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

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.

Objecthood at the End of the World: Anime’s Acting and its Ecological Stakes in Neon Genesis Evangelion

Link to article: Objecthood at the End of the World: Anime’s Acting and its Ecological Stakes in Neon Genesis Evangelion 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.

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.

Consuming Production: Anime’s Layers of Transnationality and Dispersal of Agency as Seen in Shirobako and Sakuga-Fan Practices

Link to article: Consuming Production: Anime’s Layers of Transnationality and Dispersal of Agency as Seen in Shirobako and Sakuga-Fan Practices. Arts, Special Issue “Japanese Media Cultures in Japan and Abroad: Transnational Consumption of Manga, Anime, and Video Games,” 7, no. 3 (2018): 1–19.

As an alternative reading of anime’s global consumption, this paper will explore the multiple layers of transnationality in anime: how the dispersal of agency in anime production extends to transnational production, and how these elements of anime’s transnationality are engaged with in the transnational consumption of anime. This will be done through an analysis of Shirobako (an anime about making anime), revealing how the series depicts anime production as a constant process of negotiation involving a large number of actors, each having tangible effects on the final product: human actors (directors, animators, and production assistants), the media-mix (publishing houses and manga authors), and the anime media-form itself. Anime production thus operates as a network of actors whose agency is dispersed across a chain of hierarchies, and though unacknowledged by Shirobako, often occurs transnationally, making attribution of a single actor as the agent who addresses Japan (or the world) difficult to sustain. Lastly, I will examine how transnational sakuga-fans tend to focus on anime’s media-form as opposed to “Japaneseness”, practicing an alternative type of consumption that engages with a sense of dispersed agency and the labor involved in animation, even examining non-Japanese animators, and thus anime’s multilayered transnationality.

Anime’s Actors: Constituting ” Self-hood ” through Embodied and Figurative Performance in Animation

Link to article: Anime’s Actors: Constituting ” Self-hood ” through Embodied and Figurative Performance in Animation (English version). Animēshon Kenkyū, 19, no. 1 (2017): 3–15.

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.

アニメの「行為者」-アニメーションにおける体現的/修辞的パフォーマンスによる「自己」

論文へのリンク: アニメの「行為者」-アニメーションにおける体現的/修辞的パフォーマンスによる「自己」 (2017)『アニメーション研究』第19巻第1号, 3-15。

アニメーションは命を持たない「モノ」(物理的客体)を動かし、その「モノ」に行為をさせる力が注目されてきた。人間や動物、そしてモノの「体」がどのようにアニメートされるかによって、行為者としての成り立ちが変わってくる。アニメーションにおいて、動きの形式は、特定の行為者性あるいは「自己性」を伴う。ドナルド・クラフトンはアニメーションを分析するためにアニメーションのパフォーマンスを、体現的パフォーマンスと修辞的パフォーマンスに分類して概念化している。本稿では、これらの概念をより詳細に把握し日本のテレビアニメの研究に活用することを目的とする。体現的演技という概念は、キャラクターの表現は、個別化された動きによって生み出され、内部と外部をもつ個人として成り立たせる。他方、修辞的演技は様々な仕草や記号化された表現を通して演技が行われるのである。そして、記号化・コード化された表現に頼るパフォーマンスとしては既存の表現を基にしており、それを異なる文脈で繰り返し採用するのである。これら2つの形式は、それぞれの両端において、「自己」についての異なる概念を制定する。体現的演技は、動きを示す「モノ」に近代的な個人主義の概念を演じさせるのに対し、修辞的演技は「個人主義的な自己」よりも、既存のコードを引用することによる複合構成的なものとしての「自己」を中心に据えるのである。

Anime’s Performativity: Diversity through Conventionality in a Global Media-Form

Link to article: Anime’s Performativity: Diversity through Conventionality in a Global Media-Form. Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal 12 (2017): 62–79.

Anime is a globally prominent media-form with a multitude of styles, yet it maintains a relative uniformity to sustain a recognizable identity as a particular category of media. The performance of the recognizably “anime-esque” is what distinguishes anime as a type of animation, allowing it to be sold and consumed as “anime.” Anime, and its recognizable identity, are performatively constituted by a series of anime-esque acts executed in animation, citing a system/database of conventionalized models in each iteration. What we recognize as “anime proper” are not just “animations from Japan,” but animations that perform large quantities of anime-esque acts. However, anime must continuously work through the problematic of maintaining its identity without redundancy, each performance working through the tensions of diversity and uniformity: in straying too far from a conventional model, it loses anime-esque recognizability and cannot be sold/consumed as anime. As such, anime’s identity negotiates the dynamic divisions between uniformity, repetition, and the global on the one hand, and diversity, variation, and the local on the other. Working through this problematic entails a different type of creativity as combinations of citations from conventional models in each performance negotiates that particular anime’s identity as an anime production and its distinction from other anime. Anime’s problematic is not only invoked through the engagement of conventionalized models of character design and narrative, but also in the technical processes/materiality of animation, which cite character models and conventionalized acting expressions when animated. Yet it is not just the material limits of the medium of animation, there is another limit in the performance of anime in the act of citation that facilitates the doing (and selling) of anime: in the repeated acts of the anime-esque, in the serialization of anime as a media-form, the contours of anime’s formal system becomes a factor of convergence.