dystopia*identity*m[ut]a[tio]n
A Semiotic Analysis of Anime

"I approached the symbol, with its layers of meaning, but when I touched it, it changed into only a beautiful princess."

Donald Barthelme 1

Electronic technologies mediate our relation to the world. It may seem to some contemporary minds that such mediation is a necessary component in the linear progress of humanity. The connection between centuries old industrial processes and their digital transmutations is, however, hardly symbiotic. The move from our earliest technological era to the immediate profoundly warps and distorts the cultural landscape; producing often irreconcilable rifts between modernist idealism and a multifaceted social pluralism

The genre of contemporary Japanese animation known as Anime reflects this dissimilitude. It is a media form bathed in explicit sexuality, graphic violence, and technological paranoia. One is presented with often traditional narrative forms at once buttressed by ideological nostalgia and eroded by digital immersion. Its concerns are those of postmodern nihilism and the influence of a new media formalism.

history

Anime is a term that was borrowed by Japan from the West. Originally descriptive of animation in general, it has been reappropriated by western viewers to distinguish that animated film which is produced in Japan from that made elsewhere. Contemporary Anime is an offshoot of the Japanese Manga, or adult comic book, industry that has been a cultural import to the United States for the last decade. Although its stylistic roots can be traced back to 1964's Tetsuwan Atomo 2, real success for the current incarnation did not arrive until the mid 1980's.

Although the adult comic did not formally originate in this era, the eighties movement toward information capitalism was reflected by this new brand of dark, foreboding animated serials. Ironically, the success of Anime in the United States would only emerge through a filtered variety of after-school children's programming. Space Cruiser Yamoto and Macross 3, both heavily edited, were the first to appear on American youth-related television. These programs concerned alien invasions and their earthly responses. Digital Technology is the driving force behind each and it envelops all of Anime in general.

The late 1980's and early 1990's saw a commercial boon for Japanese animation. Streamline Pictures, a dubbing specialist, got off the ground in 1988. For more 'sophisticated' tastes, Animeigo, a subtitling giant, was formed the next year. 1991 saw the beginning of U.S. Manga, a corporation dedicated solely to the distribution of Anime.

a new media?

Anime was birthed at the nexus of successive philosophical and technical moments. It falls on the heels of the postmodern elision of the absolute by the likes of Baudrillard and Lyotard; attending to a semantic relativism that sought to destroy industrial modernist ideals. It presaged, and conjugated with, the explosion of computational networking and the internet, new realms in which arcadian visions and dystopian nightmares could coexist. The birth of the 'cyber-punk' coalesced with the cyborg of Anime; both creatures "suspended in webs of significance" that they have spun.

central concerns

The following analysis will focus upon general trends in signification for anime as a whole. For the sake of clarity, however, four features will be specifically discussed. The first two of these are the feature length animations Akira and Ghost in the Shell . Perhaps atypical for their startling animation and amoral tone, these two films nonetheless exhibit characteristics entrenched in the genre. Akira, for instance, is a post-apocalyptic vision of exploitation and corruption. Ghost in the Shell questions the role of self and identity in a future age of cyborg machines. The latter two examples are popular serials that are significantly less challenging, and perhaps more typical. Bubble Gum Crash is a rather traditional action cartoon featuring a group of four young female heroes known as the Knight Sabres. Doomed Megalopolis is a dark splatterfest which owes much to Hollywood gore and new age mythology.

"The brain of each one of us does literally create his or her own world."

J Z Young

Immanuel Kant's The Critique of Pure Reasonmade us explicitly aware of the inaccessibility of the "thing-in-itself". We can discuss representation only in the context in which signs are created and meaning is produced. We indeed create our own worlds; but these worlds, in turn, create us. It is a system of mutually-defining relationships. In order to understand these correspondences, we turn to Semiotics, "a mode of knowledge, of understanding the world as a system of relations whose basic unit is the sign." This essay examines the cultural, visual, and social semiosis of modern Anime.

A reading of sign systems is organized by recognizing that signification, or the relationship between signifier and signified, occurs along two axes of meaning; paradigmatic and syntagmatic. At a paradigmatic level, one must consider the metaphoric implication of the entire set of signs from which the one used is chosen. At the syntagmatic, the message into which the chosen signs are combined is subject to examination. The cybernetic world of Anime brings forth a convoluted morass of semiotic representations. Signifiers and signifieds disconnect and reconnect; simultaneously rejecting and supporting dominant ideology. consequences

A signifier; that which represents, is always open to interpretation. This is due to the multivocal aspect of the sign, which is inherently arbitrary. Meaning is generated via difference. But the polysemy of signs subverts any sort of universal differentiation. One may therefore become a victim of that which C.S. Peirce called an "infinite regression" of meaning; what Baudrillard later termed, "hyperreality". The sign as a foundational object of semiotic analysis is limiting. And the very analysis of signification tends to threaten communication by decentering the force of convergence inherent in the communication process.

But an extreme relativism injures the social function of signification. Any cultural object is both a component of signification and an object of use in a social system, with a generative history and social context. Eco has asserted that meaning, in the end, must be linked to signified or to meaning systems operating as codes. "To assert otherwise, is to suggest that the entire universe of meanings would be contained in every text."14 A semiotic analysis can, therefore, prove fruitful only if the signs are analyzed within the phenomenon of material culture.

With Anime, we have a dissolution of the most basic types of semiosis. The traditional signified, a referent in the real world, vanishes. But this does not necessarily imply the absence of any signified. Instead, new signifieds are being created as the implications of technological shifts enter our collective consideration.

“An Interview with photographer Jacques-Henri Lartigue:
Q: You've talked to me just now of a trap for vision, something like that, is that your camera?
A: No, not at all. It's before, something I did when I was little. When I half-closed my eyes, there remained only a narrow slot through which I regarded intensely what I wanted to see. Then I turned around three times and thought, by so doing, I'd caught -- trapped -- what I was looking at, so as to be able to keep indefinitely not only what I had seen, but also the colors the noises. Of course, in the long run, I realized that my invention wasn't working. It's then only that I turned to technical tools for facilitating it.15

The preceding interview illustrates a key industrial era paradigm which highlights the correspondence between the human figure and the technology it produces. The machine is viewed as an extension of the body; as a tool to reach beyond fundamental limitations. Technology is thus defined as that which is external to, and contrasted with, the body.

What, then, are the consequences as machine and body become one? The cyborg of Anime is indicative of a philosophical shift away from the established "man/machine" dialectic. We are aware that any object of use becomes encoded with its social function; and this becomes a sign function.16 As the conventional subjective form [the human/the soul] becomes objectified [an artificial creation], the human-machine enters into a free-play of signification; meanings multiply and ideological objectification becomes varied. Established codes are revealed as inherently problematic.

In much of Anime, the metaphoric 'warping' and 'tearing' relationship between digital media and culture manifests itself explicitly. In Ghost in the Shell, for example, voluntary mutation is a prosaic past time. Security Agent Motoko Kusanagi17, the film's protagonist, and many of her colleagues sport enhanced 'cybernetic' brains and cyborg bodies. She has extra-human strength and, via 'hardwiring', is connected instantaneously with other humans, computers, and databases.

Anime characters, presumably because of this 'enhanced' physical status, inflict, and endure, extreme pain.18 While hardly a utopian view of life in the techno-future, this graphically violent aspect of Japanese animation satisfies voyeuristic tendencies within its overwhelmingly young male audience. Of course, the physiological destruction is implemented in a variety of manners. The mode of violence employed in Ghost in the Shell is symptomatic of an amoral tone and post-industial nihilism. This use may be contrasted with that of Bubble Gum Crash and more traditional 'heroic' tales, in which violent acts are less intrinsic to plot-lines.

The Knight Sabres, heroes of Bubble Gum Crash, masquerade as mild mannered, young working women by day. As trouble threatens Mega-Tokyo, however, they morph into machinelike beings by way of exoskeletal suits.19 Like many typical Anime devices, the suits operate via the control of human operators. It is thus through the agency of cybernetics that the world can be saved. That such intervention is necessary, however, can only be related to the villainous applications of that same technology.

violence

Films such as Akira, Ghost in the Shell, and many of the more graphically violent of the genre share a "sort of ironical contemplation of the human labyrinth in which one refrains from becoming intensely committed to any single point of view ... because it is too difficult to determine where truth and justice really lie."20 This detached animus derives from the experience of the Greek Tragedy; there is no clear villain, no monster, no one to identify with. In Anime, however, society at large has an omnipresent debilitating influence. Life does not occur in a vacuum. Instead, as we shall see later, information-age culture is hostile towards the traditional industrial values of identity, privacy, and freedom.

gender

Semiotic theorists have posited that all appearance "is a sign vehicle to communicate gender status differences."21 The fundamental activity of gender socialization creates a 'universe of appearance' for the individual and the society. Foucault similarly argues that social norms regulate the body.22 One of the strictest regulatory features of physiognomic traits occurs along gender lines. This is particularly evident in Anime. Femininity is often presented as 'hypersexualized'.23 Body parts which represent aspects of stereotypical femininity or describe traditional sexual appeal are exaggerated. Interestingly, this transformation corresponds with increasingly 'masculine' personality traits. These characters are becoming more powerful, violent, and stoic [traditional male roles] as their bodies increasingly mutate into cartoonish ideals of female sex appeal; an inverse anima.24

The most recognized signifiers, and the most insidious mutations, in Anime are the oversized, orb-like eyes of some male and virtually all female characters.25 Although initially used to exaggerate racial differences between the Japanese characters and their Western counterparts, these eyes have come to signify emotional vulnerability and innocence. It is perhaps no wonder, then, that this sign is almost universally applied to females, who are typically identified with such traits. These formal signifiers underscore a fundamental feature of all Anime; the skewing of the relationship between representation and the external reality it purports to be grounded in. Thus we have the 'lie' of the signifier. We are presented with ideology as fact.

This exaggeration of the female form, for example, permits the reinforcement of sexual differences as naturalized. This is a critical component of what Barthes calls myth-making.26 Signs [in this case, exaggerated body parts] give myths and values concrete form. Thus they are endorsed and transformed into the pantheon of 'common-sense'. While a significantly large number of heroes are female, their agency is only granted along masculine lines; the heroine is granted no real voice or empowerment. Her sexuality is an object of commodification.

sexuality

Sexuality is a commodity within any entertainment industry. And the hyper sexualizing of anime is almost totally dependent upon preconceived notions of female sexuality. The overtly sexual nature of female action heroes is not altogether new. The creator of Wonder-Woman is quoted as saying, "give them an alluring woman stronger than themselves to submit to and they'll be proud to be her willing slaves."27 Traditional male fantasy lays the groundwork; his tone is that of man-to-man confidence. Anime can be read in the same vein; it is often regarded as a male construction of femininity implemented by male artists for the enjoyment of other males. The small but significant minority of female readers and fans, it follows, derive meaning via aberrant decoding; a sort of Marxist 'false consciousness".

But this amounts to a functional reductionism that oversimplifies social and cultural relations. In fact, many28 have argued that what we are seeing is the emergence of a 'post-feminist' heroine. One that exists in a state of full self-awareness. She invites the male gaze and exposes it to reveal its subjective base. Clearly, the female characters of Anime run the gamut: from the obsequious and addle-brained girlfriend29 to the competent and skeptical crimefighter.30 Whatever the case, Anime cannot exclude itself from the social milieu in which it was born.

Anime heroes often add a postmodern twist to the 'wonder-woman' scenario. What matters here is not that the woman is alluring as a consummate being; rather, it is imperative that the features exaggerated are deemed sexually appealing. We can create seductive beings. It is, in fact, the distance these images have from perceived reality that is central to creating an atmosphere in which sexuality may be explored. The rise in popularity of female video game protagonists31 , Japanese virtual idols32 , and anime action heroes is an indication that sexuality has been commodified in such a manner that the focus of attraction no longer needs to be human. The signifier no longer needs to signify the Peircian object, a human. Instead, we have what Baudrillard would term a 'network of floating signifiers.'

"...manga, techno-porn, high-density urbanism, mobile fashion, hyper-violent movies, video-phones, fax cameras, hand-held televisions, video-games, disposable buildings, even a new breed of 'radically bored' teen information junkies, otaku, who shun body contact and spend all their waking hours gathering data on the most trivial bit of media."

Stephen Beard33

Anime, particularly that subset of films known as 'cyberpunk', is preoccupied with the cyborg body and the consequences of a rampant artificiality. In Bubble Gum Crash, for instance, heroes and villains both don robotic exoskeletons controlled via synaptic connections. The world of Mega-Tokyo is saturated by a digitally enhanced formalism. New technology explicitly provides the agency by which value systems are corrupted and mercifully restored. But there also exists a subtext of artificiality not overtly recognized. This metaphorical level is implicit in virtually all forms of representation within the genre. It stems from an increasingly synthetic appropriation of the human form.

It has often been observed that images in the media, particularly those of female sexuality, are highly artificial. This, one might argue, is therefore a deception. However, the increasingly artificial nature of sexual icons in anime belies this assumption. The evaporating affiliation between images and reality indicates an astute awareness of existing artifice. Anime, in this sense, exhibits what has been termed, hypermediation.34 This is a characteristic of new media in the digital age. It is a visual style that "privileges fragmentation, indeterminacy, and heterogeneity;"35 in other words, it exists within the postmodern.

Anime humans are exaggerated in such a manner as to be incongruous with possible anatomy. The legs of female action stars comprise typically two-thirds of the character's full height. If one considers morphological consequences, the huge eyes would leave scarcely any room in the skull for a brain. Characters are often absurdly childlike; all women under fifty years of age seem to be at a perpetual 'sweet-sixteen'.

Why, then, the attraction? What is it in overt and unreasonable amplification that is appealing? The answer may lie in the assumption that there can exist no deception within an overtly artificial form. Flaws can presumably be unacceptable in a body that can be remanufactured. Hypersexualized beings are the brainchild of a capitalist utopian vision of fantasy fulfillment. This would, perhaps, explain the recent explosion in Hentai, or Anime pornography, on the World Wide Web.36 Literally hundreds of sites deal in this new brand of male fantasy fulfillment. Most of the sites are linked from more traditional, "human-porn" sites and are marketing in the same manner; advertising that they have the 'youngest and most innocent girls' on the Web. In the animated world, age is not verifiable. Anime presumably can deliver where real-porn sites would fail. Seduction is a commodity of the hyperreal.

transvestitism

Jean Baudrillard claimed seduction lies within the realm of artifice.37 To illustrate, he discusses a social construct laden with meaning; transvestitism. With the transvestite, sexuality becomes that which is signified through conscious construction. The seductive object lacks the anatomy that would provide a modernist functionalism. Instead, a hypersexual version of femininity is created.

Barthes moves in a similar vein; explicitly referencing the Japanese kabuki. "The oriental transvestite does not copy woman but signifies her." The signifier is detached from the signified. "Femininity is presented to read, not to see: translation not transgression."38 The white of the face exclusively erases the trace of features. It is a written face that "writes nothing". The human form is reduced to the elementary signifiers of writing.

Transvestites are clearly nothing new. There does, however, lie a connection between the hypersexualism of Anime and the gender-trading tradition of Japanese culture. We find an augury of the trans-gendered identity of cyber-culture. Transvestitism is a phenomenon which negates the fundamental male/female distinction and its dominating social order. It is inherently antisocial. As a signifier, it violates the integrity of distinct meaning construction; it complicates intelligibility.

The overtly artificial nature of 'cyber-anime' characters is endemic of industrial culture relationship to digital technology in general. Media theorist Erhki Huhtamo has argued that "technology is gradually becoming a second nature, a territory both external and internalized, and an object of desire. There is no need to make it transparent any longer, simply because it is not felt to be in contradiction to the authenticity of experience."39

hyper-reality

A system of signs cannot be intelligible by relations with objects alone. Meaning occurs only through the play of difference between the signs. Contemporary Japanese animation becomes understandable only in relation to the lack of a physical signified. This can be traced to several constitutive factors. Among them are the traditions of Imperialist Japan,40 the freewheeling signification of consumer capitalism,41 and the decentralizing nature of digital technology. Anime is produced in accordance within what has become a rampant post-war, post-industrial economic system. It is thus a material and cultural object. The ideology of consumerism has reduced all material objects to their sign value. Consumer objects and, therefore, all of Japanese Anime, constitute a network of floating signifiers designed to induce desire.

But a multiplicity of meaning undermines this patriarchal induction. As an example, consider an early 80's pioneer of anime, Space Cruiser Yamoto.42 The titular spaceship is actually a reconstitution of a sunken World War II battleship, inviting Japanese viewers to consider an anti-interventionist, anti-U.S., nostalgic position. Viewers at home can rest assured that justice will prevail. The technology is indeed impressive, but it is the spirit of the original Yamoto that produces an aura of invincibility. The name of the ship was, of course, altered for U.S. audiences. For audiences in Japan, however, the reference is clear. Counter pose this with the physical features of the protagonists. These are the images of the western, Anglo-Saxon ideal. Blonde haired, blue eyed, with fair complexions; these are the heroes in whose hands the world's collective fate lies. Only a polysemic reading of a sign system could coalesce these two contradictory texts into a coherent cultural narrative.

This polysemy of signs is inevitable because of the arbitrariness by which signifiers and signifieds are combined. According to Barthes, every object of use becomes encoded with its social function; the object itself is therefore a sign function. Baudrillard goes one better; "reality itself does not exist. We are all trapped in a hyperreality - a universe of images. Every object operates as a higher-order sign function."43 The Peircian "absolute object" is no more. Instead, we have a more complex notion of signification. If there must exist a signified for each signifier, it is not at all clear that it must correspond to an object in the real world. Thus, we may present an animated anthropological form divorced from the reality it explicitly calls; reality moves toward hyperreality.

“Hell is truth seen too late."

-G.W.F. Hegel

Anime traditionally makes explicit reference to the consequences of technological transitions. Characters often struggle through oppressive, secretive, or anarchic governmental systems. Questions of identity and media saturation are pervasive. In Critical Issues in Electronic Media, Simon Penny addresses a similar concern; "we have heard for twenty years that the electronic revolution will be as resounding as the industrial one. But we are only now moving beyond the techno-utopian rhetoric to understand the nature of this revolution."44 Film has traditionally reacted to, rejecting or endorsing, prevailing social and economic conditions. With Anime, we are asked to view these situations via the conceit of a not to distant future. Whether these films act as a critical mechanism or an oppressive tool is difficult to determine. "Films are not merely aesthetic spaces but political ones that contest or naturalize the primacy of those subjectivities necessary to the status quo and suppress or privilege oppositional ones."45

Though atypical in many respects, Akira is exemplary of various thematic paradigms. It is a cautionary tale, which details the malady of a technology unchecked. Tetsuo, a young gang-member in post-apocalyptic Neo-Tokyo is the unwilling test subject of secretive governmental agencies.46 His powers, facilitated by a mysterious governmental weapon system gone awry, become monstrously out of control. His pain is transfigured into the near destruction of an already devastated city. This is a monotorial narrative that endorses popular nostalgia and preys upon common fears. This kind of trepidation is indicative of the "proliferation of meaning" that Baudrillard's hyperreality provokes within the traditional modernist environment. The absolute freedom of signification is a danger to tradition and institutionalization.

identity

The central concern in Masamune Shirow's Ghost in the Shell is that of cyborg identity. The primary character, Motoko Kusanagi, has very few traditionally 'human' characteristics. Although typical in appearance, her body is entirely synthetic, as is most of her brain. When faced with an entirely artificial life-form, known only as the 'puppet-master', she questions her own 'ghost' or soul. The concern for "puppets without ghosts" is emblematic of the micro-politics of identity including opposition and segmentation between class, gender, ethnicity, and race. It recalls the problematic of 'cyborg politics'.47 We are asked to face implications of technologies that move beyond increased efficiency or economic fluctuations. This sentiment is encapsulated in the puppet-masters plea for recognition as a sentient life form. "Can you," he asks a bewildered governmental agent, "offer me proof of your existence?"

publicity

Another concern of Anime is the economic stratification resulting from technological implementation. The streets of the decaying urban meccas are not home to the wealthy or powerful. We are shown a street life teeming with the telltale sign of commercial objectification, advertisements.48

On publicity, Berger writes, "the only places relatively free from [it] are the quarters of the very rich."49 Advertisements are the tools of elemental control. Publicity is not about the objects in focus; it is a reinforcement of social relations as innate. It is essentially nostalgic, selling the past to the future. We are presented with an urban life not the product of volition, but a state of oppression.

Anime thus presents the viewer with several none-to-subtle allusions the ills of technological advancement. These references, however, can mask ideological signification that works on a higher-order.

"How could these near-nonsense words, murmured in a child's restless sleep, make me sense a meaning, a presence? She was only repeating some TV voice. Toyota Corolla, Toyota Celica, Toyota Cressida. Supranatural names, computer generated, more or less universally pronounceable. Part of every child's brain noise, the substatic regions too deep to probe."

Don Delillo, White Noise50

Animation as a narrative form is well suited to act out ideology. It can, relatively easily, convey possible realities. Since ideological functions involve the unity of the real and the imaginary, a medium which presents the two seamlessly can, in this case, prove highly functional. Ideological discrepancies can be smoothed over; perceptions may be altered. Barbara Klingler observes: "The intense intertextual environment of mass culture . . . is not simply a context full of free-floating signifiers that can be operated by members of society as they will; mass culture embodies a series of ideological procedures accompanying textual production that bear significantly on reception."50 Indeed, "ideology exists in the apparatus"51 Semiosis occurs only with respect to the production and consumption of these animated images.

history/culture

The intertextual environment of a Japanese product consumed en mass by western audiences certainly embodies ideological implications. Anime borrows heavily from the culture of the United States. Although typical fans of the genre in America may feel that they are 'stealing' cultural modes from an eastern land; they are, in essence, retrieving a Hollywood filtered through another distinct cultural milieu. Althusser long ago gave ideology material existence. Societies create there own reality. In doing so, they promulgate dominant ideological interests. We live in a history that "does not belong to us." Instead, "we belong to it."51 Anime must belong to that history as well

Significations for a character the likes of 1964's Tetsuwan Atomu53 are manifestly varied. Possibly the earliest of Anime, thoughts on the 'mighty atom' must immediately bring forth images of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Even his watered-down American counterpart, Astro-Boy, seems to be the spawn of a post-atomic detonation. The subtext is that of apocalyptic fallout. His lovable demeanor belies the conditional organism from which he arises.

Perhaps a more unambiguous example of holocaust fantasy, Akira presents an image of a city devastated by conflagration. It is typical of anime in its reference to the residue of Imperialist Japan. Kuan Hsing-Chen has, in fact, asserted that the strategy of Japanimation as a cultural movement is elementally allied with imperialism.54 He calls this strategy sub-imperialism and defines a sub-empire as a secondary dependent empire which has hegemony much more in culture and economy than in the military system. John Berger remarked that "an image becomes a record of how x had seen y"55 To examine a visual object is to become immersed in the social and cultural sea in which it is produced and consumed. Anime is inescapably linked to a history and culture predominantly, but not exclusively, Japanese.

nostalgia

Umberto Eco noted that insofar as a sign is made to represent something else, it does not matter that the something may or may not exist. "Semiotics is in principle the discipline studying everything which can be used in order to tell a lie."56 The lie occurs when the sign shows the existent as nonexistent, and vice-versa. The nostalgic turn in most Anime underscores this. The motivating factor in virtually all of these films is a desire to return to the relative peace of a past long gone. But nostalgia is merely a tool that serves to endorse existing dominant values. Although inherently specious, the lie of the nostalgic enables social identification and alignment in opposition to social change. A sign gives myths and values concrete form. The ex-soldiers-turned-villains of Bubble Gum Crash or the mangled superhighways of Akira's Neo-Tokyo invite a paranoia regarding the influx of the digital into our lives. techno-orientalism

Japanimation unifies the image of automation and the actuality of animation. It functions both as an armament of criticism and an ideological apparatus. The high-development of Japanese technologies have produced 'Japanoid' stereotypes in the west. Morley and Robins note that "western stereotypes of the Japanese hold them to be sub-human, as if they have no feeling, no emotion, no humanity."57 These manifest themselves into a phenomenon of "Techno-Orientalism", whereby Japan exists in binary opposition to a geographic and cultural West. It is as if "the Orient exists in so far as the west needs it, because it brings the project of the West into focus."

Whereas the "Orient" was invented by the West, the Techno-Orient is the product of information Capitalism. Technology has become 'Japanized'. It is certainly no coincidence that the rise in the popularity of Anime was contemporaneous with Japan's ascendence as an economic power. With an increasing American presence, came a corresponding Western fearfulness. The "brain noise" about which Delillo writes highlights a concern for what these new technologies [read Japanese technologies] are doing to "us". Japan has become synonymous with technologies of the future. Just as Baudrillard called Japan "a satellite in orbit", Anime reinforces an image of a nation of automatons; Chaplinesque automated/animated assembly-line workers that are the product of a "post-Modern Times."

modernism/urbanity

Mega-Tokyo, Neo-Tokyo, giant urban metropolises; these are hallmarks of modern Anime.58 The giant urban centers of Bubble Gum Crash and Akira are reminders of a state occupied by a system of industrial production. These are the Colonial vestiges of a dying centralized system. "The new and quite unfamiliar state is transnational commodity capitalism, enabled by instantaneous, space-collapsing communication of electronic data."59 When the aged mystic of Doomed Megalopolis reproaches "all your dreams of a great modern Tokyo will be ashes,"60 we are reminded that the semantic unity of the historic city is no more. When the central metropolis of future Tokyo is destroyed, we encounter the failure of modernity.

Self-awareness is constituted by ideologies and prejudices which preexist the individual. One cannot escape community mythologies; we are interpellated into particular subject positions. Anime exists within a community and, as such, hails us as ideological commodities.

quixotical analysis

A semiotic analysis should not presume to exclude social factors. Signs are not merely symbolic expressions. They are expressive symbols used to facilitate social processes. There is more than the 'text'. Sign systems interact into complex and shifting wholes created by the interaction between individuals and various social strata.

Stuart Hall made us aware that the audience not only receives broadcast messages61. It is the source of them. The content, form, and development of a film, television program, or publication is inextricably linked to the audience consuming it. This is not to deny that influence varies across culture. Instead, we must be aware that the problematic of signification involves much more than a simple bipolar dispensation and supplication between the haves and have-nots.

Any in-depth analysis of sub-cultural categories within society provokes a ponderous difficulty. Conflicting and contradictory meanings are not unusual; they are, in fact, the norm. Political agendas and regulatory interests will typically find blurred divisional lineations. A more fruitful approach will be to seek issues rather than answers; to welcome new questions.

questions

What is the origin of Anime?

Anime's transparent lineage extends over thirty years. Japanese animation is a post-World War II phenomenon that reached a critical turning point in the mid-1980's. Sustained by an emerging "cyberpunk" culture and shifting theoretical assumptions, a new brand of adult animation was spawned. It's meanings and signs are those of a society aware of the influence of new-media. Anime is often pessimistic; demonstrating a growing lack of trust in industrial and fordist structures. And yet, it is still an object of commodification. It is designed to sell and it promotes dominant ideology. It is part of the apparatus of history.

Who is provided agency? How?

There are clear distinctions, within the genre, along gender lines. The very notion of a "cyborg" body reminds us of difficult issues regarding identity and social participation. The body of Anime is intensely objectified; reflecting the fracturing nature of digital media in an post-industrial society. We are made explicitely aware of the subtle and unwavering ironic contemplation of the post-modern.

What are the mythologies put into circulation?

The hyperreality and hypersexuality of Anime are the result of high-order semiosis. The sign speaks to a signified that in turn becomes a signifier. While the settings, characters, and feel of "new" Tokyo presume to represent a slightly off-kilter version the real world, we are actually presented with a narrative framework of the dominant ideology of consumerism. Ideologies are engineered into material form; a non-anthropomorphic form. Just as the design of "high-tech" moves toward abstraction; so to do the signifieds in Anime move from "reality" and become abstract objects of desire.

films

Akira 1989,1993 Akira Committe Orion Home Video / Streamline Pictures

BubbleGum Crash! Episode One: Illegal Army 1992 AnimeEigo, Inc.

Doomed Megalopolis: Episode One: The Haunting of Tokyo 1992 Toel Co., Ltd Licenced for Distribution in N.A. by Streamline Pictures

Ghost in the Shell 1996 manga entertainment inc. 1995 masamune shirow

texts

Barthelme, Donald. 1993. Sixty Stories New York: Penguin Books.

Barthes, Roland. 1982. Empire of Signs New York: Hill and Wang Publishing.

Berger, John. 1972. Ways of Seeing New York: Penguin Books.

Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin. 1999. Remediation: Understanding New Media Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Carey, James. 1989. Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society. New York: Routledge.

Kim, Kyong L. 1996. Caged in Our Own Signs Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing Corporation.

Fiske, John. 1990. Introduction to Communication Studies, Second Edition. New York: Routledge.

Fraser, John. 1974. Violence in the Arts. London: Cambridge University Press.

Gottdiener, M. 1995. Postmodern Semiotics: Material and Culture and the Forms of Postmodern Life. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.

Haraway, Donna. 1991. Simians,Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge.

Howard, Tharon. 1997. The Rhetoric of Electronic Communities. Greenwich, CT: Ablex Publishing Corp.

Huhtamo, Erkki. 1995. "Encapsulated Bodies in Motion: Simulators and the Quest for Total Immersion." in Simon Penny, ed. Critical Issues in Electronic Media. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Levi, Antonia. 1996. Samurai from Outer Space: Understanding Japanese Animation. Chicago: Open Court Publishing Company.

Penny, Simon. 1995. "Introduction" in Simon Penny, ed. Critical Issues in Electronic Media. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Virilio, Paul. 1991. The Aesthetis of Disappearance [translated by Phillip Beitchman] New York: Semiotext(e)

Poster, Mark. 1988. "Introduction." in Mark Poster, ed. Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Morley, David and Kevin Robins. 1995. Spaces of Identity: Global Media, Electronic Landscapes, and Cultural Boundaries. New York: Routledge.

Whelehan, Imelda and Esther Sonnet. 1997. "Regendered Reading: Tank Girl and Postmodernist Intertextuality." in Deborah Cartmell, I.Q. Hunter, Heidi Kaye, and Imelda Whelehan, ed. Trash Aesthetics: Popular Culture and Its Audience. Chicago: Pluto Press.

Zavarzadeh, Mas'ud. 1991. Seeing Films Politically Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

hypertexts

"CyberPunk Anime." at http://omni.cc.purdue.edu/~stein/anime.html

Hamilton, Robert. "Virtual Idols & Digital Girls: Artifice & Sexuality in Anime, Kisekae, & Kyoto Date." in Bad Subjects no.35 nov.97 at http://eserver.org/bs/35/hamilton.html

Newitz, Annalae. "Anime Otaku: Japanese Animation Fans outside Japan." in Bad Subjects no.13 apr.94 at http://english-www.hss.cmu.edu/bs/13/Newitz.html

Ueno, Toshiya. "Japanimation and Techno-Orientalism." at http:www.t0.or.at/ueno/japan.htm