The history of anime

This is another long, long, long post. A full article, even. At any rate, if you are a new reader maybe start with something like Have Some Shame!, that seems to be a crowd pleaser. But if you're interested, this is a really interesting topic and the theories and concepts in it are really neat, I mean, I think so. So if you're up for it, here it is:

A history of the animated image and fantasy space in Japan:

Most art historians place the origins of anime at around 1916, during the Taisho period in Japan. But the history of the projected and even the animated image in Japan can be traced back to the late Edo-period, when in about 1800 utushi-e became popular. This was a form of entertainment that involved manipulating images projected through painted glass slides, the movement being produced by an actual movement of the lamp behind the paintings. Film and animation as we know them, however, were introduced by the west. In 1909 the first animated films were imported. Among these first films shown were animations by French filmmaker Emile Cohl. These animations were serial in nature and all of them were called Kid Deko’s new picture book. These short animations were often based on bizarre stream of consciousness type transformations, not very sophisticated in technique. At this time there was a huge movement to develop a Japanese cinema, called the pure film movement. This was a movement away from film versions of traditional Japanese theater, a movement to reject styles associated with Japanese drama and adopt Hollywood and European narrative styles. Central to the movement was a differentiation of the cinematic from the uncinematic, which became a distinction between the Japanese and the Unjapanese.

Okura Kihachiro argued that cinema is characteristically an important national enterprise, and requested that Japanese filmmakers dedicate themselves to producing original Japanese films for export, in order to introduce Japanese landscape and culture to the rest of the world. Animation played a very important part in achieving these goals, both a movement away from the traditions of literature and theater and in moving away from these while creating a distinctly Japanese product.

In 1917, Shimokawa Oten made a film based on a popular cartoon, Imoko Keizo or The Doorboy, thought to be Japan’s first animated film. Not surprisingly, he naively arrived at methods much like those of Emile Cohl. The film was made by drawing pictures with chalk on a blackboard, photographing, and erasing them. Eventually he graduated to photographing a background and using white ink to clear spots where characters would stand. Also in 1917 Kitayama Seitaro began to develop cut-paper animation techniques and make short cartoon comedies. In this technique, drawings are cut out and placed on backgrounds and photographed with a camera fixed horizontally above the table. His first film was Saru kani gassen, or The monkey Crab war, which in 1917 opened at Asukasa Denikan Theater, known for showing foreign films. That it opened at this theater implies that it could be considered equivalent with foreign films, one of the main goals of the Pure Film Movement. This film also made the important leap to including intertitles to explicate plot, another explicit objective of the pure film movement. Japanese cinema at the time still utilized benshi, live performers who supplied narration and were thought to disrupt the filmic experience and to discourage film makers from using the medium to tell the story, so the inclusion of intertitles was a significant step towards the goals of the pure film movement.

Another significant step was taken by the animator Ofuji, who made cut-paper animation using traditional patterned Japanese paper. In this way, he utilized foreign cinematic systems but ensured his product was differentiable in an international market. In 1927 his film Whale was internationally well received in the Soviet Union and France, and when he remade it with cellophane in 1953 it went on to win an award at the Cannes film festival. In this way it was the medium of animation that first allowed Japan to develop a national cinema as an object separate from other traditional Japanese entertainment arts.

The next major event in the development of anime was the effect of the events leading up to, during, and following WWII on animation production and content. Beginning in 1917, the government made a major attempt to standardize and centralize state regulation of moving pictures and to increase the power of censors over films. At about this point there occurred an intersection of the concerns of the artists and the concerns of the state. This has been said to have been a response to the negative influences of a French serial animation called Zigomar, which glorified the exploits of a master criminal. Copycat Zigomar style gangs alerted the government to the power of film's influence. Out of this came a sense that cinema had to be understood as separate from other art forms, but still no real differentiation between live action and animation. From this point Japanese cinema was constructed between two sites, one of knowledge production and one of knowledge regulation. The government began to use films for education and propaganda. The Deposit Bureau of the Ministry of Communications began funding educational and propaganda films, such many a mickle makes a muckle, (1917), Afforestation, (1924), The Journey of A Letter, (1924), and The Spread of Syphillis, (1926)
The advent of war in 1931 saw extreme changes for animation. Animation production came under government control and the previously limited financial situation was drastically changed. Beginning in 1939 the censorship policies of Nazi Germany were adopted, and censorship was applied from the script writing process on. However, freed from financial restraints, animators were able to experiment with new techniques and work in larger studios with teams of animators.

Seo Mitsuyo was the first Japanese animator to work with Disney’s invention , the multi-plane camera, on the movie ari-chan(ants) in 1941. Disney’s productions became a reference point for quality, although for financial reasons most Japanese studios took financial shortcuts such as re-using cels. Many films of this period were made to promote an intense nationalism, which set the stage for many modern debates about the role of Japaneseness in Japanese animation. Many of the Shinto myths and characters that had previously been used to make Japanese animation a distinctly Japanese product were utilized to inspire the country to an intense sense of nationalism. There had already been a tendency in animation to use traditional Shinto stories and characters, as the nature of the medium allowed an exploration of the fantastical and this allowed for the construction of a truly Japanese project while avoiding using traditional theatrical and literary techniques. The government also had a history of using Shinto imagery and mythology to inspire strong nationalist tendencies in the Japanese people. One of the most notable instances of this was the re-writing of the legend of the sun goddess Ameraterasu, which resulted in excesses of neo-shintoism in 30’s and 40’s that led to disturbing racist/nationalist reactions. At this same point, Japanese Miko priestesses were outlawed and both Shintoism and the tradition of female spiritual power were more or less appropriated by militarists. Miko were banned on the grounds that they made Japan look silly and old fashioned, meanwhile Shinto myths were heavily used in propaganda put out by same militarists.

In 1943 the animator Seo made the first feature length Japanese animated film, Momotaro no umiwashi (The peach boy's sea eagle) , which was a 37-minute propaganda film advertising the success of pearl harbor. He also made Momotaro:Umi no shinpei(peach boy, divine soldier of the sea) in1944, in which navy paratroopers are depicted attacking British soldiers who are depicted as ogres. This film was heavily edited by censors because it depicted Japanese soldiers dying.

The Wartime government set up a basis for post-war animation, encouraging technical experimentation, training animators, and creating conditions for teams of animators to work. Technical development, military development, and national mobilization were inseparable in a way reflected in present day anime’s explorations of technology in the post war era, particularly technologies of destruction. The Shinto and technological themes persist in anime today. The US occupying troops in 45 were the first in the history of Japan to breach its defenses, and the psychological effect of this defeat has been explored by Japanese artists and animators since.

Attempting to make a product that would sell as well as Disney, in1956 Toei studios released Okawa Hiroshi Hakujen, The legend of the white serpent. This was a

big budget feature length animation, utilizing many of the techniques used by Disney and the Fleischer brothers, most importantly rotoscoping. The style and format were also very similar to Disney, including a human protagonist accompanied by some cute animals who burst into song from time to time. Domestically, the film was as technologically and financially successful as Disney films. However, one animator working on the film thought that animation should be a distinct object from film, one that relied on exaggeration and omission rather than a reproduction of live footage. He thought that the process of making Hakujen, basically that of making two movies instead of one, was not how animation should be executed. This animator was Dr. Osama Tezuka, credited by many people as one of the originators of anime as the distinct style of animation it has developed into today. Cinema and animation could, up to this point, still be treated as one object. Many people argue that the birth of animation as a distinct and separate form in Japan as well as the birth of anime as a distinct and different style of animation both originate with Tezuka.

As an animator he was clearly influenced by the technologies of Disney, as well as a sense of playfulness and his humanist philosophy. He was also greatly influenced by the Fleischer Brothers. His influences also include French New Wave Cinema, and when his animated television series’ came out in the 60’s they utilized panning shots, extreme close up, time lapse, and flashbacks. These influences are present in Tezuka’s cartooning as well as his animation, and it has been said that he brought film to Japanese film.

Tezuka also took some cues from the traditional theaters of Japan; Noh, Kabuki, Bunraku, and Takarazuka theater. Although originally the aim of Japanese films and animations was to divorce themselves from these theatrical traditions, Tezuka found a way to utilize some of the elements of traditional Japanese theater in a way which utilized the nature of the medium of animation; which contributed to the emergence of a kind of animation unique to Japan. Tezuka made the best use of the limited animation style, using the filmic techniques borrowed from French New Wave cinema and elements taken from Japanese theater, such as sound effects, stylized poses held for an extended period of time, and tableau effects to maximize the impact of moving images without drawing movement. Instead, he moves the drawings, he moves the camera, he moves the spectator to a different point of view, and he moves the spectator’s eye through the image instead of breaking down movement into a series of images, drawn or painted sequentially. In this approach, the animator must act like a movie camera in representing movement.

Recently, artist Takashi Murakami has discussed the aesthetics of anime in terms of a long history of Japanese graphic arts. In his essay “superflat” he identifies a lineage of 2-dimensional spaces in the history of Japanese art, and also discusses the success of many of these images to draw the eye in certain ways, in a manner similar to the way moving drawings in anime move the spectator and change the viewer’s point of view while the scene remains still. In this way, animators took limited animation and a rich art history of movement in two-dimensional spaces, creating a new and unique style out of the necessity to take some financial shortcuts. This style places emphasis on shape shifting, metamorphoses, timing and movement, and typically uses techniques such as holding poses over a number of frames, floating figures, and emphasis on emotionally or visually charged frames and a suppression of intermediate movements which results in jerky movement or sudden, explosive transitions. Camera movements become more pronounced, and it is very common to see panning across the image, tracking up or back, and framing in or out.

Tezuka’s famous series Astro Boy premiered New Years Eve of 1963 and ran until 1966. Astro was neither machine nor human, and began a long tradition of technological futuristic science fiction in Japanese animation. Astro is intrinsically linked to the atom bomb because he is atomically powered, so in short he is an exploration of humans living responsibly next to the destructive technologies that we can create. Many more recent animes that address this theme are less optimistic. The constant battle for robots to be met on equal footing by humans in the series also mirrored the social rights movement in the US that was occurring when the show aired in America, a bold move no US animator would dare to make. Taken out of the context of the civil rights movement, this theme begins the tradition in anime of exploring the line between robot and machine and pushing definitions of what makes us human. The robot as introduced to Japanese culture in Astro Boy is a friend, and by Asimov’s law of robotics cannot do anything to harm humans. Destruction caused in the series is always a result of misused technologies or the human inability to understand the nature of what they have created. More recent films in this genre view technology as a double-edged sword; they depict a snowball effect that humanity has started and must now understand and control. This attitude is reflected in Japanese culture as well. The Japanse are recognized worldwide to be at forefront of robotics, but largely stay away from trends present elsewhere. There is a larger emphasis on application of robotics to social issues such as security and the aging as opposed to the western emphasis on military technologies.

Tezuka also understood very early on the concept of cuteness now rampant in Japanese entertainment culture. Astro Boy was child like in style even when dealing with very adult subject matter, as were all of Tezuka’s works including works such as his graphic novel Adolf, which deals with very dark subject matter. With his trademark style, Tezuka latched onto something that has become an enormous factor in Japanese pop culture today, the issue of kawaii or cuteness. Many argue that this emphasis on the cute has roots in the disillusionment of post war society with many of post-war Japan’s goals. Unlike the west, Japan never developed a conception of animation as being limited to child audiences. Instead, the cute and childlike style developed by Tezuka was meant to create an environment where animators could explore important themes through fantasy and play. The huge role of fantasy, play and escapism in anime has been developed and discussed much since Tezuka’s original contribution.

Current day anime is largely concerned with both the issue of escapism and of pacifism, both of which are seen as results of Japan’s reaction to WWII and the atom bomb. The stresses and pressures of an increasingly competitive society which places more and more emphasis on material values at the expense of an overall sense of community is described by many theorists. All these things and more contribute to the popularity of escapist, fantasy and play sub-cultures, including the rising popularity of manga, cosplay, anime and even cults like Aum Shinrikyo. The phenomenon of kawaii, or cuteness culture, is attributed to a perceived inadequacy of Japan’s post-war economic goals, which led to increasing disenchantment with these values and goals.

Science fiction and robot themes in anime are also a result of a culture of fantasy, play and escapism in post-war Japan. The context of an animated fantasy world provides a space to discuss war and violence safe for those affected by the devastating effects of WWII. This space has been an integral part of Japanese culture for a very long time, and is referred to as Matsuri, or festival. Festival space allows for a controlled chaos, concerned with a temporary leveling of the social order. Matsuri celebrates sex, death, worship, fear, purity and pollution. An example of a more traditional implementation of Matsuri space would be a typical kyoka poetry gathering in Edo period Japan. Kyoka was traditionally the poetry of the lower class, based on wild humor and word play as opposed to the more intellectual and higher-class form, haikai. At these gatherings people would gather and create kyoka together, including people of many classes and women. Anime themes of wild humor, exaggeration, escape, stateless space, and strong images of sex and violence reflect this spirit of a space free from social boundaries. Specifically, the tradition of Matsuri being a leveling of social order is often manifested in the overturning of traditional female submissiveness. Animated space is capable of being context free, and well suited to developing and exploring a stateless, transnational culture. This stateless animated space is a safe setting for much of anime’s exploration of themes of war and destruction.

An issue often discussed but rarely understood in anime is its place in a concept of a Japanese cultural identity. The appeal of anime to the Western audience is often it’s distinct difference from our concept of animation or cinema. However, the ethnically ambiguous character designs and stateless fantasy spaces have historically allowed themselves to be adapted to fit foreign audiences. The success of Japanese animated series in the 60’s was heavily contributed to by the ease with which they could be dubbed, characters names changed and story lines re-written. Many fans find fault with how “Western” anime characters appear, and it is often commented that anime characters are depicted with blond or light brown hair. However, no one seems to notice the equally high frequency with which characters with green or pink hair appear. I would argue that the very same ‘different ness’ that is appealing to westerners is appealing to the Japanese themselves, and that this anime style and space is something other to both cultures.

Also of interest to me is a difference between a western conception of art or the art object comparative to Japan’s. The distinction between the art object and a commercial commodity was more or less introduced by the West, and still does not exist in the same way in Japanese culture. As a response to the discourse on the role of fantasy and play in Japanese culture, Takashi Murakami has encouraged artists to move into the realm of popular culture and entertainment and explore the idea of play as a survival mechanism in modern society. He encourages a conception of the creative process as a communal enterprise reflecting society, and creates commercial objects that utilize the same aesthetic and conceptual issues dealt with in anime, manga, and many other entertainment cultures that can be discussed and theorized in similar ways.

For all of these reasons and more, anime has become hugely popular in Japan and overseas in recent years. In 1988 roughly 40% of studio releases in Japan were animated and by 1999 at least 50% were animated. Although many contemporary anime fans criticize Tezuka’s work for being too cutesy, most modern anime and manga styles could be described as elaborations or evolutions of his original conceptualization of the cute, the childlike and the innocent. Studio Ghibli, originally Tezuka’s production company, has recently released several new films in his style, often based on his manga. As well as being an animator, Tezuka completed over 150,000 pages of cartooning in his career, and his work has been highly influential in many different aspects of the Japanese entertainment cultures which include manga, anime, video games, cosplay and countless other subcultures based around fantasy and play.

It would be impossible to address all of the facets of anime, but I will mention two more major landmarks in the history of anime. In 1974 a TV series re-named for American audiences "Star Blazers" was released, and following the show’s wild popularity a magazine called Animage came out in Japan. Animage discussed in detail every aspect of anime production, allowing fans to learn the techniques of this style of animation from individuals in the industry, and fans began to make amateur 8mm animations, parodies of popular anime, and started hundreds of fanzines to discuss and critique the work. This began an explosion of anime production. The next huge contribution to the sheer volume of anime produced was the introduction of video in the 80’s, and the availability of a straight to video option changed the limits on the kinds of content available and increased the global market because foreigners were no longer limited to the watered down for TV versions of popular Japanese cartoons. I will finish by saying that animation is an important medium for the Japanese to explore issues of national and cultural identity and it’s effectiveness for these purposes is apparent in it’s prevalence as a form of communication and striking given a closer look and deeper consideration.

Bibliography

Drazen, Patrick. Anime Explosion, (2003) Stone Bridge Press Berkley CA

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Lent, John, Animation in Asia and the Pacific (2001) John Libbey Publishing Indiana University Press Bloomington

Levi, Antonia, Samurai From Outer Space, Understanding Japanese Animation, (1996) Carus Publishing Co. Peru, Illinois

Mathews, James-Anime and the Acceptance of Robotics in Japan: A Symbotic Relationship 2003/2004

Miyao, Daisuke- Before anime- animation and the Pure Film Movement in Pre-War Japan

Napier, Susan. Anime from Akira to Princess Mononoke (2000) Palgrave NY NY