#250: Bartender (2006)

 

Studio: Palm Studio

Director: Masaki Watanabe

Screenplay: Yasuhiro Imagawa

Based on the manga by Araki Joh

Voice Cast: Takahiro Mizushima as Ryuu Sasakura; Ayumi Fujimura as Miwa Kurushima; Leo Morimoto as Narration

Viewed in Japanese with English Subtitles

 

Manga, and anime adaptations of them, about food and cooking were once a niche in the West, but this has begun to change when certain titles gained traction. Food Wars, a Weekly Shōnen Jump title whose manga run was from 2012 to 2019, and its anime series adaptation, helped as an accessible example of this genre, depicting cooking by being a story of rivalry and competition by way of over-the-top Iron Chef scenarios. Other stories, like Yakitate!! Japan the manga and the anime, took this more over-the-top tone too, a story about competitive bread making which is just as ridiculous and offers one bread recipe so good it briefly sends one to the afterlife dead, so there is enough playfulness with the idea of food as a story premise. Work that is more serious does exist, and this is not forgotting that alcohol, an important part of human culture too, has been the subject of manga and anime too. One manga about wine, The Drops of God (2004-2014 for the first manga series) as written by Tadashi Agi, a pseudonym employed by creative team of sister and brother Yuko and Shin Kibayashi, even became influential in the wine industry itself. During the journey of its lead to solve the mysteries of thirteen wines his late father has assigned him to find, wines which were namedropped in the manga gained interest for those wishing to try them, turning the likes of the French wine market upside down as a result, increasing stocks and prices alike¹.

Among anime, Bartender is distinct even within this genre, what it says on the tin, about a bartender, and in that presenting something completely different even next to others mentioned in this paragraph. A title that was once a fan subbed only release, this has in the 2020s had official Western releases, in the United States by Shout! Factory, and Anime Limited in the United Kingdom. Finally getting its due in the 2020s in itself feels apt, as this also belongs to another trend over the 2010s of anime designed to be soothing and comforting, saying a lot about the state of the world in general that anime not about plots or drastic drama needed to be created, but in itself presenting different ways for them to still tell stories in themselves, Bartender as a 2000s production befitting their ilk as a prototype.

Bartender is both very idiosyncratic in premise, but is so simple structurally that, if a longer work, this could have lasted seasons as a "cocktail of the week" show. Ryuu Sasakura, who we do snippets of the past of during this series, is considered the "Glass of the Gods", a bartender who goes beyond the basic requirements of the job to being even a life preserver for the down-and-out, able to serve the right drink for the right time. He follows leads of other manga and anime, regardless of profession and genre, exaggerated in how good he is at picking the right cocktail. He can make a Black Velvet, champagne mixed with Guinness beer, without causing it to spill out of the glass, but he can literally scare off a con artist trying to marry a woman for her money by guessing the taste of alcohol diluted into a single drop in water.

To the show's credit, it is actually effecting emotionally. Expect knowledge and exposition thrown at you men - it explains not only the history of certain alcohols, but other types of culture, such as one episode structured around Ernest Hemingway and his last work The Old Man and the Sea (1952) - but it has a human core. Regrets, loss and disillusionment are tackled as much as there is humour, the wacky professor part of the Christmas episode where the Black Velvet is prepared. It can be viewed as pat, finding happiness when the right metaphor for your life is served by Ryuu in an expensive drink, but it works. This is especially as this does the admirable thing of having even how a cocktail came to be and alcohol consumption given weight to them sociologically, even in terms of real history when one episode talks about the hostile rule of the English over Scotland in centuries past, especially the taxes, influenced their legendary types of whiskey production. It is also easy to forget, as this has an emotional heart to it, that alcohol and bars despite being linked to addiction and destructive decadence even in pop culture and art still have an importance in human history. Alcohol has existed since the first cave dweller (or pre-historical civilisation) accidentally discovered intoxication, and even alcohol has been said to have been given to us by Gods, such as the Ancient Greek god Dionysus being the god of wine among his other contributions to existence.

This show, frankly, is meant to sell booze, and to a lesser extend Ginza, where the show it set, where these cocktails would be expensive and the locale potentially elitist, but the show never feels like this is the priority. One episode even explicitly is about a man who is poor but saved from all his work to half drink an expensive choice, which shows that Bartender was after something universal, even in having the recipe each week per episode for the viewer to record. The show is less selling glamorous than a hardcore rumination on alcohol in fuzzy blanket of quaintness. This is also in mind to how, working around the budget and the limitations of the story, the creators of Bartender, studio Palm Studio, deserve a lot of praise for the visual creativity they put into the production. You can notice that the bottles of alcohol, even the liquid inside them when poured, are CGI and that there are many static scenes of dialogue, but it does not stop the production from being visually creative. The show is willing to bend reality, intersplicing the variety of figures within the tale, such as the two older male bartenders who taught Ryuu, and Ayumi Fujimura, a female character introduced in the first episode that becomes the only other reoccurring character, to interject the history of the subjects being discussed.

The show is also happy to be metaphorical and distort reality, such as a beautiful moment following an advertiser, near the end of his career and regretting his career path, being nodded to by his creations across Ginza and the rest of the city as he travels to his desired goal. Touches like this make Bartender ultimately a show that, taking its distinct premise, won me over early into the episodes, and thankfully, as it is finally more readily available in the West, more people can appreciate it as well for its virtues. Sadly, if there is a tragedy to this work, it is that Palm Studio in 2007 stopped producing animation. With only a few titles in their CV, it is sad that they clearly were not able to continue developing more titles and films in their short run. It befits the melancholic tone of Bartender though to metaphorically drink a toast to them and appreciate this fully.

 

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1) The Drops of God: The Manga That Disrupted the International Wine Market, written by Bea Caicoya and published for CBR.com on May 29th 2021.