Abstract
Japanese animation is one of the rare non-Western media to appeal to a truly global audience. Ian Condry’s latest book searches for the ‘soul’ of Japanese anime to question the idea of its success either as a one-sided economic matter or a deterministic account of an all-encompassing ‘Japanese’ culture. For the author, the soul of anime is neither simply technology nor popularity, but the social energy that drives communications between people, media and objects. In contrast to many hermeneutic/semiotic readings of Japanese anime, the author’s main effort is to introduce an ethnographic perspective in the analysis of the Japanese industry of animation, deploying participant observation and numerous interviews with practitioners, directors, producers and fans. In this way, the book aims to provide a wide idea of what anime means today, for many different people, both inside and outside Japan. The completion of this task, however, demands a confrontation with some of the limits imposed by the theoretical perspective adopted in the text. The subjective point of view of ethnographic research and the notable resistance to political economy, in particular, provide an incredibly lively but also quite idealistic representation of the anime industry, in which creativity, collaboration and success ultimately prevail over inequality, power and competition.
The book opens by considering anime production, analysing the films by acclaimed director Hosoda Mamoru at different stages of their development and distribution. By following the work of a famous director through the multiple moments of negotiations within the anime studio, the author is able to outline the concept of collaborative creativity (p. 2), one of the key ideas of the book. Against the celebrations of Japanese anime directors as ‘romantic’ figures gifted with superior talent and creativity, Condry highlights how anime is the result of complex operations that cannot be carried out by a single person. Behind the work of every author there is always more than an entire studio injecting its ‘social energy’ (labour) into the completion of a common goal (pp. 52–53). The following chapters further expand on this idea, showing how collaborative creation is not limited to inside the anime studio but also establishes links of social interaction across industries and between different actors, which are not necessarily ‘human’.
Arguing against Henry Jenkins’ (2006) famous idea of transmedia storytelling, Chapter 2 brilliantly demonstrates how characters and worldviews constitute the most important creative elements in contemporary anime production. Although narrative is often taken as a key focus by anime fans and observers outside Japan (p. 56), several sessions of script meetings for the children’s anime series Zenmai Samurai and interviews with many practitioners in the industry suggest to the author that the main aim for Japanese creators is to develop flexible platforms (p. 55), or bridges to seriality, of which ‘narrative’ is a crucial but secondary product. The analysis is a thorough portrait of anime production as seen from within, one able to account for the transmedia and serial potential of the anime medium without directly reducing it to the single idea of storytelling.
Chapter 3 presents manga, television and films as the platforms through which characters and worldviews can extend their outreach. The wide and cheap circulation of Japanese comics, in particular, is said to provide in Japan the most important creative resource for the animation industry, which abundantly draws on well-established manga characters and worldviews for its new productions. In this respect, the existence of a constant ‘feedback loop between producers and audience’ (p. 107) in the manga industry would work as a sort of quality control, in which the ‘best’ series become hits and the ‘worst’ are immediately discontinued. Yet, whether or not this is enough to define this system as a form of ‘democratic capitalism’ (pp. 106–107) still remains a debatable issue, probably requiring further empirical and theoretical examination. In general, however, the chapter concentrates on a short history of anime as a medium, analysing the birth of the first studios in post-war Japan (1950s/1960s), their relations with the powerful Disney model, and the subsequent development of TV animation as an integrated media complex based on the technology of limited animation and character merchandising.
Chapter 4 insists on the network of relations established by anime by considering the role of merchandise and toys in extending the ‘life’ of anime characters in the social environment of consumers. The chapter follows the historical development of TV anime series especially designed for adolescent boys, and the parallel emergence in Japan of specific forms of anime fandom from the mid-1970s. Key to these developments was the toy industry and its production of metal and plastic models of anime’s giant robots (kyōdai robotto) (p. 120), something that is specifically addressed by the author in relation to a one-day fieldwork study at Japan’s biggest toys producer – Bandai.
Chapter 5 completes the ethnography of anime production by considering creativity in the renowned studio Gonzo, which was constantly visited by the author during the making of the TV series Red Garden. Complementing the data and interviews collected during this fieldwork with some comparisons with the different strategies deployed by some competing studios, this chapter offers an original portrait of the anime industry, with fresh details about the work space, its labour conditions and the professional practices of the creative team.
The two final chapters move outside the studio rooms to consider various activities involving consumers and fans, both in Japan and abroad. As seen from the site of consumption, collaborative creativity takes the form of a ‘dark energy’ (pp. 163–164), exemplified by the practices of fansubbing and file sharing that take place among online fan communities. Given that they are intended to improve the anime business via illegally spreading its works, these practices offer a controversial account of how media users react against copyright laws by questioning received ideas of justice, ethics and community. In contrast, the seventh chapter looks at the affective bonds established between Japanese hard-core fans of animation (otaku) and their favourite fictional characters. This topic becomes an opportunity to put into question forms of hegemonic masculinity in contemporary Japanese society, although one might ask here if the author is not endorsing too closely the subjective perspective of male consumers. In this respect, the claim that the feelings of Japanese male fans towards 2D anime characters are ‘a plea for accepting a new kind of relationship between consumption as feeling (as love) and society’ (p. 202), proves to be not particularly convincing. Instead of the sign of an emerging non-normative masculinity, otaku’s desire to ‘marry’ female fictional characters (p. 186) sounds too close to the conservative and quite widespread male fantasy of controlling the female body by turning it into an object without substance, perfectly desirable as it cannot speak or act back. Certainly, this chapter promises to ignite a lively debate around the themes of fandom, consumption and identity politics. As a recap of the main arguments, the book ends with a conclusive chapter also outlining some observations about the future of Japanese animation and its increasing globalisation.
The seven chapters of this book – as well as its introduction and conclusion – are diverse and complement each other very well. Moving nimbly between ethnography, media analysis and Japanese contemporary culture, Condry succeeds in deconstructing some key cornerstones of the literature on Japanese anime, such as the notion of the individual author, the role of storytelling in contemporary media productions and the practice of file sharing as simply illegal and unethical. In this sense, the design on the book’s cover – weaving 1800s popular art with contemporary animation in an essentialist continuum – does not do justice to the inquisitive breadth which drives most of the text. Overall, the book provides a broad picture of how the production, circulation and consumption of Japanese anime actually work, and how different subjects attach different meanings and symbolic values to the same audio/visual creations. As a plus, the well organised materials are accompanied by several black and white pictures that are helpful to visualise the content discussed in the text.
The book’s underlying idea of developing a ‘critical theory of production’ (pp. 31, 148) and consumption, however, has to come to terms with some theoretical questions left open by the concept of collaborative creativity. ‘Creativity’ – as well as ‘success’ – has become an ideologically charged term in contemporary popular discourse, and here it seems to sit uncomfortably alongside the critical/Marxian jargon that informs part of the theoretical framework of the book (e.g. labour, commodification, value, etc.). Although the stress on collaboration works very well when it is used to counter individual creativity, at times it becomes a universalist common denominator into which unequal power relations can silently be diluted. This is particularly evident in those passages where ‘social energy’ and ‘creativity’ seem to dispel any friction in the name of some sort of ‘shared interests’ (p. 104) or a ‘common, collaborative enterprise’ (p. 77). In Chapter 4, for instance, the ‘success’ stories of the Gundam franchise and studio Gainax overshadow the harsh reality of the commercial fiascos out of which they actually originated; the mention of bullying inside the studio in Chapter 5 (p. 139) is skimmed over without raising too much concern. Likewise, the excellent portrait of the anime studios as creative ‘open spaces’ is never put in relation to actual work contracts, as if ‘collaboration’ meant the same things for managers, directors or the young animators. To be fair, this is not something the book hides completely. However, the choice to avoid any kind of economic analysis – or thorny issues like failures, redundancies or exploitation – in an industry whose work is articulated by the market, ultimately causes this book to miss the huge opportunity of critically assessing the deep inequalities that lie behind the colourful and fancy façade of the world of Japanese animation.
To sum up, this book remains an excellent resource for those interested in Japanese media culture and the animation industry more broadly. Its ethnography of the anime studios, in particular, adds a new and welcome perspective to the field, offering important examples and case studies for further research or debates in the classroom. Although the book works in the wake of critical culture industries studies, however, it is evident how its perspective does not go beyond a liberal commentary on the creative economy and the ‘successes’ that this would allegedly generate. Many could find this unsatisfactory, if not thoroughly ideological; it is the most evident limit of an otherwise very interesting book.