Society. Spaces. Screens
Abstract
This paper examines the hold ‘tactility’ continues to hold over animators and animation viewers in the digital era, at a time when handcraft could be at risk of disappearing in digitally-inflected visual mass media. It begins by observing a phenomenon in contemporary Japanese animation where films and TV series are returning to an intensely tactile aesthetic, where the tools of digital animation are used in part to facilitate a greater aesthetic engagement with the handcrafted qualities of animation. Viewed in conjunction with the large, lucrative arm of the Japanese publishing industry dedicated to ‘pre-production’ animation materials like storyboards, background art, and key animation frames, this paper explores from where this magnetic pull towards such material comes. What is the root of this impulse, strong enough that it not only ‘survives’ the digital transformation, but plays a key role in shaping the deployment of digital tools in 21st-century anime? ‘Tactility’ is the unifying word used to answer this question: the notion of physical presence, of material tangibility, acts as a gravitational center for a series of examinations of why viewers, ‘fans,’ and artists respond to and identify with traces of the hand in animation. These examinations engage with a wide array of classical and contemporary theory on film, photography, animation, and other visual arts, and in synthesizing these sources with contemporary anime examples, I find that what viewers identify with is the reminder of the body – that of the artist and that of the viewer – embedded in these images.
Jonathan R. Lack is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Iowa’s Department of Cinematic Arts, earned his BA and MA summa cum laude from the University of Colorado, and has written and podcasted on film and media since age 10. He specializes in Japanese Film History, Animation Theory, and Transnational Cinema, has written extensively on directors Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata, and is currently writing his dissertation, Newtypes: Digital Technology and the Evolution of the Language of Anime.