Some of my current academic work revolves around analyzing the Evangelion works as a transmedia franchise, particularly in how fans approach consumption and understand of the entire, vast narrative. I question in particular the reception of the four new Evangelion movies. Since they are not remakes of the Evangelion television series and instead are new visualizations of the Evangelion story, these films appeal to two sorts of fans: the viewers that grew up watching the television series, and a new set of fans that are understanding the Evangelion narrative for the first time. The interrelationship between these two sets of fans — particularly because they are divided by generation on top of consumptive experience — poses loads of new questions and problems about how audiences consume transmedia*.

* For example, one set of related comments voiced by fans after having watched the first film focus on how the film is “a remake of the first six episodes of the television series.” This, however, is untrue, as the film disregards most of Shinji’s emotional trauma. But I’ll break down my thoughts on this topic soon in another article…

If you have yet to see the films, I suggest watching these trailers to start:

Evangelion 1.0: You Are [Not] Alone, trailer

Evangelion 2.0: You Can [Not] Advance, trailer

These four films, two of which of course have already been released in Japan, are also a good chance to analyze the idea of auteurism in particular application to Japanese animation. As I said in my last article, a number of visual elements and styles present in Anno’s Kare Kano resemble those of Evangelion. For example, take a look at the following clip from the 22nd episode of Evangelion, in which an angel “literally” rapes Asuka’s mind.

Neon Genesis Evangelion, episode 22
Watch from 6:09, or click here for a direct link to that time. Watch it until about 7:00.

The quick cuts and flashing words are typical in Evangelion, particularly in times of emotional stress. The style of this scene is even implied in the opening credits sequence to the television series:

Watch it in full, or skip to 1:06.

Similar to the clip of Asuka above, at these points of visual characterization of emotion, comparable visual elements appear in Kare Kano:

Kare Kano, episode 4
Watch from 1:35, or click here for a direct link to that time. Watch it until 2:50.

A similar thematic element is Anno’s placement of locative and geographical frames over dialogue. For example, check out this short clip:

Kare Kano, episode 4
Watch from 3:46, or click here for a direct link to that time. Watch it until 3:58.

From this clip, as well as the previous ones with words, the visual elements are meant to cue metaphoric connections in the viewer’s mind. It’s really that simple: the clip above shows an “under construction sign” when Yukino (the female character) questions her budding relationship with Souichirou, and then it follows with a stop sign (止まれ), signaling that she should slow down and not get ahead of herself).

We could even present a similar comparison to (auteurist director) Akiyuki Shinbou, who frequently utilizes seemingly arbitrary frames that features places and locations in his animations.

However, after watching the first two Evangelion movies, it appears that the production staff has stripped these emotional elements out of the new narrative entirely. But this should come as no surprise, as the Executive Producer, Toshimichi Outsuki has already commented on the changing face of the Evangelion project. In a NEWTYPE magazine interview (translated for Newtype USA and reproduced here), Outsuki states, “I want everyone — from hardcore fans of the original work to people who only know it because of the licensed stuff — to look at it as a standalone film series.” However, these new innovative changes come at the expense of Anno’s auteurism. The article reads, “Otsuki adds that they’re removing much of the deliberate obfuscation that made Eva infamous: “Filling works with difficult workds [sic] and concepts in order to create confusion among viewers was a good technique 12 years ago, but not anymore, and one of our primary goals for this project is to turn everyone’s expectations upside down.”

This comment is actually pretty interesting in and of itself, because I believe it says much about how Japanese viewers, and particularly otaku in the 1990s, consumed television. That techniques of “confusion” were successful might actually inform our understanding of the construction of anime narratives coming into the 2000s. For example, how does this play into the otaku fervor around The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, which was the next mega-success in the anime industry after Evangelion, but which premiered in 2006.

Continuing from that point, the article also reflects on Evangelion’s identity as a sign of the anime industry proper:

The new movies also reflect the staff’s feelings about the state of the anime industry. It’s even suggested that this project is a rejection of current anime production philosophy. “It’s true that Eva was a huge hit,” Otsuki says. “But its success spawned a great deal of confusion and misunderstanding in the in the industry, the end result being a bunch of mass-produced junk. That mindset has persisted for ten years, but now we’re in a position to prove it wrong. We’re determined to close the door on the post-Eva era for good.

I find it incessantly interesting that we can define an era of fan activity and industry production by the effects on one Japanese animation.

Regarding the concept of a canon, I define it as the fundamental works of a type of media (books, movies, etc.), but more specifically those fundamental works with which a reader (viewer, consumer, whatever) may grasp an elementary understanding of how the media (or a subset of the media) operates as media. For example, the Bible is a critical part of the Western canon of literature not just because it remains the leading text of more than one of the world’s major religions, but also because it has a rich history of dissemination around the world, on top of some of the best (and probably influential) narrative structure in world literature. Another example, for film, would be Orson Wells’ Citizen Kane. While not the most enjoyable movie, it remains one of the foundational films on which film students build their academic careers.

To transition bluntly, a canon for Japanese animation is difficult to generate. However, the anime fandom — or what we know of it in America — has obsessed over “the best” anime for decades, even if we have no idea what we’re really talking about. There have been books detailing “the major works” of the key Japanese directors and animators of anime — such as Patrick Drazen’s Anime Explosion: The What? Why? & Wow! of Japanese Animation (even though I’m not sure why Key: The Metal Idol was ever included) and, less so about the canon but still popular (why?!) amongst academics, Susan Napier’s Anime: From Akira to Howl’s Moving Castle. Even Lawrence Eng, our forefather of academic otaku studies in America, has written about the topic too, with “A Look at the Four Revolutions of Anime.”

I won’t go into much detail about how American fandom, at least contemporary fandom, is relatively ignorant of even the major cultural works of Japanese animation (eg., the hordes who have never watched the original Gundam, given its huge impact not only on otaku but Japanese culture in general — read: Odaiba Gundam; and I won’t even go into the influences that Astro Boy lent to modern robotics). The evidence for the (passive-aggressive?) statement is, of course, the popularity of panels at conventions such as GeekNights‘ Anime You Should See; or, maybe not the popularity, but the lack of hands that immediately fly into the air when Akira is flashed onto the projector screen.

Although I could call it a problem, the fact that many anime fans today (comprised, if you step offline, walk into a convention, and talk to a bunch of random kids, of people that probably saw something quickly online, or also as common, just watched Bleach or Naruto on broadcast television) haven’t seen many fundamental anime, or just anime in general is a product of ordinary Internet-age modes of media consumption. Of course, there are many other problems that contribute, such as the proliferation of the hardcore fandom online instead of dispersed amongst strong physical/geographical communities. But, while I point out that NQ-fans (“not quite fans”) aren’t watching enough anime, not watching anime isn’t the problem.

Instead, the real problem is that the original and pivotal goal of the early American anime fandom has succeeded too well. This goal, plain and simple, was to make anime available to everyone. In the hundreds of newsletters and correspondence that I read in the Fred Patten collection, the ideal of media ubiquity held strong and pushed the dissemination of early fansubs across the United States in the 1980s and 90s, eventually culminating in the creation of the contemporary American anime industry. And, luckily for all those fans that can’t speak Japanese, there’s A LOT of anime available for fans to purchase and view. On top of the industry side, the online fansubbing community has also made thousands of titles readily available for anyone to download and view in the comfort of both their own home and own schedule.

So, what’s the problem? It seems like the anime fandom is thriving, especially with all the rumors that con attendance has been steadily rising since the early 2000s. We have all this anime, so what’s wrong?

Well, frankly, there’s too much anime for any one fan to watch. Yes, where at the point where ubiquity has become a negative trait. The current overpopulated media environment for Japanese animation means that fans don’t know what to watch. Unless they’re particularly well-connected to other fans — which the majority of fans, I would say, are not — we’re facing a situation where people don’t know what constitutes “the good stuff.” The solution seems to be what I have already mentioned: panels, websites, and educated fans that can tell fellow viewers what’s good. But even these representatives of the larger fandom can’t possibly watching everything out there, unless they want to ruin their lives by pulling a Jason Thompson. And the problem isn’t even that there’s too much anime. If we focus solely on television series, anime is bounded by time: 25 minutes per episode (conversely compared to manga, which can be read at relative speeds). The fact that a fair number of series boast more than 50 episodes, or even in some cases more than 100 episodes, means that if we want to live up to the otaku namesake, we have to spend a lot of time indoors in front of a screen.

Talking about a canon for Japanese animation, I wish to avoid speaking about the content of the canon (specific titles that stand out) and instead wish to emphase the construction of the canon. How do we choose what fans need to watch?

From here on out, I must mention that I am stealing an idea. I’ve had a lot of ideas in the past that I’ve never pursued, and I feel like stealing an idea once in a while saves others from feeling guilty that they cannot pursue their own ideas. This idea, then, is credited to Carl Li, over at Ogiue Maniax. Previously, he wrote about A Comprehensive Guide to Essential Episodes, which I would like to borrow for this article to propose a utilitarian venture to save the future of the anime fandom from complete ignorance of anime (worst case scenario: no newer fans have watched anything!). Carl proposes “a guide to… long shows… pointing out the episodes which are considered, while perhaps not “necessary” to the viewing experience, to be the apex of the show. That way, anybody who just wants to sample the show but in a meaningful way (not just watch the first episode or two and be done with it) can do so and fully understand the reasons that show is called a classic.”

I will state right off the bat that my proposal does not solve the problem of fan ignorance (not having watched enough shows, or enough of a show, to talk about them/it critically). However, it approaches a solution to the degree of good enough. I wholeheartedly believe that the future of the fandom relies not on fans having completed X number of shows, but instead depends on current fans continuing conversation between fellow fans and with potential fans. The only way to continue that conversation, then, is to make sure that fans can talk about shows they’ve watched, even if they haven’t watched all of it. As Carl points out in his article, most shows (especially those with hundreds of episodes) are drowning in a sea of filler episodes that attempt to buttress the main narrative (especially when it begins to weaken — a common occurrence in anime).

So let’s get into technical and methodological details. The goal is to gather information by crowdsourcing the anime fan community. Whether this includes 5 or 500 members, I suppose ultimately it doesn’t matter. We could argue about levels of expertise, or attention to detail, or quality assurance; but, in the end, this project just needs to be completed one way or another.

Websites are simple and inexpensive — I can host a domain and FTP. But if we’re going to go beyond a simple Wiki, I’d also need someone (or a few people) with relatively-solid coding experience to whip up a site with user accounts, along the lines of My Anime List (without all of the egotistical wanking). One page per series, with a short (under 100 words) exposition per episode, with a voting module that ranks watchability: Required or Optional. Even if only one person ranks a 100-episode series, if other fans can understand the basics of the narrative and art direction for that series by watching only 15 episodes, then The Project has succeeded.

So, there’s now a Call for Help. Let’s build the Anime Canon Project. If you’re interested in working on this venture, or at least think it’s a good idea, leave a comment at the end of this article, or email me at alexleavitt @ gmail . com. I’ll see what I can do to gauge interest and pursue some sort of operational model.

I’ve had this short interview with Shoko Nakagawa at Anime Expo 2008 from Anime Genesis in my Firefox tab queue for a number of weeks, but I finally got around to clicking play this evening.

If Japanese otaku fandom is a bit under the radar for you, Nakagawa-san’s name has garnered a lot of attention in the past couple years. Besides obviously singing the intro theme to Gainax’s Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, “Shokotan” (as many fans call her) is notorious for calling herself an otaku (or, well, “not really”). Whether or not she cares about authenticity, she runs a blog on which she at least sometimes posts about otakudom. Patrick Macias wrote up an article about her for the Japan Times at the beginning of this year if you’re interested in reading that here.

The blog must be mentioned, since it caused a stir on 2channel, but particularly because in the Anime Genesis interview above, she draws a connection between blogging, the Japanese otaku community, and the contemporary reception of otaku in Japan. If you were too lazy to watch, the translation reads, “Times have changed and the otaku culture is certainly more accepted in Japan right now, because everyone blogs and there are community sites where you can share your interests with other people.” I’m not so certain if the public sentiment toward otaku has improved because of blogging. But it seems that Nakagawa-san suggests at minimum a stronger, maybe even reestablished, sense of community among otaku in Japan, certainly post-Miyazaki. Obviously there’s been a huge cultural shift in otaku habits to the Internet, particularly at 2channel. However, I can’t really judge the relative impact of the Internet on Japanese fandom, mainly due to the dichotomy between blogging and general Internet communities and where 1) discussion, 2) critique, and 3) socializing occurs.

The Internet has also visibly helped out the American fandom in solidifying regional bases and connecting fans on a wider scale across the nation (which of course is much larger than Japan). But my thought is whether the American fandom needs anime bloggers. Japan for the most part lacks any events similar to American anime conventions, so I can understand how blogs have aided in the dissemination of ideas for otaku. However, anime conventions in the United States were created for the explicit purpose of connecting fans to watch and discuss Japanese animation. As a lot of the fandom established headquarters on the Internet, we saw the convention circuit explode with new faces and names, as staff circles could be more easily formed and marketing of events more easily announced. But what has blogging as a medium done for the American fandom?

First, I must distinguish between the mediums over which fans communicate. Basically, there exist forums and blogs, which serve different purposes: the former to foster discussion, the latter stimulate long-form writing. In theory, blogging would have replaced fanzine articles. But I’m not so sure that it has. In my limited experience of looking at anime blogs, I see more articles relates to episode-centric impressions than anything else, but how many times does this observation have to be repeated?

One thing we certainly don’t see much of anymore is fansites. The fall of Geocities possibly heralds the end of that form of fan-propelled curation of information. But with free services like blogs replacing services like web hosting, we won’t see much more of the intense excavation of series as we did with fansites, on which the creators wrote as much as possible about one (or more) series. The modern equivalent of this is Wikipedia, which I suppose might make fansites pointless.

But if blogs aren’t going to connect fans to information, or at least critique, then I’m not so sure that blogs matter in the long run to the anime fandom. Or is it really that communication as a fan activity has decreased as well? It seems at modern conventions we see a minority of discussion about anime, with more focus spent on masquerades or what have you (this observation has also been beaten into the ground). But if panels are the only surviving artifact of fans sitting in a room talking about anime, then perhaps the fandom is slowly breaking apart, returning to a bunch of people in the same country watching the same shows. At the same time, though, American fandom hasn’t suffered from the social affects (ie., 義理) as has the Japanese fandom (here I blatantly mean the repercussions of Miyazaki in 1989). Then there’s also the question of how many fans actually use blogs or read them at all.

Not many is my assumption.

This morning, I got a chance to listen to Anime Pulse’s podcast of Professor Ian Condry’s panel from Anime Boston 2008, in which he relates his research on the production of Japanese animation in his upcoming book. I’ve known the following sentiment for a fair while, but Ian recalls a feeling that many Japanese animators of anime have expressed for a fair while on the topic of digital animation versus older, hand-drawn productions: the former doesn’t show enough of the human behind the creation. Of course, it comes down to personal aesthetics. But Ian says, “I had an interesting moment when I was in a cab with a couple of anime producers, and we were just coming back from a studio visit, and we were talking about Shrek. And they just marveled at the ways that flowing hair and the kind of detail that could happen in computer animation was really quite mind-blowing. But then one of the producers said, ‘But, y’know, for all the technical sophistication, we feel like it lacks a little soul. Right? It lacks something.’ And I think that’s one of the things that they said… Hand-drawn animation will continue in Japan.”

I personally had this feeling after recently watching the new release of the first episode of Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood (aka. the second season).

I must begin, though, by stating that the issue doesn’t come down to cel-animation versus computer animation. The first season of Full Metal Alchemist, released in Japan from late 2003 to late 2004 (and then broadcast in America from 2004 to 2006), relies heavily on digital animation. A number of sketch-based cels (as in non-painted cels) can be found online, but we can safely say that FMA is a digital production. Five years later, though, digital animation has surpassed the techniques of 2004, and we now view entirely different trends in more modern anime productions.

Because the art is constantly changing over time, looking at the evolution of anime (and especially manga, since it’s drawn by one artist rather than many members of a team) is fairly interesting. One cool thing about anime, for instance, is that since it’s made for television, you can see how the production studio’s team improved or worsened throughout the production, simply by watching the broadcast. For manga, it’s pretty much the same: compare later chapters of the manga to the earlier ones, and you’ll commonly see significant differences in the character designs, backgrounds, line work, etc. Such evolution is particularly present in Hayao Miyazaki’s work on the Nausicaa manga, which Takekuma Kentaro explained in a lecture this spring at Kyoto Seika University, entitled The Space Between Anime and Manga: #4: Why is the Manga Version of Nausicaa So Hard to Read?, which Ko Ransom skillfully translated over at welcome datacomp. It’s a must-read piece and provides particularly interesting insights on how art in manga operates in terms of story and content.

So, back to Full Metal Alchemist 2. I’ve only watched the first episode so far, but I have already noticed a distinct difference in character design and art style compared to the first season. Talking to my former roommate Kent last night tipped me off to an (apparent) opinion expressed online that the second season of FMA resembles the manga a lot more than the first season had. I wondered if this was true, and while watching the episode this morning noticed that the character’s faces were a lot rounder, the colors were a bit different, and the line strokes were a bit thicker than the first season.

Basically, I noticed three possible differences in the second season compared to the first:

1) The possibility that the design was changed due to digital technologies
2) The possibility that the design was changed to reflect the manga
3) The possibility that the design was changed because of, well, a new character designer

To start, I believe that the third point does not bear much importance in this discussion. It is true that the character designers changed from Yoshiyuki Ito to Hiroki Kanno, but ultimately the character designs do not differ; instead, the art design changes. However, the entire art team was reorganized for the second season, so I can’t make any solid judgments based on those facts.

The first point makes a bit of sense, but my argument is a bit weak. I want to assert that hand-drawn lines reflect a certain humanness that cannot be reproduced with a mouse and Photoshop, because the art programs used (probably something more advanced than Adobe’s products?) have been coded to resemble the human form already. Drawing a curved line of variable width on a computer program does not allow for the immediate human correction of said line’s skew or width by way of pencil and eraser, at least not on a similar scale.

For example, in this comparison (where the top image is from the first season of FMA, and the bottom image is from the second season), we notice that the use of bolder lines is particularly evident in the second season, namely the line of Ed’s facial structure. This, however, may be a reflection of the manga, as will be discussed later.

However, I feel that in terms of digital technology, one thing we can examine is the use and modification of color.

If we examine more modern anime, the colors seem bolder and brighter, by far. A basic look at the history of color in anime produces a few interesting points in a very indistinct timeline. Avoiding discussion of black-and-white anime, we can see:

a) Flat colors, as seen in the Cutie Honey intro from 1973

(However, this does not ignore instances of shading, as seen in the intro to Mazinger Z from 1972.)

b) The four-layer technique, probably begun in the ’80s, as seen in the movie, Macross: Do You Remember Love from 1984 (and advocated by Paul “Otaking” Johnson)

Which continued on into the ’90s with anime such as Trigun from 1998

c) Sometime in the new millenium, a return to flat colors, propelled by (IMO) digital coloring techniques, such as in the first opening of Naruto from 2002.

Nowadays, the colorization depicted in Example C appears to be the common trend in popular modern anime (my assumption is that it’s the easiest to produce). It’s certainly difficult to argue a difference between the first and second season of Full Metal Alchemist, because both seasons use the modern, flat colorization. However, with updates to technology, from my perspective I see those colors becoming much more bold and distinct. Perhaps this also has to do with the switch to digital broadcasting and HD technologies.

Here, we see Ed in the first and second seasons, from the top respectively. The first season’s colors seem a bit fuzzier or faded to me.

Ed ripping his shirt in Season 1 and Season 2, from the top respectively. Even the lines seem a bit more distinct in the second season. Comparing the color of the shading between seasons, I think that the first season’s shadows look a bit more realistic, while the second season’s seem more like a darker and more-defined layer of color.

Light shining off of Ed’s armor in the first and second seasons of FMA, from the top respectively. Again, like the shadows in the above image, the glint of the light seems more realistic in Season 1, because it gives off a blurred, dusty feeling. However, it may be argued that it appears that way as an effect of the metal or environment (eg., the second season is supposed to seem like more-polished armor).

Approaching the possibility of Season 2 resembling the manga more so than Season 1 might require a stronger argument. However, it is clear that the facial designs from Season 2 are a lot rounder than Season 1, and the line strokes are in places much deeper or bolder than the first season (look again at the images of Ed’s face [image 1 and image 2]). If we examine the manga, we can see the change in design that I mentioned at the beginning of the article.

Images from the earlier chapters of the Full Metal Alchemist manga.

Images from the later chapters of the FMA manga.

I chose two fight scenes from both the earlier and later chapters of the manga serialization, because the pictures contained a maximum amount of lines, providing us with some material for comparison. Just as Takekuma Kentaro in his lecture explains that Miyazaki later learned to adapt his images for manga and developed much bolder lines, so does Hiromu Arakawa, the artist and writer of the manga. The characters and their appendages in the later chapters are surrounded by much bolder, distinct lines, even if those lines are drawn with much more rigor (they appear to be more jagged). The faces of the characters also appear to have rounder characteristics. Even the background lines evolve: in the earlier chapters, all of the lines resemble each other and are arranged in a similar pattern; however, in the later chapters, the background vary, even though similar actions are taking place.

When I talked to Kent, he said that “people online” expressed their distaste for the new season of Full Metal Alchemist, because the art style was significantly different enough to notice. Whether or not that change is a reflection of the manga, I believe, does not matter, but if the cause of the change is actually an attempt to mirror the manga’s style, that would indeed be, well, awesome. It’s a neat tip-of-the-hat to the series origin, but it’s also a more subtler one than, say, the new Shin Mazinger Shōgeki! Z-Hen being shown on Japanese television this season, which attempts to retain a similar style of artwork and animation from its predecessors.