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Document type

Book review

Published

10 November 2009

4 Anime Books

• Schoolgirl Milky Crisis: Adventures in the Anime and Manga Trade
• Mechademia 3: Limits of the Human
• Robot Ghosts and Wired Dreams: Japanese Science Fiction from Origins to Anime
• Ga-Netchu! The Manga Anime Syndrome

Review by:

Jasper Sharp

Schoolgirl Milky Crisis: Adventures in the Anime and Manga Trade

Author:

Jonathan Clements

Publisher:

Titan Books (2009)

Call me a cynical old curmudgeon, but the world of anime and manga scholarship is a regular source of bemusement to me. For starters, it's obvious that the single-minded focus on the purely Japanese product suggests that many of its main authorities see something irreconcilably different in these media than in animation and graphic novels produced outside of Japan, and that these qualities therefore elucidate unique hidden truths about Japanese culture, society, traditions and aesthetics. Comparisons or connections between the art and economics of similar industries across the world, when they do occur, are usually reduced to a simplistic Japan-versus-Hollywood binary.

Why, oh why then, as I've noticed over the years, is it that the field's most fervent writers and researchers seem to have so little interest in other aspects of Japanese culture, notably live-action cinema or literature. The focus is so tightly restricted to the object of analysis that, more often than not, one comes away with the feeling that the relentless theorising around topics such as magic girls, cyborgs and cosplay is merely just an excuse to valorize the otaku by replacing fanboy jargon with academic gobbledygook, taking the discussion into realms where it probably doesn't belong. While I've argued strongly myself that cartoons aren't just for kids and there is plenty of interest to be found in the field (if you look in the right places), sometimes you just feel like banging these peoples' heads together and shouting "For God's sake, it's only a cartoon!"

And so, despite the success of Miyazaki et al, anime appreciation remains in something of a ghetto, wrapped in layers of impervious verbiage guaranteed to put off the casual viewer. In light of these observations, Jonathan Clements is something of a violin in the void. Best known for his sterling work on The Anime Encyclopedia, his latest foray into the subject, which takes its rather bizarre name from an imaginary unmade series that he regularly invokes in his insider anecdotes to protect the innocent, is a compendium of almost twenty years of assorted articles, lectures and liner notes largely gleaned from his regular columns for the magazines Neo, Newtype USA and the UK SCI FI Channel website.

I'm going to quote from one of these pieces, called "Explanations: The Search for Deeper Meanings", because I think it encapsulates the reservations I expressed above, as well as giving an example of the irreverent wit that marks a lot of these articles:

'Have you ever wondered how a Japanese pundit might sound holding forth on our own culture with the same kind of attitude?

"Aha! The comic. Yes, the komm-ick. Contracted from the German for 'come with me', the traditional invitation of the medieval story teller. A comic, or in some parts of Europe, a comique, is by definition, comical. You see, they have to be funny. If it's not funny, it's not a comic. The first comic was invented in a cave in France by a nameless Stone Age man. It was about a reindeer hunt, but the guy in the cave next door drew his own about a bear hunt, and eventually there was a crossover. DC have recently released it as Reindeer Hunt Reloaded, with two collectible covers. Then came the Bayeux Tapestry, which wasn't actually a comic, but looks a bit like one. In Europe, comics are usually read by children, as they have more time on their hands. Adults don't read at all, unless it's Harry Potter, or fan fiction they downloaded for free off the Intarwebnet. Comics often have square panels in order to create cruciform shapes in the spaces in between, a reference to the European cult of Christianity..."'

Clements is particularly well placed to talk about such things, not only because he's been working at the coalface of the industry for years, as a translator, scriptwriter, voice cast director (and sometimes voice actor) and all-round pundit, but because he's not unhealthily fixated on just this one subject, as a glance at some of his recent book titles bears out: A Brief History of the Vikings, The First Emperor of China, Wu: The Chinese Empress Who Schemed, Seduced and Murdered Her Way to Become a Living God and Confucius: A Biography.

At almost 400 pages in length, Schoolgirl Milky Crisis touches on all sorts of areas of interest, and not only in the field of anime and manga. There are interviews with the likes of Mamoru Oshii, Neil Gaiman and Barefoot Gen creator Keiji Nakazawa. There's information on Chinese animation, hentai anime, manga adaptations of Mills and Boon romances, recent Korean cinema, kaiju eiga and the eikaiwa racket (the piece 'Gaijins and Dolls: Language School or Dating Agency?' is sure to invoke shudders of recognition amongst all us poor sods who have served our time teaching English in Japan). Perhaps the most interesting parts for anime fans are going to be the pithy anecdotes surrounding the clueless moneymen that jumped on the bandwagon after the field started being seen as something of a cash cow in overseas markets.

There's lots of information here, and Clements casts his net far and wide, although not necessarily particularly deep, which is fair enough given its piecemeal format. With most of the pieces about a page in length, it makes for a breezy read, and without wishing to be too facetious (and certainly in no way a reflection on the quality of the writing), Schoolgirl Milky Crisis fits pretty comfortably into the "toilet book" category: a book you'll more likely want to keep dipping in and out of rather than scouring from cover to cover in a single sitting. But it's fun, and certainly casual consumers of Asian culture will find much of interest, while I dare say academics could also learn a thing or two.

Availability

Mechademia 3: Limits of the Human

Editor:

Frenchy Lunning

Publisher:

University of Minnesota Press (2008)

Flicking through the third volume of Mechademia, it dawned on me I might have been unduly harsh on the direction of this series in my review of the first, Emerging Worlds of Anime and Manga, back in 2006. Though I didn't see the second volume, Networks of Desire, it occurred to me that editor Frenchy Lunning, assisted this time by Thomas LaMarre and Christopher Bolton, is less interested in trying to posit these intrinsically Japanese media in some sort of socio-historical context than in attempting to address them on their own terms.

After all, just as 1965 manga Terebi-Kun ('Television Boy') "plays with the notion of another world that interacts with our everyday existence, while also highlighting the intensely commercial nature of the medium", as Michael Dylan Foster explains in one of the earlier essays, 'The Otherworlds of Shigeru Mizuki', the post-modern floating worlds created on the page or on the screen (with the emphasis on 'created', not 'recorded' or 'reproduced') with which Mechademia engages are more about imagination than reality. In this context, the way these images become dis-anchored from their cultural roots and reach audiences across the world is of interest.

Foster's essay won me round, of course, as I've been a huge fan of Mizuki's Ge Ge Ge no Kitaro manga for some time, with its panoply of yokai - spirits and mystical beings drawn from legend and tradition. (In fact, isn't it about high time someone thought of publishing English translations of this beautifully grotesque series? As an aside, I have this hazy, near subliminal, memory from my distant childhood of seeing an animated 'kassa-obake', or umbrella ghost, on UK television in the early 1970s - but I can't think what this would have been, or why it would have been broadcast. Anyone with any ideas out there?). Foster provides a beautiful balance between factual information and theory in his exploration of the origins of Mizuki's fantastical and eccentric creatures, and why they constitute such a strong "postwar construction of a communal memory of a premodern cultural ecology".

The themes addressed in Limits of the Human are wide-ranging, and are divided into three sections: Contours - Around the Human, Companions - With the Human, and Compossibles - Of the Human. Sure enough, the Ghost in the Shell films come up for discussion, notably in Steven T. Brown's fascinating 'Machinic Desires: Hans' Bellmer's Dolls and the Technological Uncanny in Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence' and Sharalyn Orbaugh's 'Emotional Infectivity: Cyborg Affect and the Limits of the Human', both of which isolate specific strands from the wide range of influences Oshii has drawn upon in his film (I must say, I never knew anything about Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's 1886 novel L'Eve Future, with its perfect artificial woman called Hadaly, that Orbaugh writes about).

Other topics under discussion include Theresa Whinge's "Undressing and Dressing Loli: A Search for the Identity of the Japanese Lolita", Thomas LaMarre's "Speciesism, Part 1: Translating Races into Animals in Wartime Animation" and Takayuki Tatsumi's "Gundam and the Future of Japanese Art." While I'm not going to renege on my original assessment of the first Mechademia, as some of its essays were distinctly sub-par, this third volume shows the journal clearly establishing a serious identity of its own and as such provides a vital platform for intelligent discussions of anime and manga. I look forward to the next.

Availability

Robot Ghosts and Wired Dreams: Japanese Science Fiction from Origins to Anime

Editors:

Christopher Bolton, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Takayuki Tatsumi

Publisher:

University of Minnesota Press (2008)

From the same publishers as the Mechademia journal, and with essays by many of the same writers, comes this wonderful anthology that does exactly what I claimed most books on anime don't. i.e. put it into some sort of context, with half the first five of the book's eleven chapters focusing on prose science fiction and the other half on animated science fiction. As is pointed out in the introduction, very little Japanese sci-fi literature has been translated, which makes it rather difficult for foreign viewers to work out where anime and manga sit within the broader scheme of things. Miri Nakamura's opening essay, 'Horror and Machines in Prewar Japan: The Mechanical Uncanny in Yumeno Kyusaku's Dogura Magura' really had me slathering to get a hand on a English-language copy of this seminal work from 1935, which sounds absolutely extraordinary, but alas, only a French translation exist. One hopes studies such as this one will encourage publishers to give it a try.

Nakamura's piece comes illustrated with some amazing photos of Japan's first robot, (jinzo ningen, or 'artificial human'), which are worth the cover price alone. Created in 1928 by the scientist Makoto Nishimura, it was seen as heralding the birth of Japan's "machine age" (kikai jidai), which gave rise to early Japanese science fiction and ero-guro writing. In fact, when you consider that the world's first magazine devoted to sci-fi was only published in 1926 by Hugo Gernsback, it becomes apparent how early the Japanese were in on the game.

Thomas Schnellbacker provides an interesting analysis of the precedents leading up to Sakyo Komatsu's Japan Sinks, in 'Has the Empire Sunk Yet? The Pacific in Japanese Science Fiction', but for me the cherry on the cake of this section has to be William Gardner's 'Tsutsui Yasutaka: Multimedia and Authorship', a study of the writer whose experimental multimedia capers led to the works Gaspard of the Morning (1993) and the 1993 source novel for Satoshi Kon's Paprika.

The anime section is pretty good too, with essays including Sharalyn Orbaugh's 'Sex and the Single Cyborg: Japanese Popular Culture Experiments in Subjectivity' and Livia Monet's 'Invasion of the Woman Snatchers: The Problem of A-Life and the Uncanny in Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within.' Top of the pile in this half is editor Christopher Bolton's contribution 'The Mecha's Blind Spot: Patlabor 2 and the Phenomenology of Anime.' The more I read of Bolton's work, the more I'm convinced he's one of the more profound voices in this area of studies.

In summary, Robot Ghosts and Wired Dreams is an essential read, full or startling insights and fantastic nuggets of information, and not just for anime students either. Go buy a copy.

Availability

Ga-Netchu! The Manga Anime Syndrome

Author:

n/a

Publisher:

Deutches Filmmuseum

There's been a dearth of decent introductory texts for those not "in" on the manga/anime scene who wish to find out what the whole thing is all about, what the main titles are, where the aesthetic and cultural origins lie and how they have evolved, the state of these industries today and how both media are constructed and consumed in Japan. Thankfully the Deutches Filmmuseum have put this to rights with this lavishly-illustrated hardback released as the catalogue to "Anime! High Art - Pop Culture" exhibition held in Frankfurt am Main in 2008 that subsequently travelled to a number of other venues across the world.

I should state at this point that it is difficult to be wholly objective about the book, seeing as my 'Between Dimensions: 3D Computer Generated Animation in Anime' is one of the 30 or so essays included between its 280 pages, but one thing that really struck me when seeing the finished product was what a good job the editors have done in commissioning pieces that tackle the two fields from a variety of different angles yet which build upon and interconnect with each other in revealing ways, while still remaining concise enough to make their points without outstaying their welcome. For example, my essay is bracketed by Thomas Lamarre's 'Full Limited Animation', which explains what is meant by the terms full and limited animation (the latter being a cost-cutting device where only a limited part of the flat image moves, something of a defining characteristic of anime best exemplified by Osamu Tezuka's Astro Boy TV animations in the 60s) and how both techniques have been creatively deployed in Japan, and Nils Dittbrenner's 'Anime Interaction: Video Games and Manga Culture' about how the manga/anime aesthetic has influenced the form and content of video games.

There's a number of articles about portrayals of women across these media, including Dinah Zank's 'Girls Only!? Japanese Girls' Culture as Reflected in Manga and Anime', Doris Croissant's 'Prince Genji in Manga: Gender, Pop and Parody' and Holger Briel's 'Hentai: Eroticism in Manga and Anime'; there are focuses on individual studios in Lawrence Eng's 'The Fans Who Became Kings: Gainax and Otaku Culture' and Julia Nieder's 'A Southern Breeze from the Far East: the Films of Studio Ghibli'; there's Stephan Kohn's 'Japan's Visual Turn in the Edo Period'; Daniel Kothenschulte's 'Opulence and Limitation: The Styles of Early Anime'; Volker Fischer's 'Urban Iconophilia: Manga and Product Culture'; and a revealing article by Nippon Connection's Alex Zahlten entitled 'Something For Everyone: Anime and Politics' about Japan's recent attempts to promote its 'contents' industry encouraged by former Prime Minister and self-confessed manga fan Taro Aso, what this means for the industry at large and whether it is indicative of a new form of nationalism that emphasizes the differences between Japanese and foreign pop culture ('soft power' and 'national character' are two phrases you'll hear a lot in relation to anime nowadays). Did you know, for example, that only a few years back the Japan Foundation donated a season of the soccer anime Captain Tsubasa (1983), dubbed into Arabic, to the largest Iraqi television station "to provide the children with a vision of a positive future", according to Aso.

You'll notice from the above that most of the writers are locally based, but the German angle brings about its own revelations, notably in Josef Gohlen's 'Suspect, Yet Successful: Anime's Way Onto German Television', which looks at how Japanese/German/Austrian collaborations such as Vicky the Viking (1972-74) and The Adventures of Maya the Bee (1975) came about, and how Europeans were consuming Japanese animation long before Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira hit Western markets.

The strongest aspect of the catalogue is its plethora of full-colour illustrations, which demonstrate convincingly the points made in many of the articles; for example, how the flat manga style was derived from Edo period woodblock prints by the likes of Kunisawa Utagawa, Hokusai Katsushika et al, how depictions of war evolved in woodblock prints and manga between the Sino-Japanese and Pacific wars, how the styles of different animators and manga artists vary, and perfectly illustrate such articles as Kazuma Yoshimura's "Manga is the Face: Manga, Photography and Portraiture."

Ga-Netchu! has been published in both German and English, though the English-language version is currently not stocked by online retailers such as Amazon.com, and can only be ordered from the Deutches Filmmuseum website for only 24.90 Euros which, for a hardback pushing 300 pages so stuffed with words and images, is a virtual giveaway.

Availability