Very Important Animals: The Concierge

Welcome to ANIWIRE! This week we’re discussing the film The Concierge and what it has to say about retail work. Before that, though, here’s some news from the past week or two.

News

• Nicholas Dupree, a writer and journalist at Anime News Network, sadly passed away yesterday. His mother set up a GoFundMe to pay for his funeral, which you can find here.
• Kyoto Animation’s next big project is a 2025 adaptation of Keiichi Arawi’s comedy series City. They previously collaborated on an adaptation of Nichijou in 2011, a series in which (among other things) a school principal suplexes a deer.
• A long-rumored Patlabor anime project (titled Patlabor EZY) has finally been announced for 2026, featuring director Yutaka Izubuchi and several members of past Patlabor productions. Patlabor was a cult classic mecha series starring municipal policemen that pilot giant robots to solve crimes; key members of its creative team, Mamoru Oshii and Kazunori Ito, went on to create the acclaimed film Ghost in the Shell.
• Yasuomi Umetsu, one of the anime industry’s most skilled and ambitious purveyors of trash, announced a new film series titled Virgin Punk that is scheduled to premiere in 2025. Umetsu’s recent series have been uneven (to put it mildly) but he’s a talented enough guy that you can never dismiss his work out of hand.
• The long-in-the-making anime adaptation of beloved horror series Uzumaki is finally set to air on September 28th. Why did it take so long? Well, according to Vulture, the director’s “original idea was to use motion capture and build everything in CG, then re-draw all of it…”

Bookmarks

• For Crunchyroll News, Liam Dempsey interviewed Yoshimi Itazu about The Concierge.
• For Sakuga Blog, Kevin Cirugeda wrote about Kyoto Animation’s past adaptation of Nichijou, and what to expect from CITY THE ANIMATION.
• For Anime Feminist, Chiaki Hirai discussed her past experiences as an interviewer.
• For Anime Herald, Kennedy wrote about the process by which terms from anime “fansubs” become stuck in public consciousness.
• If you’re curious to read through Nick Dupree’s past work, I recommend sampling his contributions to Anime News Network’s ongoing This Week in Anime column. Or, you could read his weekly coverage of the classic anime boondoggle EX-ARM.

What I Wrote

• For Crunchyroll News, I covered the twists and turns of Uzumaki director Hiroshi Nagahama’s wild career: from his rotoscoped adaptation of Flowers of Evil to the time he collaborated with Stan Lee.
• Also for Crunchyroll News, I defended the controversial climax of the first season of 2010s goth hit Tokyo Ghoul.
• For KComicsBeat, I reviewed the Korean webtoon series A Compendium of Ghosts, The Horizon, Mystic Pop-Up Bar and Her Tale of Shim Chong. All are worth checking out.
• For startmenu, I reviewed the spooky “infinity flow” visual novel The Final Prize is Soup.

AMV of the Week

Here's "Safety Dance" by Shin.

There’s a story my former coworker used to tell about our workplace. One day, he received a call at the information desk from an irate older woman. She demanded to speak to the manager of the cafe downstairs. After forwarding her to the right number, he walked down to the cafe himself to see what was going on. There he found the cafe’s employees tied up in a tense phone conversation with that same woman. What, he asked them, was she so mad about? Their answer: “she was upset that her cookie was too warm.”

This story illustrates a specific way in which retail work damages employees. It isn’t just that customers are rude, although they sometimes can be. Neither is it the power differential that requires staff to bend over backwards for their clientele. It is instead a subtle, insidious danger: the ease by which retail workers stop thinking of customers as human. When every person that walks through the door of your establishment makes the same stupid mistakes, why not see them as beasts instead?

This phenomenon is precisely why I find The Concierge, an animated film set in a luxury department store, so funny in concept. While the staff of Hokkyoku Department Store are human, its customers are animals; big, small, furry or scaly. “Retail workers” and “customers” are already treated as different species in the workplace. So I find it quite fitting that The Concierge dehumanizes its customers completely.

The Concierge then goes one step further with this metaphor by introducing “VIA,” or “very important animal” customers. These are endangered or extinct species like Japanese wolves, sea minks and the great auk. Nothing better sums up the paradox of customer service. A customer might rend your flesh with their teeth or claws, yet they are all so vulnerable that even too much kindness might kill them. When it does, it’s always the fault of the employee. Why would anybody expect a customer of all things to take care of itself? Nobody would expect anything else of a foolish animal.

This all sounds quite cruel, to be sure. Yet the foolish animals of Hokkyoku Department Store are undeniably fun to watch on screen. Wealthy owls hoot like stereotypical anime gentry; peacocks display such brilliant plumage that Hokkyoku Department Store regulates their public displays of affection. There’s even a wooly mammoth who is an award-winning sculptor. Save for one problem customer, a stubborn monk seal, Hokkyoku Department Store’s clientele are quite reasonable. Everybody is happy to be there.

The heroine of The Concierge is a young human woman named Akino. Ever since she was a child, she longed to become an employee of Hokkyoku Department Store. Once she dons the uniform, though, she runs into a series of familiar customer service conundrums.  What do you do with a customer seeking a gift for an estranged relative with no idea where to start?  How do you fulfill a big promise to a customer in need after you’ve made it? If a customer asks you for something impossible, do you turn them down gently or do your due diligence? Alternatively: do you break the rules in order to make the impossible possible?

Akino’s clumsiness and lack of experience frustrates her bosses to no end. Yet they are won over by how earnestly she wants to help every animal in the department store. Akino respects their needs and works around their limitations. In short she treats them just like people. This can be quite difficult, because (as anybody that has worked retail knows) treating customers like people is rarely efficient. Recognizing when empathy is getting you nowhere, and when you need to cut and run, requires a different skill set. In fact, too much empathy at the wrong time might lead to confusion or anger on the store floor. 

Akino’s empathy certainly gets her in trouble. But it’s also her strength. Early in a film, she promises a Japanese wolf dining the store’s restaurant that she’ll assist with his marriage proposal. She does this on the spot without letting the staff know in advance. Once they find out, many are frustrated and want nothing to do with it. It is, after all, a lot of extra work! But once the head cook signs on and Akino’s plan starts rolling, the kitchen and wait staff are caught up in the momentum. Everybody is ecstatic when it works out perfectly. 

That’s the two-sided coin of retail work, cynicism on one side and idealism on the other. Nobody likes to be bullied by customers or left to manage clueless pedestrians. But everybody I knew as a bookseller loved helping people. Even particularly jaded coworkers of mine had one or two customers they routinely had long conversations with. There were also times when customers would reciprocate. One customer once gave me all his old brochures for the science fiction convention WorldCon. Another bought my department holiday gifts.

Yet it’s tempting to close your heart to the community you serve regardless. Leaving yourself open, after all, invites pain. Any one person might take it into their heads to hurt you just because they were tired or irritable that day. Even bubbly Akino has her share of bad days, as well as fellow coworkers who see her attitude towards customer service as a liability. Even a beautiful establishment like Hokkyoku Department Store is a business at the end of the day, after all. It’s never been about making friends with people. It’s about taking their money.

As somebody who not so long ago worked in retail, though, I always saw building relationships as key. Your neighborhood is your first responsibility. Understanding their needs, and pointing them in the right direction, is part of the job description. Then again, I was always an Akino; the only way I could talk to a customer in a retail context was by leaning on the part of myself that cared about what they were going through. If I go back to retail one day (and I might) it may be because I still find helping people with their problems rewarding despite how tiring it can be.

Recently my coworker retold the story about his experience with the older woman on the phone and her too-warm cookie. “Thinking about it now,” he said, “I think she just wanted someone to talk to.” The wisdom to know when somebody’s rude behavior stems not from cruelty, but an unfulfilled need; that’s what it takes to understand both humans and animals.