From kino-eye to anime -eye/ ai : the filmed and the animated in Imamura Taihei's media theory

Abstract

As a contribution to the new critical work on animation and new media, this article re-animates the forgotten Japanese philosopher of media Imamura Taihei. Imamura'swork of the late 1930s and 1940s is not only the first attempt in Japanese to conceptualize the difference between film and animation, but his two major works Theory of Animation (1948) and Theory of Documentary Film (1940) represent the earliest philosophical attempt to think through the difference between film and animation in any language. Tracking Imamura's deployment of the notion of the filmed and the animated through these two books, I attempt to demonstrate the utility of these concepts for contemporary understandings of digital phenomena of all kinds. Imamura's analysis advances current understanding of visual media in that he shows the ways in which filmed and animated images are immanent to shifts in capitalism. In so doing, he provides a framework that, with just a small upgrade, can be redeployed to configure the visual logics of the so-called new economy and e-commerce. Finally, although Imamura reads animation as in some sense epiphenomenal to Fordism and Taylorism, he also provides critical maps and escape routes from these capitalist techniques by arguing that animation points to utopian possibilities beyond and between regimes that demand the extraction of surplus from disciplined, laboring bodies.

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