The Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation (review)

In 1986 Fredric Jameson famously and controversially stated that "all third world literature is national allegory," a remark that described how Western audiences perceive non-Western literature as, at some level, consistently expressing a culturally specific identity. Of course, Japanese animation (anime), is not "literature" in the traditional sense, nor is Japan by any conventional standard "third world" but, in The Anime Machine Thomas Lamarre explicitly confronts what he sees as the problematic tendency of scholars and audiences to see anime largely in terms of Japanese cultural identity. He instead offers an alternative, resolutely culture-free vision of anime, based on the technological capabilities and determinations of anime and animation. As he says in his introduction, "I give priority to technical determination over social, cultural, historical, and economic determination" (p. xxviii).

The result is a breathtakingly ambitious and intellectually exciting work, a densely developed and sustained theory of animation as a "machine." By machine, Lamarre does not mean simply the techniques that produce animation (although he goes into considerable detail concerning animation devices such as the multiplanar camera and compositing techniques). Instead, he builds on Gilles Deleuze's theory of the machine and Paul Virilio's theory of cinematism to advance his own theory of "animetism" which he explains is not only "a different way of perceiving things in an accelerated world but also promises a different way of thinking about technology and of inhabiting a technology-saturated world" (p. 6). In Lamarre's view, animetism or perhaps animation in general (he is not always clear on the distinction, an aspect of his argument that some of my students found challenging) may even have the potential to suggest "other ways of dwelling" within the "modern technological condition" (p. 6).

These are heady claims. But Lamarre goes a fair way toward at least laying the groundwork for, if not totally proving, a new way of positioning anime and animation as offering alternative approaches to a variety of issues subsumed in the term "technological condition." These include alternatives to conventional technology (as exemplified in the works of Miyazaki Hayao), the construction of gender and sexuality in a postmodern world (as seen in the series Chobits by the collective known as Clamp), and the transition from the military-industrial complex to our current globalizing information-gathering society that he sees forecast in the works of Studio Gainax. It must be stressed that Lamarre does not work through these issues in terms of analyzing the theme, content, or characters of a particular animation but rather through a sustained analysis of the material and technical properties that are the basis of each animation he chooses to discuss.

Lamarre begins The Anime Machine with a discussion of fundamental aspects of animation, especially in relation to how it differs from cinema. This section is painstakingly thorough in its exploration of some of these aspects of the mechanics of animation although, interestingly, Lamarre never refers to it as a medium nor does he touch on any of the work of Paul Wells, the central scholar of animation studies. Perhaps this is due to Lamarre's concern to set the stage for some of the major differences he sees between American animation and Japanese "animetism." Thus, while he accurately credits Walt Disney with the invention of the multiplanar camera that allowed for the sensation of "movement into depth," he is quick to point out how the Japanese developed their own "animation stands" which led to more "open compositing" (as opposed to the "closed compositing" of Disney), giving Japanese animation an arguably freer and more flexible movement. He develops this argument further in his chapters on the great Japanese animator Miyazaki Hayao whose open compositing of cel layers allows him to slide the planes of an image, creating a panoramic sense of a world "opening up" (p. 38) before the viewer. Lamarre's examination of the special properties of Miyazaki's animation is fascinating, although it might have enriched his...