Sam wk 5

Questions answered this week (tada!);

Is anime a genre or a media? Is it a branch of film or another mode?

Is it a high or low cultural genre, according to Napier (2005)? What are some of its subgenres?



Napier (2005), in seeking to differentiate anime from other forms of animation (thus explaining why it has flourished so broadly as a style in its own right), compares it to popular western styles (inevitably dredging Disney), anime having a comparatively diverse range of themes, frequently featuring content otherwise reserved for live-action films. Also, Napier observes anime’s ability to transcend ‘generational lines’, whereas western animation, though not exclusive to, generally produces for younger audiences (not excluding the wizards at Pixar whose films, though offering much for ‘adult’ viewers, does this almost slyly, as knowing aside and/or innuendo). Napier goes further than anime’s superior thematic range, citing Ledoux and Ranney in their observations of even earliest anime (circa the 1970’s), in it’s stylistic variation of “unusual camera angles and extreme close-ups”, as opposed to the “action obsessed middle-distance” of western styles of animation. Anime, then, offers a visual scrutiny, affectively constructing “unique aesthetic worlds” (Napier, 2005), outmoding near-infantilized American-produced animation in its current wide-spread (and escalating) popularity (Japan’s shamefully anime obsessed “otaku” roughly synonymous with ‘geek’, Napier, 2005).

Napier cites animation scholar Paul Wells in asserting “the primacy of the image and it’s ability to metamorphose into a completely different image”, before crediting anime with this very ‘primacy’ in it’s embodiment of the hyper-relativity of “fluctuating post-modern identities” (2005). According to Napier anime does this in assuming three almost archetypal discoursal modes; apocalyptic, festival and elegiac (being not absolutely categorical, rather frequently overlapping).

For an example of anime’s ‘apocalyptic’, we can look to its numerous ‘cyberpunk’ entries (e.g. Akira), these being often cynical reflections (and paranoid visions) of techno-culture, artistic reconcilement of collective anxieties over the possible trajectories of technological development and advancement in society. Anime indeed acts as ‘high cultural medium’ when voicing these shared digital nightmares (Napier, 2005).

For an explanation of ‘festival’ Napier (2005) cites Mikhail Bakhtin’s “carnivalesque”, namely, “the pathos of shifts and changes, of death and renewal”, the “joyful relativity” of norms transgressed and inverted. An obvious example from the anime canons is Satoshi Kon’s ‘Paprika’ (2005), borrowing science-fiction threads from it’s cyber-punk sibling. Paprika is a ‘super-shrink’, offering therapies in which, by the grace of cutting-edge a nano-device, she descends into the dreams of paying subjects, battling emancipated psychological demons, as her subject’s orgiastic subconscious marches literally ‘carnivalesque’ through suitably whimsical dreamscapes. Visually, she is a scantily clad vixen, and her liaisons with ‘paying customers’ resemble shady meetings in prostitute dens, only it is She being paid to ‘penetrate’ the psyche of He. This deliberate sexualization and reversal of roles in what clearly parallels a sex act is exactly the type of gleeful norm-inversion constituting festival anime.

Finally there’s ‘elegiac’ anime, “lyrically mourning” in it’s emphasis on cultural loss, with Napier’s examples ‘Grave of the Fireflies’ chronicling actual historical events towards the end of the Second World War, and ‘Princess Mononoke’, lamenting the wedge driven between humanity and it’s initial environmental equilibrium, the latter lost with the advent of the industrial age (2005).

In the rapidity of it’s thematic/visceral transformations, Napier concludes anime an encapsulation of the ‘post-modern’ melting pot that is identity politics (more so than it’s tenuous western counterparts, that one sense has no such lofty aspirations anyway), making it by the sheer magnitude of it’s depth and range more a (high-cultural) media/medium than a ‘genre’ (the latter better describing obvious throwaway commodities of the entertainment industry which anime, though not without it’s fodder, is decidedly not).

One could go so far as calling anime a modern, globally minded cultural phenomenon (the otaku/geeks will be happy).