This article was printed byJapan Echo in 2000 and originally appeared in Ronza as "Pokemon' wa naze Beikoku de Seiko shita ka". It was taken from the archives of Japan Echo Online and appears below in it's entirety, including Echo's commentary.
Kubo Masakazu is currently the chief creative director of Shogakukan Ink, and editor of Gotta Manga Magazine, which specialises in video-game based kids comics. He worked as exective producer on many of Pocket Monsters films, including Myutsuu No Gyakushuu. He spoke in 2004 at several conventions in Thailand and Singapore regarding Pokemon, the animation industry and touting the ideas of cultural translation, as covered in the article below.
Kubo Masakazu
2,874 words
1 April 2000
Japan Echo
59-62
Volume 27, Issue 2; ISSN: 0388-0435
English
Copyright (c) 2000 Bell & Howell Information and Learning Company. All rights reserved. Copyright Japan Echo Inc. Apr 2000
Pokemon, the breed of Japanese video-game and cartoon creatures whose name is short for "Pocket Monsters," is creating a sensation in the United States. The cute characters' first full-length feature Poketto Monsuta: Myutsu no gyakushu, released in the United States in November 1999 as Pokemon: The First Movie-Mewtwo Strikes Back, topped the U. S. box-office charts-if momentarily-and broke every overseas record for Japanese movies. Until recently anime (animation) and mango (comic book) culture, although considered one of Japan's few cultural industries that can compare with those of the rest of the world, had enjoyed the attention of only a small number of Japanimation buffs. Kubo Masakazu, known as the mastermind of the Pokemon craze, recounts how Pokemon succeeded in breaking this jinx.
Although the Pokemon television series was popular in the United States, frankly we were not sure how well the movie would do there until just before it was released. We started negotiations on producing and distributing a U.S. version in February 1999, and after talking with nearly every major studio we chose Warner Brothers. The company must have run a survey beforehand and known for sure that the movie would be a hit, since it decided to show Pokemon: The First Movie in some 3,000 theaters nationwide.
It was at the time of the advance screening, held at Mann's Chinese Theater in Los Angeles a week before the actual release, that we really got the feeling that the movie was going to be successful. So many people had shown up for the event that the police had to block off part of Hollywood Boulevard. I have never seen such a sight in Japan. That was when I first sensed what I might call a real "tug on the line"-by no means were we full of confidence from the outset.
What greatly encouraged me in the project of exporting this movie to the United States, actually, was a contact I had with Kurosawa Hisao, the president of Kurosawa Production. Recently we at Shogakukan launched a new comic magazine, Gotta, using the same media-mix strategy as Corocoro Comics-which carries serials geared for lower elementary school children based on video-game characters-but targeting an older age group. I visited Kurosawa to ask for his permission to make a series for the magazine combining elements of the movies Yojinbo and Tsubaki Sanjuro (Sanjuro), both directed by his father, Kurosawa Akira.
The junior Kurosawa immediately agreed. But at the same time, he gave me some words on what we could not do. The gist of what he said was that we should not alter the basic essence; but that aside, he gave us the freedom to do as we liked.
As everyone knows, Kurosawa Akira's films have been imitated in countries all over the world and in many ways, including by George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. These people, moreover, do not even try to hide the fact. Usually in a contract-oriented society like the United States, the moment someone says that you are copying another person's work, you have a lawsuit on your hands. But that does not happen with Kurosawa movies. Not only does it not cause trouble, but the fact that someone imitated the work results in heightening the value of the original Kurosawa film.
What Kurosawa said to me that day was precisely the approach we aimed for in the U.S. production of the Pokemon movie. With Norman Grossfield, who used to work for CBS, as the producer, the U.S. version was thoroughly adapted for the local market. The essential theme-respect for life, whether friend or foe and regardless of species-was not to be tampered with. But other than that, we trusted the U.S. staff, the sole consideration in remaking the movie being how best to make it appeal to American children. This, I think, is the main reason for the movie's success in the United States.
In the U.S. version, the music was all changed and the story was partially altered, and the running time grew slightly longer as a result. The lines, too, were not simply translated but were rewritten to make them more accessible to American viewers. And about Y70 million went into adding even more punch to the pictures, including the computer graphics.
In talking about cultural barriers, the first thing that comes to my mind is Disney's animated screenplays. Most people are surprised when I say this. Disney animations are wonderful, and they exemplify a highly successful case of American cultural exports, so why do you say that? they ask me. But while Disney videos sell fairly well, there actually have not been many box-office hits in Japan. I believe the reason lies in the problem of localization. When bringing a movie to Japan, Disney does not think about adapting the work for Japanese audiences; it simply translates the lines from one language to another. In other words, pulling off a theater hit requires reworking a film according to the recipient country's sentiments, but Disney does not do that for quality-control reasons.
The same can be said of Japanese cultural exports to the United States. If the exporters are too strict about changing the content when marketing a work in a foreign culture, it is difficult to sell it to the masses. This may be a posteriori thinking, but the Japanese animated movie Mononoke Hime, which was released in the United States as Princess Mononoke around the same time as the Pokemon movie, apparently went largely unrevised-without cutting scenes that Americans would consider problematic, like where a man's hand gets chopped off. This resulted in the film's being rated PG-13 for images of violence and gore, which means that children under 13 years of age require parental guidance to see it. Because of this, it started off in less than 30 venues, even though it had originally been scheduled to be premiered in some 1,000 theaters across the United States.*
In a slightly different case, another Japanese anime TV and movie series called Sailor Moon was popular a few years ago. When the movies went on the silver screen in the United States, very little was altered visually. The outcome was a moderate hit, but the series never got to be like the big craze it was in Japan. Our research on this case suggests that things like Japanese writing showing up on signboards in the background and uniquely Japanese family settings distract American kids, preventing them from really becoming absorbed in the movie's fictional world. With these examples in mind, from the start we had our hearts set on thoroughly localizing Pokemon: The First Movie, though we may not have been completely successful in doing so.
Once we actually started looking at the requests of Warner Brothers, however, it often gave us headaches. Especially regarding the music, we even checked with them a number of times whether that was really what they wanted. They would reply, "Sure, this is perfect, no problem:' As opposed to the Japanese version, which uses a lot of stirring orchestral music, the U.S. version mainly uses dance and rap music, and there were many scenes where we thought, `Are they seriously going to play such driving music here?" Some sad scenes would be accompanied by very upbeat sounds, for instance. But when you listen carefully, you find that the lyrics actually match the scene. Considering that the soundtrack has already sold over a million copies on compact disc, I guess that what they did was right for the United States. They replaced the orchestral music with the kind of songs that American teenagers prefer, and they were right on the mark.
The people at Warner also gave us some hassle over the script. According to them, the Japanese original does not distinguish clearly enough between the good guys and the bad. Such a movie would not be successful in a multiethnic country like the United States, they insisted, because the viewers would not know who to identify with and who to cheer on. In other words, the heroes and villains needed to be identified clearly. They accomplished this by revising the various characters' lines.
There is proof that their insight was correct. Pokemon T-shirts have been sold in the United States since before the movie was released, and while in Japan the most popular by far are those with Pikachu, the main Pokemon featured in the series, in the United States those of Ash, the boy hero known in Japanese as Satoshi, sell better. I think this demonstrates how much American children revere heroes.
The movie is about a confrontation between Pocket Monsters and their clones, the main one being Mewtwo. In the Japanese version we intentionally avoid using the term kuron (clone), though, because the word has a frightening feel. This makes it difficult to bring the story to a happy conclusion where the originals and clones all become friends, so we softened the scary image by using the expression copy instead. In the U.S. version, by contrast, when the characters are told about Pokemon copies they react by explicitly saying, "Copies!?" "They're clones!" I do not know if they did it deliberately, but the U.S. team clarified some points that we had obscured.
While we allowed considerable liberty in remaking the film, we made sure the theme and essential features were not changed, as I have already said. The two versions are the same in that they conclude with the message that the lives of both the protagonists and antagonists are equally valuable. This may have been unpopular with some Americans, particularly critics. The November 22, 1999, issue of Time magazine carries an article titled "The Man Who Just Didn't Get It," in which Richard Corliss describes the movie with the words: "dull treatment of a way-too-familiar scenario." He goes on to say, "And I do like things kids like. . . . So I'm no grinch. . . . I'm just a guy who loves good cartoons and, when he sees a bad one, gets a little . . . bit . . . UPSET."
On the other hand, we also received positive comments from some who noted that the movie brought back feelings that they had forgotten. It seems that people with children tend to rate it more highly.
One thing that still makes me happy every time I think about it is that the audience applauded and cheered at key points in the story during the Hollywood preview screening, such as after the hero dies and Pikachu's tears bring him back to life, and also when the "good" Pokemon strike back. Just as in Japan, parent and child would rejoice together. I hear that people usually do not react like this at previews in the United States, so this was an indication that our work had been successful.
That is not to say that everything went perfectly well. I did feel the difficulty of exporting a cultural product without losing its Japanese character, and was forcibly reminded of some of the differences between Japan and other countries. Recently it was reported that some Pokemon cards had been taken off store shelves in the United States because a symbol resembling the Nazi swastika was printed on them. This is a sticky issue of international cultural understanding. Even though it is a highly familiar symbol that represents temples on maps for the Japanese, once it begins circulating overseas, it can evoke an entirely different response.*
Another Japanese export that has done well in the United States is the Power Rangers TV series. In this series Japanese footage was used only for the fighting scenes between robots, and all scenes containing people were made anew with American characters in place of the Japanese ones. The show did well, and the toys sold very well, too. But I do not know of any other case like Pokemon where the nucleus was preserved so faithfully even while adjusting the cultural content for a foreign audience.
Although this may not be widely known, the U.S. market for child-oriented products is incomparably larger than that in Japan, not only in terms of the absolute number of articles being manufactured but also per capita. With Pokemon: The First Movie, Warner Brothers is planning on putting some 10 million copies of the videotape on sale-- so many because there are a lot of working mothers over there, and they tend to hire baby sitters rather than take their children to day-care centers, as Japanese mothers are more likely to do. If an American mother is anxious about what her children will be doing while she is gone, she tells the baby sitter to show the kids some tapes that she has chosen herself-especially since videos are cheap in the United States, so people can buy them rather casually. So videos that suit mothers' tastes or child-rearing policies enjoy tremendously good sales.
The first full-length Pokemon movie, liberally adapted to appeal to American children, turned into a tremendous hit at the box office.
For a product to become popular among children, in other words, it has to be one that also goes down well with mothers. Successful characters usually have just as large a following of mothers as of kids. For the creators, therefore, the most important point is to make sure that they charge the work with a message to the mothers. The "message" in the Pokemon movie was the theme itself, which I have already discussed.
It is also important that the characters themselves be of a nature that makes mothers exclaim, "How cute!" and become instant fans, as well as that they be easy to remember. Pikachu meets these conditions perfectly. I believe that Pokemon's success owes largely to our having placed Pikachu in a leading role. As people who have played any of the Game Boy versions of Pokemon know, this character is of little use in the video game; but it was just right for starring in the anime.
First, it is cute enough to attract just about any woman, thanks to a winning character design. Second, the coloring is excellent. Yellow really stands out to the human eye; it is one of the three primary colors and also one of the traffic-light colors. On a traffic light, yellow signifies caution. The meanings of these signals are something that has been imprinted in people's unconscious minds, so yellow and red characters are attention-getting. Yellow is better than red, moreover, because there are very few competitors of that color. The only other famous yellow character that I can think of is Winnie-the-Pooh, which means that when people see Pikachu from a distance, they could mistake it for Pooh but for no other character. This is very important in terms of easy recognition.
We have in our heads a checklist of about 20 items like these, which we use to gauge a character's potential. We can predict whether or not the character will go a long way by seeing how many items it fulfills. Among the other criteria is that the name has a unique ring, so that people remember it after hearing it only once. In Pikachu's case, it is not only its name that sounds unique, but also its cry-"Pika" and "Pikachu" are all it ever says-so children can easily remember and imitate it.
The design should not be embarrassing when worn on T-shirts and should look cool on badges, moreover, and anyone should be able to draw it. There is also the question of whether the character can be rendered with a tearful look, since, if this can be done, animators will be able to depict the character in a full range of emotions.
On thoroughly reviewing the work in this way, I think that the characters of Pokemon world are very well made. I would give them all full marks.
Translated from "Pokemon' wa naze Beikoku de Seiko shita ka," in Ronza, February 2000, pp. 78-86; slightly abridged. (Courtesy of Asahi Shimbun)
KUBO Masakazu Born in 1959. Graduated from Waseda University, where he majored in education. Worked for Shogakukan Inc., where he served as a planner for the animated cartoon show Pocket Monsters and executive producer for films including Pokemon: The First Movie. Is now executive producer of the Character Business Planning Department and editor in chief of the monthly comic magazine Gotta.
Footnotes:
as printed in Japan Echo
* As of the second weekend of December 1999, when this article was being written, Princess Mononoke ranked number 30 in U.S. boxoffice sales. The total profit came to about $2 million, compared to Pokemon's $80 million.
*The two signs actually are not identical: The Japanese symbol's arms bend counterclockwise, whereas those of the Nazi swastika bend clockwise.-Ed.