Book 1

University of Hawai'i Press
Chapter Title: THE RISE OF “PERSONAL” ANIMATION
Book Title: Japanese Cinema in the Digital Age

Book Author(s): Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano
Published by: University of Hawai'i Press. (2012)
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt6wqh7n.8
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The Rise of
“Personal”
Animation
The diversity of Japanese animation

in terms of its history, media, genre, and style makes it both an exciting sub-
ject and a difficult one to analyze. Anime is often misperceived as represent-
ing the whole history of “Japanese animation,”1 a premise that emphasizes
its intrinsic cultural difference from the norm, American animation—namely
Disney. Jonathan Clements and Helen McCarthy’s The Anime Encyclopedia,
for instance, covers an impressive list of over two thousand Japanese anima-
tion titles from 1917 to 2001. They introduce terms such as “early anime” and
“wartime anime” for Japanese animation produced in the period up to 1945.
However, the term “anime” became prevalent only as the genre boomed in the
late 1970s.2 In other words, there is a significant gap between the encyclope-
dia’s discursive anime and anime as a historical nexus for converging media.
Anime’s low-budget, “limited” animation style has often been understood
as a form of resistance to the high-value “full” animation style of Disney. That
resistance, or difference, has been the dominant frame of analysis whenever
anime is in English-language studies. If there is a crucial distinction in anime,
however, it is not simply a matter of timeless cultural differences but rather of
the anime industry’s limited scale and peculiarity of the domestic market. The
Japanese industry, for instance, has been slow to adopt the CGI animation
74
technology, exemplified by Pixar’s Toy Story (1995, John Lasseter) or more re-
cently, Disney Digital 3-D animation films such as UP (2009, Pete Docter and
Bob Peterson). The industry’s high affinity with television and OVA (origi-
nal video animation) has configured the characteristics of anime primarily
as 2-D, or a style evoking cel (celluloid) animation. Anime’s distinctiveness,
moreover, is not singular but rather diverse. As it has developed over the last
four decades, anime has become further individuated from the oft-discussed
“robot genre” anime to even various works of “anti-animation,” such as those
seen in the last episodes of Neon Genesis Evangelion (TXN, October 4, 1995–
March 27, 1996). In an instance of anime deconstructing its fans’ expecta-
tions, the director Anno Hideaki boldly subverted Evangelion’s climax by sub-
stituting a raw pencil-sketched storyboard in place of animated sequences.
The linguistic distinction of “anime” from “animation” is both a bless-
ing and a curse in that it has effectively conferred cultural capital to the
market brand while attaching a constricted paradigm of cultural difference
in attempts to understand it. The defining question of anime has long been
whether it should be understood as a visual and narrative form with particular
ties to Japanese society and its cultural traditions or as simply another mode
of expression in multimedia, diversified within the endless cross-cultural
exchangesof global culture. Indexical differences such as otaku, the fan-based
culture of anime, for instance, are too often presented as prima facie subjects
rather than explicated in relation to industrial strategies. Indeed, the Japanese
animation industry has emphasized a particular type of auteur branding,
which eschews Hollywood-sized promotion budgets and instead shapes an-
ime’s reception based on consumers’ connoisseurship that is typically associ-
ated with otaku culture. The anime industry has been astute at tapping into the
otaku culture’s market demand, and the otaku culture in turn helps promote
products to a larger global audience by creating buzz via the Internet, subti-
tling, or otherwise.
In this chapter, I first discuss the problem of how anime has been discur-
sively constructed largely upon notions of intrinsic cultural differences out-
side Japan. Second, I argue that anime, or more precisely Japanese animation,
is not culturally monolithic but rather diverse in its convergence of media and
stylistic deployments. Anime instead needs to be examined in light of its affin-
ity with media convergence; in other words, technological developments (tele-
visions, videos, laser discs, DVDs, personal computers, Blu-ray Discs, etc.)
have punctuated shifts in anime’s production and its stylistic diversity. In or-
der to explore these two aspects, I discuss the animations of Shinkai Makoto
and Yamamura Koji as examples of the smaller, personal scale of production
in Japanese animation, now possible through home-based digital technology,
The Rise of “Personal” Animation 75
in contrast to Oshii Mamoru’s large-scale studio production. Yamamura’s
animation has, for example, intentionally emphasized “Japaneseness” on
levelsboth of narrative and visual image, and yet the cultural specificity does
not originate from an intrinsic cultural difference but is strategically—and
deliberately—embedded by the author, who relies on international animation
festivals to develop an audience for his works. The stylistic diversity of the ex-
perimental realism, enabled by technological development in current Japanese
animation, is exemplified by Oshii Mamoru’s Amazing Lives of the Fast Food
Grifters (Tachiguishi retsuden, 2006), Shinkai Makoto’s Voices of a Distance Star
(Hoshi no koe, 2002), and Yamamura Koji’s Franz Kafka’s A Country Doctor
(Kafka: Inaka isha, 2007). Against the so-called realistic movement that char-
acterizes Disney animation, these films represent realist aesthetics by deploy-
ing a variety of visual media or their concepts—drawings, photos, computer-
generated imagery (CGI), and paper theater (kamishibai)—that underscore the
risk-taking tendencies of the smaller but flexible Japanese animation industry.
The Discursive Construction of Anime

in the U.S. Academy
David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson differentiate between full animation as
a style or technique employed by big-budget studio cartoons (such as Disney’s
films) with “lots of movement and detailed drawing” and limited animation
as a style or technique created in cheaper production houses with “only small
sections of the image moving from frame to frame,” a technique “mainly used
on television, although Japanese theatrical features have exploited it to create
flat, posterlike images.”3 They locate Japanese animation films as part of the
television-animation tradition, citing the “flatness” aesthetic of the film Silent
Möbius (1991, Kikuchi Michitaka and Tomizawa Kazuo). The anime con-
structed in this discourse is located in the nexuses of full and limited anima-
tions, film and television, big budget and cheap, and American and Japanese.
What is lacking in this view is the diversity of Japanese animation, which
deploys a variety of full and limited techniques and, moreover, a coherent
distinction between full and limited animations, since both can represent “lots
of movement” and use “detailed drawing” in their expressions. For instance,
many animation films or OVAs have extensively detailed drawing in their
backgrounds to compensate for the limited movement in the foreground, and
many of the so-called full animations seldom use twenty-four cels per second,
since it is too expensive and time consuming, even for Disney.
Although the stylistic distinction of anime as limited has often been used
for differentiating it from other kinds of animation, the limitedness represents
76 The Rise of “Personal” Animation
merely one aspect of anime, and, as Bordwell and Thompson indicate, this
aspect most often characterizes television animation whether in Japan or else-
where. Also, with the appearance of highly elaborate CGI productions, such
as Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001, Sakaguchi Hironobu and Sakakibara
Moto), the limitedness is no longer even an essential characteristic of anime.
However, Bordwell and Thompson’s focus on the differences in media, televi-
sion, and film, rather than simply on aesthetics, is a central issue in terms of
discussing anime, which I will elaborate on later.
Casting anime’s difference in terms of culture, Antonia Levi treats anime
as an “index” for Japan.4 She positions both anime and Japanese culture as
fixed, ontologically axiomatic objects that are radically different from their
counterparts in the United States. She writes, “Anime can show you a side of
Japan few outsiders ever even know exist. Unlike much of Japanese literature
and movies,anime is assumed to be for local consumption only. . . . [Anime
artists]write for and about Japanese. As a result, their work offers a unique
perspective, a peeping Tom glimpse into the Japanese psyche.”5 For Levi,
anime is different because it “comes from Japan and Japan is not a Judeo-
Christian culture.”6 Axiomatically connecting anime with Japan or Japanese
culture is obviously problematic, since culture is permeable and Japanese ani-
mation in particular has a long history of hybridization.
Generally, scholars in anime studies have attempted to move away from
such essentialist approaches and address anime as an “international” prod-
uct within the flows of cultural globalization. Amidst this transition, one can
even see an almost “schizophrenic” sway between viewing anime as particu-
lar to Japan and as a ubiquitous global commodity. With the popularity of her
book, Anime from Akira to Princess Mononoke (2001; the updated edition chang-
es its title to Howl’s Moving Castle, 2005), Susan Napier successfully established
the position of anime in U.S. universities. Since the book has often been ad-
opted as an introductory text for courses related to Japan, anime is now fully
enclosed as an object of knowledge in Japanese studies. This development
of anime studies within the trajectory of Japanese studies has cemented the
provenance of anime in cultural terms, for better or worse.
The value of Napier’s work is that she consciously tries to avoid limiting
anime as a subject of cultural “difference” and instead situates it as “a cultural
force” bringing “the wider issue of the relationship between global and local
cultures.”7 However, her analyses of anime often return to anime’s connection
with the broad swath of Japanese history and culture, as one can see in her
central outline of three narrative “modes” (the apocalyptic, the elegiac, and
the festival) that, for Napier, characterize Japanese culture. Her monumen-
tal work in anime studies neglects viewing anime’s historical specificity, the
moment of cultural nexus within specific developments of visual media and
technology. In other words, it overlooks the rise of anime in the late 1970s and
1980s that came about as a result of the popularity of animation programs
on television, their expansion to film, and their release on videotape and how
this media convergence created the foundation for the anime boom in Japan.
More recently, the focus on media, or its variation and relations, has
been emphasized as a more productive approach to anime studies, as one can
see in the special issue of Japan Forum in 2002. In his introduction, Thomas
Lamarre adapts a “relational theory” by shifting the focus from anime as a
cultural object to its relations with other media, mainly cinema. He states
that “our articles strive to think ‘intermedia,’ to move between cinema and
animation, in order to create relational approaches to anime,”8 and he contin-
ues, “emphasizing the object tends to generate descriptions and comparison,
mostly at the extremely general level concerned with story and character. The
articles in this issue thus move towards a (relational) theory of anime.”9
Each essay in the special issue has contributed significantly to anime
studies,particularly in their emphasis on the materiality of anime as multiple
media, not simply as a delimited text, and the contributors’ cross-disciplinary
approaches free anime from the axiomatic ties with Japan and Japanese
culture. However, a question arises as to how one sets viable limits within
this relational approach. For instance, in the first essay, as his title “Before
Anime” indicates, Daisuke Miyao skillfully analyzes Japanese cinema and
animation in the Taisho period (1912–1926). Apart from their correspond-
ing positions as “a medium [being] discursively constructed as an object of
knowledge,” how does the animation of the 1910s–1920s connect with the
anime of the 1970s–1980s?10 If Catherine Russell’s intriguing essay is indeed
“less concerned with the possibility or impossibility of differentiating cinema
and anime”as Lamarre describes,11 isn’t there any divergence between the
relations of cinema in the 1930s and its audience and those of anime in the
1990s and its audience? It seems to me that the expansiveness of the relational
approach raises questions of tenability regarding the historical specificity of
anime and its contexts.
In Cinema Anime: Critical Engagements with Japanese Animation, the editor
Steven T. Brown also shifts the question from “What is anime?” to “Where
is the anime screen?” in order to “avoid essentialization of anime into the
unitary, fixed object that is presupposed by the other.”12 The anthology’s nine
essays are divided into three parts: anime’s engagement with the politics of
identity (self-invention, gender, and cultural negotiation between anime fans
and characters); post-humanism in anime; and anime as the media extend-
ing the aesthetic limits of cinema. The overall emphasis of the anthology
is, Brown writes, “anime’s hybridity of different styles and modes of image
making,”13 and he consciously avoids locating anime within Japan or else-
where. Differentiating anime from cinema, Brown states, “Instead of being
defined as a pale reflection of national cinema, anime is repositioned along
a continuum of visual production mapped in relation to the intersecting and
multidirectional lines of transnational movement out of which political, eco-
nomic, social, technological, ethnic, and aesthetic flows emerge, coalesce,
enter into conflict, and take flight.”14 One finds in his statement the erasure
of a cultural “agent” and the invention of a perfectly neutralized subject. If
it is a “transnational movement,” where are the sites for the “continuum of
visual production” actually located? The volume’s goal of departing from the
ontological question “What is anime?” or the “cultural difference” discourse
causes another difficulty: a case of “amnesia” regarding the “agents” of an-
ime’s cultural expansion from Japan since the 1970s and1980s. And, if anime
is the result of absolute hybridization of “different styles and modes of image
making,” why does the anthology present analyses only of animations created
in Japan and not elsewhere?
The recent exhibition, “Massive Change: The Future of Global Design,”
held at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 2004, showed various forms of contem-
porary visual culture: anime, comics, video games, and art. The curator Bruce
Grenville asserts in the exhibition’s catalog, Krazy! The Delirious World of Anime
+ Comics + Video Games + Art, that recent visual culture, including anime, is
“best described as a field of production, with points of intersection and points
of divergence.”15 In Krazy! Grenville divides “the delirious world” into seven
categories—comics, graphic novels, animated cartoons, computer and video
games, anime, manga, and visual art—and assigns one or two specialists in the
field as both curator and commentator for each section. Anime is a separate
category from animated cartoons, as is manga from comics or graphic novels.
For instance, the cocurators of the comics section, Seth and Art Spiegelman,
select seven American comic artists and one Canadian (Seth himself) and in-
troduce their representative works. In the manga section, cocurators Kusumi
Kiyoshi, a cultural critic, and Ueno Toshiya, a sociologist, both from Japan,
selected eight Japanese comic artists. The sections on animated cartoons and
anime are also rigidly divided by nationality without any explanation why or
how anime is different from animated cartoons. The cultural “intersection”
that Grenville describes does not appear to apply to the field of animation;
“anime” equals “Japanese” and “cartoons” are “North American,” and never
the twain shall meet.16
I view Grenville’s “intersection,” as well as Lamarre’s notion of “inter-
media,” as similar attempts at freeing anime, or Japanese animation, from the
extremes of either cultural determinism or transnationalism. The difficulty is
how one can explicate the “intersection” or “intermedia” phenomenon with-
out losing a subject’s ties with specific points of history and its cultural con-
texts. For the purposes of this chapter, I focus on the historical intersection of
anime and technological development in visual media in Japan as the specific
cultural context.
Anime and Media Convergence:

Oshii Mamoru
As we can see in both Lamarre’s special issue and Brown’s anthology, they
tend to focus on the intermediation between “anime” and “cinema,” and
many of these discussions have often been caught up in the stylistic or the-
matic differences between anime and the cinema. If we look at anime’s
trend since the 1970s, however, we notice its affinity with the latest “delivery
technologies”—television, video, CD-ROM, DVD, computer games, iPod,
and so on—and their convergence. Cinema’s high-end production model has
played a large role in anime’s rise, as we can see in Toei Doga’s and Studio
Ghibli’s feature-length animation films. But this is only part of anime’s in-
tersection with various media.17 Particularly since the late 1990s, when both
computer production and DVD distribution became relatively inexpensive
and popular, anime’s intermediation with digital technology exceeded that
of its other ties. In other words, anime’s intermediation needs to be examined
within both historical specificity and diversity.
By focusing on three animators of different generations, Oshii Mamoru
(1951–), Yamamura Koji (1964–), and Shinkai Makoto (1973–), I will discuss
how these animators produce their works within specific intermediations.
Through the comparison, I extend my analysis into anime’s recent trend to-
ward a smaller, even personal mode of production (Yamamura and Shinkai),
which coexists with the opposite trend—the concentration of media attention
and capital by a small handful of larger anime studios and productions. Oshii,
for instance, has worked within larger animation studios, such as Tatsunoko
Production (1977–1980), Studio Pierrot (1980–1989), and Production I.G.
(1989–present). The full variety of Japanese animation comes from this pro-
duction environment, in which seemingly adversarial or even predatory rela-
tions between small and larger studios productions are not necessarily working
against each other, and they often share the demanding markets of Japanese
animation both domestically and abroad. This pattern of coexistence between
new media technologies (personal production) and mainstream commercial
media (larger studio production) is not limited to Japanese animation; it can
be seen in many cultures and societies, including the American media envi-
ronment.18
Revisiting his early career in the 1970s, Oshii Mamoru describes anime’s
formative ties with television, particularly the anime programs’ roles as mer-
chandise vehicles for their sponsors (typically toy or snack food companies).
Oshii nonchalantly admits that there was little self-reflection about creat-
ing something artistic, nor were original ideas ever requested.19 Seen in this
light, anime’s best-known genre, the “robot genre,” which includes icons
such as Gundam, seem less reflective of a techno-oriented Japan than sales-
driven promotions by the sponsor companies and their ties with television.
Although the practice of merchandise tie-ins had already been established
with Tezuka Osamu’s television cartoon Mighty Atom (Tetsuwan Atomu, Fuji
Television, January 1, 1963–December 31, 1966),20 the success of the produc-
tion companySunrise’s tie-ins with Mobile Suit Gundam (Kido senshi Gandam,
TV Asahi, April 7, 1979–January 26, 1980) became the landmark of anime’s
potential for a wider marketing demographic.21
The emergence of the videotape transformed not only the distribution pat-
tern but also, according to Oshii, dramatically changed both the mode of pro-
duction and the way the product was received by audiences. 22 As consumers
adopted home video recorders and began recording animation programs at
home for repeat viewings, they demanded higher-quality anime. Anime critic
Kitano Taiitsu highlights the television series Brave Raideen (Yusha Raidin, TV
Asahi, April 4, 1975–March 26, 1976) as a significant marker in changing
modes of production, as animators’ shifted from a passive role of hired hands
to active creators with greater responsibilities, such as writing the screenplays
for each episode.23 This change in production resonates with a parallel trans-
formation in reception away from the fleeting ephemera of weekly television
programming to the viewer’s increased identification with matters of “author-
ship” and “style.” For example, Raideen’s director, Tomino Yoshiyuki, who
also directed the landmark anime Mobile Suit Gundam (he directed and wrote
screenplays), became a “deified” robot anime maker with his adult-oriented
screenplays, which dramatically widened anime audiences beyond the show’s
child demographics. Animation magazines such as Animage (1978–), Animedia
(1981–), and Newtype (1985–) also emerged as the videotape spread in popu-
larity, and these magazines accelerated the pattern of anime reception, the
“auteur” formation, and its appreciation in anime fan culture, which has con-
tinued to the present.
Oshii underlines a characteristic of anime audiences in Japan as their
high convertability among different media, and he attributes his success as an
anime maker to that aspect.24 Of course, this fluency in media convergence
can be credited to the economic affluence of Japan, which fed a growing
consumer appetite for new gadgets. Still, anime has kept its affinity with tech-
nological developments, and its success on television has led it to reproduce
itself via film adaptation, videotape, Laserdisc, DVD, Blu-ray Disc, and video
games. Oshii states his own case as follows: “The reason that I have been able
to continue my career is in this high ‘convert-ability’ among the Japanese an-
ime fans. My works have been reproduced and re-promoted each time when a
medium’s format is converted. In other words, I received royalties each time,
which often supported me when I had a scarcity of work. . . . Indeed, all my
works have been distributed in video, LD, and DVD, and they allowed me to
buy a house like other people.”25
As one can see in both his oeuvres and his animation style, such as adapt-
ing camera movement and shot angles from live-action films in his anima-
tion, Oshii has always demonstrated his interest in cinema, and he has di-
rected some live-action feature films: The Red Spectacles (Jigoku no banken: akai
megane, 1987), Stray Dog: Kerberos Panzer Cops (Jigoku no banken: Keruberosu,
1991), Talking Head (1992), Avalon (2001), Kiru (2008), and Assault Girls
(2009). His recent “animated” film, Amazing Lives of the Fast Food Grifters, even
deploys a technique called “super-live-mation,” which combines digital photo
images of actors with a frame-by-frame animation technique to create a sort
of pixilated film. In other words, film, whether as animation or as live action,
is Oshii’s ultimate medium for his creative output.
Amazing Lives of the Fast Food Grifters emphasizes a history of postwar
Japan until the end of the Showa period (1926–1989) through both narrative
and animation techniques. Fictional folklorist Inugai Kiichi narrates the sto-
ries of eight con artists and their legendary skills in ordering fast food without
paying. They are all petty criminals, but they are nonetheless presented as
masters due to their “philosophy” and “aesthetic” of bilking. Inugai’s story
starts in 1945 at the end of World War II, and it continues until 1988, the year
before Emperor Hirohito’s death. The vicissitudes of Japanese fast food cul-
ture, from a cheap bowl of noodles to a hamburger at franchised restaurants,
contributes to the narrative’s chronological development. Each episode is in-
troduced with “historical” documentary-like footage from postwar to current
Japan, which is done in CGI. The film presents a new type of realist aesthetics
with its usage of “super-live-mation.”
Super-live-mation’s concept originated from kamishibai, a regional me-
dium for storytelling. The film deploys not only the new media of digital
technology, it also revitalizes this antiquated local medium. There are some
academic debates about the origins of kamishibai; some assume that it started
from Buddhist temples’ picture scrolls (emaki) in the twelfth century, but it is
clear that kamishibai’s popularity as a commercial enterprise for the entertain-
ment of children dates from the 1910s and remained popular until the early
1950s, when television began broadcasting in Japan.26 From kamishibai, Oshii
adapted the concept of “pepusato,” a Japanese-English word that means “a
paper puppet” having two images with slightly different expressions on both
sides of a stick, and the image changes as one turns the stick. The shift from a
still image to a moving image caused by rapid movement of the two drawings
creates a sense of liveliness, or realist aesthetic, regardless of the picture’s
quality (figures 3.1a and 3.1b). The expression “pepusato” was used in post-
war Japan when inventive kamishibai performers tried to distinguish their art
by using more complex picture puppets. Oshii took thousands of photos of
actors’ theatrical poses and digitally processed the images as CGI data. Super-
live-mation lacks the sense of reality that we see in Disneylike animation, but
it presents its own cinematic, photogenic, and theatrical quality through its
realist aesthetics. These images look neither like film, photo, or theater, but
they bear traces from all those existing media. In other words, Amazing Lives
of the Fast Food Grifters represents the process of visual media’s convergence of
the old with the new, and of paper with film and digital imaging.
By incorporating kamishibai in his film, Oshii not only adapts its tech-
nology but also highlights the aspect of craftsmanship, which stands out for
its handmade quality. In contrast, high-budget digital animation tends to ef-
face the individual craftsmanship of animators in the process of production.
Oshii, meanwhile, demonstrates a willingness to leave his fingerprints in such
self-referential deployments as the con artist grifters reappearing from his ear-
lier work, such as the comedy, Urusei Yatsura 2: Beautiful Dreamers (1984). The
maker’s craft is also evident in the kamishibai puppets that reference the short
animation omnibus Minipato (2002, dir. Kamiyama Kenji; writing, concept,
and music Oshii Mamoru), itself a parody of his earlier mobile robot anime
Patlabor: The Original Series (Kido keisatsu patoreiba, 1988). The densely crafted,
complex images simulating postwar documentary footage and the esoteric
narration overflowing with often fictional cultural information that is, at best,
tangential to the plot—such signature aspects of Oshii’s work seem designed
for repeated viewings and reward the expectations of his fans.
“Personal Production” of Anime:

Shinkai Makoto
Since the 1990s, anime’s affinity with digital technology’s development
has shifted to nearly all aspects of production, distribution, and reception.
Producing anime with personal computers and distributing them on DVD or
Figures 3.1a & b. Amazing Lives of the Fast Food Grifters (Oshii Mamoru, 2006).
The rapid movement of two images creates a sense of animation.
Blu-ray Disc have led anime production to be more flexible and diverge from
a larger studio-oriented mode, as in the case of Oshii Mamoru, to a single
creator form. The move toward a smaller scale of production and greater per-
sonalization can be keenly sensed in Shinkai Makoto’s work. After working
for five years as a designer for a computer game company, Shinkai became an
independent anime maker without receiving any training from anime produc-
tion companies. He was part of a new generation of animation artists who
had little drawing skill but were knowledgeable in computer animation soft-
ware. His first recognized solo work is the twenty-five-minute digital anima-
tion, Voices of a Distant Star (Hoshi no koe, 2002), and he recently directed his
first feature-length animation film, 5 Centimeters per Second (Byosoku 5 senchi-
metoru, 2007).
Thanks to his home computer (a PowerMac G4 400 MHz), Shinkai not
only assumed all the principal roles of director, screenplay writer, drawing
artist,art director, cinematographer, and editor in Voices of a Distant Star, but
he also provided the voice for the leading character, Noboru.27 In a DVD
bonus-feature interview, Shinkai asserts that the affordability of computer
hardware and software in the late 1990s and early 2000s allowed him to pro-
duce animation from his home (“personal production”):
When I started thinking about making Voices of a Distant Star, I was

still working at a video game company. That was the period when
the prices of hardware and software for making digital images be-
came affordable for individual/home users. Moreover, the DVD had
already become popularized via PlayStation II in Japan at that time.
My colleagues and friends started to discuss the high possibility of
“personal production” of visual image. In my case, I had already
owned these hard and soft digital tools and trained myself how to
use them at least on the basic level at work. Then, I thought why not
start making an animation alone.28
In his animation, Shinkai intermediates with not only “new” digital or

computer technology, but he assimilates his animation with “old,” coexisting
media, such as television (anime series), printed media (manga and contempo-
rary novels by Murakami Haruki), and popular music from iPod. He creates
patterns, intermedia networks that weave across contemporary Japanese pop-
ular culture historically and synchronically and are strongly influenced by his
own personal experience and interests. This personal experience—that is, a
pattern of accessing media individually—is a trend among the post-cinematic
or nontheatrical cinema generation in Japan and elsewhere.29 They listen to
music with iPods (a pattern that was established with the release of Sony’s
Walkman in 1979), send text messages via cell phone, view films on personal
computers or via their smartphone devices, and play games on Game Boys.
Shinkai even describes his goal in making animation as creating an “environ-
ment” for himself modeled on the lifestyle of a manga artist or novelist, one
who usually creates his or her work alone (or with a few assistants) and lives
on royalties.30 What he produces in his creative process and work is the “per-
sonal experience” of both producers and consumers in the popular digital
culture that he has grown up with and knows intimately. His animation Voices
of a Distant Star is a typical example of the breakdown between producers
and consumers, in which, as Henry Jenkins describes, “consumers seek to act
upon the invitation to participate in the life of the franchises.”31
On the level of aesthetics and narrative, Shinkai’s “new” digital solo ani-
mation Voices of a Distant Star has converged with “old” television animation
and photo images. His work shares many techniques with television anime,
such as “library” (recycling background images), “tome-e” (using one image
for a long duration of time), and the main characters’ anime-ish look (usually
teenage boys and girls with a pointed chin, big eyes, a small mouth, pointed
noses without nostrils, and they are often thin and wearing school uniforms)
and a story similar to the television animation series, Neon Genesis Evangelion,
in which teenagers have a double life as a student and a pilot of a mobile suit
robot (figure 3.2). Voices of a Distant Star’s narrative is a familiar trope within
the anime world, which has been established with a number of mobile suit
robots and teenage pilots over more than four decades. The fifteen-year-old
heroine Mikako is accepted to be a member of the United Nations Universal
Army, which will deploy her throughout the universe, and her boyfriend
Noboru is left alone on Earth. Their communication is limited to their cell
phone text messages, but the farther Mikako is from the Earth the more time
it takes for their text messages to reach each other; by the end of the film,
it takes more than eight years for a message to reach them (figure 3.3). The
film is full of characters’ narrations, either dialogue or monologue, which
do not necessarily correspond with the still images onscreen. Shinkai’s use
of this limited television animation technique was the only way for him to
Figure 3.2. Voices of a Distance Star (Shinkai Figure 3.3. The last text message from Mika-
Makoto, 2002). Adhering to the mobile-suit ko to Noboru (voice, Shinkai Makoto), which
genre’s conventions, the protagonist Mikako took more than eight years to reach him.
(voice, Shinohara Mika) is a pilot of a space
force protecting mankind.
Figures 3.4a & b. Typical suburban images, originally photographed by Shinkai and transferred
into anime with CGI.
make animationeffectively with limited labor and time. Shinkai presents en-
vironmental images of the Earth, typical suburban images of houses, roads,
and empty lots, which he originally shot himself, or images of fighting in the
universe, which he created with 3-D CGI (figures 3.4a and 3.4b). These digital
images were all processed by Photoshop and AfterEffects to make them suit-
able for the “anime” look.32
Shinkai has been creating his animation content in the fast-paced digital
era, in which “old” and “new” media have converged. This convergence
works in the ad hoc formation of “an old concept taking on new meanings,”
or in Jenkins’s terms, “a kind of kludge.”33 The gap between Shinkai’s highly
techno-oriented production mode and the “familiar” expression of both aes-
thetics and narrative in his animation can be explained as a product of tech-
nological “kludge.” Through my correspondence with Shinkai in e-mails, I
asked him whether he had a particular medium in mind for distributing his
work. Shinkai replied,
I was thinking of selling on CD-ROM when I created my earlier

independent work in the late 1990s. Then, the targeted distribution
medium for Voices of a Distant Star became DVD in 2002, and I con-
sciously made the following work The Place Promised in Our Early Days
[Kumo no muko, yakusoku no basho, 2005] with HD DVD. For my latest
animation 5 Centimeters per Second, I made it a download-friendly
content for net streaming or iPod. But, now I feel that we no longer
need to think about the difference in media anymore. . . . All media
are connected to the Internet, whether television, the information
for theatrical release, and DVD sales. In other words, one can even
say that any contents that are not connected with the Internet do not
existin the current market.34
And at the end of this question-and-answer session, Shinkai highlighted the

following “individual audience”:
But the other end of this net line is ultimately an individual.

Therefore, I think that any content needs to be created for individual
not mass audiences, though there are many more factors that might
be involved for planning production costs and marketing. I sense
more and more that “personal animation” does not necessarily
mean a solo production, but rather content produced for an indi-
vidual.35
In this sense, Shinkai’s animation—or moreover its targeted audience—is

very different from Disney’s or Pixar’s animation, which is strictly designed
for family viewing. Though both are called “animation,” they differ in many
facets, from production to the pattern of consumption. As Shinkai has com-
mented, “I hope both are needed in this world.”36 The difference between
Shinkai’s and Disney’s animation derives not simply from intrinsic cultural
differences but is more directly linked to the needs and demands placed upon
animation in each market, which can sometimes outpace any limits set by
national or cultural boundaries.
“Japanese” Animation: Yamamura Koji

Anime’s recent trend toward a small-scale production using personal
computersand DVD distribution has further diversified Japanese animation,
which has led to the convergence between short and feature-length films and
art and commercial animations. Yamamura Koji is another animation artist
who normally works in solo production. A small condominium in Setagaya
Ward, Tokyo, serves as the workshop for Yamamura Animation, and his wife
Sanae is his only full-time assistant. Like Shinkai, Yamamura occasionally
hires assistants for larger projects, such as Franz Kafka’s A Country Doctor. But
with the use of his computer, he usually works on his own to avoid extra
expenses. While Shinkai’s work inherits the flat anime aesthetics of the televi-
sion series Neon Genesis Evangelion and shojo manga (manga aimed at school-age
girls) in both stylistic and narrative forms, Yamamura, on the other hand,
draws upon his “art animation” background, detaching his animation style
from the ubiquitous “anime look” and promoting his work via another type
of mediation—namely animation film festivals. The popularity of recent ani-
mation in Japan is due both to its diversity and multiple connections with
various media; in other words, animation’s numerous ways to gain “cultural
capital.”37
Yamamura’s animation is usually described as “art animation” or “au-
teur animation,” and it looks distinct from anime or commercial animation
with its handmade quality of errant lines. One can see how this difference is
often discursively highlighted, for instance, in the text of the official festival
Web site of the 2008 Ottawa International Animation Film Festival: “‘A New
Wave of Japanese Animation’—A showcase of exciting and eclectic Japanese
auteur animation. Presenting another side of ‘anime,’ this program has been
curated by a panel of animation producers, directors and distributors includ-
ing Academy Award nominee Koji Yamamura and Taku Furukawa.”38
As the indefinite expression “another side of anime” indicates, the dis-
tinction between anime and art animation has often been an arbitrary one,
and it is sometimes used strategically in anime studies as well. In the case
of Hu Tze Yue, she analyzes the omnibus animation Winter Days (Fuyu no
hi, 2003, Kawamoto Kihochiro et al.), to which Yamamura contributed one
short, forty-second animation, and Hu terms the animators as “independent,”
“auteur,” and “animation artists.” Although she briefly mentions the histori-
cal parallel between the puppet animation artist Kawamoto’s past ventures
and the “golden peak period of anime in Japan” in the 1970s, Hu does not
reference their intersection any further.39 Livia Monnet, to give another ex-
ample, examines the Japanese artist Tabaimo’s (real name: Tabata Akiko)
animated installations and short animated films, which have been available
since her debut in 1999. Although Monnet’s essay does not make a specific
distinction between Tabaimo’s art animation and anime, we can see that there
is an ambiguous connection between the two since the essay is presented in an
anthology focused on anime.40 The division between art animation and anime
reinvokes the disputed dichotomy of high and low cultures and is often sub-
stituted with another set of divisions: independent and commercial. However,
as Yamamura himself asserts, such divisions are ultimately unreasonable or
even false, since, except for a very few animations, they all have sponsors pro-
viding financial support and have commercial venues where they can reach
audiences.41
In an interview with the author, Yamamura states that since he was a
boy in primary school, he has been interested in various animations from
around the world, not just Japanese anime.42 He started drawing comics and
making animation, and he attended an art college to study abstract drawing.
He has both the skill to create different styles of animation and an impressive
knowledge regarding animation’s history and techniques, all of which has
been displayed in his book Welcome to the World of Animation (Animeshon no
seaki he yokoso, 2006) and his exhibition “Yamamura Animation Museum”
at Expo 2005 in Aichi, Japan. It is interesting to note that he even worked as
an assistant animator at the animation production company Mukuo Studio,
which has specialized in art design and background drawing for film and tele-
vision animation series, such as Harmagedon (Genma taisen, 1983, Rin Taro)
and Sailor Moon (Bishojo senshi sera mun, TV Asahi, March 1992–February
1997). As an accomplished virtuoso, Yamamura can create a wide range of
animations in diverse styles and techniques, and his work has complex levels
of adaptation, intertextualization, and collaboration. Within this process of
production, one can see Yamamura’s conscious choices for distinguishing his
work in the challenging markets he pursues. I will examine this aspect by
comparing his two recent festival-awarded works: Mount Head (Atama-yama,
2002) and Franz Kafka’s A Country Doctor.
Yamamura has sent all his solo-production animations to international
animation film festivals, which function as sites for finding new talents for
commercial productions. For those animation makers like Yamamura or
Shinkai with a personal production system, international festivals are indeed
the most important venue to display their work and get future producers or
sponsors. But as Liz Czach, a film programmer at the Toronto International
Film Festival, has written, “Cultural nationalism and national identity are
bound up in the histories of film festivals,” and film festival programming
often takes a role in forming a national cinema.43 The case of animation film
festivals is no exception.
Yamamura’s first acclaimed animation, Mount Head, received the grand
prize at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival in France (2003),
the World Festival of Animation Film in Zagreb, Croatia (2004), and the
Hiroshima International Animation Festival (2004), among others. The ani-
mation was also nominated for the category of short film at the 75th Academy
Awards (2003). These animation festivals are not simply celebrating the year’s
achievements; they function as fully commercialized marketplaces for finding
the year’s best “crop.” Especially in the field of short animation, the success-
ful ones are considered to be “portending the shape of things to come.”44
The ten-minute film Mount Head is an adaptation from a traditional comic
storytelling (rakugo) of the nineteenth century, and it is narrated by Kunimoto
Takeharu, the famous recitation performer (rokyoku-shi), accompanied by a
shamisen (a three-stringed musical instrument).
The narrative’s temporal and spatial aspects are set in contemporary
Tokyo, in which businessmen with indistinct gray suits and office girls in
salmon-pink uniforms enjoy the cherry blossoms in their crazy hanami (cherry
blossom viewing) festival (figures 3.5 and 3.6). In a bizarre twist, the event is
held on Mr. Mt. Head, where a marvelous cherry tree, the symbol of Japanese
spring, grows from a bald man’s head. After endless disturbances by those
visitors, who are drinking, smoking, dancing, and even urinating on the tree,
Mr. Mt. Head finally uproots the tree and creates a ditch, which becomes a
pond after it begins to rain. Again, people start visiting his head for swimming
and fishing in the pond. In order to end this madness on his head, Mr. Mt.
Head finally jumps into his own pond and drowns (figure 3.7).
Mount Head obviously makes the form of animation intersect with the
story from the Japanese narrative tradition and the rokyoku-shi Kunimoto’s
voice performance, adding more of the sense of “classical” and “Japan.”
In this animation, Yamamura apparently made a conscious attempt to put
“Japaneseness” at the forefront, in both narrative and sound (including its
shamisen music), and his attempt worked in those international animation
festivals. As a result, he later became an acclaimed auteur animator in Japan as
the first grand prizewinner at all four well-known animation festivals: Annecy,
Ottawa, Zagreb, and Hiroshima.45 This aspect of performative or constructed
“Japaneseness” in his animation can be further highlighted by contrasting it
with his later animation The Old Crocodile (Toshi o totta wani, 2005), which has
fewer cultural references to Japan and had only a modest reception at those
same international film festivals.
In Yamamura’s most recent animation, A Country Doctor, he successfully
translated Kafka’s internalized narrative in visual terms and received the
grand prize at the Ottawa International Animation Festival in 2007, among
other festivals (Etiuda and Anima International Film Festival, in Poland; the
International Trickfilm Festival of Animated Film, Stuttgart, Germany). As
in Franz Kafka’s short story, written in 1919, Yamamura enforces the cultural
intersection with Europe via the reproduction of the setting in eighteenth-
centuryPrague, Austria-Hungary. His work skillfully articulates the story’s
ethereal spatial and temporal aspects, typical in Kafka’s stories, with the
culturallyinflected voice of a kyogen-shi (performers for a traditional Japanese
theater, kyogen, a comedic intermission of sorts in Noh performance),
Shigeyama Sensaku and his family.
The animation’s narrative starts with the country doctor being summoned
by a family with a sick boy. The doctor’s horse has just died the night before,
so he sends his maid Rosa to borrow horses for his carriage. Although she
comes back empty-handed, the doctor instead finds a mysterious groom and
borrows his horses. The doctor senses the groom’s desire toward Rosa, but
Figure 3.5. Mount
Head (Yamamura Koji,
2002). In contemporary
Tokyo, businessmen
with indistinct gray
suits enjoy their crazy
hanami festival.
Figure 3.6. Finally a

crowd gathers on the
bald man’s head.
Figure 3.7. People

again start visiting his
head for swimming and
fishing.
his horses take him abruptly to the sick boy’s house. Even after arriving at the
house, the doctor rather worries about his maid being assaulted by the groom
while he is away. The doctor tries to escape from the boy’s house, but his fam-
ily takes off all his clothes and confines him to the boy’s room. At the end,
the doctor succeeds in fleeing and returns to his house, yet we do not find out
what happened to either Rosa or the sick boy.
The characters’ monologues are crucial to the narrative’s interior psycho-
logical realm, and they are expressed by a group of kyogen-shi with their darkly
comical and culturally marked voice performance. Whether an animator cre-
ates anime or art animation, their way of gaining “cultural capital” is not
intrinsically tied with their inherited culture but rather with a “performance”
of national identity—be it their own or someone else’s—in order to gain
distinction.All techniques and expressions can be, at once, aleatoric and
highlyintertextualized with various other animations, and yet Yamamura
boldly and consciously chose the European story to encounter with the
remarkableJapanese voice performance, and he synthesized the encounter
through his skillful animation techniques and styles.
In A Country Doctor, Yamamura’s repertoire of various techniques and
styles delivers a novel impression to the work, a detachment from either “full”
or “limited” animations. Those techniques, while not being completely his
own invention, are drawn from his encounters with other animations and vi-
sual media. In his interview, Yamamura states that A Country Doctor was influ-
enced by Nicholas Ray’s Western, Johnny Guitar (1954), in its description of
characters’ movements in some of the sequences capturing the external space
with blowing wind and a sandstorm.46 He exemplifies this influence in his
animation, especially in the first long sequence, in which both the doctor and
Rosa are seeking horses on a cold winter day. These two characters’ move-
ments are not only exaggerated but also conceptualized by losing their spatial
reality; they do not follow the rules of perspective or gravity and constantly
swell with changes in their sizes or standing positions, which creates an un-
usual visual depth (figures 3.8a and 3.8b). It is a distorted aesthetic that is well
suited to the tortured psychology of Kafka’s work, the sense of the self ’s inte-
rior pressing out through the body’s membranes. The distorted movements of
the characters separate his animation from both full (Disneylike articulation
of smooth movement) and limited animations (jerky or lack of movement). In
fact, the movements of Joan Crawford (Vienna) or Sterling Hayden (Johnny
“Guitar” Logan) in the Wild West have no relation to the doctor’s and Rosa’s
distorted body movements in A Country Doctor, but there is some proximity
betweenthose texts, particularly in regard to textural materiality—that is,
layersin the space within those scenes.
Figures 3.8a & b. Franz Kafka’s A Country Doctor (Yamamura Koji, 2007). The Doctor’s (voice,
Shigeyama Sensaku) exaggerated movement disrupts the spatial reality and presents unusual
visual depth.
Yamamura creates a three-dimensional textual volume for the film in

his two-dimensional animation with layers of images and their movements.
This layering is one of the best examples for animation’s transformation by
its digitization. Due to the change from a hand-drawn cel frame to a digitized
image, animators now can use numberless layers to create a rich and more
textual image. Yamamura uses various images of lighting, reflection, snow,
or even a couple of ropes trembling from the strong winds and layers them
into his digital and, at once, handmade animation. This attempt at creating a
handmade aesthetic can be seen in his animation’s drawing lines, often subtly
shaking in order to create the visual tension and materiality against the flat
uniformity of digital animation. For the handmade look, he even tactically
reversed the order of pencil drawing and color marker painting and kept the
pencil’s black blot (figure 3.9). This technique, as Yamamura himself points
out in his interview, is well known in some other animators’ works, such as
Paul Driessen from the Netherlands, creator of The Killing of an Egg (1977)
and 3 Misses (1998).47
When scholars talk about intermedia, the connection between anime and
cinema is emphasized, since it is assumed that they share similar patterns
of viewing. Scholars borrow and apply frameworks from film studies that
already have an established history with its own terminologies, concepts, and
theories. However, anime’s affinity with technology, the expansion of its con-
tents across various media—the “media mix,” which is the prime source of its
attraction for fans—has created a pattern of intermediation markedly differ-
ent from cinema’s essential characteristic of collaborative production and the-
atrical viewership, which has also been transforming dramatically in the last
few decades. In short, anime is post-cinematic in its nature, as its first appear-
ance coincides with the 1980s’ prevalence of home videotape, the exact pe-
riod when the cinema was compelled to adopt new distribution and reception
patterns. If the cinema’s natural order originates in groups in its production
and reception, anime’s natural order originates in the smaller scale of private
television viewing. Moreover, its early investment in multiple media has made
it possible for anime to remain adept in changing with the high speed of tech-
nological development required for anime’s production and distribution.
Figure 3.9. The handmade aesthetic: Yamamura’s pencil smudge.
Returning to the question of “difference,” anime is different from Disney’s
or Pixar’s animation, as Shinkai clearly stated. But the difference is not rooted
in anime’s ethnic identity; rather, it stems from its ties to media convergence,
at the intersection of both local and global markets. As Oshii’s long career
with various media indicates, his success at multiplying royalties from the
same content rests on his audience’s high convertability, their receptiveness
to hardware and media “upgrades,” which has accelerated with Japan’s
economic affluence from the 1970s to the early 1990s. Shinkai’s “personal”
animation, which resembles in style and narrative such television anime as
Evangelion, has successfully tapped into television animation’s characteristi-
cally loyal audience in Japan; in other words, Shinkai’s OVA animation does
not need to compete with Disney or Pixar, whose marketing investments are
heavily centralized with the theatrical release. Yamamura’s highly technical
animation highlights “Japan” or “Japanese culture,” but these are all per-
formative and constructed conscious elements, which can be attributed to a
“coercive mimeticism” engendered in the dynamic of international film festi-
vals.48 Anime is indeed difficult to study because it is diverse, and a large body
of work has been produced. Moreover, its high affinity with technological de-
velopment makes studying anime even harder and more demanding in terms
of speed and knowledge. However, anime is fascinating precisely for these
reasons. Anime sustains its attraction through risk-taking challenges either
on the level of style, such as new realist aesthetics of a revitalized kamishibai,
the limited still image, or a layered materiality, or on the level of narrative of
either Japanese postwar con artists, an esoteric story from Kafka, or a story
about an eight-year-old text message from across the universe.

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University of Hawai'i Press

Chapter Title: THE RISE OF “PERSONAL” ANIMATION

Book Title: Japanese Cinema in the Digital Age

The diversity of Japanese animation

The Rise of “Personal” Animation 75

The Discursive Construction of Anime

76 The Rise of “Personal” Animation

The Rise of “Personal” Animation 77

78 The Rise of “Personal” Animation

The Rise of “Personal” Animation 79

Anime and Media Convergence:

80 The Rise of “Personal” Animation

The Rise of “Personal” Animation 81

82 The Rise of “Personal” Animation

“Personal Production” of Anime:

The Rise of “Personal” Animation 83

84 The Rise of “Personal” Animation

When I started thinking about making Voices of a Distant Star, I was

In his animation, Shinkai intermediates with not only “new” digital or

The Rise of “Personal” Animation 85

86 The Rise of “Personal” Animation

I was thinking of selling on CD-ROM when I created my earlier

The Rise of “Personal” Animation 87

And at the end of this question-and-answer session, Shinkai highlighted the

But the other end of this net line is ultimately an individual.

In this sense, Shinkai’s animation—or moreover its targeted audience—is

“Japanese” Animation: Yamamura Koji

88 The Rise of “Personal” Animation

The Rise of “Personal” Animation 89

90 The Rise of “Personal” Animation

The Rise of “Personal” Animation 91

Figure 3.6. Finally a

Figure 3.7. People

The Rise of “Personal” Animation 93

Yamamura creates a three-dimensional textual volume for the film in

94 The Rise of “Personal” Animation

Figure 3.9. The handmade aesthetic: Yamamura’s pencil smudge.

The Rise of “Personal” Animation 95

96 The Rise of “Personal” Animation

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