Between Cinema And Anime

Introduction: between cinema and anime THOMAS LAMARRE

[Hume] created the érst great logic of relations, showing in it that all relations (not only ‘matters of fact’ but also relations among ideas) are external to their terms. As a result, he constituted a multifarious world of experience. (Deleuze 1991) There has, in recent years, been a lot of discussion about how digital animation or computer graphics imaging (CGI) is transforming the relation between cinema and animation. Especially in the past year, a spate of élms has spurred more massmedia interest in questions about the impact of new technologies on cinema: one has only to think of the digitally generated characters in Shrek and Final Fantasy, the high-tech rotoscoping that turned digital footage into animation in Waking Life, the digitally retouched backgrounds in Amélie Poulin and the interaction of computer-generated 3-D backgrounds with 2-D cel-animation characters in Metropolis and Atlantis. Such élms have contributed to the general sense of a major mutation in élm, which involves a profound transformation in the relations between animation and cinema. On the one hand, one often reads that cel animation has become old hat, that the future of animation lies in digital animation. This is the argument propounded by Jensen and Daly in Entertainment Weekly (2001). Their remarks come largely in response to the astonishing box-oféce success of digital features (Shrek, Toy Story 2, etc.) in comparison to the relative failure of high-budget, cel-animation élms (Atlantis, Tarzan, etc.). Yet, in addition to simple box-oféce criteria, Jensen and Daly draw some attention to the materiality of digital animation. They write about how traditional cel animation slowly began to use 3-D digital to increase the reality effect of its otherwise 2-D world – and how this, in turn, opened the way for digital animation to supplant cel animation. Their remarks follow from the ways in which Shrek thematizes the superiority of digital animation over cel animation. Against the shallow prettiness of Disney’s fairy stories, Shrek shows the ugly, gooey, oozy, dirty and apparently more realistic, deeper side of the same Japan Forum 14(2) 2002: 183–189 Copyright © 2002 BAJS

ISSN: 0955–5803 print/1469–932X online DOI: 10.1080/09555800220136347

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fairy tales – foregrounding qualities difécult to achieve in digital animation, such as viscosity and irregularities in texture. More importantly, Shrek places great emphasis on movement in depth (versus the 2-D superéciality of cel animation). And it equates spatial depth with psychological depth – as if 3-D were just allaround deeper, more real. It is not surprising then that this élm in particular has inspired speculation about the death of cel animation. On the other hand, there are commentators who fret about the demise of cinema. Here the hype centers on photo-real characters. In the New York Times, for instance, in an article about digitally generated characters, élm critic Dave Kehr expresses concern about the loss of cinematic integrity and a relation to the real world. For him, cel animation presents no threat, for it has always known that it is not real: ‘Animation, as practiced by Disney or McCay, never pretended to reproduce the real’ (2001: 26). The problem with CGI is that it ‘aspires to something different: a reality that is realer than real’ (ibid.: 26). This ‘realer than real’ constitutes ‘a clear and present danger’ to our relation to the real world – a relation that cinema affords in those privileged moments when the real actor or actress, their very life, shows through the cinematic artiéce. In other words, if Kehr feels that it is ‘safer to begin with organic matter than a cloud of numbers’, it is because he is interested in a sort of psychological reality that somehow demands real people on the screen to assure dramatic and spatial integrity – that is, integration or identiécation of the spectator with the actor (ibid.: 26). As these two examples suggest, the emergence of digital animation into the mainstream is accompanied by a heightened sense of the materiality of élmic forms. Many élms, like Shrek, foreground and even thematize the new materiality. Critics, too, often draw attention to the actual media used in élmmaking, and speculate about its effects and the differences between them. It is difécult to avoid a growing sense of the importance of looking at the relations between media. There is a kind of common sense about how new media are constructing new relations to reality and integrity, to weight and depth, and so forth – even if many of the responses are predictable. For Kehr it is a matter of psychological loss, for Jensen and Daly, a box oféce boon. Now any attempt to theorize anime will face its relations to cinema, cel animation and digital animation. Especially important is the current bias that, with digital animation, something new is emerging – something not limited to digital animation but constituting a global, epochal, epistemic transformation. This shift is often broached by considering transformations in the relations between cinema and animation. One important writer on new media, Lev Manovich, suggests that ‘digital cinema is a particular case of animation that uses live-action footage as one of its many elements. . . . Born from animation, cinema pushed animation to its periphery, only in the end to become one particular case of animation’ (2001: 302). For Manovich, it is the digital that has transformed the relation between animation and cinema, creating a sort of metamedia animation that subsumes or incorporates a number of prior media. In other

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words, in digital media, he sees the historical transformation of a particular set of relations. But how does anime enter into these new, digitally altered relations between cinema and animation? Typically, anime is aligned with the emergence of something new. Kehr, for instance, sensing that anime is really not like traditional cel animation as deéned by Disney, places it alongside CGI. He sees anime, comics and digital animation as destroyers of cinematic integrity: ‘When that integrity [of cinema] is ruptured . . . there is a loss of weight and wholeness. The medium becomes little more than a comic book (or “graphic novel,” as the more serious comic books are called) that happens to move and speak (like the anime the Japanese have been turning out for years)’ (2001: 26). Although disparagingly, he situates anime as analogous to new media in its effects. A host of commentators in Japan have likewise situated anime in relation to the emergence of something new – the postmodern, the post-human, the postnational, non-identitarian politics and, more recently, the digital and new media. Tatsumi Takayuki (1993) addressed the ceaseless play of derivativeness in Japanese SF and anime, which suggested to him a sort of post-national ‘japanoid’ mode. In a book on feminism linked to Neon Genesis Evangelion (1997), Kotani Mari evoked the post-human and post-feminist possibilities of anime. Famously, Okada Toshio’s point of departure in his celebratory interpretation of otaku was that ‘they are people whose vision has evolved’ (1996: 10–11). More recently, Azuma Hiroki situates anime in relation to the postmodern collapse of grand narratives and ideologies. He writes of a shift from an ‘arboreal world’ to a ‘databasic world’, looking at transformations in anime worlds and their consumption in order to outline a new form of reading and viewing in which the database becomes the underlying structure that consumers ‘enter’ or ‘read into’ (yomikomu) (2001: 50–3). There are any number of other examples. The point is that those anime qualities that are anathema to Kehr – lack of depth, weight, wholeness, etc. – are precisely those that, for many commentators, serve to link anime to the emergence of something new. The same qualities are expressed in the aférmative: lack of depth is represented as èatness; lack of weight as levity or celerity; lack of integrity becomes derivativeness, dispersion, layering, openness and so forth. And it is such qualities that are frequently evoked to link anime, not with traditional cel animation but with the postmodern, the digital and new media. Some anime producers and commentators thus express conédence about the future of anime, despite the fact that digital technologies and high-tech budgets are far less accessible in Japan (Funamoto 1998). Yet uneasy questions about technologies and budgets for ‘post-Japanimation’ linger – particularly if Shrek is the future of cinematic animation. Now, if I introduce this issue with a general look at relations among media, it is because this is precisely what the present group of articles aspires to analyze. Our articles strive to think ‘intermedia’, to move between cinema and animation,

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in order to create relational approaches to anime. In fact, it is interesting to note that many of the relations evoked in the recent press on digital animation are discussed by the contributors to this issue: reality, weight, wholeness or integration, depth, etc. Yet our approaches diverge dramatically from the journalistic discourse cited above. For, although our articles deal with some of the same relations, our emphasis is truly on the relation – not on the object. Which is to say, we are not interested in deéning objects, new or old. Even though our papers frequently dwell on formal, aesthetic and material differences between cinema and anime, we are not interested in deéning what cinema is, what animation is or what anime is. There are a number of reasons for our emphasis on relations rather than objects. First, the attempt to deéne or typologize invariably constructs objects, which forecloses thinking about relations. In élm commentary, the impulse to deéne what cinema is, or what animation is, tends to leave the critic with some very simple choices: pick or pan; promote or deèate; the vertigo of the present or nostalgia for the past. The impact of digital animation becomes either énancial boon or psychological loss. We are not interested in premonition, endorsement or condemnation of something, new or old. Miyao Daisuke’s contribution to this issue raises important questions with respect to these two points, for he deals with anime as a discursive construction. He argues that there is no objective way, there are no reliable formal or stylistic criteria, to determine what cinema is or what anime is. Objects like cinema or anime are discursive objects for him. They are constituted by social discourses and regulations that establish and police, for instance, the boundaries between the cinematic and uncinematic. And, as Miyao traces the boundaries between cinema and animation in pre-war Japan, he énds that animation remained largely within the discourses on ‘pure élm’. Animation in pre-war Japan was sometimes differentiated from cinema, but only tentatively, and only on the basis of its suitability for children’s education and wartime propaganda. And, in the immediate postwar era, Japanese animation produced for global dissemination sustained the boundaries and biases established by pre-war discourses on pure élm. Ultimately, he suggests, without some attention to discursive conditions of production, we shall simply fall back on market deénitions. Second, as anime moves into universities, there will surely be efforts to deéne a scholarly object of knowledge. Yet, without some attempt to think, to think relations, such efforts will succeed only in making scholars into marketers and promoters. We thus lay no claim to being anime experts. The contributors to this volume come from anthropology, élm studies, history and literature. The real experts are elsewhere, probably on the web as you read. Catherine Russell, for instance, is less concerned with the possibility or impossibility of differentiating cinema and anime than with the ways in which Tokyo has been imaged and imagined in Japanese movies. What interest her are transformations in the representation of Tokyo, because these afford a way to narrativize

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social shifts in Japan. In other words, it is the relation between image production and the historical imagination of urban space that commands her attention. In which case, to deéne anime as an object distinct from cinema is not so much impossible as undesirable. In fact, she suggests, ‘the metropolitan space of anime is only one more variation of the way that the city of Tokyo has égured in the discourse of Japanese modernity’. Third, if it is impossible to isolate and deéne cinema, animation and anime as objects, this is because there is always animation in cinema, cinema in animation, cinema in anime, anime in animation and so forth. And there always has been. What are of empirical and theoretical interest are the relations between them – or, to be more precise, the constellation of relations. Looking at Ghost in the Shell in relation to Blade Runner and other cyberpunk precursors like Neuromancer , Livia Monnet calls attention to what might be called ‘genre effects’ – the repetition of scenes, character types, narrative conceits and so forth. Yet, because these genre effects traverse different media (literature, élm, animation), Monnet opens questions about media, or rather intermedia. In her analysis of Ghost in the Shell, she draws attention to the ways in which animation becomes the medium that remediates all others – a kind of hypermetamedium. Provocatively, she suggests that, to sustain its hyper-meta-operations, Ghost in the Shell relies on fantasies of the feminine sublime. Animation, as a medium, turns out to be the site of profound transformations in vision and gender. Fourth, only by thinking relations can one produce a theory of anime with some degree of speciécity. In much of the current commentary on them, anime élms are usually retold, recapped or summarized, with some global comparisons. As a result, anime appears to be nothing more than another narrative genre with different types of characters. It is not clear whether anime has any speciécity as a form, style or medium (or combination of media) or any speciécity in its social or historical construction. In sum, emphasizing the object tends to generate descriptions and comparisons, mostly at the extremely general level concerned with story and character. The articles in this issue thus move towards a (relational) theory of anime. Discussing Imamura Taihei’s emphasis on modes of production and reception in his theorization of the élmed and animated, Mark Driscoll raises questions about the material conditions for making and viewing anime. In his theory of documentary élm, Imamura sees the camera itself as opening a new relation to reality – one with a great emancipatory potential that was as yet unrealized due to the persistence of certain modes of production and reception (theatre seating, for instance). If documentary cinema failed to achieve its historical mission, however, Imamura later énds in animation a different form of dialectical overcoming – in the synthesis of drawing and photographing. Yet this is an ominous outcome, one that spells the triumph of commodity fetishism. While Driscoll shares some of Imamura’s concerns about the commodity and the current ascendancy of the

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animated, he reminds us that reception is never entirely passive (as Imamura tended to assume). And in the play of the anime-eye between the look and the gaze, in the dialectical gap between seeing (eye) and being with (ai), he énds possibilities for a critical theory of animation that would address its speciéc forms of ideological suture in the hegemonic North. Thomas Looser’s account implicitly presents a challenge to world-historical, revolutionary theories of historical transformation. In order to think about the contemporary moment of transition, a transition that is often described as a shift from analog to digital, Looser questions whether it makes sense to see such a transition as a complete break. Instead, he poses a number of different mixed-media or intermedia contexts – especially those of early cinema and anime. One of the key modes of relations he considers is depth, particularly in relation to architectural qualities that serve to orientate relations of time, movement and space. Looser thus draws attention to different compositions of relations, effectively using the notion of intermedia to show that transitions are not absolute but rather relational. And they are transversal: what happens between also arises within. As a consequence, to think relations allows a way to think about the limits and potentialities of eras. Fifth, as the previous examples make evident, thinking relations always opens questions of a more systemic and epistemic nature. For instance, in his account of cinema and animation, Kehr centers on a relation (spectator-character) that leads to questions about the perception of reality itself. Kehr unfortunately forecloses these questions with a characterization of different élmic objects – cinema (reality), traditional cel animation (fantasy), digital animation (hyperreality). Our aim, however, is to open and pursue such ‘reality-type’ questions. In all the articles in this issue, thinking relations – between cinema and anime, animation and anime, animation and cinema – opens larger questions, questions about history, gender, material conditions of production and reception, urban space, discursive construction of objects and subject formation. In my own paper, I explore how perceived and institutionalized differences between cinema, animation and anime do not only construct external boundaries but also come to function as a kind of internal limit within anime, one that allows for divergent series of distinctly anime-ic expression and experience. Then, with the example of Miyazaki Hayao, I look at how the internal limits of anime can come to imply a speciéc constellation of relations,which constructs speciéc ways of imaging history, genre and gender. In effect, in my paper as in the others, to explore the relation of cinema and anime is to ask, ‘What are the futures of image-based narrative?’

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Deleuze, Gilles (1991) Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature, New York: Columbia University Press. Funamoto Susumu (ed.) (1998) Anime no mirai o shiru: posuto-japanimeshyon kiiwaado wa ‘sekaikan + dejitaru’ (Knowing the future of anime: the keyword for post-Japanimation is ‘worldview + digital), Tokyo: Ten Books. Jensen, Jeff and Daly, Steve (2001) ‘High toon’, Entertainment Weekly 22 June: 50–4. Kehr, Dave (2001) ‘When a cyberstar is born’, New York Times 18 November: 1, 26. Kotani Mari (1997) Seibo¯ Evangelion: A Millennialist Perspective on the Daughters of Eve (Immaculate Mother Evangelion), Tokyo: Magazine house. Manovich, Lev (2001) The Language of New Media, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ¯ ta shuppan. Okada Toshio (1996) Otaku-gaku nyu¯mon (Introduction to Otaku-ology), Tokyo: O Tatsumi Takayuki (1993) Japanoid senden: gendai Nihon SF wo yomu tame ni (A manifesto for Japanoids: for the reading of contemporary Japanese SF), Tokyo: Hayakawa shobo¯.