The Anime Paradox: Patterns and Practices through the Lens of Traditional Japanese Theater by Stevie Suan (review)

Stevie Suan’s The Anime Paradox, a stimulating meditation on how the formal structure of anime is indebted to traditional theatrical forms in Japan, culminates in the following claim:

Anime has honed its aesthetics to such a pristine point that it has produced an expression of the (post-)modern condition with a particular acuteness. It is through repetition, slight variation, and a deep commitment to aestheticized expression that has kept and created the form of Anime, raising it to a high degree of sophistication.

(p. 321)

This claim of sophistication, with which the present reviewer is not inclined to disagree, could have been introduced as an article of faith from the get-go. Yet Suan’s observations and opinions throughout the 300–plus pages building up to this claim mostly outstrip it in terms of sheer inventiveness if not overall interest.

Counting himself among the first of the new generations of scholars who entered their field because of an interest in contemporary Japanese pop culture, Suan studied at Kyoto Seika University, Japan’s epicenter of manga and anime studies, and trained at the University of Hawai‘i, bastion of Japanese theatrical studies in the United States, where, impressively, he wrote the volume under review while a graduate student. Conversant with both fields, Suan compares multimedia moments in nō performances and anime, say, to illuminating effect. This is quite an accomplishment, one few scholars can pull off so seamlessly.

Appropriately enough, Suan’s overarching aim—and the main contribution of his book to Japanese studies—resides in throwing “Anime” into generative dialogue with “Japanese traditional theater.” By the former term, which like “Noh” Suan capitalizes (as though to engender comparison), he means Japanese animation in its globally recognized form, particularly movies and serialized TV shows, typically tied to manga, emanating from Japan. Perhaps necessarily, this definition leaves unopened the can of worms of how Suan’s Anime is related to Japanese-styled animation (anime) of other nations, or to animation more broadly, let alone to the numerous anime styles within Japan itself. Even so, being based on only a few titles of the massive Japanese anime phenomenon, Suan’s resultant “Anime style”—elongated human form, exaggerated eyes, small sharp noses, triangular mouth, pointed chin (p. 234)—somehow seems at once too broad and too narrow.

Similarly, by “Japanese traditional theater,” Suan lobs together kabuki, bunraku (puppet theater), nō, and kyōgen as though these comprised a single monolithic “tradition” that has continued unchanged from premodern past to postmodern present. Tellingly, to represent kyōgen as only existing “Interspersed between Noh plays” (p. 14) fossilizes an early moment in the development of an art form that, while indeed a kind of interval play initially, went on to evolve into its own independent theater, as Suan himself surely knows. The two key terms of this study—Anime and Japanese traditional theater—are likewise arguably stilted.

Still, Suan’s aim is less to imply that his overgeneralized Anime derived directly out of his overgeneralized “tradition” than to compare and contrast these two fields of cultural production. Comparing the formal structures and styles of Anime and Japanese traditional theater seems justified since both are “total theaters,” the former comparable to the latter, which is “made up of multiple arts, from singing, instrumental music, pantomime, dancing, costume, set and spatial design, as well as literary production” (p. 10). Suan further maintains that the comparison works both ways: “Rather than just stating that Anime is similar to Japanese traditional theater, I would say that the theater is also similar to Anime” (p. 233). Clearly focused on Anime, however, The Anime Paradox is ultimately more provocative than telling, if not convincing, though it nevertheless makes for some compelling reading along the way. Take the observation that Anime and bunraku are creatively deceptive in the same way:

Despite the appearance of the voice coming from inside the character, the...