Abstract
In the last few years, the global success of many Japanese media franchises seems to have confirmed the idea of a culture of convergence characterised by new modes of seriality, literacy and interplay between consumers and producers enacted by digital media. The peculiar history of the Japanese form of media convergence, however, still remains mostly obscure to media scholars with no training in Japanese. Mark Steinberg’s Anime’s media mix: Franchising toys and characters in Japan fills this gap by providing an analysis of the transmedia strategies commonly known in Japanese marketing by the term ‘media mix’. The book’s main argument is that media convergence developed earlier than the digital era, thanks to practices of character licensing and merchandizing able to ‘mediatise’ things, objects and the entire social environment. As these processes have been catalysed in Japan by the development of television animation (anime) from the 1960s, the analysis of this book focuses on a genealogy of Japanese anime conceived as the nodal point of that intermeshed media ecology organised around the connective power of characters.
The book is divided into two distinct parts. The first defines the features of the media mix using as a case study the turning point represented by the first anime TV series Tetsuwan Atomu (Astro Boy). The launch of this series in 1963 established Japanese anime as a new medium based on the optimization of the production costs and the inclusion of character merchandising at the core of the production process. Despite the very limited frame rate imposed by the budget restrictions, particular technical solutions were used to impart under-animated images with a sense of movement. According to the author, this very feature of exalting motion in still images is the key to understanding anime’s extraordinary openness towards other media and objects. Anime’s ‘dynamically immobile’ images were not only genealogically related to older Japanese media like manga and kamishibai (paper theatre) but also very well suited for attachment to disparate objects able to extend their ‘movement’ from the TV screen to the physical environment. This is illustrated in Chapters 2 and 3 through an analysis of the historical transformation of Atomu’s characters into tangible media commodities. The material circulation of objects like stickers or toys reproducing the anime characters allowed young consumers to feel that they were inside the narrative world of the series, at the same time maximising its popularity and the sales of its sponsoring products. In contrast to the analyses of the commodity form mainly concerned with its immaterial qualities (i.e. exchange and sign values), the author highlights how capitalism increasingly relies on both the virtual nature of intellectual properties and the very material heterogeneity of things to establish interobject and interpersonal networks necessary to arouse desires and spur consumption.
The theoretical implications of the emergence of these media commodities are the focus of the second part of the book, where the media mix and its synergetic system of transmedia relations are considered symptomatic of post-Fordist modes of production and consumption. Chapter 4 tries to historicise the Japanese discourse on the media mix by analysing the shift from its first definition as a marketing strategy for multiplatform advertising campaigns towards a model of integrated media production exploited more recently by big media conglomerates like Kadokawa Publishing. The last chapter further dwells on this idea through a theoretical ‘dialogue’ between the critique of contemporary capitalism by Italian thinker Maurizio Lazzarato and Japanese media theorist Ōtsuka Eiji’s concept of the character–world relation: As the post-Fordist enterprise exploits social interactions making them productive, similarly the media mix constructs a fictitious world of characters that exploits consumer’s attention by tying it to the different commodities of the same franchise.
Compared with the existing literature on Japanese anime, the book’s most original aspect is its choice of examining its subject not simply in terms of visual representation but in the technical and material capacities of each medium to create networks of relations. In this, it interestingly applies to the Japanese media mix many insights drawn from media ecology studies, actor–network theory and deleuze-inflected cultural studies. Thanks to this perspective, the author manages to explore the intricate networks established by Japanese anime escaping two opposite but complementary risks: reducing anime to a derivative evolution of ‘Western’ influence (i.e. Disney’s model) or conceiving it as essentially rooted in a Japanese ‘culture’ impermeable to any exogenous development. The willingness of the author to put Japanese theories of animation and merchandise alongside more general works about media and cultural economy is a further attempt to remove the discussion on Japanese media culture away from the ‘culturalism’ and self-referentiality by which it is often affected. The case studies proposed are convincing and supported by a wide range of Japanese primary sources, and the exposition is always clear even in the more theoretically dense passages.
Occasionally, the book leaves some space for minor criticisms. The use of the dynamically immobile images of anime as a key to explain the development of Japanese character merchandising, for example, is an original and inspiring idea, but its prominence in the book’s framework leaves the reader with an unresolved conundrum. Why is character merchandising so widespread in other countries, like the United States, which have historically developed forms of animation not based on the same technical specificity? The answer remains open to further comparative study on character merchandising and relative media ecology. The second part of the book, instead, represents consumers as active but still powerless actors in front of capital’s subsuming power. Without contesting the idea that audiences become literally ‘productive’ in contemporary media culture, it is equally undeniable that many social practices challenging the regime of accumulation based on intellectual property are currently taking place, even in the sphere of Japanese popular culture. Counter-examples potentially in contrast with the Marxist framework of the Real Subsumption – such as anime fan-subs or manga scanlations – are not taken into account in this study of the media mix. Finally, the book lacks a concluding chapter to keep the arguments of its two main sections together.
These, however, are only small blind spots compared with the overall contribution of this book to our understanding of character merchandising as a technology of media relationality. All in all, this study succeeds in providing a detailed, historically grounded and theoretically original account of an interesting but underdeveloped topic in the English language. With it, Steinberg provides a timely conceptualisation of anime characters, encompassing – but not merely determined by – economy, copyright law and technology. As such, it definitely represents a key reading for anybody interested in Japanese media, cultural economy or comparative perspectives on media convergence.