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Despite the longevity of animation and its significance within the history of cinema, film theorists have focused on live-action motion pictures and largely ignored hand-drawn and computer-generated movies. Thomas Lamarre contends that the history, techniques, and complex visual language of animation, particularly Japanese animation, demands serious and sustained engagement, and in The Anime Machine he lays the foundation for a new critical theory for reading Japanese animation, showing how anime fundamentally differs from other visual media. The Anime Machine defines the visual characteristics of anime and the meanings generated by those specifically "animetic" effects-the multiplanar image, the distributive field of vision, exploded projection, modulation, and other techniques of character animation-through close analysis of major films and television series, studios, animators, and directors, as well as Japanese theories of animation. Lamarre first addresses the technology of anime: the cells on which the images are drawn, the animation stand at which the animator works, the layers of drawings in a frame, the techniques of drawing and blurring lines, how characters are made to move. He then examines foundational works of anime, including the films and television series of Miyazaki Hayao and Anno Hideaki, the multimedia art of Murakami Takashi, and CLAMP's manga and anime adaptations, to illuminate the profound connections between animators, characters, spectators, and technology. Working at the intersection of the philosophy of technology and the history of thought, Lamarre explores how anime and its related media entail material orientations and demonstrates concretely how the "animetic machine" encourages a specific approach to thinking about technology and opens new ways for understanding our place in the technologized world around us.
[...]... and technical specificity of animation that lie prior to any elaboration of animation form I found it necessary to ground my reading of animations in a theory of animation based on its materiality, that is, on the material essence or x P R EFAC E force within its technical determinations As a consequence, rather than provide a list or catalog of formal features of animation or anime, I look at animations... slow pans over the image The pan over an image, however, can be as easily produced by sliding the drawing under the camera, rather than moving the camera Because of the relative immobility of the camera, the emphasis in animation often falls on drawing the successive movements from frame to frame One of the masters of animation, Norman McLaren offers this seminal definition: Animation is not the art of. .. popularity but played a central role in it Japanese animations were central to the tectonic shift in modes of image production and reception that generated the wave of interest in animation and animated media In fact, the centrality, ubiquity, and popularity of Japanese animations raise the question of why we should not structure animation studies around the study of Japanese animation Why do Japanese animations... activities that bring together a range of events and media platforms Looking at anime from the angle of the force of the moving image offers a way to avoid the technological determinism implicit in apparatus theory (namely, the animation stand somehow determines all of anime and anime- related franchises and fan activities), and to go beyond the reflection model or representation theory that remains prevalent... technological device is an abstract machine a multiplanar machine—that is at once technical/material and abstract/immaterial Needless to say, because animation entails technologies of the moving image, the multiplanar machine might more accurately be called an animetic machine or a multiplanar animetic machine The stacking of sheets or planes of the image (and thus compositing) happens in concert with the. .. to ask, what exactly is it about the anime image that allows it to function as a nodal point in transnational multimedia flows? From Apparatus to Machine Central to this inquiry into the material and perceptual specificity of anime is the animation stand, a fairly simple apparatus for stacking celluloid sheets, which allows animators to introduce layers into the image This apparatus became of central... I owe thanks to Kotani Mari, Nakagawa Shigemi, Tatsumi Takayuki, and Ueno Toshiya, as well as my friends Tsuzura Junji and Narita Makoto In the ¯ course of translating essays by Kotani Mari and Otsuka Eiji and supervising a translation of Azuma Hiroki for Mechademia, I found myself drawn deeper into their way of looking at manga, anime, and fans, and I am indebted to them for their patience and generosity... innovations with the animation stand, but at this juncture, I wish to consider some of the questions that use of the animation stand raises about the status of the apparatus As I mentioned above, film studies today shies away from apparatus theory because it smacks of technological determinism, because the apparatus appears to determine or structure the whole of cinema When I turn to the animation stand... that unfold around anime that we do better to think always in the plural, in terms of animations The Japanese animations that are loosely grouped under the term anime entail an exceedingly vast range of media platforms, aesthetic conventions, and fan activities; they are today distributed or circulated transnationally and, with increasing frequency, are also produced transnationally Although some anime. .. philosophical speculation, without any consideration of the materiality of animation A third common approach bypasses textual questions and the materiality of animation in favor of sociological and anthropological readings: anime is a source of information about Japan, especially about Japanese youth Even though I think all these approaches have their place and their merits, it is nevertheless in response .