What is Anime: Art vs Nationalism

One conventional definition of anime reads something like “animation created in Japan for a domestic Japanese audience”. This definition…

What is Anime: Art vs Nationalism

One conventional definition of anime reads something like “animation created in Japan for a domestic Japanese audience”. This definition offers a false sense of clarity: it does not cleanly map onto what most people think of when they hear the term — neither in Japan, where it simply means ‘animation’, nor elsewhere, where it’s shorthand for not merely a large partially-overlapping set of stylistic and narrative conventions but also a difficult to define ‘vibe’.

It makes sense to basically everybody to imagine ‘non-Japanese anime’: this doesn’t provide any of the difficulties presented by imagining, for instance, a ‘square circle’; similarly, we can also imagine ‘live action anime’. In fact, we do not merely need to imagine these things: there is media that gets classified this way, and whether or not we agree with those classifications, we have an intuitive understanding of why someone might classify them in this way.

On top of this, the Japanese-ness of even unambiguously Japanese anime is a complicated matter. Emphasizing the Japanese origin of anime is problematic in that it sets inaccurate expectations for the content of anime and primes us for an inaccurate understanding of its history, but it’s also problematic because it feeds into a particular set of narratives that have been slowly weaponized by Japan’s slowly-recovering far-right nationalist movements.

Anime’s Cosmopolitan Genesis

While animation in Japan goes back almost as far as animation in general, the origin of something we can recognize as ‘anime’ is much more recent: Tetsuwan Atom (AKA Astroboy), in 1963.

While Astroboy was already a popular manga, its TV animation incarnation was something new and important. After the second world war, Japan’s animation industry was systematically disassembled by the american occupying forces on the grounds that it was a propaganda organ; Tezuka’s Mushi Productions became a central node in a new network of TV animation studios, densely interconnected by shared staff and subcontracting relationships, wherein most new studios are the product of older studios splitting. To this day, most Japanese TV animation studios can be traced to the Astroboy production through these connections — even Gainax, which was not founded by professional animators, did an enormous amount of subcontracting (including for Miyazaki). In other words: the new Japanese TV animation industry was a big, incestuous family, and new ideas (no matter how radical) could quickly migrate across the entire landscape.

The Astroboy TV animation was intended to fulfill a desire for domestically-produced limited animation. In the late 50s, television ownership in Japan began to increase substantially, and imported limited animation (Hanna Barbera productions like The Flintstones, produced quickly with lots of animation reuse and simple, stylized characters) was displacing independent domestic entertainment like kamishibai (itself a kind of limited animation). This production was intended to operate on several levels: it would advertise Tezuka’s Astroboy manga, employ manga artists and former kamishibai performers, and look indistinguishable from the imported TV animation kids were used to. On this last point, it was highly effective: Astroboy got syndicated in the US because an American stationed in Japan had caught it on TV and called up contacts in the US animation industry to inquire about it on the mistaken assumption that it was an american show!

Even the component parts of Astroboy that look Japanese are more cosmopolitan and syncretic than they first appear. Kamishibai performances — magic lantern shows with paper puppets, shown with a ‘theatre’ attached to the back of a bicycle — typically included Japanese folkloric characters freely mixed with characters taken from american superhero comics and imported films. While manga goes way back, manga of this era had much in common stylistically with western newspaper comics and with early Disney animated shorts. Astroboy itself is in dialogue with an imported western form of science fiction, as seen in 50s and 60s B movies, rather than Japan’s already-existing form of speculative fiction, the ‘Irregular Detective’ genre, which Tezuka riffed on in other works (and which itself is syncretic).

As TV anime became more ambitious, export markets remained important. Up through the tail end of the 80s, most anime exported from Japan was treated as raw material from which to make new shows, sometimes with enormous departures: Gacchaman was turned into several different shows for north american audiences, Robotech is a composite of several unrelated anime, plots were changed substantially in Speed Racer, and Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro was chopped up into a laserdisc-based arcade game. To some degree, this tendency continued up through the first decade of the 21st century, especially with shows targeted at younger audiences: the Ghost Stories dub is more representative of the way anime has historically been treated in the west than any other ADV property. Since the ability to pass Japanese animation off as western shows was important for exporting TV anime, the racial ambiguity initially produced as a side effect of high stylization in the anime of the 60s had to be preserved through the 70s and 80s.

In the 70s, with the cartoony manga and anime of earlier eras beginning to show diminishing returns, some artists began branching out into explicitly new styles and movements. At the same time, the pulp nature of manga had already created an experimental scene.

The most profitable form of manga, the material in shonen magazines aimed at teenage boys, had started feeling formulaic, but right next door in the even more stigmatized and far less profitable shojo magazine space was an incredible amount of innovation. Many women were being employed as authors and artists, some coming out of fandom; stories were being written that eschewed short gag-based comedy and hero narratives in favor of historical epics, character pieces, cerebral science fiction in the vein of the New Wave stuff just then appearing in the UK, psychedelia, and surreal politically-charged material covering topics like sexuality, gender bending, and labor. At the same time, these new, deeper stories were being combined with more detailed, realistically-proportioned character designs that nevertheless continued the stylistic tendency toward emphasizing expressive elements. The shojo artists had figured out how to work pages of character development into a single curve — the slight smirk on the edge of a smile, or the sweep of a hand in gesture — while allowing that highly-expressive character to look recognizably human. Shonen artists began reading shojo, and then began integrating these elements into their shonen work, producing the ‘bishojo’ style that we now associate with anime: characters who look like people, but whose facial features and gestures are exaggerated in size and expressiveness.

At the same time that shonen authors were integrating this feminine influence, they were also beginning to integrate influences from gekiga — folks who rejected the term ‘manga’ (which translates to ‘whimsical pictures’) because they wanted to write Serious, Edgy material. From two directions at once, mainstream manga (and the TV anime that adapted and shared staff with it) was pushed away from simple gag-driven stories and toward complicated characters and narratives that felt more human.

At the tail end of the 70s, the VCR was introduced, and studios saw in it an outlet for the artistic work that they could never put on TV (because it was too high-brow for an audience of mostly children, or because it would not meet decency standards, or because its appeal was too fringe, or some combination). At the same time, this was a way for studios to advertise their skills and make significantly more money than they would on a TV production: they are beholden to neither TV sponsors nor TV deadlines. This is the beginning of the OVA, and before the 70s was over, there would be everything from hentai OVAs to experimental feminist art film OVAs.

In the late 60s and early 70s, the industry tried its hand at adult-centered theatrical releases, largely influenced by shojo stories, which themselves were largely influenced by Class S literature of the 1920s and 1930s — a genre largely written by upper middle class lesbians that appropriated the aesthetics of 18th century french aristocracy. (Any anime fan can tell you that the ripples of this genre are still very much present.) As a result, these films look extremely… French, and deal with European settings and subjects. These films could be seen as a proof of concept for OVAs: there was, in fact an adult audience for animation worth marketing to directly. (A little later, TV anime was full of loose adaptations of classic European children’s books, so the late 70s and early 80s in anime was full of explicitly European aesthetics.) The fodder for the next generation of European aesthetics in anime was being seeded at this time as well, since Dungeons and Dragons had been imported into Japan and set off a boom in the popularity of high fantasy and an interest in western occult practices. (To this day, elements of the Lesser Key of Solomon are more familiar to anime fans than to your average westerner, simply because the aesthetics of medieval grimoires are frequently drawn on in anime, and this extends to familiarity with the names and attributes of goetic demons.)

In the late 80s, the term ‘anime’ and the emphasis on its ‘Japaneseness’ was introduced to the west. This was basically borne out of the OVA export market. OVAs were of substantially higher quality than TV anime, and typically of much shorter length; at the same time, they were not subject to TV content restrictions (even Japan’s much looser ones). In the time before Evangelion popularized the noitamina programming block, OVAs were the primary form of animation aimed at adults in Japan, and, being specialty products, fetched fairly high prices. Americans had even fewer choices when it came to adult animation (it was Heavy Metal or Fritz The Cat, basically), and imported OVAs filled that niche. The marketing around them focused on (and conflated) two things: the sex and violence present in these shows, and their Japanese origin. (Of course, these shows were rarely involved in nationalistic projects themselves; imported anime that tried to say something about ‘Japaneseness’ often did so in ways not accessible to outsiders — like Patlabor — and while ninja and samurai shows got put front and center in advertising, this was largely in order to emphasize the rather shallow connection to Japan that made particular importers unique.) As noted earlier, being made in Japan did not necessarily imply that a show had any special qualities (as demonstrated by the number of TV anime that got passed off as american cartoons); really, the sex, violence, and high production values that characterized the imports first bearing the name ‘anime’ (as well as the related term ‘japanimation’) come from their status as OVAs.

It’s true that the OVA market was mostly domestically-focused: OVAs were being made by studios with Japanese audiences in mind. OVA importers through the tail end of the 90s were not much more careful about context than their TV importer brethren; while Nelvana or 4Kids might break the plot of a show and heavily re-edit episodes from season 1 using footage from season 5 in order to remove any implication that lesbians might exist, Central Park or Media Blasters might import only the three episode hentai spinoff OVA to a 160-episode multi-decade franchise and then rename it to remove any indication that it was a spinoff. Animators in Japan recognized that catering to western audiences didn’t actually improve their likelihood of selling to western audiences — in part because they didn’t have a good idea of what might appeal to them, in part because importers were liable to make huge changes in the name of localization, and in part because both the OVA importers and the new breed of importers of TV anime in the 90s (like ADV) would sometimes specifically seek out licenses for particularly Japanese-looking shows in order to feed into audience expectations built by marketing. But just as with the early OVAs, just because they weren’t catering to western audiences doesn’t mean that they didn’t wear western influences on their sleeves: anime is heavily influenced by whatever media the creators were watching at the time, and while 80s anime is redolent of american slashers and american action movies, 90s anime is full of european high fantasy. This is a natural extension of the general cosmopolitan tendency seen in the Japanese media industry as a whole.

Cosmopolitan Japan

While Japan has a well-earned reputation for insularity and homogeneity stemming from being one of the last countries to ‘open’ to western trade, the very vigor with which western trade was suppressed and controlled for so long actually demonstrates the thirst for cosmopolitanism that most people felt. Even through those restrictions, the impact of the little bit of contact that had been allowed was enormous, and when restrictions were finally lifted the deluge was incredible. Looking at the Meiji and especially the Taisho period, we do not see a displacement of Japanese traditions so much as an incredibly rapid, playful, and creative integration of foreign and domestic elements. (For an academic survey of this, see the book Erotic Grotesque Nonsense; for an illustration, the Taisho Trilogy of films is very evocative.)

Even Japanese nationalism is, effectively, a foreign integration: unfortunately, the opening of Japan coincided with the formation of the idea of the modern nation-state, and during the time that Japan began striving to become ‘modern’, ‘modern’ was conflated with ‘western’ and ‘western’ was conflated with racialized and militarized nationalism. Japan has a somewhat unique relationship to nationalism, having seen firsthand that (as Fanon described and Deluze & Guattari explained) nationalism is a war machine against facialized conceptions of deviance and, when it runs out of targets, will inevitably eat itself. Popular Japanese conceptions of national identity are loaded in not quite the same way as German conceptions, and there are complicated interactions with the (somewhat accurate) idea that modern Japan is a vassal state of the US. I have neither the time nor the qualifications to fully explore Japanese nationalism in this text; the important part here is that, to a degree comparable to other ethno-nationalisms (and perhaps to even a greater degree), conceptions of Japanese ethnic and cultural purity as an ideal are necessarily based in a fragile fantasy that falls apart upon contact with historical reality.

Nationalism is far from the only thing Japan imported and made their own in the Taisho period. Western things were high-status, and Japanese mass culture emphasized piecemeal borrowings of western aesthetics and philosophies. Translations of classic European literature landed just in time to be taught in European-style boarding and finishing schools, some of them run by actual European christian missionaries; the students in those schools would, alongside studying European languages, get opportunities to study translations of western political tracts on fascism, communism, feminism, libertarianism, and anarchism, and some of them would form domestic bluestocking movements, while others would become involved in highly Europeanized theatrical traditions that had their origins in Japan. Edogawa Ranpo, pseudonymous translator of the works of Poe and the Sherlock Holmes stories, would become an important figure in the ‘irregular detective’ genre that now appeared in Japan — a form of speculative fiction that combined the tropes of a drawing-room mystery or police procedural with often elaborately grotesque science fiction or supernatural elements — and this genre shared popularity with the regular ‘fair play’ detective works (both domestic and in translation).

While the second world war necessitated an emphasis, in propaganda, on Japanese ‘traditions’ (which were about as authentic, and as mercenary, as the faux pan-germanism assembled by the Nazis), the Japanese imperial government and military was largely modeled upon western lines in this period. Syncretism with western cultural elements, though disavowed during the war, continued apace during it.

After the war, a cultural trade-flow was reestablished, and the upward economic trajectory Japan experienced from the end of the occupation to the early 90s probably owes as much to a willingness to become cultural producers on an international market as it does to the fixing of the exchange rate between dollar and yen. Today, Japanese politicians largely think of Japan as a producing (rather than consuming) node in this network, and associate it explicitly with export anime, sometimes spinning it in a nationalistic direction; however, we can fruitfully compare the roles of Japan and Italy in cultural production.

Cosmopolitan Everywhere

Italy also lost its film industry in the wake of the second world war. And, much like Japan, it built that industry back up by allowing highly creative people with small budgets to cash in on foreign trends and take those trends in new directions, selling the results back to the rest of the world. There is even a cycle between the US, Japan, and Italy: samurai films influenced westerns, which influenced spaghetti westerns, which then influenced the new generation of grittier samurai films. Anime is actually not so unique: its attributes are shared with pulp media around the world, and we can begin to unpack what is actually important about anime by identifying what feels like anime in other kinds of media.

Anime makes heavy use of genre conventions (in addition to stylization). The benefit of genre in pulp media is clear: a genre is a promise to deliver particular tropes, and by delivering beloved tropes, one subsidizes a work. For instance, the films of Jean Rollin are formal experiments in creeping dread, dissociation, and unease; they are also full of full-frontal nudity, and more people are willing to pay to see a “naked lesbian vampire movie”, even if it also happens to be a slow art film, than a slow art film that contains no violence or nudity. Similarly, Evangelion promises cute girls, giant robots fighting weird aliens, and a massive mysterious conspiracy, all of which attracts an audience who would otherwise not choose to watch psychedelic dream sequences, meditations on absurdism, and a short introductory lecture on individuation and its role in the conflict between man and civilization. A genre allows someone with a message a cheap ticket to an audience.

The particular way that anime uses genre, however, is less like how american films use genre and more like the way Italian films use it. Rather than identifying a genre as a ‘big tent’, where individual genres have a whole host of tropes that they alone own, both anime and Italian pulp films operate on a kind of ‘legacy’ system: an interesting element will be borrowed from one or more previous works, deterritorialized, and recontextualized in a new work. Some of the confusion and debate around what counts as ‘giallo’ comes from this: folks who had previously worked on films that were unambiguously gialli would often integrate elements of gothic horror or crimi with traditional giallo elements, producing new works that could not be categorized using sharp boundaries between genres but only placed and contextualized based on the earlier works they are in dialogue with. (We might argue that Japanese media was primed to fit well with this kind of playful subversion; as Bad Girls of Japan makes clear, there’s a long-running Japanese political tendency that favors subversion over rebellion, at least when it comes to women working against patriarchal expectations.) Long-time anime fans will recognize this same pattern: a show will become popular, and suddenly dozens of other shows with a similar premise will be green-lit, producing a micro-genre; this microgenre will get increasingly absurd variations until it becomes pastiche. In fact, this mechanical exploration of genre-space is precisely what Azuma describes in Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals, except that Azuma neglects to recognize that the database is always, in fact, growing.

Part of what we see in a piece of media that makes us think “anime” is a side effect of this kind of incestuous fecundity: we see tropes that, due to some long, occluded history, have already been taken to absurd extremes (the extremely powerful high school student council, extremely long and complicated fight scenes with elements like shouting the names of moves, long and drawn out transformation sequences). But this habit has the same ultimate end as drawing big eyes: to maximize the amount that can be expressed by a single line, a single image, a single word. What defines anime is that it favors semiotic bandwidth over realism: the world of anime is constructed so as to be absolutely saturated with subtextual meaning.

Non-Japanese animated anime: Venture Bros, Archer

Japanese non-animated anime: Cutie Honey (2004), House (1977)