In The Concierge at Hokkyoku Department Store by Tsuchika Nishimura, a shopping center and its staff are transformed to accommodate anthropomorphic animals. It may be brief, but Production I.G.’s anime adaptation of The Concierge is a funny and beautifully made realization of Nishimura’s idea. It also serves as a reflection on what places like Hokkyoku represent: monuments to the power, happiness, and destruction of trade.
The movie follows Akino just like the manga does — an employee at Hokkyoku who found the store when she was little after being discovered by the concierge. Now grown up, she works in the same place she used to visit as a kid, serving “VIAs” (Very Important Animals). (Her role here is essentially that of a sales assistant/receptionist/personal shopper/troubleshooter.) Her work is The Concierge’s only setting, but it feels deceptively large on screen — like a hidden world within itself that we see bit by bit in sweet vignettes.
Akino’s training forms The Concierge’s slight and breezy plot. She handles various fires and tries hard to assist all sorts of creatures pouring into the high-end emporium under the eyes of her floor manager (a human), her boss (a penguin), and an outside consultant tasked with trimming down underperforming staff. This makes her less confident and graceful than usual; she stumbles into customers’ legs and accidentally steps on one of them herself — a little great auk. Here The Concierge starts being playful: The bird kindly asks Akino (who already has another customer waiting for their consultation) — her rehearsed yet panicked reaction animatedly conveyed — to give him a push so he can keep sliding along the store’s aisles.
The director Yoshimi Itazu and his crew execute some wonderfully expressionist illustrations for The Concierge. This gives the film almost a modernist look, with its human characters’ shapes and their flat coloring mashed up against each other with an absurd sense of humor — as in Masaaki Yuasa’s The Tatami Galaxy or Night is Short, Walk on Girl. Different quirky designs crash into each other; some drawings are intentionally simplified (Akino’s shoes are often just triangles) and shaded, giving the film this beautiful, softly stylized quality. It’s many things at once: One chef looks like he stepped out of a Tintin comic. Chie Morita’s character designs have stylish costumes that only add to the adorable fun: a movie-star sea mink wears a wide-brimmed hat while a seal tries on traditional dresses from around the world.
But it’s delightful even just watching these characters move — like when Akino comes barreling into frame as she tries to mediate between a father and daughter who are both buying wrong presents for each other on separate trips. She speeds through at lightning pace, taking over the frame as she sweats over which choice to try convincing them of. The various animals she serves in the halls of Hokkyoku also move with lovely idiosyncrasies that Itazu plays against the refinement of their human clothing.
Mr. Todo in The Concierge is a very funny character. He’s the kind of person who stands inside a store to take stock of its productivity, but with his mustache shaped like a lightning bolt and jagged edges where Akino’s curves swoop softly, he looks nothing gentle or swoopy at all. He looks demonic, which is why sight gags involving him coming out of paintings or coat racks or even a vat of soup to give stern advice to the rookie concierge are so funny.
The store itself isn’t just drawn well – there are wrinkles on every surface that suggest some sort of process was involved in their creation, buildings painted in warm pastels peeking through each other like The Grand Budapest Hotel. That Wes Anderson movie also left its mark on imitations of his hallmark symmetrical compositions that were dotted around this one; most notably those belonging to staff members who had rather passionate and poetic perspectives about what it means (or should mean) to be hospitable.
But Itazu and screenwriter Satomi Ooshima don’t stop having fun with their idea once they’ve set everything up. In fact, they seem to have even more fun as Akino’s idealism starts running into problems that can’t be solved by kindness alone – let alone sincerity. Aseal takes advantage of her generosity and spouts insufferable entitled rhetoric that any service worker will recognize from miles away.
This is a key thing about The Concierge: almost all its conflicts are expectedly human, but when you throw them into an animal kingdom scenario like Hokkyoku’s romantically depicted halls… well now we start getting somewhere somber.
It happens bit by bit. “There aren’t any other Japanese wolves here,” says one lonely customer – a real-life story of extinction folded cleverly into one of many storylines that make up Akino’s time as concierge-in-training. But eventually this blossoms into The Concierge’s main idea – the thing that brings all of Hokkyoku’s clients together and dictates how Akino has to serve them. Which is that everyone who comes through this door is already dead, or dying out. And so environmentalist messages shape-shifted themselves accordingly: they became reflections on human decadence through pride in service; department stores became reflections on our appetites for destruction.
This mix of magical and mundane turns The Concierge from being just another flighty fantasy about talking animals into a genuinely sad reflection on what it means (or should mean) to be hospitable. There’s a point where capitalism meets extinction here that feels didactic, but not in an annoying way – more like a suggestion on how we might better serve our neighbors down the block (or planet). I hope David Attenborough gets to see this one. It’d also feel preachy if it weren’t for how naturally everything fits together once you realize contradictions are at heart of Hokkyoku itself, which is why even though there’s some bitter sweetness towards its end… no worries mate! This movie rocks!!
Final thoughts
With vibrant artwork full of absurd characters and scenarios, each vignette within The Concierge paints an engaging picture both of the Hokkyokku Department Store as a fantastical ecosystem unto itself and also humanity’s relationship with real-world ecosystems. What starts off light-hearted takes dark turns quickly showing us that even seemingly innocent tales can contain heavy lessons; such is life!
Watch The Concierge on Kimcartoon
