Early in the postwar era, renewed modes of animation adapted to changing media infrastructures, such as those for film and television, and manifested across media forms. For instance, influences from manga and cinema pervade the televisual aesthetics of the “limitedly animated.” Contemporaneously in Mainland China, “National-Style” animation was officially endorsed, while many of those same productions navigated transnational circuits and industries forged from Cold War geopolitics, thus shaping the trans/national aspects of animation aesthetics. In particular, the success of anime in 1960s Japan laid the foundation for not only global but also transmedial “boom” that is still underexplored.
Going beyond an emphasis on nation, this panel will explore the hybridity, transmediality, and trans/nationality of animated media within and across postwar East Asia from 1950s to 1980s. Panelists offer views of myriad case studies through differing critical lenses, including audiovisual analyses, industrial histories, and overviews of intersections between aesthetics, politics, and industry.
Turning to women’s intermedial performances for various modes of animation in mid-twentieth century Japan, Jason Cody Douglass argues that the moniker “animator” has historically functioned as a gendered appellation. Despite the preponderance of women workers within postwar cel animation studios – as well as on the set of smaller-scale productions for puppet, educational, and scientific shorts – there remains an ongoing dearth of research on the many un- or under-credited women artists who inked, stitched, stretched, painted, or voiced objects into some semblance of life. Douglass takes aim at gendered conceptualizations of the animator and their creative (as opposed to noncreative) labor. By exploring the animating forces of opera singer Miura Tamaki, child star Hirai Hideko, and avant-garde vocalist Ono Yōko, Douglass proposes a methodological intervention concerned with both the labor at the interstices between frames and the sounds that bind frames together.
Muyang Zhuang discusses Chinese animated comedies that applied cartoonish styles amid the prominence of National Style in the socialist era. From propaganda works to child films, to animated effects in live-action, comedic visual effects were conjointly provided by cartooning/manhua and animation. The visuality generated through these works manifested cinematic spatiotemporality apart from that of National-Style animation. Walking through political and cultural histories of the early PRC (1949–1966), Zhuang first outlines the development of and challenge to animated cartoons at the juncture of the foundation of the PRC. Zhuang will also analyze the correlation between animated comedies and cartooning in mainland China during the Cold War, through which he will demonstrate the worldmaking of animated cartoons in the early PRC and unveil the shadow history of Chinese animation from the perspectives of socialist media mix.
Finally, Laura Lee will present on the transformation of the anime image’s visual organization in the early 1980s through focus on the “Itano Circus,” a unique style of animated aerial choreography developed by Itano Ichirō. Drawn in distorted perspective to simulate varying distances, and combined with a densely-packed frame and high-speed camerawork, it gives a distinct impression of dynamism and depth from a subjective viewpoint inside the flurry of activity. Yielding a perceptual confusion akin to trick flying, its name stems from its resemblance to military pilot Genda Minoru’s aeronautical shows in the 1930s. Taking seriously this origin of the term, Lee looks afresh at Paul Virilio’s seminal work on the new way of seeing that fundamentally linked cinema and aviation so as to rethink the specific conceptualization of space and time that undergirded the Itano Circus, including connections with warfare, postwar subjectivity, and emerging technologies of home video and videography. By centering on cinematography’s creation of new modalities of movement and depth in anime, Lee redirects focus away from anime’s connections with manga, flatness, and immobility, and toward its new cinematicism, sensorial excess, and tactility in the early 1980s that joined it with live-action film and videography, and which resulted in a permanent shift in anime aesthetics.
By pondering animation as a hybrid media, and by locating its sites of (re)production, transmission, and exhibition in postwar East Asia, the panel aspires to unveil media histories once obscured by previous discussions of “national style,” “traditional” ideologies, and cultural origins.