Animation current issue

Editorial

Buchan, S. — 2008-06-24

From the `Cinematic' to the `Anime-ic': Issues of Movement in Anime

Ruddell, C. — 2008-06-24

This article explores the way that movement is formally depicted in anime. Drawing on Thomas Lamarre's concepts of the `cinematic' and the `anime-ic', the article interrogates further the differences in movement and action in anime from traditional filmic form. While often considered in terms of `flatness', anime offers spectacle, character development and, ironically, depth through the very form of movement put to use in such texts.The article questions whether the modes of address at work in anime are unique to this form of animation.Taking into account how the terms `cinematic' and `anime-ic' can be understood (and by extension the cinematic and animatic apparatus), the article also begins to explore how viewers might identify with such images.

Star-Spangled Ghibli: Star Voices in the American Versions of Hayao Miyazaki's Films

Denison, R. — 2008-06-24

This article offers an examination of the use of American stars in re-voicing a set of Japanese animated texts. The author argues that a new industrial, contextual and textual understanding of stardom is required to penetrate the dense network of meanings attached to star voices in animation. Furthermore, she utilizes a mixed textual and contextual approach to several of Studio Ghibli's American DVD releases to consider the markets for and meanings of anime in America. In so doing this article represents an intervention into a range of academic debates around the nature of contemporary stardom and the significance of anime in America.

Nervous Light Planes

Gfader, V. — 2008-06-24

Electronic streams appear to be most illuminating when they fail or break down. At these moments, they make apparent our desire of wanting to keep continuity, to experience things uninterruptedly. In the contemporary artistic environment marked by electronic pulses and lightscapes, the flickering screen, with its conflicting modes of engagement, provides the thinking of a limit and erasure. Philippe Parreno's analogue line animation What Do You Believe, Your Eyes or My Words? Speaking Drawing: . . . (2007) inhabits such a corruptive site of `no single continuing line' where the various time structures inherent to the work resist to create unity, both in terms of the work's spatiality and its relation to our sense of time. In Semiconductor's digital piece Inaudible Cities: Part One (2002) the flickering strips the image of the failed electronic stream, its supposedly essential element. The animated cityscape presents us with yet another kind of electronic light movement co-dependent on the sonic pressures of an electrical storm. What is expressed is the process of image-forming itself, the image's potential for self-variation which is linked to imagination and Brian Massumi's `vagueness of the virtual'. Referring to notions such as Gilles Deleuze's `point flicker' or Massumi's `imaginative and non-systemic', the article addresses the sensation of flickering as an experience of spacing and rupturing inherent to animation. Not only does this sensation propose animation as an often paradoxical work, but, proposing a particular site its image can occupy, it allows us to think of the animated image as an erasure itself, with its potential of becoming art.

The Many Faces of Internationalization in Japanese Anime

Lu, A. S. — 2008-06-24

This article explores the internationalization of Japanese anime (animation) in an effort to help explain the cultural politics behind this popular cultural product. The internationalization of anime includes the incorporation of de-Japanized elements into anime's background, context, character design, and narrative organization. A theoretical framework for understanding anime's internationalization is developed, proposing that there are at least three kinds of cultural politics working behind anime's international success: one, de-politicized internationalization, which primarily serves as a commercial tactic to attract international audiences; two, Occidentalized internationalization, which satiates a nationalistic sentiment; three, self-Orientalized internationalization, which reveals a cultural desire to establish Japan as an ersatz Western country in Asia.

Hallucinatory Vision and the Blurring of the Subject in Jeremy Blake's `Time-Based Paintings'

Hertz, B.-S. — 2008-06-24

From the turn of the 21st century until his death in 200 Jeremy Blake worked at the convergence of animation, digital technology and painting, synthesizing them through the use of cinematic strategies. This article discusses the debt Blake's early abstract works owe to the experimental animated films of the Visual Music artists and American post-war Color Field painters. During this period, Blake applied his exceptional facility with emerging animation software to sequential figure/ground abstractions based on literary narrative structures. Subsequently, Blake shifted from `time-based painting' to richly textured non-narrative biographical sketches created in collaboration with maverick protagonists in contemporary popular music. The visuality of Blake's hallucinatory moving images intensified emotionally as new digital software became available. The deep hybridity of his visual compositions, transmitted through constant fades and overlays of photo-based images and abstracted color patches, doodles and animation characters, create a richly textured bridge between subjective consciousness and the world of appearances.

Review: Animation Universe: The 19th Society for Animation Studies Conference, Portland State University, USA, 29 June to 1 July 2007

Dow, M. V. — 2008-06-24

Review: Tom Corby (ed.), Network Art: Practices and Positions (Innovations in Art & Design). London: Routledge, 2006. 206 pp., 83 halftone illus. ISBN 978--0415364799 (hbk)

Dieter, M. — 2008-06-24

Review: French Lunning (ed.) Mechademia, Volume 1: Emerging Worlds of Anime and Manga. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. 184 pp., 32 b/w and 13 col. illus. ISBN 0--8166--4945--6 $19.95

Thouny, C. — 2008-06-24