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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
Eishi
Eizan
Geisha at the
Matsumoto Teahouse
Ôban, c. early 1790s
Hanging Picture
in Horinouchi.
Ôban, 1807
Kabuki Theatre
Kabuki Theater
Creator Name:Torii Kiyotada
Bunraku Theater
A 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
Nishikawa Sukenobu
The Heart of the Pond /Ehon ike no kokoro/
1739
a book, sumizurie, an illustration
Author unknown
Love, the Pavilion of Water
Chrysanthemums /Enshoku Suikotei/
c.1840-1850
a book, nishikie, 123x155mm
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-Pop
Enka
Karaoke
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.
Origins of anime
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e-makimono (picture-scroll narratives)
Kabuki theatre
The ‘Noh’ tradition (theatrical masks)
Bunraku (puppet theatre)
Ukiyo Zoshi (the novel)
Manga (graphic novel)
Other Influences
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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
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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 Manga
Tetsuo: 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
“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)
Apocalypse
The vision of worldwide destruction,
expressed as material, spiritual or
pathological catastrophe.
Eg: Akira
Akira (1988, Dir. Katsuhiro Otomo)
Spirited Away
Director
Hayao Miyazaki (2002)
“a phantasmagoric fairy-tale”
Princess Mononoke (1997, Dir. Hayao Miyazaki)
Spirited Away (2001, Dir. Hayao Miyazaki)
Anime, Global Identity and Hybridity
“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 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.