The Concierge – Magic and Consumer Culture

Ok, so I’m writing this before putting the media in so I don’t know yet if I found the clip or not. If I did, it will speak for itself. You will already know that The Concierge is a really well-animated and directed movie that uses highly dynamic choreographed scenes for comedic effect that is both visually stunning but also just fun to watch.

You may not have noticed the huge amount of anthropomorphized characters just filtering about. And they are all different animals with widely varying proportions and shapes. Really, The Concierge is a treasure trove of character design, especially if you like the animal types. Artists take notes!

I also noticed the eye designs in the humans. Not the iris as I usually do but the shape. They are left a little fluid with incomplete outies and that not only sort of gives a widening effect but also makes those eyes convey a lot of emotion with relatively little movement. That was really fun to watch!

All in all a great-looking little movie with some truly charming character designs that stood out to me!

You’re going toned some context here. A lot of context maybe… Stop me if I’m rambling!

I saw The Concierge at Fantasia. (That’s a movie festival in Montreal that I have been attending for well over a decade and I have a lot of history with). I might write a post about this separately but for several reasons, Fantasia just doesn’t have the same impact on me as it used to so simply seeing a movie at the festival is no longer significantly different than seeing it in the cinema but there is still a little more electricity in the air that might give the experience a little bump.

And in this case, there were also a lot of other considerations. I was attending with a friend I don’t see often enough and always enjoy spending time with. The huge hall was absolutely packed, and everyone was in a good mood. At some point, someone dressed as a Japanese wolf in a business suit (a character in the film) just showed up to cheer and it was completely unexpected. The costume was stunning as well. And the director and character designer (which might be part of the reason I thought about character design so much but also, they really were quite good) of the movie were both in attendance and answered questions from the crowd. They even gave us free goodies afterward. Look I got a signed, personalized poster! I’m going to frame it!

When you put it all together, The Concierge wasn’t just a movie I went to see, it was an experience. One that you can’t recreate by simply streaming the film in your living room or even going to see it in theaters. You’ll get your own experience, and it might be just as great. But I want to warn you ahead of time that my experience was most certainly coloured by everything else that was going on that had little to do with the actual movie!

With all that out of the way, let’s talk about the actual movie. The movie itself is more like a series of shorter stories. A bit of a slice-of-life movie albeit in a fantastical setting. I understand it was adapted from a manga and they chose the chapters that best suited the narrative they were going for and put those together. There is a loose connective line as it is all about Akiko’s quest to become the best concierge she can be and the last story does really bring everything together in a really satisfying way, but for the most part, the stories are independent of each other.

There is a lot about love in this movie. You could argue that it’s really all about love and how we treat each other. But it’s also about loss and guilt. And the thing is, I really liked The Concierge, but if you dig into the deeper message the movie seems to be going for, it sort of breaks apart a bit.

Ok, so there will be spoilers from here on out. Despite the fact that I’m going to complain a bit here I still think it’s a good anime that I will be recommending to people in my real life and I also encourage you to see it if you are interested. As such, if you want to go in blind then this is where I leave you. I hope you enjoy it as I did!

Ok, so The Concierge exists in a magical realist version of the world. It seems that the world is much as we know it and history is largely the same except for this one department store where animals are anthropomorphized and have these detailed lives and backstories. Moreover, the VIAs (Very Important Animals) are all extinct species.

The movie never goes into detail about how any of it is possible. It’s a bit on the nose but thankfully they only actually explain it out loud once towards the end. Personally, I would have preferred it if they didn’t explain it at all but I do think this is an all-ages film so maybe they thought some of the kids would have been too young to pick up on it by themselves. In any case, it’s a very fancy old-school department store, I mean it has concierges! And all the staff are humans who serve the animal customers. There is a little speech about how humans drove so many species to extinction and this store was a way for them to redeem themselves.

But the thing is, it doesn’t really work, does it? The department store is still a store and the animal customers have to pay for the stuff they want and the experience of getting served. Just like any other store. You wouldn’t really think of the staff at high-end department stores redeeming themselves to the rich customers that enter those stores, would you? It’s a very weird metaphor.

And Akiko along with all the other concierges, store clerks, restaurant staff, and so on, is getting paid for her work. She’s doing a job and she can get fired from it. How is this atoning for driving species to extinction in any way? I couldn’t answer that question and honestly, I think the movie would have been stronger if they just left all of that out.

I mean the speech. They could have still included the extinct species, and maybe even found a way to mention the circumstances of the extinctions. That would have given the contemplative and wistful tones the movie was going for in places, I think. And just left out the part about capitalism for redemption or whatever. It fell flat in my opinion. Maybe this is better expressed in the manga o there is more to it than I saw but I simply did not like this message and it was delivered as if it was at the core of the story which lessened the whole for me.

On the other hand, the individual vignettes were often both quite funny and touching and I will admit, this movie made me think about animal conservation a lot so there is that!

All in all, I would definitely recommend the concierge. I just think it tripped over a few things.

You’re an animal lover 🙂

I like the little artist…

A Salty Dog 😉