Introduction: between cinema and

anime
THOMAS LAMARRE

[Hume] created the Ž rst great logic of relations, showing in it that all relations
(not only ‘matters of fact’ but also relations among ideas) are external to their
terms. As a result, he constituted a multifarious world of experience.
(Deleuze 1991)
There has, in recent years, been a lot of discussion about how digital animation
or computer graphics imaging (CGI) is transforming the relation between cinema
and animation. Especially in the past year, a spate of Ž lms has spurred more mass-
media interest in questions about the impact of new technologies on cinema: one
has only to think of the digitally generated characters in Shrek and Final Fantasy,
the high-tech rotoscoping that turned digital footage into animation in Waking
Life, the digitally retouched backgrounds in Amélie Poulin and the interaction of
computer-generated 3-D backgrounds with 2-D cel-animation characters in
Metropolis and Atlantis. Such Ž lms have contributed to the general sense of a
major mutation in Ž lm, which involves a profound transformation in the relations
between animation and cinema.
On the one hand, one often reads that cel animation has become old hat, that
the future of animation lies in digital animation. This is the argument propounded
by Jensen and Daly in Entertainment Weekly (2001). Their remarks come largely
in response to the astonishing box-ofŽ ce success of digital features (Shrek, Toy
Story 2, etc.) in comparison to the relative failure of high-budget, cel-animation
Ž lms (Atlantis, Tarzan, etc.). Yet, in addition to simple box-ofŽ ce criteria, Jensen
and Daly draw some attention to the materiality of digital animation. They write
about how traditional cel animation slowly began to use 3-D digital to increase
the reality effect of its otherwise 2-D world – and how this, in turn, opened the
way for digital animation to supplant cel animation. Their remarks follow from
the ways in which Shrek thematizes the superiority of digital animation over cel
animation. Against the shallow prettiness of Disney’s fairy stories, Shrek shows
the ugly, gooey, oozy, dirty and apparently more realistic, deeper side of the same

Japan Forum 14(2) 2002: 183–189 ISSN: 0955–5803 print/1469–932X online

Copyright © 2002 BAJS DOI: 10.1080/09555800220136347
184 Introduction

fairy tales – foregrounding qualities difŽ cult to achieve in digital animation, such
as viscosity and irregularities in texture. More importantly, Shrek places great
emphasis on movement in depth (versus the 2-D superŽ ciality of cel animation).
And it equates spatial depth with psychological depth – as if 3-D were just all-
around deeper, more real. It is not surprising then that this Ž lm in particular has
inspired speculation about the death of cel animation.
On the other hand, there are commentators who fret about the demise of
cinema. Here the hype centers on photo-real characters. In the New York Times,
for instance, in an article about digitally generated characters, Ž lm critic Dave
Kehr expresses concern about the loss of cinematic integrity and a relation to the
real world. For him, cel animation presents no threat, for it has always known that
it is not real: ‘Animation, as practiced by Disney or McCay, never pretended to
reproduce the real’ (2001: 26). The problem with CGI is that it ‘aspires to some-
thing different: a reality that is realer than real’ (ibid.: 26). This ‘realer than real’
constitutes ‘a clear and present danger’ to our relation to the real world – a relation
that cinema affords in those privileged moments when the real actor or actress,
their very life, shows through the cinematic artiŽ ce. In other words, if Kehr feels
that it is ‘safer to begin with organic matter than a cloud of numbers’, it is because
he is interested in a sort of psychological reality that somehow demands real
people on the screen to assure dramatic and spatial integrity – that is, integration
or identiŽ cation of the spectator with the actor (ibid.: 26).
As these two examples suggest, the emergence of digital animation into the
mainstream is accompanied by a heightened sense of the materiality of Ž lmic
forms. Many Ž lms, like Shrek, foreground and even thematize the new materi-
ality. Critics, too, often draw attention to the actual media used in Ž lmmaking,
and speculate about its effects and the differences between them. It is difŽ cult to
avoid a growing sense of the importance of looking at the relations between
media. There is a kind of common sense about how new media are constructing
new relations to reality and integrity, to weight and depth, and so forth – even if
many of the responses are predictable. For Kehr it is a matter of psychological
loss, for Jensen and Daly, a box ofŽ ce boon.
Now any attempt to theorize anime will face its relations to cinema, cel
animation and digital animation. Especially important is the current bias that,
with digital animation, something new is emerging – something not limited to
digital animation but constituting a global, epochal, epistemic transformation.
This shift is often broached by considering transformations in the relations
between cinema and animation. One important writer on new media, Lev
Manovich, suggests that ‘digital cinema is a particular case of animation that uses
live-action footage as one of its many elements. . . . Born from animation, cinema
pushed animation to its periphery, only in the end to become one particular case
of animation’ (2001: 302). For Manovich, it is the digital that has transformed
the relation between animation and cinema, creating a sort of metamedia
animation that subsumes or incorporates a number of prior media. In other
 Thomas Lamarre 185

words, in digital media, he sees the historical transformation of a particular set

of relations.
But how does anime enter into these new, digitally altered relations between
cinema and animation? Typically, anime is aligned with the emergence of some-
thing new. Kehr, for instance, sensing that anime is really not like traditional cel
animation as deŽ ned by Disney, places it alongside CGI. He sees anime, comics
and digital animation as destroyers of cinematic integrity: ‘When that integrity
[of cinema] is ruptured . . . there is a loss of weight and wholeness. The medium
becomes little more than a comic book (or “graphic novel,” as the more serious
comic books are called) that happens to move and speak (like the anime the
Japanese have been turning out for years)’ (2001: 26). Although disparagingly, he
situates anime as analogous to new media in its effects.
A host of commentators in Japan have likewise situated anime in relation to the
emergence of something new – the postmodern, the post-human, the post-
national, non-identitarian politics and, more recently, the digital and new media.
Tatsumi Takayuki (1993) addressed the ceaseless play of derivativeness in
Japanese SF and anime, which suggested to him a sort of post-national ‘japanoid’
mode. In a book on feminism linked to Neon Genesis Evangelion (1997), Kotani
Mari evoked the post-human and post-feminist possibilities of anime. Famously,
Okada Toshio’s point of departure in his celebratory interpretation of otaku was
that ‘they are people whose vision has evolved’ (1996: 10–11). More recently,
Azuma Hiroki situates anime in relation to the postmodern collapse of grand
narratives and ideologies. He writes of a shift from an ‘arboreal world’ to a ‘data-
basic world’, looking at transformations in anime worlds and their consumption
in order to outline a new form of reading and viewing in which the database
becomes the underlying structure that consumers ‘enter’ or ‘read into’
(yomikomu) (2001: 50–3).
There are any number of other examples. The point is that those anime qualities
that are anathema to Kehr – lack of depth, weight, wholeness, etc. – are precisely
those that, for many commentators, serve to link anime to the emergence of some-
thing new. The same qualities are expressed in the afŽ rmative: lack of depth is
represented as  atness; lack of weight as levity or celerity; lack of integrity
becomes derivativeness, dispersion, layering, openness and so forth. And it is such
qualities that are frequently evoked to link anime, not with traditional cel
animation but with the postmodern, the digital and new media. Some anime
producers and commentators thus express conŽ dence about the future of anime,
despite the fact that digital technologies and high-tech budgets are far less access-
ible in Japan (Funamoto 1998). Yet uneasy questions about technologies and
budgets for ‘post-Japanimation’ linger – particularly if Shrek is the future of cine-
matic animation.
Now, if I introduce this issue with a general look at relations among media, it
is because this is precisely what the present group of articles aspires to analyze.
Our articles strive to think ‘intermedia’, to move between cinema and animation,
186 Introduction

in order to create relational approaches to anime. In fact, it is interesting to note

that many of the relations evoked in the recent press on digital animation are
discussed by the contributors to this issue: reality, weight, wholeness or inte-
gration, depth, etc. Yet our approaches diverge dramatically from the journalistic
discourse cited above. For, although our articles deal with some of the same
relations, our emphasis is truly on the relation – not on the object. Which is to
say, we are not interested in deŽ ning objects, new or old. Even though our papers
frequently dwell on formal, aesthetic and material differences between cinema
and anime, we are not interested in deŽ ning what cinema is, what animation is or
what anime is. There are a number of reasons for our emphasis on relations rather
than objects.
First, the attempt to deŽ ne or typologize invariably constructs objects, which
forecloses thinking about relations. In Ž lm commentary, the impulse to deŽ ne
what cinema is, or what animation is, tends to leave the critic with some very
simple choices: pick or pan; promote or de ate; the vertigo of the present or
nostalgia for the past. The impact of digital animation becomes either Ž nancial
boon or psychological loss. We are not interested in premonition, endorsement
or condemnation of something, new or old.
Miyao Daisuke’s contribution to this issue raises important questions with
respect to these two points, for he deals with anime as a discursive construction.
He argues that there is no objective way, there are no reliable formal or stylistic
criteria, to determine what cinema is or what anime is. Objects like cinema or
anime are discursive objects for him. They are constituted by social discourses and
regulations that establish and police, for instance, the boundaries between the
cinematic and uncinematic. And, as Miyao traces the boundaries between cinema
and animation in pre-war Japan, he Ž nds that animation remained largely within
the discourses on ‘pure Ž lm’. Animation in pre-war Japan was sometimes differ-
entiated from cinema, but only tentatively, and only on the basis of its suitability
for children’s education and wartime propaganda. And, in the immediate post-
war era, Japanese animation produced for global dissemination sustained the
boundaries and biases established by pre-war discourses on pure Ž lm. Ultimately,
he suggests, without some attention to discursive conditions of production, we
shall simply fall back on market deŽ nitions.
Second, as anime moves into universities, there will surely be efforts to deŽ ne
a scholarly object of knowledge. Yet, without some attempt to think, to think
relations, such efforts will succeed only in making scholars into marketers and
promoters. We thus lay no claim to being anime experts. The contributors to this
volume come from anthropology, Ž lm studies, history and literature. The real
experts are elsewhere, probably on the web as you read.
Catherine Russell, for instance, is less concerned with the possibility or impos-
sibility of differentiating cinema and anime than with the ways in which Tokyo has
been imaged and imagined in Japanese movies. What interest her are transform-
ations in the representation of Tokyo, because these afford a way to narrativize
 Thomas Lamarre 187

social shifts in Japan. In other words, it is the relation between image production
and the historical imagination of urban space that commands her attention. In
which case, to deŽ ne anime as an object distinct from cinema is not so much
impossible as undesirable. In fact, she suggests, ‘the metropolitan space of anime
is only one more variation of the way that the city of Tokyo has Ž gured in the
discourse of Japanese modernity’.
Third, if it is impossible to isolate and deŽ ne cinema, animation and anime as
objects, this is because there is always animation in cinema, cinema in animation,
cinema in anime, anime in animation and so forth. And there always has been.
What are of empirical and theoretical interest are the relations between them –
or, to be more precise, the constellation of relations.
Looking at Ghost in the Shell in relation to Blade Runner and other cyberpunk
precursors like Neuromancer , Livia Monnet calls attention to what might be
called ‘genre effects’ – the repetition of scenes, character types, narrative conceits
and so forth. Yet, because these genre effects traverse different media (literature,
Ž lm, animation), Monnet opens questions about media, or rather intermedia. In
her analysis of Ghost in the Shell, she draws attention to the ways in which
animation becomes the medium that remediates all others – a kind of hyper-
metamedium. Provocatively, she suggests that, to sustain its hyper-meta-opera-
tions, Ghost in the Shell relies on fantasies of the feminine sublime. Animation,
as a medium, turns out to be the site of profound transformations in vision and
gender.
Fourth, only by thinking relations can one produce a theory of anime with some
degree of speciŽ city. In much of the current commentary on them, anime Ž lms
are usually retold, recapped or summarized, with some global comparisons. As a
result, anime appears to be nothing more than another narrative genre with
different types of characters. It is not clear whether anime has any speciŽ city as a
form, style or medium (or combination of media) or any speciŽ city in its social
or historical construction. In sum, emphasizing the object tends to generate
descriptions and comparisons, mostly at the extremely general level concerned
with story and character. The articles in this issue thus move towards a (relational)
theory of anime.
Discussing Imamura Taihei’s emphasis on modes of production and reception
in his theorization of the Ž lmed and animated, Mark Driscoll raises questions
about the material conditions for making and viewing anime. In his theory of
documentary Ž lm, Imamura sees the camera itself as opening a new relation to
reality – one with a great emancipatory potential that was as yet unrealized due to
the persistence of certain modes of production and reception (theatre seating, for
instance). If documentary cinema failed to achieve its historical mission, however,
Imamura later Ž nds in animation a different form of dialectical overcoming – in
the synthesis of drawing and photographing. Yet this is an ominous outcome, one
that spells the triumph of commodity fetishism. While Driscoll shares some of
Imamura’s concerns about the commodity and the current ascendancy of the
188 Introduction

animated, he reminds us that reception is never entirely passive (as Imamura

tended to assume). And in the play of the anime-eye between the look and the
gaze, in the dialectical gap between seeing (eye) and being with (ai), he Ž nds possi-
bilities for a critical theory of animation that would address its speciŽ c forms of
ideological suture in the hegemonic North.
Thomas Looser’s account implicitly presents a challenge to world-historical,
revolutionary theories of historical transformation. In order to think about the
contemporary moment of transition, a transition that is often described as a shift
from analog to digital, Looser questions whether it makes sense to see such a tran-
sition as a complete break. Instead, he poses a number of different mixed-media
or intermedia contexts – especially those of early cinema and anime. One of the
key modes of relations he considers is depth, particularly in relation to architec-
tural qualities that serve to orientate relations of time, movement and space.
Looser thus draws attention to different compositions of relations, effectively
using the notion of intermedia to show that transitions are not absolute but rather
relational. And they are transversal: what happens between also arises within. As
a consequence, to think relations allows a way to think about the limits and poten-
tialities of eras.
Fifth, as the previous examples make evident, thinking relations always opens
questions of a more systemic and epistemic nature. For instance, in his account
of cinema and animation, Kehr centers on a relation (spectator-character) that
leads to questions about the perception of reality itself. Kehr unfortunately fore-
closes these questions with a characterization of different Ž lmic objects – cinema
(reality), traditional cel animation (fantasy), digital animation (hyperreality). Our
aim, however, is to open and pursue such ‘reality-type’ questions.
In all the articles in this issue, thinking relations – between cinema and anime,
animation and anime, animation and cinema – opens larger questions, questions
about history, gender, material conditions of production and reception, urban
space, discursive construction of objects and subject formation. In my own paper,
I explore how perceived and institutionalized differences between cinema,
animation and anime do not only construct external boundaries but also come to
function as a kind of internal limit within anime, one that allows for divergent series
of distinctly anime-ic expression and experience. Then, with the example of
Miyazaki Hayao, I look at how the internal limits of anime can come to imply a
speciŽ c constellation of relations,which constructs speciŽ c ways of imaging history,
genre and gender. In effect, in my paper as in the others, to explore the relation of
cinema and anime is to ask, ‘What are the futures of image-based narrative?’

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 Thomas Lamarre 189

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