From Edogawa to Miyazaki: cinematic and anime -ic architectures of early and late twentieth-century Japan

Abstract

The influence of Miyazaki Hayao,whose animated films consistently break Japanese film box-office records, and those of Japanese anime in general, is locatable within an increasingly global interest in new media - an interest that is accompanied by a sense that new media are inaugurating new modes of sociality. This is not altogether new: earlier in the twentieth century, for example, Edogawa Rampo depicted the onset of modern conditions in Japan in terms of filmic modes of orientation. This article assumes that both the early and late twentieth century are transformative eras - and, focusing first on an earlier twentieth-century story by Edogawa, and then the late twentieth-century work of Miyazaki (and other anime creators), it views the two eras as a relation between filmic and ' anime -ic' conditions. These conditions do have technical grounds; the article examines claims regarding privileged technologies (the analog versus the digital) and orientations supposedly constructed within these technologies (especially of perspectival depth versus surface 'flatness'). But I also argue that these conditions are systemic (including economic relations) and epistemic, and therefore part of more general shifts in the horizons of everyday life. Juxtaposing the two eras in this way provides a history of sorts, while it also allows for consideration of arguments that new media are somehow emancipatory.

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