Bartender

What's Bartender? It's an anime, based on a manga by Araki Joh and Kenji Nagatomo. It aired for 11 episodes in 2006. And it's about this guy!

A picture of the protagonist

That's Ryo Sasakura, the titular Bartender. Essentially, it's a show in which, every episode, a customer will come into his bar with some problem or other, and he'll help them out with it, usually by making them a drink. And then what generally follows is a whole lot of exposition about the drink that then relates back to the customer's problem in some way. Take this made up example: "Oh no, my wife left me" "Ah, I will make you a dry Martini. Did you know the dry martini was invented by a man whose wife also left him?" and so on.

In essence, this is a show that is silly in a very particular way. It absolutely demands that you buy into the premise of people's life problems being solved by being served a nice drink by a bartender at a fancy bar. And, like, I can buy into that, at least for the duration of the show. It's a classic sort of anime silliness, but with more of a mature tone to it. To be honest, I think that's kind of what makes the show work so well for me. The show's soundtracked with jazz music, presumably to lend a mature intellectual air to the proceedings, and this just adds to that vibe. It's also kind of interesting how the stories are presented - with other characters kind of breaking the fourth wall to offer narration and commentary. It really all works very well in service of the story and the premise. Honestly, this is probably one of my favourite series, and I sort of see it as something of a forgotten gem.

In terms of production, it's animated by Palm Studio, who don't have that many series under their belt - probably the most notable would be the first season of Genshiken (another personal favourite). The director is Masaki Watanabe, whose work I'm not otherwise familiar with. Where things get interesting though is the writer - Yasuhiro Imagawa, who's probably best known as the director and writer of the excellent Giant Robo OVA from the 90s, as well as directing G-Gundam and several other series. He's definitely got a flair for the dramatic (if you've seen Giant Robo you know what I mean) and that's probably a big contributor to this show.

But why did Bartender not get more attention? Aside from the more mature subject matter (like, this is an anime about people who are old enough to drink) probably not interesting the conventional anime fan type people so much, one thing that probably held it back is its lack of an English-language release until relatively recently. It's one of these shows that just slightly predated the rise of streaming services like Crunchyroll, and it's yet to make it onto any of them. 2006 was kind of the heyday of the digital fansubber - where different fansub groups would compete to get their subs out first, or seek out series that nobody had subbed yet, for the pure benefit of feeling like you're a cool important person on the internet. Official releases didn't come until later, when the DVD companies would pick the rights up to release in English-speaking parts of the world onto physical media. But for Bartender, that never happened at the time. Whether the publishers had just looked at the show and decided it wouldn't sell well enough, or whether there was some other reason is something we can only speculate at. One theory I've heard is that there were licensing issues with all the liquor bottle lables visible in the show - since they're all real brands that means clearances have to be paid, and that's complicated. But Bartender did eventually get an English release - much more recently. UK publisher Anime Limited picked up the rights for a Blu-ray release covering the UK and the US (where Shout Factory is distributing it), and put it out in a fairly nice collector's edition including cocktail recipe cards (apparently these were included with the Japanese home video release too) and, appropriately enough, drink coasters. Now, being a release covering both the UK and the US, that means for most people reading this there's likely no issue with region coding, since the discs are dual-coded for Region A and B (not sure about Region C though). So even though there's not an Australian release as such, we can import it with relative ease.

Anyway, I have, in typical fashion for me, rambled on about the release history of this show for more than I rambled about the actual show, but suffice it to say I really recommend checking out Bartender.

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