Relationships between Manga and Anime
Published
in Manga Impact Phaidon Press, 2011
(excerpted from the introduction to 100 ANIME BFI Publishing, London, 2005)
Hand-made in Japan
An especially endearing aspect of anime is how flat its images appear before us. They seem to be in denial of their impulse to ‘animate’. It’s a graphic hand-drawn super-flatness that communicates with great depth – one that ironically, formally and materially views its surface as a universe for its encoding and layering. The absence of any photographic aura globally scars animation and anime equally, segregating them somewhat from cinema and leading them to be slightly stigmatised and perceived as ‘not-cinema’. This in itself is not a problem, though becoming conscious of how deeply ingrained this differentiation is aids in comprehending the ‘animatic grain’ of anime.
Not as modern an invention as presumed, photography brought to life the Renaissance dream of light, depth and perspective. This ‘hands-free mechanical-eye’ feat of capture has since magically cast cinema as being beyond rendering, leaving animation gripped by a manually mediated appearance. Impinged by late 19th Century orthodoxy, photography, cinema, and ‘cinegraphic’ CGI live the dream of looking out the window to the world, while comics and animation look like they are still contemplating themselves on the drawing board. While Western photography and cinematography have progressed through either embracing or contesting the camera’s predisposition toward actuality and ‘realism’, anime maps alternative dimensions of ‘unreality’ on its plane of materiality, intensifying the graphic and nullifying the photographic. The power of the pen and the boldness of the brush guide anime as a motion medium born of manga, where the act of drawing by hand is viewed as a powerful mode of narration.
Beyond manga, Japanese culture is abundant in ways that the hand-made and hand-operated is acknowledged. Manual dexterity and physical manipulation are signs and processes of a primary interfacing between human creativity, technological application, and material connection. Accordingly, the hand is technological and the machine is organic, positing them feverishly interchangeable. As ritualised in the way that department stores wrap their parcels delicately by hand, manual dexterity, physical touch and material tactility are cosmologically aligned with the everyday, no matter how technologically advanced its exchanges.
As such, an asynchronism in sensibility forges a rift between anime and the recent rise of CGI in American animation and live-action: anime’s hand-made production simulates machine-made manifestations, while Hollywood’s computer-generated production insinuates human-generated manifestations. Even if computers are employed in anime (as they increasingly are), they will appear hand-drawn, to express the Japanese sense of physicality. Conversely, Hollywood’s CGI spectacles archaically transform the cinema into a Sistine Chapel, claiming closeness to the godly touch of unmediated perfection in life-likeness.
Calligraphic Momentum
Anime employs a concept of linear energy, where a causal vein of energy is contracted from one point to the next in either dispersive wave form or directed beam form. While Occidental thought will readily exemplify this by analogue systems like electricity (where man tames nature through ‘inventive containment’, then allows energy to territorially pass along a controlled line), Oriental thought provides a more immediate and corporeal model: chi, the energy that exists in anyone and anything. It can be hidden, exposed, tapped, exercised, abused. From the many martial arts through to disciplines like Tai Chi, one channels energy as a linear flow coursing through the body. This type of transference of invisible chi occurs in a range of energy manifestations in physical reality: from the stature of one’s standing body, to the slice of the samurai sword, to the brush stroke in calligraphy. All are marked embodiments of channelled energy. Each example – the shape of the body, the slice of the sword, the calligraphic character – is a visual mark which is held in place by the latent dynamics of an invisible energy controlled by the body.
The calligraphic momentum of anime is a particularly self-reflexive condition. If we take calligraphy to be not only the traditional art of expressive brushwork but also the ways in which chi leave its mark on anyone and anything, anime is the graphing and encoding of how things exist in the most fundamental sense. While the history of Western art – both the art itself and the ways in which it ‘sees’ non-Western art – is a para-evolutionary charting of progressive visualisation according to optical paradigms of ‘how things look’, anime is a dynamic graphing of the same but with attention paid to ‘how things are’. Across six centuries of Japanese visual art, the brush has been used less as a tool and more as a ‘musculatory extension’ of the body/arm/hand. It is the instrument for channelling energy so that any act of depiction is more properly the recording of energy that simulated an actioning of its form. This advanced philosophical awareness through manual dexterity underpins the bulk of Japan’s traditional practices – so much so that the representational and the ideogramatic are reversed. The ideogram idealises the energy of a thing due to its calligraphic inscripture, leaving the representation to be merely the surface affect of that energy’s documentation.
This supplanting of the representation with the ideogram is at the heart of how anime’s sense of motion differs from Western animation derived equally from DaVinci’s vanishing perspective and Muyerbridge’s photographical analyses. Anime literally animates brushstrokes, not things: this is its core relationship with manga. Anime’s formal characteristics are based less on watching things move and more on observing the frequency, range and ratio of their momentum. The resulting ‘calligraphic momentum’ never closely matches how things move or appear in the real world, yet anime is remarkable in its evocation of movement itself. Spiralling colons of billowing smoke, lapping waves of agitated water, shimmering fields of windblown pampas grass, even passing through a fluoro-lit underground freeway tunnel – these are among the many poetic moments of motion in anime.
