Japanese Animation and New Media
Lecture Two
In the first lecture, rather than repeat the contents of the Introduction to The Anime Machine, I tried to give more background on one-point perspective. So I used a series of images to show one-point perspective came to be more than just another way of depicting things or representing the world. It came to be associated with scientific accuracy, rationalism, and the ability of humans to bring order to the world based on the underlying laws of nature. This is commonly called Cartesianism, and in the essay by Martin Jay in the reader, Jay talks about how one-point perspective came to be seen as the modern regime of visuality.
In addition, I talked about how one-perspective became built into optical systems and technologies such as the camera obscura, and even into entertainments such as the peepshow.
One-point perspective and the camera obscura were used in Edo Japan in a variety of ways. Generally speaking, the Cartesian regime of visuality did not come to dominate. Or to be precise, it didn’t really become a regime of visuality per se but was folded into other regimes of visuality, often functioning as one perspective among many. Nevertheless, in late 19th-century Japan, when there came a concerted effort to transform prior political arrangements into a modern nation, there were precedents for dealing with the new visual regimes and technologies that gradually became associated with government-directed modernization: scientific accuracy in drawing (one-point perspective and related systems for visual measurement), photography, and cinema. A shift in emphasis became possible: the Cartesian regime associated with one-point perspective and optical technologies was no longer folded into other regimes but was able to fold other visual techniques and traditions into it. Thus a modern Cartesian regime of visuality emerged in Japan. And, as we will see later, contemporary Japan scholars still tend to associate modernization and modernity with Cartesianism.
In the context of Japanese animation, a series of questions arise that I’ll talk about today.
First, because animation is above all an art of movement, we need to ask: what happens to Cartesianism under conditions of movement?
Second, how can we talk about the specificity of media (such as cinema and animation) without endorsing some version of technological determinism?
Let me begin with the first question, in the context of ‘Cinematism and Animetism,’ which is the topic of Chapter One.
