss Alps, I was immediately struck by the epic scenery while on the bus from Geneva to the small medievil town. The cartoons and fairy tale story books hadn’t lied to me. It was just as visually breathtaking as it had been in my head and in many ways fairy-tale like. I felt like Heidi running through the fields.

Miyazaki has re-visited a mish-mash of different European settings in several of his works. Miyazaki is believed to have based much of the setting of Howl’s moving Castle on a pre-war image of the Alsace region in France. Kiki’s Delivery Service has elements of Stockholm and Gotberg in Sweden as well as Munich’s Old town. Funnily enough, the colonial architecture of my city of Adelaide as well as Melbourne and Parts of Tasmania were also part of the film’s visual reference. This always makes me think  excitedly did Miayazaki come to my city at some point? In Tasmania there is a picturesque bakery and bed and breakfast thought to have inspired Kiki’s Guchokipanya bakery that also gets Japanese tourists each year.

Miyazaki’s love of an old Europe and UK  is also evident in the TV series Sherlock Hound set in England as well as his feature film Porco Rosso, set in a romanticised Italy. Japan’s cultural crush on a timeless Europe is thought to emerged after the success of the manga The Rose of Versailles and the TV series it spawned Beursai no Bara set in period France. Then other series followed suit, such as Dog of Flanders (1975)  based on the English tale  by Marie Louise de la Remee, set in Antwerp, Belgium. Antwerp has since become a destination for Japanese tourists who remember the series fondly from their childhoods.

The other hugely popular European set series in Moomin. The Swedish-Fin comic strip by Tove Jansson was turned into an animated series by the Japanese who developed a love for the cute and lovable hippopotamus-troll looking characters living in magical woods. In Finland, Moomin World is also a frequent holiday destination for Japanese Europhiles, their equivalent of Disneyland.

Victoriana and Edwardiana is also very prevalent in many Japanese animations. The Steampunk slant on this period is also hugely popular in Japanese animation and culture.  This industrial era England is featured in Steamboy, Howl’s Moving Castle as well as Laputa; Castle In The Sky. Lewis Carroll’s Victorian classic Alice In Wonderland is also a hugely popular story in Japan. Tim Burton’s recent live action adaptation did fantastically at the box office for this reason. Characters such as Alice and Heidi have also made their way into the cosplay part of Japanese youth culture, which is a strangely amusing concoction of the innocent and pristine and the fetishistic.

This cute and quaint Victorian storybook aesthetic has also made its way into Japanese subculture and youth culture spawning the Gothic Lolita or GothLoli fashion trend has a huge following.

Each year, thousands of Japanese tourists flock to Europe to look for this nostalgic image of the country. Some of them may find it as visually and atmospherically it still exists. I discovered a disorder that has struck several Japanese tourists visiting Paris, called Paris Syndrome or Syndrome De Paris. It has been said that Japanese tourists can be struck by this syndrome after visiting Paris and expecting an idealised fairy tale, romantic Paris they have seen in films and read in literature. A combination of the culture shock, prejudice and rudeness they face in the city induces symptoms of depression and hallucinations among other things. While it sounds utterly ridiculous, it does actually exist and sort of makes sense in the context of what I was pondering upon the eve of my journey to Europe… Let’s just hope I don’t return with Paris Syndrome.

Growing up in Australia we had our fare share of Japanese cartoon series that were cut, sliced, diced and re-served by the U.S. like appealing sushi for the English speaking market. If American cartoons were from ‘the big city’ and British cartoons were from ‘around the corner’ then Japanese cartoons were certainly from space or the future… or space in the future. They were robotic humans with split-personalities and internal struggles that their moon faces and wide ‘saucer’ eyes couldn’t hide. They were spacefood, just add hot water and like a packaged cake of dry noodles, the steam would rise and there it was ready to slurp up.

Japanese cartoons had a completely different feel to other cartoons altogether. They had a soft glow to them. Even stuff that wasn’t supposed to glow, glowed. Outdoor shots look like they were lit indoors under lights. They could be cute and adorable and make you wanna cuddle up to them OR they could be dark and ominous and sort of scary and unsettling. This is what I think I liked about them. Many of the cartoons felt like they didn’t talk down to you and seemed like they were for ‘Big Kids’ and that made you wanna watch them.  They were like a cute little robot animal pet, who’s eyes  glowed bright and who’s tail wagged but could at any minute, snap and grow in size, turning into a giant battling robot that could destroy a legion of enemies with an in-built series of giant missile shooting guns. Aside from the series set in Space, many had quaint settings that had a fairy tale like innocence to them or were set in a ‘simpler time’ before the robots came.

Astro Boy, Voltron, Robotech, The Mysetrious Cities of Gold, Samurai Pizza Cats and Belle & Sebastien were the ones that really stay in my mind vividly, although there were many more and they increased in numbers like a self-cloning robot army in the early to mid nineties.

There was certainly something a little strange about these cartoons. This was probably a mix of cultural differences and the vastly different visual style they and and the fact that many of them were re-packaged, anglosized incarnations of their former Japanese native product. The subject matter was often quite intense and the characters would usually find themselves in some real trouble mid-episode where close-ups would show them wincing in pain and tears welling in their eyes. There was a real sense of pain in most episodes. Characters could be destroyed, killed and the show would go on. Robotech and Voltron had characters that were killed in battle and would cease to be in future episodes. They really weren’t afraid to show life and death together.

When I think back, watching Astro Boy on TV is one of my earliest recollections of watching animation as a series and actually waiting for the next episode. The theme song is just as infectious and stirring today as it was when I was 4. Here’s the end credit sequence which actually showed children how animation is made. I still think it’s the best closing credit sequence for any cartoon series ever.

One of my favourites, even though obscure, was The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which was The Wizard of Oz story re-told in the Japanese style. The show was re-packaged by Cinar, a Canadian company at the time, but I still remember how the show made me feel; sad, anxious, scared, hopeful and cosy all in the same half hour. Here’s the Show’s title sequence vs. The original Japanese show’s title sequence. This shows you the real difference in the way the cartoons were packaged for different cultural audiences.

Here’s the original Japanese version, which makes the English one look gawdy and super 80s.

My favourite was probably Voltron and what a concept for kids. Robotic lions of different colours that team together to make one big robot that smashes the baddies. Genius. And we lapped it up. Explosions always looked better in Japanese cartoons. They were white hot and filled with shrapnel and mini explosions within the big ones. Many studios in Japan had and still do have animators who specialise in ‘shit blowing up’ shots. Here’s the opening title of the version we got from the U.S. I still think this music is as epic and stirring as anything.

And thanks to the wonders of youtube, I for the first time (and possibly you too) can watch the opening of the original Japanese version of Voltron Beast King Go Lion. I actually think the U.S version of the opening takes the sake.

The Mysterious Cities of Gold was also a sort of strangely eerie piece that blended sci-fi with History. I remember being sort of scared by the show and even it’s unusual but catchy theme song but the giant golden condor craft always got me and those friendly kids waving at you.

Some of them were just plain weird. Just bizarre. Such as Samurai Pizza Cats. This is one that emerged in the early 90s following closely behind the success of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles ( It even took a shot at the Turtles in the theme song) It was hyperactive, colourful, completely ridiculous but just a ball of metal, feline fun to watch. Kids would come to school and sing the theme song and even talk about how weird it was… then go home and watch it again the next morning. It was a real pre-cursor to the Pokemon epileptic series of the late 90s.

As a young child I can’t remember knowing that there cartoons were ‘FROM JAPAN’. I just knew they were from somewhere different. Maybe space. I did one day look at some little figurines I had (in the same visual style I saw on Voltron etc) and on the bottom of them was ‘MADE IN HONG KONG’ so I think I then thought the cartoons were from this mysterious land of ‘Hong Kong’ which I thought could have been the coolest country in the world.

Next Post: Canadian Cartoons