Japanese Animation in Asia

Transnational Industry, Audiences, and Success

Marco Pellitteri, Wong Heung-wah, Marco Pellitteri, Wong Heung Wah

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781351343206
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Social Sciences
• Categoría: Ethnic Studies

Anime is a quintessentially Japanese form of animation consisting of both hand drawn and computer-generated imagery, and is often characterised by colourful graphics, vibrant characters, and fantastical themes. As an increasingly globalising expression of popular art and entertainment, and distributed through cinema, television, and over the internet, anime series and films have an enormous following, not only in Japan but also in Asia. This book provides a comprehensive survey of the historical development, industrial structure, and technical features of Japanese animation and of the overall dynamics of its globalisation in key contexts of the Asian region. Specific chapters cover anime's production logics, its features as an 'emotion industry', and the involvement of a range of Asian countries in the production, consumption, and cultural impact of Japanese animation.

Part I

Background and working concepts on Japanese animation

1 History and media discourse

Key notions to understand ‘anime’

Marco Pellitteri

DOI: 10.4324/9781315123707-1

As Heung-wah Wong has explained in greater detail in the Introduction, this collection offers new contributions on how animated cartoons created and designed in Japan (henceforth, anime) have intercepted the media systems, professional domains, and audiences of other Asian contexts.

Our main aim is to offer, in Part II, essays on six experiences with anime in the Republic of Korea, China, the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, and India. The need to provide readers with preparative contextualisations in order to situate the implications of anime's circulation and success gave us the chance to present, in Part I, historical information and discussion on anime as an industry and a business field, as well as the opportunity to provide a preliminary framework on how we believe anime should be intended as an articulated and composite form of media entertainment. Among the topics that will be discussed in Part I: the anime sector in Japan and its inward (Chapters 1–2) and outward (Chapter 3) orientations; ‘media mix’, transmediality, the cultural bias inscribed in anime's alleged ‘de-nationalised’ visual appeal, the fascination for anime's deep contents (Chapters 1 and 4); and some insight on anime's unexpected popularity in other regions—namely, in the 1970s–1980s’ western Europe (Chapter 4).

In the first half of this preparatory chapter, a historical account of animation's development in Japan is provided; in the second half, we discuss a set of concepts that should help to put at least some of the main connotations of this book's themes into context. In the last section of the chapter, we point out a few further theoretical notions that readers either will meet throughout the book or may want all the same to keep in mind, as they are attached to anime's polyhedric nature.

Manga and anime: quick definitions

Manga. Manga is the general word for comics and graphic novels in Japanese. This is not a book that speaks about manga, if not in tight relation to anime: manga has been an important visual and narrative source for anime since the 1960s. In this book, which focuses on anime, extending the discourse to the journeys and transnational markets of manga would have enlarged the discussion beyond our scope and framework. Mentions to manga and its role in the experience of anime's exportations, however, will be distributed all across the collection where deemed opportune. The word's etymology is multi-layered; in general, the term is to be translated as ‘funny picture(s)/dynamic figure(s)’. The main supporters of the word to indicate first cartoons on magazines, and then sequential comics, were Kitazawa Rakuten (1876–1955) before the Second World War, and Tezuka Osamu (1928–1989) in the postwar period; the latter was also one of the main contributors to manga's storytelling canons. By the word manga most Japanese, today, usually indicate comic books produced both domestically and in general, i.e. also foreign comics; for which, moreover, is often used the loan from English komikku/komikkusu (‘comic/comics’). Outside of Japan, however, the term refers to and implies comics made by Japanese creators; although we are recently beginning to talk of ‘non-Japanese manga’, i.e. comics made not in Japan by non-Japanese authors, but that reproduce or quote structures and visual styles regarded as typical of manga.¹

Anime. While animated cinema has been defined in Japan by different names, since the 1970s the English word ‘animation’ took over in the field's parlance, and it was soon shortened into anime. Since then, this peculiar word designates animated films and series made in Japan through the ‘cel’ techniques (see the next section), despite the fact that several authors—such as Miyazaki Hayao and the late Takahata Isao, co-founders of Studio Ghibli—prefer(red) to label their animated films manga eiga (Gan, 2010), a Japanese word that we can translate as ‘dynamic picture film(s)’.

The words anime and manga can be intended both as singular and plural. When either is intended as a medium, the singular form should be used; if either is framed as a collective body of works, we must resort to the plural form, but without the English's plural ‘-s’ desinence.

In the next three sections, we provide a synthetic historical overview of Japanese animation as a creative sector in its home country. For reasons of space, we won’t engage in discussion on its styles and contents; the focus will be only on the development of its main industrial features.

Building the industry of Japanese animation / 1: the origins

Animation is a form of cinema that consists of numerous techniques; in this sense, the production of experimental animations has also been thriving in Japan. But in this country, the most representative technique has always been, since the late 1910s, that of animated cartoons drawn on celluloids or ‘cels’ (transparent acetate sheets), the method introduced in the United States in 1914 by Earl Hurd for John Bray's Bray Productions and soon after in use in any other US studio as well as in Europe.

It was precisely from the United States that these techniques were imported, without forgetting the considerable technical and stylistic influences of Chinese traditional animation on Japanese creators from the 1930s to the 1950s (Hu, 2013). Still today, although slowly and inevitably decreasing, the cel animation techniques are in use in Japan, despite the growing recourse to the digital tools.

The first company that produced animation in Japan was Tennenshoku Katsudō Shashin, shortened as Tenkatsu, founded in 1914 by former employees of Nihon Katsudō Shashin, or Nikkatsu. Nikkatsu had been created in 1912 from the merger of four photography and film studios; still today, it is one of the largest film companies in Japan. At Tenkatsu, Shimōkawa Ōten, one of the first Japanese animators, created the short film Imōkawa Muku-san genkanban no maki (‘Story of Imōkawa Muku-san, the guardian’, January 1917). His fellow pioneer Kitayama Seitarō convinced Nikkatsu to fund his own short film Saru to kani no kassen (‘The fight between the monkey and the crab’, May 1917). Kōchi Jun’ichi made Namakura gatana or Hanawa Hekonai meitō no maki (‘The blunt sword’ or ‘Hanawa Hekonai and the famous sword’, June 1917), with the help of Kobayashi Shōkai, a short-lived production company founded in 1916 by Kobayashi Kisaburō after he had left Tenkatsu. In the 1920s and 1930s, largely in the Kansai region around Osaka, a numerous and financially independent atelier-style animation community developed. However, from 1926 to 1945 the main funding source for animation came from the public sector, particularly the military, for ideological and war propaganda purposes; it was from the aforementioned community that the government mainly sourced the artists for its funded animations. Production endeavours such as the one that led to Momotarō: Umi no shinpei (‘Momotarō: The sacred sailors’, by Seo Mitsuyo, 74’, b/w, 1945), the first feature-length film in the history of Japan's animation, were key experiences for the development of the medium (Tsugata, 2004; Bendazzi, 2015, I: 180–7).

The military's commissions stopped at the end of the Second World War. Postwar reconstruction initiated an industrialisation process that involved animation: studios were established, like Tōei Dōga in 1956 (from 1998, Tōei Animation) and Mushi Production in 1962. These two companies, although of different sizes and based on different logics—Tōei Dōga was a division of the huge Tōei film studios, Mushi was the initiative of a single entrepreneur, manga artist Tezuka Osamu—were both industrial organisations, especially if compared with the production system of the smaller ateliers that also flourished in those years. After a season of seminal feature-length theatrical releases between 1958 and the mid-1960s, in which Tōei Dōga mostly self-financed its films (Rumor, 2012; Bendazzi, 2015, II: 85–8), the arrival of television marked the dominance of a model in which some actors were investing, while others were producing (Tavassi, 2017a: 73 ff.).

This model has endured over time. Today, the industry consists of about 36 major studios and some 586 small and medium-sized companies. Among the bigger studios as well as several smaller studios, many are affiliated to the AJA (Association of Japanese Animations). Among them: Gainax, Gonzo, Production I.G, Shōgakukan, Sunrise, Tezuka Production, and Tōei Animation. Overall, the sector employs over 10,000 people, half of whom work in the animation companies, and about 2000 as voice actors (Masuda, 2016). Of all these companies, as many as 542 are based in Tokyo.

Today, there are many problematic aspects in the job conditions of animation workers in Japan, which will be addressed in Chapter 2; such issues are both directly and indirectly connected to the phenomenon of industrial outsourcing abroad, namely in Asia: a topic discussed in Chapter 3. Here it can at least be mentioned that making anime in Japan, for the vast majority of animators or other artists and technical professionals in the field, has never really been a stable or economically dignified employment and certainly not a safe one in terms of social security; a topic that has been addressed in the scholarship, but that has never been thoroughly faced in the actual job market and in politics in terms of unions, regulations, or even just common sense (de Peuter, 2011; Morisawa, 2015).

In the United States, with the advent of television in the second half of the 1940s, many animated cartoons that had originally been released in theatres before and during the war enjoyed a second life in the new medium; soon thereafter, many animation studios partly or mainly directed their new output to television. American cartoons originally made for television, however, were based on much smaller budgets than the previous or coeval theatrical cartoons. Whereas cinema animations were made in ‘full animation’ (a high number of distinct drawings per second), the smaller budgets invested for TV cartoons entailed that these were made in a ‘limited animation’ technique (with fewer distinct drawings per second): this means that full-animated cartoons enjoy more fluid movements of characters and objects, whereas limited-animated cartoons are more economic, less animated, and therefore, overall less ‘fluid’ in the movements displayed on the screen. This technical feature would have an important impact on the development of commercial animation in Japan.

Among the first theatrical animations as well as the first cartoons specially made for television that were broadcast in Japan, were those of Disney, in the Walt Disney Presents TV show (from 1958), and Hanna-Barbera studios, starting with The Flintstones (1960, in Japan from 1964). In those years, animation in Japan partly migrated towards television, and the companies that ventured in TV cartoons adopted the limited animation from the very start. The new cartoons made for television through the limited animation method were named in Japan terebi manga, that is, ‘TV manga’ or ‘TV cartoons’, in an extended acceptation of the word manga. This, especially since 1962, when Japanese studios finally produced their own first television animated cartoons.

As said earlier on, animation has been and is known in Japan by various names. As noticed before, the most common label in the postwar period was ‘manga eiga’, given a graphic similarity with comics and the semantic polyvalence of the term ‘manga’ in Japanese—on which also cf. the related explanatory subsection. In the same years, however, the English word ‘animation’ started to be shortened into ‘anime’, as the phonetic transliteration of the complete word in Japanese is written and sounds animēshon. In the 1970s, ‘anime’ replaced ‘terebi manga’ and ‘manga eiga’, although the latter two are still used in the everyday language and in the professional and artistic fields.² This also implies a terminological principle meant to avoid silly anachronisms: no cel animation made in Japan before televised series of the mid-1970s should be called ‘anime’ but rather, ‘terebi manga’.

Building the industry of Japanese animation / 2: outsourcing and committees

In the late 1970s, animation became in Japan a bigger phenomenon. Since the first TV anime hits in the 1960s, a strategy had begun to unfold, providing for synergies between studios, manga publishers, and gadget- and toy manufacturers, as well as for exports. At the end of the 1980s, a method consolidated to design the business as mostly based on cross-medial initiatives. The method has been thriving not only through television and cinema but also via direct-to-video releases and computer games. The anime market started to be framed as twofold: in a narrow sense, as the—indeed limited—income for production companies, as will be explained in Chapter 2; and in a broad sense, as the aggregate income from the products based on anime franchises (Masuda, 2007).

The main sources of profit for all the actors involved come from broadcasting, theatrical film distribution, home video, merchandising, the music industry, exports, and, more recently, slot machines (so-called pachinko and pachislo), webcasting, and live events (musicals, exhibitions, fairs). But overall, today, the bigger margins mainly come from merchandising and licenses abroad.

Outsourcing

Outsourcing, in the case of anime, occurs since the 1960s, but more systemically since the 1970s, to support the increase in production and further reduce costs. The first outsourced works were made by South Korean studios, followed by other countries (Chapter 3 in this book; JETRO, 2005: 2 ff.; JETRO, 2008; Tavassi, 2017a, 2017b). In parallel, Japanese directors and animators were invited by American studios to teach US teams how to animate better and at lower costs, using the techniques of Japanese limited animation while still ensuring visual and cinematic quality. Several US animated series of those years were directed or co-directed by anime-makers ‘on loan’ from Japanese studios, among whom renowned names such as that of Dezaki Osamu (1943–2011), one of the most talented Japanese animation directors of his generation, who had served or would serve for top studios such as Mushi Production, Tokyo Movie/Tokyo Movie Shinsha (est. 1946; from 1991, TMS Entertainment), and Madhouse.³ On the other hand, by virtue of this exchange, other cartoon series were realised by US animators who had been tutored by Japanese directors and designers.

The studios of these US-financed series would also outsource several technical phases to companies from Japan and then South Korea and Southeast Asia; and not only small ateliers, but also major studios would serve ...