u N i V e r S i T Y O F M i N N e S O T A P r e S S m i n n e a p o l i s • l o n d o n

m e c h a d e m i a 1Emerging

Worlds of Anime

and MangaMechademiaAn Annual Forum for Anime, Manga, and Fan Arts

FreNCHY LuNNiNg, eDiTOr

Mechademia is a series of books, published by the University of Minnesota Press, devoted to creative and critical work on anime, manga, and the fan arts. Linked through their specific but complex aesthetic, anime, manga, and the fan arts have influenced a wide array of contemporary and historical culture through design, art, film, and gaming. This series seeks to examine, discuss, theorize, and reveal this unique style through its historic Japanese origins and its ubiquitous global presence and manifestation in popular and gallery culture. Each book is organized around a particular narrative aspect of anime and manga; these themes are sufficiently provocative and broad in interpretation to allow for creative and insightful investigations of this global artistic phenomenon.

Senior BoardMichelle Ollie, Associate EditorChristopher Bolton, Admissions EditorTimothy Perper, Review and

Commentary Editor, Otaku EditorMartha Cornog, Review and

Commentary EditorMarc Hairston, Otaku EditorPatrick Drazen, Otaku EditorGilles Poitras, Otaku EditorYuriko Furuhata, Otaku EditorThomas LaMarreThomas LooserHaijime NakataniSusan NapierAbé Mark NornesMark J. P.  WolfWendy Siuyi Wong

Editorial BoardBrent AllisonC. B. CelbulskiTrish LedouxDavid RappBrian RuhTheresa Winge

Advisory BoardPamela GossinAdam HaeckerJohn A. LentNora PaulLester Shen

Contents

Mechademia Editorial and Advisory Boards

http://www.mechademia.org/

The University of Minnesota Press gratefully acknowledges the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, whose Faculty Enhancement Grant 2005 helped support this project.

“The Japan Fad in Global Youth Culture and Millennial Capitalism” was originally published in Anne Allison, Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).

“Kurenai no metalsuits, ‘Anime to wa nani ka/What is animation’” originally appeared as “What Is Animation?” in Ueno Toshiya, Crimson Metal Suit: Anime as a Battlefield, translated by Michael Arnold, Michigan Monograph Series in Japanese Studies (Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2006); reprinted with permission of the publisher.

Anime timeline by Brian Ruh. Manga timeline by Patrick Drazen. Illustration by Ke Jaing.

Copyright 2006 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Published by the University of Minnesota Press111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520http://www.upress.umn.edu

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.

1 Anifesto Fre NCHY Lu NNi Ng A ND CHri STOP He r BOLTON i l l u s t r at e d by s a r a p o c o c K

11 The Japan Fad in Global Youth Culture and Millennial Capitalism A NNe A LLi SON

23 Globalizing Manga: From Japan to Hong Kong and Beyond We NDY Si u Yi WONg

47 The World of Anime Fandom in America Su SA N NA P i e r

65 Costuming the Imagination: Origins of Anime and Manga Cosplay T He re SA Wi Nge

78 Assessing Interactivity in Video Game Design MA rK J . P. WOLF

87 Mori Minoru’s Day of Resurrection TATSu Mi TA K AYu K i t r a n s l at e d by c h r i s to p h e r b o lto n

92 Superflat and the Layers of Image and History in 1990s Japan T HOMA S LOOSe r

In the Hollywood hit of 2003, Lost in Translation, Tokyo is the backdrop for a tale about modern-day angst and cultural dislocation. As shot by the film’s director, Sofia Coppola, the screen fills with scene after scene of a searingly beautiful Tokyo: neon-lit Shinjuku, a pristine sushi bar, the quietude of a temple, a nightclub’s jagged excesses. All of this is filtered through the per-spective of two American travelers who are as lost in this foreign culture as they are in their personal lives back home. Strangers when they first meet, the two connect over shared insomnia and malaise. Both are reluctant visi-tors to a country that neither one is interested in; both find Japan utterly strange. Yet the strangeness inspires not only gaffes and gaps in cultural (mis)communication but also intimacy between the two. By the time they part, Japan has acquired a new attractiveness and meaning for them. Yet nei-ther character exhibits greater knowledge or understanding of the country: they are as clueless as when they first checked into their hotel. Indeed, the film’s audience shares the same position, as strangers “lost” in a culture that, while quirkily and sensuously beautiful, is foreign and outside “translation.”

In 2004 ABC aired an episode of the long-running children’s television show, Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers, with a story that referenced Coppola’s

The Japan Fad in Global

Youth Culture and

Millennial Capitalism

A N N E A L L I S O N

11

12 a n n e a l l i s o n t h e j a pa n fa d i n g lo b a l yo u t h c u lt u r e 13

movie. Titled “Lost and Found in Translation,” this story of a cross-cultural encounter is played with a twist: here the protagonists will not only lose but also find their way in(to) a different culture. The episode opens in the United States with the rangers—teenagers who morph into superheroes to fight alien monsters and defend the earth—in their everyday garb, working on a social science project comparing two cultures. On television, they dis-cover a program from Japan that turns out to be a version of Abarangers (that season’s variant of Power Rangers) dubbed into English. Two of the three

Americans are riveted, fascinated by the cy-borgian upgrades and fighting stances of the Japanese rangers. But the third dismisses the foreign show as inauthentic, saying that they “got it all wrong” and discounting the enemy as a “guy in a rubber suit.” His pals, however, remind him that it’s just a TV show and urge him to use his imagination. Sitting back and watching more, he gets into the action and admits that it’s “kinda cool.” The episode ends with a message about cultural

difference voiced by the new convert. “We’re not so different after all, just a slightly different interpretation.” Returning to his homework assignment, he announces the title to the others: “Japanese versus American Culture—Closer Than We Think.”

Both the above stories, produced by U.S. cultural industries in the new millennium, feature Americans who are discomforted in their encounters with a foreign culture. In both cases, that culture is Japan; in both cases, the discomfort is dispelled. The reasons for this, however, are different. In the former, a blockbuster movie for and about adults, the characters are dislo-cated from home in a cultural milieu they feel lost in. But, in what has been called a love story, the couple uses the alienness of Japan to bridge their own personal alienation in the company of one another. And, in this, the setting could be anywhere, reviewers have suggested, and Japan acts more figura-tively than literally to signify a sense of dislocation in the world at once un-easy and potentially pleasurable. The story line in “Lost and Found in Trans-lation”—an episode for a children’s television show featuring kids—is quite different. Here, the tale is set in the United States, where the foreignness Americans confront is on the screen instead of the street. Fictional and un-real, the ranger escapades constitute popular culture: something that Ameri-can youth take very seriously. And it is in these terms that the U.S. rangers

on the show come to read and appreciate the differences of their Japanese counterparts. Bearing a style that the Americans find cool in its own right, the show’s cultural logic doesn’t defy translation as much as yield a different interpretation.

I use these two tales of imaginary encounters between Americans and Japan/ese to reflect on the rise of manga, anime, video games, and various play trends around the world, including the United States. Starting in East and Southeast Asia in the 1980s and other parts of the world such as Western Europe, Russia, Peru, and the United States in the early to mid-1990s, the global market in Japanese youth products has skyrocketed. Called the coun-try’s GNC (gross national cool) by the American reporter Douglas McGray (2002), these exports now exceed what had been the leading industries in Japan’s postwar economy: automobiles and steel. Having tripled in the past decade—a time of a nagging recession precipitated by the bursting of the Bubble economy in 1991—the industry of cool culture is bringing much-needed capital to Japan, both real and symbolic. Taken seriously these days even by the Japanese government, which hopes to channel it as a form of “soft power,” J-cool raises questions about what precisely the nature of its ap-peal is around the world; what, if any, influence it is having on global culture; and how exactly “Japan” figures in any of this. Concentrating on the United States here because of how its own cultural industries have dominated the global imagination, I consider how Japanese properties are entering not only the marketplace and play habits of U.S. kids but also the imaginary of Ameri-cans more generally. In a place where storytelling has been so ethnocentric, the omnipresence of Japanese cartoons on Saturday morning TV, for exam-ple, and the shelves of manga sold in chain bookstores like Borders (many printed right to left in Japanese style) are striking. Does this really represent a shift, however, from the global (cultural) power of Americanization? Fur-ther, what do we make of the fact that this fad, so driven by youth, is also so incomprehensible to American adults, that “culture” here comes in the reg-ister of virtual, fantasy worlds, and that J-cool trades in an image of Japan more imaginary than so-called real?

The influence of Japan on American pop culture is hardly new. Godzilla, of course, was a huge hit in the 1950s, with its endless sequels and incar-nations that have survived until the new millennium. Japanese television shows like Astro Boy and Speed Racer have been broadcast on regional sta-tions since the 1960s, Japanese metal robots and transformers have sold in American toy stores since the early months after World War II, and entertain-ment technology such as the Sony Walkman and Nintendo Game Boy has

the global market in

Japanese youth products

has skyrocketed. these

exports now exceed what

had been the leading

industries in Japan’s

postwar economy,

automobiles and steel.

t h e m u lt i p l a n e r i m ag e 121

When I take the Shinkansen, I love watching the countryside stream past the windows. I can’t help but recall Paul Virilio’s remark, that the landscape seen from the train window is art, just as much as the works of Pablo Picasso or Paul Klee. Virilio calls the effect of speed on the landscape an “art of the engine.”1 And he associates it with cinema. “What happens in the train win-dow, in the car windshield, in the television screen, is the same kind of cin-ematism,” he writes.2 For Virilio, this art of the engine, these effects of speed, for all their beauty, are deadly. Cinematism entails an optical logistics that ultimately prepares us for the bomb’s-eye view, consigning us to a life at one end or the other of a gun, or missile, or some other ballistic system. Maybe it’s just me, but as I look at the landscape from the bullet train, I watch how the countryside seems to separate into the different layers of motion, and how structures transform into silhouettes. These effects make me wonder if there is not also an “animetism” generated through the effects of speed. This animetism does not turn its eyes from the window in order to align them with the speeding locomotive or bullet or robot. It remains intent on looking at the effects of speed laterally, sideways, or crossways. Consequently, ani-metism emphasizes how speed divides the landscape into different planes or

The Multiplanar Image

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layers. In addition, it gives the impres-sion that it is not simply the train that moves; the entire world is in motion.

In one of the early sequences in Ôtomo Katsuhiro’s Steamboy (2004), as the young hero travels by train to Lon-don, the English countryside streams past the window, and the landscape—a series of rolling hills, clumps of trees, and small houses—looks like a diorama (Figure 1).3 But it is not one of those dioramas that use three-dimensional figures and scale models. It recalls the ones that children make in school with a shoebox and cardboard cutouts. Each house and hill and tree is decidedly flat, as if cut out and pasted in place. All sense of depth comes from the play be-tween the cutout layers. As your view-ing position moves, you distinctly feel the gap between these different layers or planes. The gap between layers is hard to catch by looking at a static se-ries of screen grabs, so you’ll have to imagine the effects of motions (or see the film on a large screen, which really accentuates the play between layers).

The depth of these open layers is a strange depth—strange, that is, in comparison with the hyper-three-dimensionality that is now familiar to us from digital animation in the style of Pixar; strange, too, in comparison to cinematic norms. The diorama style in Steamboy does not construct depth in accordance with the conventions of geometric perspective. This animetism focuses less on realism of depth than on realism of movement. It lingers on the effects of speed, but here the image’s different layers seem to move inde-pendently of one another. The result is a multiplanar image.

Of course, in this “steampunk” tale, Ôtomo goes to great lengths to evoke and alter technologies of the Victorian era, and his use of diorama-like land-scape is part of the historical conceit. The diorama recalls optical technolo-gies of the period, and the sequence emphasizes the diorama effect by slowly

Figure 1. Sequence from Steamboy.

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pulling away from the landscape to frame it in the train window—a perfect dioramic moment. The multiplanar image is not limited to Steamboy or to old-fashioned optics, however. In Spriggan (1998), for instance, in the sequence in which the young hero drives through Istanbul, the landscape appears as a collection of flat, superimposed layers of buildings (Figure 2). Again you feel the openness between the flattened planes of the image, which defies certain conventions of depth yet imparts a distinctive sense of movement. Rather than move into the landscape, you seem to move across it, soaring, speeding, spinning, wheeling.

Since Ôtomo also worked on Spriggan (as general supervisor), you might think that these multiplanar effects are part of his distinctive style, or of Studio 4°C, which is associated with experimental styles, not only on Ôtomo projects such as Memories (1995) and Spriggan but also on series like Eternal Family (Eien no kazoku, 1997–98) and films like Mind Game (2004). Multipla-nar effects, however, appear all the time in animation, not only in Ôtomo films or experimental animation. These travel sequences from Steamboy and Spriggan touch on something fundamental to animation—at least to those forms of animation that grow out of cel animation.

THE MULTIPLANE CAMERA

A basic feature of cel animation is the layering of celluloid sheets, or cels, which produces odd effects of depth—odd, again, from the standpoint of certain conventions of rendering depth. Take a very simple scenario, for in-stance, in which you draw the lines of a character in dark ink on a transparent sheet of celluloid and carefully apply colors. You then place the character cel on top of a background (painted on celluloid, glass, or some other support). Two layers alone can produce effects of depth. If you draw and color the back-ground somewhat lighter than the character, the more boldly drawn character will appear closer to the viewer—which is usually the desired effect. Now you draw various positions of movement for the character and take exposures. When projected, the character will appear to move in the foreground; if you slide the cel a bit, the character seems to move over or across the background. Still, as depth goes, this is not all that deep.

The difficulties begin when you want to create illusions of movement in depth, as Walt Disney did in the early 1930s.4 As you stack more and more cels, you can create some sense of depth, but you also begin to get silhouette effects, and a host of other problems arise. For instance, the colors of the lower cels tend to change, and lighting becomes difficult. Things truly take a turn for the worse, however, if you want to create the sensation of moving into or out of a background—for instance, if you adopt the viewing posi-tion of a character moving toward something in the background. Say that you want to create the sensation of walking toward a barn under a full moon. You can change the camera focus (zooming in or out) or move the camera closer or farther away from the picture. The problem is that, as the barn gets bigger, so does everything around it in the picture. The moon, for instance, also grows larger—rather than remain the same size, as it ought. Piling on

Figure 2. Sequence from Spriggan.