From the Bookshelf: Anime: A History
Apr. 14th, 2014 05:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerReading an interview on Anime News Network with Jonathan Clements about a "history of anime" he'd just written piqued my interest. While I'm not as familiar with his previous work as some, the thought of adding another volume to my small number of actual books about anime did interest me. I went ahead and ordered it, but even as I did I might have been wondering just what I would be getting into, whether I would be informed and interested or finish with the uncomfortable feeling of having read a very extended introduction to the sort of "portents of doom" forecasts made by those who seem convinced the stuff they're interested in isn't being made any more.
Just as the discussion on the article had said, the book did have the air of an academic text in its citations (which gave me an impression, though, of Clements being able to place considerable reliance on Japanese-language works, something that does stand out to me when I remember casual comments about "Japanese anime magazines" being "lightweight promotions") and terminology (although the word "tropes" was used often enough to leave me wondering if I've somehow begun to assume that specific term has become "fan-appropriated.") As I'd also known, it began back in the silent film era and devoted half its length to everything that preceded Osamu Tezuka and "Astro Boy," which is where a certain number of "fan" chronologies seem to really pick up as the broad outlines of a familiar look begin to jell. Those two things might have accounted for why it took me a while to get through those early chapters. In their sense of continuity from the earliest known experiments to the animation industry being caught up in the drive to World War II and the militarized multi-reel cartoons made then that people do now more or less know about (even if perhaps with something like the "Japan is kind of strange" undertones once associated the beginnings of fandom over here) to scraping things back together after the war, though, it did make a cohesive narrative.
I hadn't known that the stop-motion animation for "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" had been done in Japan, nor that a steady line of participation in other Rankin/Bass productions extended from that special all the way to Thundercats and the following cartoons that looked like it in the mid-1980s (which I'd at least known before to have been made in Japan). After learning that to my interest, though, the book got to the chapter on Osamu Tezuka, which had the colour plates, the apparent halfway mark, right in the middle. (I noticed that after some frames of a tinted silent film and a picture from one of the theatrical features that just preceded Tezuka's move to television, we get straight to Perfect Blue and some "notable" movies that followed, movies not extensively touched on in the later text.) With that, things got more familiar, although still seeming to emphasize production and business over a collection of individual titles. (However, while it was pointed out how making a big deal of Space Battleship Yamato misses the significance at the same time of the show Heidi, there is an interesting suggestion of how the father-inventor figures of the giant robot shows could be seen as a suggestion to working fathers shopping for toys.) In the descriptions of how things changed, I did happen to notice Hayao Miyazaki seems to have been consistently critical about things not made by himself.
The emphasis on "anime in Japan" changes for one chapter on foreign markets and fandom (and there quotes from the notable Anime News Network interview with former Geneon employee Chad Kime), but in conclusion Clements does seem to avoid the apocalyptic hyperbole that does crop up from some dwelling on works that sell a few thousand discs per volume, even if I did wonder if, in his speculating about anime returning to a state of "selling things not itself" as it was decades ago, he didn't seem to say quite enough about anime "made from" other sources. There were also comments about the outsourcing of in-betweening as perhaps setting up future good-enough substitutes made altogether on the mainland and mentioning how "3D" computer animation pulls in the big audiences (even while certain vocal fans continue to disdain it in anime). However, in mentioning certain modern trends (including the suggestion that familiar female character types come from the programming of romance games), the perhaps loaded word "moe" didn't seem to be used. One thing I was left wondering about was whether subscription streaming sites were really addressed as either useful in "monetizing product" or not making a difference there, despite Crunchyroll being mentioned in a table of "anime-digital connections." In a history of anime that covers close to a century of Japanese history, though, Jonathan Clements does get to point out that animation in that country has made it through a lot.
Just as the discussion on the article had said, the book did have the air of an academic text in its citations (which gave me an impression, though, of Clements being able to place considerable reliance on Japanese-language works, something that does stand out to me when I remember casual comments about "Japanese anime magazines" being "lightweight promotions") and terminology (although the word "tropes" was used often enough to leave me wondering if I've somehow begun to assume that specific term has become "fan-appropriated.") As I'd also known, it began back in the silent film era and devoted half its length to everything that preceded Osamu Tezuka and "Astro Boy," which is where a certain number of "fan" chronologies seem to really pick up as the broad outlines of a familiar look begin to jell. Those two things might have accounted for why it took me a while to get through those early chapters. In their sense of continuity from the earliest known experiments to the animation industry being caught up in the drive to World War II and the militarized multi-reel cartoons made then that people do now more or less know about (even if perhaps with something like the "Japan is kind of strange" undertones once associated the beginnings of fandom over here) to scraping things back together after the war, though, it did make a cohesive narrative.
I hadn't known that the stop-motion animation for "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" had been done in Japan, nor that a steady line of participation in other Rankin/Bass productions extended from that special all the way to Thundercats and the following cartoons that looked like it in the mid-1980s (which I'd at least known before to have been made in Japan). After learning that to my interest, though, the book got to the chapter on Osamu Tezuka, which had the colour plates, the apparent halfway mark, right in the middle. (I noticed that after some frames of a tinted silent film and a picture from one of the theatrical features that just preceded Tezuka's move to television, we get straight to Perfect Blue and some "notable" movies that followed, movies not extensively touched on in the later text.) With that, things got more familiar, although still seeming to emphasize production and business over a collection of individual titles. (However, while it was pointed out how making a big deal of Space Battleship Yamato misses the significance at the same time of the show Heidi, there is an interesting suggestion of how the father-inventor figures of the giant robot shows could be seen as a suggestion to working fathers shopping for toys.) In the descriptions of how things changed, I did happen to notice Hayao Miyazaki seems to have been consistently critical about things not made by himself.
The emphasis on "anime in Japan" changes for one chapter on foreign markets and fandom (and there quotes from the notable Anime News Network interview with former Geneon employee Chad Kime), but in conclusion Clements does seem to avoid the apocalyptic hyperbole that does crop up from some dwelling on works that sell a few thousand discs per volume, even if I did wonder if, in his speculating about anime returning to a state of "selling things not itself" as it was decades ago, he didn't seem to say quite enough about anime "made from" other sources. There were also comments about the outsourcing of in-betweening as perhaps setting up future good-enough substitutes made altogether on the mainland and mentioning how "3D" computer animation pulls in the big audiences (even while certain vocal fans continue to disdain it in anime). However, in mentioning certain modern trends (including the suggestion that familiar female character types come from the programming of romance games), the perhaps loaded word "moe" didn't seem to be used. One thing I was left wondering about was whether subscription streaming sites were really addressed as either useful in "monetizing product" or not making a difference there, despite Crunchyroll being mentioned in a table of "anime-digital connections." In a history of anime that covers close to a century of Japanese history, though, Jonathan Clements does get to point out that animation in that country has made it through a lot.