Inventing Intervals: The Digital Image in Metropolis and Gankutsuō

In Olivier Assayas’s 2002 film Demonlover, there is a scene in which the president of the pornographic hentai anime company “TokyoAnimé” declares that the “wave of the future” of anime production lies in 3-D animation. Cel anime is already outdated, Mr. Ishikawa tells a group of visiting French executives, and the future of anime lies in full 3-D animation. In many ways Assayas’s Mr. Ishikawa voices a position implicit in Lev Manovich’s now-canonical consideration of cinema in the age of digital media, “What Is Cinema?” ¹ As live-action footage becomes merely one element of a wider array of images characterizing contemporary cinema—and contemporary Hollywood cinema in particular—cinema itself is redefined. No longer the “art of the index,” digital cinema becomes, for Manovich, “a particular case of animation that uses live-action footage as one of its many elements.” ²

Implicit and explicit in Manovich’s account is the importance of 3-D computer animation, which allows for a realism of detail and permits digital film-making to “generate film-like scenes directly on a computer with the help of 3-D computer animation.” ³ To be sure, Manovich does not see the possibilities of digital film solely in relation to 3-D computer animation; he does emphasize the importance of 2-D computer animation and the “painterly” in his account of digital cinema.⁴ Yet what comes to the fore in Manovich’s consideration of digital cinema and in the uses of digital animation in Hollywood films in particular is the importance of photographic realism within the computer-generated illusion of reality. The ability to simulate the visual qualities of three-dimensional space as it is photographed makes 3-D animation an invaluable tool of Hollywood cinema. What 3-D computer generated imagery (3-D CGI) offers Hollywood is what Stephen Prince terms “perceptual realism,” wherein “even unreal [i.e., animated] images can be perceptually realistic.” ⁵

It is not so much “animation” that has subsumed cinema, then. Rather, it seems that digital cinema has selected a particular style of animation—the smooth motion of full animation and the perceptual realism of 3-D CGI—to further its own agenda: the realism of fantasy worlds in blockbuster entertainment. Cinema only uses the kind of animation (3-D CGI) that can “repeat” its aesthetics.⁶ Despite Manovich’s hopes for animation to subsume cinema, it seems that cinema has subsumed animation.

Anime, Realism, and the Perspectival Image

If this were to be the fate of anime as well, this would be a sad fate indeed. Yet anime has long had an ambiguous if not outright critical relationship to the kind of cinematic realism that 3-D CGI reproduces. Demonlover’s Mr. Ishikawa’s opinion to the contrary, 3-D computer generated animation has not replaced 2-D cel animation, either in hentai animation or in Japanese animation on the whole. This is not to say that there have not been dramatic changes in the way anime is produced in Japan, or that the use of 3-D imagery has not grown considerably. The digital revolution has indeed completely transformed animation production in Japan since the late 1990s. Much cel animation at present is made from sketches scanned into a computer where they are colored, composited, and so on. Thus the very term “cel animation” has become something of an anachronism.⁷ And the use of 3-D animation has increased exponentially over the past decade and a half.

However, contemporary Japanese animation is best characterized as a hybrid form that includes both cel-style and 3-D animation. Indeed, the hybrid use of animation technologies and styles itself became a subject of reflection in anime from the 2000s. In this article I would like to look at two anime made in the early 2000s—the animated feature Metropolis (2001, Metoroporisu, dir. Rintarō), and the TV series Gankutsuō: The Count of Monte Cristo (2004–5, Gankutsuō, dir. Maeda Mahiro)—in order to show how the collision of image spaces and animation technologies is visually and...