Marc Steinberg

Immobile Sections and Trans-Series Movement: Astroboy and the Emergence of Anime

This article contrasts the different economies of motion found in cinema and animation, and explores the particular economy of movement and libidinal investment that accompanies Japanese anime, paying close attention to the first anime TV series, Astroboy (Tetsuwan Atomu). Metz and Lyotard argue that cinema generates an impression of reality through its particular economy of motion. Cel animation, in contrast, relies on a different economy of motion. This is especially the case in the specific kind of limited animation found in Japanese anime. This article focuses on the specificities of this kind of animated movement (particularly its emphasis on stillness), and the way Astroboy relied on commodity serialization to generate a particularly immersive image environment - one that set the stage for what is now known as ‘anime’.

A Vinyl Platform for Dissent: Designer Toys and Character Merchandising

‘Designer toys’ or ‘urban vinyl’ offer themselves as a fascinating site of resistance to the contemporary circulation of images and things. This article provides an introduction to the field of designer toys and argues that the field may be understood to be a materially situated critique of the commercial practice of character merchandising. Beginning with a description of the logic of character merchandising, this article goes on to demonstrate how designer toys critically and creatively transform some of the fundamental tenets of this practice, advancing a critique of character merchandising via the material objects themselves. In this age of image circulation, the case of the designer toy demonstrates how material artefacts can themselves become significant sites of critique.

Introduction: Regional Platforms

This introduction provides an overview of this special issue on ‘Regional Platforms’, presenting its background, significance, purpose, and overall structure. To characterize the regional implications in platforms, we first define the concept of ‘platform’ by outlining its basic typology. We define three different types of platforms: product-technology type, content-platforms, and transaction-type. Each of the three designates a different meaning of the term platform and describes a different configuration of platforms in relation to media studies. Challenging the dominant mode of platform studies that presume a global geography for US -based examples, this special issue purposely situates our typology of platforms in regional terms. We argue that digital platforms have given rise to a sense of media regionalism and a renewed regional media geography through both transnational and transmedial processes. The five essays composing this issue are then summarized to demonstrate how the authors approach the question of the regionality of platforms.

Media Mix Mobilization: Social Mobilization and Yo-Kai Watch

Animated television programs have been considered an integral element of the ‘media mix’ or transmedia in Japan. In multiple contexts, the place of such television shows has been framed as a ‘30-minute commercial’ or ‘program length commercial’. This article examines the 2014 anime and media mix Yo-kai Watch as an example of the animation episode as something else: part of a call towards total mobilization. Taking seriously the incendiary remarks by one of Japan’s media mix pioneers – Kadokawa Haruki – who claimed that his model for the media mix was taken from Hitler’s ‘total mobilization’ of fashion, sound, and image for a nationalist endgame, this article considers the Yo-kai Watch media mix in light of the concept of total mobilization. Through a close analysis of the objects, games and animation of Yo-Kai Watch, the author suggests that the endgame of this media mix geared towards very young audiences is their total mobilization towards collection-based consumption. This means thinking a ‘logistics of consumption’ that requires in part an examination of the circulation of objects as well as the function of the anime as an incitement and manual to play.

McLuhan’s World, Or, Understanding Media in Japan:

In Japan, McLuhan was a divided figure. Before he was translated he was introduced, and this introduction was performed by two different people in two markedly different ways. In lieu of discussing my own encounter with McLuhan’s Understanding Media, I’d like to use this space to ask us to think of a different space of reception: late 1960s Japan. Here interest in McLuhan had a fireworks-like intensity matched by an accompanying brevity. There would be McLuhan revivals – around his death in the early 1980s, and from the late 1990s into the 2000s, as his work was repurposed for a new media era. But what is fascinating about the reception of McLuhan in Japan – in addition to its impact on media theorization thereafter, and its important place in the still-to-be-written story of McLuhan’s global reception – is the way that the divisive figure of McLuhan is literally mapped onto two very different writers, who introduce two very different McLuhans.

Review: Steven T. Brown (ed.), Cinema Anime: Critical Engagements with Japanese Animation. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. 248 pp. ISBN 1—4039—7060—2 (hbk)

The appearance of a book with the title Cinema Anime: Critical Engagements with Japanese Animation is an exciting event for an emergent field – Anime Studies – that is mostly populated by introductory books, encyclopaedias and manuals on how to draw anime characters. The title alone promises a book that considers the relation of anime to other media, and moreover anime as a medium or at the very least a media type (rather than a literary approach that treats only genres or narratives). In addition, the title promises a certain level of critique all too absent from most books on anime. Generally speaking, these expectations are met by the essays in this anthology, essays which put anime into relation with such issues as globalization, power relations, gender relations and representations, the gaze, modernity and postmodernity, media formations, colonialism, distributions of labour, embodiment, identity, and media environments. The book is divided into three sections, and consists of nine essays (including the introduction) written by authors from various fields, all of whom have experience writing about anime, or books published on the subject: Steven T. Brown (the editor of this volume), Susan Napier, Antonia Levi, Tatsumi Takayuki, Sharalyn Orbaugh, Carl Silvio, Brian Ruh, Thomas Lamarre and Livia Monnet. Each contribution tends to focus on one or two anime texts which are made either the main focus of analysis or the point of departure for asking larger questions. The texts analyzed include works by Kon Satoshi (Perfect Blue, 1997; Millennium Actress, 2002), the punk-pop fiesta TAMALA 2010 (2002, directed by the t.o.l. collective), Ghost in the Shell (the first