“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
