Japanese Cinema in the Digital Age

3. The Rise of “Personal Animation

74 The Rise of “Personal” Animation 3 The DiversiTy oF Japanese animation in terms of its history, media, genre, and style makes it both an exciting subject and a difficult one to analyze. Anime is often misperceived as representing the whole history of “Japanese animation,”1 a premise that emphasizes its intrinsic cultural difference from the norm, American animation—namely Disney. Jonathan Clements and Helen McCarthy’s The Anime Encyclopedia, for instance, covers an impressive list of over two thousand Japanese animation titles from 1917 to 2001. They introduce terms such as “early anime” and “wartime anime” for Japanese animation produced in the period up to 1945. However, the term “anime” became prevalent only as the genre boomed in the late 1970s.2 In other words, there is a significant gap between the encyclopedia ’s discursive anime and anime as a historical nexus for converging media. Anime’s low-budget, “limited” animation style has often been understood as a form of resistance to the high-value “full” animation style of Disney. That resistance, or difference, has been the dominant frame of analysis whenever anime is in English-language studies. If there is a crucial distinction in anime, however, it is not simply a matter of timeless cultural differences but rather of the anime industry’s limited scale and peculiarity of the domestic market. The Japanese industry, for instance, has been slow to adopt the CGI animation THE RISE OF “PERSONAL” ANIMATION 75 technology, exemplified by Pixar’s Toy Story (1995, John Lasseter) or more recently , Disney Digital 3-D animation films such as UP (2009, Pete Docter and Bob Peterson). The industry’s high affinity with television and OVA (original video animation) has configured the characteristics of anime primarily as 2-D, or a style evoking cel (celluloid) animation. Anime’s distinctiveness, moreover, is not singular but rather diverse. As it has developed over the last four decades, anime has become further individuated from the oft-discussed “robot genre” anime to even various works of “anti-animation,” such as those seen in the last episodes of Neon Genesis Evangelion (TXN, October 4, 1995– March 27, 1996). In an instance of anime deconstructing its fans’ expectations , the director Anno Hideaki boldly subverted Evangelion’s climax by substituting a raw pencil-sketched storyboard in place of animated sequences. The linguistic distinction of “anime” from “animation” is both a blessing and a curse in that it has effectively conferred cultural capital to the market brand while attaching a constricted paradigm of cultural difference in attempts to understand it. The defining question of anime has long been whether it should be understood as a visual and narrative form with particular ties to Japanese society and its cultural traditions or as simply another mode of expression in multimedia, diversified within the endless cross-cultural exchanges of global culture. Indexical differences such as otaku, the fan-based culture of anime, for instance, are too often presented as prima facie subjects rather than explicated in relation to industrial strategies. Indeed, the Japanese animation industry has emphasized a particular type of auteur branding, which eschews Hollywood-sized promotion budgets and instead shapes anime ’s reception based on consumers’ connoisseurship that is typically associated with otaku culture. The anime industry has been astute at tapping into the otaku culture’s market demand, and the otaku culture in turn helps promote products to a larger global audience by creating buzz via the Internet, subtitling , or otherwise. In this chapter, I first discuss the problem of how anime has been discursively constructed largely upon notions of intrinsic cultural differences outside Japan. Second, I argue that anime, or more precisely Japanese animation, is not culturally monolithic but rather diverse in its convergence of media and stylistic deployments. Anime instead needs to be examined in light of its affinity with media convergence; in other words, technological developments (televisions , videos, laser discs, DVDs, personal computers, Blu-ray Discs, etc.) have punctuated shifts in anime’s production and its stylistic diversity. In order to explore these two aspects, I discuss the animations of Shinkai Makoto and Yamamura Koji as examples of the smaller, personal scale of production in Japanese animation, now possible through home-based digital technology, 76 THE RISE OF “PERSONAL” ANIMATION in contrast to Oshii Mamoru’s large-scale studio production. Yamamura’s animation has, for example, intentionally emphasized “Japaneseness” on levels both of narrative and visual image, and yet the...