Anime Fan Communities

Transcultural Flows and Frictions

S. Annett

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137480651
• eBook ISBN: 9781137476104
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Film & Video
• Index: Social Sciences

How have animation fans in Japan, South Korea, the United States, and Canada formed communities and dealt with conflicts across cultural and geographic distance? This book traces animation fandom from its roots in early cinema audiences, through mid-century children's cartoon fan clubs, to today's digitally-networked transcultural fan cultures.

Part I

Animation and the Miraculous Cinema

1

Cartoon Internationale

Rather than ask at what point film became a global medium, it is perhaps more pertinent to ask: was there ever a point at which film was not a global medium? A quick survey of film history reveals that moving picture technologies were themselves internationally mobile from their inception. Supported by the vast networks of imperial trade established by the end of the nineteenth century, Edison’s Kinetoscope and the Lumière brothers’ cinématographe spread with a speed and scope that remain impressive today. Within two months of the first commercial cinématographe screening in Paris on December 28, 1895, the Lumières’ program was being shown in London. A few more months and it reached Central Europe and the United States (April 1896), Canada (June 1896), and Russia (July 1896). By 1897, the cinématographe had been demonstrated on every continent except Antarctica, with screenings in Alexandria, Bangkok, Bombay, Buenos Aires, Osaka, and Sydney.

Along with film programming, filmmaking equipment and technological innovations also traveled quickly. Edison’s Kinetoscope had been demonstrated in Kobe, Japan by 1896, and in 1897, the same year the cinématographe debuted in Osaka, photographer Asano Shirō imported a motion-picture camera and began filming local street scenes and geisha (Richie 2005, 17). In the next decade, technological elaborations on live-action filming, such as the first animated “trick films” featuring objects or drawings shot a frame at a time, spread equally as fast. James Stuart Blackton’s 1907 stop-motion animated short “The Haunted Hotel,” for instance, created a sensation in Paris within four months of its American debut (Crafton 1993, 14–16), while Frenchman Émile Cohl’s 1908 hand-drawn “Fantoche” films had their Japanese release in 1910 at the Imperial Theater in Asakusa, Tokyo (Yamaguchi and Watanabe 1977, 8). Based on these well-known facts, it would seem quite easy to say that the production, distribution, and consumption of film was a world-spanning venture from the start.

That said, it is ideologically suspect to claim that film was “always already” global, in the ahistorical, totalizing sense that phrase takes on when used carelessly, as if to say, “I see globality this way now, so this is the way it has always been.” Rather, it is necessary to ask what form of globalization was taking place in early-twentieth-century animation. Upon closer inspection, it may be premature to call film or animation “transnational” in this period, as scholars such as Michael Baskett (2008) and Daisuke Miyao (2007) have done. For all that ideals of cosmopolitanism shaped the content and distribution of animated films, I will demonstrate that animators still worked most often at the international level throughout the 1920s–40s, in that their films represented trade between (inter-) fairly distinct national cinemas and film industries, without the kinds of mutual collaborations across difference that make up transnational globalization and transcultural community in the twenty-first century. When exploring animation in the early twentieth century, then, it is necessary to ask: through what structures of trade and discourses of (inter)nationalism were film images and apparatuses circulated? How did the mobile works themselves depict the relationship between audiences and media, nations and films, world and cinema? And how did such depictions change along with the changing film technologies and geopolitical conditions of the early twentieth century?

This chapter aims to answer such questions by focusing on the production of animated films for international markets in the Americas and Japan before the end of World War II. In 1911, Russian playwright and screenwriter Leonid Andreyev wrote a paean to the cinematograph in which he expounded

The miraculous Cinema! . . . Having no language, being equally intelligible to the savages of St. Petersburg and the savages of Calcutta, it truly becomes the genius of international contact, brings the ends of the earth and the spheres of souls nearer, and gathers the whole of quivering humanity into a single stream. The great Cinema! . . . It copes with everything, conquers everything, conveys everything. (Qtd. in Reeves 2003, 3)

As we shall see, silent and early sound animators, as well as some animation critics, also tended to frame animation as the “genius of international contact,” spreading characters and ideas throughout the world using the mobile medium of the cinematograph. Animating audiences—depicting them, but also interpellating them as audiences—was an important part of this project in animation, especially as it transitioned from silent to sound film in the early 1930s. Animated short films actively modeled film-going behavior both on a national level, showcasing their own countries’ content and modes of spectatorship, and on an international level, showing famous cartoon characters such as Betty Boop traveling to Japan—or, in Japanese works, becoming Japanese herself. The shorts introduced here provide the first intimations of future transcultural fan cultures. Ultimately, however, film animation of this period remained embedded in structures of international trade and opposing imperialisms that limited the chance for truly transcultural collaborations to develop. The systems of cinematic internationalism that connected and constrained diverse creators and audiences will be the subject of this chapter.

Reflexivity and Animation

Andreyev describes film as a medium that “copes with,” “conquers,” and “conveys”: that is, a form that interlinks cultural anxieties or frictions that must be managed, political issues of territory, and questions of communication between filmmakers and audiences across all the “ends of the earth.” Likewise, film animation began its life around the turn of the twentieth century as a medium which coped with, conquered, and conveyed a world shaped by its own (international) mobility. The theme of movement features strongly not only in its distribution as a product and its properties as a medium, but also reflexively in its content, as the subject matter of many of the earliest silent films. In the introduction to his Before Mickey: The Animated Film 1898–1928, Donald Crafton notes that “the first [stop-motion] animated films were concerned with making objects appear to move with a mysterious life of their own” (1993, 7), highlighting the creation of motion. Hand-drawn works, such as Winsor McCay’s “Little Nemo” (1911), likewise showed comic-strip characters who announced in on-screen text “Watch me move!” (103, 105), demonstrating in content the new medium’s capabilities as machine.

Along with animated movement, early Western cartoons were also prone to show the mover, the pencil-wielding hand of the animator. Crafton states that “the early animated film was the location of a process found elsewhere in cinema but nowhere else in such intense concentration: self-figuration, the tendency of the filmmaker to interject himself into his film” (11). In his view, what animation primarily animates is itself: its capacity to create the illusion of life and to show its own creator, the animator, in “the role of life giver” (12). He goes on to show how self-reflexivity was accomplished “not mysteriously, but deliberately” (12) through the purposeful decisions of animators and through the technologies and studio organizations they helped to develop.

Crafton’s argument that self-reflexivity became an established trope in silent American and European animation before 1928 is important for the foundations of Western film animation, but it also provides an intriguing way to begin thinking about how animation developed outside the West, yet not beyond its influence. In Japan, silent animated cartoons of the 1920s and early 1930s also show a level of reflexivity about their technologies and their status as created works, though not always as explicitly as Western cartoons that literally showed the “hand of the animator” entering the frame. Reflexivity as a visual trope can be understood to “reflect” (and perhaps create) a relation between individual viewers, their social/geopolitical contexts, and the apparatus of the viewing medium itself. So, in order to understand animation’s international manifestations, we must pay close attention to how animation was framed as such by depicting the animator’s work. In addition, I would also like to introduce another reflexive figuration common in early cartoons that animation scholars, including Crafton, often overlook: the audience. While Crafton discusses live spectators’ reactions to early films, he does not consider animators’ representations of their audiences in their own films at any length. And yet, interpellating audiences through animation was an important part of the work of animation from its inception.

In terms of the animation of animation, there is a self-reflexive tradition going back to the silent days, and even into the pre-cinematic lost works and “false starts” of animated film. Consider, for example, one of the many rumored fore-runners of animation in Japan: the so-called Matsumoto Fragment. This little strip of drawings, created by stencil-printing¹ on the 35mm 4 sprocket-hole film used by Edison since the mid-1890s, was discovered by respected researcher Matsumoto Natsuki in Osaka in 2005, jumbled in a box amidst antique European magic lantern toys. In a 2011 article on “Domestic Imaging Appliances During the Advent of Film: Magic Lanterns, Animation and Toy Films,” Matsumoto states that he “carefully dated the years of manufacture of all the peripheral materials found in situ with the Fragment, in order to deduce the earliest possible point in time when such a group of items could be assembled,” (trans. Clements 2013, 20). His guess based on this dating was that the short might have been made up to ten years earlier than the previously known anime produced in 1917, though it was by no means conclusive. His speculation, however, was seized upon by Japanese newspapers eager to claim the priority status of “firsts” and place Japanese animation alongside European contemporaries, with Asahi Shinbun echoing Matsumoto’s phrasing of “up to ten years older” (“Japan’s Oldest?” 2005), and Mainichi Shinbun pushing the date back to “just after 1900” (Clements and McCarthy 2006, 169). The fixed date of 1907 has been seized upon in the English-speaking world, perpetuated by crowd-sourced projects such as Wikipedia and YouTube.

As of 2011, the strip itself still remains undated and its pedigree unverified. It is a highly disputable beginning for anime, and should not be considered as such in any linear, teleological timeline of film history. And yet, as the remnant of a moment in Japan’s amateur visual culture, its contents are intriguing. When played at 16 frames a second, the Matsumoto fragment reveals a black line drawing of a little boy in a sailor-style school uniform and a red peaked cap. In clear Japanese, in the old right-to-left style of orthography, the boy writes a phrase on a board. The phrase he writes is: 活動写真—katsudō shashin—moving picture. He turns to face the audience. In the same movement, he doffs his red cap and bows, smiling. In one phrase, in 50 frames, the entire medium of film animation is reflexively introduced. Just three seconds have passed.

Now, let us compare the Matsumoto Fragment to the rather better-documented silent short “Fantasmagorie.” This film was certainly created around 1908 in France by Émile Cohl, an artist and hobbyist of film. According to Crafton, his works were not quite the first animated experiments in the West, and he was not recognized as an innovator in his lifetime. But thinking in terms of moments rather than lineages, “Fantasmagorie” acts as an interesting early vector for reflexivity. Here, on an all-black background, a live-action hand comes into frame from the left and draws a clown in thick, solid white lines. It’s an exercise in figurative geometry: lines for arms, circle head, triangle hat, square torso. The hand moves out of the way, and the little clown pulls down the “bar” it is holding over its head, which becomes a rectangular screen picturing a fat man, his body one huge circle, with a top hat and umbrella. The clown steps off right, and the fat man floats down, losing hat and umbrella, into a theater seat. A woman wearing an immense feathered hat enters and sits in front of the man, blocking his view. What they are watching is literally peripheral: just the tantalizing corner of a proscenium arch on the far left of the screen, mostly out of frame. Curtains rise and fall, revealing halves of figures and indecipherable lines. Is it a theater stage, or a movie screen? What is happening up there? Whatever it is, it is clearly affecting her. As the man pulls feathers off the woman’s hat in a bid to see, she, absorbed in the show, cries a line of tears into a handkerchief, smiles, peers through opera glasses. When the last feather is removed, the man sits back with a cigar that (accidentally?) lights the woman’s head on fire. But no harm done: the ball of fire turns into a bubble with the clown inside. It floats away and everything changes. Figures morph fluidly one into the other, cannon to champagne bottle to flower to elephant, as increasingly nonsensical events chase each other in a series of visual free associations, arbitrarily evolving and just as arbitrarily ended. The finished cartoon is just less than two minutes long.

There are a number of significant differences in style and content between the anonymous Matsumoto Fragment and Émile Cohl’s “Fantasmagorie.” The drawing style of the Fragment is figurative and (by comparison to Cohl) naturalistic, depicting a simplified but recognizably Japanese boy. The written text “Katsudō Shashin” is also clearly aimed at those who could read Japanese, and so suggests an intended domestic audience. Indeed, it is doubtful if this short played beyond a household setting, if it ever played at all. Cohl’s more international “Fantasmagorie,” by contrast, has no written dialogue or screen text, but does draw on the visual language and white-on-black style of the American J. Stuart Blackton’s blackboard short “Humorous Phases of Funny Faces” (1906), even as its strange iconography reveals Cohl’s debt to the avant-garde “Incoherent” art movement in France (Crafton 64). Already these silent examples demonstrate approaches, themes, and characters that would recur in Japan, across Europe, and into America throughout prewar and wartime animation. In Japanese animation, there is the figure of the little boy in uniform, the self-conscious representation of new, imported technologies, and the importance of Japanese language teaching and learning through direct address. In France (as in America) there is a focus on the self-figuration of the artist’s hand and the depiction of emotional spectators. For all their differences, there is one similarity: both, to a greater or lesser extent, are characterized by reflexivity. They are cartoons about cartoons, their technologies, their creators, and most importantly, their viewers.

Still, how much of the “reality” of animation is being depicted in these examples? The attention given to drawing hands and moving pictures here suggests a medium that is essentially self-reflexive, depicting only what goes into the making of the film itself. Similar observations have led some scholars to claim that animated self-reflexivity leads to a kind of filmic narcissism or self-enclosure. For instance, Dana Polan argues that when Daffy Duck duels with the pencil that controls his character design, backgrounds, sound, framing, and camerawork in the 1953 Looney Tunes short “Duck Amuck,” animation “closes in on itself, fiction leads to and springs from fiction, the text becomes a loop which effaces social analysis” (1974, n.p.). In this view, there is a sharp divide between works that are naturalistic and represent social reality, and those that are self-reflexive and represent their own essentially unreal world.

Others scholars, however, take a more nuanced stance on the issues of filmic reality and reflexivity. Robert Stam, in his thorough overview of Reflexivity in Film and Literature: From Don Quixote to Jean-Luc Godard, argues that “Realism and reflexivity are not strictly opposed polarities but rather interpenetrating tendencies quite capable of coexistence within the same text” (1992, 15). Stam thus prefers the term “reflexive” to “self-reflexive.” I follow him in understanding animated “reflexivity” not only as a matter of how animated works depict their own genres, materials, and technologies, but also how they reflect the social conditions of spectatorship that make them possible, in the sense that “reflection” itself is a discursive process by which “reality” is formed. This process is particularly evident when animation turns from depictions of itself to animate audiences in the context of national identity and international exchange.

Animating National Audiences

From the silent period onward, American animators have had a great fondness for showing both filmmaking and film-going. Among the most memorable meta-cartoons from the major producers of the 1920s and 1930s are Otto Messmer’s silent Felix the Cat shorts “Felix in Hollywood” (1923) and “Flim Flam Films” (1927), the Fleischers’ silent “The Cartoon Factory” (1924) and sound “Betty Boop’s Rise to Fame” (1934), Warner Bros. Studios sound shorts such as “Bosko’s Picture Show” (1933) and “The Film Fan” (1939), and Disney’s sound shorts “Mickey’s Gala Premier” (1933) and “The Autograph Hound” (1939). Many of these, like Cohl’s “Fantasmagorie,” show general audiences in the space of the theater. To take just one example, Friz Freleng’s 1937 talkie “She Was an Acrobat’s Daughter,” a Warner Bros. Merrie Melodies cartoon, parodies the bad habits of movie theater audiences using animal caricatures. It shows a fat hippo stepping on toes while he squeezes in and out from the middle row, a jackass getting kicked out for trying to shill snacks, and a motor-mouth duckling who chatters in a non-stop stream “Is there a cartoon I like cartoons do you like cartoons Daddy?” until he is chased ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: Frictive Pictures
• Part I   Animation and the Miraculous Cinema
• Part II   After These Messages: Television Animation in the Age of “Posts”
• Part III   Online Conversations Across Difference
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index