Big↘ O↘ther↗, wake up! Someone’s invading our symbolic order!1
Editor’s note: One person’s view, offered in the hope of drawing out better ones.
Keeping at one particular thing: when we look back from the present to 2018 and further still, some of our activities were not connected with that undertaking at first. Yet after undergoing various experiences, the subject retroactively assigns them symbolic significance; they too can then be counted as part of keeping at that one thing. I would like to take this opportunity to offer a few modest thoughts on learning to improve one’s ability to appreciate and write criticism of animation—though I would really rather call it an expansion of dimensions. Given my limited knowledge and abilities, the examples below will be drawn largely from Japanese animation, or animation in a Japanese style.
First, I should make one thing clear: enjoying animation or live-action films does not necessarily require any fancy assortment of “appreciative and critical abilities.” In primary school I knew nothing about any of this, did not even get the anime references, and still thoroughly enjoyed Hayate the Combat Butler. But some people may want to uncover more dimensions of appreciation, so this article really ought to have “expanding the dimensions…” in its title. No one can truly exhaust every dimension, but that does not stop us enjoying things. Let us leave the question of the title’s legitimacy there and get to the point.
1. Animation Production Knowledge from the Industry Side (a Heading I Just Made Up)
Understanding how animation is made helps us grasp the characteristics of this artistic medium and the styles of its creators. Without a basic knowledge of animation production, critics can easily make fools of themselves: these matters are generally agreed upon within the community of creators—that is, the animation industry—and critics should respect that knowledge.
For example, I used to equate dōga with in-betweening. Only after a friend corrected me did I learn that dōga includes both tracing the key drawings into clean final lines and drawing the in-betweens.
For many people, watching Shirobako sparks an interest in this kind of knowledge. What next? I began learning through introductory video lectures on animation drawing, or sakuga, by two pioneers I greatly respect:
The Basics of Japanese Animation Drawing: Complete Version
Sakuga Lecture: Japanese Animation Drawing and the Animators Behind It (2013 Version)
After that, I kept building up knowledge and experience by regularly watching Anitama’s sakuga MADs—its “reconciliation” feature of animation compilation videos—and reading translated articles from Western sakuga blogs, among other things. Even now, though, I can claim only a very rudimentary understanding.
Besides animation drawing, there is direction:
An Analysis of the Direction in JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: Golden Wind, Episodes 03–07
We will leave aside such stages as developing a project in pre-production and photography/compositing in post-production. As for books, here is one example:
I also took a chance on a few Chinese textbooks about animation’s audiovisual language and storyboard design, guided by Douban, the books-and-culture review site, and my own book-buying instincts. They are fairly thin, with little text, and quite easy to read. Still, I hesitate to display them here for fear of leading people astray.
For me, learning about animation production has many benefits: avoiding mistakes about established production facts; paying respect to creators; and better understanding animation’s artistic characteristics and individual creators’ styles. All of this is very helpful to animation appreciation and criticism.
2. The Visual Arts and the Philosophy of Art
Animation is an art with its own particularities, which we must treat with care. Conversely, exploring the wider world of art can help us understand both what is distinctive about animation and the more general categories of art. There are plenty of different arts. Apart from the live-action films discussed below, let us single out the visual arts here.
Of course, most people who make animation are not specialist art historians. But we should remember a familiar point: artistic creation is always influenced, consciously or unconsciously, by the broader spirit of the age and by social history. That will do by way 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:
A screenshot from the course. The lecturer is relaxed, but packs in a good deal of information.
Fu Lei’s Twenty Lectures on Masterpieces of World Art is a highly regarded introduction to art history. Animation and visual art share certain categories—perspective, line, color, composition—and studying art history helps us understand some essentials of animation as drawings set in motion. Besides art history, we might also mention the philosophy of art. I have absolutely no competence to comment on it; all I can do, very nervously, is show one book I have read:
3. Philosophy and the Social Sciences
These intellectual resources are generally brought to bear on animation as a text—not necessarily a written one.
What? You can do that? Seeing is believing (?), so here are a few articles from Lab on Roof that show the possibilities of this dimension of animation criticism:
The Parallax View | Iori Nagase: Why Psychoanalysis Is an Adventure
An examination of Iori Nagase’s actions in Kokoro Connect through psychoanalytic theory. I think the interpretation is excellent.
Toward an Analysis of Relational Forms: Love Triangles in Erciyuan and “Journey Under the Midnight Sun”2
A convincing structural analysis of love triangles using concepts from Simmel’s sociology.
The Parallax View | Notes toward an Ontological Aesthetics of Erciyuan: The Return of the Sacred
An exploration of erciyuan aesthetics drawing on Benjamin, Lacanian thought, Baudrillard, and others.
Wait, you say—how could the creator possibly have thought of all that…? Please see our account’s closing illustration. Creators’ own ideas deserve respect, but once a text comes into being, it has a relative independence and a plurality of meanings. Of course, whether an interpretation is good must be tested by fellow critics, readers, and history.
The fields of study here are so vast… Everyone has to choose directions that interest them and suit their strengths. With my thoroughly ordinary abilities, late start, and lack of hard work, I can barely keep up. Last year I read quite a few books that could fall under “philosophy and the social sciences”—a truly enormous label. Since this article is meant partly as an introduction, here are a few introductory works:
The new seventh edition has just been published.
I need to restrain myself from rattling off books like a waiter reciting a menu. Life has its limits; slacking off and learning have none.3 One warning is necessary here: beginners who are not specialists and lack guidance from a trained academic run a considerable risk of misreading thinkers’ original works if they plunge straight into them before gaining an overall grasp of the history of philosophy, or of ideas in the relevant discipline. I will refrain from giving examples. It is better to use sites such as Douban and the Q&A platform Zhihu to find introductions and reading guides trusted in academia, and learn something of what scholars have already achieved. Oxford’s Very Short Introductions series is a good choice.
On to the next section.
4. Film Theory and Film History (Leaving Television Drama Aside for Now)
As the most popular cultural product, film is an important part of social and cultural life. Animation creators may draw on cinematic techniques in their own methods, such as storyboarding and direction. For instance, to heighten a realistic effect, they might imitate a live-action shot with shallow depth of field and out-of-focus bokeh, blurring the distant background. Animation would not produce this effect automatically—though, conversely, its use in live-action footage need not be unintentional either.
English translation of the screenshot text: “Imitating depth of field in live-action footage.” Subtitle: “Yamada and Ishihara deliberately used the cherry blossoms to blur the shot.” Video title: “[Subtitled Discussion] Sound! Euphonium: In Pursuit of the Most Romantic Realism.”
We must be careful here! Animation and live-action film are, after all, two different arts. Film theory applied mechanically to animation criticism may prove ill-suited to its new context. But we can make specific judgments about whether borrowing a concept is appropriate only after becoming familiar with both fields. Quite apart from creative techniques, animation creators are a group within society, and it hardly needs saying that the content and styles of works by major filmmakers and classics of film history influence them. This is part of the mutual influence at work throughout society.
There are plenty of film-history videos too, for example:
Complete Collection: Crash Course Film History—All 16 Episodes, Trailer, and Outtakes
The two versions of the film-history videos, one short and one long, each have their strengths. I think watching film-history videos like these before moving on to introductory books on film might make the reading a little easier.
On film’s audiovisual language:
TNABO | Film Language: Composition in Storytelling, by Channel Criswell
It is worth mentioning that TNABO also enjoys Japanese animation. There are plenty of MOOCs on film appreciation, so I will not go into those. I try them out, and if I think the content is good, I keep watching at my own pace. When I have time, I watch different versions to help the material sink in.
5. Japan and the History of Japanese Animation
If we are discussing Japanese animation, the value of knowing Japanese social history hardly needs defending. For instance, the wisecracks of Hachiman Hikigaya—“Great Teacher” to Chinese fans—often contain references to local Japanese culture. Both his story and that of a certain rascal from Rascal Does Not Dream of Bunny Girl Senpai are unmistakably steeped in Japanese school culture:
This is Yutaka Nakamura’s animation, right? I have not got that wrong, have I? Please correct me if I have.
This series practically recounts most of Japan’s history in the second half of the twentieth century through metaphor, with a great many references to tokusatsu, Japan’s effects-driven live-action tradition, mixed in. Anitama has a series of articles exploring these in depth. Without some knowledge of Japanese social history and tokusatsu, viewers will recognize far less of the information the creators want to convey through the series. (All that talk was really just an excuse to get you to watch Concrete Revolutio.)
Japanese history… Unfortunately, with my meager knowledge, I dare not recommend any books. My own studies have been a patchwork of bits and pieces. Next semester I will audit Japanese History II and ask the lecturer for advice. Meanwhile, let me recommend a taiga drama—dramatizing history need not mean talking nonsense about it:
Taiga dramas, NHK’s historical drama series, are certainly not serious historical scholarship. But if watching one gives us more motivation to learn Japanese history, isn’t that a good thing? There are also many reflections of Japanese culture in Japanese animation. An obvious example is Shōwa Genroku Rakugo Shinjū, which uses animation to convey the delights of rakugo, the traditional art of solo storytelling.
That will do for this glimpse of the tip of the iceberg of Japanese social history and culture. Let me now say a little about the history of Japanese television animation. The relatively systematic illustrated histories of Japanese animation I know include versions on Douban and Anitama:
Looking Back at Twentieth-Century Japanese Television Animation, with Some Overlooked Works (32)
(I absolutely did not choose this installment on purpose.)
I would also like to recommend the Japanese TV animation history videos made by Bingfeng de Xihe:
Of course, there are many other versions of animation history; I am only talking about the ones I know. And animation history naturally leads us back to watching the works themselves. If we want to review Director A’s new work, for example, familiarity with that director’s earlier body of work gives us a grasp of their distinctive style, as well as some expectations and knowledge to bring to the new one. I generally follow four routes in choosing animation to watch:
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Auteur theory: work through the films and series of directors I like.
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“Studio theory”: work through the productions of animation studios I like.
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The genre approach: follow the genres I like—for example,
tokusatsu; wait, that doesn’t count, does it? -
The ratings approach: find things to watch through aggregated rankings and the recommendation lists based on them. Here is a well-known example:
Of the shows I have caught up with recently, IDOLiSH7 astonished me with how good it was. I will write a review sometime.
6. Learning from Others’ Practice, and Trying It Yourself
If sections 1 through 5 are about building up ideas and knowledge to draw on, then section 6 is about seeing how others put them into practice and having a go yourself.
Thanks to my position (?), I have of course read every article published by Lab on Roof. I have helped edit, lay out, and publish quite a few of them, discussing their critical arguments with the authors. It may be work, but it has also brought me into closer contact with a great deal of criticism, from which I have learned much, both in knowledge and in critical methods.
Here I would especially like to applaud two articles:
Metacriticism of Animation I: Critical Expression as a Problem—White, Hyouka, the Commander
Its conceptual analysis, in the style of analytic philosophy, gave me a clearer understanding of what animation criticism ought to describe.
It is easy to imagine that when a critic writes, “Such-and-such a work, plot, or shot creates vivid character portrayals,” without further clarification, readers’ ideas about what makes those “character portrayals” “vivid” may differ from the critic’s own, unclearly expressed ideas.
Yet in practice there seems to be no such difficulty, at least as far as common sense tells us. If we do not wish to abandon our ordinary confidence in animation criticism, we must answer the following question:
(P) When an animation critic writes, “Such-and-such a work, plot, or shot creates vivid character portrayals,” how can readers of the criticism understand what the critic means?
How Is (Animation) Criticism Possible? Thoughts from a “Stranger’s” Perspective
Mr. Zhong’s two diagrams really opened my eyes:
Finally, on the basis of my shallow knowledge and understanding, I have taken it upon myself to put together two little contraptions: a “Category Diagram” and an “Axis of Dimensions in Anime Criticism.” They are intended to convey the diversity and relativity of such criticism. The axis summarizes only four “ideal types.” An accomplished critic may well spread their attentions across all four; a single article may even range across all four dimensions. Nor does this rule out criticism that goes beyond these dimensions and categories.
English translation of the diagram text:
- Horizontal axis, pointing right: “Breadth of analysis,” with “unfamiliar angles” beneath it.
- Vertical axis, pointing down: “Depth of analysis.”
- Green ellipse: “Criticism A.”
- Yellow ellipse: “Criticism B.”
- Red ellipse: “Criticism C” and “optimized criticism.”
- Purple ellipse: “Criticism D,” with “the dialectic of desire in ero manga [erotic manga]” beneath it. Beside the reaction image: “Meow meow meow?”
- The blank regions are labeled “residual categories.”
- Dashed horizontal line: “Kyon-line.”
- Notes: “1. The Kyon-line is the Kyon warning line. If a piece of anime criticism goes beyond this line in depth, it is liable to be seen as ‘overinterpretation.’ 2. The blank areas are residual categories that remain to be explored.”
- Credit: Zhihu, @Zhong Zimo.
English translation of the diagram text:
- Axes: “Theory/structure” at the top; “Experience/history” at the bottom; “Work/content” on the left; “Culture/form” on the right.
- Upper left: “Literary and artistic theory”; “Literary criticism”; “Analysis of ACG [animation, comics, and games] works.”
Example: “Wayne Booth’s ‘unreliable narrator’ is actually telling us that a character does not necessarily reflect the author’s ideas, and may even run counter to what the author really thinks…” - Upper right: “Critical theories of culture”; “Cultural studies”; “Cultural sociology, analysis of industrial structures.”
Example: “Through Ghost in the Shell, Masamune Shirow expresses his concerns about the future. An involuted populace can no longer organize genuinely meaningful action. Cyber society is filled with humdrum daily life shrouded in post-ideology…” - Lower left: “Viewing reports”; “Compilations of references (neta)”; “Anime and manga essays.”
Example: “Yet Hachiman Hikigaya has built a youth of his own by negating youth; showing the hope of growth through the disappointments of youth is what draws me most to the story…” - Lower right: “History of cultural development”; “Industry stories, accounts of the creative process”; “Introductions to and appraisals of CAST and STAFF.”
Example: “Jun Maeda’s brush with death from heart trouble inevitably recalls the pathos of his Angel Beats!. More dramatically still, his flirtation with a nurse also ended in failure. Can this experience rescue him from creative exhaustion…?” - Credit: Zhihu, @Zhong Zimo.
Of course—and it is tiresome to have to make this defense in advance—the diagrams above are not inviolable rules. They are Mr. Zhong’s personal view, an insightful and valuable one.
I have also between crushing real-world obligations, endless study plans, retreating into brooding over why I am such trash, slacking off, and carrying out my duties at Lab on Roof practiced by writing one modest piece myself:
An Informal Discussion | It’s White Album Season Again…
6. Among My Companions, There Is Always Someone to Learn From4
We humans… 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, even unnecessary. Coming together to learn, raise questions, and work through them with one another is therefore another good way to make progress.
This is, of course, also one of my hopes for the Lab on Roof community. During my time as director, the many different heavyweights I have met—and I am not throwing that word around; they really do know their stuff—have taught me a great deal. Some study direction, some specialize in animation history, some have a deep knowledge of a particular field in philosophy or the social sciences, and some are veteran sakuga enthusiasts. To someone as shallow and ignorant as me, their guidance has been like a lighthouse.
That, then, is my account, leaving out far more than it covers, of how I have kept at “expanding the dimensions of animation appreciation and criticism.” To be honest, now that I am almost finished, I feel distinctly uneasy. What if someone who really knows their stuff points out a serious flaw? What if I lead readers astray?
But I am still willing to take those risks, embarrass myself, and lay out a summary of the roads—and wrong turns—I have taken. If any friends find something useful here, nothing could be better. And if they can tread my meager achievements underfoot and stride far beyond them, isn’t their surpassing me so mercilessly exactly what I most hope to see? All I can do is gear up again: learn, learn, and learn some more, and between bouts of slacking off do my utmost to catch up with you all.
Let me end with words from Weber’s lecture:5
Every scientific “fulfillment” means new questions; science asks to be surpassed, to be put in the shade. Anyone who wishes to devote themselves to science must face this fact… Being continually surpassed in science, let me repeat, is not only the fate of every one of us, but our common purpose. We cannot work without wishing that others will do better than we have. In principle, this progress has no end. Here we come to the question of the meaning of science.
(Author’s gloss: In German, “science” seems to mean something like systematic knowledge, hence historical science, the human sciences, and the science of art.)
January 10, 2019: Revised the grammar and typos in response to comments, and added some material. Since the platform allows only one edit, any further corrections will have to be made on our other platforms. If there is a major update, I will publish a new post.