Japanese Animation and New Media
Week Ten: Chapter Sixteen: A Face on the Train
The notion of ‘a face on the train’ is way of introducing the mechanical or mechanized girl, that is, the mecha-shojo.
With the face on the train, say, Thomas the Tank Engine, we have a mixture of the human (face) and mecha (train), which were held apart in the animations by Miyazaki and Anno that we saw previously. Anno starts to scramble the human and mecha at the level of interface, especially in Evangelion. And his hyper-limited animation tends to blur the boundary between the design and movement of mecha and those of human characters. Still, there is a distinction between human and mecha, and blurring the distinction creates a lot of panic and crisis in Evangelion. Oddly enough, it is often technophilic genres that seem most panicked about human-mecha combinations, especially genres with cyborg women. They like displays of high-tech in conjunction with heavy dark moral conceptualizing about ‘what’s happening to the human?’ But the series that we’ll focus on in this unit, Chobits, is more a romantic comedy and melodrama about humans and mecha. Rather than dark and sinister, its world is lighter, fluffier, funnier. So the question of technology is posed very differently.
With mecha-shojo in particular, we introduce questions about gender. With robot girls, female cyborg, gynoids, and other amalgamations of girl or woman and mechanisms, we have a special instance of a more general paradigm or trope: the girl who is not one. The girl who is not one is at once a girl who is not a girl and a girl who is for some reason not unitary but appears inherently and internally heterogeneous. This ‘girl who is not one’ thus introduces some psychological questions about gender and sexuality. What does it mean to ‘not be one’?
In this unit, we’ll be looking at the relation between technology and gender in the context of mecha-shojo. On the one hand, we will look at gender and sexuality from the angle of psychoanalytic theory and feminist responses to it. Here we will focus on structures of position, positioning, or positionality. Which is to say, psychoanalytic theory devotes a lot of attention to how men are positioned differently than women. On the other hand, we will continue to poses questions about the role of technology, asking whether (how) animation technics affects gendered positioning or positionality. After all, there are techniques of positioning within animation, techniques that position us vis-à-vis male and female characters, potentially with a gender bias.
As a preface to the fuller discussion of the ‘girl who is not one,’ I’d like to provide a schematic overview of how we looked at animation technics in the context of Miyazaki’s and Anno’s animations.
Let’s look first at an overview of Miyazaki based primarily on Castle in the Sky.
