Re: R.I.P.

I did say something like that, although the ratio was probably more like 1/100. The other day, I went back and looked at Japanese box office figures for 2006, and it seems Paprika never made the weekly top 10, even in its opening week. In March I was in Japan, talking with some people in the industry, and they certainly had the impression Kon's films didn't make back their money at the box office.

It's not about trying to knock Miyazaki off a pedestal--never mind anime or Japan, he is one of the great filmmakers of the world, and deserves and has earned his status as a top box-office draw. It's more frustration and regret that Japan doesn't seem to appreciate its other talented anime directors enough. Of course, I expect a broadly accessible, family-friendly Miyazaki film to be more successful than the experimental and adult works of a Kon or an Oshii. It is just that the ratio between what a Ghibli film earns and what they earn is so extreme--so wildly disproportionate--that it calls into question just how much Japan really accepts anime as a film medium for adults. Accepts it where it counts for the industry--at the box office.

A Ghibli film can gross US$200 million in Japan. If we were to imagine a hypothetical, lower box-office tier for adult-oriented anime films at what seems a very modest ratio--say, that on average they'll have only 1/20th the box-office appeal of a Ghibli film--US$10 million--you would see more films being made with the ambition of Kon's Paprika or Oshii's The Sky Crawlers, or Okiura's Jin-Roh. But in his own country, Kon couldn't count on one-twentieth the audience a Ghibli film could; not one-fiftieth, not even one-hundredth. From the perspective of a foreign critic, Kon was so neglected by Japanese audiences he hardly registered with them at all. As we've come to know from his extraordinary final letter, Satoshi Kon was a man of grace as well as genius, and of the money his films made, he graciously said that they got what they deserved. But I don't have Kon-sensei's grace, and in sadness and anger I say, no, they did not get nearly what they deserved.