"Irresponsible Pictures" The Art of Anime

An interview and overview of Japanese animation with Mamoru Oshii, director of Ghost in the Shell.

By David Nerlich

After its cataclysmic introduction into the nuclear age Japan was busy rebuilding itself in America's image and largely succeeding. Postwar Japan was also becoming a powerhouse producer and exporter. They haven't been the only nation to take American ideas and sell them back to the Americans cheaper. Animation was one such success story as comic artists like Osamo Teszuka, genuinely taken by the creations of Disney, gave birth to lasting children's animated favourites like Astroboy and Kimba the White Lion .

Later, we in the west (including we who think of ourselves as part of the west but are actually a large island in the asia pacific archipelago) became aware of something lurking under the apparent constraint and conformity in the emergent Japanese society. The thing that belied other signals about the Japanese nature was what those young corporate citizens were reading on the overcrowded commuter trains - something that hinted that all was not stable and corporatised under the besuited veneer. Something called Manga - comic book stories of monsters and murder and violent sex.privately imploding through this outwardly composed culture.

In fact, Japanese cartoons of this kind date back a long way. Erotic and demonic imagery from the buddhist cosmology can be found on illustrated scrolls from the 10th Century with a cartoonish style common. Woodbloock prints from the 16th and 17th centuries, including the era of the master Hokusai often continued this tradition. Such woodblocks were sometimes bound and carried captions. They might be considered the earliest comic books, evolving into the printed serialised stories we know today. The word manga was first coined by Hokusai in 1815, usually translated to mean "irresponsible pictures."

As Japan rode its 'economic miracle' into the computer age, the animation industry collided with the spirit of manga and began to give life, colour and movement to the darker imaginings of a slightly older audience than fans of Astroboy.

If anything typified the new adult anime ­ if blatant pandering to the taste of teenage males can be considered adult - it was a lack of restraint. Everything explodes. Dramatic intensity often seems to be measured in millimetres of blood. Common taboos are paid liitle heed. Demons gleefully rape schoolgirls. It's as if only animation could realise visually the full extremity of what wanted to break out of the adolescent Japanese soul. At a stretch, viewing Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira, the spectacular bodily eruptions of the tormented teenage character Tetsuo could be likened to exaggerated transformative growing pains of a misunderstood adolescent. And you thought your teenage acne was bad.

But are we pinning too much on the Japanese here? If anime like this is Japan's best known cultural export to the west, what does it really say about us? How much do we risk projecting upon amime's culture of origin when so much of its audience is found outside Japan? Given the oft noted occurrence of (to us) non-Japanese looking characters with blonde or red (or then again green or blue) hair it's a forgivable impression that there may be more to consider here than internalised Japanese angst.

Mamoru Oshii, creator of the sexy-as-hell cyber fable Ghost in the Shell proclaims "I doubt if there's ever been a Japanese animation produced with the Western audience in mind. I certainly never directed any of my animations thinking about how these might be received in the West." He notes that films like Akira and Ghost in the Shell, famous abroad, were not generally rated as commercial successes in Japan. Others like the films of Hayao Miyazaki (Porco Rosso, Castle of Cagliostro, Princess Monomoke) were bigger earners in Japan, though less known outside.

"I would think that the major reason for the "success" of these works in the West must be that these had a style, which were not found in animations and films produced in the West," says Oshii, "that they had something original and unusual about them. I am not talking about the originality in the stories here. The originality in the techniques used in the making of these works including the design is what I mean."

Indeed the best techno-oriented manga are brilliant visual manifestos for fantasy hardware and a natural outgrowth of Japan's high tech manufacturing culture. Oshii cites the Ridley Scott works Blade Runner and Alien as influences on many anime directors, with those films' sophisticated and deeply researched art direction embracing a similarly overt culture of technology.

Much of Oshii's Ghost in the Shell displays the kind of maximisation and sensory overload that defines adult anime, at least of the techno oriented genre - something of a visual corollary to the 21st Century Tokyo depicted in SF writer William Gibson's novels. There is richness and exaggeration in every dimension. The heroine's lithe but metal-heavy cyborg body fractures solid concrete as she leaps to the ground. She has invisibility on her side but this of course only if she removes all her clothing. She single handedly faces an eight legged tarantula-like tank ­ a gorgeous piece of fantasy industrial design. Moments of zen garden silence are intercut with pulses of scattergun action and bone crunching violence.

Oshii states his interest in directors "who can express worldviews rather than human drama on screen.", In a sense these are really dramas of techno-determinism. Where the technology heavy environment and what it means to those living in its sway is the locus of the drama. The grand narrative of technological advancement is the story's reason for being. Style and substance merge. However, of the many genres that make up the anime world, this is but one.

Oshii says, "The style of Japanese animation varies depending on when it was made, which animation studio produced it, producers' beliefs and attitudes and so on. In fact, that is one of the characteristics of Japanese animation production. I don't believe that Japanese animation had identifiable pioneering producers as such. The way I see it is that in the process of producing animations to be aired on Japanese TV, producers and animators learned things via trial and error, and consequently their sensational style evolved. No doubt, manga had the strongest influence in that process. Manga's influence on Japanese animation is not just in the character design and story development. Anything - violence, sex, literary and philosophical issues, and adult themes can be considered as a subject matter in manga. The greatest influence from manga on Japanese animation would be this very attitude. As a matter of fact, animation always seems to lag behind manga in the actual expression of this attitude."

As an genre of the action film, anime owes more to the editing approach of Sergei Eisenstein's seminal cut-up manifesto Battleship Potempkin than to the balletic stunt comedy approach of the Hong Kong film industry, with which anime shares some kinds of subject matter. An anime action sequence often progresses like a flipbook of frames of delicious detail enhanced by percussive sound effects, a sometimes dreamlike blend of high speed and slomo dynamics. This is true of techno-futuristic anime as well as historical fantasy stories featuring swordsmen and demons.

"Actions in kung fu movies are old-fashioned when seen as a technique in production of movies." says Oshii, "In animation making in Japan, people who like action typical of kung fu movies are a minority, although films directed by a young generation of film-makers, for example John Woo, have been inspiring. Most people would think that neither kung fu action nor sword movements are easily expressed in the medium of animation, and therefore these are not suitable for animation."

Describing the production process for his action scenes, Oshii explains, "A scene structure and how an action is divided up are the basic components of action sequencing in animation. A director writes a story in detail on the storyboard including specifications for picture lay-out and camera-work. Based on what is on the storyboard, animators draw pictures, with the duration for each cut specified by the directors. Doing this is quite taxing for directors. Because of this, gun-action, body-action, and weapon use in animation reflect the knowledge and sense of the directors. Some directors choose to leave these details to animators who are good at these. Also, there are designers who specialises in weapon designs, and they give directors advises too. Especially when the mechanics of robots, tanks, airplanes, and so on need to be expressed, participation of skilful designers are quite important. There are not that many of these people around".

Despite Oshii's claims of cultural independence he doesn't mind citing a number of European directors as influential during his student days, including Bunuel, Bergmann, Antonioni, Fellini, Godard and Wajda. "They inspired me to become a film director, but since I became one, I lost interest in them". He says the directors who now interest him are those who deal in ideas, visions and worlds, citing the earlier work of Kubrick, Ridley Scott and Lars Von Trier as well as David Lynch.

As for why anime has been one of Japans most successful exports Oshii can only say, "I don't have a definitive answer to this question. Isn't this question something you want to ask yourselves about?"

First published in IF September 2000