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.

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.

Fansubs: fan-produced subtitles added to original footage of foreign television programs or films.

Most commonly a practice by fans of Japanese animation, fansubs have, since the 1980s in America, allowed fans of anime to view the Japanese-language media and share it amongst friends. While technically illegal [1] in terms of copyright law, fansubbing in the Internet age has proliferated to a point that 1) fans rely on fansubbing groups to keep up with the latest series, and 2) the animation industry has felt the need to form a conversation around protecting their intellectual property [2]. By the end of 2008, the demand for English-language fansubs reached such a critical point that major Japanese animation companies teamed up with the (previously illegal) Crunchyroll.com to distribute fansubs streaming online in a timely manner (read: one hour after television broadcast in Japan) for a fee or after a longer period (one week) for free [3].

In the summer of 2008, I traveled down to Baltimore, MD for Otakon, the largest East-coast anime convention, and attended the Fansubber & Industry Discussion panel (viewable online [4]). After the panel ended, I snagged Interactii, one of the members of the popular fansubbing group Dattebayo Fansubs, LLC [5], for a quarter-hour to ask a few questions, reprinted below:

Q: Can you comment on the fact that Dattebayo, while fansubbing is technically illegal, [is] asking YouTube to follow through with legal actions…

Interactii: Yeah, the reason that we do that is because we believe that having some level of control over the material is very important. So if it is asked of us to stop, we can try to stop as best as possible. And YouTube is so uncontrolled in its methods of distribution and it’s so accessible — it’s accessibly accessible — by my viewpoint. And so our goal is just to reduce that. And it’s also kind of to protect the interest of the show, because it’s not good for that to be on YouTube. Anime companies don’t want it, fansubbers and fansubbing groups don’t want it… we’re all working towards that same kind of goal.

Q: Where do you think the intellectual property lies? Is it just in the fansubs themselves? Or is it in the link between the fansub and the video…

Interactii: From our standpoint?

Q: From the company’s standpoint, because technically the entire use of the episode is not under free use.

Interactii: It’s murky for sure, but we went through the process with YouTube, and we got the approval to do it. We do it on the basis of the translations and the styling of the translations as a thing that’s copyrightable, which is technically under the DMCA, which is something that we can take down. That’s kind of our approach to it, and it hasn’t been challenged by anyone so far. So we’re continuing to operate under it.

Q: What material do you submit to them so that they can track the takedowns?

Interactii: Actually, it’s not tracked by them. We have someone on our staff who has the authorization to take down the videos.

Q: If the Japanese company were to go to YouTube and try to find some parallel between your takedowns and their takedowns, do you think there would be some kind of conflict there?

Interactii: Probably, yes. But I don’t see how our take-downs would possibly be non-beneficial to them. We only remove our content. We don’t remove all Naruto. We remove Naruto with our subs on them; we remove Bleach with our subs on them. It’s only those things that we’re removing, so we’re not removing anything that they might be contributing. So there’s really no negative effect in my mind.

Q: Have you guys taken any legal action against people who try to distribute these videos?

Interactii: We really have no grounds to. We’ve asked places who do that to stop, and we’ve sent people other requests — Please stop doing this. And that’s basically the same course we did with YouTube, and by being persistent about it they gave us the access to do that.

Dattebayo Fansubs, who subtitle the trendy anime Naruto Shippuuden and Bleach, currently rests at the sixth position for most copyright-related take-downs of the videos tracked by the Youtomb project (excluding those removed by “a third party”). TV Tokyo Corporation, the Japanese distributors of Naruto and Bleach, occupies the third position [6].

The conflict between the fansubber and the owner of the animation certainly evokes new questions regarding copyright, particularly because the subtitles remain a translucent layer of intellectual property draped over the original media. Is it legal, therefore, for Dattebayo to claim partial property or legality to a complete (“whole,” “unified”; not “entire”) cultural production? Free use, unfortunately, does not apply in this case. Or, in a more general sense, is it legal to make a claim of copyright where a more legitimate layer of copyright exists? Either way, it is illegal to upload the original animation, with or without fansubs, according to the YouTube Terms of Service, Section 6D and 6E [7]:

D. In connection with User Submissions, you further agree that you will not submit material that is copyrighted, protected by trade secret or otherwise subject to third party proprietary rights, including privacy and publicity rights, unless you are the owner of such rights or have permission from their rightful owner to post the material and to grant YouTube all of the license rights granted herein.

E. You further agree that you will not, in connection with User Submissions, submit material that is contrary to the YouTube Community Guidelines, found at http://www.youtube.com/t/community_guidelines, which may be updated from time to time, or contrary to applicable local, national, and international laws and regulations.

In the contemporary agenda of YouTube copyright, my personal interest lies in a parallel between fansubbed material and Youtube’s trend of music-related takedowns. It may not (but should) be common knowledge that Youtube utilizes its Content Identification system [8] to target videos that contain copyrighted music. My curiosity (and concern) is whether animation studios will submit the original audio of anime episodes (audio that comprises music, actors’ voices, sound effects, etc.) to track more quickly any uploaded content. I wonder too whether groups like Dattebayo could do the same and do it legally. Although they do not own rights to the original footage and audio, could fansubbing groups also use the original audio to track when fansubs are uploaded?

[1] http://www.law.ed.ac.uk/ahrc/SCRIPT-ed/vol2-4/hatcher.asp#legal
[2] http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2008-03-29/tokyo-anime-center-posts-stop-fan-subtitle-notice
[3] http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2008-11-17/tv-tokyo-to-also-stream-naruto-through-crunchyroll
[4] http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/convention/2008/fansubs-and-industry-panel
[5] http://dattebayo.com/
[6] http://youtomb.mit.edu/statistics
[7] http://www.youtube.com/t/terms
[8] http://www.youtube.com/t/contentid

Tomorrow afternoon, I along with my friend and fellow traveler Matt Sabban will commence a journey of epic proportions, never before witnessed in the history of our study abroad program.

Shikoku, one of Japan’s larger islands south of the mainland, maintains eighty-eight (88) temples along the perimeter of the island. For hundreds of years, adventurers and thinkers have attempted to visit every temple along the island, starting in the northeast and ending around the whirlpools of Naruto city. They call it the pilgrimage of the eighty-eight sacred temples of Shikoku. Matt and I, setting out from Kyoto (on the map linked above, about halfway between Osaka and the northern coast), will mount our bicycles and attempt to visit fifty-nine of these temples. We plan to cycle from the first temple in Tokushima to the thirty-sixth, bike north across the island to the sixty-fifth, and end up at the eighty-eighth, entirely in six days. Is this possible? Is this crazy? Or is this necessary? We’re on fall break, so we’ve decided to ignore the answers.

This is the farthest I have been from the Internet in a while, since my seven-day canoe and hike through the mountains in Maine back at the beginning of high school. In Japan, you are never without a cell phone (if you want to send words of encouragement, reach me at a13x@softbank.ne.jp [no more than 140 characters]), but my primary tools will be a pen and notebook. I suppose I’ll see what results.

(photograph by Alex Leavitt, http://flickr.com/photos/alexleavitt/)

The question.

Dear Internet,

I hope that, at least once, every person is faced with a question or problem that changes his or her life. Last week, I may have been asked that question: Would you like to stay in Japan for another semester? Internet, if you have opinions, please relate them to me. If I stay in Japan, I will basically set aside classes, research, internships, conferences, friends, family. I must still deal with jobs, graduation, and grad school applications. On the other hand, I’ve already taken over a thousand photos, traveled around the country, and lost myself in and out of translation, and reveled in every minute of it.

As with any difficult question, I need advice. And if you’re willing to give it, I’d love to hear it.
Sincerely,
Alex