The Concierge Review — Scotland Loves Anime 2023
The second movie I watched at this year’s Scotland Loves Anime film festival in Edinburgh is very different to the first. Lonely Castle in the Mirror was two hours of deep adolescent angst that left me emotionally exhausted. The Concierge, however, is a bright and breezy seventy minutes filled with colourful visual humour, peculiar funny animals, and a delightful, plucky protagonist.
Based on the two-volume manga The Concierge at Hokkyoku Department Store by Tsuchika Nishimura, this is a very unusual anime movie. It doesn’t look like anime, for one, partly because most of the characters are stylised animals, and those few that are human have very exaggerated features that wouldn’t look out of place in an American independent humour comic.
Main character Akino is a new concierge at the Hokkyoku Department Store, a specialist establishment that serves an exclusive clientele of sentient, anthropomorphic animals. The explanation for the existence of this place is covered in the film, and is both spoilery and whimsical — so I won’t detail it here. For any readers who don’t know what a concierge is, and I wouldn’t be embarrassed, as I think a large proportion of the audience at SLA weren’t completely sure either, a concierge is like a professional problem-solver. They’re highly-qualified, there’s an internationally-recognised qualification, and although they’re usually associated with hotels, they can also be employed by large, exclusive department stores. Their job is to fulfil the wishes of their customers, regardless of oddness or obscurity.
Inexperienced Akino’s job is made especially challenging as she’s constantly under the watchful eye of her intense boss (it’s a running joke that he keeps popping up out of the most bizarre places), plus her clientele are so diverse in terms of their body shapes, personalities, species and needs. Akino’s only on probation so stresses that she isn’t good enough, especially as she makes lots of mistakes. The film flits from scene to scene as Akino madly dashes from one part of the store to the other, almost always seconds from potential disaster, yet more often than not leaves her customers delighted with her heartfelt efforts. Akino is easy to root for, she represents the epitome of every new professional hire — clueless but well-meaning and full of energy and drive to succeed.
Structured mostly as a series of interconnected vignettes, there isn’t too much of a plot — and there doesn’t need to be. It’s a creative, entertaining and at times exuberant production, with Production I.G.’s Yoshimi Itazu directing great busy scenes full of characters. Compere Jonathan Clements, who introduced the movie, likened the original manga to the childrens’ books of Richard Scarry with their busy, hyperactive illustrations. I can’t think of a more apt comparison.
Also of note is that all of the various animal characters are voiced by famous Japanese actors — both from animation and live action — this of course isn’t obvious to English-speakers, but is a fun piece of trivia. I wonder what Crunchyroll will do with their surely inevitable English dub for when they distribute it next year?
For a mostly light-hearted and funny movie, The Concierge features a few scenes of marked pathos — one involving a widower pining for his deceased wife, the other involving a character desperate to propose to their partner in the most perfect setting possible. I think my 18-year-old daughter may have found these scenes even more moving than the ones from Lonely Castle in the Mirror that made her father blub like a baby.
I’d definitely recommend The Concierge to fans of Odd Taxi, that other recent anime show featuring funny animals, though the genre is completely different. There aren’t any murders in The Concierge, for one. Everyone in the cinema laughed heartily during the many humorous scenes, myself included. I’d happily watch it again — with such a short runtime, it hardly overstays its welcome. There aren’t many other anime movies like The Concierge, it’s something I may never have watched without attending Scotland Loves Anime, and I was glad of the opportunity to experience it.
Next on the itinerary is a very different type of movie: the jazz-filled Blue Giant, and I’ll return with a review very soon.
The Concierge
Directed by: Yoshimi Itazu
Screenplay by: Satomi Ooshima
Music by: Tofubeats
Character design by: Chiyo Morita
Studio: Production I.G
World Premiere: 25th April 2023, Annecy
JP premiere: 20th Oct 2023
US premiere: 2024 (distributed by Crunchyroll)
UK premiere: 4th Nov 2023
Runtime: 70 minutes
Language: Japanese audio with English Subtitles
BBFC rating: 12
Based on: The Concierge at Hokkyoku Department Store manga by Tsuchika Nishimura
JP publication: Big Comic Zōkan (Shogakukan) Feb 2017 — Nov 2018 — 2 volumes
ISBN: 978–4–09–189763–3, 978–4–09–860337–4
