16 :(: Realism in the Animation Media

Environment: Animation Theory from Japan

M A RC STE I NB E RG

Realism and animation? Realism in animation? The association of the

two terms may seem incongruous to those more familiar with notions
of filmic realism. Realism is undoubtedly a term much more closely asso-
ciated with film than with animation.1 In part we can understand this to
be a product of film’s relationship with profilmic reality; film offers an
image and style of movement that is an iconically and indexically faith-
ful portrait of the profilmic events that occurred in front of the camera.
This also comes in part from the greater prominence of debates around
realism at various stages within film discourse, criticism, and theory.
Film’s phenomenological reproduction of reality, or its artificial or semi-
otic construction of realism (depending on whom you ask), was one of
the key dividing lines between the supposed naive phenomenological
approach of André Bazin and the more critical approach of writers asso-
ciated with 1970s screen theory. Finally, the link between film and real-
ism is made all the stronger by the multiple film movements that have
evoked concepts of realism—from Italian neorealism to the kitchen-sink
realism of the British new wave to the long-take, long-shot aesthetic of
what is sometimes called slow cinema or contemporary contemplative
cinema that informs contemporary transnational art cinemas.
Animation has traditionally had a far more tenuous relationship to
realism. It is not in any obvious way a realist form. While there is no in-
herent contradiction between drawing and realism—indeed realism as
a concept emerges from both literary studies and painting in the nine-
teenth century—animators have tended to embrace nonrealistic styles
of drawing and movement in their creations.2 Similarly, realism has his-
torically not been a key component to animation criticism or theory.
What theoretical works on animation there were tended to emphasize
the nonrealistic quality of animation—one need only think of Sergei
Eisenstein’s fragments on Disney, wherein the theorist-filmmaker finds
the plasmaticness of animation of the greatest interest.3
One site where theoretical, critical, and practical interest in realism
in animation first comes together is around the work of Disney. Walt
Disney famously pushed his animators toward a greater verisimilitude
of movement and weight displacement in the drawing of their charac-
ters. Disney’s drive toward realism was also taken to new levels in his
attempt to reproduce the filmic production of depth in the form of the
multiplane camera, a camera with multiple levels of glass separated spa-
tially, allowing animators to produce a cinematic illusion of depth (from
differentiation between foreground, middle ground, and background to
the simulation of racking focus and the creation of out- of-focus parts
of the shot). Disney aimed for the production of what Paul Wells, bor-
rowing a term from Umberto Eco, calls “hyper-realism.”4 Hyperrealism is
an appropriate term because it implicitly traces a lineage of animation
from Disney to the three-dimensional computer-generated imagery
(3-D CGI), a more recent development in animation wherein we en-
counter the problematic of realism. This heightened form of realism is
often known as hyperrealism, or, in Andrew Darley’s coinage, “second
order realism.”5
What makes Darley’s term second-order realism so useful is that it
clearly states what is sometimes ambiguous: that the referent for CGI’s
realism is not “the real world” or the profilmic but rather cinematic con-
ventions of realist representation: the perspective of objects recorded
by a monocular camera lens, lens flare, perspectival depth, motion blur,
and so on. This distinguishes Darley’s work from that, say, of Stephen
Prince, whose seemingly similar term, “perceptual realism,” ultimately
refers to what the referent of the image, if it had existed, would have
looked like to the perceiver. Prince’s interest lies in how “even unreal
[i.e., animated] images can be perceptually realistic”—how nonindexi-
cal, nonphotographic images could still seem to us to be perceptually
real.6 When Darley defines second-order realism as “an attempt to pro-
duce old ways of seeing or representing by other means,” he ultimately
takes one step further and forward by suggesting that animated real-
ism—in Disney as in contemporary CGI—is in fact a representation of
an older form of representation: the animated reproduction of standard
photographic techniques.7

288  • Marc Steinberg

Realism and Animation: Japanese Debates

This brief sketch of the state of debates on realism in animation studies

provides us with a ground from which to approach the place of real-
ism and animation within Japanese critical discourse of the 2000s. Two
of Japan’s main animation critics and public intellectuals, Ōtsuka Eiji
and Azuma Hiroki, have organized part of their critical work around
the question of realism in animation.8 However, the principal manner
in which these writers engage with realism resembles (and exceeds)
Darley’s conception of second-order realism. Animation, for these
writers, is not a medium capable of reproducing realism as much as it is
a medium that itself provides the basis for “animation-like” work within
a different media form. Realism is first and foremost a set of conven-
tions proper to a historically produced configuration of a given medium,
rather than a visual resemblance to a given reality. Moreover, Ōtsuka
and Azuma push the debate one step further by suggesting that realism
applies not to animation’s imitation of another medium (cinema) but
rather another medium’s imitation of animation styles and problems.
In addition to providing this different take on the relation between
animation and realism, my discussion of Ōtsuka and Azuma’s writings
also provides a gateway into the ways that animation has been engaged
with and theorized within recent Japanese critical discourse. Beginning
in the late 1990s and really taking off in the early 2000s, public intellec-
tuals such as Ōtsuka and Azuma, as well as Saitō Tamaki, Kasai Kiyoshi,
Uno Tsunehiro, Itō Gō, and others, organized their critical activities in
part around commentary on Japanese animation, its associated forms
of media (comics, novels, and games), its cultures of consumption, and
the critical terminology that often develops out of its fan cultures.9 In
this sense the trend in critical thought known as zeronendai no shisō
(thought of the oughts) has seen the unprecedented prominence of ani-
mation as a critical node around which much criticism, commentary,
and theorization were organized. Granted, one may argue that some-
thing similar occurred in the Anglophone world as well around the be-
ginning of the millennium. This trend is embodied in Lev Manovich’s
famous claim that animation, previously cinema’s maligned twin, would
become the moving-image category par excellence, with live-action
cinema becoming a mere subset of animation.10 The appearance of jour-
nals such as animation: an interdisciplinary journal and the increasing
number of scholars working on some aspect of animation are certainly

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proof of a rise in the extent and purview of animation scholarship in the
Anglophone world.
Yet the parallels also offer some instructive contrasts. While Mano-
vich and many of the contributors to debates around animation in
the Anglophone world come from the field of film and media studies,
the Japanese critics I have mentioned come from the fields of literary
studies, critical theory, and criticism. While many now have academic
positions, they come as much from the world of criticism as from aca-
demia, a positionality that is reflected in their writing.11 They write for a
broad public readership and frame their discussions of animation very
much within wider debates around contemporary “expressive cultures,”
as they are often called. To be sure there are also a growing number of
more academic animation scholars in Japan, often with close ties to film
studies, such as the film and animation scholar Katō Mikiro and the
animation historian Tsugata Nobuyuki (both, interestingly, based in
Kyoto, while Azuma, Ōtsuka, and others are based in Tokyo—leading
to the suggestion that the latter group’s work should be called Tokyo
criticism rather than Japanese criticism). Here I would like to focus on
the Ōtsuka-Azuma debate around realism in order to provide a clearer
sense of the approach to animation adopted by these writers and to
highlight the prominent place of animation within Japanese cultural
criticism since the late 1990s. Indeed, the significance of these debates
lies both in their theory of realism and in their manner of situating ani-
mation within wider cultural and media spheres—in their manner, that
is, of situating animation as the environment for a wider media culture.
This work on animation debates in Japan will not undertake the reread-
ing of the existing film theory canon for traces of animation criticism,
but it will create a portrait of other spaces, milieus, and media ecolo-
gies in which animation criticism is being developed, and from which
film theory may itself learn. Let us turn then to an examination of the
animation criticism in Japan since the late 1990s, with an eye to what
it may teach us about the specificity of animation’s media ecologies and
the critical discourses developed around them.

Ōtsuka Eiji’s Three Realisms

Ōtsuka’s importance lies in his intervention in two fields: manga criti-

cism and the development of a theory and practice of what he dubbed
“narrative consumption.” I have introduced and discussed the latter as-
pect of his work elsewhere, but to sum up briefly: Ōtsuka worked as

290  • Marc Steinberg

an editor since the late 1980s for one of the main producers of books,
comics, magazines, and animation programs for the hard-core fans
known as otaku, Kadokawa Books. During this time he also formulated a
theory of narrative consumption that has been a constant reference for
Azuma and others within the zeronendai group.12 The second principal
field of his critical work lies in his manga criticism, and in his reinterpre-
tation of the development of postwar Japanese manga (comics), anime
(animation), and otaku culture. From his award- winning early book
Sengo manga no hyōgen kūkan: Kigōteki shintai no jubaku (The expressive
space of postwar manga: The spell of the semiotic body) through his
seminal Atomu no meidai: Tezuka Osamu to sengo manga no shudai (The
Atomu thesis: Tezuka Osamu and the main theme of postwar manga)
to his most recent project on the importance of the prewar and wartime
periods on the aesthetics, cinematic style of montage, and themes of
postwar manga, found in his Eiga shiki mangaka nyūmon (An introduc-
tion to cinematic manga artists), Ōtsuka aims to bring to light the his-
torical conditions for the development of manga style and themes that,
along with anime as its offshoot, constitute the principal media of otaku
culture.
Within this work on the aesthetic and conceptual parameters of post-
war manga and anime—the two are often treated as interchangeable
and possessing a common expressive base—Ōtsuka develops three con-
ceptions of realism. The first is most fully developed in Atomu no mei-
dai and is what we may, for lack of a better term, call biological realism.
Ōtsuka had long been dealing with a particular tension in postwar
manga between the generic, nonrealistic, semiotic drawing style and the
importance of interiority within much postwar manga, and shōjo (girls’
manga) in particular. The “semiotic theory of manga” was first elabo-
rated by Tezuka Osamu, in an interview in the magazine Pafu where
he describes his drawings as mere signs or patterns.13 According to Te-
zuka, his drawings are completely detached from any referent or exter-
nal reality, and insofar as they refer to anything, merely refer to drawing
styles developed within Disney animation or Tagawa Suihō’s wartime
manga (both major influences on a young Tezuka).
The twist that Tezuka gives to these signs is to be found in what is for
Ōtsuka a representative scene from an unpublished manga that a young
Tezuka wrote in 1945, wherein the so- called semiotic body of a charac-
ter is shot—and actually bleeds. For Ōtsuka this single comic frame,
wherein a sign bleeds, becomes the defining moment of postwar manga
and anime. What is born here is the tension between semiotic abstrac-

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tion “completely cut off from a referent” and “a fleshly body that bleeds
if shot.”14 This tension between a character that is a semiotic drawing
that has no relation to a real-world referent and yet somehow also pos-
sesses a fleshly, physical body that can bleed, die, and have sexual re-
lations with other characters forms the expressive basis for postwar
manga and anime.15 This is the “main topic of postwar manga,” which is
also the birth of “a new kind of realistic [riarizumu teki] expression that
is not dependent on realistic [shajitsu] illustrations.”16
The second conception of realism that Ōtsuka develops is a much
more conventional one: the realism of mechanical objects, particularly
vehicles and weapons, that Ōtsuka refers to as “scientific realism,” “the
realism of the depiction of weapons,” and “graphical realism.”17 If the
first form of realism is a nonpictorial realism—a realism of bodies or
biological realism whose referent is the real-world body that can die—
the second form of realism is a pictorial realism, or photo-realism; this
is a drawing style that deploys linear perspective to generate a sense
of visual resemblance to real-world objects, or their photographic rep-
resentations. This latter form of realism is deployed most often in the
drawing of technical objects such as fighter planes, guns, and military
gear. In keeping with his thesis that the roots of the otaku arts of anima-
tion and manga are to be found in fascist, wartime Japan, Ōtsuka traces
this realistic depiction of machines to the photography and technical
drawings of the wartime period, a style quickly imitated by animation
and comics of the time and adopted by postwar manga and animation
artists like Tezuka. Indeed, there continues to be a tendency toward the
realistic depiction of guns, weapons, and military gear in contemporary
animation, which often uses 3-D CGI selectively to represent warships,
planes, and the like, while cel-style animation is used for characters.18
The distinction Ōtsuka notes between the semiotic realism of charac-
ters and the graphical realism of machines is alive and well to this day.
The third form of realism that Ōtsuka identifies fundamentally differs
from the first two: it is neither a realism whose referent is the biological
body nor a realism whose referent is the machinic or its photorealistic
depiction. It is, rather, a realism whose premise is the environmental
ubiquity of animation and manga; a realism whose referent is anime and
manga: “manga-anime realism.” Ōtsuka first introduces the term at the
end of his Monogatari no taisō (Narrative exercises), published in 2000,
and further develops the concept in his 2003 book, Kyarakutā shōsetsu no
tsukurikata (How to make character novels).19
Ōtsuka first develops this concept as a way of grappling with the

292  • Marc Steinberg

specificity of what he calls “character novels” but which have since be-
come known as “light novels” (raito noberu, or ranobe for short). Light
novels are a new genre or supergenre of pulp fiction that takes the worlds
and characters of manga, anime, and video games as their objects. These
novels are generally breezily written, have covers with drawings in the
style of manga or anime characters, and include periodic illustrations of
these characters throughout the books. They are an extension of young-
adult literature, but have, since the 2000s, become widely read and an
integral part of the expressive universe of manga-anime and their otaku
consumers. These novels’ form is also related to the main form of high
literature in Japan, known as the “I-novel” (shishōsetsu), called such for
its first-person narration and characterized by its naturalism or realism.
Whereas the I-novel was based on the naturalistic mode of copying
or sketching the world of the author-as-I (with a presumed transparent
relationship between the two worlds within critical commentary), the
character novel is based on the “copying” of the fictional world of (actual
or potential) anime, manga, or video games. As Ōtsuka writes: “Charac-
ter novels are novels that adopt ‘characters’ instead of the I-novel’s ‘I’
and use anime-manga realism instead of naturalistic realism.”20 I-novels
and the naturalistic form of literature associated with them are “ways
of writing prose that transcribe the reality that we live in as a sketch
[shasei].”21 Light novels deploy the techniques of capturing reality—
sketching, transcribing, copying—proper to the I-novel yet turn them
on the worlds of anime and manga; they are novels that sketch the fic-
tional world of anime rather than that of reality, “applying the tech-
niques of naturalism not to ‘reality’ but rather to ‘anime.’ ”22 Unlike
I-novels, which assume a relation between the real world and the world
of fiction as mediated by the interiority of the first-person protagonist,
light novels based on the principles of anime-manga realism assume
that the world of fiction has a relation to the world of anime or manga
and that the “I” is in fact an anime or manga character.23
The realism of anime-manga realism is then not a matter of fidelity to
a real-world referent—the perceptual realism that Prince sees operating
within 3-D CGI, for instance. Rather, it is a style of writing that imports
the nonnaturalistic, nonrealist media of Japanese animation and comics
into a literary form that operates according to principles of naturalism.
It is an operational realism that, in writing anime-manga characters into
the naturalistic style of the I-novel, produces a sense that the charac-
ter itself—a mere conglomeration of codes or patterns, as Tezuka first
suggested—has an “I” and hence possesses interiority. This manner of

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writing characters as if they had interiority is then an interesting evo-
lution of the first form of realism that Ōtsuka identifies as the legacy
of Tezuka: the intersection of the semiotic body with the fleshly body.
However, it is also the product of a particular form of medial transposi-
tion whose effects become most apparent through the theoretical work
of Azuma.

Azuma Hiroki’s Transmedial Realism

Anime-manga realism is a realism produced by the intersection of a par-

ticular expressive milieu (anime and manga and their production of a
specific media environment) and the naturalistic formal devices asso-
ciated with the I-novel. With the ascendency of the light novel in the
first decades of the 2000s, a set of highly stylized media forms seem-
ingly quite distant from realistic depiction—animation and comics—
becomes the ground for a realism that depends less on these forms’
visual proximity to a real-world referent and more on their constitution
of a consistent and self- contained media milieu. The environmental per-
vasiveness of anime and manga styles throughout at least one segment
of the Japanese media ecology gives rise to the sensation of realism. That
codes can become naturalized and are subsequently experienced as real
is a lesson we have known at least since Roland Barthes’s Mythologies;
the twist here is that the naturalization takes place through a particu-
lar subgroup of closely interlinked media forms: animation and comics.
Hence, what we have is a distinctly transmedial realism: a realism that
depends on, first, the aesthetic consistency of anime and manga styles,
and, second, the migration to a form of literature whose presumption is
a naturalistic relation to the real world.
What about video games, that other medium so closely linked to the
media ecologies of manga and anime? Are games also open to the real-
ism associated with anime and manga? For Ōtsuka the answer is clear:
no. Video games have a reset button, which goes against the importance
of flesh and blood and the possibility of death that is at the heart of the
anime-manga expressive world and is the basis for its realism.24 This is
the point at which Azuma Hiroki enters the debate.
Azuma, a relatively younger scholar in a critical milieu where inter-
ventions are often defined around generational divides, rose to promi-
nence after publishing Dōbutsuka suru posutomodan (The animalizing
postmodern; translated into English as Otaku: Japan’s Database Ani-
mals). Azuma’s importance comes in part from his mentoring of younger

294  • Marc Steinberg

scholars, and from his creation of journals and book series that publish
critical debates relating to anime, manga, games, light novels, and the
consumer group—otaku—that has become the privileged focus of their
analyses.25 But his importance also comes from his own critical inter-
ventions into and creation of debates around areas ranging from anime
consumer cultures to Internet architecture and the security state post-
9(/(11. His critical work has, as Endō Toshiaki has written in an over-
view of Japanese critical debates of the 2000s, become “the very ‘envi-
ronment’ within a particular sphere of the world of criticism.”26 One of
Azuma’s most important contributions in this regard was his Gēmu-teki
riarizumu no tanjō: Dōbutsukasuru posutomodan 2 (The birth of game-ic
realism: The animalizing postmodern 2).
As the title suggests, the core of this work revolves around an engage-
ment with Ōtsuka’s concept of anime-manga realism. Against Ōtsuka,
Azuma argues that there is such a thing as “game-ic realism.”27 Video
games, and the logic of the “replay” that informs them, have completely
permeated light novels and so- called novel games (text-heavy computer
games with a minimum of branching and a limited degree of user input).
The most noticeable manifestation of this is the prevalence of the trope
of the loop in light novels throughout the 2000s, though the transfor-
mation of the position of the reader, brought in line with the point of
view of the player, is also another place that the game-ic is observed
within the light novel. If anime-manga realism deals with the “para-
doxical theme of expressing the fleshly body through the use of signs,”
then game-ic realism deals with the paradoxical feat of using a content
or meaning- oriented medium such as the novel to express the experi-
ence of games—an experience whose primary feature is, according to
Azuma, two-way communication, or communication for communica-
tion’s sake.28
Exploring Azuma’s theory of game-ic realism would lead us too far
astray from the topic of animation and realism. What I would like to
hone in on here is the theoretical framework that Azuma develops for
understanding how trends such as anime-manga realism and game-ic
realism can come into being. For while Ōtsuka develops a theory of what
anime-manga realism is, he does not offer a sense of the media processes
at work in this transformation. And it is precisely here that Azuma’s sig-
nificant contribution is to be found. The very condition for the devel-
opment of anime-manga realism or game-ic realism is the permeation
of the imagination by the logic of these media forms. The imagination
these media inspire has been environmentalized to such a degree that

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the media’s defining traits become the basis for the operation of other
media forms. Azuma writes:
We all live in a specific environment of the imagination. In premodern
societies people lived among the accumulation of myths and folktales
told by storytellers, the modern author or reader or citizen lived within
naturalism, and the postmodern otaku live within the database of char-
acters. These various environments determine the author’s forms of ex-
pression, as well as the form of consumption of the works.
Moreover, what is important here is that this environment functions
across works and across genres.29

This environment also functions across media forms. In a move evoca-

tive of debates around realism in animation, and particularly of the term
second-order realism, Azuma suggests that what we encounter in post-
modern works grounded in the animation cultures of Japan is “the real-
ism of an artificial environment.”30
This move is not only of interest in the context of the Japanese de-
bates. It also promises to take us one step beyond debates around real-
ism in much Anglophone scholarship on animation and realism insofar
as the basis for this realism is not to be found in an adherence either to
the perceptually real (with its insistence on the fidelity of the represen-
tation to “our” phenomenological perception of real things) or to the
filmic real (a second-order realism or photo-realism that insists on filmic
representation as the ground, or as the first-order realism). In part be-
cause they are far removed from any imperative to portray people or
things with fidelity to phenomenological reality or photographic rep-
resentations, the vibrant worlds of Japanese anime, manga, and games
form the basis for an alternative sphere of expression. Anime, manga,
and game-ic realisms develop as forms of fidelity to nonrealist modes
of representation. This is not the hyperreal, in the sense of a realm of
representation that replaces the real. Nor is it of necessity an unreal
world, going with the popular and critical assumption that animation
must be about the fantastical or the nonexistent. It is a different realm
of expression that, as Azuma properly emphasizes, is real, that is, has a
reality of its own, as well as a form of causality proper to it (here we may
recall Azuma’s comment to the effect that imaginative environments de-
termine the forms of expression and consumption of works).31 Realism,
then, designates the operation of transcription or transposition from
one medium to another, and references the existence of the consistent
yet nonrealist realm of expression of anime and manga.

296  • Marc Steinberg

Conclusion

The work around animation and realism in recent Japanese criticism

is of interest for two reasons. The first is for the ways the work differs
from common discussions of animation and realism that start with the
premise that animation can realistically depict the world (whether in
terms of the visual level through movement style and 3-D CGI or, as is
also claimed for animation, on the emotional level). These discussions
instead presume that the environmental pervasiveness of animation’s
style or theme within a given expressive media ecology can, when its
principles or problematics are translated through a different regime of
expression (the naturalist novel), lead to a form of expression (the light
novel) whose style can be called anime-manga realism, or, under differ-
ent conditions, game-ic realism.
Second, this work is of interest for the way it takes up an issue—
realism—that has played a central role in film theory, and in animation
studies in the Anglophone world, and shifts the register at which the
issue is considered. Film studies started from and, in some respects, has
recently returned to questions of realism from the premise that cinema’s
force comes from the automaticity of film’s recording of reality.32 The
primary engagements of animation studies with realism have been
equally organized around issues of second- order realism and photo-
realism in the consideration of CGI. Azuma’s and Ōtsuka’s writings shift
the ground from a question of fidelity of representation to realism as a
technique of transmedia transcription that assumes anime-manga as
an expressive regime or referent that is autonomous (not referentially
bound to the real) yet visually and thematically consistent. If one of the
problems with this Japanese criticism is its emphasis on literature and
other media instead of dealing with the specificity of animation, then
this is also the criticism’s greatest contribution: to put animation (and
its cultures of consumption) in dialogue with a wider media ecology,
one that includes literature, comics, and games more than film. Per-
haps the end result is that these theories animate media theory more
than they do film theory. But these critics should not be faulted for end-
ing up in a different place (a transmedia theory of animation environ-
ments) after starting from a different problem (an examination of the
impact of anime and manga on literature): both animation studies and
film studies can benefit from this transmedia approach to realism. In-
deed, this group of writers and the problematics they develop in their
debates shows the value of expanding the canons of film and animation

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theory to include writers from as yet underexplored critical milieus. For
it is in these milieus that we may find the potential to overturn some of
the most naturalized assumptions in the canons of film and animation
theory—such as the continued presumption that realism has to relate
to the perceptually “real.”

Notes

All translations from Japanese sources are my own, unless otherwise indicated.

1. At this point I am content to assume the common understandings of animation

and cinema. Animation will hence be understood to be frame-by-frame work,
most commonly encountered as cel, puppet, or CGI animation; cinema will be
the automatic recording of some profilmic real. It is the existence of this real,
in some form, that marks the common understanding of cinema as bound (by
ethics if not by nature) to some form of realism. For a classic display of this as-
sociation of animation with the unreal and cinema with the real (or a particu-
lar form of “rapport with the real”), see Andrew, What Cinema Is! I do not share
this view; indeed this chapter is about thinking through the particular forms of
realism that animation develops, and asks us to theorize.
2. Hayward, Cinema Studies, 311.
3. Eisenstein, The Eisenstein Collection.
4. Wells, Understanding Animation, 25. Wells’s discussion of realism and animation
in Understanding Animation is both thorough and wide-ranging, and this chap-
ter is indebted to it.
5. Darley explicitly sees the realistic CGI animation of Pixar as “continuing a tra-
dition of cartoon realism stretching back to the early efforts of Disney and his
animators.” Darley, Visual Digital Culture, 83. Debates about the stakes and im-
plications of the extension of filmic realism (or photorealism) into animation
gained fruitful food for thought in Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (Hironobu
Sakaguchi, 2001), an early attempt at a full-length, full-CGI animated film that
attempts to replicate filmic realism. It was an instructive failure (critical, box-
office, and aesthetic) that also formed the basis for several important critical
interventions into questions of CGI realism. See LaMarre, “New Media Worlds”;
Monnet, “A-Life and the Uncanny in Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within”; and Sob-
chack, “Final Fantasies.”
6. Prince, “True Lies,” 32.
7. Darley, Visual Digital Culture, 83.
8. While I call Ōtsuka and Azuma “animation critics,” they are perhaps better de-
scribed as “subculture media critics”—animation being one of the principal
media forms around which the subculture of anime-manga-game fandom is
organized.
9. For instance, the term sekai-kei (world style), which describes a particular genre
of animation and became a flashpoint for critical debate in the mid-2000s, first

298  • Marc Steinberg

 developed out of web-based fan discussions in 2002. See Maejima, Sekai-kei to
wa nanika, 27–28.
10. Manovich, “What Is Digital Cinema?”; a revised and extended version of this
essay was included in Manovich, The Language of New Media.
11. By “criticism” (hihyō) I refer to the general category of critical writing aimed
toward a general public by authors who are as likely to be unaffiliated freelance
writers as they are to be academics. In the case of this subculture criticism in
particular, it must be kept in mind that the forums of discussion are monthly
magazines, collections of debates and essays, and paperback books aimed at an
interested general audience, rather than an academic audience. Moreover, one
of the features of criticism in Japan at least since the 1980s is what we might
call its market orientation. Azuma, for instance, has explicitly made “winning”
at the marketplace the measure of good criticism. By this measure a bestseller
becomes the sign of good criticism. While certainly more critics would decry
this position than accept it, Azuma is not alone in taking this stance. On criti-
cism and the market, see Endō, Zeronendai no ronten, 53. See also Marilyn Ivy’s
“Critical Texts, Mass Artifacts”—an analysis of the consumption of theory in
the 1980s, which continues to be of critical importance to this day.
12. For a brief introduction to this aspect of Ōtsuka’s work, see my “Translator’s
Introduction” to his “World and Variation,” 99–104; I give a fuller account of his
work at Kadokawa in chapter 5 of Anime’s Media Mix.
13. Tezuka uses the words kigō (sign) and patān (pattern). Cited in Ōtsuka, Sengo
manga no hyōgen kūkan, 6.
14. Ōtsuka, Atomu no meidai, 63, 158.
15. The question of sex is an important one for Ōtsuka for two reasons, which be-
come most clear in a later work, coauthored with Ôsawa Nobuaki, “Japanimē-
shon” wa naze yabureru ka. First, Ōtsuka sees the problem of the relation be-
tween the semiotic and the corporeal or biological body playing itself out in the
development of shōjo girls’ manga in the 1970s with the “1949er” (24 nen gumi)
generation of women manga artists, whom Ōtsuka understands to be artists
who both “inherit and develop” Tezuka’s problematic. Second, the doubled
semiotic- corporeal body is at the heart of the moe phenomenon of so- called
two-dimensional love—the sexualization of and attraction to manga, anime,
game, and other drawn characters within contemporary male otaku culture.
See Ōtsuka and Ōsawa, “Japanimēshon” wa naze yabureru ka, 157, 169. For a theo-
retical treatment of moe that situates it as a postmodern phenomenon (and
against which Ōtsuka is writing) see Azuma, Otaku.
16. Ōtsuka, Atomu no meidai, 171.
17. Ōtsuka, Atomu no meidai, 144–48; Ōtsuka and Ōsawa, “Japanimēshon” wa naze
yabureru ka, 54. The last term, graphical realism, is a translation of shajitsuteki
riarizumu, which could also be rendered “realistic realism”—here mobilizing
the two senses of the term realism: the convention of realism (the translitera-
tion riarizumu) as produced by the tradition of realistic (shajitsuteki) depiction,
most notably through the technique of linear perspective.

Animation Media Environment: • 299

18. On the politics and geopolitics of the use of 3-D CGI in otherwise cel-style ani-
mation, see Bolton, “The Quick and the Undead.”
19. Ōtsuka, Monogatari no taisō, 210; Ōtsuka, Kyarakutā shōsetsu no tsukurikata.
Ōtsuka is a peculiar writer in the sense that much of his theory is presented in
the form of how-to books, reflecting his belief in the need for a close relation-
ship between theory and practice.
20. Ōtsuka, Monogatari no taisō, 210.
21. Ōtsuka, Kyarakutā shōsetsu no tsukurikata, 22.
22. Ōtsuka, Monogatari no taisō, 209–10.
23. Ōtsuka, Kyarakutā shōsetsu no tsukurikata, 27.
24. Ōtsuka, Kyarakutā shōsetsu no tsukurikata, 142–43.
25. This focus on the male otaku and the exclusively male group of academics and
commentators organized around Azuma have fostered a sense that gender cri-
tique is unnecessary, or irrelevant. Not surprisingly, this stance has provoked
some outrage, as well as also a countertrend that focuses on the female otaku
(fujoshi) instead. See, for instance, Sugiura, Fujoshika suru sekai.
26. Endō, Zeronendai no ronten, 22.
27. While the term ludic realism may be a smoother translation of the term geemu-
teki, I opt for game-ic to keep the resonances with the term (video or computer)
game that Azuma is unambiguously referring to.
28. Azuma, Gēmu-teki riarizumu no tanjō, 175.
29. Azuma, Gēmu-teki riarizumu no tanjō, 64.
30. Azuma, Gēmu-teki riarizumu no tanjō, 72.
31. Azuma suggests that while the character database is a “virtual existence that
may only exist within the minds of otaku,” its economic effects in terms of the
sales of hit light novels mean that “it is unmistakably a real existence.” Azuma,
Gēmu-teki riarizumu no tanjō, 44–45.
32. Andrew’s What Cinema Is! and Rodowick’s The Virtual Life of Film rather remark-
ably agree on the fact of film’s digital transformation, all the while reaffirming
cinema’s relation to the real—through the mediation of Bazin, in the former,
and Stanley Cavell, in the latter.

300  • Marc Steinberg