EVENT: Roundtable for The Cambridge Companion to Manga and Anime

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Roundtable for TheCambridge Companion to Manga and Anime

Featuring editor Jaqueline Berndt (Stockholm University), and contributors Akiko Sugawa-Shimada (Yokohama National University), Patrick W. Galbraith (Senshu University), Bryan Hikari Hartzheim (Waseda University), and Stevie Suan (Hosei University)

February 19th, 17:30-19:30

Hosei University, Ichigaya Campus
Ouchiyama Building, Room Y401

Online attendance is available, please sign up here: 
https://forms.gle/bxwWaA34KU4EHqiH7

This roundtable foregrounds contributors’ experiences with The Cambridge Companion to Manga and Anime: reading each others’ chapters and rereading one’s own in context, considering teaching applications in different settings, and looking ahead to potential future research within and without Japan studies.

The Cambridge Companion to Manga and Anime, edited by Jaqueline Berndt (Cambridge University Press 2024), addresses manga and anime as media forms. Their companionship may be obvious from the perspective of non-Japanese fan cultures or research fields invested in Japanese popular culture, franchising, and classroom pedagogy. But as comics and animations, manga and anime also diverge, and not all types of manga and anime interconnect easily. To conjoin them as two distinct while interrelated media forms, this Companion is divided into thematic sections that, in principle, consist of two chapters, one taking the perspective of manga studies and the other taking the standpoint of anime research. These thematic sections stretch from investigating textual forms such as visuals, voice, serial narrative, and characters to genres and forms of production, distribution, and use. The prevailing form-conscious approach results from the central position ceded to mature readers and viewers, acknowledging their imaginative and critical agency. More importantly, it allows to foreground analytical tools that are applicable to changing contents and situations, up to and including non-Japanese productions and usages of the two media forms.

“Manga” is often translated as Japanese comics, just as “anime” is frequently generalized as Japanese animation. But scholarly interest in manga and anime has expanded beyond Japanese studies in recent years. This Companion limits its scope to comics and animations that are recognized as manga and anime on a global scale, which are also the types that interconnect easily. The main emphasis is on entertaining fiction and, most specifically, serial narratives. Professional and official, that is, corporate productions are prioritized. In addition, this Companion confines itself to Japanese productions. But the underlying motivation is not to emphasize nationally specific concepts at the cost of transnational flows or to generate knowledge about Japanese culture utilizing manga and anime. Instead of manga/anime studies serving Japanese studies, the latter’s expertise aids the exploration of manga and anime as locally situated transcultural media forms. All contributions are based on primary Japanese-language sources and intimate knowledge of public, subcultural, and academic discourses concerning manga and/or anime. In equal measure, the individual chapters draw on globally shared, mainly English-language scholarship in comics studies and animation studies. While these new research fields facilitate the focus on manga and anime’s media specificity, familiarity with the particularities of the Japanese environment and its histories helps balance media specificity and transmediality.

Providing insights into the media forms themselves through deliberately analyzed examples and concurrently introducing up-to-date scholarship in an accessible style, this Companion offers an authoritative model for research in the burgeoning research fields of manga studies and anime studies to newly interested and highly experienced readers.

Character Acting in Anime

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“Character Acting in Anime” in The Cambridge Companion to Manga and Anime, edited by Jaqueline Berndt. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, U.K.; New York. 2024: 146-157.

When attention is paid to the ways characters perform and are performed in anime narratives, it becomes apparent that there are certain regularly utilized approaches to the character acting widespread in anime’s animation. Two of the most prominent modes of performance have been called embodied acting and figurative acting. Each uses distinct techniques to act out a specific character’s personality and, in the process, imply different notions of selfhood. This chapter examines the specific utilization of embodied and figurative acting in Yūri!!! on Ice and how these interrelated modes of performance dovetail with the narrative. Through its balancing of embodied and figurative modes of performance, the anime moves between an individualized self whose interior is expressed externally and an open acknowledgment of the interrelation of external others in the performance of self and gender.

On Pedagogy and the Personal: Teaching Media, the Nation, and Globalization about/in Japan

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Link to book chapter: “On Pedagogy and the Personal: Teaching Media, the Nation, and Globalization about/in Japan” in Teaching Japan: A Handbook, edited by Ioannis Gaitanidis and Gergory S. Poole. Japan Documents, Far Eastern Booksellers: Tokyo, Japan. 2024: 22-37.

This chapter details the pedagogical background and class structure of the 300-level class “Media and the Nation,” which interrogates the concept of the nation through the examination of different media in the context of modern Japan. It also provides an overview of another class that developed out of it, “Media and Globalization,” which focuses on one media (anime) and how it is riddled with transnational dynamics, even if it is closely associated with Japan. These classes were designed to give students some tools to think about the national and how it is inextricable from transnational interconnections and global contexts. The aim was to explore how the national frame operates, specific examples of where it manifests, the fault lines it can reveal, its intersections with different patterns of transnationality and globalization, how these all shift over time, and have enduring relevance to students’ daily lives.

動畫行爲者的演出：跨越疆域與身體 (“Performing Anime’s Actors: Across Borders, Across Bodies,” translated into Chinese by Ming Hong Tu)

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Link to book: 「動畫行爲者的演出：跨越疆域與身體」(“Performing Anime’s Actors: Across Borders, Across Bodies,” translated into Chinese by Ming Hong Tu) in 『故事與另外的世界：台灣 ACG 研究學會年會論文集1』, edited by Ding Gang Liu, Yiyun Li (奇異果文創事業有限公司: 台北, 2023)

Translated from the keynote speech of the 1st Animation Comics Games (ACG) Research Association Conference in Taiwan. This talk begins with examining a common method of analysis of anime which focuses on an anime as the commentary of the director about Japanese society. It explores how this method “acts” as it frames the understanding of where the creative locus of anime is located. By attending to the performance of anime as a media-form, with the enactment of animation as central to its production, a different conception of anime, who makes it, and where it comes from, is brought into view. Indeed, many of anime’s animators, colorists, and background artists are located outside of Japan—something which is not just a recent development, but reaches back decades to the very early days of TV anime. Taking account of their contributions to the performances of anime’s animation enables us to rethink cultural production under globalization. To sustain a shift in the way anime is conceptualized, the second portion of this talk explores the dynamics of such performances of anime to enable lasting recognition of the importance of the aesthetics of animation. The operations of anime’s character acting are analyzed through the examination of two distinct but interrelated modes of performance. The first, embodied performance builds characters through their individualized movement, similar to Method Acting. The second, figurative performance, constructs characters through combinations of reiterated codified expressions. Exploring such aesthetics of animation provides insights not only into anime but also the implications of how these modes of performance operate in our everyday lives.

Les acteurs de l’anime: construire une individualité par la performance en animation (“Anime’s Actors: Constituting “Self-hood” through Performance in Animation” translated into French by Marie Pruvost-Delaspre)

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Link to book: “Les acteurs de l’anime: construire une individualité par la performance en animation” (“Anime’s Actors: Constituting “Self-hood” through Performance in Animation” translated into French by Marie Pruvost-Delaspre) in La qualité du cinéma d’animation en question,entre économie et esthétique Full Animation vs. Limited Animation? Edited by Sébastien Denis, Lucie Merijeau, Marie Pruvost-Delaspre, Sébastien Roffat (L’Harmattan: Paris, 2023)

If animation allows us to envision a world of active objects through animating their movement, then surely how the objects are made to move through the animation changes how they are constituted as actors. In other words, how bodies move in animation, human and object alike, also entails certain conceptions of ” self ” as it is constituted through the dynamics of its animation. This study aims to (re) consider Donald Crafton’s conceptualization of animation performance forms (embodied and figurative performance), specifically in relation to Japanese anime. In embodied acting, the expression of character is produced through distinctive movements, where characters are constituted as individuals, each with their own discrete inside and outside. Figurative acting, on the other hand, utilizes various gestures and codified expressions. Due to this reliance on codified expressions, figurative performances build from previous ones, replaying and reiterating them in different contexts. Each of these forms enacts a different conception of selfhood: embodied acting performing the modern conception of individualism bound to the singular body on the object which performs the movement; figurative acting performing a type of “particularity” entailing a different conception of the strict internal/external borders of ” individuality, ” where the self is a composite configured through the citation of codes. Figurative performance thus facilitates an aesthetic well attuned to the contemporary performance of self under the conditions of neoliberalism, selecting from a vast array of options, jerkily moved from one product and expression to another.

Original Japanese version published in Animēshon Kenkyū, 19, no. 1 (2017): 3–15, English version.

Objetualidad en el Final Del Mundo: La Actuación en el Anime y los Riesgos Ecológicos En Neon Genesis Evangelion (“Objecthood at the End of the World: Anime’s Acting and its Ecological Stakes in Neon Genesis Evangelion” translated into Spanish)

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Link to book: “Objetualidad en el Final Del Mundo: La Actuación en el Anime y los Riesgos Ecológicos En Neon Genesis Evangelion” (“Objecthood at the End of the World: Anime’s Acting and its Ecological Stakes in Neon Genesis Evangelion” translated into Spanish) In Estudios de Anime: Aproximaciones a Neon Genesis Evangelion desde una perspectiva de medios, edited by José Andrés Santiago Iglesias and Ana Soler Baena. (Satori Ediciones C.B.: Madrid, 2023)

Different forms of selfhood enacted in the TV and filmic endings of the anime Evangelion can be revealed by building on Donald Crafton’s typology of performance of/in animation of “embodied acting” and “figurative acting.” Embodied acting is “introverted,” and tends towards the production of modernistic, anthropomorphic individuals that appear to provide a sense of depth in their enactment of emotion through their individualized movement. Figurative acting, which repeats similar codes in varying combinations for different characters, is “extroverted,” as the codes appear shared between various characters, forcing a recognition of the surface location of the code for that emotion, on not in the character. As such, the interrelation and tension between these forms of performing selfhood play out in Evangelion: objects of human creation, the Eva-units, boldly display their agency as they exhibit shocking performances of embodied acting, the Eva-units appearing with the same autonomy as human individuals; on the other hand, humans are broken into parts, their psyche examined in pieces as they delve into their minds to find only more pieces of other characters, an interrogation of the constitutive codes of figurative acting—the examination of objecthood that we see in the TV ending. However, the filmic ending departs from the optimistic embrace of objecthood and presents the harrowing vision of ecological catastrophe as it explores different individualisms, taking them to their world-ending climax.

Original English version published in Anime Studies: Media-Specific Approaches to Neon Genesis Evangelion. Ed. José Andrés Santiago Iglesias and Ana Soler Baena (Stockholm: Stockholm University Press, 2021), 135-180.

Stevie Suan on his book, Anime’s Identity, Interview by Wendy Goldberg at CaMP Anthropology

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Interview by Wendy Goldberg on Anime’s Identity: Performativity and Form beyond Japan at Ilana Gershon’s site CaMP Anthropology. In the interview, I discuss some of the ideas behind the book, transnational cultural production, and different modes of performing the self under neoliberalism: https://campanthropology.org/2023/02/13/stevie-suan-on-his-book-animes-identity/

Enacting an Ecological Disposition: Performing Dividuality in Kaiju no Kodomo’s World of Vibrant Matter

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Link to article: “Enacting an Ecological Disposition: Performing Dividuality in Kaiju no Kodomo’s World of Vibrant Matter.” Mechademia: Modes of Existence, edited by Sylvie Bissonnette, Frenchy Lunning, and Sandra Annett. University of Minnesota Press. 15 (2), Fall 2022, 193-214.

In its performances in/of animation, the anime film Kaiju no Kodomo depicts a lively world where the human becomes open to the vitality and activity of the nonhuman (what Jane Bennett would call a world of “vibrant matter”), embracing an egalitarian openness to the nonhuman, presenting a method of expressing the self that goes beyond the anthropocentric individualism so coveted under neoliberalism. This is explored through a specific employment of embodied and figurative acting operations, each engaging with different tendencies of performing the self: embodied acting tending toward anthropocentric individualism with a bordered inside-outside bodily division; figurative acting tending towards a self that is enacted through interconnection with others, whose constitutive parts link across bodies. As such, figurative acting embraces what might be labeled as object-oriented dividualism—a conception of selfhood that Bennett develops where dividuals are entities whose constituent parts stem from disparate sites, affecting themselves as well as others.

Through the specific configuration of the spatiality of embodied and figurative acting, specifically in the character Ruka, the film moves through individualism toward transforming into a specific type of dividual. Not suffering from the radical lack of closure and dissolution of self that dividuality can teeter toward, Ruka maintains an internal-external border like the individual of embodied acting, but acknowledges the permeability of that boundary, still embracing the interdependency and openness to the outside employed in figurative acting. As such, the animated film can be seen as presenting, in Bruno Latour’s terms, a fictional mode of existence, exploring a world and beings with distinct dispositions, and the interdependency with the means and materials through which they are performed.