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Video: How Manga Entertainment Almost Made A Spice Girls Anime
posted on by Andrew Osmond
The latest episode of The Anime Business, AnimEigo's documentary series of interviews with major figures in the Western anime industry, features a 40-minute interview with Laurence Guinness, about his time at Britain's Manga Entertainment, where he would eventually become head of its UK office.
Justin Sevakis, the CEO of MediaOCD and AnimEigo (and founder of Anime News Network), has worked on The Anime Business series for the past few years. The previous episodes are also available on AnimEigo's YouTube channel.
Among his comments, Guinness remembers that at one point, he was developing an anime film featuring the 1990s British girl group The Spice Girls, which he refers to as "Girl Power The Anime." Manga Entertainment even produced "development cel" images for the film with the studio Production I.G The subject comes up from 34-30 in the video, with Guinness showing some of these development images, including Victoria Beckham on a motorbike.
The film would have been aimed at a substantially different audience from Manga Entertainment's more violent fare. "If you're a 12-year-old girl in 1987, I think you might've gone to the cinema to see this," Guinness comments. "In fact, I think you would've stood in a line for a long time to get in to see this." (For the record, the Spice Girls group was formed in 1994.)
Among his other comments in the interview, Guinness argues many Manga Entertainment titles appealed to 1990s youngsters emerging from an economic recession, because of the anime's frequent themes of empowerment and reconstruction.
He says some anime distributed by Manga Entertaiment were "misogynistic and wrong" in hindsight. However, he also says these titles were "of their time and of a culture, and done in a spirit of innocence... At the time, these were incredibly exciting pieces of entertainment and filmic creativity."
He says that Manga Entertainment's expansion into the American market was mishandled. Given the size of America, Guinness says, "I think we could have focused more on getting anime onto TV screens and that would have created and generated, I think, a healthy home video market... You would have had to give up a lot, but I think the rewards possibly could have justified that, and some strategic relationships could have been forged..."
Guinness says Manga Entertainment could have continued with co-production and co-development, following the company's co-production of Ghost in the Shell. "My vision was all about synthesizing anime with the best of Western culture, or certainly some of the interesting things on Western culture."
Guinness envisioned, for example, an OAV project featuring the American hip hop collective Wu-Tang Clan, with animated versions of rappers such as Ghostface Killah and RZA.
Not to mention "Girl Power: The Anime."