The Rotoscopic Uncanny: Aku no Hana and the Aesthetic of Japanese Postmodernity (original) (raw)
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GA Journal Vol. 2, Printed Version, 2020
This article investigates Japanese animation as a posthuman machine to understand how the evolutionary co-presence of other beings produces new understandings about humans. Humanism, besides constituting itself as a philosophical and scientific model, also proposed an aesthetic vision. As such, its critical reevaluation should aim to deterritorialize humans in its theoretical and aesthetic components. Particularly, this article discusses how Posthumanism came to influence the cultural forms and practices specific to Japanese animation culture of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Since animation production is made of layers that use different techniques and visual perspectives, it can be declared that its aesthetic composition reveals the thought in action in the animation. As a methodological approach, the impact on mecha or robot genre language, and the thematic force about the human and machine interaction were considered, as such, the case analysis will focus on the animations, Evangelion Shin Gekijōban: Kyū (Rebuild of Evangelion 3.0: You Can (Not) Redo, 2012) directed by Anno Hideaki, and Inosensu (Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, 2004) directed by Oshii Mamoru. In conclusion, this article aims to establish a posthuman aesthetic approach to demonstrate the existence of heterogenesis in the visual models of the animetic machine, amplifying its discussion in the field of Arts and Humanities.
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[Winner of the Society for Animation Studies 2017 Maureen Furniss Award for Best Student Paper on Animated Media] Film theorization, particularly classical film theory, has been obsessed with the concept of indexi-cality, the idea that cinema can capture the real world. From this concept has emerged theories that position realism as the essence of cinema. Film scholar Noël Carroll sees these arguments as based around a “medium specificity thesis,” in that classic film theorists assume an essence of cinema specific to the medium. For André Bazin, Siegfried Kracauer, Stanley Cavell, and D.N. Rodowick, realism is the medium’s essence, and answers the question “What is cinema?” But in examining these arguments, it is apparent that few to no attempts are made by such theorists to in-clude animation within their scope of film theory, purposefully excluding animation as a “minor genre” (Rodowick 2007, p.121) because it disrupts their essentialist views of film. This paper will interrogate each of these writers in how their theories of cinema either exclude or diminish the role of animation, while investigating the technique of rotoscoped animation, as seen in the anime Flowers of Evil, for its philosophical potentials in regards to realist film theory.
International Journal of Arts Humanities and Social Sciences Studies, 2021
This article is an aesthetic and historical analysis of the consciousness of identity, culture and art in Japan from its period of change from the Tokugawa era to the Meiji era, as well as the stage of World War II and the Postwar. The postmodern aesthetics of Japanese anime focuses on a constant cultural hybridization between the West and the East, where the notion of what defines part of Japanese culture is the result of an interaction of literary, cinematic, musical and cultural aesthetic motifs and tropes of the Western world.
When first exposed to the rich cinematic tradition of Japanese anime, or animated film, there are several things that strike a reflective person at the level of visual images. One is the thematic prevalence of Japanese preoccupation with technology, a second dominant theme concerns their pervasive awareness of humans' connectedness with an encompassing nature, and lastly an equally ubiquitous thematic indication that the previous questions cannot be separated from a strong sense of community. One could relate the first theme to the quest for power, the second to the fundamental role of nature-religion in Japanese cultural history, and the third to the largely collectivist, community-oriented character of Japanese society. The present article explores these three themes by focusing on an anime film and two anime television series, particularly at the visual level, with a view to analysing and interpreting images, image-configurations and-sequences along the axes comprising the thematic grid in question. The chief theoretical perspective employed to come to grips with the visual embodiment of the three themes, interconnected as they are through motifs like technological power, destruction, guilt, the value of life, responsibility and reparation, is Winnicott's concept of " transitional objects ". The appropriation of this psychoanalytical notion by Stiegler (here, mainly for the understanding of art) furnishes one with the hermeneutic means of understanding the significance of visual images in the selected anime film and series in terms of what Stiegler sees as Winnicott's " discovery " of the connection between transitional objects (including artworks) and " what makes life worth living ". Visuele ontmoetings met natuur, tegnologie en gemeenskap in Japanese anime as " oorgangs-voorwerpe ". Wanneer 'n mens die ryk film-tradisie van Japanese anime ontdek is daar verskeie dinge wat 'n reflektiewe persoon op die vlak van visuele beelde tref. Een is die tematiese alomteenwoordigheid van Japanese beheptheid met tegnologie, 'n tweede dominante tema is die deurlopende bewus-wees van menslike verbintenis met die omvattende natuur, en derdens 'n ewe algemene tematiese aan-duiding dat die vorige kwessies nie van 'n sterk gemeenskapsbewussyn losgemaak kan word nie. Die eerste tema kan met die strewe na mag verbind word, die tweede met die fundamentele rol van natuur-religie in Japanese kultuurgeskiedenis en die derde met die oorwegend-kollektivistiese, gemeenskaps-georiënteerdheid van Japanese samelewing. Die huidige artikel ondersoek hierdie drie temas deur op 'n anime film en twee anime televisie-reekse te konsentreer, in die besonder op die visuele vlak, met die doel om visuele beelde, beeld-konfigurasies en-sekwensies aan die hand van bogenoemde tematiese raamwerk te analiseer en te interpreteer. Verder word die vernaamste teo-retiese perspektief vir die verstaan van bogenoemde voorsien deur Winnicott se begrip, " oorgangs-voorwerpe " , wat aangewend word by die interpretasie van relevante visuele beelde wat onderling verbind is deur motiewe soos tegnologiese mag, vernietiging, skuld, die waarde van die lewe, verant-woordelikheid en herstel. Stiegler se toeëiening van hierdie psigoanalitiese begrip (hier hoofsaaklik vir die verstaan van kuns) bied 'n hermeneutiese sleutel om die betekenis van visuele beelde in die geselekteerde anime film en reekse te artikuleer aan die hand van wat Stiegler as Winnicott se " ont-dekking " van die skakel tussen oorgangs-voorwerpe (insluitend kunswerke) en " wat die lewe die moeite werd maak " beskou. Sleutelwoorde: anime, gemeenskap, natuur, oorgangs-voorwerpe, tegnologie T he present article explores an anime film and two anime television series, particularly at the visual level, with a view to analysing and interpreting relevant images, image-configurations and-sequences along various thematic axes. The primary theoretical perspective employed to come to grips with the visual embodiment of three recurrent themes
A Subversive Potpourri: Concrete Revolutio or When the Phantasmagoria Turns Political
Ekphrasis. Images, Cinema, Theory, Media, 2016
According to Thomas LaMarre (xx-xxi), animation has been for a long time regarded as a lesser art form than cinema while the scholarly interest into animation studies has represented a rather recent development beginning with the 1990s, when it begins to coalesce into a proper field of study. In the case of anime – Japanese animation – the research on the various genres explored in anime and the various types of media production, has also represented a rather recent research interest of this art form in the West. The works of film-makers like Studio Ghibli’s internationally acclaimed Hayao Miyazaki, Mamoru Oshii or Satoshi Kon as well as other more commercially popular anime, have crossed over with global audiences. The present study analyses an anime series entitled Concrete Revolutio: Chōjin Gensō (Superhuman Phantasmagoria), produced by Studio Bones, directed by Seiji Mizushima and written by Shō Aikawa, which ran in two split cours between 2015 and 2016. Concrete Revolutio is a series removed from the archetypal trope often plaguing the cinematic and animation landscape, namely that of a logocentric worldview constrained by binary oppositions. From a methodological standpoint, the study applies a multi-layered approach to the study of anime, in order to address the socio-political implications of a series that uses idiosyncratic characters of all shapes and sizes – from superheroes to demons, from aliens to Godzilla-like monsters – to provide a meta-critique not only of Japanese postwar history but of militarism, late stage capitalism, globalization, or exploitation to name but a few.
Leonardo, 2014
The Japanese word eizo is central to an understanding of the significance of the interventions made into the cultural life of the nation by a relatively small grouping of artists and writers working between the 1950s and 1970s. Traditionally used as a phenomenological term in science and philosophy, the character connoted shadow or silhouette, later shifting to signify optical processes. Like the Greek term tehkne, creativeness and the tools used to achieve the outcome are relative, nuanced and complex.
The Magical Banal: Postmodern enchantments in the Japanese everyday
Contemporary Japan has been characterized by some as the quintessentially post-modern society. According to this viewpoint, rather than a faith in rationality, phenomenal, intuitive and aesthetic responses are privileged as modes of knowing the world and ascribing meaning. These are the means by which people engage empathetically in a social web, an involvement which produces stresses from which periodic, ephemeral escape is a necessary concomitant. The result is an openness to the involvement of the ludic and the magical in everyday experience: toys, machines which “live”, the absurd, the paranormal, and what might be termed magical realism in popular culture ; the paper presents a number of examples. Many of these entertainments embody many of the qualities of postmodernism. They replace the real with a simulacrum, they cannot be classified clearly as either high or low art, they collapse high culture into kitsch, tradition into the contemporary, and the tragic into the banal . While working within the social and economic sphere developed out of Modern conditions of capital and technological progress, conditions which have produced an urban environment of stunning monotony, such works are often critical of these same conditions. They insert within the often barren and banal social and physical environment generated by Modernity a magical imagery derived in part from traditional culture. Such works represent an ambiguous critique of Modernity’s metanarratives as manifested in Modern Japanese society, a critique articulated through the superimposition of the magical on the everyday.
New Perceptions: Kinugasa Teinosuke's Films and Japanese Modernism
Cinema Journal, 2004
This essay offers a reading of Kinugasa Teinosuke's independent silent films as responses to the traumatic experience of twentieth-century modernity. Of particular interest are the global and local intertexts in A Page of Madness and Crossways, their connections to the literary criticism of the shinkankakuha, or New Perception school, and the centrality of sensory perception in Kinugasa's work. Kinugasa Teinosuke's silent films A Page of Madness (Kurutta ippeiji, 1926) and Crossways (Jujiro, 1928) are among the most valuable surviving records of the modernist movement in Japanese film, theater, art, and literature produced during the interwar period. A Page of Madness is set in an insane asylum and employs rapid, rhythmic montage sequences, multiple exposures, lens distortions, and a battery of other visual techniques to convey the abnormal sensory experiences and visions of the inmates. Crossways is a historical drama without any swordplay that features expressionistic sets, masterful shot compositions, rich deployment of light and shade, and visually stunning, carefully placed sequences of subjective montage. Kinugasa developed the screenplay for A Page of Madness, the more formally radical of the two films, in collaboration with the young writer Kawabata Yasunari, William 0. Gardner is an assistant professor of Japanese language, literature, and culture at Swarthmore College. His study of Japanese modernism, entitled Advertising Tower: Japanese Modernism and Modernity in the 1920's, is forthcoming from Harvard University Asia Center Publications.
Reality Bonsai : Animism and science-fiction as a blueprint for media art in contemporary Japan
2018
4. Literature Survey My literature review began by addressing the research topic in order to first establish which were the key books, essays, exhibition catalogues and online texts that explain and critique Japan's newly evolving media-scape. This was carried with the intention of either proving or disproving that there is a relationship between Shinto, the indigenous spirituality of the Japanese people, science-fiction themes and today's Japanese Media Art. The initial limits that I placed on the Literature Survey were as follows: Texts had to be published after 1989, because the most prominent Japanese Media Artists became active in the late 1980s. Japanese authors writing in English or who have been translated into English Non-Japanese authors published in English With a view to further limiting the literature search, whilst also improving its focus, I chose texts that addressed the following themes, which were chosen on the basis that the Japanese Media Artists featured in my research, were all influenced by the following: Japanese pop culture; earlier manifestations of Media Art and Japanese Media Art; Japanese spirituality in contemporary Japan; science-fiction. The texts cited below have greatly contributed to the development of my thesis. For clarities sake I will divide them in two groups even though the themes discussed are intertwined: The interrelationship of manga & anime and Japanese society How contemporary Japanese society is interpreted by western scholars Pertinent to the first group are the following texts. In Anne Allison's Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination, University of California Press (2006), the author primarily looks at how Japan became a brand. Not only video games, manga (comic books), anime (animation), and toys designed by Japanese designers have been marketed as "cool Japan" and exported to the rest of the world with particular receptiveness in the US, but also sushi, karaoke, and martial arts have been commodified and marketed as goods 'made in Japan'. The author believes that the economic success and pervasiveness of such 'items' is due to the dream worlds they evoke. Allison proposes that these phenomena and fantasies arose in the post-industrial milieu of postwar Japan and led to what she identifies as a recurring theme: a polymorphous perversity with which the main characters in the narrative present scrambled identities that exist between