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.
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.
Interviewed by Jingyi Li for the New Books Podcast, I discuss some of the book’s main points and how this research aims to shift the view of anime toward analyzing the dynamics of globalization.
Winner of the 2023 Japan Society for Animation Studies Award
A formal approach to anime rethinks globalization and transnationality under neoliberalism
Anime has become synonymous with Japanese culture, but its global reach raises a perplexing question—what happens when anime is produced outside of Japan? Who actually makes anime, and how can this help us rethink notions of cultural production? In Anime’s Identity, Stevie Suan examines how anime’s recognizable media-form—no matter where it is produced—reflects the problematics of globalization. The result is an incisive look at not only anime but also the tensions of transnationality.
Far from valorizing the individualistic “originality” so often touted in national creative industries, anime reveals an alternate type of creativity based in repetition and variation. In exploring this alternative creativity and its accompanying aesthetics, Suan examines anime from fresh angles, including considerations of how anime operates like a brand of media, the intricacies of anime production occurring across national borders, inquiries into the selfhood involved in anime’s character acting, and analyses of various anime works that present differing modes of transnationality.
Anime’s Identity deftly merges theories from media studies and performance studies, introducing innovative formal concepts that connect anime to questions of dislocation on a global scale, creating a transformative new lens for analyzing popular media.
Praise for Anime’s Identity:
“Stevie Suan utterly transforms our understanding of anime. Using media theory to expand the formal analysis of anime conventions, while calling on a transnational framework to avoid a simplistic opposition between local and global, he not only provides incisive readings of key anime series, but also lays out a powerful and much-needed methodology for thinking anime in the world.” —Thomas Lamarre, author of The Anime Ecology: A Genealogy of Television, Animation, and Game Media
“Focusing on formalism and performance studies in particular, Stevie Suan proposes a radical alternative for engaging with anime studies.” —Daisuke Miyao, author of Japonisme and the Birth of Cinema
“[Anime’s Identity] is also a readable and concise digest of much of the theory and research on anime in the last decade, serving as a valuable primer for the new scholar….Suan gets to grip with an issue that has hounded people who write about anime for decades – to what extent can we get away with an essentialist notion that it ‘comes from Japan’? —Jonathan Clements, author of Anime: A History.
“Anime’s Identity provides a multilayered overview of cultural debates on anime for an English-reading audience….As a theoretical treatise, the book equips scholarly readers with a well-nuanced interdisciplinary approach to TV anime.” —Ana Micaela Chua Manansala, The Journal of Asian Studies
“[Anime’s Identity is a] readable contribution to anime media theory that is both well-grounded and provocative. The text will be of great interest to anyone studying anime, animation in general, media, or global media circulation. This book is in conversation with other works of anime media theory, such as Thomas LaMarre’s The Anime Machine, but is an innovative addition to the field that will likely become required reading like its predecessors.” —Christopher Smith, Delos: A Journal of Translation and World Literature
Titles of the chapters and subsections:
Introduction: Anime’s Performance of Identity
Anime’s Identity; Macross’s Identity; The Anime-esque; On Forms; Shifting Spatiality; Area Studies and Situating Anime; Media-Form; Historical Moment; Performance/Performativity; Overview of the Book
1. Anime’s Local–Global Tensions
The Bordered-Whole Inter-National; Mapping Anime’s Distribution; Anime’s Inter-national Stasis; Defining Anime; Anime as National Cultural Media-Form; AnimeJapan; Blurring Internal and External
2. Anime’s Dispersed Production
Authorship and Agency in Anime Production; On Anime Production and Publicity; Shirobako; Negotiated Decisions; Media Mix and Materiality; Anime’s Media-Form; Transnationality
3. Anime’s Media Heterotopia
Geographies of Production; Transnational Development; Anime’s Animation Production Network Across Asia; Heterotopic Images; (In)visible Performances; Transnational Hierarchies; Anime’s Media Heterotopia
Anime’s Creative Industry; Creativity and Copying; Citationality and Anime’s Creativity; Citations across Borders; Anime’s Creativity in China; Openly Transnational Anime; Anime across Asia
6. Anime’s Actors
Animation and How Objects Act; Embodied Performance; Figurative Performance; Mutual Implication; Lifestyle Performance and Figurative Acting
7. Anime’s (Anti)Individualism
From Evangelion to Sekaikei; Sekaikei and (Neoliberal) Individualism; Evangelion’s Success and Failure; Deconstructing Individualism; Global Anxieties; Micro-Macro, Local-Global Tensions; After Sekaikei
8. Anime’s Dislocation
Place-Focused Anime; Dislocation in Anime’s Performances; Theatricality; The Animatic Apparatus; Producing Places; Anime Out of Place; Dislocating Differently; Anime’s Complex Spatiality
Conclusion: Anime’s World
Anime’s Performance of Media-Form; Enacting Selfhood; Global Inflections; Shifting Transnationalities; Clashing Forms, Complex Regionality
The sustained achievement of the Kimetsu no Yaiba film in the number 1 spot at the box office and claim to the highest grossing film of all time in Japan marks an important achievement for late-night TV anime. While two other anime, Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi and Kimi no Na ha, have reached similar levels of sales and popularity, neither of these works were based on an established late-night TV anime like Kimetsu no Yaiba is. This may invite questions of what makes Kimetsu no Yaiba so special as to achieve this degree of fame. However, instead of pursuing the question of Kimetsu no Yaiba’s uniqueness, this presentation will instead explore how conventional the anime actually is, through an examination of its media-form, exploring how Kimetsu no Yaiba performs as an anime. Such an exploration will examine some of the recent trends in anime that are employed in Kimetsu no Yaiba, including certain character types, narrative tropes, and character designs. In addition, I will examine some of the patterns of production, and, in comparison with the manga, reveal how the media-formal elements of both mediums reveal divergent types of transnationality.
The over-arching tendency of anime research in academia (both inside and outside of Japan) has been to see anime as a “Japanese media product,” analyzing anime for sociological readings of Japan and its society. However, attending to anime’s media-form—its conventionality and the material actualities of its production processes—would reveal that while Japan is a central node in anime’s production, significant portions of the animation of anime productions have actually been produced throughout Asia for decades. In addition, there are an increasing number of anime produced outside of Japan (for Japan and other markets). Such facts invite multiple inquiries: How do we account for anime’s transnational labor, operating inside and outside of Japan? How do we conceptualize cultural production when anime’s visual conventions are animated outside of Japan? Are these merely “copies” of “authentic (Japanese) anime”? Can we conceive of a new geography to engage with this transnational dynamic?
From this standpoint, contrary to the tendency to “read Japan through anime,” there is a complex politics of place that intersects with the framework of the nation, in conflict with the transnational flows that define this moment of globalization, all enacted through the media-form of anime. Drawing on media studies and performance studies, this paper examines how anime’s performance of media-form does not insist on the neat, ordered world of the nation-state, as on multiple different levels anime explores a difficult, complex geography, enacting the tensions of contemporary globalization. Such complexities are revealed through an analysis of place-focused anime depicting locations in Japan and China (specifically the Chinese-Japanese co-production, Shikioriori), highlighting the dynamics of transnationality rather than a (national) locality on multiple levels.
Link to book (chapter): Repeating Anime’s Creativity across Asia In Trans-Asia as Method: Theory and Practices, edited by Jeroen de Kloet, Yiu Fai Chow, and Gladys Pak Lei Chong, 141–60. London and New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2019.
Anime production, which is usually thought of as located in Japan, has a long history of transnational production within Asia. In this chapter, I focus on this creative industry across Asia, instead of focusing on Japan, in an attempt to rethink how transformations of our notion of creative production can alter the concepts we use to consider regionality through the media produced. For this, I take a formalist approach, examining the mechanics of creativity as it applies to anime and engaging with the dynamics of anime’s transnational system of production. I analyze anime’s recognizability, taking anime as a media-form with repeated patterns, showing how anime itself is sustained on a type of iterability with minor variation, providing an alternative to dominant conceptions of creativity, which valorize “originality” and departure from trend. I then consider the implications of this in regards to recent transnational anime productions and propose how to (re)consider anime’s history of outsourcing labor across Asia. While the focus is mainly on recent works that relate to China’s creative industries due to the current production practices in regards to anime, there will also be attention paid to other places in Asia that have been part of anime’s transnational production network.
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.
While anime studies has flourished in the past few years, in many respects manga studies is much more developed, with a longer history and more debates within the field. Because anime and manga are intimately intertwined media, one might ask what models anime studies could borrow to expand the field. But, as there are significant differences between the two media, there will be points where the theoretical models overlap or deviate, specifically in regards to their inter-related yet media-specific aesthetics. This paper focuses on some of these points, specifically the apparent unity of manga and anime’s conventionalized aesthetics, the material distinctions in the respective media, and the variant degrees of globality.
