Japanese Animation and New Media
Week Nine: Chapter Fifteen: Full Limited Animation
In keeping with the Ghibli rejection of anime, Miyazaki has publicly denounced the animation of Tezuka Osamu, the legendary manga artist whose adaptations of his manga for the small screen are commonly taken as the point of departure for the distinctive styles of limited television animation that today are loosely called anime. Basically, Miyazaki does not think that Tezuka’s animations are any good; they do not meet his standards for animation art. So let’s look at a scene from Tetsuwan Atomu (Mighty Atom or Astro Boy), the television series from the early 1960s that is often credited as the source of anime.
What would Miyazaki hate about this kind of animation?
First, as you can probably guess from this scene, such animation is not going to have lush luminous landscapes as a frame of reference. In other words, it lacks depth. In this scene the background is so reduced and iconic that character layer and background layer are equally salient. To some extent, this flatness makes the character more prominent, and the character starts to appear autonomous of its world. The world cannot serve as an ultimate frame of reference. The character emerges as a frame of reference.
Second, as a result of flattening of relations between background and character layers, the character can only serve as a relative frame of reference.
Third, recall that, in the context of the exercise of the boy lifting a hammer over hid head, Otsuka worried that the movement would look robotic without a sense of weight and natural material limits of the boy’s body. So Otsuka builds a sense of exertion into the boy’s body, showing how that body shifts its mass as it struggles with the hammer. With Atom or Astro Boy, the character is already a robot. The character animation doesn’t have to fret about what looks natural or not. As such, the boundary between human and mecha that Miyazaki strives to enforce disappears with this kind of character animation. Once again there is no natural frame of reference.
Fourth, the boundary between boy and girl also threatens to disappear. The original model for Atom in Tezuka’s manga Metropolis had a button to switch gender. Atom retains something of that gender ambiguity or androgyny. This is not to say that Tezuka’s manga and anime don’t generally resort to familiar and predictable gender distinctions. But in the character of Atom at least, those boy-girl distinctions are significantly lessened, however temporarily or fleetingly.
Fifth, the mecha-like nature of characters is not limited to robots. Human characters often appear equally robotic, and along with mecha-like movement come mecha-like emotions. We have extreme close-ups on faces, often with very limited movement of features (a twitching eyebrow) to convey emotion. But these emotions are fairly standardized and almost mechanistic.
There are other features that we could talk about in this brief scene from Astro Boy. But let’s turn to a scene of hyper-limited animation from Anno’s Nadia that will allow us to extend the discussion and summarize the central features of limited animation.
