Anime’s Identity: Performativity and Form beyond Japan

Link: Anime’s Identity: Performativity and Form beyond Japan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021.

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

4. Anime’s Citationality

Anime’s Brand; Felicitous Anime-esque Performance; Database, Citation, Re-performance; Re-performance, Convergence; Decentralized Network of Citations

5. Anime’s Creativity

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

Revisiting Evangelion’s Endings

“Through a Glass Darkly: Identity Crises in Ghost in the Shell and Evangelion

Link to the beginning of “Revisiting Evangelion’s Endings”

Re-examining the TV and filmic endings of the first Evangelion series, this talk inquires into the notions of selfhood explored by the series by utilizing performance theory for animation. Examining the different modes of existence enacted through the performance of animation, this lecture presents an ecological reading of the two, divergent finales.

Talk given for the Japan Foundation NY with Susan Napier and Frenchy Lunning.

Anime’s Spatiality: Media-form, Dislocation, and Globalization

Link to article: Anime’s Spatiality: Media-form, Dislocation, and Globalization. Mechademia: Second Arc (Materialities Across Asia) 12, no. 2 (Fall 2020): 24–44.

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.

Repeating Anime’s Creativity Across Asia

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.

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 (English version)

Link to article: Anime’s Actors: Constituting ” Self-hood ” through Embodied and Figurative Performance in Animation (English version). Original Japanese version in 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.

Performing Differently: Convention, Medium, and Globality from Manga (Studies) to Anime (Studies)

Article in Japanese: 相違するパフォーマンス マンガ( 研究) とアニメ( 研究) を繋ぐ慣例、メディア、グローバリティ
Article in English: Performing Differently: Convention, Medium, and Globality from Manga (Studies) to Anime (Studies). In Comicology: Probing Practical Scholarship. Kyoto International Manga Museum: Kyoto Seika University International Manga Research Center, 2015.

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.

グローバルな舞台でローカルなアニメが演じるアイデンティティ危機 ―『フルメタル・パニック! The Second Raid』を中心に

Article in Japanese: グローバルな舞台でローカルなアニメが演じるアイデンティティ危機 ―『フルメタル・パニック! The Second Raid』を中心に 京都精華大学紀要 第48号  March, 2016: 3-20.

In TV anime series, narrative and character, among other elements, tend to be highly conventionalized. These conventions are a significant part of how anime is produced, recognized as anime, and interpreted. It is through the performance of these conventions that anime articulates its identity. In this study, I analyze how anime’s conventionalized patterns are performed within the context of shifting tensions between the local and global. This will be explored through an examination of Full Metal Panic! The Second Raid (TSR: 2005), an anime historically situated during the peak of anime’s exportation boom and the JSDF’s deployment to Iraq (2004-06), and which can be read as thinking through identity, globalization, and military narratives. I examine how TSR performs anime’s established conventional patterns in a manner that questions the logic of those conventions, engaging with the anxieties of expanded exportation of a previously local, niche product suddenly exported on a global scale with government backing, and the contemporaneous media discourse on the expanded militarization of Japan. The identity crisis of the main character, Sousuke, acting as the core, conventionalized plot of the series, will be analyzed in relation to the identity of anime itself. Through Sousuke’s identity crisis TSR raises questions about anime’s conventional logic (the narrative and character conventions that appear commonplace), and their connections to the ethics of using lethal force (even in defense), problematizing conventional anime narrative structures and military narratives in general.