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THE SOUL OF ANIME

Duke University Press

Contents

Note on Translations and Names..............................................................1INTRODUCTION * Who Makes Anime?.............................................................35ONE * Collaborative Networks, Personal Futures..............................................54TWO * Characters and Worlds as Creative Platforms...........................................85THREE * Early Directions in Postwar Anime...................................................112FOUR * When Anime Robots Became Real........................................................135FIVE * Making a Cutting-Edge Anime Studio: The Value of the Gutter..........................161SIX * Dark Energy: What Overseas Fans Reveal about the Copyright Wars.......................185SEVEN * Love Revolution: Otaku Fans in Japan................................................204CONCLUSION * Future Anime: Collaborative Creativity and Cultural Action.....................218Acknowledgments.............................................................................221Notes.......................................................................................227References..................................................................................237

Chapter One

In March 2010, the anime director Mamoru Hosoda visited MIT to screen his feature film Summer Wars. When the credits rolled and Hosoda skipped down the steps of the enormous classroom, physics equations still scribbled on the blackboard, the audience of 450 people broke into thunderous applause. Hosoda and his extended production staff had clearly created a film with a global and contemporary appeal. They had done something more, as well. In both Summer Wars (2009) and in his previous feature, The Girl Who Leapt through Time (2006), Hosoda and his team developed characters and worlds that dramatized broader developments in media and culture. The two films highlight seemingly paradoxical trends: today's increased potential for collaboration and networking in contrast with an increasing personalization and individualization of our media worlds. New kinds of mass culture are emerging, sometimes made by amateur producers, at the same time that niche obsessions are becoming more specific and widespread. These developments suggest shifts in the workings of economic and political systems as well. We get pulled in two directions at once, encouraged to individualize our media experiences, whether by choice or through automated filtering systems (Pariser 2011), and at the same time motivated to reach out to others through networked interactions across platforms (Benkler 2006; Jenkins 2006). How is the future trending in terms of the individual and the collective? A look at Hosoda's work in animation—and specifically at how he envisioned his films—provides ethnographic context for the films and introduces perspectives on the work that characters and worlds can do.

Summer Wars opens with a seventeen-year-old boy from the city who is asked by a female upperclassman to accompany her to her family's home in rural Japan for a part-time job. It turns out that the "job" requires him to pretend to be her fiance. As a math geek who has never had a girlfriend, he is hardly the type. Moreover, he has to play the role in front of her entire extended family, who have gathered in the family's main house in the Nagano countryside to celebrate the matriarch's eightieth birthday. Birthday plans are thrown into disarray, however, when trouble comes to Oz, a vast online realm that facilitates communication, entertainment, and a wide variety of official transactions. A rogue online artificial intelligence (AI) bot known as "Love Machine" starts causing havoc in the online metaverse of Oz. The repercussions extend throughout society—not only in Japan, but around the world—as traffic and commuter systems, water and power supplies, emergency notification systems, and so on all go haywire as a result of the malevolent program. The boy and girl and her extended family find themselves embroiled in a potentially life-threatening battle with the AI. They each draw on their own social networks and their own resources, bringing together computer equipment, power from a fishing boat, and ice from a shop (among other things) to wage war with the evil troublemaker. The film draws on metaphors from various games, from online fighting games to hanafuda, an old-fashioned but still popular card game. The world is interactive and networked in a digital sense, but in the end, it is a matter of engineering the social world that makes the difference.

An anime fan and MIT graduate student at the time described her appreciation of Hosoda's film this way: "I really liked the ways the whole family worked together to hack their surroundings and solve problems." She noted that many hacker movies follow a formula of a good-looking teen boy solving most of the problems while helped by a few "sidekicks." But in Summer Wars, she noted, "There were teenagers and older folks working together. Even the eighty-year-old grandmother did some good old-fashioned social engineering using a rotary telephone." For the student, the film portrayed something new: an extended-family approach to hacking the world.

After the screening, Hosoda spoke to the audience about his goal to create a film with a different kind of hero. Heroism is often portrayed in terms of the courage and talents of an individual, he explained. In Summer Wars, heroism arises from the collective efforts of a range of characters, each with specialized capabilities, whose connections and collaborative work generate solutions to seemingly intractable problems. In this, the premise of the film offers a metaphor for the collective labor that goes into making animation. It also suggests an effort to redesign the ways heroes, and problem solving, are imagined. One of the film's posters emphasized this idea in the catch phrase "Connection itself is our weapon" (Tsunagari koso ga bokura no buki) (see figure 5).

It's interesting that Hosoda presents the potential of connection as both frightening, as when the rogue AI runs amok, and empowering, as when the family pulls together. The language of "virtual worlds" and "cyberspace" as places apart from our living social worlds is gradually disappearing as a way to think about our connections online. Summer Wars dramatizes that process of shifting. As Hosoda explained to the MIT audience, "We tend to see the virtual world as 'fake (feeku)' and our family relationships as 'real,' " but we are coming to the realization that virtual worlds are spaces with real relationships with real consequences. There are often real people behind those avatars.

The Making of the Summer Wars Characters

In making animation, part of the challenge of creating characters is giving the sense of a real person when none in fact exists. How did Hosoda create the characters that appeared in Summer Wars? In a published interview, he laughed at the intensity of the process. Hosoda worked with Yoshiyuki Sadamoto, who also designed the characters for Gainax's Neon Genesis Evangelion and other projects. The process was grueling and involved holing up in a hotel room away from all distractions. "Yes, we were living...