Anime’s Spatiality: Media-form, Dislocation, and Globalization

Medium, Material, Convention

In an analysis of how anime has been explored in academia, Jaqueline Berndt delineates two important strands in anime research: area studies (namely, Japan studies) and media studies. Regarding the former, Berndt describes a tendency to focus on the social context of anime, to explore societal issues in Japan as they are represented in anime.¹ This methodology, like all methodologies, has certain tendencies. Specifically, Berndt notes how the givenness of anime to represent Japanese society is often taken for granted, where anime is mined for sociological readings of Japan without consideration of its mode of expression.² In such cases, anime acts as the “medium” in the sense of a conduit through which one views Japan, an invisible “in-between” or middle, the channel through which something about Japan is conveyed.

Media studies, however, investigates a different notion of “medium”: anime as animation. For example, Deborah Levitt examines anime-esque works to explore the dynamics of the medium more broadly. With almost no reference to Japan, Levitt explores animation in terms of its an-ontology, that is, how “animation must always create a world” from nothing, and in this sense “is not tethered to a grounding model . . . everything is shadowed by its possible metamorphosis, erasure, and resurrection—and there is thus no ontology.”³ Though this is Levitt’s central concern, she notes something similar to Berndt’s observations on anime as invisible in-between, stating that “conventions within animation itself have developed in different genres and national traditions of animation, and where these are used without comment, they also become ‘invisible.’” Yet Levitt asserts that animation still has the ability to “comment on conventional codes of figuration and representation, as well as to reflect upon the existential, perceptual coordinates they conventionally represent.”⁴

However, there is still more to the story of anime’s medium, as it is also important to consider how the specifics of materials can matter to the medium in question. While Levitt notes the significance of materiality, in the current context, Thomas Lamarre’s work in The Anime Machine, can be read as an exploration of how attending to the materiality of anime’s animation, the manipulation of its celluloid layers, and can reveal philosophical insights into the medium. According to Lamarre, in TV anime’s approach, in its brand of limited animation, the multiple layers are spread flat across the sequence of images, the force of the movement shunted to the surface.⁵ One product of this type of animating appears in character design, what Lamarre labels the “soulful body,” where the potentiality for movement as well as “spiritual, emotional, or psychological qualities appear inscribed on the surface.”⁶ Such characters are “at once unframed and enframed, . . . as if all the depth brought to the surface became condensed into one soulful figure, allowing it to flash from media to media.”⁷

As such, soulful bodies are not limited to celluloid animation but are “stretched across innumerable platforms and fields” in the media mix.⁸ This media mix, as Marc Steinberg has detailed, is central to many of the developments of anime’s aesthetics, and characters and their designs are integral to this dynamic. To ease the integration of various mediums (comics, stickers, figurines, etc.), a certain type of posing of the character has also proliferated, what Steinberg labels as “dynamic immobility,” the sense of potential for movement caught in the pose of the character’s body.⁹ Combining Lamarre and Steinberg’s concepts, the soulful bodies of these characters and their poses in dynamic immobility enable them to move with relative ease between mediums and materials in the media mix.

But this dynamic between medium and material gets further complicated with anime. Due to the prominence of the above-mentioned designs and poses, certain kinds of characters and poses have become conventionalized through their continued repetition across different media, producing character design models and poses, which is now associated with anime. Read through the framework explored here, the material interacts with the repetition of convention: the technical engagement with the material via limited animation affords a...