Japanese Anime

Main Topics

• Historical influences toward Japanese art

• Contemporary Japan & popular culture• Japanese cinema• Origins of anime • Aesthetic characteristics of anime• Re-ocurring themes of anime• Anime & global identity

Japanese Historical & Cultural Context

Genroku period (Mid 17th to early 18th Century)

Kasei period (Late 18th to early 19th Century)

Meiji period (1868 – 1912)

Taisho period (1912 – 1926)

Showa period (1926-1989)

IKI IN UKIYO-E PRINTS

EishiGeisha at the

Matsumoto TeahouseÔban, c. early 1790s

EizanHanging Picturein Horinouchi.

Ôban, 1807

Kabuki Theatre

Kabuki Theater Creator Name:Torii Kiyotada

Bunraku TheaterA round bunraku (puppet) theater, in Sewa village, Kumamoto Prefecture, Kyushu, Japan. Photographer: Michael S.Yamashita Date: April, 1993

Bunraku Puppet Theatre

Japanese Bunraku Puppet Theater Several puppeteers manipulate Bunraku a traditional form of puppetry in Japan. Photographer: Jack Fields 1981

Kibyoshi

Author unknown Love, the Pavilion of Water Chrysanthemums /Enshoku Suikotei/ c.1840-1850 a book, nishikie, 123x155mm

Nishikawa Sukenobu The Heart of the Pond /Ehon ike no kokoro/ 1739 a book, sumizurie, an illustration

Ukiyoe - Woodblock Prints

Author YOSHIDA, Hiroshi(1876-1950) Title "Glittering Sea” ("Hikaru Umi")Date 1926

Predominant Forms of Popular Culture

Literature

Manga - emerging from a synthesis between post WWII Western influences and traditional Japanese aesthetics.

Film & T.V; Japanese Hollywood=Shochiku Studios; Yakuza movies

Tora-san series. Kurosawa Akira

Kitano Takeshi Avant Garde

Music; J-PopEnkaKaraoke

Art; Manga Anime - Ghibli Studios, Gainax

Avant Garde

Historical Development of Japanese Cinema

Considered to be “a new means of expression, but what it expressed was old”.

Heavily influenced by the traditional pictorial and narrative arts.

Strong tradition of storytelling and performance.

Influence of the Theatre

Cinema was regarded as an extension of the stage, a new kind of drama.

• The early ‘cinema performances’, displayed a disregard for any claims of realism, which in the west was considered to be essential both in photographic and moving images.

Narrative Structure in Japanese Cinema

• Aesthetic elements communicate much more than the narrative. • “an aesthetically patterned narrative is sometimes preferred to one that is more logical”.

• Not constrained by Western insistence for narrative progression based on cause and effect & resolution.

Anime = anim

ation

Otaku = obsessive anime fa

n

Origins of anime

• e-makimono (picture-scroll narratives)

• Kabuki theatre• The ‘Noh’ tradition (theatrical

masks)• Bunraku (puppet theatre)• Ukiyo Zoshi (the novel)• Manga (graphic novel)

Other Influences

• German expressionism• Early French animation (Emile Cohl)• Russian animation (Yuri Norstein)• American comics• Disney animation• Cinema genres - ‘film-noir’, ‘the gangster’, ‘the

western’• Contemporary social & cultural issues

Manga

• “flowing pictures”

• “frivolous pictures”

• “comics”

• “graphic novels”.

Manga

Manga Genres

• Sport• Gangster• Romance• Gourmet• Historical• Erotic• Satirical• Cyberpunk• Mecha

Frame Syntax

• Meaning emerging from the syntactical arrangement of the frame

• The composition of visual elements within the frame

• The relation of one frame to another across a sequence of frames

Live Action MangaTetsuo: The Ironman, (1989, Dir. Shinya Tsukamoto)

Aesthetic Characteristics of Anime

• composition of the image.

• The relation between background and foreground

• Formalist aesthetic dominates, but there is sometimes a sophisticated aesthetic interplay between realism and formalism.

• Eg: ‘Texhnolyze’, ‘Tetsuo’

Texhnolyze (2004, Dir. Yoshitoshi Abe)

http://www.cjas.org/~leng/texhnolyze.htm

Space

• space is not used for illusionistic effect, nor is any effort made to achieve depth.

• While Western film directors view the screen as a window into a 3 dimensional space, many Japanese directors treat this screen as a flat 2 dimensional surface, much like a picture or painting.

Character Aesthetics

• Round faces and simplicity of features

• Stylistic features developed by manga artist Osamu Tezuka

• The origins of these features can also be found in the Noh (mask) tradition of Kabuki theatre.

“Mask and Persona”

The construct of the “mask” is one of the most profoundly developed aspects of the traditional performing arts in Japan with Noh theatre providing the most obvious example.

The motif of the mask can be discussed on several levels. The first is the use of masks (or masking) in the literal form as is illustrated in a pronounced fashion in several Miyazaki productions.

Re-occuring Themes of Anime

• Dystopian futures

• Cyborgs

• The relation between humans and technology • The animated body

“The body takes on animal attributes; it merges with plant life and melds with metal. The body is asexual and homosexual, heterosexual and hermaphrodite”

Eg: Tetsuo, Texhnolyze, Ghost in the Shell

Ghost in the Shell (1995, Dir. Mamoru Oshii)

“Metamorphosis (in animation) legitimizes the process of connecting apparently unrelated images, forging original relationships between lines, objects etc, and disrupting established notions of classical storytelling

…(by collapsing) the illusion of physical space, metamorphosis destabilizes the image, conflating horror and humor, dream and reality, certainty and speculation” (Napier, 2001)

Metamorphosis

Apocalypse

The vision of worldwide destruction, expressed as material, spiritual or pathological catastrophe.

Eg: Akira

Akira (1988, Dir. Katsuhiro Otomo)

Spirited Away

DirectorHayao Miyazaki (2002)

“a phantasmagoric fairy-tale”

Princess Mononoke (1997, Dir. Hayao Miyazaki)

Spirited Away (2001, Dir. Hayao Miyazaki)

“Unlike the inherently more representational space of conventional live-action film…animated space has the potential to be context free, drawn wholly out of the animator’s or artist’s mind. It is therefore a particularly apt medium for participation in a transnational, stateless culture” (Napier, 2001).

Anime, Global Identity and Hybridity

Anime may function as a site of subversion or resistance to the authority of the state. Here, Anime can be seen as opening up a new cultural space, one in which identity is not defined or constrained by an authentic ‘Japaneseness’, or a Western notion of identity.