Anime and genre

[Lewis Cook]

Todd,

The point has already been argued more cogently by others on this  
thread, but let me clarify that I certainly did not mean to imply a  
global judgement on the artistic validity or aesthetic value, etc.,  
of anime as opposed to cinema. I was simply referring to what seem to  
me significant technical differences in their respective media, both  
from the viewer's perspective and from that of the creators or, case  
in point, the 'director.' Miyazaki is identified in the credits for  
Totoro (just for example) as "kantoku," and this is duly translated  
as "director" in the English version, but however much of an 'auteur'  
Miyazaki may be (and I do not dispute this at all), the creative work  
and the kinds of control he exercises over the outcome is in many  
essential respects quite dissimilar to what a director of 'live film'  
can and cannot do.

Alexander Jacoby's remark, earlier on, that the differences between  
anime and cinema are analogous to those between painting and  
photography is very succintly suggestive, to my mind, and works well  
at a helpful level of generality. To push that analogy a bit further,  
the fact that painting - in modes such as trompe l'oeil, or  
photorealism, e.g. - and photography - in the form of digitally- 
modified images that only remotely refer to an 'exposure' (as it was  
called in the era of silver halide) of an instant perceived - can  
succeed in crossing genre boundaries only at the expense of a  
palpably disconcerting sense of illusion (with the inevitable letdown  
that follows discovery of the deception) is, to my mind, pretty good  
evidence by contraries that the differences, technical or perceptual,  
run rather deep. Which brings to mind, on the other side of the  
analogy, the uncanny sense of genre-dissonance (is it only me who  
experiences this?) aroused by the use of 'animation' in a 'live  
action' film such as "The Mask" (Jim Carrey's, that is - there are  
many better examples, one involving an animated duck in a fairly  
recent comedy I know only from trailers), where the divide between  
tolerably illusory digital special effects and outright animation is  
crossed but by no means erased. (Can't help but recall here the  
connections drawn in Freud's analysis of Hoffman's story "The  
Sandman" between illusions of animation and the sense of the Uncanny,  
in his paper of that title: a bit far off topic, or perhaps not?)
Forgive my verbosity, but I think some of these questions are worth  
getting long-winded about.

Lewis Cook



On Sep 28, 2006, at 12:18 PM, Todd Brown wrote:

> I think there are certainly distinctions within anime and a lot that
> certainly doesn't stand up to cinema standards - though you could  
> say the
> exact same thing about a huge number of films - but there are also  
> a growing
> number of animation directors in Japan who are increasingly ill- 
> served by
> having the anime tag applied.  Mamoru Oshii, Satoshi Kon, Hayao  
> Miyazaki,
> Masaaki Yuasa among others are all legitimate auteurs in their own  
> right who
> are not accorded the respect they deserve because they are forced  
> into the
> otaku ghetto.
>
> Todd.
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Brian Ruh [mailto:brianruh at yahoo.com]
>> Sent: Thursday, September 28, 2006 9:28 AM
>> To: KineJapan at lists.acs.ohio-state.edu
>> Subject: Anime and genre
>>
>> --- Lewis Cook <lcoqc at earthlink.net> wrote:
>>>
>>> 1. No idea how others on the list think about this - I don't have an
>>> interest in theoretical debates about genre per se - but I don't
>>> consider anime to be of the same basic genre as 'movies.'
>>
>> I know that you say above that you're not interested in genre  
>> debates,
>> but I just have to ask -- why is "anime" separated from "movies" in
>> your estimation? (Of course, not all anime is experienced in a cinema
>> setting, so that might be one good reason.) And do you consider anime
>> to be a genre?
>>
>> I'm curious about such perceptions of anime and how it's thought  
>> about
>> and categorized. I'm interested to hear what others might think about
>> this as well.
>>
>> == Brian