Tag: anime

Animation Studies and Cartoon Science 

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A review of Animating Film Theory, edited by Karen Beckman, Duke University Press, 2014.

Animating Film TheoryI must confess I am averse to film theory. The little I have read in this field confirms me in my opinion: film theory is empirically useless, epistemologically weak, and aesthetically unappealing. Nothing of substance has been written about the topic since Plato’s Cave, the allegory that has people watch shadows projected on the wall from objects passing in front of a fire behind them and give names to these shadows. The books and articles that are collated to form the discipline’s canon are a mixed bag of philosophical references, journalistic musings, and academic jabber. In my opinion, Deleuze’s two-volume work on film, The Movement-Image and The Time-Image, are among his weakest books. They do not amount to a philosophy of cinema, or a theory of film: at best, they are reflections on time and space that take cinema as a pretext and Bergson as an interlocutor. In textbooks and introductory chapters, film theory is a collage of quotations by cultural critics, mostly from the early twentieth century, who have commented on the birth of cinema in the context of mass culture and reproduction technologies. Remarks written in passing by Walter Benjamin or Theodor Adorno are elevated to the rank of high theory and revered as sacred scriptures by a discipline desperately in need of founding fathers. The French contributors to the Cahiers du Cinéma dabbled in film critique as a hobby and did not think of themselves as serious thinkers: they were puzzled to see cinema studies emerge as an academic discipline, and they certainly would have disapproved the emergence of a canon of officially approved texts that includes their own. When film theory tries to build a firmer intellectual grounding, it mobilizes thinkers who have written outside the purview of cinema studies and have never commented on films: Saussure, Lévi-Strauss, Derrida, Lacan, or Baudrillard. Gilles Deleuze for the French domain and Stanley Cavell in America stand as the two exceptions: they have devoted whole books to cinema as part of a program of applied philosophy. My preference goes to Cavell over Deleuze.

Animated films and live-action movies 

My biases against film theory were compounded by this volume on animation film theory. If a theory of films rests on shaky ground, what about a theory that takes animated movies as its object and proposes to build an autonomous discourse on this subset of film media? A discipline is not defined by its empirical topic, but by its methods and the way it builds a scientific object as a matter of scholarly investigation. The existence of animated movies and frame-by-frame films—which predate the birth of cinema—is in itself no justification to devote an academic discipline to their study and to engage them theoretically. I do not mean to say that animation movies should be forever marginalized and ignored by cinema specialists and cultural critics. They can provide food for thought for many disciplines and, in some instances, are valuable sources of theoretical engagement. But a discourse on animation does not a theory make. Building an animation theory has more to do with intellectual posturing and academic differentiation than with scientific rigor and sound scholarship. A caricature of the attitude that I have in mind is provided by Alan Cholodenko’s contribution to this volume. An American-Australian scholar who retired in 2001 from the University of Sidney, Cholodenko describes himself as the godfather of animation theory: “theorizing of and through animation has been my project for the last twenty-three years.” His claim of having come first to lay the “first principles” of the discipline doubles the proposition that “historically as well as theoretically, film is the ‘stepchild’ of animation, not the other way around.” Drawing inspiration from the work of Jacques Derrida and Jean Baudrillard, and postulating animation as the mother of all disciplines, his contribution to this volume amounts to little more than self-promotion and personal aggrandizement. 

What came first, film or animation? And who can claim the privilege of having “invented” animation cinema, in theory and in practice? A central tenet of the fledgling discipline is that animation represents the past and the future of all cinema. Lev Manovich, an author of books on digital culture and new media, made that claim in 2001: “Born from animation, cinema pushed animation to its periphery, only in the end to become one particular case of animation.” The division of cinema into live action and animation has been recently blurred by the digital turn: through CGI and pixel-by-pixel editing, live-action movies are merging with animation in a way that makes them undistinguishable. The cartoonization of live-action movies is propelled by special effects and computer graphics that makes whatever the mind can conceive achievable on screen. Some actors, Jim Carrey for instance (but the same could have been said of Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton), have built a whole career acting like cartoon characters. Contributors to Animating Film Theory show that the dividing line between film and animation has never been clear-cut. Photographs and moving pictures have always been mixed with drawings and text editing, such as in Dziga Vertov’s Kino-Pravda (Film Truth) experimental newsreel series in 1922-25, or in cartoons in which drawings “come to life” or live scenes are inserted in graphic sketches, a common practice since the silent movies era down to Robert Zemeckis’ Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988). The incorporation of animated beings into real-world settings is only one example of the blurring of distinctions between animation and film. Whole movies, like Disney’s 2019 version of The Lion King, are photorealistic renderings of live action scenes in which each detail of character and scenery is animated step-by-step by computer graphics (the sole non-animated shot in the entire film is the sunrise in the opening scene.) 

The French did it first

The history of animation intersects with movie history but they do not necessarily move at the same pace. The Lost World (1925) was the first feature-length film made in the United States, possibly the world, to feature model animation as the primary special effect, or stop motion animation in general. The Enchanted Drawing is a 1900 silent film best known for containing the first animated sequences recorded on standard picture film, which has led its director J. Stuart Blackton to be considered the father of American animation. As for the first animated cartoon, it is attributed (by the French) to Emile Cohl, who produced the short movie Fantasmagorie in 1908. Others point to the French inventor Charles-Emile Reynaud and his 1877 patent of the praxinoscope, an animation projection device that predated the invention of the cinématographe by Louis Lumière in 1895. Other optical toys from the nineteenth century or earlier go by the names of zoetrope, thaumatrope, phenakistoscope, and camera obscura. Likewise, animation film theory has many fathers and the competing quest for precursors, pioneers, and key figures oppose various nations, periods, and individuals. One (French) contributor to this volume casts a Frenchman named André Martin as “the inventor of animation cinema” and 1953 as the date when his invention was recorded. Another (Japan specialist) author exhibits another figure, Imamura Taihei, as the first critic to devote a whole book on animation, A Theory of Cartoon Film, first published in 1941. It turns out André Martin used the expression “cinéma d’animation” in the body of a Cahier du Cinéma article about the Cannes festival, thereby donning prestige and dignity to a genre situated at the intersection between “le septième art” (French jargon for movies) and “le neuvième art” (graphic novels and comic strips). As for Imamura Taihei, he confirms the fact that Japan stands as a key site for animation and for theory. His genealogy of cartoons and comic strips goes back to the twelfth century’s emaki picture scrolls, and also includes acting techniques found in the Nō theater and folding screen paintings from the Edo period.

To build a theory of animation, Karen Beckman, the editor of this volume, has mined systematically the writings of film theory specialists to search for references to animation. As she states in the opening chapter, “animation’s persistent yet elusive presence within film theory’s key writings make it both easy to overlook and essential to engage.” These key writings include texts by Norman McLaren, Peter Kubelka, Vachel Lindsay, Jean Epstein, Béla Balázs, Germaine Dulac, Miriam Hansen, and André Bazin, none of which I was familiar with. Throughout the book, the rare mentions of cartoons and animation movies in the writings of cultural critics and philosophers are treated as precious discoveries. Theorists of film and mass culture such as Sergei Eisenstein, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor Adorno repeatedly turned to Disney cartoons and Looney Tunes characters in articulating their reflections on aesthetics and politics. Eisenstein devised a category of “plasmaticness” that he evoked in order to stress the originary shape-shifting potential of the animated movie, the way an object or image can potentially adopt any form. For Benjamin, “Mickey Mouse proves that a creature can still survive even when it has thrown off all resemblance to a human being. He disrupts the entire hierarchy of creatures that is supposed to culminate in mankind.” Adorno and Horkheimer found nothing funny about cartoons and argued that Donald Duck actively participated in the violent oppression of the proletariat by the forces of capitalism. Writing later in the century, Stanley Cavell mulled over the “abrogation of gravity” in cartoons where Sylvester the Cat or Wil E. Coyote run over the edge of a cliff and continue their course in midair. This allows the author of the last chapter in the volume to enunciate the “first theorem of cartoon physics”: “Any body suspended in space will remain in space until made aware of its situation” (the second theorem states that “Any body passing through solid matter (usually at high velocity) will leave a perforation conforming to its perimeter”.)

Cartoon physics

Animation theory is not necessarily tied to film theory: indeed, many contributions to this volume do not start from the pantheon of film theory authors or the key concepts of the discipline. Animation can be engaged with and theorized from other perspectives: as a strand of critical thought that focuses on subaltern cultures, as in Japan, or within an epistemology of scientific objectivity and experimental representation, or from the point of view of graphic art history and media art. Several chapters focus on the link between scientific visualization practices and the history of animation. The scientific experiment plays a central role in the history of cinematography. Animation itself rests on a scientific fact: by presenting a sequence of still images in quick enough succession, the viewer interprets them as a continuous moving image. This persistence of retinal perception was exploited by the early devices of animation that used a series of drawn images portrayed in stages in motion to create a moving picture. One contributor even sees the origins of 3D animation in a 1860 invention by French entrepreneur François Willème. A glass dome, housing a perimeter ring of twenty-four cameras directed inward at a central subject, allowed camera shutters to open simultaneously to produce a “photosculpture” that was not unlike the bullet-time sequence in the film The Matrix. The experiment of film allows the viewer to experience the world in a novel way: animation, like the scientific experiment itself, becomes the way to think at the limit of understanding in an attempt to get past that limit. Scientific uses of animation include medical anatomy and health education, dimensional modeling in biology or in physics, mathematical abstraction, and all kinds of pedagogical materials. Animated images do not only illustrate: they are instrumental in the process of discovery. Climate science would be less potent without the time-lapse images of shrinking glaciers and melting polar ice caps.

Japan is in a league of its own when it comes to animation theory. As mentioned, a book on the theory of anime, Manga eiga-ron, was written as early as 1941, with subsequent editions in 1965 and in 2005. In Japanese, eiga-ron has a different meaning from “film theory”, and a different history as well. Contributions to Animating Film Theory show how animation needs to be thought in relation to media beyond film to account for the singular place of animated images in Japan. One author explores how experimental Japanese Xerox artists in the 1960s operated a crossover between animation and graphic design that sheds light on the specific context within which the issue of technological reproduction and duplication was discussed. The first translation in Japanese of Walter Benjamin’s essay “The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction” was published and discussed in Graphication, Fuji Xerox’s corporate PR magazine that presented itself as a cutting-edge publication venue for graphic art and media criticism. More generally, the great divide between commercial and academic publications that marks the intellectual landscape in America does not exist in Japan, where the bulk of critical theories are translated, published and disseminated through non-academic journals as well as mass-market books and “mooks” (a magazine in book format.) Two of Japan’s main animation critics and public intellectuals, Otsuka Eiji and Azuma Hiroki, have organized part of their critical work outside the circuit of academia and write for a broad public readership consisting of hardcore fans of media subcultures. They invite a re-reading of the question of realism in animation: beyond photographic realism and a drawing style inherited from manga comics, anime films hint toward a new style of transmedia realism without any real-world referent. The vibrant worlds of Japanese anime, manga, and video games form the basis of an alternative sphere of expression that popular Japanese critics theorize from outside the realm of film studies.

Whither animation theory?

For Gilles Deleuze, the primary operation of philosophy is problematization, the cultivation of problems such that philosophy can then go about the task of fabricating concepts. What is the problem of animation that it requires a theory? What are the key concepts that may allow animation theory to make sense and generate meaning? Film studies, in their classical form, evolved from questions of ontology, to questions of reception, to questions of context. What is film and its relationship with reality? How does film have an effect on its viewers? What is the social and political context in which film is made and received? Starting from a different set of questions, animation theory must take its own course and develop its own methodological tools. Animating Film Theory only points toward that goal, and merely sketches out the challenges that theory-makers and philosophers of the moving image might have to grapple with. The first question, already pointed out by Sergei Eisenstein and Jean Epstein, has to do with the quality of “animism” that turns people into objects and objects into animate creatures: what makes a world animated and imbued with a life of its own? A second set of questions could coalesce around the issue of self-reflexivity: animation movies are aware of themselves as works of imaginary creation, and the hand of the drawer is never far from the drawn picture. What separates us from the world of fiction, and how can we inhabit it by breaking the fourth wall that separates screen characters from the audience? The third indication we might learn from animated movies is not to take life too seriously: as the last chapter on “cartoon physics” indicates, we will always enjoy a good Tom-and-Jerry cartoon and the hilarity that courses ending in midair and cat-shaped holes might provoke.

From Marx Boys to Schizo Kids to Otaku cultures

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A review of Media Theory in Japan, edited by Marc Steinberg and Alexander Zahlten, Duke University Press, 2017.

Media Theory“Can you name five media theorists from Japan?” is the question that opens the book’s introduction by the two editors, Marc Steinberg and Alexander Zahlten. Taking up the challenge proposed by the two authors, I wrote my own entry in the book’s margins, with the intention of coming back to this list later once I would complete my reading. The handout to the assignment read as follows: Maruyama Masao, Ohmae Ken’ichi, Murai Jun, Azuma Hiroki, Sasaki Akira. The list will sound obscure to most non-specialists of Japan—and I must confess I include myself in this category. I just happen to have spent a couple of years in Japan in my formative years, and over the following two decades I have accumulated a small portable library of Japanese books and journals, mostly in the social sciences and in philosophy, although my resolution to read them has been forever deferred. Among these books, then, and to come back to my list, stands Maruyama Masao as a postwar critic or hihyōka who turned his liberal gaze on the then-dominant media, the press; Ohmae Ken’ichi as a management guru who heralded the advent of the information society in the 1980s; Murai Jun as the father of the Japanese internet; Azuma Hiroki as the theoretician of the otaku generation; and Sasaki Akira as an astute critic of Japanese theory (Nippon no shisō) and contemporary soundscapes. Having completed the reading of Media Theory in Japan, I am returning to my initial list of authors to put these names in context, add a few more, and write down a few notes on my newly-acquired knowledge.

“There is media theory in Japan”

First, a few definitions are in order. Media theory is more affiliated to the field known as theory—a low-brow version of speculative philosophy—than to the discipline of media studies, although the latter can make use of the first. The editors wryly remark that “the default setting for media theory is America; for a philosophy of media, France; and for media philosophy, Germany.” They hasten to remark that “there is media theory in Japan”; it just hasn’t made a global imprint the way that French philosophy of the 1970s made its mark on critical studies worldwide, or that Japanese management concepts influenced the curriculum of business schools at the end of the twentieth century. Theory is translated in Japanese as riron or shisō. It is closely related to the terms of tetsugaku (philosophy), hihyō (critique), and giron (debate). Compared to abstract philosophy, theory most often take the form of essay articles (ronbun) in monthly magazines or roundtable discussions (zadankai, taidan) whose proceeds are edited and published in books or monthly reviews. Critics (hihyōka) and thinkers (shisōka) are looked down by academics (gakusha) and researchers (kenkyūka) who specialize in one discipline and approach it with rigor and a sense of proper hierarchy; but the musings and cogitations of public intellectuals find many venues in Japanese society and are part of the intellectual landscape. Media theory, apart from being formalized as an academic discipline with strong American influences, remains therefore more open to free thinkers and dilettantes.

A second remark is that there has been several theory booms in Japan, which remains a theory-friendly society. The suffix –ron is affixed to many notions, including Japaneseness (nihonjinron) and media-ron. There is a history to be written that would address theory and its publics in Japan, from the Marx-boys of the 1960s to the shinjinrui (new breed of humans) of the 1970s, the Deleuzian schizo-kids of the 1980s, the otaku of the 1990s and the zeronendai Millennials. As much as media theory in Japan is, to a large extent, a theory of fandom, there are theory fans and theory addicts. Some thinkers develop a cult followership; other self-identify as fans of theoretical practice themselves and import into critical thinking the mindset and paraphernalia of fandom. There are, or there was at some point, theory camps, theory competitions, theory prizes, and, of course, theory manga and amateur movies. Theory in Japan blurs the distinctions between knowledge production, knowledge consumption, and knowledge circulation. It is a domain perpetually in flux, a moving target or a fluid that penetrates the interstices of society. Much like the fansub online communities who provide crowdsourcing subtitles of popular series on the Internet, media theory is a kind of theorization from below, by fans and media addicts. Through modern history, theory in Japan has been closely related to the dominant forms of subcultures, from ero-guro (erotic-grotesque, a Japanese literary and artistic movement of the 1920s and 1930s) to puro-gure (progressive rock). Theory corresponds to an age or a phase in life that often fades away with time: one usually grows out of one’s theory addiction.

Public intellectuals and media figures

It is altogether fitting that my first name on the list, Maruyama Masao, was known as a critic and a public intellectual more than as an academic. The study of media in Japan always had a precarious place in academia. Scholars trained in Germany introduced shimbungaku (“newspaper studies”) before the war, while cultural critics reflected upon the introduction of the cinema and, later on, of television. Media theory is usually developed to make sense of the dominant media of the day. It is always the science of “new media,” and the advent of yet another new generation of media profoundly transforms media theory along the way. The meaning of “new” itself is often predicated upon repetition. As Aaron Gerow shows in his entry “from film to television”, there are massive parallels between mid-century debates on the Age of Television and earlier theorizations on the introduction of the motion pictures, which themselves echoed turn-of-the-century debates on the onslaught of western modernity. “In Japan in particular, theories of film and television were deeply imbricated with historically specific but long-standing conflicts over problems of class, mass society, the everyday (nichijō), and the place of the intellectual.” The resistance of many intellectuals to cinema and then to television was deeply rooted. For Shimizu Ikutarō, a socialist, “television cannot permit the conditions that foster the roots of revolution.” For Katō Hidetoshi, a liberal intellectual influenced by American social critique, television’s “ability to penetrate everyday existence provides with considerable power, and could lead to the establishment of fascism in a time of peace.” Kobayashi Hideo, the pivotal Japanese critic of his time, also had ambivalent feelings regarding the advent of mass media in society.

My second entry, Ohmae Ken’ichi, a prolific writer and successful consultant at McKinsey, points toward a second figure that is familiar beyond the realm of media study: the foreign management guru and his close kin, the Japanese sidekick who introduces the first to Japanese audiences. The authors of Media Theory in Japan chose to concentrate on another character: Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian theorist of media who remains famous for a few aphorisms that sum up his approach (“the medium is the message,” “the global village”). The way McLuhan was introduced and popularized in Japan at the end of the 1960s differs from his reception in other countries. As Marc Steinberg notes, “McLuhan’s reception in Japan was colored by the fact that he was introduced by figures closely associated with television broadcasters and ad agencies, and thus he was read as a management guru by white collar ‘salary men’, media workers, and business moguls alike.” McLuhan became big in Japan because his theory was presented as actionable, like a kind of ‘prescription drug’ with the potential to provide concrete results to its users. The McLuhan boom, which was short-lived, coincided with the popularization of the term media-ron or media theory, an indeed with the use of the word ‘media’ as a stand-alone concept. McLuhan’s World, written by the media figure Takemura Ken’ichi, became even more popular than McLuhan’s book itself. This was “the first of a series of best sellers that walked the fine line between futurology (miraigaku), management theory, and media studies.” Other, more recent intellectual fads in Japan include the reception of Peter Drucker, Eduardo de Bono, Thomas Piketty, and the popularization of the concept of ‘platform,’ based on a theory of markets first coined by Nobel Prize-winner Jean Tirole and analyzed by Marc Steinberg in a more recent volume, The Platform Economy.

Nyū Aka and Dōbutsuka suru posuto modan

McLuhan’s success as a marketing guru makes visible the central role played by advertisement agencies, most notably by Dentsu, and the management consulting industry in general, in the introduction and filtering of media theory in Japan. Later on, the corporate world would also be instrumental in the reception of French theory, from Baudrillard to Derrida to Deleuze and Guattari, and in the popularization of the Japanese movement known as New Academy (Nyū Aka in short.) The central figure here is Asada Akira, which could have featured in my list and who is referred to in several chapters of the book. It is he, along with media critic Ōtsuka Eiji, who began to write complex analyses of the intersection of fandom and the popular media culture around manga and anime, often as an indicator of broader sociopolitical developments. According to Alexander Zahlten, Nyū Aka never formulated a theory of media. But the group changed the mode of theorizing itself: “Nyū Aka performed a media theory rather than formulating one.”  A number of buzzwords inspired by Guattari and Deleuze—the paranoiacs and the schizo-kids, shirake (to be left cold) and nori (to get on board), asobi (play) and ironie—entered into popular parlance, and discussing the new philosophy was perceived as a fashion statement. After the movement petered out in the early 1990s, Asada Akira, who was also coeditor with Karatani Kōjin of the journal Hihyō Kūkan (Critical space), was tasked by the national telecom company NTT to curate a journal, InterCommunication, which explored the interfaces of theory, technology, and digital arts during Japan’s lost decades. For Marilyn Ivy, InterCommunication was still too heavily dependent of the telephonic paradigm and the “capitalism of the voice” to provide a real breakthrough in media theory; but it acted as a bridge between intellectuals and communities of practice in Japan and abroad at a critical juncture in the history of media theory.

It is with my entry of Azuma Hiroki as a postmodern media theorist that I hit the mark of the book’s main focus. Considered as the prince of the otaku culture, the author of Dōbutsuka suru posuto modan (translated as Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals) has brought the pop-massification of theory initiated by Nyū Aka to the next level. In this book, published in 2001 in a popular paperback series, Azuma focuses on anime, manga, and video games; he theorizes the database as a principal construct for the interpretation of post-Internet culture; and he examines new media artifacts such as fan-produced video games to produce an analysis of new media through the prism of the otaku. Borrowing concepts loosely inspired by French philosophy (Kojève’s animal, Lyotard’s postmodern, Derrida’ postcard), and adding his own brand of theoretical constructs (the database, the kyara or anime character, moe or virtual love for a fictional character), he became a standard-bearer of the zeronendai (2000s) generation before turning to political considerations after the Fukushima nuclear disaster. The two chapters centered on Azuma’s work, by Takeshi Kadobayashi and by Tom Looser, show there was a before and an after Japan’s Database Animals. Azuma launched his career as a philosopher in 1993 with a highly abstract terminology influenced by leading Japanese critics Karatani Kōjin and Asada Akira. He made a dramatic shift in his writing style with the publication of Japan’s Database Animals, which corresponded to a new media strategy addressed to a new readership; and he returned to a more philosophical orientation with his book General Will 2.0: Rousseau, Freud, Google, having failed to develop a media theory that his earlier works anticipated. This may explain, in passing, Azuma’s failed reception in France, where he was perceived as a low-brow analyst of geek culture, while his training and earlier contributions to high theory could have given him the potential to become a new Slavoj Žižek.

Making a dent in the universe

Media Theory in Japan describes a rich intellectual landscape and makes it accessible to the general public not versed in the Japanese language. There is indeed media theory in Japan, and my initial list of authors wasn’t completely off the mark. One question remains: why didn’t Japan’s media theories make a dent in the universe in the way that French Theory achieved or, in another realm, like the influence of Japanese management concepts over global practices? The editors don’t overstate their case when they remark that “Japan, with one of the largest and most complex media industries on the planet and a rich and sophisticated history of theorization of modern media, is nearly a complete blank spot on the Euro-American media-theoretical map.” One can first point to the lack of available translations: English is the lingua franca of media theory, and works by Japanese authors are rarely made available in English. Media theorists mostly talk among themselves, and Japanese thinkers are rarely part of this conversation. One could incriminate the dearth of proper translators and sites of mediation: the journal InterCommunication, which provided translations of Euro-American authors and put them in dialogue with Japanese intellectuals, was in the end a failure. One could also point towards the more general tendency to locate the West “as the site of Theory, and the Rest as the site of history or raw materials (‘texts’).” In this respect, this book provides a welcome gesture towards ‘Provincializing Europe’, and ‘Dis-orienting the Orient.’

But the blame cannot be put solely on the West. The authors point out that Japanese attempts to articulate a homegrown media theory generally ended in impasse and incompletion. Postwar critics of television were too imbued of their bourgeois superiority and dependent on American social critique to realize that when television was still a luxury in Japan, it was often viewed outside the home by anonymous crowds or neighbor communities—in train stations, cafés, shop windows, or at the place of neighbors opening directly onto the street (as we are reminded by the 2005 movie Always: Sunset on Third Street.) Nyū Aka’s discourse amounted to a form of knowledge curation more than a genuine articulation of media theory; and Azuma was compelled to abandon his plans to publish a comprehensive theory of media. The authors even detect a hysterical streak in the Japanese subject that leads to resistance to mediation and a tendency to resort to performance and acting-out as opposed to conceptualization and working-through: “Nyū Aka performed a media theory rather than formulating one,” and so did Azuma Hiroki or the earlier critics of the television age. As the chapter on McLuhan illustrates, Japanese reception deforms European and North American media theories, and acts as a black hole absorbing energy as opposed to a mirror reflecting light. The practice of hihyō is also to blame: “taking place mostly in magazines and journals and situated somewhere between criticism and academic theory, hihyō was tailored to the needs and speeds of a massively productive print culture” that remains insular by definition.

Media theory and management practice

It is here that the globalization of Japanese pop culture—video games, anime, manga, cosplay, fansubbing, instant video messaging as on Nico Nico Douga—offers the potential to change the picture. As has often been pointed out, these subcultures usually operate in an isolated environment (straddling the borders of Japan) and they are often subject to the Galapagos syndrome: they undergo evolutionary changes independently from the rest of the world, and they are sensitive to global exposure. But some variants can also withhold competition and thrive in an open environment. As the case of new media illustrates, distinct cultural-media configurations in turn give rise to distinct forms of mediation, and distinct kinds of media theorizations. The anime industry, analyzed in The Soul of Anime: Collaborative Creativity and Japan’s Media Success Story (reviewed here), provides alternative models of value creation that may be more attuned to our post-capitalist future: value is not synonymous with profits, and the relation between producers and consumers cannot be reduced to monetary transactions and economic self-interest. Similarly, management concepts born out of Japanese practice may find applications in media theory: the notion of platform, largely conflated with the strategies of the GAFA in the American context, took up a different meaning in Japan, due to its early introduction and mediation by Japanese management strategists. The same could be said of the concepts of learning-by-doing, of tacit and explicit knowledge, of modularity, and of co-evolution and symbiosis. Management scholars can learn a lot by reading books of philosophy and critical theory; likewise, media theory in Japan could be enriched by its dialogue with other fields of practical knowledge.

Ghost in the Shell

Etienne RP1 Comment

A review of The Soul of Anime: Collaborative Creativity and Japan’s Media Success Story, Ian Condry, Duke University Press, 2013.

the-soul-of-animeIn my opinion, The Soul of Anime should be read in business schools. It provides a wonderful case study of a particular industry, and it can teach management practitioners many things about globalization, creative industries, and flexible labor. Unlike what is stated in the book’s subtitle however, the story of Japanese anime is not a success story. As Ian Condry states in the introduction, “in terms of economic success, anime seems more of a cautionary tale than a model of entrepreneurial innovation.” Judged from a management perspective, the anime industry is in many ways a case of failure: a failure to globalize, a failure to create value on a sustained basis, and a failure on the side of market participants to reap profits and secure employment. But management can learn from failures as much than it can learn from success stories. What’s more, the anthropological perspective adopted by the author points towards a different theory of value creation: for cultural content industries, value is not synonymous with profits, and the relation between producers and consumers cannot be reduced to monetary transactions and economic self-interest. This is the intuition that the founders of anthropology developed when they analyzed trading relations among primitive tribes in terms of gift-giving and reciprocity; and this is the conclusion that this modern anthropology book reaches when it describes the popular success of this particular case of industrial failure.

A failed success story

Why didn’t anime transform itself into a profit-making machine for Japanese media groups? Why didn’t studio Ghibli—the producers of Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away—develop into a franchise akin to Walt Disney’s? Why didn’t stories based on manga series—the main source of inspiration for Japanese anime—give birth to blockbuster movies the way that Marvel Comics did? For all its popular success and—in the case of Ghibli production—critical acclaim, Japanese anime production remains in many ways a cottage industry. The studios in which the author of The Soul of Anime did his fieldwork, with names such as Gonzo, Aniplex, and Madhouse, are small-scale operations that continuously stake the house on their next production. Even the biggest players such as Studio Ghibli, Production I.G. and Toei Animation are limited in size and do not generate extraordinary profits. As Ian Condry describes it, a studio can employ anywhere from fifteen to a few hundred people, and relies heavily on local freelance animators as well as offshore production houses located in South Korea, China, and the Philippines. Like other segments of the Japanese industry, the anime sector has been “hollowed out”: by some estimates, 90 percent of the frames used in Japanese animation are drawn overseas.

The work that remains in Japan is not very well-paid and is precariously flexible. Long hours are the norm, and many animators work freelance, moving from project to project, often without benefits. Visiting a studio is more like entering the den of a manga production house, with papers piling up everywhere and people working frantically on deadlines, than witnessing the cool working environment of a high-tech start-up. Indeed, manga stories provide most of the content later developed in anime movies, and the two worlds are closely interconnected. Osamu Tezuka, the creator of Astro Boy otherwise known as the “god of manga,” used to quip that manga was his wife, while animation was his mistress. Like manga, anime now attracts a cult followership across the globe, and fans are present on every continent. They often start to watch anime from a very young age: by some estimates, 60 percent of the world’s TV broadcasts of cartoons are Japanese in origin. Despite its global reach, the anime industry failed to give rise to corporate giants that could have become global actors. Even Studio Ghibli’s biggest overseas success, Spirited Away, which won an Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, scored much less on the international box office than U.S animated productions of much lower quality. Mamoru Oshii’s cult film Ghost in the Shell reached number one in DVD sales in the United States in 1996, but failed to generate profitable spin-offs and lucrative sequels. Toei Animation’s original ambition to become the “Disney of the East” has failed egregiously.

The Galapagos syndrome

In a way, the failure of anime to globalize is just another case of the Galapagos syndrome: many globally available products take a local form in Japan, a variant that is sometimes more advanced and attuned to the local ecosystem, but which diverges from global trends. This isolation from the global market acts as a form of protectionism, allowing species to develop in unique ways, but leaves Japanese companies ill-prepared for global competition. Although cultural content industries such as manga, anime, video games, music, and films are being promoted by Japanese authorities for their ability to attract foreign audiences, the fact is that creators, drawers and scenarists mostly have a domestic audience in mind when they design their stories. The scorecards that manga readers send to weekly magazines to rate their favorite episodes is a case in point: it makes manga scenarios highly receptive to the reactions of the public, as unpopular series are discontinued and only the most popular manga stories survive and evolve according to their readership’s taste. But the system also makes manga series dependent on the whim of a group of core fans or otaku that do not necessarily reflect the national public, let alone global audiences. Copyright and intellectual property rights may also be an issue: Japanese companies reap hefty profits on the domestic market where IPR protection is strong, but are pilfered in neighboring countries through copycats, illegal downloading, and video streaming. Yet another argument that explains anime’s parochialism is that the global slot of blockbusters and megahits is already occupied by American productions, leaving only the niche markets of national cinema and sub-culture.

There are many reasons anime didn’t go global the way Walt Disney did. But perhaps we are using the wrong yardstick. Perhaps the value that anime generates belongs to a different class that is more diffuse and evanescent. As Ian Condry notes, “so much of what makes media meaningful lies beyond the measures of retail sales, top-ten lists, and box-office figures.” Anime cannot be gauged solely by examining what happens onscreen or by how it is marketed by studios. Instead of analyzing the cultural content of particular series or the business strategies of anime producers, Condry looks at the role of fans, the circulation of anime series and the dynamics between niche and mass market. He shows how the unexpected turnaround from failure to success for the Gundam franchise was linked to the energy of amateur builders of giant “mecha” robots and fans forming “research groups” into “Minovsky Physics”, an invention from the sci-fi series. He follows hard-core fans in sci-fi conventions, cosplay contests, and other fairs where amateurs distribute home-made manga and otaku videos. He focuses on fansubbing, the translation and dissemination of anime online by fans, which is governed by complex rules that are not always hostile to copyright protection. He considers how people can express strong affection or “moe” for virtual 2D characters with and sees it as “pure love” with no hope for a reciprocal emotional payback. This is a multi-sited ethnography, based on participant observation or “learning by watching” (kengaku), in which the author attempts to assess how value arises through the social circulation of media objects.

Follow the soul

Economists follow the money; anthropologists follow the soul, the energy, the mana. In his classic study of the Kula trade among the Trobriand islanders, Bronislaw Malinowski described the complex rules by which shell necklaces and trinkets circulated around a vast ring of island communities to enhance the social status and prestige of leaders. Kula valuables never remain for long in the hands of the recipients; rather, they must be passed on to other partners within a certain amount of time, thus constantly circling around the ring. French anthropologist Marcel Mauss, author of The Gift, reconceptualized this analysis of the Kula trade to ask: ”What power resides in the object given that causes its recipient to pay it back?” His answer was that Kula objects were invested with a certain property, a force binding the receiver and giver that he called the ‘hau’ or life-force. Another Polynesian notion that Marcel Mauss used was the ‘mana’: a form of a spiritual energy or charisma which can exist in places, objects and persons. Applying these notions to the Japanese context, we can say it is the ‘hau’ of anime that makes fans devote some of their time to give back to the community of anime lovers through writing subtitles or designing cosplay costumes. By summoning the ‘soul’ of anime, Ian Condry reconnects with some basic concepts of the discipline, and renews the inspiration of two of the great founders of anthropology. Both Bronislaw Malinowski and Marcel Mauss tried to build theories of exchange and the economy that went beyond monetary transactions and the economic interest of rational individuals. We find that same attention on how energy flows, reputations accumulate, and people collaborate in the production and circulation of anime.

Management scholars can also learn a lot from reading this modern anthropology book. The concept of ‘co-creation’ used by management scholars and sociologists is close to the ‘collaborative creativity’ used by Ian Condry to describe emergent structures of creative action in which both anime studios and fans play an important role. Similarly, “platforms” are a hot topic in management studies. Business scholars see platform industries as embodied in technologies that allow open collaboration and value creation on an unprecedented scale. Economists see platforms as multi-sided markets having distinct user groups that provide each other with network benefits. Rather than viewing technologies or markets as the platform, the anthropologist draws our attention on the circulation of emotions and meanings that define and organize our cultural space. Observing script meetings for a particular children TV series, Condry describes how a logic evolving around ‘characters’ and ‘worlds’ form the basis on which anime scripts are constructed and evaluated. Characters and worlds are trans-media concepts: they make a particular design or atmosphere move across media and circulate among people. They attract and connect, without being tied to any particular story or media. A well-known example is Hello Kitty, a character which exists independently from any storytelling and which has become an icon of a world of cuteness or ‘kawaii’. But characters are ubiquitous in Japan: they advertise anything from government agencies to city wards, and ‘character designer’ is a popular profession among the young generation.

From niche to mass market

Anime is often considered as the land of otaku, the realm of geeks, the kingdom of nerds. It is segmented into different categories or sub-genres, and a series’ appeal is generally limited to one single age group, as even the biggest successes very seldom straddles generations. It is, in essence, a niche market. Very seldom can it hope to reach a mass audience. But as Condry argues, the path from niche to mass may first involve jumps from niche to niche. Indeed, this might be the key to a more accurate definition of mass: to see it as network of niches acting in unison. The notion of “media success” often hinges on a movement from something small-scale that expands to become large-scale, yet niche has a chance in the context of global popular culture, free downloads, and viral videos. This is a new world after all, a world where the music video of an obscure rap singer from South Korea can be viewed over 2.5 billion times on YouTube, or where a gore movie such as The Machine Girl, whose schoolgirl heroin has a machine gun grafted to her amputated arm, can feature among the most often downloaded films on some media sharing platforms. Management should better pay heed to the otaku out there—or, in Steve Jobs’ words, “to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes… because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.”

Ian Condry also redefines what we mean by social media. As he remarks, “today, media forms are more than something we simply watch, listen to, or consume; media is something we do.” Social network services like Facebook or Twitter have demonstrated that media could be a platform for participation as much as an object of consumption. What makes “social media” new is not the technology as much as the idea that media is not something to consume from a Network (like ABC) but something we participate in through our (small “n”) networks. Social network services or SNS make real what is virtual by making virtual what is real. In other words, Facebook-like platforms project onto the virtual world structures of relations between people and objects that form the basis of our day-to-day interactions; and by doing so, SNS show the materiality of the invisible bonds that connect components of the real world. Social media has helped put back the social into the media; but as the story of anime illustrates it, the social has been there all along. Anime’s success as a media form relies on the feedback loops between producers and audience. This brings us back to the energy around anime, which arises through its circulation and the combined efforts of large number of people. We might think of this collective energy as a kind of soul. The social in the media is what the anthropologist calls the soul. It is like a ghost in the shell: it animates real and virtual bodies, it moves across media platform and licensed goods, it makes energy flow from producers to consumers and back again. Anthropology is a very useful means of capturing these dimensions of our social reality that are ghost-like and often spirited away, because fieldworkers can gain access to that which is most meaningful to people through persistent engagement and critical questioning. This is why, in my opinion, anthropology should be taught in business schools.