Personal Notes on Expanding the Dimensions of Animation Criticism: A Resource Directory, Version 2.2

1. Industry-Side Knowledge of Animation Production (a Heading I Just Made Up)

Understanding how animation is made matters to our grasp of its characteristics as an artistic medium and of the styles of the people who create it. If you do not know the basics of animation production, you can easily make a fool of yourself as a critic. These are often matters of agreement within the community of creators—that is, the animation industry—and critics should respect that knowledge. This information is also an important source of material for arts criticism.

For many people, watching Shirobako sparks an interest in this knowledge. What next? I began with introductory video lectures on drawn animation, or sakuga, by two pioneers I greatly respect:

• An Introduction to the Basics of Japanese-Style Animation: Complete Version
• Animation Lecture: Japanese-Style Animation and the Animators Behind It (2013 Version)
• One Video to Explain Exactly How Animation Is Made—Anitama’s New-Series Analysis Special, Episode 1

After that, I kept building my knowledge and experience by regularly watching Anitama’s sakuga showcase compilations, or MADs (and keeping up with its Jie (“Explained”) and Xinsheng (“New Voices”) features), reading translated articles from Western sakuga blogs, and so on. So far, though, I can only claim a rudimentary understanding.

Beyond drawn animation, there is also direction:

Search for the original question on Zhihu

We will leave aside stages such as early project development and later photography and compositing. As for books, here is one example:

Book search: 制作进行 (“Production Coordination”), by Kazuya Masumoto

Terminology Roundup: Search Page—Anitama

With help from Douban and my own book-buying instincts, I also tried selecting and buying a few Chinese textbooks on animation’s audiovisual language and storyboard design. They are fairly slim, with little text, and quite easy to read. Still, I hesitate to show them here: might I lead beginners astray? Some of Niangao’s earlier analyses, though, are worth learning from:

Niangao’s animation analysis videos (Bilibili search)

• Who Watches the July Anime Season Like This? | º言º)

Reports from the production floor are also precious resources:

• “When Magic Is Born”: A Little Witch Academia Production Diary

For me, learning about animation production has many benefits: avoiding mistakes about basics on which practitioners generally agree; paying respect to creators; and gaining a better grasp of animation’s artistic characteristics and individual creators’ styles. All of this is very helpful for appreciating and writing criticism of animation.

2. Visual Art and the Philosophy of Art

Animation is a distinctive art form, and we need to treat its particular characteristics with care. Conversely, exploring the wider artistic world will help us understand what distinguishes animation and where it fits within art’s broader categories. There are all sorts of art, of course. Apart from the live-action films discussed below, let’s single out visual art here.

Of course, most people working in animation are not trained art historians. But we should remember a familiar point: when people make art, they are always influenced, consciously or otherwise, by the general spirit of their age and by past and present society and history. That is enough of a defense. My own knowledge of art history, which I began studying last year, is actually very shallow. Here are a few resources I like:

“Sixteen Lectures on Western Art History” (XuetangX search)

“Appreciating Modern Western Art” (China University MOOC search)

Fu Lei’s Twenty Lectures on Masterpieces of World Art has a strong reputation as an introduction to art history. Animation and visual art share certain categories—perspective, line, color, composition—and studying art history helps us understand some of the essentials of animation as pictures that move. Besides art history, we might mention the philosophy of art. I am in no position whatsoever to pronounce on it; all I can do is nervously offer one book I have read:

Book search: Noël Carroll, Philosophy of Art: A Contemporary Introduction (Chinese edition)

I have put introductory books on literary and cultural theory in the next section.

3. Philosophy and the Social Sciences

Generally speaking, ideas from these fields are used to analyze both what lies within the text of an animated work and what lies beyond it—and a “text” need not consist of written words.

What? You can do that too? Seeing is believing (?), so here are a few articles that show what animation criticism along this dimension can do:

• Toward an Analysis of Relational Form: Love Triangles in Erciyuan Culture and “Byakuyakō”¹
• The Parallax View | An Essay on the Ontological Aesthetics of Erciyuan Culture—The Return of the Sacred

Hang on, you say—how could the creator possibly have thought of all that…? Creators’ own ideas deserve respect; the author does not leave the stage. But once a text comes into being, it has relative independence and multiple meanings. And, as I said at the beginning, the information creators convey remains an important source of material for criticism, but not the only one. Whether an interpretation is any good must, of course, be tested by fellow critics, readers, and history.

What an enormous field of study this is… Everyone has to choose areas that interest them and suit their abilities. I am only an ordinary soul who started late and has put in too little work. All I can say is: study hard and improve every day. Given this article’s partly introductory purpose, here are some introductory works on literary theory, the history of sociological thought, and the history of philosophy, respectively:

Book searches, for the Chinese editions: Peter Barry, Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory; Randall Collins and Michael Makowsky, The Discovery of Society; William F. Lawhead, The Voyage of Discovery: A Historical Introduction to Philosophy, fourth edition.

I need to resist rattling off books as though reciting a menu. Life has its limits; slacking off and learning have none. One warning is needed here: beginners without specialist training or guidance from a teacher in the field run a substantial risk of misreading thinkers if they go straight to their original works before gaining an overall grasp of the history of philosophy, or of thought in the relevant discipline. I will refrain from giving examples. It is better to use sites such as Douban and Zhihu to find academically credible introductions and readers’ guides, and acquaint yourself with some of the work scholarship has already done. Oxford’s Very Short Introductions are a good choice.

I have also found a few MOOCs—massive open online courses—that can serve as scaffolding as you follow an interest into a new field. Here they are for readers to explore:

“Classical Sociological Theory” (XuetangX search)

“Introduction to Communication Studies” (China University MOOC search)

“Through the Classics: Reading Together” (China University MOOC search)

“Chinese Philosophy” (China University MOOC search)

Let’s move on to the next section.

4. Film Theory and Film History (Leaving Television Drama Aside for Now)

As the most popular product of mass culture, film is an important part of social and cultural life. Animation creators may be influenced by cinematic techniques in how they work—for example, in storyboarding and direction. To heighten realism, they might imitate a live-action shot with shallow depth of field, blurring the distant background to simulate out-of-focus bokeh. Animation does not produce this effect automatically—though, conversely, its use in live action need not be unintentional either.

“Sound! Euphonium: In Search of the Most Romantic Realism” (Bilibili search)

We must be careful here! Animation and live-action film are two different arts. If we mechanically transplant film theory into animation criticism, it probably will not travel well. Yet only after becoming familiar with both can we make specific judgments about whether borrowing a concept is appropriate in a particular situation. Beyond creative techniques, it scarcely needs saying that animation creators, as a group within society, are influenced by the content and styles of celebrated films and filmmakers. This is part of the wider interplay of influences throughout society.

There are plenty of film-history videos, too. For example:

• Complete Collection: Crash Course Film History—All 16 Episodes, Plus Trailer and Extras
• The Story of Film: An Odyssey—All 15 Episodes

These two video histories, one short and one long, each have their own character. I think watching film history in this form before picking up introductory books on cinema may make the reading a little more approachable.

For cinema’s audiovisual language:

• TNABO: The Language of Shots—Composition in Storytelling, by Channel Criswell

Incidentally, TNABO also likes Japanese animation. Want more film-analysis videos?

Related videos by Dianying Qiao Hong Menzhu (Bilibili search)

Here is another well-regarded introduction to film theory, this time a physical book:

Book search: Robert Stam, Film Theory: An Introduction (Chinese edition)

5. Japan, Japanese Animation History, and More

If we are discussing Japanese animation, the enormous usefulness of knowing Japan’s social history surely needs no defense. For example, the sarcastic remarks of Hachiman—the fans’ “Great Teacher”—often contain references to Japanese local culture. His story and that of a certain teenage “Rascal” from Rascal Does Not Dream of Bunny Girl Senpai are also unmistakably steeped in Japanese school culture:

Another example is Concrete Revolutio, a lovingly made, underappreciated series from Bones:

Through metaphor, this series practically tells the greater part of Japan’s history in the second half of the twentieth century, mixed with a great many references to tokusatsu, Japan’s live-action special-effects tradition. Anitama has a series of articles exploring this in depth. Without some knowledge of Japanese social history and tokusatsu, viewers will recognize much less of what the creators want to communicate through the work. (After all that, I really just wanted to recommend Concrete Revolutio.)

If you know little about Japanese history, why not use some Japanese television dramas, such as the historical taiga dramas, as scaffolding to build an interest?

• Ryōmaden
• Sanada Maru

The Summer of the Bureaucrats: TBS program page

Taiga dramas are not serious history, of course. But if watching them gives you more motivation to study Japanese history, isn’t that a good thing? Here is an introductory NHK lecture series on Japanese history as well:

• Diamond15 Fansubs: NHK High School Lectures—Japanese History

We will leave Japanese cultural and intellectual history aside for now, but it is worth learning a little about Japanese literary history, especially modern and contemporary literature:

Book searches: An Outline of Japanese Literary History; A History of Modern and Contemporary Japanese Literary Movements.

On a separate note, knowing the history of Japanese otaku culture may also be quite helpful:

• Kemi Talks: A History of Dōjin and Otaku Culture, 1950s–1970s—Their Prehistory and the Launch of Comic Market

While we are here, let me recommend a short history of J-pop by the same Sanniu:

• From Edison to Hikaru Utada: A Hundred Years of Japanese Popular Music in the Twentieth Century, 1900–1999

And since we have reached J-pop, I might as well recommend T-Nymph’s lovingly made music-theory lessons (we’re wandering further and further afield):

• T-Nymph’s Music Class, Vol. 1: My Good Buddy, the C Key—Learning Music Doesn’t Have to Be Such Hard Work

Also, when it comes to Japanese otaku cultural history, there seems to be no getting around that man: Hiroki Azuma.

Book search: Hiroki Azuma, The Birth of Game-like Realism (Chinese edition)

There are also writers such as Shinji Miyadai, Tsunehiro Uno, and Eiji Ōtsuka, who have studied Japanese otaku culture:

• Imagination after the Earthquake: Japanese Otaku Culture in the 2010s—Tsunehiro Uno
• Shinji Miyadai: Semantic Shifts in Japanese Subculture since 1992

In the West, on YouTube for example, there are also some research-oriented AniTubers. Pause and Select has many excellent video essays, offering us different insights and reminding us that there are friends in the West doing arts criticism of anime, comics, and games—ACG—too:

• Shadows of Fukushima: Reflections on Your Name, Shin Godzilla, the March 11 Earthquake, and More

That is enough for this glimpse of the tip of the iceberg of Japanese society, history, and culture. Let me turn to the history of animation—Japanese television animation, specifically. Among the fairly systematic illustrated histories of Japanese animation I know, there are versions on Douban and Anitama:

• Looking Back at Twentieth-Century Japanese Television Animation: A History and Supplement, Part 32

(I absolutely did not pick this installment on purpose.)

I would also like to recommend Bingfeng de Xihe’s video history of Japanese television animation:

• A Chronology of Japanese Television Animation: Let’s See What Has Been Made since TV Animation Began, Part 1

There are many other versions of animation history, of course. I am only talking about the ones I know. Animation history naturally leads us back to watching animation itself. Suppose we want to review Director A’s new work: familiarity with Director A’s earlier works gives us a grasp of their distinctive style, and some expectations and knowledge to bring to the new one. I generally follow four approaches in my animation viewing:

• The auteur approach: follow the directors, episode directors, series-composition writers—who oversee the overall script structure—and source creators I like.
• The studio approach: follow the animation studios I like.
• The genre approach: follow the genres I like. Tokusatsu, for example—wait, that doesn’t count, does it?
• The ratings approach: find things to watch through rankings drawn from large datasets and the recommendation roundups based on them. One famous example:
  • Data Updated July 2021: The All-Time Top 500 Japanese Anime by Reputation—Combined Ratings from Chinese, Japanese, and US Websites; Recommendations for Catch-Up Viewing

6. Learning from Others’ Practice and Trying It Yourself

If sections 1 through 5 are about building up a reserve of ideas and knowledge, section 6 is watching others put them to work and having a go yourself.

I have done quite a bit of editing, layout, and publication work on articles released by Lab on Roof, discussing their critical content with the writers. It is work, but it has also let me read many pieces of criticism more closely and attentively, and learn a great deal, both in knowledge and in critical methods.

Here I would particularly like to applaud two articles:

• Animation Metacriticism I.i: On the Ebbing of the Sublime and Private Experience, with Zombieland Saga and VTubers as Examples

Its conceptual analysis gave me a clearer understanding of what animation criticism should describe.

It is easy to imagine that when a critic writes, “Such-and-such a work/plot development/shot creates a vivid character,” without further clarification, readers’ ideas about why the character is “vivid” may differ from the ideas the critic has left unclear.

Yet in practice, this difficulty does not seem to arise—at least from an ordinary, commonsense point of view. If we are not to abandon our everyday confidence in animation criticism, we must answer the following question:

(P) When an animation critic writes, “Such-and-such a work/plot development/shot creates a vivid character,” how can readers understand what the critic means?

English text of the figure. The horizontal axis is “Breadth of analysis,” with a marker for “Unfamiliar angle”; the downward vertical axis is “Depth of analysis.” The four shapes are labeled “Criticism A,” “Criticism B,” “Criticism C (‘optimal’ criticism),” and “Criticism D.” The blank areas are labeled “Residual categories.” Notes: “1. The Kyon-line is Kyon’s warning line. If a piece of criticism extends beyond this line in depth, it is liable to be seen as ‘overinterpretation.’ 2. The blank areas are residual categories open to exploration.” The character at the lower right says “Meow meow meow?” Below: “The miniature dialectics of erotic manga.” Credit: Zhihu, @Zhong Zimo.

Zhong Zimo uses “criticism” in a broad sense here, though the third and second quadrants are generally closer to what we usually mean by it.

English text of the figure. The axes read “Theory/structure” at the top, “Experience/history” at the bottom, “Work/content” on the left, and “Culture/form” on the right. Credit: Zhihu, @Zhong Zimo.

• Upper left: “Theory of literature and art”; “Literary criticism”; “Analysis of ACG works.” Example: “What Wayne Booth’s ‘unreliable narrator’ really wants to tell us is that characters do not necessarily reflect an author’s ideas; they may even run counter to what the author actually thinks…”

• Upper right: “Theory of cultural criticism”; “Cultural studies”; “Cultural sociology, analysis of industrial structures.” Example: “Through Ghost in the Shell, Masamune Shirow expresses his anxiety about the future. Involuted masses can no longer organize action with substantive meaning. Cyber-society is filled with a humdrum everyday life veiled by post-ideology…”

• Lower left: “Viewing reports”; “Collecting references and allusions (neta)”; “Informal essays on anime and manga.” Example: “Yet it is by rejecting youth that Hachiman Hikigaya establishes a youth of his own; revealing the hope of growth through disillusionment with youth is what most draws me to this story…”

• Lower right: “History of cultural development”; “Industry stories, creative journeys”; “Introductions to and assessments of cast and staff.” Example: “Jun Maeda’s near-death experience with heart trouble inevitably recalls the sorrow of his Angel Beats! story. More dramatically still, his flirtation with a nurse also ended in failure. Can this experience rescue him from his creative exhaustion…?”

• (Animation) Criticism: How Is It Possible? Thoughts from a “Stranger’s” Perspective

Finally, drawing on my shallow knowledge and understanding, I took it upon myself to construct two “contraptions”: a “diagram of categories” and “axes of critical dimensions.” They are meant to express criticism’s diversity and relativity. The axes merely summarize four “ideal types.” There is nothing to rule out an accomplished critic lavishing attention on all four, or even a single article touching on all four dimensions—let alone criticism that goes beyond the dimensions shown here.

—Zhong Zimo

Of course, to make a tiresome preemptive defense: the diagrams above are not sacred laws. They are Zhong’s personal view, an insightful and valuable one.

7. Among Any Three People, I Can Find a Teacher

Human beings—there is only so much one person can do… What I mean is that everyone has different strengths and specialisms. Being good at everything is difficult, perhaps even unnecessary. Coming together to learn, raise doubts, and question our reasoning is therefore another good way to learn and improve.

So there you have my modest learning experience, one thing mentioned, ten thousand left out, as I have persisted in “expanding the dimensions of animation appreciation and criticism.” Honestly, now that I am nearly finished, I feel quite uneasy. What if someone who really knows their stuff points out a serious flaw? What if I lead beginners astray?

Still, I am willing to take those risks, to embarrass myself by taking stock of the routes—and detours—I have followed and laying them out here. If any of you can benefit, nothing could be better. And if you can put my meager achievements beneath your feet and stride beyond them, isn’t that unsparing act of surpassing me precisely what I most hope to see? All I can do is gear up again: study, study, and study some more, and struggle to catch up with you all between bouts of slacking off.

Let me close with words from Weber’s lecture:²

Every scientific “completion” brings new questions; science asks to be surpassed, to be shown inferior by comparison. Anyone who wishes to devote themselves to science must face this fact… The constant overtaking and surpassing that takes place in science, let me repeat, is not only the fate of each of us but our common goal. We cannot work without wanting others to do better than we have. In principle, this progress has no end. Here we come to the question of the meaning of science.

(In German, “science” probably means something like systematic knowledge; hence the sciences of history, the humanities, and art.)

Revised April 12, 2019.