The Anime Machine
Jan. 9th, 2010 03:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sanetWell, it's back to Winnipeg and back to work with me. The temperature with windchill when I got up this morning was -39, and that's not even a really cold day. (The really cold days come with a five-minute frostbite warning.) Times like this, all you can do is curl up with a blanket and a long book -or at least write a review of one. So here are some thoughts on Tom Lamarre's The Anime Machine.
Lamarre, Thomas. The Anime Machine. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2009.
Tom Lamarre is hands-down one of the best anime scholars working in English today. When you see his name under a title, you can be pretty sure that what follows is going to have something original and important to say. This book, which reworks a few of his previously published essays and adds a wealth of new material, is no exception. Lamarre provides some very useful concepts for looking at the technologies and formal properties of anime as moving images. He also makes interesting links to male otaku subjectivity and sexuality. But, as a fan struggling to be a scholar (and a scholar feeling like an inadequate fan) it still makes me wonder: just who watches anime like this? Because it seems to me that we’re not talking about otaku here; we’re talking about how academics think about otaku through postmodern film theory.
The Anime Machine takes a solid film-studies approach to anime, drawing most heavily on Gilles Deleuze’s two-volume Cinema. (Disclaimer: I’ve only read Cinema 1 myself. Cinema 2 is in a holding pattern on my “to read” shelf.) Rather than analyzing anime narratives, reception, or cultural orientation, Lamarre focuses on the “materiality of the moving image itself” (x) as a starting point. The first thing he looks at is the actual animation stand, the table that allowed animators to stack and slide cels in front of the camera. Unlike live action filming, where the camera can physically move through space, this method requires an attention to compositing within the image. Basically, animators have to pay attention to how different layers of images move and interact, and how to create the impression of movement through layers.
There are two approaches to compositing. One is “closed compositing,” which relies on the “suppression of the perception of movement between layers” (xxiv). Disney’s multiplane camera, which enabled animators to keep different layers in proportion and so create a sense of “movement into depth” (19) is his clearest example. Lamarre associates closed compositing with Paul Virilio’s ideas of “cinematism,” in which filmic perspectives are determined by the monocular lens of the camera and “bullet’s-eye view” shots, reinforcing the unified Cartesian subject and a suicidal drive to speed and militarism.
The other approach is “flat compositing,” or, animetism. Animetism, he says, “is not about movement into depth, but movement on and between surfaces. This movement between planes of images is what I will call the animetic interval” (7). Examples include the sliding layers of landscapes in Steam Boy and Castle in the Sky. (I also thought of the Wachowski Bros’ Speed Racer as a film that tries to do animetism in live action.) These approaches aren’t strictly limited to cinema vs. animation, or full animation vs. limited animation, or Disney vs. anime, and they aren’t mutually exclusive opposites. They’re more like tendencies. Both animetic and cinematic tendencies can be found in many works. Still, he does seem to favour anime as a style that tends more to the animetic, and suggests a more flexible kind of subjectivity than Virilio’s deterministic view of film.
So, what can you do with animetism? Lamarre applies and extends it through three main texts: Miyazaki’s Castle in the Sky, Anno’s Nadia, and CLAMP’s Chobits. The chapters on Miyazaki look at the relationship between animation and technology. Lamarre argues that Miyazaki’s use of animetism counters Virilio’s idea of cinematic technology as a destructive force, not by totally rejecting technology and returning to a pure era before it, but by trying to “actualize a different relation to technology through a different use of the animated moving image” (305) –creating a “free relation to technology,” in Heidegger’s phrase. Still, Lamarre does find some problems with Miyazaki’s approach, including the tendency to deify the figure of the Shoujo, and to return to panoramic views of capital-N Nature, especially evident in his painterly backgrounds.
Looking at the limited animation style of Anno and the Gainax crew resolves some of these problems, but presents others. The flatness of limited animation may seem to overcome the problems with “movement into depth” seen earlier. But Lamarre critiques Takashi Murakami’s “anime” aesthetic of the Superflat as still reliant on modernist one-point perspective. He proposes another way of conceptualizing anime images called the “exploded view,” where many divergent perspectives are used in a single image, as an assembly diagram arrays all the part of a machine without being limited to linear perspective (120-2). He connects this sort of multiplicity of viewpoints to a (generally male) otaku subjectivity, arguing that “the otaku is not a fixed subject who consumes anime objects or patronizes the anime world. The otaku is an interactor…a cooperator in the production and promotion of the expanding world” (153). The otaku is a “subjectile,” moving along “lines of sight,” rather than a fixed subject, just as the anime image itself has many moving layers of perspectives. All of this leads up to the chapters on Nadia, demonstrating how it multiplies and layers different frames of reference, from its mix of historical eras in the settings, to the way the plot collapses major events into very small personal incidents (171) –a familiar tactic in Evangelion, too, where the fate of the entire world hinges on adolescent identity crises.
The Chobits chapters look even more closely at the psyche, especially psychoanalytic theories of desire and affect. He demonstrates –perhaps too thoroughly- how Chobits can be read using the Lacanian model of male desire as “unity-in-lack,” and the woman as a symptom or specter of male desire (see pages 236-7, which I have dubbed my “Section O’ Psychoanalytic Rage” in the margins.) Lamarre chides Japanese scholars Saito Tadao and Azuma Hiroki for their complicity with compulsory heterosexuality and the fixed subject of psychoanalysis, respectively. His own argument, however, is finally that “CLAMP’s view might be styled as post-Lacanian, because, as Chobits demonstrates so beautifully, the unity-in-lack of the male subject…comes into play at the level of fantasy. It is the perversion of male perversion” (298). Which to me is not entirely satisfying. He speaks so much about this model that he’s criticizing that there’s less room for things that aren’t that model. Actually, I’d love to see more of Deleuze&Guattari in this chapter –for instance, their theory of Bodies without Organs- and less of Lacan and Zizek!
Overall, there are many useful and interesting ideas in this book. I really like the focus on affect, and I appreciate the attempt to get away from the limiting kind of psychoanalysis that’s still floating around film studies. But at the end, I still found myself wondering, what now? What can your average fan do with a book like this? What should an anime scholar do with it? Should I just go out and find instances of animetic intervals or “subjectile” otaku in different anime? A friend of mine (who is also an anime fan and has degrees in English and fine arts) read a few pages and said she thought it was full of “dead words,” jargon terms empty of meaning; though, as I replied, it means a lot more when you’ve read enough film theory get the network of references. Still, I feel the same way about Deleuze’s Cinema 1: it provides an incredible technical and philosophical vocabulary, but very little idea as to how to connect that vocabulary to actual everyday practice. Lamarre brings the theory closer to earth, just not there yet. Now, I don’t presume some sort of material base or essential reality we can get to, and I’m not making a case for Orwell’s “plain English.” But I know, at least, how I perform my love of anime in the way I watch, in cosplay and so on, and I don’t see that “mattering” in this book. Still, it’s a good thing when a book gives you some different ways of working towards your own interests. So I think I’ll take The Anime Machine as an assembly diagram, like the exploded view, to build something else again…something with more on female anime fans!
Lamarre, Thomas. The Anime Machine. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2009.
Tom Lamarre is hands-down one of the best anime scholars working in English today. When you see his name under a title, you can be pretty sure that what follows is going to have something original and important to say. This book, which reworks a few of his previously published essays and adds a wealth of new material, is no exception. Lamarre provides some very useful concepts for looking at the technologies and formal properties of anime as moving images. He also makes interesting links to male otaku subjectivity and sexuality. But, as a fan struggling to be a scholar (and a scholar feeling like an inadequate fan) it still makes me wonder: just who watches anime like this? Because it seems to me that we’re not talking about otaku here; we’re talking about how academics think about otaku through postmodern film theory.
The Anime Machine takes a solid film-studies approach to anime, drawing most heavily on Gilles Deleuze’s two-volume Cinema. (Disclaimer: I’ve only read Cinema 1 myself. Cinema 2 is in a holding pattern on my “to read” shelf.) Rather than analyzing anime narratives, reception, or cultural orientation, Lamarre focuses on the “materiality of the moving image itself” (x) as a starting point. The first thing he looks at is the actual animation stand, the table that allowed animators to stack and slide cels in front of the camera. Unlike live action filming, where the camera can physically move through space, this method requires an attention to compositing within the image. Basically, animators have to pay attention to how different layers of images move and interact, and how to create the impression of movement through layers.
There are two approaches to compositing. One is “closed compositing,” which relies on the “suppression of the perception of movement between layers” (xxiv). Disney’s multiplane camera, which enabled animators to keep different layers in proportion and so create a sense of “movement into depth” (19) is his clearest example. Lamarre associates closed compositing with Paul Virilio’s ideas of “cinematism,” in which filmic perspectives are determined by the monocular lens of the camera and “bullet’s-eye view” shots, reinforcing the unified Cartesian subject and a suicidal drive to speed and militarism.
The other approach is “flat compositing,” or, animetism. Animetism, he says, “is not about movement into depth, but movement on and between surfaces. This movement between planes of images is what I will call the animetic interval” (7). Examples include the sliding layers of landscapes in Steam Boy and Castle in the Sky. (I also thought of the Wachowski Bros’ Speed Racer as a film that tries to do animetism in live action.) These approaches aren’t strictly limited to cinema vs. animation, or full animation vs. limited animation, or Disney vs. anime, and they aren’t mutually exclusive opposites. They’re more like tendencies. Both animetic and cinematic tendencies can be found in many works. Still, he does seem to favour anime as a style that tends more to the animetic, and suggests a more flexible kind of subjectivity than Virilio’s deterministic view of film.
So, what can you do with animetism? Lamarre applies and extends it through three main texts: Miyazaki’s Castle in the Sky, Anno’s Nadia, and CLAMP’s Chobits. The chapters on Miyazaki look at the relationship between animation and technology. Lamarre argues that Miyazaki’s use of animetism counters Virilio’s idea of cinematic technology as a destructive force, not by totally rejecting technology and returning to a pure era before it, but by trying to “actualize a different relation to technology through a different use of the animated moving image” (305) –creating a “free relation to technology,” in Heidegger’s phrase. Still, Lamarre does find some problems with Miyazaki’s approach, including the tendency to deify the figure of the Shoujo, and to return to panoramic views of capital-N Nature, especially evident in his painterly backgrounds.
Looking at the limited animation style of Anno and the Gainax crew resolves some of these problems, but presents others. The flatness of limited animation may seem to overcome the problems with “movement into depth” seen earlier. But Lamarre critiques Takashi Murakami’s “anime” aesthetic of the Superflat as still reliant on modernist one-point perspective. He proposes another way of conceptualizing anime images called the “exploded view,” where many divergent perspectives are used in a single image, as an assembly diagram arrays all the part of a machine without being limited to linear perspective (120-2). He connects this sort of multiplicity of viewpoints to a (generally male) otaku subjectivity, arguing that “the otaku is not a fixed subject who consumes anime objects or patronizes the anime world. The otaku is an interactor…a cooperator in the production and promotion of the expanding world” (153). The otaku is a “subjectile,” moving along “lines of sight,” rather than a fixed subject, just as the anime image itself has many moving layers of perspectives. All of this leads up to the chapters on Nadia, demonstrating how it multiplies and layers different frames of reference, from its mix of historical eras in the settings, to the way the plot collapses major events into very small personal incidents (171) –a familiar tactic in Evangelion, too, where the fate of the entire world hinges on adolescent identity crises.
The Chobits chapters look even more closely at the psyche, especially psychoanalytic theories of desire and affect. He demonstrates –perhaps too thoroughly- how Chobits can be read using the Lacanian model of male desire as “unity-in-lack,” and the woman as a symptom or specter of male desire (see pages 236-7, which I have dubbed my “Section O’ Psychoanalytic Rage” in the margins.) Lamarre chides Japanese scholars Saito Tadao and Azuma Hiroki for their complicity with compulsory heterosexuality and the fixed subject of psychoanalysis, respectively. His own argument, however, is finally that “CLAMP’s view might be styled as post-Lacanian, because, as Chobits demonstrates so beautifully, the unity-in-lack of the male subject…comes into play at the level of fantasy. It is the perversion of male perversion” (298). Which to me is not entirely satisfying. He speaks so much about this model that he’s criticizing that there’s less room for things that aren’t that model. Actually, I’d love to see more of Deleuze&Guattari in this chapter –for instance, their theory of Bodies without Organs- and less of Lacan and Zizek!
Overall, there are many useful and interesting ideas in this book. I really like the focus on affect, and I appreciate the attempt to get away from the limiting kind of psychoanalysis that’s still floating around film studies. But at the end, I still found myself wondering, what now? What can your average fan do with a book like this? What should an anime scholar do with it? Should I just go out and find instances of animetic intervals or “subjectile” otaku in different anime? A friend of mine (who is also an anime fan and has degrees in English and fine arts) read a few pages and said she thought it was full of “dead words,” jargon terms empty of meaning; though, as I replied, it means a lot more when you’ve read enough film theory get the network of references. Still, I feel the same way about Deleuze’s Cinema 1: it provides an incredible technical and philosophical vocabulary, but very little idea as to how to connect that vocabulary to actual everyday practice. Lamarre brings the theory closer to earth, just not there yet. Now, I don’t presume some sort of material base or essential reality we can get to, and I’m not making a case for Orwell’s “plain English.” But I know, at least, how I perform my love of anime in the way I watch, in cosplay and so on, and I don’t see that “mattering” in this book. Still, it’s a good thing when a book gives you some different ways of working towards your own interests. So I think I’ll take The Anime Machine as an assembly diagram, like the exploded view, to build something else again…something with more on female anime fans!
