For some reason spring has two remakes of anime from the bygone past. And Bartender is even older than Spice and Wolf – it’s been 18 years since the first series aired. I’m not sure why either of these old chestnuts got reboots – I never had the sense the public was beating the drums demanding them. In this case the first anime was 11 episodes (and if you hear 11 episodes and 2006, you should know it was NoitaminA), and given that the manga didn’t end until 2011, obviously left a lot of material unadapted. Whether this version will stick around long enough to rectify that I have no idea, though Bartender getting a complete adaptation at 21 volumes would be even more surprising than it getting remade in the first place.
The other thing Bartender has in common with Spice and Wolf is that both shows pretty much bored me to tears at the time they aired, despite drawing pretty widespread praise. Once more we have a case – well-regarded seinen manga in this instance – where I feel like I ought to like a series more than I do. But truth be told I have been known to engage in a bit of imbibing on occasion, and I do rather like cool bar settings, so there’s more thematic overlap with my tastes here. Once more I wade in to see if many years have changed the way I perceive a series.
As with S & W, I don’t remember enough of the first anime to say whether this new one is “better” or “worse”. And again, my overall take is that this was perfectly fine. The studio, Liber, as far as I know has only produced one series, but it was a good one – Koori Zokusei Danshi to Cool na Douryou Joshi. It has a veteran director in Kuraya Ryouichi and the pacing and staging of the premiere is pretty well on-point. I’d be lying if I said the premiere was really compelling, but I was entertained. And as I said, this one is at least relevant to my interests (even if I’m more of a scotch and bourbon than a cocktails guy).
Obviously some things have been updated here – I’m assuming cell phones didn’t play such a large part in the 2006 series’ intro, and in fact Sasakura’s incompetence with them might be a wry commentary on the time gap since it aired. Or he could be a demon or something (again, I remember almost nothing) – I mean, red eyes certainly isn’t natural. The pitch here is that a fancy new hotel is looking for a bartender for their “intimate” counter bar, and the director insists that he (or she) be able to produce “the glass of God”, even though he can’t say what he means by that except “you’ll know it when you see it”. In charge of the search are the Yin-Yang personalities of two office ladies from the hotel.
That search leads them to the aforementioned Sasakura Ryuu, after numerous candidates are summarily rejected. Sasakura (they met him at the park, where he forgot a library book) owns a tiny Ginza bar called Eden Hall, where the interwebs say he makes the best cocktails in town (and Tokyo is at the very top of the cocktail pyramid). Having won a prestigious European mixology title while working at the “Ratz” (ROFL) Hotel in Paris, he had quite a reputation even before he returned to Japan. There are hints of mysterious goings on with Eden Hall – like, not everyone can find it (but then, that’s normal for Ginza), but the two ladies ocate it easily enough and put Sasakura to a test he passes with flying colors.
The mixology scenes are fun, and if you have an interest in such things, well- interesting. It amused me that all the bottles were their real versions, so there’s product placement a-plenty, and the discourses on Pousse-café style and making bar ice were fun in a geeky way. The whisky anorak in me requires that I point out that Glenfarclas is in fact a Speyside not a Highland, despite saying Highland on the bottle, but since Speyside was once considered part of the Highland region I won’t deduct points for that. I don’t know if Bartender will hold my interest now when it couldn’t back then, but my obsessions with both hooch and anime have skyrocketed in the intervening years so I’d give it a better shot than Spice and Wolf if I were a betting man.
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