0. Introduction: The Seventh Moon, an Outlier
Across the thirty-seven-year history of the Macross franchise, Macross 7—M7 from here on—may be its most anomalous entry. Nothing makes this clearer than ordinary viewers’ sheer bewilderment at the so-called animated feature Macross FB7. Granted, Macross FB7 is a cash-in packed with cheap compilation footage, but scenes from M7 itself may well make first-time viewers feel an urge to tag the “Baffling Behavior Awards” account.
“Defeating the enemy through song,” a theme running throughout Macross, is taken to its absolute limit in M7. Apart from Basara himself, nobody—including the audience—knows why this guy in glasses and a tank top has been flying a fighter out into space to sing “Totsugeki Love Heart” since the very first episode. At least in the original Macross, we know that Lynn Minmay’s singing happens to inflict culture shock on the Zentradi; in Macross Frontier, Sheryl and Ranka’s singing is bound up with powers that can affect the Vajra; and Macross Delta establishes Walküre’s role as a “tactical sound unit” in its first episode. Basara, however, acts quite unlike any of the franchise’s divas. Before Sound Force is officially formed in the second half of the series, few people believe that singing has the power to drive back the Protodeviln, and Basara himself has no intention whatsoever of treating his singing as a weapon. He never even says directly why he goes to the battlefield to sing. All we remember of this legendary savior of the entire galaxy, this official cheat code of the Super Robot Wars games, is that stupendous declaration: “Mountain! Galaxy! Listen to my song!!!!!”
By the usual methods of anime criticism, a work so full of controversy and ambiguity, yet so widely praised among its devoted fans, ought to be an ideal subject for an interpretation in depth. Some readers, however, may already have noticed that “Against Depth” in this essay’s title pays homage to Susan Sontag’s “Against Interpretation.” Her critique of interpretation in art could, in fact, be applied to this piece of anime criticism without changing a word. Of course, I do not want to follow Sontag in advancing radical views about a practice that remains ubiquitous in the arts. Interpretation, after all, joins many other practices in making up our overall understanding of artistic and literary works. My sole aim here is to offer a perspective that shows how M7 embodies a possibility of rejecting depth.
1. Interpretation and Depth: A Pair of Twins
As I said in the introduction, a work full of controversy and ambiguity generally offers excellent ground for interpretation. One of the classic examples is the scene at the end of The End of Evangelion in which Shinji tries to strangle Asuka. Fan circles are full of readings of this scene; even articles discussing Neon Genesis Evangelion itself abound in titles such as “EVA’s World, Fully Explained,” “Religious Metaphors in EVA,” and “Otaku Culture’s Historical Context and EVA.” A recent example I have encountered is the experimental anime serial experiments lain. The discussion centers on “how to interpret” the work: the meanings of its various images, the correct structure of its story, the profound themes it explores, and so on—although, in my own experience of watching lain, its fragmented mode of narration itself works to dissolve the discussion of content.
In any case, interpretation in anime is no different from interpretation in art and literature generally. Both try to tell you that beneath the play of light and shadow on the surface lie deeper meanings, actual concerns, or even a hidden narrative structure, which can be disclosed only through some practice of interpretation. The cross-shaped fire that follows an Angel’s defeat is not merely the fire of an explosion: it actually symbolizes the cross. The Patlabor OVA episode “The Seven Days of Fire” seems to concern infighting within the maintenance crew, but is actually a metaphor for Japan’s political movements in the last century, or even “using politics as an outer shell to talk about the animation industry.”1 Put roughly, interpretation has this basic structure: “What appears on the surface to be A is actually B / means B.” In many cases, depth and the act of interpretation are twins. Elements that can be regarded as possessing depth are always brought to light through a process of moving beyond surface appearances and exposing deeper structures.
More specifically, depth has many different faces, and so it always calls for different practices of interpretation. Simple symbolism and metaphor are the easiest cases: we need only identify what each image corresponds to, as though cracking a code. A hidden narrative structure requires us to pay closer attention to the internal connections within the anime as a whole, and to have enough imagination to reconstruct the true shape of the story from the scattered traces its creators have left behind. In some cases, particular kinds of images can themselves be interpreted as signs of depth. Such images often depart subtly from the anime’s overall tone—or the overall tone the anime leads us to expect—creating an incongruity that nevertheless seems to make sense. The first season of Kemono Friends offers many good examples. Some viewers, for instance, traced all the images of abandoned amusement parks in its ending sequence to real parks that had closed for various reasons. The rise of “Kemono Studies”—fan research into Kemono Friends—shows that people recognized how carefully worked out and richly detailed its setting was beneath the guise of a show “for children.” This also led viewers to scrutinize the anime more seriously, as though every subtle difference between its lines of dialogue were actually hinting at something concealed, something that needed interpretation.2
The most complicated case may be the interpretation of an anime’s meanings, governing ideas and central themes. Depth at this level most clearly expresses a position that does not center the author. Depth of intellectual substance concerns grand narratives almost without exception. It therefore requires not only a sound grasp of the work itself, but also the relevant cultural background, and perhaps even formal academic training. Starting from different positions and using different theoretical systems as tools, we invest the logical connections between the work’s various parts with different meanings. Sometimes we even need to supplement this with knowledge of the historical context. “The shadow of the Second World War,” “the afterglow of the bubble economy,” “the impact of the Tsutomu Miyazaki incident”: phrases like these are constant presences in the discourse of anime criticism.
Interpretation still occupies an overwhelmingly dominant position in anime criticism today. This is neither good nor bad in itself. After all, many creators are keen to bury depth in their anime; such works seem to be waiting for people to interpret them. More importantly, our age is far more tolerant than the age when Sontag declared that “we need an erotics of art.”3 No interpretation claims to reveal a work’s inner truth. In this sense, however serious and tedious interpretive practice may appear, it can itself be regarded as a creative act. The evidence lies in the great diversity of anime interpretations available today. This diversity is apparent not only in the many diametrically opposed readings we can give of the same text, their relative merits aside, but also in our ability to bring out an anime’s unspoken depth through interpretation, whatever the anime happens to be. A reading of Cannon Fodder from the perspective of political philosophy is certainly insightful; a reading, from some possible perspective, of the famous “Sphinx” in My Sister, My Writer could be just as engrossing. Perhaps the scene deliberately presents a “homage” to ancient Egyptian art. Perhaps it seeks to awaken our primal fears through the terrifying collapse of its pretty-girl artwork. Or perhaps the anime itself intends, through its dramatic visual presentation, to indict the anime, comics and games (ACG) industry as it operates under the male gaze.
Just as Duchamp’s Fountain shows that, in principle, anything can become a work of art, contemporary interpretive practice shows, at the very least, that no anime is beyond interpretation. Since depth and interpretation are twins, this also means, to some extent, that in principle no anime is without depth.
Can there be no dimension of anime, then, that escapes depth? In Sontag’s “Against Interpretation,” Pop Art makes its content uninterpretable by using content that is simply “what it is”; it is consequently held up as one way of rescuing us from the intellectual pollution of interpretation. Our age, however, has taken intellectual games to a point unimaginable in the 1960s. Our toolbox now contains more than enough theoretical tools to interpret anything utterly ordinary, anything as simple as it appears to be. To escape depth, we cannot rely on the intellect’s powers of discrimination to steer clear of things whose depth could be disclosed through further interpretation. A more natural course is to return to the very passion our feelings arouse.
2. When Passion Rejects the Intellect
When we turn our attention back to Macross 7, we find a very different landscape in the criticism surrounding it. The work certainly contains plenty of ambiguity and controversy, yet there are almost no “interpretations” of it to be found on the Chinese-language internet. The vast majority of reviews merely praise the power of its music and story to move us. Of course, anyone who has watched the series through can intuitively think of many explanations for this. One is that it is merely a mediocre work, or even a crudely made “piece of shit”—in principle, the notoriously botched cabbage in Brighter Than the Dawning Blue could be interpreted too, but what need is there to interpret it? Another is that the shock delivered by Neon Genesis Evangelion, something like a “paradigm shift,” left every other anime of the period in the shade. Turn A Gundam, which brought all of Gundam to an end, is good too, but what seems to have ended instead is the appeal of the Gundam franchise itself.
These explanations are plainly very persuasive, but they all overlook some of the praise M7 receives. “Totsugeki Love Heart,” “POWER TO THE DREAM” and “TRY AGAIN” set our blood racing; Basara Nekki’s incomprehensible behavior somehow strikes a chord with viewers; the flower girl’s finally managing, after forty-nine episodes, to deliver her bouquet brings genuine delight… Such responses are utterly commonplace. They do not even count as anime criticism in the usual sense. The passion expressed in these judgments amounts to no more than a description of trivial private feelings, and private feelings themselves mean nothing in a piece of criticism addressed to other people: after all, we cannot share our feelings with others through words. Yet when we seek a dimension of anime that escapes depth, private feelings open up an excellent possibility.
Starting with the many faces of depth allows us to see more clearly how this passion rejects the intellect’s attempt at interpretation. M7 is certainly a simple enough work: almost everything in it can be laid out in plain sight and understood through common sense. But it is not entirely devoid of things with symbolic significance. The flower girl, for example, is a character who lends herself to interpretation. After forty-eight episodes of near misses, she finally places her flowers in Basara’s hands in the last episode. We can quite naturally see this scene as corresponding to the stupendous course of Basara’s music finally moving the galaxy. Nor does M7 really offer a straightforward account of a story whose whole course is obvious at a glance. Basara Nekki’s almost completely blank past seems to suggest that we might reconstruct another version of M7’s story from the scattered traces within the anime. As for grand themes, M7 follows directly in the tradition of the original Macross. The central premise of “moving the enemy through song” itself contains many questions that could be explored in depth. Does art, to some degree, have the power to tame violence? Can the experience of beauty cross boundaries of culture, race, or even species? We could go further still and say that, through its story of “music saving the galaxy,” M7 in turn celebrates the value art possesses in and of itself, simply as art.
M7 plainly lends itself to interpretation in at least these three respects, and in at least these three respects it can therefore be regarded as possessing depth. Yet when we recall those responses to the work—those private feelings that praise the songs’ power to set our blood racing, that simply resonate with the characters’ experiences, that register inexplicable delight at certain scenes—we notice something. To interpret aspects of M7 and disclose their depth, we must first be brought back to those private feelings, and to the passion they arouse. If we see the flower girl’s experience as symbolically linked to Basara’s musical journey, our interpretation does not in fact arise from a formally rigorous comparison. It arises from the similar surges of passion we felt in the two characters’ journeys through the story. Likewise, however many grand themes we believe M7 addresses when we sit down to write a review, our argument always originates in how powerfully we are driven by a passion we cannot put into words. Even if M7 really does contain some unspoken, latent narrative structure, when the Seventh Emigration Fleet sings “Totsugeki Love Heart” together in the final episode, most of the intellect’s interpretive games become utterly unimportant beside that passion.
From this perspective, rather than saying that M7 lacks possibilities for interpretation or lacks depth, we should say that it rejects interpretation through and through, and therefore opposes having depth imposed on it. We can explain how M7 opposes depth in the plainest, most natural and most unremarkable terms: Macross 7 tries to carry us along, to move us, to set our blood racing—but the one thing it does not try to do is persuade us. In fact, we do not care why a threat on a galactic scale, such as the Protodeviln, can be neutralized through song. Nor do we care what sort of past led Basara Nekki to think of flying a fighter out to sing. M7 wisely leaves these trivial matters unshown. Most of the plausibility in a fictional story brings no pleasure in itself; in many cases, content made explicit is nothing but a burden on our experience of passion.
This perspective also offers another way of understanding those works widely acknowledged to be “pieces of shit.” Last year’s most talked-about anime, Darling in the Franxx (DitF), keeps deliberately making room for interpretation, as though it feared that the world’s anime Brahmins might run out of things to discuss and jinx with their predictions. Yet as people invested every detail of the anime with more and more meaning, the series became more and more disappointing. Only after it had become a laughingstock in many ACG discussion communities did people remember what they had wanted from it in the first place: “A bicycle at the start; a planet-destroying warship at the end.” Although DitF’s eventual development really did remain within the framework of those ten Chinese characters, a story burdened with too many interpretations and too many claims to depth had already left people with no appetite for the final battle in space.
As Sontag advocated, what we need in anime is something more “transparent”; what we need is an “erotics” of anime. We need pretty girls and giant robots, or giant pretty-girl robots. We need passion. Passion refuses to let the intellect play endless games of interpretation; passion refuses to let works go on drowning in the whirlpool of depth. Perhaps depth remains an indispensable category in our evaluation of art and literature, but Macross 7 has already shown, to some degree, that it is possible to oppose interpretation and depth.
3. Lessons: From a Rock Band to Basketball
Finally, it is instructive to revisit a controversy from two years ago. Some readers may remember that the Oscar for Best Animated Short Film went to Dear Basketball two years ago.4 This provoked considerable controversy among animation fans, and even a fair-sized row between animation fans and basketball fans.5 The grounds for dispute around Dear Basketball are plain enough. After all, the full name of the Oscars is the “American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Awards.”6 In the eyes of devoted animation fans, this award implies, to some extent, that the winning work has made an original, exploratory contribution to the art or science of animation, and that its excellence should derive, as far as possible, from the excellence of the animation itself. We do not know what the Oscar judges that year actually took into account. But Dear Basketball is praised more because of its association with the name Kobe, and the emotion people feel while watching it comes more from the passion this great player has given them in real life. In short, for animation fans who know little about basketball, factors outside the animation have introduced too much interference into judgments of the short.
But when we look back on this episode two years later, perhaps we should ask what exactly counts as “inside the animation,” or “part of the animation itself.” Clearly, Kobe’s life experiences lie outside the animation. Is music, then, part of the animation itself? Perhaps, in M7’s case, music is obviously something that comes from the anime itself. An anime ordinarily includes music, and the music of the fictional band Fire Bomber comes exclusively from M7. But suppose an anime inserts a well-known piece of music that already existed, and the overall viewing experience is excellent. Can that piece of music count as something that comes from the anime itself?
We could answer that music differs from Kobe in that music itself forms part of the animation. As long as the finished result with the music is excellent in itself, even the use of a pre-existing, well-known piece at least demonstrates the makers’ talent for choosing music. Music is therefore inside the animation in every case. By contrast, in Dear Basketball, the crucial factor moving viewers who are fans—Kobe’s legendary NBA career—is itself shown very little in the short’s few minutes. Beyond what the short itself presents, however legendary Kobe may be, that remains a factor outside the animation.
But this answer cannot account for some more complicated examples. On the Chinese-language internet, fans of tokusatsu—Japan’s live-action special-effects films and television shows—are often anime fans too, so Hideaki Anno’s Shin Godzilla is a fair example to use. The reception of this tokusatsu film in Japan stands in stark contrast to its reception elsewhere in the world. Japanese viewers rated it very highly, while viewers in almost every other country generally found it dull and boring. Of course, many critics familiar with Japanese culture tell us that this is a film aimed entirely at Japanese viewers. Godzilla symbolizes nuclear disaster in the minds of Japanese people, and the whole story is full of political metaphors that Japanese viewers immediately grasp. Foreign viewers are therefore obviously unlikely to feel the same personal involvement. The question, then, is this: if, as foreign viewers, we cannot feel personally involved in the film because of our own cultural background, how should we evaluate it? Taking the Dear Basketball example as our starting point, we ought not to consider Shin Godzilla a good work, since it involves even more factors outside the work. We might yet become basketball fans in our lifetime, but we can hardly choose our own cultural background.
In actual criticism, however, people often hold that the specific context needed to appreciate a work does not count as a defect. By this standard, Dear Basketball should not have provoked so much controversy. We can imagine that Kobe Bryant might have an enormous influence in American society, that he is a cultural symbol and part of its shared memory today, so much so that the Oscar judges regard his career itself as possessing artistic value. On such an account, the short’s award would be well deserved. Of course, my concern here is not with the controversy surrounding Dear Basketball. I only want to show that the distinction between what is inside and outside the animation is not as clear-cut as we think.
Anime criticism should make room for a perspectivist view—this is hardly news. But we rarely realize that perspectivism in fact means there is a possibility of opposing interpretation and depth. This possibility exists not only in M7, but also in Dear Basketball and Shin Godzilla. After all, no interpretation, however precise and thorough, can turn us into basketball fans or Japanese people who feel personally involved.
In this sense, what rock music and basketball jointly teach us is that opposing interpretation and depth does not mean abandoning content and embracing form. More importantly, it means turning our attention to the private feelings the work itself brings us. However superficial and crudely made an anime may be, it can acquire depth through interpretation. Opposing depth does not mean that we must henceforth stop using depth as a critical category. It means recognizing that all depth is an intellectual construction driven by private feelings—indeed, nothing more than an unnecessary defense of those feelings. Precisely because Macross 7 makes us so clearly aware of this, it offers a fitting lesson in how to stand against depth.