Puppets, Gods, and Brands: Theorizing the Age of Animation from Taiwan by Teri J. Silvio (review)

Puppets, Gods, and Brands: Theorizing the Age of Animation from Taiwan by Teri Silvio is my new favorite book!! (I wrote the author a fan letter before I even got to the end!) I suppose this is not a very scholarly way to begin an academic review, but given that a good portion of Silvio's book deals with fandom, perhaps I am allowed. And the sentiments are true. For Silvio does not just analyze ang-a, Taiwanese anime, and its fans' active interactions with it, but, through her theory that we are entering an age of animation, broadly speaking, shows how a wide variety of increasingly popular contemporary practices link together to offer an anthropological perspective on the global culture of our times.

Silvio begins her study by laying out her understanding of animation as a theoretical lens. She states:

We are entering an Age of Animation. What I mean by this is not simply that we are increasingly surrounded by virtual worlds and virtual entities. I mean that our attention is increasingly turned toward the idea of animation. Animation in the narrow sense (a kind of cinema or video) is popular because animation in the broad sense (giving objects lives of their own) is good to think with – specifically, to think through what is happening right now in the intersections of technology and capitalism, of the global and the local, of the human and the nonhuman.

(p. 3)

She proposes that this age of animation is a transition from the twentieth century, an age of performance. She writes:

Over the course of the twentieth century, a concept of performance developed in which the embodiment of roles came to be seen as a kind of action that linked human behavior across a range of social fields, a trope that could be extended from the field of professional entertainment or religion, politics, economics, kinship, and all the social interactions of everyday life.

(p. 4)

But the concept of performance, "seems to fall short when we are talking about animated characters" (p. 6), a trend that goes beyond Japanese anime or ang-a, its Taiwanese counterpart, infiltrating many other aspects of culture, such as the proliferation of corporate branding through mascots. These trends are particularly pronounced in Taiwan, offering Silvio a rich environment for case studies that show how her theory operates in relation to religious practices, traditional puppetry, and cosplay.

In Chapter 1 "Animation versus Performance," Silvio lays out the full scope and implications of these contrasting theoretical lenses. She defines animation as "the construction of social others through the projection of qualities perceived as human—life, soul, agency, intentionality, personality, and so on—outside the self and into the sensory environment through acts of creation, perception, and interaction" (emphasis Silvio, p. 52). Some important ideas that emerge from this very robust chapter include issues in the "Creator/Character Ratio." In opposition to performance models, "the animation of one character by many people is the norm within the entertainment industry" (p. 43) allowing fans to invest themselves in the manipulation of character through their own creative activities such as fan fiction and art. Silvio appeals to Roland Barthes' views on bunraku puppetry in discussing "Organic versus Striated Personhood" in order to underline the value of the montage nature of puppets and other animated figures. "Fleshing Out versus Stripping Down" reveals that actors and animators see these two processes of creating character operating very differently in regard to viewer's identification. While actors "believe that fleshing out increases audience identification," animators, by contrast, use paring down to heighten "emotional involvement" (p. 45).

Chapter 2, "The Ang-a: A Taiwanese Mode of Animation," reveals how "the concept of animation can help us see particular kinds of cultural logic" (p. 53) by outlining salient features of ang-a also found in traditional puppetry...