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215 director talked with me about his love of Hollywood film, and asked me if I studied his favorite director, William Wyler. Of course, since I am not an animator or animation professional, there are obvious limits to how much I could identify with the crew, but my status as both foreigner and Japanese allowed me to wear multiple cultural hats. In this respect, my background for film and Japanese popular culture helped me gain the trust among various tiers of staff, but also allowed for staff to go about their business, not feeling the need to explain or break down processes they assumed I would already be familiar with. Rather than studying strictly “sideways,” tapping into dual cultural backgrounds allowed me to study bilaterally. Another reason for the reluctance of “studying up” is to examine how workers across the studio conceive of their own roles in producing anime texts. My analysis of the anime studio is informed by both participant observation and “thick description” of interviews, and my data was comprised of the people “on set:” the directors, producers, animators, writers, technicians, and voice actors who formed the staff of anime productions. Even here, I spent more time with certain groups (producers, writers, directors, voice actors) than others (cameramen, editors, sound mixers). The highest-ranking studio executives who determine the direction of what productions will be made figured very little into my observation, largely because I was interested in seeing how anime was constructed on a social level between various participants. Thus, my analysis is embedded in what Paul Willis has called the everyday of workers' experiences. 307 This “theorizing from the ground up” follows the work of John Caldwell, whose forays into television production focused not just on network executives, but on gaffers, grips, and other below-the-line technical
307 Paul Willis, Learning to Labor: How Working Class Kids Become Working Class (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), 201-203. | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |
216 crafts that comprise the “nomadic labor system” of television production in Los Angeles. 308 Caldwell's study of “critical industrial practices” focuses on the highly reflexive interpretive schemes of rituals, artifacts, and other media forms of film and television workers, but what I find particularly helpful in examining the anime studio is his call to look at how social activity and professional interactions are deployed within the industrial environment of media production. 309 Where Caldwell uses Bruno Latour's “actor-network” theory (ANT) to explain these relationships, I fall to Clifford Geertz's concept of “thick description” to understand the complexity of practices and the varied agency of those who work in the anime studio. Part of the reason why I eschew Latour's theory is that some have criticized ANT for downplaying the human element, ignoring the emotions or feelings of participants in favor of an objective diagramming of subject movement. 310 These critics might say that ANT as a methodology is lacking in “soul. ” To this point, I also hew toward Ian Condry's anthropological study centered around various anime creators and studios, which attempts to find the “soul” of the anime industry. Though Condry's study was published after the completion of my fieldwork, it helped me to reconsider issues of social organization in the studio in relation to anime transmedia. Condry's focus on the production sites of anime is an intervention of sorts that seeks to address an imbalance in anime studies that focus exclusively around the textual object. Rather than focusing inward on the content of anime narratives, he suggests a turn outward, looking at “the social relations, emergent business
308 John Caldwell, 113. 309 Ibid, 6-7. 310 See Eric Laurier and Chris Philo, “The Region in the Boot: Mobilizing Lone Subjects and Multiple Objects,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 21, no. 1 (2003): 85-106. | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |
217 networks, and day-to-day activities that expand the cultural universe of anime. ”311 An outward analysis can reveal the “social energy” that drives anime production, guided by its creators and fans, which forms the “soul” for the media object. This soul is powered by the collective and collaborative energy behind small social networks organized around the anime object. Such a study, in its own way, provides another alternative to the concept of “spreadable media” formulated by Ford, Green, and Jenkins. Rather than focus solely on the media object as it spreads through different social contexts, honing in on the producers themselves as they spread media reveals how people imbue value into media objects before they are unleashed into the world. This approach thinks of media in terms of the people doing the spreading and the value that they attain from their actions rather than the inherent transmediafication of the media object itself. 312 Looking at anime production in this way can help us to better understand how media gains life, or a soul, through its movement across social boundaries, media forms, and categories of producers. Such a method not only provides a supplement to the many excellent close textual readings of the manga or anime text, but also begins to formulate what Condry calls a “critical theory of production,” a way of looking at media texts through the meanings creators attach to them, rather than the cultural meanings they might communicate to spectators or audiences. 313 Anime (as well as manga) are a particularly useful focal point for a critical theory of production, as it spreads media not through stories or narratives, but through the proliferation of characters and worlds. The Toei Animation studio functions as a massive network, each of which allows for small divisions of collaborative workers to generate their
311 Condry, 30. 312 This is a concept I elucidate in chapter three of this dissertation and the construction of producer-powered interfaces of manga texts. 313 Condry, 43. | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |
218 own characters and worlds across projects. While networks might seem distributive of control, they actually establish power relations within their very structures. Just because the network of a production involves dozens of creators and craftsmen does not mean the in-between animator has as much say as a producer (or any say at all). As Alexander Galloway argues, “The network, it appears, has emerged as a dominant form describing the nature of control today, as well as resistance to it. ”314 Working in networks does not allow its participants to completely elude forms of control, from the studio boss and producer on down the production line. But networks can, as Christopher Kelty explains, reorient cultures into working together to create something of value to one another. Kelty calls those who participate in massive creative platform activities such as free software movements “recursive publics,” or participants who exert control and maintenance over their environments and “which, in turn, constitutes their everyday practical commitments and the identities of the participants as creative and autonomous individuals. ”315 The production of anime is tiered, with the script and storyboard exerting more control over the production than the key animators and background artists. But what is key to the collaborative activity in anime networks is how the creative work and opinions of several tiers of workers is not only respected, but solicited. This, in turn, allows workers to feel a sense of control over their own work, even if the locus of control (and money) is centered elsewhere in the studio. This chapter's emphasis on individual agency, divisional management, and segmented creative work does not intend to obscure or compensate for the scientific management principles that organize Japanese anime production. Toei Animation was one
314 Alexander Galloway, The Exploit: A Theory of Networks (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 4. 315 Kelty, 6-7. | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |
219 of the first studios to institute Taylorist management practices into its workplace, breaking down the animation process into discrete tasks carried out by individual workers. While anime production in Japan has been influenced to some degree by post-Fordist changes in management structures-principally the incorporation of new technologies that reduce the need for labor, as well as the near total adoption of contracted labor for most animators-the model for anime production in Japan has changed remarkably little, with writers, directors, animators, artists, and voice actors continuing to occupy the same industrial roles that they assumed in the late 1960s. This institutional production means that constraints are placed on creative labor for the sake of the studio's bottom line of standardized production. Vicki Mayer has shown how repetitive Taylorist principles and Japanization kanban and kaizen management standards produced anxiety among workers constantly under surveillance in media production environments. 316 Upon visiting the Toei Animation Studio in the late 1950s, the animator Jimmy Murakami called it an intense and serious “factory,” with employees who weren't “sitting there and joking around like [the American studio] UPA did!”317 During this brief period, Toei ordered its animators to form three or four man units and make “whatever they wanted” to fill the time, but these experimental teams soon were dissolved to make way for systematic television production. 318 The sort of workplace anxiety and feeling of disempowerment that Mayer describes was later echoed by the director Hayao Miyazaki, who stated that during his time at Toei, “I felt ill at ease every day-I couldn't
316 Mayer, 44-47. 317 Andrew Osmond, “A Ton of Work (Jimmy Murakami Interview),” Manga UK, 4 March 2012 <http://www. mangauk. com/?p=3656> (2 March 2015) 318 Otsuka, 82. | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |
220 understand the works we were producing, or even the proposals we were working on. ”319 Miyazaki lamented the reduced role of the animator in the new production process, where instead of conceiving everything in a film including the storyboards, the animator became “someone who merely draws as ordered and makes those drawings move. ”320 But, as Mayer notes, workers in these situations “look creatively for solutions to stressful limits because they had no other choice. ”321 Workers, and not solely animators, at the animation studio find ways to exert their own creativity within the limits that are imposed by their own talents, experiences, or the studio's bottom line, and these “sanctioned” creative actions within the studio network's divisions are in service of managing discrete areas of characters and worlds. This chapter will map these creative actions within the network and each of its divisions of character management (see figure 14): the idea men and women of the seisaku iinkai; the producers who function as staff/character caretakers; the scriptwriters who manage narratives; the directors, animators, and artists who function as the builders and movers of worlds; and the voice actors who become the celebrity faces and voices of the anime series. Some of these divisions (largely concerning pre-production) are directly employed through the anime studio, while others (production and post-production) are contracted from separate companies, but all have a direct relationship to character management as it is organized through and centralized at Toei's studio.
Figure 14: Mikami Koji's map of the animation workflow322
319 Miyazaki, 70. 320 Ibid, 30. This was a large reason for Miyazaki's impetus for leaving Toei and, eventually, forming his own studio, Ghibli. The studio was dedicated to making the sort of quality, feature-length animation that he felt Toei had stopped producing after abandoning its concentration on feature-length films. 321 Mayer, 47. 322 Mikami, 75. | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |
221 Pre-Production
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Production
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Post-production
Planning (seisaku iinkai) Script Design Character settei Storyboards Layouts Background
settei
Key frames 3D-modeling Backgrounds Scanning 3D-motion check and shading 3D-rendering In-betweens Scanning Digital color Quality check Camera prep/ Cinematography Non-linear editing Music, sound effects, voice Dubbing (mix) Video editing Completion SFX Color/ finishing | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |
222 By understanding how the anime studio functions as a massive network of people sharing and expanding compelling characters and worlds, then we can begin to see how the logic of each studio is organized according to its creators within. Indeed, I came to this conclusion through my fieldwork at Toei Animation. I had first conceived of my study of the production of the Japanese media mix through an industrial focus on both shōnen manga and anime, though I soon realized that the processes that organize boys' manga are entirely different for animation studios. While the production of boys' manga magazines and the manga therein creates social communities that rely on the reinforcement of certain ideals, character types, visual patterns, social practices, and working relationships, the anime studio operates according to a more variegated template. A studio as large as Toei must work with what they can acquire and conceive, with a variety of productions in different genres and audiences in order to minimize and spread risk. This often means adapting shōnen manga since the precedent has already been established and the returns are more reliable; but other times, this means creating entire series for marginalized demographics in order to draw the eyeballs and wallets of previously ill-served audiences. The economics of studio production dictate that a focus on solely shōnen anime would be not only unwise but impossible, for a studio as large and diverse as Toei requires they look for new market opportunities, make anime that takes advantages of new technologies, cater to emerging audiences and genres, and generally take on any number of productions in order to hedge their bets in case any one series or genre performs poorly. This also means creators have the opportunity to work on a variety of projects, testing their skills out in constantly new directions. Toei was encouraged from a very early period to vary its production in this way, mostly creating anime films and | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |
223 television programs for boys, girls, teens, and families. Thus, while the codes and expectations that organize shōnen manga are central to the manga magazine and the manga, the transmedia that is created through anime operates according to its own logics of production. Looking particularly at the logics and history of Toei's network can give us insight into a different mode of collaborative and diversified creation that propels the media mix of anime. Pre-war and Early Post-war Animation in Japan In order to better understand the contributions of Toei Animation in the post-war era, this section will first briefly outline the development of animation in Japan in the first half of the 20th century. Toei is the first Japanese studio to commit to the production of full-length feature film animation in the vein of America's Disney studio. The efforts that went into this project created a market and training of animators who would grow and support a full-fledged animation industry. But the history of animation in Japan precedes the foundation of Toei Animation by several decades, and experienced craftsmen comprised a cottage industry of illustrators and animators who developed their craft well before the establishment of Toei. This section will briefly examine the production of animation in Japan before the formation of Toei, showing how assorted movements and processes within Japanese society were established in the pre-war and post-war years that laid the seeds for the establishment of Toei. The earliest animation to circle the globe came in the form of what Tom Gunning has called a “cinema of attractions,” a mode of film experience that favored theatrical | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |
224 exhibition over narrative continuity. 323 The trick films of Georges Melies, for example, were not explicitly animation in the sense that they did not show drawings, but films such as Trip to the Moon (1902) incorporate stop motion and other visual effects to convey the appearance of movement. The first examples of animation with drawings, such as J. Stuart Blackton's Lightning Sketches (1907) and Windsor Mc Cay's Gertie the Dinosaur (1914), incorporated the directors themselves into the experience of viewing the animated images. 324 Koga Futoshi has argued how these films made their way to Japan, exerting a strong influence on Japanese magic lantern performances and kamishibai performances which used light and moving scrolls to simulate animated movement. 325 The first Japanese cartoons emerged from these sideshows. While there is some dispute as to the exact date of when the first Japanese-produced animation screened in Japan, the year 1917 was significant in that it saw the screening of three short animation works by Shimokawa Oten, Koichi Junichi, and Kitayama Seitaro. 326 The latter of this trio released his short films through the film studio Nikkatsu and would go on to make many more. The subject material of these early shorts was often nonsensical manga escapades or adaptations of children's folk stories. 327 In the next decade, Japan would see the first small studios dedicated to producing animation. Cel animation did not become widespread in Europe until the 1930s, and would
323 See Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectators, and the Avant-Garde, in Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, ed. Thomas Elsaesser and Adam Baker (London: British Film Institute, 1990), 56-62. 324 Donald Crafton, Before Mickey: The Animated Film 1898-1928 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1984), 50, 111. 325 See Koga Futoshi, “Melies wa itsu kara shirarete ita no ka: Nihon ni okeru Melies kotohajime” (When Melies Was Recognized: On Melies' Beginnings in Japan), in Nippon eiga no tanjo (Birth of Japanese Film) ed. Iwamoto Kenji (Tokyo: Shinwasha, 2011), 44-62. 326 See Tsugata Nobuyuki, “Research on the Achievements of Japan's First Three Animators,” Asian Cinema vol. 14 no. 1 (2003): 13-27. 327 Stingray and Nichigai Associates eds., Anime sakuhin jiten (Dictionary of Animation Works) (Tokyo: Nichigai Associates, 2010), 217. | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |
225 be rare in Japan until 1934, when Fuji film corporation began manufacturing it domestically. 328 Methods of production varied during this period from animators who preferred paper cut-outs (Murata Yasuji) to kirigami colored paper (Ofuji Noburo) to the newest and latest cel animation technologies imported from abroad (Masaoka Kenzo). During the 1920s and 30s, animators were heavily encouraged to make educational films, receiving subsidies from the Ministry of Education “for the production of films for pedagogical purposes. ”329 These films were screened in town halls and colleges, ensuring animators received a paycheck while also honing their craft. The content of these stories were narrative-driven, often using folk tales with their appeals to national culture, as well as sports stories to appeal to the nation's increasing modernism and interest in international competition. 330 While most of these films were black and white and silent, by the end of the 1930s, many were synched with sound and some even developed technologies to convey color tinting, such as Ofuji Noburo's chiyogami works that used kaleidoscopic patterns of brightly colored paper. 331 The end of the 1930s saw significant changes to both film and animation production in Japan. The Film Law (Eiga-ho) of 1939 saw heavy restrictions placed upon filmmakers by government authorities. Cast and crew had to be licensed, and films themselves had to fit within a program that consisted of newsreels and “cultural films” designed to “nourish
328 Jonathan Clements, 49. 329 Daisuke Miyao, “Before Anime: Animation and the Pure Film Movement in Pre-war Japan,” Japan Forum vol. 14 no. 2 (2002): 203. 330 See Murata Yasuji's Dōbutsu Olympic Taikai (Animal Olympic Games, 1928), described by Jonathan Clements and Helen Mc Carthy as “the first identifiable sports anime,” in The Anime Encyclopedia: A Guide to Japanese Animation Since 1917, revised and expanded edition (San Francisco: Stone Bridge Press, 2006), 607. 331 Ofuji was an animation pioneer in many respects. He constructed the first camera set-up that used multiple glass planes separated by a few inches, in essence prefiguring the first multiplane camera which would be patented by Disney in 1940. See Thomas Lamarre, 23-24. | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |
226 the national spirit. ”332 All films henceforth were regulated to contribute to national policy, and foreign films were phased out of theatres. 333 Animated films had already begun to exhibit propaganda content, such as Sora no Shanghai Sensen (1938, The Aerial Battle Over Shanghai), but after 1939, animation would be mobilized in full for the use of the Japanese government and its imperialistic ambitions. Anime historians note the importance of the multi-reel animated films Momotarō no umiwashi (Momotarō's Sea Eagles, 1943) and Momotarō umi no shimpei (Momotarō's Divine Sea Warriors, 1945) the latter of which-with a running time of seventy-four minutes-qualifies as “the first truly feature-length Japanese cartoon. ”334 Sponsored by the Ministry of the Navy and directed by Seo Mitsuyo, the film stars the folklore hero Momotarō leading a band of Japanese chimps against the anthropomorphized allied forces in an epic sea battle. Both Momotarō films were a notable technological leap forward in their utilization of the multiplane camera, patented by Disney in 1940, to create the illusion of depth in its aerial battles through the use of multiple panels of art, and the films offered animators valuable experience with cel animation techniques. 335 But there were other avenues for Japanese animators to work through contributing to the national effort. As Jonathan Clements documents, the “shadow staff,” a group of animators commissioned as a Special Film Unit, made a number of unrecognized, secret animations during the war instructing soldiers on level bombing theory and practical bombardment. 336
332 Jasper Sharp, Historical Dictionary of Japanese Cinema (Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2011), 63. 333 Kyoko Hirano, Mr. Smith Goes to Tokyo: Japanese Cinema Under the American Occupation, 1945-1952 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institute, 1992), 207. 334 Clements, 64. 335 Mochinaga Tadahito, Animation nicchū kōryūki (A Chronicle of Sino-Japanese Animation Cultural Exchange) (Tokyo: Toho Shoten, 2006), 92-94. 336 See Clements, 57-60. | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |
227 The post-war period saw the end of the Film Law and a second ordinance by the occupation forces that no new films would espouse national propaganda. Foreign cartoons such as those from Disney and Fleischer flooded the market shortly after the war, adding to the competition for domestic animators. Disney's feature-length color films made an especially strong impression on both the public and the nascent animation industry. While animators struggled all year to produce a seventeen-minute black and white short, Disney released the 83-minute Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) in full color in Japan in 1950. Disney films would continue to be the only feature-length animated films screened in Japan for a full decade, and their influence on animators and audiences was significant not only in production scale, but also in thinking of how to create an industry around animation sales. 337 The Japanese public could not know of the immense costs both in time and money that the Disney films incurred when they were first produced, but the expectations for animation quality and content rose considerably upon its initial screening in Japan. With new leaders and censors came new sources of income for animators. The end of the war was a great disruption in animation production, but animators such as Masaoka Kenzo and studios such as Toho quickly established studios such as the Shin Nihon Dōga-sha (New Japanese Animation Company) and the Nihon Dōga-sha, or Nichidō, respectively. Commissioned by Occupation authorities to make animation films with an educational purpose, many of the animators made films for children, such as Masaoka's gentle pastoral, Sakura (1947). Failing to please Occupation censors, a good number of these films were never screened for audiences,338 though studios such as the Yokohama Cinema Shokai did
337 Tsugata Nobuyuki, Animation gaku nyūmon (Introduction to Animation Studies) (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 2005), 64-65. 338 Yamaguchi Yasuo ed., Nihon no anime zenshi (Complete History of Japanese Animation) (Tokyo: Ten Books, 2004), 64-65. | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |
228 make several films instructing children in the finer points of manners and morals. 339 Toho, like most film companies at the time, struggled to balance the demands of the new censors with theatrical profits amid rising inflation and dismal exports. Staff in film and animation production were forced to endure long hours with very little pay, leading to several employment disagreements and labor strikes in 1947-48. 340 By the mid 1950s, however, a new source of income was now starting to become available-television animation in the form of animated commercials. While independent radio broadcasts began in Japan as early as 1925, government authorities understood the new medium's influence and importance. By mid-1926, several companies were forced to merge into a public interest national monopoly, the Nippon Hōsō Kyōkai, or NHK. By the outbreak of the war, what little independence NHK had was completely in control of the state as a propaganda arm. 341 Following the war, Occupation authorities refashioned Japanese broadcasting under the Broadcast Law of 1950, which divorced NHK from state control and cast it as an independent, publically-funded corporation. To ensure competition, authorities wrote into the law the establishment of commercial broadcasting and a dual system of public and private broadcasting. 342 Thus, when the first public television broadcast aired on NHK in Februrary of 1953, the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper company and advertising giant Dentsū collaborated to form the Nihon TV network and air their own broadcasts later that year. Mainichi Shimbun newspaper quickly followed suit by building their own network around the Tokyo Broadcasting System (TBS) in 1955, and the Sankei,
339 Tsugata 2005, 166. 340 Hirano, 224-229. 341 Ellis S. Krauss, Broadcasting Politics in Japan: NHK and Television News (New York: Cornell University Press, 2000), 91. 342 Krauss, 93-94. | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |
229 Asahi, and Nihon Keizai Shimbun all formed their own broadcasts by the end of the 1950s. 343 As film exhibitors increasingly dropped shorts, newsreels, and cartoons from their programs, cartoon advertisements grew through television programs for the new broadcasters. 344 Television ownership exploded in Japan during this time, and the number of television sets in the country skyrocketed from 866 in 1953 to close to two million by 1959. 345 With the increased sales of television sets came an increased demand from advertising to fill empty slots. Wealthy new patrons for animation emerged in the form of advertising companies such the spice company Momoya and the whiskey producer Torys. The vertically-integrated Dentsū, in particular, was a major client for animation, having secured over 60 percent of prime-time advertising slots by the 1960s. 346 Tsugata Nobuhiko estimates that during this period, over 70 percent of advertisements used some form of animation. 347 With its more lucrative returns and steady work, it was during this period that animators first began working for television production in Japan. The Formation of Toei Dōga During the early post-war period, Nichidō, the largest surviving group of Japanese animators, was struggling to maintain its roster of animators with full-time work, and most
343 D. Eleanor Westney, “Mass Media as Business Organizations: A U. S.-Japanese Comparison,” in Media and Politics in Japan, eds. Susan J. Pharr and Ellis S. Krauss (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1996), 60-61. 344 Similar to the United States, film studios in Japan initially viewed television skeptically, refusing lend films or stars to television broadcasts after the summer of 1956. But by 1957, due to an absence of American-style laws that forbid studios from vertically integrating, many film companies reacted to rapidly falling box office receipts by investing heavily in emerging television studios. See Joseph L. Anderson and Donald Richie, The Japanese Film: Art and Industry (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982), 254. The opposite can be seen today, however, with television broadcasters having a stronger foothold in Japanese advertising than ever. Networks such as Fuji, TBS, and TV Asahi have invested heavily in smaller production companies, and NTV even owns a majority stake in former studio major Nikkatsu. 345 Anderson and Richie, 254. 346 Mark Tungate, Ad Land: A Global History of Advertising (London: Kogan Page, 2007), 187. 347 Tsugata 2011, 24. | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |
230 staff members were forced to take on part-time jobs at other companies to stay afloat. Mori Yasuji, an animator at Nichidō at the time, took on a job as an advertising artist at a department store for a year, while other animators had to manage their schedules when demands for labor suddenly arose on urgent projects. 348 In 1956, however, Nichidō was acquired as a subsidiary of the Toei film company, one of the newly formed “big five” studios in the post-war period and itself a subsidiary of the Tokyo-Yokohama Railway Company. 349 With the newly acquired Oizumi Eiga studio and roughly thirty theatres in its possession, Toei believed it was equipped to produce niche entertainment for new audiences. Nichidō was rebranded as Toei Dōga and moved to a state-of-the-art facility across from their Oizumi film studio (see figure 15). The word dōga literally translates to “moving pictures,” and was coined by Masaoka Kenzo when he set up the Nihon Dōga Kyōkai (Japanese Animation Association) in 1937 so that the Japanese would have their own word for “animation,” rather than referring constantly to the Western word. 350 Figure 15: Toei Animation's production facility in Oizumi, Tokyo (2013)
348 Mori Yasuji, Mogura no uta: Animator no jiden (The Mole's Song: An Animator's Autobiography) (Tokyo: Animage Bunko V, 1984), 117-118. 349 Sharp, 251. See also Richie and Anderson, 259-260. 350 Yamaguchi Katsunori and Watanabe Yasushi, Nihon Animation Eigashi (A History of Japanese Animated Films) (Osaka: Yūbunsha, 1977), 12-13. | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |
231 Both the introduction of Disney and television in Japan were instrumental in Toei Dōga's formation. The ability to produce commercials for the growing medium of television was a strong business opportunity that would justify Toei's employment of large standing staff of animators. 351 In many ways, these short animated films nurtured the technical and creative talents of many novice animators into eventually producing full-fledged television animated series. Toei's larger goal, however, was to mimic the business model of the most highly visible animation studio in the West. Inspired by Disney productions such as Dumbo (1941) and Bambi (1942), the latter of which was especially successful in Japan, newly appointed studio president and defacto Toei Dōga head Okawa Hiroshi vowed to make Toei Dōga the “Disney of the East. ”352 Using the American animation studio as a model, Okawa had designs to make Toei Dōga a producer of animation that could be exported across the globe, with an output of “two feature-length and four short animated films a year. ”353 In order to do this, Toei Dōga needed to increase production capabilities by bringing in many new and less experienced animators, and having them be trained by veterans. In just two years, the first of these films, the all-color Hakujaden, was released in 1958, successfully imitating the length, look, style, and sound of Disney. It is a watershed film that marked a number of firsts for a Japanese animation production-the first Japanese animated color film, the first post-war animated feature-length film, and the first Japanese feature film that was exhibited to audiences in the United States, as Panda and the Magic Serpent. 354 The circumstances that led to its rapid creation
351 Tsugata Nobuyuki, Nihon animation no chikara, 122-123. 352 Yamaguchi, 67. 353 Mori, 125. 354 Clements, 99. | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |
232 are a testament to the studio's consolidation of animation veterans, as well as its formation of a system that sought to hastily develop new talent. Created as a subject for export to Asian markets, with funding secured by Okawa from Shaw Brothers in Hong Kong, Hakujaden is based on the Chinese legend Madam White Snake. Since there were not enough experienced animators available at the studio, in order to achieve the high quality look of Disney, the staff animated much of the film through rotoscoping, a variation of animation where actors are recorded beforehand to provide the models for sketches and drawings. 355 The process was colossally expensive, as Daisuke Miyao notes it was “like making two films, a live-action film and an animated film. ”356 While the human characters in the film are rotoscoped using professional actors and actresses (Sakuma Yoshiko and Ishikawa Yoshiaki), the animal characters, on the other hand, are animated with considerable malleability, exhibiting an elasticity to animals that was popularized by Disney in the “squash-and-stretch” method. 357 The result is a film that displays both considerable range and beauty in its animation, though also, as Hu Tze-yue has argued, diplomatic aspects that assert Japan's international benevolence and industrial ingenuity to its Asian neighbors. 358 It is to this newfound exhibition of technical aptitude in which Hakujaden's legacy is most conspicuous. Hakujaden did not find a large reception from audiences in Japan, but the film had the more profound effect of acting as a casting call for the most talented animators in the country, as well as drawing would-be animators who were interested in making full-length and color animated films in the Disney style.
355 Yamaguchi and Watanabe, 66. 356 Miyao, 207-208. 357 See Frank Johnson and Ollie Johnson, The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation (New York: Abbeville Press, 1981), 47-51. 358 Hu Tze-yue, “The Animated Resurrection of the Legend of White Snake in Japan,” Animation Vol. 2 (March 2007): 56. | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |
233 Toei Dōga would continue to make an animated feature-length film every year, with the release usually timed for spring, but because of the large number of staff needed to make the productions, crunch periods needing many staff members were followed by lulls in production where animators had very little work. The studio was forced to find ways to occupy staff through short films and commercial work, but the studio's employment of such a large standing staff meant the company was rapidly losing money for every month that revenue wasn't coming in. 359 Okawa realized this, though he saw the process as a sacrifice for gains further down the road when staff became more experienced to produce animation at a faster, standardized rate. Until then, he treated Toei as a training academy, a view echoed by former employees who called the studio the “Toei Animation University” (Toei Dōga Daigaku) in reference to the immense amount of experienced animators it trained and created after the war. 360 Young artists would be placed under the wing of more experienced animators, who were given roles as section chiefs. As the new animators worked on various projects, veterans would assess and advise on the quality of their work. With enough feedback and on-the-job training, they would learn enough to prove capable of handling their own in production and gradually advance in seniority within the studio. When it came time to work on Hakujaden in 1958, a dai-ni genga, or “seconding” system was established, creating small teams of three animators working under one of the only experienced animators at the studio-Daikuhara Akira or Mori Yasuji. Under this system, Daikuhara and Mori would draw hundreds of rough key frames-the main drawings used to signal transitions in movement-while less experienced animators would
359 Tsugata 2007, 195. 360 Sugiyama Taku, “Terebi anime no zenshi: Toei chōhen anime no jidai” (A Pre-History of TV Anime: The Era of Toei's Feature-length Anime), in Zusetsu Terebi Anime Zenshō (Complete Book of TV Animation: Illustrated) ed. Misono Makoto (Tokyo: Hara Shobō, 1999), 119. | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |
234 polish up the drawings before sending them to do the next line of animators. 361 Through repeated implementation in subsequent features, this system trained notable talents such as Kusube Daikichiro and Otsuka Yasuo, who would go on to work on some of the most memorable animated works at Toei and the internationally recognized Studio Ghibli. 362 Animators became more proficient through the training, and the studio's output increased to the point that a feature-length animated film was produced each year. By 1962, Otsuka Yasuo notes that staff members were now experienced enough to split off onto two different features a year. The following year, a third team was created to handle the production of a new weekly animated television series. 363 In six years, Okawa's vision for a fully-functioning animation studio producing both features and other commercial material had been realized. The system did not come without other problems, notably the low wages of novice staff members working during what was viewed as a training period. Okawa viewed these animators as receiving a free education, though staff members who struggled to subsist on the low starting salary thought otherwise. 364 Toei, like most Japanese conglomerates, hired employees based on a tiered salary system, where male management track employees who were university graduates received a salary more than double that of female and/or high-school graduate animators. 365 Eventually, animators agitated for a union and began negotiations for improved conditions with Toei management in late 1960. Among their
361 For a more detailed breakdown of the seconding system, see Otsuka Yasuo, 65-72. 362 Despite this training, there was also a noticeable degradation of quality by the fourth feature, Sinbad the Sailor (1962). The animator Sugiyama Taku laments this process, arguing that the standardization of the animation leads to a noticeable loss of personality that prioritizes the wishes of the corporation over those of animators. See Sugiyama, 108. 363 Otsuka, 115. 364 Sugiyama, 113. 365 Kano Seiji, Nippon no animation wo kizuita hitobito (The People Who Built Japan's Animation) (Tokyo: Wakakusa Shobō, 2004), 92. | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |
235 demands were the scaling back of mandatory overtime, fewer work obligations during breaks and lunchtime, the ending of abuse by section chiefs, and the elimination of pay discrepancies between new staff and those hired mid-career. 366 As Sugiyama Taku humorously notes, this became known as “the katsudon proposal” when the animators asked to be to able to treat themselves on occasion to a bowl of katsudon, a meal of pork cutlet and egg over rice. 367 Negotiations turned hostile in 1961, however, and union members held short strikes in December to coerce management into concessions. Okawa reacted strongly to the strikes, locking the studio gates and barring animators from entry and exit, the latter of which happened to occur ironically when several animators were locked in while working yet another graveyard shift. 368 The union and studio finally met again a few days after the lockout, though the concessions by both sides resulted in a number of changes to Toei and its relationship with workers. The studio conceded to worker demands and small salary increases, but put pressure on the most unruly animators, forcing many well-regarded animators to defect to other studios. 369 The most important change that came from the labor disputes, though, was that Toei switched from hiring animators as permanent employees to contracted freelancers, a system which remains in place today and in the industry at large. 370 A second major change that occurred at Toei in 1960 led to large-scale changes in how the anime industry would organize itself. Toei's third film was to be an adaptation of
366 Minakawa Yuka, Nippon dōga no kōbōshi: Shōsetsu Tezuka gakkō Vol. 1 (Rise and Fall of Japanese Animation: The Story of the Tezuka School) (Tokyo: Kodansha, 2009), 126 367 Sugiyama, 112. 368 Oguro Yuichiro, Plus Madhouse 04: Rintaro (Tokyo: Kinema Junpō-sha, 2009), 30. 369 Ibid, 31. 370 Sugiyama, 114. | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |
236 Tezuka Osamu's Boku wa Son Goku, a variation of the Journey to the West story of Chinese mythology known as Saiyuki. Toei and Tezuka agreed to have Tezuka himself storyboard the film, a first for feature-length animation in Japan. 371 While famous as a best-selling mangaka, Tezuka had harbored ambitions towards becoming an animator earlier in his career. Commuting to the Oizumi studio every week and taking part in schedule and staff meetings was Tezuka's introduction to the processes of production and managing teams of animators. According to Otsuka Yasuo, his storyboards and approach to animation were difficult to work with, conveying too much information and inattentive to the rise and fall of dramatic action that was part and parcel of Toei's storytelling at the time. The animation process, on the other hand, was made much simpler than Hakujaden due to Tezuka's “modern” designs. 372 Tezuka's characters were drawn with a simplified and uncomplicated line that lent themselves to easy reproduction and, consequently, smoother adaptation to animation. Saiyuki ended up being animated with over one hundred-thousand cels, a record at the time, though the film looks somewhat less accomplished than Hakujaden due to the simplicity of the designs. 373 Following the film, however, Tezuka poached a number of Toei staff to form his own studio, Mushi Productions. Tezuka's aim was to adapt his own manga series, Tetsuwan Atomu into animated form on a weekly basis for the emerging medium of television. The intricate, cel-intensive animation at Toei, what was described as “full animation,” was impossible for regular weekly production, so Tezuka implemented the “limited animation” production scheme, similar to that used by the American company Hanna-Barbera. This style of animation involved, as diagrammed by former Mushi Pro
371 Clements, 112. 372 Otsuka, 94-95. 373 Ibid, 96. | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |
237 staff Yamamoto Eiichi, a series of elements listed in the previous chapter such as shooting on threes for fewer images per second of film, stop-images or still frames to reduce animation where it isn't required, pull-cels or sliding cels that give the impression of movement, repetition of animation that loops certain backgrounds and sequences, sectioning animation in characters to certain parts of their bodies, shorter shots that create the effect of montage, and the image bank system, which recycled cels-such as poses-from previous episodes into newer episodes. 374 But even these changes were not enough to bring the costs of production significantly down, as Tezuka was employing a large staff of experienced animators at Mushi Pro. Tezuka found a potential solution by partnering with Mannen-sha, an advertising company that purchased television spots for advertising revenue, broadcast network Fuji TV, and Meiji Seika, a confectionary maker that partnered with Tezuka to include Tetsuwan Atomu stickers in their boxes of Marble Chocolates. Mannen-sha, however, was reluctant to pay for much of the costs of production due to the risk involved in television's first anime series. It was here, in late 1962, that Tezuka made the fateful decision to sell his anime to Mannen-sha for several hundred-thousand yen below the cost of production, with the hopes of making back the production's losses in merchandising and advertising revenues once the anime found an audience. 375 With the funding hurdles somewhat cleared, Mushi Pro proceeded with production, and Tetsuwan Atomu premiered on Japanese
374 Yamamoto Eiichi, Mushi Pro no kōbōki: Ani meita no seishun (Chronicle of Mushi Pro: The Youth of Ani Meita) (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1989), 105-106. 375 Yamaguchi, 74-75. This decision would have a lasting impact on all future television anime, with the average production today incurring a loss of roughly one million yen. See Tada Makoto, Kore ga anime business da (This is the Anime Business) (Tokyo: Kosaido, 2002), 81. | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |
238 television on January 1, 1963, garnering high television ratings and advertising revenues in the process. 376 Tezuka's decision to set the value of anime at only a portion of its actual production costs with the hopes of making revenue through alternative means was a watershed moment in the animation industry, and its ripple effects continue to reverberate to this day. Following Atomu, several studios began making animated television productions of their own. Toei Dōga was one of the first, hiring former Tezuka disciple Tsukioka Sadao to helm Ōkami Shōnen Ken (“Wolf Boy Ken,” 1963), Toei's first television animated series about a boy raised in the jungle, itself also sponsored by a confectionary company. The show premiered in November, in the same year as Atomu, but Toei took the extra step of using their own movie theatres just a month later to show several of the show's first episodes, spliced into a single program called the Ōkami Shōnen Ken Daikoshin. Ken used many of the same methods of production that Tezuka pioneered at Mushi Pro, a similar foreignness in its setting and story, and a similar business model of spreading production costs around a committee. Other studios, such as TCJ's Tetsujin 28 (1964), quickly followed suit with television anime productions of their own. By 1964, what is now generally viewed to be the main elements of anime-limited animation style, borderless settings, production committees, licensed merchandise-had come to define animation production for television in Japan, as distinct from what Toei had envisioned when it first sought to be the “Disney of the East. ” As Tezuka supposedly put it to his staff upon the making of Tetsuwan Atomu,
376 Though these same revenues slowed to a trickle just three years later by the time of Atomu's cancellation which coincided with the manga's end and the move to color television production at Mushi Pro. See Clements, 125. | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |
239 “Gentlemen, what we are making is not animation. It is television anime. Let me repeat: a-ni-me. ”377 Toei continued to make feature films alongside its television anime, culminating in the masterpiece Taiyō no ōji Horus no daibōken (Hols, Prince of the Sun, 1968), the first film that brought together director Takahata Isao, animation director Otsuka Yasuo, and key frame animator and scene designer Hayao Miyazaki in a feature that greatly expanded the possibilities of the medium beyond children's entertainment. However, the film performed poorly at the box office. By the end of the 1960s, Toei would significantly scale back its production of feature films in favor of anime “festivals” (Toei manga matsuri) that showcased several episodes of television anime spliced together alongside new shorts and the latest live-action tokusatsu or special effects films. The studio continued to produce primarily television anime, with feature-length anime films made typically from original scenarios based on popular television anime series. In addition, the studio also worked continuously on the animation of several American cartoons in the 1980s. These shows include G. I. Joe (1983-86), Transformers (1984-87), and My Little Pony (1984-87). In 1998, Toei Dōga changed its corporate name to Toei Animation, reflecting its original creator's desire to be viewed as a producer of world-class animation. While the studio has gone back to making feature-length animated films today, including annual prestige features such as Sato Keiichi's Asura (2012), most feature-length anime films are spin-offs of existing television anime properties. These trends follow Toei's priority in making serial television anime and its concomitant media mix over stand-alone feature-length animated films, an emphasis that remains in place to this day.
377 Takahashi Ryosuke, “Anime enshutsuron-Anime ni okeru enshutsu, matawa kantoku towa” (On Anime Direction: Regarding Anime Direction and Directors), in Anime-gaku (Anime Studies) eds. Takahashi Mitsuteru and Tsugata Nobuyuki (Tokyo: NTT Shuppan, 2011), 48. | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |
240 Idea Men/Women: Seisaku iinkai Compared to manga, the production of anime requires much more in the way of labor and costs, so much so that the creation of anime entirely relies on a collaborative network of designated roles and divisions. The next several sections will map the making of a television anime production through fieldwork analyses of two different television anime series: Saint Seiya and Pretty Cure. Both are original productions created by Toei's brain trust, though the former is based on Kuramada Masami's popular shōnen battle manga of the 1980s, while the latter is based off of a long history of mahō shōjo, or “magical girl” anime produced by Toei. Both shows share several similarities despite their difference in subject matter: they are shows that run for four consecutive cours, each of which is a season that runs for thirteen weeks; they are catered toward specific gender and age demographics; they are responsible for creating a cast of heroes who do battle against a horde of evil villains; and they are produced by a committee of various interests including advertisers, publishers, or toy companies. Both shows ran concurrently while I was observing their production at Toei, and I was a participant-observer for a period of roughly five months apiece. Each show also faced nearly the same types of production obstacles and solutions, and I was privy to seeing how staff work through these hurdles to nevertheless produce a single episode of animation every single week for a full year. As Otsuka Yasuo puts it, these are the “cogs in the machine,” though my examination of these various creators shows the anime “machine” requires constant communication, collaboration, and individual creativity to operate at full capacity. This chapter will focus mainly on the production of Saint Seiya Omega. | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |
241 Before I began my fieldwork, both series had already been conceived and planned by a seisaku iinkai, or “production committee. ” Seisaku iinkai are one of the most important distinctions between the transmedia franchises of Japan versus the rest of the world. Unlike the United States, where corporate mergers and acquisitions coordinate media integration, even large conglomerates tend to work collaboratively in Japan through these cross-corporate media partnerships. First appearing in the 1980s through Kadokawa-style media mix film productions, seisaku iinkai became popular in the 1990s with anime productions like Neon Genesis Evangelion (Project EVA, 1995) as a way of mitigating risk by spreading costs around to multiple partners. 378 The seisaku iinkai system is used in Japanese film and television productions to share the cost of production between various organizations, each of whom have a stake in the work being produced, and each of whom are responsible to “maximize the exploitation of, and continually reinforce, intellectual property rights. ”379 Production committees can consist of film or television studios, media distributors, theatrical exhibitors, talent or advertising agencies, music or fashion labels, toy manufacturers, banks, and any number of independent video or animation production houses. 380 Through strategic, inter-company partnerships, well-managed seisaku iinkai can achieve the sort of horizontal media integration that characterizes US media conglomerates' management of intellectual property (see figure 16).
378 Tanaka, 48. 379 Rayna Denison, Woojeong Joo, and Hiroko Furukawa, Manga Movies Project Report 1: Transmedia Japanese Franchising (University of East Anglia: Arts and Humanities Research Council, 2014), 13. 380 Masuda, 132-133. | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |
242 Advertising costs Seisaku iinkai (Production Broadcast fee committee) Production costs
Figure 16: Map of seisaku iinkai (production committee) Toei's kikakubu, or planning department, is responsible for coming up with business strategies for intellectual property. The kikaku department is the highest creative division of the studio, comprised of senior ranking producers responsible for creating conceptual ideas for new anime series, continuing series, and series based on pre-existing media. Whenever a television anime series is made, the top priority for the kikaku is to justify its existence through production committees. When an anime is adapted from a manga, its goal is to increase volume sales for the publisher and mangaka, but also to tie-in the brand to other sponsors, generate merchandise, lead to alternative media, and create a cash flow that will sustain the production staff's income and make the studio money. When an original anime is made, the pressure is on kikaku to conceive of a way for that anime to make a profit, largely to due the precedent set by Tezuka Osamu's first television anime production ensuring that all anime would be made at a loss unless there was enough cooperation from sponsors. In some cases, a third party-a game developer or a manga Sponsor Ad agency TV Network Anime studio | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |
243 publisher-will approach Toei to adapt their existing property. In other cases, a toy company might have an idea for a project where the anime will sell toys. In increasingly rare cases, an anime series can be made purely for the sake of selling DVD or Blu-Ray copies after the series has concluded its broadcast, though this model of financing has become less common as hard disc sales have rapidly shrunk since 2007. For the most part, a television anime series must act in some way as an advertisement for a product, and kikaku is never a one-way process. Seki Hiromi is one such member of the kikaku division. A longtime employee of Toei Animation, she is currently a section chief for feature-length anime. While she was a student at Waseda University, one of the top private universities in the country, she began writing scripts for television series. She submitted scripts to Toei for their tokusatsu, or special-effects driven children's program, “Bizarre Comedy Series,” and her screenplays were adapted into episodes on Robot 8-Chan (1981-82) and Batten Robomaru (1982-83), two live-action children's programs based on Ishinomori Shotaro's popular manga series. Upon graduation, she wrote for various magazines before entering Toei as a full-time employee in 1985. Her interest was in making anime series. “The anime that first got my attention when I was a child was the magical girl series Himitsu no Akko-chan (Secret of Akko-Chan, 1969-70),” she said. “It was based on a manga by Akatsuka Fujio, but the anime is what I got hooked on. ” She was soon involved as an assistant producer on the shōjo anime series Lady Lady!! (1987-88), and received her first producing credit on Ghost Sweeper Mikami (1993-94). Seki acted as producer on some of the most successful franchises Toei has created, particularly the various iterations of the card-battle anime, Digimon (1999). Her proudest works, however, involve helping to create the shōjo works | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |
244 that inspired her as a child such as the historical romance Ashita no Nadja (2003-04) and the magical girl series, Ojamajo Doremi (Troublesome Witch Girl Doremi, 1999-2003). Now in an executive producer and planning role, Seki is responsible for coming up with concepts for new series, such as the Pretty Cure franchise, but also new directions for studio animation production. She was behind the innovative Kyōsōgiga (2011-12) net animation that was eventually made into a late-night television animation in 2013. All planners have their own logic when it comes to how and why a series will be successful, though most share a common agreement that the original concept need to have compelling characters, settings, and premises. Seki ensures these elements are accounted for by placing a great deal of emphasis on the scenario. Likely stemming from her background in constructing screenplays, her opinion shows the importance of the tightness of an original concept: “I'm a firm believer in coverage. When I went to America, all the producers were familiar with coverage of scenarios, and this helped the discussion flow much more smoothly. I think by breaking down a story according to the strength of its characters, settings, premise, or structure, we have a much better idea of how a story can work. ”381 Seki asks her young producers-in-training, as well as new scriptwriters and directors, to provide coverage to a variety of films and anime they watch in order to know the difference between a strong or weak script. When producers submit new concepts to the planning department for review, their experience with writing story coverage ties the script to previous works and scenarios that have succeeded in the past, a process producers like to call “providing comps. ” Story coverage also ties into the most important idea for a planner: the reality of an anime's success. As her comments in the epigraph to this chapter show, Seki presses for
381 Seki Hiromi, interview by the author, August 2011. | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |
245 business acumen in any creative concept. All television anime at Toei must, in some way, sell something. When Toei began their feature film productions, the films sold themselves and recuperated costs (or lost them) through the ticket gates. But with television, the anime itself must in some way to be tied to the product. Seki's reference to Shakespeare in this context is an appeal to the history of art and commerce, arguing that the two have forever been terminally intertwined, but it is also an argument that anime is itself a legitimate art form, and not merely a method to shill goods. For the former to exist, the latter must do its part. Looking at how Saint Seiya Omega was conceptualized is instructive for how planners must always imagine a built-in audience and target product in mind for television anime. When kikaku conceived of a new series to follow the early morning slot occupied by Digimon Xros Wars (2011-12), they opted to make a new installment of Kurumada Masami's classic shōnen manga franchise, Saint Seiya (1986-91), which was serialized in Weekly Shōnen Jump. Saint Seiya Omega (2012-14), or Omega for short, is a spiritual successor to the television anime adaptation of Saint Seiya (1986-89), itself animated by Toei Animation and based off of Kurumada's shōnen manga. The story follows Seiya and his brothers, a group of orphans called “Saints” who are able to harness their spiritual energy, or “cosmos,” in battle. The Saints protect themselves with “cloth,” a magic armor imbued with mystical powers derived from the constellations of Greek mythology such as Pegasus, Andromeda, or Cygnus. The Saints have various ranks such as bronze, silver, and gold, but they are all unified in their duty to protect Kido Saori, the human reincarnation of the warrior goddess Athena. Entire story arcs cover battles between the Saints and minions of Hades or Poseidon. | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |
246 The kikaku department created Omega as a pseudo-sequel to this story arc, unburdened from keeping to Kurumada's manga like Shimabukuro's Toriko and other Shōnen Jump manga. 382 While Omega intended to borrow from the world of Saint Seiya, the planning committee would conceive of how to make the series profitable. The project's planning committee was expanded to include senior Toei staff members like Seki who have worked on multiple anime productions before, but also representatives from Kurumada Pro, the copyright owners; TV Asahi, the network sponsor; and Dentsu, an advertising company which represents the toy company Bandai Namco and who are responsible for purchasing the air space from the network in which Omega airs. Omega's broadcast time was from six-thirty on Sunday morning, suggesting either that the sponsors had low expectations for the show's performance, or felt that the broadcast time mattered little in terms of attracting its core demographic of young males and their parents. The only elements that were decided at this basic stage was that the series would evoke the spirit of the original, with Saints, armored cloth, and passionate characters powered by their “cosmos” in battle. This bare bones foundation was all that was needed, for in the case of Omega, the planning committee already had the green light to proceed on production through an association with the already popular Seiya franchise. With a new series, a stronger an, or premise, needs to be in place to alleviate the fears of sponsors. Even with existing series, the sponsors' involvement in the creation of the premise can also be tied to the degree in which the products are tied into the anime itself. This is the case with anime such as Pretty Cure, whose sponsors request heavy product incorporation into the show. With Omega, Toei had more freedom to figure out
382 Permission for the use of the Seiya name and concept was required not from the publisher of the original Saint Seiya, Shueisha, but from the owner of the manga's and intellectual property copyright, Kurumada Masami and Kurumada Productions, which gave the go-ahead for the series. | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |
247 what Bandai Namco product could be sold to its key male demographic. Most television anime series at Toei are created to appeal and sell merchandise to children, though Omega had the added benefit of attracting fathers nostalgic for the original series in the 1980s. Matt Hills has called this process “double-coding,” where both children and adults can both enjoy the same work, and even grow into deeper understandings as they mature while the work continues to sustain itself within popular culture. 383 By appealing to these two groups, Omega could hedge its bets and count on revenue streams from two different audiences. These audiences, moreover, were not mutually exclusive, but rather could reinforce one another. Children used to getting up early for Sunday morning cartoons might get their fathers to join them, while parents nostalgic for the Saint Seiya anime of the 1980s could prod their sons and daughters into watching a new version of the anime with which they grew up. The series' products were designed to hit both demographics. Omega was part of a long-tail media mix strategy, whereby the series would run for four cours, a full year, while generating hype for various other media during its morning time slot. The first product featured in Omega was a recycled idea from the original Saint Seiya anime: figurines. Bandai Namco concluded through its market research that boys love to study the Seiya characters' intricate “cloth” armor, which are continually upgraded with new powers and designs in the series. The cast of the original Seiya was also quite large, with countless supporting characters and enemies based on the various constellations, making for a Pokemon-like setup where fans would collect all the Saints in order to field a complete lineup. When a show needs to stick to a concrete storyline or integrate products, then the
383 See Matt Hills, Triumph of a Time Lord: Regenerating Doctor Who in the 21st Century, (London: IB Tauris & Co., 2010), 119-139. | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |
248 sponsor can coordinate with the staff to ensure that products are reflected in many aspects of the series, but in Omega's case, the main products being sold were figurines, meaning as long as the show emphasized the characters in various poses and exhibiting a range of emotions, then the sponsor's obligation would be met. With Omega, however, Bandai Namco pumped out a new, deluxe line of die-cast figurines comprised of expensive polymers and polyvinyl chloride. The figurines only showcased the Gold Saints from the original series, in considerably more detail and with a considerably higher sticker price of anywhere between six and ten thousand yen (see figure 17). The planning committee here relied on the notion that parents would be as attracted to the new show as their children, and catered their main product accordingly. Commercials for the figurines, which aired during breaks in each episode, were overtly targeted not towards children, but to the fans of the original series. The ads used aural cues, visual signs, and colorful graphics that were a trademark of the first manga and anime, even putting the figurines into poses that only fans would find significant. With this strategy, Bandai Namco concluded that it would be more cost effective and less risky to market to an established audience rather than a new one. 384
Figure 17: High-quality figurines appeal to the older fans of the anime
384 Bandai Namco, I was told, also proposed an alternative idea of wearable cloth for children that was designed to correspond to a series of elements, but neither side embraced the idea. | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |
249 The emphasis on high-quality figurines did not mean that the planning committee had abandoned making a show for its children's segment; it merely meant that it prioritized the existing base over the potential one during Omega's initial episodes, and decided to move the new audience gradually into the existing property's world. Other media events and productions were organized around tapping into the original anime's legacy and characters, particularly that of feature-length animated films. While the anime garnered fans and media attention during its broadcast, the digital effects group at Toei began working on a Saint Seiya feature-length film animated completely with computer graphics to be released in the summer of 2014. The story and characters of the film skewed heavily toward the original Seiya anime; while it would have been geared towards only the adults familiar with the original series, Omega effectively could function as a year-long advertisement for the film for children new to the series. Meanwhile, depending on the success of the series, other spin-offs could be conceived, such as an “origins” story for the original Seiya. 385 In essence, Omega would function simultaneously as a sequel and revival for the old franchise. Perhaps no media event signaled the planning committee's reliance on the original series more than the extravagant “Seiya Night. ” Hundreds of fans from both Japan and abroad gathered at Shinjuku's Balt 9 Cineplex for a sold-out midnight premier screening of Omega's first episode. The event was a hot ticket, for it would feature not only the first episode of Omega, but also a talk show before and after the screening with the producer, director, and the voice actors and actresses of the series. The premier was simulcast to fans who gathered in cinemas across Japan to witness the event firsthand, but it was also
385 The spin-off origins series, Saint Seiya: Soul of Gold, chronicling pre-story of the Gold Saints of the first series, was eventually produced and premiered in April 2015. | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |
250 broadcast to select countries around the world, even being presented by a Japanese and English-speaking master of ceremonies. The original Saint Seiya was especially popular in Brazil and France, and the latest iteration of the series was anticipated in both countries for many months. Indeed, the crowd itself was filled with a mix of Japanese, Taiwanese, Brazilian, French, and Italian fans chatting in a variety of languages before the event began. Toei had these these fans in mind, many of whom bought tickets or were tuning in based on the Seiya legacy, as well as the opportunity to revel in its nostalgic past. Kageyama Hironobu, the singer-composer of the original Seiya's opening theme song, was greeted to thunderous applause and an impromptu sing-a-long, as he was brought in to perform the themes to both the original Seiya and the new Omega. Following the screening of the premier episode, a half-dozen Saint Seiya animated movies from the original series were screened until the first trains began running again early in the morning. The event's straddling of dual media creations effectively encapsulated the merging audiences of the old and new Seiya. Creative Caretakers: Producers The person in charge of events like the “Seiya Night,” as well as a host of other coordination duties once the series has been approved, is the producer. The producer's job and role can change from production to production. Most anime have several producers who are responsible to their corporate employers, and their roles vary according to the nature of the anime series and its planning committee. In Toei's case, the producer has a much larger role than most anime productions to be the creative voice that steers the general direction of the project. Akahoshi Masanao has argued that Toei employs a “producer system” for their animation, where the producer's voice and general opinion | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |
251 hold considerable sway in creative decisions. 386 Where most anime employ a chief director to guide the creative vision of the series, Toei instead hires “series directors,” a seemingly small distinction that makes a considerable difference in how the anime program operates. For Toei series that continue for a number of years such as Toriko or One Piece, the series director might be replaced or request to leave the production in order to work on another series. In this case, the producer's job is to maintain continuity between the production staff and ensure that the series does not suddenly display notably different visual or thematic changes. Toei's producers are the constant on the anime when a team is overhauled, overseeing aspects of production apart from the animation such as the series' scripts, music, merchandise, promos, events, and the selection and overall contentment of its staff. Producers are managers, first and foremost, of human relations, ensuring that the various directors of each division can produce without interruption. While series directors at Toei might impart a certain visual style or technique to the series they direct, the types of characters, worlds, and narratives are often more in line with the producer's/studio's sensibilities and judgment. This idea is echoed by Akahoshi, who writes that scholars looking to find an authorial consistency to Toei anime directed by specific directors will be disappointed to not find thematic tendencies among their works since they are often hired to direct single episodes. Those interested in the personality behind a series or a collection of series should instead look at the body of work of Toei's producers, who exhibit certain tendencies over a long career for genres, character types, and thematic conflict. This unconscious reflection of personality in anime production echoes Peter Wollen's auteur
386 Akahoshi Masanao, “Toei Dōga no kenkyu” (Toei Animation Research), in Zusetsu Terebi Anime Zenshō (Complete Book of TV Animation: Illustrated) ed. Misono Makoto (Tokyo: Hara Shobō, 1999), 215-219. | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |
252 theory of “structural” patterns which manifest in preferences of themes and, particularly, sets of characters, such as the male-intensive narratives of Howard Hawks. 387 Producers at Toei are not directly involved in the animation process, though many come from backgrounds in production and other fields. Several producers, as well as the vice-president of Toei Animation, were former anime directors at one point. One producer was a reporter for a major Japanese media outlet; another was a staff member of a minor film production studio; another defected from a large advertising agency. Some are more intrusive on creative decisions than others, but each brings a set of skills that create a distinct working atmosphere. Two of the producers I observed, Wakabayashi Go and Hasegawa Masaya, come from backgrounds intensive in film production and analysis. Wakabayashi was the producer for Saint Seiya Omega. He had spent several years studying in the United States before applying to Toei after graduating university, a requirement for any permanent staff. 388 Wakabayashi recounted: I knew I wanted to be involved in creating something, but I didn't know that I wanted to be involved in Japanese media until I went to Los Angeles, ironically. While I was studying in Santa Monica, I watched a retrospective of Fukasaku Kinji's yakuza films he made under Toei. They were unbelievable in their energy and spirit. That was a big catalyst for my applying to Toei, and probably even getting the job. 389
387 See Peter Wollen, “The Auteur Theory” in Signs and Meanings in the Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969), 74-115. 388 Toei, like most major Japanese corporations, hires employees to begin in April, though their recruitment periods are biannually rather than the typical annual hiring of other companies. For a breakdown of the Japanese corporate structure, see Arthur Whitehill, Japanese Management: Tradition and Transition (London: Routledge, 1991). 389 Wakabayashi Go, interview by the author, May 2012. | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |
253 Wakabayashi told this story to the human resources staff who interviewed him for a job at the studio, concretely tying his interest in working in filmmaking and the studio to his initial awakening to the wild and energetic film productions of Toei's 1970s yakuza and pinky violence movies. There might have been some destiny as well. Wakabayashi Go was the name of one of the lead actors of G-Men '75 (1975), a popular television detective series that was produced by Toei's film division, a fact that did not go unnoticed by the producers in the interview. Wakabayashi was assigned to the company's international marketing division and spent four years in France before transferring to the producing department back in Japan. He was an assistant producer for Toriko, as well as a producer for Heart Catch Precure! (2010-11) and Dragon Ball Kai (2009-11) before he was assigned to Omega, ensuring that he had the bona fides to helm a shōnen series. Being a company employee means that Wakabayashi has little say in which productions he works on, or even which department he works in. “To be honest,” he told me, “Working in the marketing division was great. I got to see a side of film that very few people understand. I took a lot of pleasure out of seeing our films or animation screen in foreign countries to non-Japanese audiences. But when Seki-san came to France, we got to talking, and she told me to come back to Japan to become a producer, and that was that. ”390 One of the aspects that appealed to Seki was Wakabayashi's smooth handling of several events for French fans of various Toei series. His quick-thinking helped him deal with any number of problems that arose during the events in France. This ability to handle problems as calmly and efficiently as possible is one of the most important traits for any producer at Toei. I personally witnessed Wakabayashi handle a sudden dilemma when one of the voice actors sprained his ankle the
390 Ibid. | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |
254 day before an important commercial recording and claimed he could not perform his role that day. Wakabayashi propped him up on a stool, an unconventional practice for voice actors, and insisted he record the performance while sitting. The official role of the producer is to appease the financial expectations of the various sponsors behind the production's budget, as well as the creative desires of the production staff. The first management duty a producer has is towards the human relations of the seisaku iinkai. When it comes to the production of the series, Wakabayashi is responsible for leading the seisaku iinkai, simultaneously appeasing the various parties in the committee, as well as maintaining a standard of quality for Toei's anime production. The producer is also responsible for organizing and managing creative team that includes a director, head writer, and character designer/animation director; these are the key figures who work together to construct the characters, world, and main story of the anime, meeting every week to construct scripts for each episode of the series. The members of the production committee can choose to have producers attend these meetings as well, and some meetings are stacked with a handful of producers in addition to the creative team. The producer must be a manager of the relations of the staff. In order for the series director and project manager to make sure the production runs on time, the animators aren't overworked, and the quality of each episode is high, the producer must handle many of the side functions to ensure staff are provided with the resources they need. Beyond basic budgeting issues, producers handle staff events, MC for company parties, and grant interviews for media outlets. Wakabayashi was the last staff member left at the “Seiya Night,” greeting fans when they deliriously left the theatres at six in the morning. Producers must also do generally nice things for the production team like pay for team | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |
255 dinners. In the case of Omega, Wakabayashi frequently spent time with various members after meetings or work socializing over drinks until late into the night and sometimes into the next morning. He felt that these were valuable opportunities to get to know his team, but these drunken pow-wows also functioned as moments where the he could hear freely from staff members who were not in the presence of other regulars about team issues, problems, or discomfort. Wakabayashi felt it his obligation to accompany any member and lend them his ear at the end of the day, with confessions, frustrations, and ambitions expressed on a regular basis. These moments of “real talk” were also areas where Wakabayashi could gauge issues with production he was not aware of in a form of soft surveillance. A key part of Wakabayashi's work day began when he assumed the role of proverbial counselor and watchdog at the end of the normal shift. This is not to say that all producers partake in this ritual, nor that all teams demand it. Hasegawa Masaya, the producer of Pretty Cure, rarely went out with staff after meetings. A family man, he likely concluded that what he could gain in staff relations would harm the relationship with his wife and daughter back home. Hasegawa also felt less obligated to weigh in on creative matters regarding story or character construction. Some of his reticence was due to this being his first production at Toei, though his attitude is shaped in large part by how he views a producer in the scheme of the anime's production. He, too, views the producer as a manager, but entirely in the stead of the characters' merchandise: I might have some ideas on stories or how a shot should look like, but I generally leave that to the staff. I need to be vigilant about potential problems as well, such as parental complaints about offensive content. Mainly, I want to make sure the toys are featured in the story as much as possible. If the character toys aren't featured, | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |
256 then the anime, for all of its other virtues, will be a failure. Sometimes this means asking directors to alter their storyboards or change the script entirely if I feel it's inappropriate. Some animators might have a problem with this, but I would argue that they should work on some other anime other than Pretty Cure. It's my job as a professional to make sure that their creative whims don't impinge upon the integrity of the franchise. 391 Hasegawa's view of his role as producer is largely shaped by the influence of his sponsors, who had heavy input into how the character toys would be incorporated into the show, and who finance the show through sales of merchandise. While Omega is no less obligated to helping sell figurines and video games, the series construction had considerable more creative freedom for Wakabayashi and his team since the sponsor was not so heavily involved in incorporating its merchandise into the production. Even here, Hasegawa attitude illustrates the producer's responsibility for overseeing the entirety of the franchise's brand and style, embodied in his sense of duty for what is “right” for the particular series and its world. Besides managing the production committee, Wakabayashi's other managerial role is as a character caretaker, a role that is central to the anime's media mix, particularly in the case of Omega. Firstly, he is the link that connects the idea of creators should the anime continue in perpetuity. Unlike other original productions that run for a year, Omega was extended another four cours for a full, second-year run. Much of the original cast decided not to continue on for the second year, including the series director, the animation director, and the lead series writer. This meant that not only was Wakabayashi responsible for selecting replacements for his head staff, but he was also the only link between the separate
391 Hasegawa Masaya, interview by the author, June 2012. | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |
257 production teams and series' story arcs. The second season was produced with an entirely separate cast of characters, though the first season's characters and world settings were constantly referenced throughout. For a new staff unfamiliar with the series' characters and world, Wakabayashi's input was instrumental. His knowledge of characters and the established world helped bridge the production teams, especially in the initial episodes of the second year, through tweaking dialogue that didn't fit his perception of the character's personality, or asking for additional scenes to feature certain characters in order to delve deeper into their relationships. Wakabayashi's other role as a character manager comes into play when he represents the anime as it incorporates other media, from figurines to music CDs. Every week, Wakabayashi leads a meeting with various sponsors, who go over sales of television ratings, event revenues, and sales of the many legs of merchandise tied to the series' characters. The producer typically helps organize the construction of ancillary media that is incorporated into or from the series. Wakabayashi, for example, was responsible for choosing the show's multiple opening musical themes. For the first theme, he chose to reuse the opening theme song from the original Saint Seiya in order to connect the show nostalgically to older viewers and thematically to the previous series, of which it would be a direct sequel. However, to bind the show to a new audience, he had the song performed by the new lead heroine of Omega, an idol and personality popular with young children and serious hard-core anime fans. When it came to create a new opening theme for the second season, Wakabayashi also approved the new version after listening to several song samples of varying quality before finally selecting the one that best reflected the tone and themes of | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |
258 the series. This involved telling the producer to use certain phrases and catchwords, such as “Pegasus,” “Saint,” and “cosmos,” that were popularized in the original series. 392 Some producers will leave the creative decisions to the director and lead writer, though Wakabayashi was more vocal in his creative input. Like many of the other Toei staff, he is well-versed in both film and animation history, especially Toei's, and had strong desires to make anime through his own proposals to kikaku. 393 Wakabayashi unofficially viewed his role as making the anime as interesting as possible, going as far as to suggest story ideas during meetings. To him, the characters were more important than any other feature, evident in everything from the story construction to the merchandise design. He illustrated this to me in his explanation of the differences between two poster designs for Toei animations: The first one here, it's quite beautiful, but it's difficult to get a feel for the characters with this design. They all look the same, or are hard to see. Some of these characters have their backs to us. I wouldn't have OK'd this design. You need to feature the characters; we need to see them. Their poses should be dynamic, and their faces should be distinct. Even if the character designs might be similar, it's our job to make them appear as individuals. 394
392 I accompanied Wakabayashi to the recording of the song-a pop number sung by an up-and-coming boy band. When we arrived at the studio, only one of the members was there to meet us. The recording was organized so that each member of the band would record his part individually, and the various voices arranged by a sound mixer afterwards. This was presumably done because the members would not be able to sing effectively together, and after witnessing each one fail to carry a tune in their solo recording, I can confirm this decision was a sound one. 393 Producers and other staff members are encouraged to pitch their own proposals to the senior staff at Toei. The chance of any one proposal getting the green light for an anime production is minimal, though ambitious producers can grease their chances through working with other staff to include concept art, product ideas, and a total conception of the production's media mix. Wakabayashi was constantly pitching new series, from a co-production with Marvel's Avengers, to a historical adventure caper heavily inspired by Lupin III. 394 Wakabayashi Go, interview by the author, August 2012. | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |
259 Wakabayashi saw himself as the producer of the world and characters of Omega, believing every facet of the production should bring out the existence of that world. His design for the poster of Omega reflected this desire, with the characters placed in the center of the frame in dynamic poses that displayed their personalities and traits. The producer has the same responsibility when it comes to media derived from the anime. Meeting with a producer for Bandai Namco, Wakabayashi presents a game premise written by one of the young staff writers that he'd like to be used in the Play Station Portable game, Saint Seiya Omega: Ultimate Cosmos (2013). The premise is accompanied by concept art for a special character that will be created only for the game. While the game is a two-player brawler of likely middling quality, Wakabayashi feels it his duty to ensure that the game both reflect Omega's characters and world, as well as provide fans who bought the game a compelling story and additional characters beyond what is represented in the anime. This sort of thought for fans and players is indicative of what the game designer Iwatani Toru has called gaming's itareritsukuseri, which is the creator's wish to “leave nothing to be desired. ”395 Obviously the addition of new content can provide fans with extra incentive to buy the game, though the participation of the show's producer in its construction is more akin to organization of what Michael Clarke calls “tentpole TV” through its showrunner. But where those big personalities lord over the ancillary media in film and television franchises like Heroes or Lost, Wakabayashi merely provides his suggestions for creating something compelling. Such ideas are less demands or directives than strong wishes that the game's producers can technically ignore, though they would be disrespecting Wakabayashi and his staff's strong concept of the Omega characters and
395 Iwatani Toru, “Foreward,” in Video Games Around the World, ed. Mark J. P. Wolf (Cambridge, MA: MIT press, 2015). | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |
260 world. Similar to the handling of original material in the manga's transmedia, producers willingly respect and approve the intent of the original creators as a sort of unspoken industry ritual that must be performed to the satisfaction of the original owners of the copyright before moving on to construct a separate media form. Storytellers: Writing by Committee The producer selects the core staff for the production to create the series' premise and concept details with the possible help or requests of the planning committee, but the director and scriptwriters construct scenarios for each individual episode before it goes to the production staff. These members meet every week with the producers throughout the course of the series' construction to hash out the overarching development of character details and story premises. This creative team sets to work on the pre-production of the anime, creating series premises that are fleshed out bit by bit. The gradual, collaborative work of the pre-production process reveals how character construction in anime is often generated and slowly developed by committee. This creative team of director, writers, and producers is effectively in charge of managing the anime blueprint: the script. In contrast to manga-based transmedia, where the manga serves as a sort of blueprint, the script of original anime is what determines the creative design and direction of the production staff. The creative team shared a belief that to create something interesting, they would not appeal to fans of the original work. While this decision to create a series of new characters and premise seemingly stands in contrast to the producers and production committee's expectations of honoring the original series, it is actually consistent with the anime's intention of tapping into the original Seiya world. The directors and writers would rely on the world of the original Seiya and its considerable lore built upon the manga, | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |
261 anime adaptation, and countless spin-offs, while the characters and premise of Omega would be created from scratch,. The ancillary merchandise, which relied heavily on characters from the original Seiya, would reinforce this lore to a younger audience unfamiliar with its world and history. In essence, extra-textual materials that reference the original Seiya such as the recycling of the original theme, the commercials featuring classic figurines, and the events marketed towards older fans served as tiny hints into the unexplained deeper mythology of Omega to pique the curiosity of younger fans left in the dark to the Seiya backstory. In this respect, ads serve a function that reveals the text in ways that are more direct than the text itself. The creative team first worked together with producers to create the premise of the series. In Omega's case, the first premise revolved around a sequel to the original Seiya, set a number of years in the future, with a new Saint teaming with the original Pegasus Seiya to once again protect Athena from the enemy. A second premise was proposed that added to this story by focusing on a single new Saint representing the Pegasus constellation. Attached to the new premise was a generic situation that involved a tier of enemies to fight from the original Seiya called the Sanctuary. Both premises were heavily dependent on the characters and story of the original Seiya series, but the creative team wanted to revive the spirit of the original series by creating a new storyline that would be interesting for contemporary children. Wakabayashi took this premise to Kurumada, who gave the group encouragement to continue in this general direction. 396
396 Kurumada, in fact, has a reputation for being very protective of his creations, and was rumored to be displeased with a previous Toei adaptation of his original work, but the Seiya creator found a windfall of money from the use of Seiya in a series of pachinko machines, a form of legalized gambling in Japan in which players attempt to steer little metal balls through a maze of pegs into holes on a vertical grid. This lucrative pachinko revenue is said to have made Kurumada more open to letting Toei take free reign with the newest creation. | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |
262 Wakabayashi took the premise back to the team and continued to brainstorm. The creative team tweaked the proposal and decided on a final list of characters, as well as their backstories and motivations. Upon receiving a blessing from Kurumada regarding the pursuit of a different direction, Wakabayashi offered several proposals that would be in line with an original production, and not a direct sequel to the original series. 397 The creative team decided on a protagonist, Koga, who would not know he was the Pegasus Saint, nor the existence of other Saints. This stark contrast with the original Seiya was decided in order to explain to viewers what Saints are, and to establish a drama in becoming one. The final cast of characters consisted of several Saints. Some were designed to link the histories of the old and new series, such as the second generation of Dragon Saint, Ryuho. Some characters mined new territory to reflect a more diverse audience, such as the Aquila Saint, Yuna. In the original Seiya, only men were allowed to become Saints of Athena, and women who desired to become Saints were forced to wear masks to conceal their gender identity. Kurumada himself suggested the idea of a female Saint who refused to wear a mask and hide her gender. In total, a cast of six Saints was created, united in fighting an extra-terrestrial god-like enemy named Mars. The concept of an anime series is often conceived through the characters and their basic personalities. How characters will interact with one another, the way they reflect the world and its history, what motivations they will bring to the story, and their potential for depth is offered as a starting point for anime in lieu of a concrete narrative. Character templates exhibiting emotions and feelings of what the characters represent are prioritized
397 In one of his proposals, he suggested a ninja Saint as the protagonist, thinking the idea would be popular with foreign audiences and especially in France, where he had witnessed firsthand the country's embrace of ninjas in popular culture. Though the planning committee decided to have Pegasus Saint, Koga, as the protagonist, Wakabayashi's ninja was embraced by the director and found its way to the final version in the form of another character. | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |
263 over deep backstories. Some would call these characters “archetypes,” though there is enough combining and mixing of different personalities and elements in these characters to make them more varied and less dependent on a single trait. In Omega's case, character personalities also need to straddle the interests of multiple audiences. The Saints more complex personalities were made somewhat more understandable through the added premise of Saints representing light against the forces of a generic dark evil. At the same time, certain characters were packed with references to the previous world. Ryuho, for example, evokes the first Dragon Saint, Shiryu, through his cloth and special abilities. His personality, however, is gentle and sickly, evoking the one of the most popular characters of the original Seiya, the Andromeda Saint, Shun. It is up to the series kōsei, or head writer, Yoshida Reiko, to take these character concepts and form the basis of a series chronology, and write the first episode's script for the studio and its sponsors. Yoshida has been one of the most in-demand scriptwriters in the anime industry since her breakout hit about an all-female school band club, K-On! (2010). She trained through the Brother Noppo writing school, a school for anime scriptwriters established by Koyama Takashi, a veteran scriptwriter for Toei and other studios whose most famous work is the anime adaptation of Dragon Ball and nearly every one of its feature film spin-offs. Upon graduating, Yoshida worked on several Toei anime, but proved herself capable of writing both original material and adaptations for just about any story. Her most popular series, such as Kaleido Star (2003-04), K-On!, and Girls und Panzer (2012) have been geared towards men but feature casts of self-assured and individually unique female protagonists. One of the first series compositions she constructed was for an original video anime spin-off of the shōnen period anime Rurouni | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |
264 Kenshin: Trust & Betrayal (1999). She injected the comedic action of the shōnen series with a fresh element, inventing a plot detailing the protagonist's brutal past as an assassin and the tragic murder of his wife. The script won plaudits for its combination of shōnen elements with a tragic-romantic strain. Yoshida was brought on to provide a similar humanity and pathos to the battle-heavy Seiya story. Yoshida's job is to take the premise and manage a series of motifs for the characters and their world. This is the beginning of the construction of the character settei, or design. She first creates a chronology of the characters, tracing the story back to the original manga and anime and making sure there are no inconsistencies in the details of the lore. She then fills in the blanks, creating potential backstories for the characters and defining characteristics of their personalities. These backstories are built out of the relationships between the protagonists and antagonists of the anime. Since the central character would know as much about the world's Saints as a five-year-old viewer, she had to build a story where the protagonist is awakened to their existence and his potential of becoming one. Yoshida said the suggestion to use pair characters with elemental abilities such as fire, wind, and water helped clarify their personalities: Character designer Umakoshi Yoshihiko requested little dramas for the characters to help him illustrate their designs, so I used the elements to fix the settei. The “wind” element user Yuna is a wild and headstrong character, but also soothing and gentle. The “fire” element user Soma has a warm side, but also a cruel and ferocious one when he burns. The “water” element user Ryuho can be rapidly swept away if he's not careful, but is sturdy once he faces the current. Some of the other | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |
265 ones were simpler-the “earth” user is very persistent and persevering, while the “lightning” user is violent and proud. 398 Using Koga's elemental ability as a catalyst, Yoshida fixed on the idea of the central character representing the light, but struggling with the temptations of the dark in a vein similar to George Lucas's Star Wars. She named the protagonist Koga, a name which is spelled with the Japanese kanji for “light” and “fang,” but cast the central villain Mars as the villain representing the dark. To continue with the sci-fi homage, she made Mars into Koga's estranged father who abandoned and nearly killed him as a child. The other characters were then provided with various backstories and supporting roles that fit into this central conflict of light versus dark. Characters, in other words, establish the themes and motifs of the world, working as blank vassals for the series kōsei to inscribe upon her own profiles and backstories. Once Yoshida came up with the how the various characters fit into the story, she provided a script of the first episode. This episode, much like the backstories, sets the tone for the series through establishing dialogue, tone, pace, and conflict. While Yoshida knows how the series will conclude, a team of scriptwriters pens individual episodes throughout the course of the year. Yoshida and the team of writers decide on script direction through a collaborative meeting called an uchiawase, a meeting that is both presentation and discussion. I observed a number of these meetings, where writers, producers, sponsors, and the director all interact and bounce ideas off one another to generate the right idea. Unlike the Hollywood writer's room, ideas are not just limited to the screenwriters, but are expected of anyone in the room, from the studio producer to the director to the television producer, who may or may not have worked on anime before. The same might be said of
398 Yoshida Reiko, quoted in Kobayashi Miki, Saint Seiya Pia (Tokyo: Pia, 2012), 27. | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |
266 the scriptwriters. Omega employed an unusually large staff for an anime writing team, partly because of the 50-plus episodes needed for the year's quota to be met, and partly because Toei tends to give writers a chance who are starting out through professional connections. Two such writers-the son of the head of Brother Noppo, and a more experienced novelist of light works and erotic video games introduced by Yoshida-were working on their first anime. Their job in the first months was to observe, like myself, the scripts of the more experienced staff and to contribute ideas when team members were stuck. Eventually, they would pen their own scripts, go through many tough revisions, and eventually find roles as key writers on the staff during its second season. Creative Shepherds: Directors/Designers The directors of an anime are its most important creative voices. When the premise is established, it is up to the series director and animation director to provide a visual template for the anime series. Through the collective wishes of the creative team, they are the managers of the look and pace of the entire anime. For Omega's series director, Wakabayashi chose Hatano Morio. Morio had been with Toei since 2001 and had worked with Wakabayashi on several Toei productions as an enshutsu, or episode director, for Heart Catch Precure! Wakabayashi remembered the episodes that Hatano directed were dynamic, possessing camerawork and layouts uncharacteristic for a girls' anime, and he felt that Hatano would be able to provide the visual style and dynamism characteristic of the Seiya universe. I saw down to chat with Hatano at a coffee shop directly across the street from Toei studios, shortly after the completion of the Omega series. I wanted to discuss his history with the studio and the role he played as series director of the first year of Omega. In particular, I wanted to know what was his role in the early stages of the series' | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |
267 conception now that the series was finished. Had I not waited until this time, he likely would have been too distracted to sit with me for such a long period. Hatano revealed to me during a staff dinner towards the end of production that he had taken just three days off the entire previous year, one of those days being when he was incredibly sick and couldn't make it out of bed. In fact, he exited the dinner early to go back to the studio and work on storyboards and art for an important upcoming episode. Hatano first entered Toei Dōga after studying history in graduate school since he had no interest in a career in academia. “I couldn't even be bothered to finish the thesis and dropped out after finishing my coursework,” he told me. Hatano liked animation as a child, even drawing manga in secondary school, but soon developed a passion for cinema. He entered a program at Toei for animators, specializing in a directing course, with the goal of becoming a director and making the kinds of films he was interested in. He was offered a contract by Toei upon graduation from the program, one of less than a handful employed by the program every year, and began directing individual episodes of a variety of series from Kaidan Restaurant (2009) to several magical girl series. A key point for him was the potential to make original work and not only adapt the work of other artists: Toei is unlike any other company in Japan, with the exception of Sunrise, in that they make original animation for an entire year or more. Most anime is made for one or two cours, and this is to limit risk, but it's too short to really get invested in the characters or setting, in my opinion. Toei offered the opportunity to create something really big and original, even if it was somewhat linked to another work. This is the appeal of this studio. 399
399 Hatano Morio, interview by the author, February 2014. | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |
268 Hatano's background and comments reveal some of the key differences with animators versus mangaka. Where mangaka must push their work into a demographically-designated manga magazine to reach a broad audience, animators work on a variety of material that is sent their way. The production conditions of studio animation demand animators be flexible with what they can draw, rather than adhere to a single style of art, line, or narrative. In such conditions, the opportunity for original work, untethered to another visual source, is most attractive for directors. Though he was working on the sequel to one of Toei's most successful hits, Hatano said his priority was not about making a nostalgia trip for old fans, but in making something unique for new viewers. This would be no easy task; there was considerable pressure to make something that would be part of the Seiya “universe,” not just from fans, but from original Seiya mangaka Kurumada, who has a reputation for being demanding of adaptations of his work, as well as the vice-president of Toei Animation, Morishita Kozo, who directed the original Seiya over twenty years prior. 400 Toei Animation's series directors are responsible for more of a series production than most anime series directors. They are the ones who oversee the entire anime, coordinating with various staff to steer it to completion. They are responsible for cementing and fixing staffing, receiving and ensuring each department works to put together a final package for delivery to the network. Series directors are responsible for storyboarding the first episode and other episodes of any given series, establishing a tone in a similar way to
400 Morishita had directed the animation for the American series Transformers and worked closely with Kurumada to make sure the anime version of Saint Seiya would bring out the characters and sekaikan of the original. Under the prodding of Bandai, Morishita changed the cloth and character designs of the manga to provide a better fit for the anime and its toys. The series garnered high ratings and sold over six million figurines, but also went severely over-budget repeatedly. See Morishita Kozo, Toei Animation 40-nen Funtōshi: Anime Dragon Ball, Saint Seiya, Transformers wo tegaketa okoto (Toei Animation and 40 Years of Struggle: The Man Who Wrestled with the Anime of “Dragon Ball,” “Saint Seiya,” and “Transformers) (Tokyo: Ichijinsha, 2010), 126-138. | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |
269 the head scriptwriter. While separate episode directors helm other individual episodes in the series, each of them reports to the series director, sending in storyboards and conferring with the series director when questions arise. If there are problems with the storyboards, the series director will correct them him or herself. The series director similarly checks in on each section of the animation process, from key frames and artwork to the computer graphics and voice recording, to ensure quality and their particular vision for the series. Series directors at Toei are also responsible for overseeing the direction of the voice actors in recording sessions. As they have eyes on every aspect of production, series directors have the most creative control for the anime's story and style, working with the character designer and animation director from an early point to establish the look of the characters and settings. Since they are the only ones involved in every aspect of production, they are frequently tasked with making many important creative decisions. At Toei, most series directors need to have considerable experience working as an episode director of various series before being given the shot at directing an entire series, as the amount of work and responsibilities required are daunting. 401 Hatano said he was fortunate that Umakoshi Yoshihiko was assigned as character designer and sakuga kantoku (sakkan), or the chief animation director for Omega. Umakoshi is one of the most well-regarded animators in the industry, having done key animation and character designs for a number of series at Toei and other studios. His previous work at Toei was on magical girl anime such as Ojamajo Doremi and various iterations of Pretty Cure. Umakoshi's designs for these girls' anime were typically bright and colorful, distinctive in their extreme deformity and exaggerated long proportions, but
401 Hatano told me that he was at the studio for roughly seventeen to eighteen hours a day during the entire year-and-a-half in which he supervised Omega's production. | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |
270 also hiding a dark side, with facial expressions that just as easily express horror as well as happiness. He was apparently inspired early in his career by the work of Araki Shingo, the character designer of the original Seiya, Rose of Versailles, and a number of other high-profile anime. Umakoshi has a reputation for creating characters made of “flesh and bones,” easily recognizable through their appearances. One director remarked, “I would get the designs back, and though there were no names attached to the characters, I knew who they were right away and think, 'Oh, this character is so-and-so. ' Instead of trying to explain to me his designs, he let his art do the talking for him. ”402 Though Umakoshi had done key animation for a Saint Seiya original video animation several years before, he said he was most motivated by the youth and freshness of the new project. Though he had done key animation for an original video animation (OVA) series of Saint Seiya several years prior, he was not sure if Omega was the right project for him. “I had my own ideas, but I had the strong belief that this should be an anime that can get young people excited,” he said. “Seeing guys much younger than myself like Wakabayashi and Hatano try their best to make a new Seiya made me motivated to make myself useful for them. ”403 Umakoshi used Yoshida's character backstories to create a settei, or a set of character drawings and designs to get a sense of how the world will look like. Examining the settei reveals how Umakoshi conceptualized Yoshida's backstories. The protagonist Koga, for example, is a Saint that is embodied by the element of “light,” with a design that is seemingly appropriate for the melodramatic backstories supplied by Yoshida. “Koga is a hot-blooded and straightforward young man, but I didn't see him as just your typical shōnen hero. I wanted him to have a dark side. While he's supported by the element of
402 Igarashi Takuya, quoted in Umakoshi Yoshihiko: Toei Animation Works (Tokyo: Ichijinsha, 2011), 203. 403 Umakoshi Yoshihiko, quoted in Figure King No. 170 (April 2012), 14. | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |
271 'light,' I saw him as equally supported by the 'darkness. '”404 Most of this is communicated in the shapes of the eyes and mouth, which in Koga's case is left expressionless. This sort of vague character template is uncharacteristic for a lead protagonist of a battle manga, reflecting Umakoshi's desire to have Koga be a complicated hero with deep-seated anxieties. On another level, Koga's body reveals several aspects of the world and look of Omega. His bodily proportions are exaggerated, with long and angular limbs characteristic of Umakoshi's background in magical girl anime drawing feminine protagonists. While he is wearing the “cloth” of the Saint, it is so tightly attached to his body that it is almost undistinguishable. Umakoshi designed the “cloth” as constructed from a futuristic material, with a tactility that is akin to a second skin. The cloth in this evolved world of Omega is more of a suit than an armor, giving the Saints a greater visual affinity with magical girls than masked warriors. In his own way, Umakoshi pairs a feminine visual aesthetic-familiar to fans of shōjo anime-to Yoshida's sensitive and romantic character backstories. With television anime settei such as Omega's, characters create the narrative and represent their world, rather than the other way around. But while character-driven media creation is the most efficient, it is not all by choice. Part of this prioritization of character over narrative is due to time constraints. Hatano told me that he would have liked to focus on the sekaikan, or world settings and atmosphere, if he had two or three months to really create the world from scratch: I would have liked to first establish the enemy's history and motivations, and really go into the backstories of where the characters are from. Doing an entire chronology or history of the world would be attractive and help other staff members with understanding the world. But we had no time, so we came up with a generic
404 Ibid. | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |
272 character named Mars. To be honest, I have no idea why we decided on him and his minions as the enemy. 405 Hatano amusingly speaks to his creative frustrations here with the tight deadlines of television anime construction. While Toei spends considerable time planning for a series, so many series are constantly being produced that staff are under constant pressure and deadlines once the series construction is underway. Indeed, the timeframes for production would seem herculean to most Western cartoon studios. From the premise construction stage to scripting to animation to recording to editing to air is only a matter of nine months, and in extreme circumstances, shows can be animated, recorded, and delivered only mere hours before the national broadcast. Thus, like many forms of commercial art, character-driven media construction is borne out of industrial constraints. In the middle of this production is Hatano, a key figure who discusses series construction with the producers and scriptwriters, but also a production head who must manage an entire team of animators. Hatano's job is unenviable, for there is truly never a moment where he is totally “off. ” At any point outside of meetings with staff or animators, it is possible for him to work and make the show “better,” whether those improvements come in cosmetic changes to storyboards, revisions to the scripts for voice actors, or trimming of scenes to fit time constraints, all while never letting go of the bigger picture of the series entirety and continuity. Hatano's role as a middleman for the script team and animation team is essential for bridging the ideal and the possible. During one meeting, a powerful saint character is introduced representing the Gemini constellation. It is not clear from his writing of the character whether that person is sufficiently good or evil, a deliberate choice made by the scriptwriter to play on the saint's dual personalities. But
405 Hatano Morio, interview by the author, February 2014. | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |
273 Hatano points out that the script is too wordy in its conveyance of this point, and that there needs to be more reliance on the animators to paint this picture. In the script, the Saint is defeated by a “pretty” version of a powerful super move, but this sort of language conversely does not convey the meaning of the move properly. Here, more detail is needed to explain how this move will look in relation to the rest of the episode. “Aren't all our drawings pretty?” he quips. He whips out a pen and pad and begins sketching a detail of the scene, giving examples of what he thinks the writer means. Though Hatano claims to not have any talent as an artist, the sketches are varied and show a command of different camera angles, character blocking, and visual possibilities to expand upon in the animation. The enemy hides in an area called “The Zodiac Temples” (jūnikyū) and the series calls for a vision of how this will look. Hatano conveys his impression to the rest of the room-a smattering of tiered floating islands, each connected to the next by suspended steps as they cascade to the sky. The group nods in approval, giving suggestions as to how perspective could look more dynamic or the background art could give the scene more depth. For the most part, Hatano's sketches are rarely revised here, and serve to provide the writers with a literal drawing board for them to see how their ideas will work in the animated form. But his impromptu illustration serves to connect the ideas to the action in real time, the genesis of worlds forming before our eyes. For experienced writers like Yoshida, this is largely unnecessary, but for the new writers and myself, the lessons proved illuminating. World-Builders: Ekonté/Enshutsu While the script is in construction, Umakoshi creates an image board, or model pack of characters in various poses, expressing a range of emotions, and wearing an | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |
274 assortment of clothing. Animators then use the boards to create the layouts for each episode. Typically, the designs should be as detailed as possible so that animators do not go off model and lead to more work in corrections for the chief animation director. If there are new characters that need designs, Umakoshi will create new image boards. Sometimes these designs will go back to the scenario room and the writers and producers will weigh in on the characters' appearances, but in many cases this will simply be hashed out between Hatano and Umakoshi. After the final draft of the is approved, the director takes it to the animators, who begin the process of turning the words on the page into a visually interesting moving image. This begins with the episode directors, who are tasked with the visual and narrative design of individual episodes. Episode directors function as mini-managers, in charge of small temporal chunks of the anime's narrative and design. The first step of the animation process is constructing the storyboards, or ekonté, which literally translates to “picture continuity. ” The storyboards summarize what will happen in each episode, shot for shot. They typically consist of a drawing showing visuals, dialogue and sound effects, and camera instructions. The storyboard is like a second script, giving visual detail to the instructions in the written script. In many cases, changes to the script are inevitable when constructing the storyboard. As the late director Kon Satoshi has remarked, “Even after you've composed the details of the screenplay, in the process of drawing the storyboards-when the characters' faces are made, the locations begin to take shape and the compositions are determined-they change, even though the scenes and plot don't. ”406 In most respects, the anime storyboard is a much stronger and concrete visual diagram for the episode than a film or television storyboard, and animators are not expected
406 Tom Mes, “Interview: Satoshi Kon,” in Midnight Eye, 11 February 2002, <http://www. midnighteye. com/interviews/satoshi-kon/> (4 January 2014). | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |
275 to deviate greatly from the delineated shot setups and camera directions. As Ian Condry puts it, storyboards “help guide the collaborative creativity of anime production in distinctive ways. ”407 Specifically, storyboarding is the process of the beginning of world movement: both the beginnings of movement of the anime episode itself, and the migration of the anime world and its characters from the finished space of the writer's room to the collective creators in the animation studio. The storyboard serves as the in-between space between ideas and execution, a guide that takes the collective ideas of the creative team and imparts them to the animators and artists for collective action. At Toei, nearly all directors are expected to complete their own storyboards for the episodes they helm. 408 In the Toei Animation department, I huddle with Hatano as he shows me his storyboards for the final episode of Omega's first season (see figure 18). On the left-hand side is a series of panels in a vertical row, much like that of a filmstrip. To the left of the panels are two columns, one designating the scene count, the other designating the shot count. The storyboards break the script down into two parts for television: an A part-before the mid-point commercial break-and the B part, after the commercials have aired. Together, the two parts in the final episode contain over 300 shots, for a total of about 3500 drawings. 409 To the right of the panels is a wide column for stage directions, and another wide column for dialogue and sound effects like that found in manga. At the far right of the page are a series of smaller columns for the time count, music cues, and visual effects. These sets of columns contain information explaining the action in the panel
407 Condry, 9. 408 Directors who cannot draw, such as Studio Ghibli's Takahata Isao, give animators a set of instructions to do their storyboards for them. 409 This figure likely ran over for the denser and more detailed final episode) | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |
276 to the key animators who will be taking Hatano's storyboards and attempting to create layouts from their sketches. Figure 18: Director Hatano at work on storyboards for the final episode of Omega Some storyboards are cleaner or rougher depending on the style of the director and the nature of the production. Directors with exacting standards, such as Miyazaki or Kon, have meticulous storyboards that could double as layouts. Hatano's sketches are admittedly rougher than the more polished storyboards that are on display in the art books of feature | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |
277 animation studios such as Studio Ghibli or Madhouse. Hatano says he isn't the most skilled artist, though the drawings' rough quality can owe more to the time crunch of the production than to the talent of the director. Because of the roughness of the sketches, it is difficult to discern a visual style to Hatano's direction, especially when viewed in light of his other work (or other especially skilled animators), though there are a few tells for how Hatano wants the episode to look. One tactic Hatano uses is an abundance of short shots. With television animation, long and detailed character animation is difficult given the intensive time and labor needed to draw such animation. Hatano typically has shots that are a single drawing and with very little dialogue, which would mean that they are very brief in length. Because of this sequencing, the cuts are fast and less repetitive. A side effect of this fast-cutting method is that there is little opportunity to showcase detailed character animation, a benefit considering the lack of time and talent available. With more elaborate scenes, however, the shots are longer, consisting of three to five frames apiece. Towards the end of the episode, even shots of character faces are comprised of three frames, the drama unfolding “moment to moment” rather than “action to action. ”410 While there is no hard and fast rule about how storyboards must proceed, depending on the scene and the nature of the shot, the storyboard conveys a greater or lesser amount of detail. Hatano also compensates for his rough sketches by imparting each scene with several concrete instructions. For example, on one page, he gives detailed instructions for how a battle scene should proceed. Three panels are dedicated to a single arm, with very
410 Scott Mc Cloud describes panel/frame transitions through six different modes depending on how much time passes between each frame. Mc Cloud argues that Japanese manga has a tendency to widely vary the passage of time so that some frames might tighten the temporal gap to the extreme, while other frames have little relation to the previous panel and come across as mood-setters or non-sequiturs. Mc Cloud's analyses of manga panel composition is extremely useful in showing how manga artists use a variety of cinematic techniques to display narrative and atmosphere, though he also extrapolates this concept for far-reaching generalizations about Japanese art and culture as a whole. See Mc Cloud, Understanding Comics (New York: Harper Collins, 1993), 70-80. | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |
278 little differentiation. To the right of the panels, however, is written, “Koga is pushed to the ground. His fist strikes the earth with great force. He attacks!” Hatano's instructions reveal the extent of direction needed for a team of animators. For less experienced animators, more detailed visual signs might be needed to convey the meaning of a given scene. But here, Hatano draws more or less the same drawing for a shot that will need to be provided with more movement by the animator. In this case, Hatano knows and trusts the animators of this scene are capable of such detailed movement. On a subsequent page, the drawings are even harder to make out, but Hatano draws a detailed camera setup to the right of the panels, showing a two separate camera setups connected by a swooping line (see figure 18). The directions call for a panning shot that will follow the character as she flies through space. In this case, more instruction is needed for the movement of the scene to be properly conveyed. Detailed camera directions such as these coupled with sound effects can accompany the crude drawings to provide more of a scene then the visuals themselves allow. If there's enough time, a storyboard that illustrates this movement within the panels might be easier to understand, but directions like these can describe the movement of the scene without relying on the panels alone. This is the key difference between manga and storyboards. The former can adjust panel sizes to incorporate more expression or detail, eliminating or incorporating the gutter in order to best convey an idea on the page. As the director Aikawa Kenichi states, “With manga, you can adjust the panel size or even shape, spilling the characters out into the gutter for more dynamic compositions. The main purpose of storyboards is to frame the camera perspective. ”411 Storyboards are limited to the 4:3 (or
411 Aikawa Kenichi, Eizō enshutsu no kyōkasho (Manual for Visual Direction) (Tokyo: Genkōsha, 2011), 86. | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |
279 16:9) aspect ratio of the screen, but anything in the “gutter” can serve as an additional command when the layouts are completed. Unlike manga nēmu, which is a rough approximation of a manga chapter, the ekonté is a blueprint for the anime episode, where the shots themselves become improved and modified through the key animator's layouts. Once the storyboards are completed, they are given to the episode director, or enshutsu. Enshutsu often translates as “director,” but in this case really means the director of the particular episode. In some cases, such as pivotal episodes in the series, Hatano will act as enshutsu, but the job will usually fall to another series director so Hatano can supervise other episodes that are being produced simultaneously. Enshutsu is one of the most difficult and demanding jobs on any given series. At Toei, they are responsible for supervising the episode from script to completion, coordinating with the animation director and the animated scenes under production, setting up the various scenes for camerawork and editing, and even supervising the voice recording sessions by directing voice actors. The enshutsu is often, though not always, responsible for the storyboard that gives the episode its visual and narrative direction. 412 Using a variety of enshutsu is essential for such large productions running for one or more years, but the director-enshutsu system is also how most Toei standardizes its production and keeps the visual look of series consistent from episode to episode. The technical ability of the enshutsu and animation director might change depending on the episode, but Hatano and Umakoshi check and retouch the storyboards, key frames,
412 Toei prefers its directors to provide storyboards and direction, though with time constraints and understaffed productions, the storyboard might need to be outsourced. Hatano told me that, as a series director, he often prefers to have the storyboards outsourced instead of drafted by series staff. “When someone on the staff draws up the storyboard and I want to change something, it's more difficult to tell them straight what I want or what I think is wrong,” he told me. “But when it's from someone outside, it's very easy to give instructions on what I think needs to be improved. ” | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |
280 camerawork, and backgrounds to ensure that the overall quality of the episode is in line with other episodes of the series. This sort of standardization ensures that no enshutsu drastically stands out, making it more difficult for the average viewer to see an individual's style or design in ways that are more pronounced or emphasized in other productions with fewer episode directors. There are, of course, still various ways that enshutsu and even animators can put their stamp on an episode, and Toei gives their enshutsu relative freedom when it comes to directing their episodes. Sometimes, a well-directed episode can deviate from the rest of the anime, just as long as the layouts, key frames, and subject matter don't stray too off model. But no one person at Toei does more than a dozen enshutsu of a single series, and typically several directors will be working on multiple episodes at any given time. This makes it easier to add or lose enshutsu from season to season for especially long-running productions, all while reducing the studio's dependence on any one talented animator or director. While there are advantages in production economy and efficiency through this model, there are creative sacrifices in dividing up directors on projects in such a way. The producer, after all, does not draw any frames. 413 World-Movers: Animators Once the storyboards are completed, the directors coordinate with the seisaku buchō/desk, or production management controller, to assign shots to animators. 414 Either
413 Toei, to its credit, has been responsible for producing a number of auteurs through this model. Every year, they produce the odd challenging work, such as the ongoing feature-length film adaptations of Tezuka Osamu's Buddha (2011, 2012), as well as the the wildly experimental original net animation Kyōjūgiga (2013). In both cases, the anime did not perform very well commercially, but were artistically some of the most mature and inventive created by any studio in those years. Both were also the products of small teams of animators who worked together on the project from beginning to end. 414 Seisaku project managers, or the “desk,” coordinate all the different departments for the production process. Seisaku is responsible for schedules, meetings, budgets, and every cel, pixel, paper, or drop of ink used for the production. Production managers have a difficult and demanding job, for they must get on animators who are falling behind or who are sick, and must coordinate with staff at the studio, freelancers, and outsource companies. They coordinate with the series director to make sure the production is | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |
281 the series director or sakkan is responsible for assigning shots and scenes from the storyboard to individual animators based on their strengths. Animators are given entire shots or sequences and animate everything in them, unlike Western cartoonists who typically animate only a part of a shot. After animators have been assigned certain shots, they will have a meeting with the enshutsu to know exactly what they want from those shots so there are no problems later in the process. When assigned a shot or sequence, the director and sakkan will usually know what to expect from that animator given their experience and talent level. Some animators come to be known for being highly skilled at particular scenes like mecha action or battle sequences or character animation. One of the facets that make anime interesting is that this distribution of labor can result in entire sequences of an episode that look very different from the rest of the episode, both in good and bad ways. Animators are thus responsible for managing, to a large extent, the foundational movement, and a large part of the personality, of the anime's characters. While digital and computer-generated tools have simplified much of the later stages of the animation process, the foundation for most anime today is still drawn on paper by hand (see figure 19). Animation involves two processes: the movement, involving the drawing of layouts, key frames, and in-between animation; and art, which involves the backgrounds. The combination of the two is what forms the animated image: the relationship between the characters and their backgrounds/worlds. Overseeing all of this is, once again, character designer Umakoshi. Upon winning the job of character designer through an audition, Umakoshi was also assigned as sakkan, or chief animation director, a
proceeding according to schedule, and ensure the animators spend plenty of overtime at the studio if they are behind. A typical episode of Omega contains roughly 3500 drawings, so seisaku is responsible for making sure that the episode doesn't go drastically over since that will strain the production's budget. They take on an immense amount of work, though theirs is more of an administrative role than creative. | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |
282 dual designation fairly common in the anime industry in order to create greater consistency and easier workflow between design and animation. The title “chief animation director” is a bit of a misnomer, since it implies that the role has more creative control that it actually has. 415 The sakkan checks the animation of the key animators and makes corrections to their layouts if the quality of their drawings is subpar. Most of the time, this work revolves around ensuring that the drawings of characters do not stray too far from the original models; otherwise, the artwork will look too varied depending on the technical ability or personal style of the individual animator. Many animators would rather draw designs or key animation than be sakkan, since the work is repetitive and can be especially laborious if the key animation has been outsourced to a careless studio. Some sakkan will correct everything, and some will only correct the faces and leave the movement relatively intact. The nature of this correction depends on the personality of the sakkan and the schedule of the project. Animation is divided roughly between genga and dōga, or the key animation and in-between animation. The first step of the animation process is creating layouts. Key animators, also known as gengaman (even though there are female key animators), are almost always responsible for turning the drawings on the storyboards into layouts. Layouts are a more detailed image that concretely establish the look of a particular shot and size of the scene, the camera angle and framing of the shot, and, most importantly, the relationship between characters and backgrounds. Once the various directors approve or revise the
415 The role was first created at Toei by Mori Yasuji on the film Wanpaku ōji no orochi taiji (Little Prince and the Eight-Headed Dragon, 1963) due to his great influence lording all of the animation in the film. Prior to this film, no one person oversaw the entirety of the animation in the production of an anime film like is standard today, though veteran animators such as Mori and Daikuhara Akira did serve dual roles as animation directors and key animators during early productions such as Hakujaden. | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |
283 layouts, they are then sent to the art department for background illustration. While the artists work on the backgrounds, the gengaman work on the key frames. Figure 19: Left-A typical workspace in the studio for animators and directors Right-Stacks of drawings organized according to project and scene Key frames are the starting and ending points for any transition in a shot or sequence in animation. Called “frames” from being measured temporally in frames on a filmstrip, they define what the audience will see and the timing of the movement. The key frames of a character, for example, will show the most important poses along the arc of a character's motion in a particular shot. After drawing the key frame, the key animator then creates a timing chart which tells the next step of animators how to fill in the drawings in-between the key frames. 416 In Japan, since key animators are responsible for entire shots and scenes, they need to understand specifically what the director is trying to convey in the scene. But while there is little room for diversion from the storyboards and the director's instructions, talented key animators can imbue a scene with idiosyncratic or kinetic movement. Because of this avenue for personal expression, key frames are the heart of
416 There is another step before the key frames are passed to the in-between animators called the daini genga, or “second key animation. ” This stage involves animators who inspect the key frames and clean them up so that the key animators can produce more key frames without worrying about having to perfect the composition. | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |
284 most animation. Each shot consists of many components, but the key animation is what gives the shot its personality. Different ways of conveying movement through the key frames is how it is possible to see highly individual pieces of animation in any given anime despite the dispersed production system. Sometimes the sakkan will correct a scene if it stands out too much, but if the animation is particularly effective, then the corrections might be minimal or left to mainly correcting the faces and leaving the movement intact. Some scenes are storyboarded with particular key animators in mind, and some key animators are brought in to do animation they are particularly good at, such as character expressions or robot movements or weather effects such as lighting or rain. Himeno Michi, the character designer and sakkan for the original Seiya, was brought on for the first episode of Omega. In the first episode, Seiya makes a key appearance defending Athena/Kido Saori from the invading Mars. Himeno was most familiar with the way Seiya and, especially, Saori looked and moved. She was in charge of designing all the female characters of the original Seiya, and her touch was helpful for the new staff of animators for Omega in establishing the movement for characters from the old series. She says her preference for limited animation techniques is what has helped her to succeed in the anime industry: In Japan, you can still do a good job if you have drawings that don't move. They move when you need them to move. I like this balance. With foreign cartoons, it seems like big entrances or stopping the image at the point of a transformation are discouraged. With anime, stopping the action for a dramatic moment reflects a history that stems from the Japanese culture of noh or kabuki. I love the allowance of a gap. Of course, I also think it's amazing when a character is animated right | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |
285 down to the points of their hair like in Disney. I think environments that foster that kind of animation are wonderful. They must be working in environments where they can take their time. 417 Himeno's comments once again touch on the scheduling factor that always weighs on anime production, though she twists the limitation into a virtue and reflection of Japanese society and culture as a whole. Like Seki's comments on anime and Shakespeare, Himeno seeks to tie animation in Japan to a broader history of Japanese art and culture, similar to the attempts by the media scholar Takuji Okuno and artist Takashi Murakami to tie “Cool Japan” products to traditional Japanese aesthetics. To Himeno, creating a rhythm in the key animation is itself an artistic skill cultivated among generations of Japanese artists. But key animation is only one half the process of animating movement. The completed key frames and time sheets are sent to the in-between animators, or dōgaman. The job of a dōgaman is to use fill in the drawings in-between the key frames for smooth movement. Time sheets and timing charts are used as reference points to designate the number of drawings and how far apart they should be spaced between key frames. Depending on the scale of the production, there can be greater or fewer drawings in between the key frames to make the animation appear more fluid, but the job of the in-between animator is to typically make the transition between the keys appear as seamless as possible, with as little personal expression as possible. Genga and dōga occupy simultaneously complementary and opposite poles of the animation process. Genga are prized for their sense of layout design, and in most productions are acknowledged for the
417 Himeno Michi, quoted in Kobayashi Miki, Saint Seiya Pia (Tokyo: Pia, 2012), 79. | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |
286 work they do in the credits. 418 Dōga are indispensible for making key animation fluid, and skilled in-between animation can improve rough key frames, while shoddy in-between animation can ruin even the best of them. Though they are both responsible for the animation of entire sequences of movement, in-between animators are not always listed in the credits for the work they complete, especially if they were part of a company to which the studio outsourced some of its work. By this equation, it is hard to argue that in-between animators are truly “managers” of their work, as they are tasked with little comparative agency in the distributed animation process. If anything, they are managers of their own personal skill and self-improvement, as in-betweening is not desirable or sustainable as a long-term career. Much of this work at the lowest tiers is monotonous, piecemeal labor, in poor working environments in separate studios and entirely different countries. It is difficult to envision what form of management those just starting out as in-betweeners or colorists can enact when they are so poorly paid, valued, and treated. Theirs is the very definition of precarious life, with concerns very different from the creative dissatisfaction of a director or producer. With a few years of experience and competent in-between work, in-between animators can climb the animation hierarchy and get promoted to drawing key animation, but they first must endure the relative monotony of their job-which involves hours upon hours of tracing near identical images over and over-as well as the paltry compensation. Roughly 30% of all animation in Japan (primarily in-between animation, as well as “finishing” work such as coloring or tracing, is frequently outsourced to cheaper labor
418 This wasn't always the case, as older production credits rarely credited the full staff of key animators and in-betweeners in the credits. | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |
287 pools in South Korea, China, Taiwan, and India. 419 However, this still means that a good deal of anime from smaller studios and productions with smaller budgets use inexpensive studios in and around Tokyo. Some of these conditions can be very difficult to endure for young animators. All animators are compensated per drawing, but in-betweens are paid roughly 180 to 250 yen per television episode drawing versus 3000 to 4500 for key frames. Recent figures put in-between animators in Japan at roughly one million yen a year, not nearly enough to live off of with even the most meager means in a city of Tokyo's expense, and in-betweeners at the lowest-paying studios compensate by working other part-time jobs during lulls in production, in-betweening the in-betweens, so to speak. Others resort to living at their parents' home or spending weekday nights at the studio. These brutal conditions are accepted as fact for most animators starting out, where industry ritual implicitly suggests that animators must “earn their stripes” and prove their love of the medium. Most veteran animators I spoke to said that their standard of living improved only when they were assigned to key animation after several years, and especially after they found jobs as animation directors. Of course, since key animation demands much more in the way of visual expression than in-betweening, the expectations and challenges of work rise considerably when animators are promoted to the keys. Many animators burn out before their opportunity to prove themselves arrives. One girl I spoke with, Soo-jin, had graduated from a top university in South Korea. She turned down a potential white-collar career to come to Japan and pursue her dream as an animator and character designer, working on the kind of anime that she loved as a child. But after several years of in-between animating, she had become visibly depressed and sick. “I barely make
419 Toei Animation itself claims that 70% of its animation (mostly in-betweening, finishing, and coloring, with some second key animation) is completed at its studio in the Philippines, Toei Phils. | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |
288 enough to get by,” she told me. “I work 14 hour days and spend overnight at the studio if I have to. I'm always tired. ”420 When I asked her if she would be working key animation anytime soon, she replied, “Animators are a dime a dozen. There are so many not just here, but in Korea, too. I know a lot of great artists and they still don't make much money. I don't know what I'm working for. ” After five years in the industry, Soo-jin decided to leave the industry and move back to South Korea. Exploited or overworked in-betweeners are an aspect of the industry that many conveniently attribute to a lack of talent or motivation. Other animators I spoke with were more defensive towards the industry. Yu, an upbeat animator and illustrator, told me he spent four years in-betweening before getting an opportunity to do firearms key animation for a popular new series. “It's not as bad as people make it out to be,” he said. “There are some bad companies, but we all accept working late. Even in-betweening, there are good companies that pay a living wage. And once you start doing key animation, it's enough to get by. I don't make a ton of money, but it's not the sweatshop industry that some people make it out to be. ”421 Yu's opinions reflected what I observed from most experienced animators, who had weathered the storms to find the clouds had parted on a less harsh-looking career landscape. Of course, differing individual circumstances mean that some have the means to handle years of difficult conditions more than others. The divide between what most people unfamiliar with animation would consider the same job shows the brutish side of the industry, where the extreme creative highs of making personal, highly expressive key animation is literally filled in with the toil of inexperienced or unlucky in-betweeners.
420 Soo-jin, interview by the author, 26 August 2012. 421 Yu, interview by the author, 25 September 2014. | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |
289 Background: Artists and Technicians While the key frames and in-betweens are composed, the bijutsu kantoku, or bikan, draws up the backgrounds. This is the art director, responsible for taking the layouts and creating background image boards, or illustrations that appear in major points in the scenario. To create the image boards, directors draw their own rough setting settei. These model packs are similar in their variation to the character designer's model packs, replacing character poses, clothing, accessories, and expressions with landscapes, buildings, and color instructions. The settei sets the general tone, color, and details of the scene so that illustrators can extrapolate from them and create background art for the layouts. The bikan's job, like the enshutsu and the character designer, is to make the settei clear enough for the next rungs of illustrators to do their job and fill in the next level of detail. One episode of television anime requires roughly three hundred backgrounds, sourced from a variety of different companies. Akiyama Kentaro, the bikan for Omega, said that he frequently looks at a range of structural information to draw inspiration for his backgrounds, from landscape photography to architectural blueprints, altering them so that they can be incorporated into the anime's world. For one of the communes in Omega, director Hatano advised him to make it look like France's Mont Saint Michel. Rather than making a copy from a photograph, Akiyama drew up concept art based on his memory and knowledge of the island, inserting details into the background that would reflect its society and place in Omega's world. The majority of the background's color and level of detail is determined by their relationships to the characters: | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |
290 I decide on the design of a background based on the size of the characters' eyes. For example, with a realistic anime like Jin-Roh (2000), the characters' eyes were small, so I knew photographic backgrounds would make the characters not seem out of place. On the other hand, if the eyes are big, I know I have to make the backgrounds round and deformed. With Omega, the eyes are round and the lines have energy, so I knew that these characters wouldn't pop with realistic backgrounds. I drew the backgrounds with an abbreviated touch, using loose lines filled with a similar energy. 422 Akiyama thinks of every background with regards to how they are balanced with the character designs. Just as it wouldn't do any good to make ultra-realistic backgrounds for (the robot gag anime) Doraemon, his backgrounds are tailored to express the characters' reality within the world of Omega. The rest of the animation process is finished by teams of skilled technicians. In an ideal production schedule, both the animators and art director work on the animation and background designs in tandem so that both sets of work, upon completion, can be sent to the digital scanners, color coordinator, and digital colorists for tracing and coloring. 423 Unlike the gengaman or enshutsu, a good majority of colorists are women. Both staff and producers told me that this was due to women being naturally better at understanding color schemes, though this seems to be also a convenient way to keep women in positions that do not frequently lead to many chances at promotion. What is undoubtedly true is that color
422 Akiyama Kentaro, quoted in Kobayashi Miki, Saint Seiya Pia (Tokyo: Pia, 2012), 29. 423 Many of these tasks used to be done by hand on cels, but now all drawings at Toei are scanned into a computer, traced and painted through RETAS and Avid digital suites, and then accessed via a massive database called “Rabbit” that links up various computers in Japan and the Philippines. See Mikami Koji, “Anime seisaku shuhō to gijutsu” (Anime Production Methods and Techniques), in Anime-gaku (Anime Studies) eds. Takahashi Mitsuteru and Tsugata Nobuyuki (Tokyo: NTT Shuppan, 2011), 88-105. | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |
291 coordination is a complex job that requires a keen sense in order for the work to be done quickly and with little revision. Color coordinators create a similar color coordination settei, or iroshitei, which provides a model pack of precise colors that the staff can refer to when painting the background and coloring in drawings. The job of the color coordinator used to be much more complicated when colors were done through mixing paints and were coordinated by specific ink codes. The coordinator needed to have an excellent memory of the colors so that she could refer to the color quickly when staff had questions, but with the move to digitization, much of this process has been automated to the 16 million colors available. Once the colors are set, then drawings goes to the shiage, or finishing department. These are digital painters and computer colorists who take the finished artwork and scan them into the computer for digital tracing and coloring. 424 The digitization of anime has also led to the increased use of special effects, or tokkō. Many of these effects are now digital, including computer-generated graphics and post-production touch-ups, and are incorporated into various aspects of the animation process. 425 Toei is especially known for their high-quality digital effects department, having poached a number of highly-skilled digital effects artists from video game companies. These effects can be cosmetic, creating heightened weather or lighting effects, or providing digital enhancements to existing color schemes. In other cases, digital graphics can be used to create entire opening or ending sequences, with elaborate camerawork and precise movements that would take much more time and require a significantly greater number of drawings to animate with the same amount of detail. In Omega's case, digital graphics were kept to a minimum for a Toei production, though this
424 Much of this work is given to Toei Phils. With bigger workloads and tighter budget controls, there is an increasing number of situations where foreign staff work on coloring, in-between art, and even key frames. 425 See Mikami, 74-75. | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |
292 did entail the use of lots of lighting effects for the characters' various elemental transformations and attacks. Once all of the animation and background art is completed and digital effects are added, the artwork is sent to the camera and editing departments. Camera directors take each finished drawing and shoot it one frame at a time. Since the characters movements are limited due to the lower frame rates of limited animation, there is a lot more camera movement to create the illusion of movement. Camera directors of anime use pans and zooms to stretch single shots into much longer duration, especially during lengthy dialogue scenes. By shooting with a multiplane camera, the camera director can also create an illusion of movement through several layers of sliding panels. In the past they could be very creative with lighting, filters, and making the most out of still images. When the shots are complete, they are sent to the editing department, which uses non-linear editing systems to assemble the footage into a completed package. This concludes the anime production assembly line, save for one minor detail: sound and voices. Celebrity Actors: Sound and Seiyu The recording of sound and voice is done in several miles away from the Toei Animation Studios in a facility called Tavac, a large recording studio that is operated by Toei, but actually records for a number of anime, films, and video games from other studios as well. The visual and sound design at Tabac is where the “celebrity” of the character is formed. As Sugii Gisaburo has stated, the limitations of anime become more tolerable with creative voice acting, where the apparent cheapness of seeing a single frame stretched across seconds was often reduced once sound was added. 426 Good character designs can give audiences an impression of characters just by looking at them, but voice
426 Tsugata 2007, 105. | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |
293 actors are what make characters into distinct individuals. Today, voice actors, or seiyu, not only do they lend their singular voices to specific characters, but they also appear in a variety of public functions, essentially representing the characters in live-action form. While the producer meets and talks with magazines and sponsors, and the director is in charge of the anime's production, it is the voice actors and their characters who become the human “face” of the franchise most accessible to the public. The most popular voice actors in Japan are as well known as many actors of film and television, and even popular young voice actors have fan bases that reach those who only casually watch anime. Mapping the creative contributions of voice actors reveals how humans themselves, and not just the artwork produced by them, fuel characters of the media mix. As the last leg of the character creation process in the anime, voice actors get fans excited about new series, but also manage their own character brand through the social recognition of their various character roles. Competition to become a seiyu is fierce, as there are thousands of voice actors working in Japan's seiyu industry in some capacity through one of the myriad talent agencies available, though far fewer support themselves entirely on animation. Many moonlight for voiceover work and acting jobs in addition to their anime work while taking bit jobs until they can land a lead or supporting role in a regular broadcast. The stars are the ones who manage to take on enough work to land a major role in either a popular franchise, or a series that becomes an unexpected hit. For any anime series, a casting director hires actors from a pool of available talent that is tied to specific talent agencies. Some studios have better relationships with certain talent agencies; Toei, for example, regularly uses voice actors from Aoni Pro for their television anime such as Omega, with a cast comprised | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |
294 of a mix of experienced veterans and younger up-and-coming talent. There is special, long-term capital for voice actors who are able to attract large numbers of fans for their performative work in ways that directors and animators simply cannot. The voice actors for Omega not only provide voice to the anime characters of the series, but also manage a personality that extends beyond the limits of the show's characters and into other spaces. I was able to sit in on a number of voice-acting sessions during the course of my observations of Omega, which were always conducted in the studios of Tabac. During the course of production, I watched voice actors meet every week for Omega's afureko, or “after recording. ” In contrast to prereko, or “pre-recording,” afureko means that the voices for the characters are recorded after the animation is finished. This is in stark contrast to Western cartoons, where voices are recorded beforehand and animators then match the movement of the characters' mouths to the speed and intonation of the actors' speech. Needless to say, this process takes considerably more time and work to do accurately, and the Japanese production system rarely has the time or budget to handle such detail. As stated in chapter three's section on limited animation, animators will draw the characters' mouths in “flaps,” which are simply the opening and closing of the mouths to simulate the characters speaking and to save time. Voice actors must be able to visualize the scenes beyond what is provided for them in ways similar to theatrical actors of the stage. Though the term afureko implies that the voices are recorded once the animation is completed, this is often far from the case. When the actors come to the studio to record their voices, the only thing that is complete is the scenario. Voice actors watch the animatics, or what in Japan is called a “Leica reel,” which are just the key frames, shot by a cameraman and assembled by an editor into a crude | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |
295 animation of the storyboards for the purpose of the recording. Production schedules are often so tight that the recording must take place well before the animation can be completed, so voice actors are often only presented with this crude rendering of what the final version will look and play like. Their performances are thus based less on what they see of the character's actions, and are more on what they perceive are the character's personality and emotions. Considering that most experienced voice actors are playing a number of roles every week, the ability for the average voice actor to inhabit dozens of characters a year is simultaneously impressive and dizzying. The Tavac recording studio has several soundproof booths for the actors to perform in, as well as mixing rooms where I sat and watched along with staff and sound engineers (see figure 20). At the front of the mixing room is a small observation area and window into the booth, so that directors and mixers can communicate instructions while watching the actors perform. Some productions will have a voice director specifically brought in to direct the voice actors, but as stated earlier in the chapter, Toei's policy is for their enshutsu to handle the voice acting for their episodes. A set of microphones in the middle of the booth is where the actors speak into to record their voices, and a large projection screen at the front of the booth shows the episode's animation to which actors synchronize their voices. Underneath the screen is a small table of snacks and drinks donated by staff or guests for the actors to keep their mouths lubricated during the recording. The sides and back of the booth are lined with chairs for actors to observe and wait their turn to act. | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |
296 Figure 20: A voice-recording session at Tavac Studio Before the recording begins, actors arrive one by one. Though the voice acting industry is comprised of mostly younger actors, the range of acting generations in any one series can be quite varied. With Omega, the voice actors of the Saints were quite experienced; all had been acting at least a decade, and the voice actor for the original Seiya himself, the legendary Furutani Toru, was brought on to reprise his role for the new series. There is somewhat of a sempai/kohai, or superior/subordinate, dynamic involved in how young voice actors treat more experienced actors, performing clerical duties such as setting up snacks and cleaning up chairs, though the willingness to do such tasks was also viewed by producers as indicative of having a strong work ethic. When the recording is set to begin, there is an implicit seating arrangement for stars and supporting roles. With the afureko of Pretty Cure, for example, the voice actors sat in teams according to their characters; the heroes sat at the center of the room, the villains sat to the side, and minor characters without a recurring role sat on the side of the room closest to the door. On the other hand, Omega's more experienced voice actors sat at the center of the room, while the younger actors sat off to the side. In both the recording of Pretty Cure and Omega, the more experienced actors were the ones in the major roles, and thus were provided with the best | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |
297 view of the projection screen, the quickest access to any of the microphones, and the focus of everyone's line of vision in and outside the recording booth. Voice actors are “on” for the entire duration of recording. When the recording begins, there are several rehearsals where the actors run through the lines in synchronization with the animatics, making notations to their scenario about pauses, points of stress, and timing. They are then given directions by the enshutsu or the series director for their performances. If the enshutsu is sharp and knows how to give good instructions, then the actors can make quick adjustments to their performance, but if the enshutsu is indecisive, then multiple retakes become necessary, much to the chagrin of the producer and sound mixer. Recording booths cost bundles of money, though even the longest afureko are usually finished within four hours. One reason for this efficiency is that the voice actors are themselves efficient. When voice actors in other countries run through the entire script in a recording booth, they frequently must stop to make adjustments. Any mistakes delay the production significantly, since the recordings are done in long takes from beginning to end. But in Japan, takes are usually recorded in their entirety, and then mistakes or retakes are recorded in bits and chunks separately. This saves considerable time since the recording can focus only on the areas that need to be recorded again, but this is only possible if the voice actors can instantly jump in and out of character and scenes on demand. Voice actors must have an extraordinary sense of the character and intuitive sense of the scene to be able to do this quickly and with minimal amounts of retakes. Most experienced voice actors require almost no time at all to adjust to director instructions. One voice actor I spoke with told me that he never even read the scripts before he arrived at the studio. When I asked him that was considered unprofessional, he took offense. “I've | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |
298 trained for all sorts of roles, and after a few episodes, I know the character inside and out. If I need that much preparation for each episode, I shouldn't be doing this work. ”427 The efficiency of voice recording can be traced in large part to anime voice actors being “in character” from the moment they enter the recording booth. Another reason for this efficiency is that less “acting” is required from anime voice actors than Western voice actors. A voice actor for an anime is a known quantity; since there are so many of them available, staff can choose with greater specificity what voice actors fit which roles. Voice actors thus often become typecast for a certain style of acting, taking that style to various roles or specific characters, rather than coming up with a completely new voice for each anime. This was, in fact, exactly the case for Omega. Directors Hatano and Umakoshi designed main character Koga with veteran seiyu Midorikawa Hikaru in mind. Midorikawa entered the audition expecting to play the role of several other Saints, but was surprised when asked to act the part of Omega's protagonist: Koga is a lot younger than me, so I thought, “There's no way that they think I could fit this part. ” Of course, I gave the audition my all. But a funny thing happened, and I gave a performance that fit my image for that character exactly. I was selected for Koga based on that audition. I didn't even receive any background information on the character, so maybe it was a good thing that I just voiced him according to my instinct. 428 With Midorikawa, the animators created a character whom they felt would benefit from Midorikawa's own style of acting. While Koga is a young and passionate character, as Midorikawa describes him, “He's also naïve and a bit of a mama's boy. I could actually
427 Interview with a voice actor, name withheld, October 2012. 428 Midorikawa Hikaru, quoted in Figure King No. 170 (April 2012), 17. | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |
299 draw upon my own past experiences to get at his essence. ”429 As Midorikawa possesses a greater range of emotion than a younger voice actor, Hatano and Umakoshi felt free to design Koga as a more complex protagonist than the typical shōnen hero knowing that the character's depth would be appropriately conveyed. Voice actors play another role beyond the actual recording, providing the replayable aural spec of the media mix through lending their character voices to a number of secondary productions such as promotional videos, commercials, toys, video games, and events. With the voices of the characters, other companies can utilize the character in ways that benefit their own bottom line, while also exposing the series' characters to audiences through additional avenues when the television series has finished. By continuing the series in various ways through these peripheral media, voice acting becomes an essential way for the characters of an anime's media mix to extend beyond the original broadcast. Character voices become an authenticating measure added to the character commodity, providing additional value beyond the image alone. They are also able to adapt or conform to the wishes of any sponsor as long as the voice actor mouths the specific script and the animation studio creates the appropriate promotional art and designs for the actions. In the case of Omega, the media mix includes toy commercials, video games, and character events for children, and “alternative” programming for adults. Voice actors appear “out of character,” in these situations, often using their acting celebrity to appeal to fans of their entire body of work beyond the character of any one particular show. Midorikawa Hikaru hosts the Saint Seiya Omega show, an internet radio program that invites other characters from the Omega series to discuss their experiences working on the show and their feelings about the characters they perform. Midorikawa also spurs guests to
429 Ibid. | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |
300 talk about other details related to their personal lives, letting listeners in on the private matters of the voice actors when they are not “in character. ” Omega's voice actors are asked to reveal their identities apart from the characters on the show, in essence appealing to and creating fans of not just the characters, but the voice actors' brand. Voice actors gain fan capital from appearing as they are, speaking candidly as authorities who have a special insight into the feelings of their characters. This sort of character authority is reflected in several other events, including the heavily publicized “Seiya Night,” where each seiyu was asked to give his or her opinion on the nature of each character's background and personality despite having voiced less than a handful of episodes and having virtually no idea of the events of future episodes or character relationships. If voice actors have the most capital with fans, becoming the most popular celebrities behind the anime's creation, it is also related to their individual capital as visible talent. In an industry where companies have sold their works for lower than market value and raced to the bottom for animator salaries, voice actors have a way around the studio through the brand value of voices that are easily discernable to the public. Where the work of in-between animators is invisible, and the designs or animation of key animators are recognized only by ardent fans of the medium, voice actors are literally able to make their voices heard indirectly through their characters and directly through fan events and public appearances. For the hundreds of voice actors who make a living off of their animation work, however, there are thousands more who are unable to find more than bit parts and supporting roles. Some are able to cobble a career together on these sorts of roles with hard work, but others drop out relatively quickly. And in contrast to writers and series directors, who are owed royalties for sales of the anime's DVDs, Blu-Rays, and digital media, voice | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |
301 actors have little ownership over the voice that they give their characters. What this means is that voice actors, while more independent than animators regarding their own livelihoods, are nevertheless just as dependent on the animation company's ability to construct the compelling worlds that make their contributions meaningful. I witnessed this sort of anxiety over career flux after the recording sessions were finished, when voice actors would frequently head to local izakaya drinking bars with the staff. It was there where senior/junior relations were most visible, regardless of age or gender. Newer actors were deferential toward the veteran staff regardless of how old they were; what mattered was seniority within the industry. While older voice actors obviously spent more years in the industry, this did not always mean that they commanded the most seniority. Actors who had major roles in the most popular productions were as valued and respected than ones who have had a long career in bit roles or supporting parts. The veteran staff regaled new actors with tales on older productions and their experiences working with famous actors, while also dispensing with advice through half-drunken hazes to the younger actors on working harder. One popular voice actor, who had some dozen years in the industry despite his young age, severely dressed down one of his contemporaries for making too many mistakes in the few roles he received. I asked him later what he thought was the reason for why some voice actors fail or succeed: To be honest, anyone can do this work. You might think what I'm doing is really difficult. It takes lots of training, but once you do the training, even you could do this job. What separates those who find a career and those who drop out is the amount of work you do. That might be the case in any industry, but with voice | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |
302 acting, you could have days or weeks without work. Once an opportunity arrives, you need to drop everything and take the job seriously, no matter what role. 430 This seiyu's comments are similar to the prioritization of work ethic in the shōnen manga industry, where “effort” is followed by “victory,” but also to Hollywood myth-making, where even the hardest workers need to catch a break. It takes good fortune to land on a popular series with memorable characters at a young age. The most respected voice actors were the ones who had spent years in the industry, eventually landing a role on productions that become industry blockbusters. One seiyu, possibly the most well-known Japanese voice actor in the world for having lent her talents to the iconic voice of Pokemon's mascot Pikachu, commanded a respect from staff and actors alike for her professionalism and randy sense of humor. She was the only voice actor I ever saw at any event who was always accompanied by her manager. What both she and the other voice actor shared was exposure. Despite their success, both appeared in dozens of roles both large and small every year, unlike television actors and actresses who try to limit “overexposure. ” Since any anime has the potential to be a “hit,” the more anime characters that an actor inhabited, the greater the chance that they can manage the face of another popular brand. Conclusion Toei Animation employs hundreds of animators in service of anywhere from six to twelve anime series and films a year. Some of these series originate from highly popular publications, including the Detective Kindaichi series, spin-off anime with the American comics powerhouse Marvel such as The Avengers, and the Weekly Shonen Jump series One Piece, which is now regarded as the most popular and best-selling manga franchise in Japan. A series such as One Piece can greatly alleviate the burden of staffing a studio as
430 Kakihara Tetsuya, interview by the author, August 2012. | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |
303 large as Toei's for a number of years through a large transmedia network of extended merchandise tie-ins, movie spin-offs, and the licensing rights to video games, events, and shows that use the voices and designs from the television series. Toei's first high-quality, animated feature films such as Hakujaden and Saiyuki were originally birthed from Chinese folk stories, so the studio's history of adapting material in some ways has naturally made them a good fit for partnerships with publications and game companies. The studio has been able to sustain its facilities through such adaptations as early as 1964's anime version of Shirato Sampei's manga Shonen Ninja Kaze no Fujimaru (Samurai Kid, 1965). But as the previous case study on Toriko demonstrated, while the manga can spread through the efforts of the animation studio, the collaboration between mangaka and animators is restricted due to time constraints and media differences. Simply put, there are creative limits imposed both by the differences in media and on animation staff to adhere to the original property's characters, settings, and worlds. Thus, original anime productions both give Toei more control over the rights and production of the anime itself, as well as maximizing the creative agency of the network of creators staffed and contracted by and through the studio. Toei Animation's studio production flows according to the network of professional creative managers outlined in this chapter. Hundreds of creative workers come together to form a team that is tasked with developing a twenty-two minute episode of animation every week. Since it is counterproductive to have all of these creators working on any given animation in the same room and at the same time, animation production is organized into the stratified network delineated in this chapter, relying on every division to make it work. With Toei Animation's productions, efficient communication within the network of | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |
304 producers and writers, directors and artists, animators and voice actors is necessary for the system to function week in and week out. At the same time, each creative manager is tasked with an incredible amount of individual creative responsibility which can be recognized and rewarded. Where fans might only reward the visible efforts of voice actors, producers, writers, and directors can be hired for more ambitious projects, while animators and artists can move up the chain of responsibility and importance in creating the animated image, or become known for a particular design or style of movement. This collective creation, when it is harmonious, can lead to both project success and individual agency. This chapter has focused on movement in its myriad forms. The movement of an idea into a concept into a design; the movement of a premise into a script; the movement of directors between production settings; the movement that animators give to the drawn object; and, most importantly, the movement of the character, the central object that passes between the hands and minds of these different creators. Characters move through the studio's networks as the connecting thread of diverse ideas, backgrounds, and work cultures, becoming deep and gaining life through the piecemeal contributions of each of the creative managers. They produce concepts, stories, and worlds through the collaborative labor that is attached to each of their creations. Through this collective build up, they gain an energy that ends up fueling the entire media mix behind the anime. Toei Animation has managed to carve out a financial niche for its salaried workers and most of its regular staff through this approach to its anime and characters that focuses on the financial bottom line, while simultaneously trusting its staff to produce work that can be artistically interesting. These decisions have significant effects on how their original anime and media mix is made, how it looks, and how it relates to its audiences. Character movement is what binds | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |
305 all of these various media forms and social fields together. As the next chapter will show, the additional movement of characters through the animation studio, between media forms, and into the social environment is what becomes central to the existence of the media mix and the centrality of the character in contemporary Japanese society. | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |
306 Chapter 5: Case Study-Pretty Cure's Convergence Text Television anime is like eating snacks. You can't eat expensive fruit like Ghibli films everyday. Most days, you eat Choco Balls. Maybe once a year, you eat Godiva, and it's delicious. But it's expensive, so you eat Choco Balls the rest of the year, and you eat a lot of them. I stake my life on making Choco Balls, and I don't take that responsibility lightly. That's how I approach each episode of anime. -Anime director Otsuka Takashi431 While Toei Animation initially marketed itself as the “Disney of the East,” with an aim to produce world-class feature-length animation, it simultaneously produced animation for commercials and television shortly after its foundation. Much of their animation is thus made for regular weekly consumption, the easy and eminently snack-like “chocolate balls” of the anime industry. The television anime of Toei can be divided into adaptations from manga or other visual novel sources, and “original anime,” lucrative media mix franchises created without a literary or visual source. The production strategy of the latter is the very opposite of most contemporary Hollywood and Japanese film productions that rely on the built-in audience of a novel, comic, or television program for adapted screenplays, and where “original” scripts are far too risky. There are two main differences between Toei's original anime and adapted anime that can apply to the vast majority of commercially produced anime and manga. First, Toei's original anime television series are conceptualized by a seisaku iinkai, or production committee, and a mixed team of salaried and contracted creators: producers, directors, and writers working together with teams of animators, designers, and technicians to create original characters, worlds, and stories. This collaboration goes beyond the mangaka-editor-assistant relationship by virtue of extensive meetings where ideas are generated from all those involved. Through the seisaku iinkai, Toei can exhibit a greater degree of creative
431 Otsuka Takashi, interview by the author, February 2014. | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |
307 control, though this creative agency must also line up with the intentions and goals of the entire production committee. Second, Toei's original anime series incorporate commercial products based on the series concept, and these products are required based on the level of involvement of the show's corporate sponsor. These sorts of heavily integrated products are characteristic of Toei anime such as Sailor Moon and Pretty Cure, as well as a number of other popular series geared towards older male audiences (Mobile Suit Gundam) and kids/family viewers (Case Closed). Animation producers, television network executives, advertising agency representatives, music label producers, and toy account managers all work together so that their various interests are represented in the show's final form. Through the negotiation of these participants, anime becomes viable through the sponsorship of merchandising companies, and their involvement shapes the direction and content of the show. The media mix of original anime corrals creativity, relegating writers and animators to essentially making an extended, long-form advertisement as interesting as possible. A series such as Saint Seiya Omega, while using the name of a pre-existing manga, is a prime example of Toei creating something original based off of a basic premise, reviving interest in a moribund franchise for the purpose of selling character figurines, digital video copies of the show, and theater tickets for the upcoming CGI-animated feature film. While the motives are wholly commercial, the resulting enterprise is a great deal of creative freedom for the directors and writers and animators, even if-as in the case of Omega-there is some pressure to adhere to the “spirit” of the original manga and anime television series. The differences between anime and manga transmedia can be summed up in the following table (figure 21): | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |
308 Manga-based Transmedia Anime-based Media Mix Ground-up creation Adherence to text/author Centrifugal management Authorial augmentation Derivative products (optional) Dispersed text Top-down creation Adherence to plan/committee Centripetal management Collective authorship Product-portals (optional) Convergence text
Figure 21: Manga vs. anime transmedia models This chapter will feature an analysis of one such original anime media mix, the “magical girl” series Pretty Cure (2004-2015). Through a combination of ethnographic fieldwork, participant observation, and textual analysis of episodes of the series itself, this chapter will show how characters and products are collaboratively built, marketed, and spread through a committee-centered media mix. Key to the function of the “magical girl media mix” is the convergence of multiple media forms in the broadcast of the anime program itself. Unlike the dispersed transmedia of the manga, creators for original anime like Pretty Cure collaborate at the level of the studio. Similarly, this creative labor is represented in the text itself, which manifests its various interests and ancillary media extensions. The broadcast, in its centralizing of media and media creation, becomes a kind of “convergence text,” tying in the anime episode, its advertisements, announcements, and, most importantly, the sponsor's products which lubricate the machinery of the show, studio, and various other industries. Toei's media mix is organized not only around just its characters and worlds, but through these products that become incorporated into the characters' reality. These products-everything from wands and dresses to clocks and compacts-then become a part of the audience's environment through a calendar of advertisements and events that are | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |
309 calibrated to their lives through shared cultural rituals and traditions. Products become a medium for the characters of Pretty Cure to communicate and identify with audiences, who buy such material goods not only to own a piece of the series' world, but to perform aspects of it that are integrated into a convergence text. A close look at Toei's transmedia reveals that social and cultural coordination are as important to the anime's media mix as any industrial concerns. Much of this is born from the collaborative process of anime creation itself, which blurs the roles and titles of its various creators in order to generate world ideas and nurture the growth of characters. Characters and their products in Pretty Cure effectively blur various cultural, national, and gender boundaries, producing a perpetual media experience that revolves around conspicuous exposure, constant commodity consumption, but also considerable participatory pleasures. The Perpetual Media Mix Engine Toei Animation's central original television anime is its “magical girl” series, starting from the shōjo manga adaptation of Sally the Witch (Mahōtsukai Sally, 1966-68), and climaxing in the 1990s with the globally popular animated television series Sailor Moon (1991-97) and its many spin-offs and sequels. This is where much of Toei's creative manpower is directed and capital accumulated, and for which it has maintained a particularly strong business model for the last twenty-five years. I spent six months from February to July of 2012 witnessing this very business model through observation of the production of the original television anime series, Smile Precure! (2012-2013). The show is an iteration of its principal magical girl series, Pretty Cure, which has broadcast for over a decade and revolves around contemporary Japanese girls who are granted the ability to transform into princesses with magical abilities and physical combat skills. During this | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |
310 time, I sat in on script meetings with directors, producers, and scriptwriters; observed art direction meetings with colorists and background artists; watched voice-recording sessions with professional (and amateur) voice actors and actresses; met with sponsors and merchandise representatives to hear about media tie-ins; and talked to dozens of professionals on both the creative and business side of animation. Eventually, this observation spilled over into participation when I contributed some ideas for an episode and helped coach a voice actor in his English speech of a character. This chapter will document production meetings at the level of idea creation, focusing on two key aspects. First, this chapter will examine how creative decision-making is highly centralized in anime construction. My experience observing the anime construction of Smile Precure! mirrored Ian Condry's experience with the production of the NHK's television anime series Dekoboko Friends (2002-2011). The production of both shows are prime examples of how viable, long-running anime is often organized not according to plots or stories, but by a combination of elements such as characters, premises, and world settings. These elements are then constructed through a creative network of talented creators who come together to generate ideas and overcome problems as a group. 432 Where chapter four diagrammed the varied management of the production process, this chapter and case study will show how these various managers come together to collaborate on the construction of individual episodes. Second, this chapter will look at what organizes this creative activity. For a series that involves so many companies and corporate interests such as Smile Precure!, the series must be conceived with a mindful eye on many aspects of production. Developed by a creative team that uses the pseudonym of Azumi Tōdō, Pretty Cure features characters who
432 See Condry, 54-84. | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |
311 are principally represented through their transformation, straddling worlds and responsibilities to their families, friends, and comrades. The series' creators must similarly straddle responsibilities to various corporate bodies, interests, and audiences. A successful series might garner high television ratings or critical acclaim or fan-made material, but each series has its own seisaku iinkai to answer to. In the case of Smile Precure!, this production committee was associated with television and toy companies, effectively making the sales of toy products the most conspicuous aspect of the series' success. The job of the Smile Precure! television anime was to construct episodic narratives with the long-term aim of selling greater amounts of character goods for the duration of a year. Thus, the job of the anime is to draw viewers to its broadcast, with the larger goal of getting viewers to invest in the experience of Pretty Cure beyond its thirty-minute timeslot. This is the broad target of commercially made anime: to move beyond the timeslot of the broadcast and into the realm of the media experience, operating at all times of the day to deliver to its viewers a relationship to characters and their worlds. Mark Steinberg has articulated this idea of “anime as experience,” calling the media mix an effective transformation of the Japanese social environment into a “media environment” that is “understood to designate both the media ecology as a system of media and its lived experience by human subjects. ”433 Characters and their goods become adaptable to any format through their pairing with mobile advertisements or other portable media objects. The media mix of anime is endemic to the environment, imbricating itself into multiple areas of social life in order to better assimilate its various commodities. By asking audiences to consume various aspects of a franchise for a larger and deeper experience of that media, anime transmedia moves away from the idea of “transmedia
433 Steinberg, xi. | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |
312 storytelling” to that of “transmedia world. ” Perpetual worlds are obviously not the realm of anime alone. Writing of film worlds, Dudley Andrews says, “Worlds are comprehensive systems which comprise all elements that fit together within the same horizon, including elements that are before our eyes in the foreground of experience, and those which sit vaguely on the horizon forming the background. These elements consist of objects, feelings, associations, and ideas in a grand mix so rich that only the term 'world' seems large enough to encompass it. ”434 Andrew's conception of the world would stem to be as much a creation of the spectator as the filmmaker, made up of myriad experiences and backgrounds. Chronicling how imaginary worlds are created, Mark J. P. Wolf stresses how world-building is based on this confluence of sources: “Imaginary worlds differ from traditional media entities in that they are often transnarrative and transmedial in form, encompassing books, films, video, games, websites, even reference works like dictionaries, glossaries, atluses, encyclopedias, and more. ”435 Imaginary worlds rely on a bevy of sources to not only build their histories, but also to convey an open-ended space that resists closure. Television would seem to be an ideal medium for this sort of perpetual world-building, as the closure between text and its interruptions is masked through what Raymond Williams has described as the televisual “flow” of the broadcast and its commercials, of how the “evening's viewing is in some ways planned, by providers and then by viewers, as a whole; that is in any event planned in discernable sequences which in this sense override particular programme units. ”436 Williams concept has been prodded by media theorists, from Nick Browne's conception of the television program and schedule as a “supertext” to William
434 Dudley Andrews, Concepts in Film Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 37. 435 Mark J. P. Wolf, Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of Subcreation (New York: Routledge, 2012), 3. 436 Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form (New York: Routledge, 1974), 93. | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |
313 Oricchio's analyses of live vs. recorded television. 437 This phenomenon of the flow of continuous media experience now extends extratexually, with American television shows since the early 2000s using websites to draw viewers into seeking additional narrative information, “live” chats with characters, and “unaired” visual and audio clips. John Caldwell has called this digital turn “second shift aesthetics,” with the “first shift” television broadcast being abetted by a phalanx of hustling alternate programming strategies which cycle through “everything from interface and software design to merchandising and branding campaigns. ”438 These cases show how world-building and perpetual media exposure has become more symptomatic with the proliferation of digital media technologies. The collaborative activity and processes behind the creation of anime mirrors many of these developments, with characters and worlds comprising continuous programming, textual interstitials, interactivity, and user flows across multiple media forms. But Pretty Cure, and other similarly commodity-tied anime programs such as Digimon and Yu-Gi-Oh!, creates a slightly different media experience than those articulated by these media theorists, largely based on the transformative aspects located in the texts themselves through carefully integrated merchandise. I call these instances of textually integrated toys and characters product-portals. Unlike character products, which are any merchandise spun off from a character image, product-portals are merchandise which serve a transformative and dynamic process in the show by delivering highly interactive media experiences that ask users to participate in the construction of the text itself (see figure 22).
437 See Nick Browne, “The Political Economy of the (Super) Text,” in Television: The Critical View 4th ed., ed. Horace Newcomb (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 585-99 and William Oricchio, “Television's Next Generation: Technology/Interface/Culture/Flow,” in Television After TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition, eds. Lynn Spiegel and Jan Olsson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 163-182. 438 John Caldwell, “Second Shift Media Aesthetics: Programming, Interactivity, and User Flows,” in New Media: Theories and Practices of Digitexuality, eds. John Caldwell and Anna Everett (New York: Routledge, 2003), 132. | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |
314 Similar to the manga interfaces which present the spectator or user with multiple sets of entry points into a database of elements, portals can provide organized gateways into diverse amounts of information and connect gaps in different registers of media. Products in anime can function this way, connecting multiple registers of media in a similar way to how characters spread across media. Products in these shows are ingrained in ways that connect characters to viewers, and fantasy spaces to spaces of everyday reality. Product-portals become connective tools that slide between characters and viewers: they position the viewer within the character's world, show how products integrate within it, and empower the viewer's ordinary daily routines and rituals. Figure 22: Examples of Pretty Cure product-portal merchandise Such experiences can be similar to alternate-reality games, or other transmedia activities that ask users to participate when the consumption of the original media has finished, but with Pretty Cure and its sister shows, the commodity is tied into the texts themselves through careful integration from as early as the level of the script's construction. In other words, the alternate media is no longer optional, but essential to constructing and consuming the text. This sort of coordinated sponsor involvement is different from product placement, where products are delivered either innocuously or conspicuously into the | Inside the Media Mix0ACollective Creation in Contemporary Manga and Anime.pdf |