The Anime Ecology: A Genealogy of Television, Animation, and Game Media by Thomas Lamarre

Author:Thomas Lamarre [Lamarre, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, pdf
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
Published: 2018-03-12T23:00:00+00:00

Code Switching

Ōtsuka Eiji’s and Azuma Hiroki’s accounts invite us to consider media mix in terms of a relation between character and world that is mediated through story-play or fabulation on the part of the consumer. Ian Condry’s account introduces a slightly different triad from the perspective of the producers of anime series: characters (kyarakutā), premises (settai), and worlds (sekaikan), “specifically, the design of characters, the establishment of dramatic premises that link the characters, and the properties that define the world in which the characters interact.”[14] Nonetheless, accounts of media mix generally gravitate toward the anime character, for the character is the point of the triangle where it is relatively easy to gauge the pressure exerted by the other two points: the world or worldview, and the dramatizing or fabulating. Indeed, the anime character appears to have incorporated world and story-play into its very being. Thus the anime character may be considered to be social technology. This is why Condry calls the anime character a generative platform.

Looking at the anime character from the angle of the media platform and its infrastructures introduces a different yet complementary perspective. The emphasis is less on interactions between producers and consumers and more on intra-actions generating them and generated through them—the productive force of distribution, and the distributive force of television media. Producers and consumers are generating and playing on the same electromagnetically charged field, but that field is only charged because they are not distributed evenly or equally. Thus we need to think about the media mix less as a combinatory system and more as media ecology (forces and relations entailed in the production of distribution). Let me begin by focusing on a fundamental tension between the basic structure of anime episodes and the ecology of their media reception. In this way, I hope to gradually reveal what I think is a more fundamental tension between code switching and media switching.

Hatakeyama Chōko and Matsuyama Masako provide a detailed analysis of the basic structure of the thirty-minute episode of animated television series, focusing primarily on the original 1963–67 Tetsuwan Atomu (Astro Boy) and its 1980–81 remake; the years 1985 and 1995 in the long-running Doraemon animated series (1979–2005); and finally Pokémon, which began broadcasting in 1997. Their central structural analysis thus roughly covers the four decades from 1960 to 2000. Particularly striking is the degree to which the basic structure of the internal segmentation for an episode remains in place. The basic pattern is as follows: commercial, opening, commercial, first half of the story, commercial, second half of the story, commercial, preview, ending, commercial.[15] Striking, too, is the degree to which the timing for the segments remains the same across four decades. As might be expected, there are some changes, such as a slight decrease in the story time and an increase in the time allotted to commercials. But these changes are minor. Consider, for instance, Hatakeyama and Matsuyama’s parsing of two episodes from the Doraemon series (Figure 9.2).[16]

The segmentation of televisual flow within the

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