The Skyfall Effect: Vinland Saga's "River"

Welcome to ANIWIRE! This week we are talking about how the second season of Vinland Saga is connected to the 2012 James Bond film Skyfall. Before that, though, here’s the news from the past week.

News

• August 20th was the 40th anniversary of Daicon IV, the legendary animated short by the folks who went on to found Studio Gainax. A historic landmark for good and bad reasons. The short still whips though.
• Black Clover is switching from weekly serialization in Shonen Jump to the quarterly Jump GIGA magazine. Haven’t read this series, but some folks I know are big fans.
• Art director Nizo Yamamoto, best known today for his contributions to Studio Ghibli films like Princess Mononoke and Grave of the Fireflies, sadly passed away at the age of 70 in mid-August.
• The author of popular “isekai” series Mushoku Tensei spoke about recent developments in the currently airing anime, such as why the protagonist Rudeus buying two slaves is totally understandable. He then walked those words back after a social media outcry. For context on the series, I recommend Kim Morrissey’s write-up on “narou” fiction.
• The trailer premiered for Abel Gongora and Science Saru’s upcoming Scott Pilgrim anime! Here’s hoping it’s good.

Bookmarks

• Alex wrote about ANIWIRE favorite Skip and Loafer, particularly its “combo of realism and nostalgic, romantic not-so-realism.”
• The Awayfarer wrote about idiosyncratic animator Shinya Ohira, who has made memorable recent appearances in One Piece and Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron.
• Amilee Doree released a video about Parfait, a visual novel by White Album 2 writer Fumiaki Maruto.
• For Anime News Network, Coop Bicknell interviewed Shoji Kawamori and Hidetaka Tenjin at Otakon. Kawamori’s always a good time…
• For IndieWire, Kambole Campbell wrote about 10 1980s anime films that changed the game.
• For Dicebreaker, Alicia Haddick profiled this year’s Yu-Gi-Oh! World Championships.
• Hazel is back once again, doing another deep dive into an unexpected topic–this time, tokusatsu!
• And another fun video: Pyramid Inu tackled cult classic Stop! Hibari-kun!

AMV of the Week

Here's "Parents" by NearphotisonAMVs.

The second season of Vinland Saga aired this year, and there’s plenty of reasons to be thankful for that. It adapts the part of the manga at which the series transforms from a very good action comic into artist Makoto Yukimura’s treatise on masculinity and nonviolence. Despite switching from Studio WIT to MAPPA, the producers managed to keep the majority of the first season’s staff on board. (If you’d like to read further about the show’s production, I recommend PurpleGeth’s write-up over on artist_unknown.) I don’t think the anime adaptation is a substitute for the manga, if only because Yukimura’s art is so good. But it hit the beats it needed to, and turned out some very good episodes. Critics loved it, and my fellow podcaster Alex Lupp–the biggest fan of Vinland Saga I know–was satisfied.

What stuck out to me most about Vinland Saga’s second season, though, had nothing to do with the series proper. It was the opening credits storyboarded by Yusuke Sunouchi, set to Anonymouz's song "River." In a vacuum it’s a good, thematically fitting opening sequence. We see Thorfinn sink into the waters of depression and servitude; important side characters Einar and Arnheid are given moments to shine; Canute appears to remind us that he is walking a path to violence and destruction. It’s a big change from the viking action of the first season’s opening sequences. The credits prepare the viewer for Vinland Saga’s transformation into a different kind of story.

Still, I couldn’t help but think: why did this seem so familiar?

Could it be that Vinland Saga's second opening credits sequence is a big homage to the opening credits of Skyfall? Yes. Yes it is.

Both sequences share skull motifs, hole motifs, water motifs...the connections go on and on. They even end with a breaking of crystals/glass.

Why would Vinland Saga do this? At first glance, the series doesn't share much in common with Skyfall. The former is a historical fiction epic set during the time of vikings. The latter is a stylish spy thriller that sets James Bond and his crew up against the forces of death and inevitability. Perhaps it's the focus on death that binds these two together. The Skyfall opening credits pivot around the apocalyptic destruction of Bond's childhood home, a conceit that only reveals itself in the film's final set-piece. Meanwhile, the farm arc of Vinland Saga is all about annihilation of the self; Thorfinn must forsake his violent past in order to become a whole person.

The alternative is that the folks that made Vinland Saga just really love Skyfall. I suppose that's fair. They aren't the only ones. What about the first opening credits sequence of romantic comedy series Kaguya-sama: Love is War?

Kaguya-sama's opening credits sequence is elevated further by the theme song "Love Dramatic," which features "Japan's King of Love Songs" Masayuki Suzuki. Suzuki has been putting out albums since the 1980s, making him the sort of established musical talent anime typically avoids in favor of flavor-of-the-month vocalists and J-rock bands. "Love Dramatic" doesn't sound much like a James Bond song, but to me it still has that ineffable James Bond energy. (Or perhaps, Space Adventure COBRA energy? City Hunter energy?)

The real give-away though is the use of symmetry. Nearly every anime opening riffing on Skyfall has this.

You better believe "River" pulls this trick as well. They even snuck in the house!

You'd think that an actual anime spy show would riff on Skyfall. Oh, wait. Remember 2018's Release the Spyce? They did that.

To be honest, I would have otherwise completely forgotten Release the Spyce, a series that came and went without much fanfare. Knowing that somebody on the team snuck a Skyfall reference into their opening credits sequence earns it a place in my heart as "another one of those." I'll always prefer Princess Principal though.

Plenty of Japanese animators love American pop culture, including the kinds of works that cause anime fans to burst out in hives. Hiroyuki Imaishi is a Michael Bay aficionado.  Mushishi director Hiroshi Nagahama is a big-time Marvel fan.  It wouldn't be surprising if Yusuke Sunouchi just thought to himself one day, "I love Skyfall," and decided to make an opening credits sequence modelled on Skyfall. Or perhaps we have Vinland Saga director Shuhei Yabuta to thank. I say this because the opening credits to another Yabuta project, the science fiction anime series Inuyashiki, are a riff on True Detective's excellent first opening sequence.

Inuyashiki's credits were handled by Yuzuru Tachikawa, the director behind Mob Psycho 100 and Death Parade. It's a grab bag of random fun ideas (fire animation! a garbage dump! giant CG models!) but the True Detective lift stands out to me the most. Once again, it's a seemingly random choice in that Inuyashiki doesn't have much to do on the surface with True Detective's spooky southern gothic. It has me wondering whether Tachikawa and/or Yabuta stuck with the series after season 2, or if they only ever watched the opening credits and thought "this is great! Let's borrow it." As someone who never finished True Detective but has watched the opening credits many, many times, I can relate.

All this has me thinking: when will we see American films or television opening credits borrow from anime? The majority of television opening credits these days follow the trend of large thematic objects super-imposed with the names of the actors. Even some anime, like Netflix's Dragon's Dogma adaptation, follow this approach. I'd love to see work that's more stylistically diverse. Something like the live-action Cowboy Bebop opening credits, even though I consider those a noble failure despite the team's best efforts. (Much like the show itself, to be honest!)

For my money, it's tough to beat the Peacemaker opening credits for sheer anime opening energy. It's a flashy dance number that introduces each member of the cast one by one. At the same time, it gestures sneakily at the show's themes. Details reveal themselves on multiple rewatches. This is what opening credits sequences should be, not slow pans over maps and tiny figurines. I'm tempted to rank Peacemaker's dance sequence up there with Yuzuru Tachikawa's famous Death Parade opening. But Peacemaker's director James Gunn hasn't seen Death Parade...or has he?!