Anime

A History

Jonathan Clements

• Publisher: British Film Institute
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781844573905
• eBook ISBN:
  9781838714390
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

This comprehensive history of Japanese animation draws on Japanese primary sources and testimony from industry professionals to explore the production and reception of anime, from its origins in Japanese cartoons of the 1920s and 30s to the international successes of companies such as Studio Ghibli and Nintendo, films such as Spirited Away and video game characters such as Pokémon.

1KID DEKO’S NEW PICTURE BOOK

Early cartoons in Japan 1912–21

In December 2004, the researcher Matsumoto Natsuki stumbled across an antique box of movie paraphernalia in Japan’s ancient capital of Kyoto. Among the camera parts, film canisters and other bits of junk, Matsumoto retrieved a small strip of 35mm film, comprising a mere fifty frames – just enough footage to splice into a loop. More crucially, the film contained images in red and black ink, drawn directly onto the celluloid.

If run through a projector at the early twentieth-century norm of sixteen frames per second, the scrap of film would last just under three seconds. The sequence of hand-drawn images would present an impressionistic, stylised but identifiable sequence: a boy in a beret, scrawling the words Katsudō Shashin (moving pictures) on a blackboard, and taking a bow (Matsumoto 2011a: 98). Scanned into a computer and looped on the Internet, it would eventually reach a worldwide audience far larger than any that could have conceivably seen it a century earlier.

The discovery of the Matsumoto Fragment was a contentious issue in the study of Japanese animation. Reported in the Japanese newspapers during the ‘silly season’ of summer 2005, its significance soon ballooned from a mere curio to a matter of politicised scandal. Matsumoto unwisely speculated that the fragment could be ‘up to ten years older’¹ than the cartoon previously thought to be Japan’s oldest, inadvertently leading the Asahi Shinbun to immediately assume that it had been made in 1907, and others to proclaim that the Matsumoto Fragment was even older (China Daily 2005). In the space of a few column inches, rehashing a press release at the height of summer when there was little other news worth reporting, journalists had inflated the story from that of a simple antique curio to a discovery that could rock the world of animation studies – suggesting that the medium of animated film itself might have been created in Japan.

Matsumoto never made such a claim. A few foreign anime magazines credulously repeated the hype, only for it to die down again. The nescience of the original reporters had allowed Japanese animation to briefly assert its own tradition as the original tradition, before it became clear that there was no evidence to back up the claims. The Matsumoto Fragment was old, certainly, but it could not be dated. It may not even have been screened, rendering it, to some, as less a film than a comic drawn on celluloid.

In the years since, Matsumoto has published a more detailed account of the context of his discovery. Most notable is a further description of the ‘junk’ amid which it was found – cardboard boxes containing toy magic-lantern kits from distant Europe, and intended for home use. The notion led Matsumoto to reconsider the rhetoric of previous ‘firsts’ and defining ‘events’ – yes, we can still hunt down the ‘first’ reported cartoon in Japan and the place of its first exhibition, but such a bias towards public exhibition ignores the possibility of a vibrant, unseen domestic culture of magic-lantern shows, and toys that produced animation in some other form (Matsumoto 2011a: 99–100).

It is difficult to discern an exact origin point for animation in the history of film. We might split hairs by pointing out that all film is animation, imparting the illusion of movement to images that are still when in their resting state – if this is the case, then the zoetrope and praxinoscope, alongside other Victorian curios, are themselves types of animation, and cinema itself is an outgrowth from this root.

Historians of pre-cinema similarly argue for the rise of the magic-lantern show as a precursor to true cartoons. Although its first arrival in Japan is unrecorded, examples certainly made it as far as China, where in the 1670s, the Italian Jesuit Claudio Filippo Grimaldi demonstrated a series of optic ‘miracles’ before the court of Kangxi, the Emperor of Hearty Prosperity (Mannoni 2000: 73).

Eventually, the technology of the magic lantern reached the isolated island nation of Japan, where the use of local materials and ingenuity transformed it from a simple picture show into something far more dynamic. Finding the European metal lanterns too weighty and unwieldy, Japanese practitioners made their own from more portable paulownia wood, which in turn made it easier for Japanese performances to incorporate motion (Koyama-Richard 2010: 54). The term in Japanese for a magic-lantern show varies from place to place, reflecting the itinerant nature of such performances. From the first appearance of magic-lantern shows or phantasmagoria in 1803 as utsushi-e (‘reflected pictures’) in the Edo (Tokyo) area, they were known in the Osaka region as nishiki kage-e (‘brocade shadow pictures’), but in Shimane simply as kage ninge (‘shadow puppets’). The materials deployed in magic-lantern shows were fragile in the extreme. Every wooden projector (or furo) required two lenses, and each magic-lantern plate (tane-ita) was painted onto the thinnest possible glass. Hence, very few artefacts have survived from the period – a gap of nescience that has led many historians to assume that Japanese cinemagoers had no frame of reference for watching pictures in the dark. But magic-lantern shows in Japan would often involve several practitioners darting behind the screen creating, in the words of the Minwa-za company director Yamagata Fumio, ‘a real spectacle’ (Koyama-Richard 2010: 54–5), with each lantern projecting a particular character, allowing them to appear to move and interact more like insubstantial puppets than projected slides. Nor were the magic lanterns confined to fairy tales or legends, since some were also employed for instructional purposes – commencing with their incorporation into anatomy lectures as early as 1877, but expanding by 1895 to spectacular military news events, complete with a narrator, choir and accompanying musicians, who would thrill Japanese audiences with tales from the Sino-Japanese War (Ōkubo 2011: 76, 87).

The screening of films in Japan throughout the so-called silent era coalesced around issues of a performative ‘event’, in which a master of ceremonies, the benshi, would string together the often disparate two- and three-minute reels of film with an ongoing patter of elucidation, humour and interpretation. Particularly in the earliest days of cinema in Japan, when the form of the new entertainment was just as exciting a prospect as the content, the benshi would begin by explaining how the technology of film projection actually worked. Only then would he move onto the content of the upcoming films, giving advance notice of the nature of the next film, including any warnings that might be required about fearful moments or incidents of odd foreign behaviour, such as kissing (Greenberg 2001: 7; Katō 2006: 211).²

Japan gained its first dedicated movie theatre, the Denki-kan (Electric Pavilion) in Asakusa, Tokyo in 1903 (Standish 2005: 18). Such an event is an important milestone in the development of early cinema, since the presence of ‘fixed sites’ (Elsaesser 1990: 161) suggests an immediate rise in demand for product to fill them. Although there were 300 Japanese movie houses by 1916, the vast majority of them were concentrated in the Tokyo and Osaka metropolises. The cinematic experience in the countryside remained in the hands of travelling shows that performed in tents. In all cases, the benshi was a critical conduit of meaning and entertainment. Intertitles were largely absent from Japanese film before 1920, rendering foreign works hard to follow without a live interpreter.

The benshi was hence more than a mere announcer or narrator, although he also performed those roles. He was the cinema’s barker and town crier, its warm-up man and the literal interpreter of the film. To many audience members, the benshi was the star (Greenberg 2001: 8; Katō 2006: 214). A good benshi could send the audience home praising a spectacular night’s entertainment, even if the films on show were little more than reel-ends and cast-offs; a bad one could turn the greatest of films into a dull evening out. There are stories of benshi in tuxedos and tails, adding a touch of class to the local picture house, and instilling a sense of occasion among moviegoers. There are photographs of benshi attired as the movie stars they are voicing, imparting an immediate, third-dimensional impact to the films they presented by dressing up as, say, Charlie Chaplin (Bernardi 2001: 101). When the inaugural issue of Japan’s first film magazine Katsudō Shashin Kai (Moving Picture World or The Cinematograph) appeared in June 1909, it was a benshi, not a movie star, who graced the cover (Fujiki 2006: 68).

The benshi style pre-dated the moving pictures themselves. Similar narrators had long been a feature of Japanese puppet theatre, where onstage musicians accompanied a man who performed the voices of the characters. The term was also applied to the itinerant storytellers of the kamishibai (paper theatre), a tradition that persisted until the 1950s, who could set up their stands in streets and parks, and tell a story by slotting card pictures in and out of a frame like a proscenium arch, sometimes mounted on the back of a bicycle. The kamishibai benshi’s performance was supposedly free, but only children who bought sweets from him got to sit at the front (Nash 2009: 80).

The notion of a benshi was not foreign to Western audiences – before the rise of the intertitle in France around 1903, cinemas employed a bonimenteur to talk audiences through the ‘silent’ presentation.³ Some of the earliest practitioners of film in America and Europe used it as part of a hybrid performative event, and promised ‘prologue presentations’ by live acts that ensured every time-slot would precisely fill the requisite two hours (Balio 1993: 27; Crafton 1997: 75–6).⁴ Others made the film and live presentation symbiotically reliant upon each other. Perhaps the most famous of such hybrid performances was that of the cartoonist Winsor McCay, who presented a one-man show in which he acted the role of a dinosaur tamer. The part of Gertie the Dinosaur was ‘performed’ by a sequence of drawn images shown on film on a screen behind McCay. Gertie the Dinosaur in its original incarnation, was a ‘vulnerable’ text designed as part of Winsor McCay’s vaudeville act. McCay himself would stand on stage and interact with Gertie in the manner of a lion-tamer, coaxing her into performing tricks, throwing her an apple and finally walking behind the screen and ‘into’ the picture, as a cartoon McCay that rode off on his dinosaur (Crafton 1982: 111). In Japanese terms, McCay functioned as a unique and exclusive benshi, presenting a film that originally could not exist without his personal presence.

McCay was prevented from presenting Gertie in its original intended form by a conflict-of-interest issue with his new employers at the Hearst Corporation, who wished to limit his public appearances. As a result, the edition of Gertie that has survived is a retooling of the original footage, with a newly filmed framing device in which McCay the eccentric artist wagers that he can make the dinosaur come to life. He is hence preserved as a performer of his own work, and the performance of his animation, the making animate of Gertie the Dinosaur, is part of the new story. In this reversioning of Gertie the Dinosaur (also 1914), the dinosaur animation takes up five minutes from a total running time of twelve (Crafton 1982: 117).

Such performance in and of animation has been a feature of the medium since its first appearances on film. In 1896, Georges Méliès, under the stage name of le dessinateur express, undercranked the camera that filmed him drawing caricatures of celebrities, in order to give the impression of ‘lightning sketches’. A decade later, J. Stuart Blackton’s Lightning Sketches (1907) presented Blackton himself at work before zooming in on the blackboard as the characters came to life (Crafton 1982: 50, 55). Animation in the West hence began as it did in Japan, with its origins obscured in the ferment of sideshows, vaudeville acts and ‘trick films’, as part of a cinema of attractions. Such trick films made their way to Japan during the very earliest days of cinema; the film historian Koga Futoshi has persuasively demonstrated that a 1903 poster for an event at the Kado-za theatre in Osaka, the Tennen-shoku Katsudō Daishashin (Natural-coloured Moving Great Pictures) bears Japanese artists’ renditions of at least eight of Méliès’ films stretching from Le Livre magique (1900) to Les Trésors de Satin (1902) (Koga 2011: 48–50).⁵ A year later in 1904, the Kabuki-za, in competition with nearby picture houses that were showing reportage from the Russo-Japanese War, fought back with a gloriously eclectic selection of otherwise unidentified movie reels, including one called The Haunted House in the Ruins of Napoleon’s Palace (Dobson 2005: 78). This may have been one of the many ‘haunted house’ trick films that had already flooded the European market. Although none of these films are ‘animation’ in the strict sense of drawn images given implied motion, several contain pixilation (time-lapse), stop-motion or visual effects that utilise elements of the process we now call animation.⁶ In 1905, these films reappear alongside a number of identifiable later Méliès works in a Japanese catalogue of magic-lantern slides and moving-picture shows (Koga 2011: 57). Both appearances predate the establishment of Japan’s first true film magazine, Katsudō Shashin Kai in 1909, and henc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Kid Deko’s New Picture Book
• 2. The Film Factories
• 3. The Shadow Staff
• 4. The Seeds of Anime
• 5. Dreams of Export
• 6. Warrior Business
• 7. The Brown Screen
• 8. The Third Medium
• 9. The Pokémon Shock
• 10. The Digital Engine
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Filmography
• Index
• List of Illustrations
• eCopyright