The Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation

by Thomas Lamarre

Despite the longevity of animation and its significance within the history of cinema, film theorists have focused on live-action motion pictures and largely ignored hand-drawn and computer-generated movies. Thomas Lamarre contends that the history, techniques, and complex visual language of animation, particularly Japanese animation, demands serious and sustained engagement, and in The Anime Machine he lays the foundation for a new critical theory for reading Japanese animation, showing how anime fundamentally differs from other visual media. The Anime Machine defines the visual characteristics of anime and the meanings generated by those specifically "animetic" effects-the multiplanar image, the distributive field of vision, exploded projection, modulation, and other techniques of character animation-through close analysis of major films and television series, studios, animators, and directors, as well as Japanese theories of animation. Lamarre first addresses the technology of the cells on which the images are drawn, the animation stand at which the animator works, the layers of drawings in a frame, the techniques of drawing and blurring lines, how characters are made to move. He then examines foundational works of anime, including the films and television series of Miyazaki Hayao and Anno Hideaki, the multimedia art of Murakami Takashi, and CLAMP's manga and anime adaptations, to illuminate the profound connections between animators, characters, spectators, and technology. Working at the intersection of the philosophy of technology and the history of thought, Lamarre explores how anime and its related media entail material orientations and demonstrates concretely how the "animetic machine" encourages a specific approach to thinking about technology and opens new ways for understanding our place in the technologized world around us.

Genres: Nonfiction, Japan, Anime, Art, Film, Theory, Philosophy

408 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

Reviews

[Buck · Rating 5 out of 5]

Detailed and yet wide in scope. Lamarre's intervention into question of animation has him confront the tendencies in histories of animation to hierarchically value "realism" and "full animation" over the potentially explosive and experimental space that the limited animation style of less drawings per frame can provide. By harnessing this theme across the axis of how animation "thinks" the force of the moving-image, Lamarre can provide a theory of animation that can deal with questions such as capitalist commodification/serialization, gender/sexual asymmetry and the way animation can think(and subvert) the technology/nature divide

Its impressive how much Lamarre can wield within this approach, which takes as its main inspiration a Simondian and Guattarian method which allows technical objects like the composited animation image as a site of divergent heteropoesis which is only homogenized/serialized afterwards across various ideological/cultural contexts.

Highly reccomend! Especially if you wanna see anime media theory that interacts with and seeks a third way out from the naive conservative optimism of Saito Tamaki's account of animation and of the equally conservative pessimism of Azuma Hiroki's thesis about Otaku data-ification.

[Joel Gn · Rating 2 out of 5]

Lamarre's analysis of Japanese animation techniques is certainly compelling and insightful, but I was left a little confused by the nomenclature - terms such as 'animetism', 'animetic interval' and 'animetic machine' are used interchangeably and for the most part seem to refer to the same thing, but the author doesn't explain how and why they are used differently. It seems (to me at least) that Lamarre was trying to articulate a paradigm that will encompass these characteristics, but had difficulty finding a label for the phenomena he wanted to discuss.

Even more lamentable is the close reading of Chobits in the third part, which digresses from the possibilities of technique to a psychoanalytic treatment of the characters in the plot. There are clear references to the notion of animetism, but the theoretical justification is very convoluted and even spurious. To sum up, Lamarre's understanding of animation techniques as a 'free relation' to technology is a profound accomplishment, but his later Lacanian treatment of gender politics in Chobits feels relatively unpalatable and excessive.

[Petra · Rating 4 out of 5]

I got a lot of useful stuff out of it, but I think the third installment re: gynoids was a bit rushed and not as strong as the parts before

[Max Gallimard · Rating 5 out of 5]

One does not simply understand this book without having read Heidegger, Deleuze and Lacan... or watching Miyazaki or Hideaki Anno. I love the way Lamarre deals with poststructuralism and art theory. A must-read book for those engaged in film studies. (Still, it may be a little heady for casual anime fans).

[Sophie · Rating 4 out of 5]

A ton of really well done scholarship, I read portions of this book years ago and it was a great experience to finally go back and read the complete picture. I did feel like the final section on the psychoanalytics of chobits needed another pass of editing, I found the beginning portion of the section pretty compelling but as it proceeded it gradually came to feel more and more repetitious and unnecessary. At time I also found myself feeling like the thread of “anime thinking technology” and “technology thinking anime” was somewhat stretched thin in this portion as well.

Not really a ding in terms of technique, as Lamarre makes it pretty clear that the focus of his scope is the pieces that have found an audience of male otaku, but as a woman interested in what women otaku consume, it was somewhat frustrating to feel like we were approaching really interesting territory with the chobits stuff but not fully delve into the experiences of women fans and creators. Marketing the book as “a media theory of animation” but only focusing on what the male otaku demographic consumes and experiences feels a little disingenuous, but I understand this is also kinda par for the course in terms of a lot of existing scholarship up until this point (2009).

Still, some really great stuff in here and I’d recommend to anyone interested in doing scholarship on anime, or just learning more about it. I’m looking forward to reading his more recent book!

[Anne]

Very looking forward to this...

[Kel · Rating 3 out of 5]

The early parts were somewhat dry, but this book presents some interesting theory. It's easy to get confused without some familiarity with psychology and philosophy, however.

[Michael Ledezma · Rating 5 out of 5]

What more can a fanboy of Heidegger and Miyazaki ask for, than for them to be joined as binary star/tag team of criticism of technological rationality? This book is just gravy!

[Gyewon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Love to see it soon