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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.
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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.