Breath director: Jun Ichikawa producer: Motoki Ishida screenwriter: Jun Ichikawa cinematographer: Taishi Hirokawa art director: Yoshikazu Ichida editor: Tomoh Sanjo composer: Ryuichi Sakamoto duration: 76 minutes cast: Issei Ogata Rie Miyazawa Shinohara Takahumi year: 2004
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to raise a family, she demonstrates her essentially escapist nature. The film only departs from Murakami’s text towards the end when Tony makes an attempt to re reconnect with Hisako, reaching out from his solitude, but his phone call remains unanswered. Ichikawa leaves us thinking that it is not only our deliberate choices but the circumstances that we are living in that play a part in determining our destiny.
anime /
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Anime is a great buzzword but is quite imprecise when it comes to denoting a specific segment of Japanese cinema. The word ‘anime’ is just a truncation of the word ‘animation’ and, as such, when it is used in Japan, can refer to any kind of animation. However, when used by English-speakers, ‘anime’ is generally used specifically to refer to animation from Japan, usually of the hand-drawn variety (or at least appearing as such) that falls within a range of styles. For example, when Yamamura Koji’s Mt. Head was up for an Academy Award for best animated short film in 2003, it was relatively ignored by ‘anime’ fans. This linguistic haziness can certainly cause confu- sion when speaking about ‘anime’ with someone from Japan. For our current purposes, though, I will use the term as it is commonly used in English.
In the introduction to his book Animation and America (2002), animation scholar Paul Wells identifies the ‘ani- mated cartoon’ as one of America’s ‘four major indigenous art forms’. Although animation of course exists in many countries other than the United States, it was in the US that some of the earliest advances in the medium were made. The works of major American animators, especially those of Disney and the Fleischer brothers, have often been cited as formative and stylistic influences on the creators of Japanese comics and animation. Anime expert Helen McCarthy (2003) states that ‘[t]he American animated films of the period [before WWII] were not so far removed from the traditions of Japanese folk art, with their sense of the ridiculous, their gross exaggeration of physical characteristics for dramatic or comic purpose, their anthropomorphic animals and clean, simple lines, and their influences were readily absorbed.’ Japanese animation as a whole can be seen as the work of globalization in action – animators from Japan took ideas
and styles from abroad and created a product that reflects their own lifestyles and culture.
Japan is one of the world’s leading producers of film and television anima- tion. According to one source, anime accounts for over half of the animated films shown worldwide and in 2004 the anime market was estimated to be worth $4.2 billion in the United States alone. Part of the reason for anime turning to global markets has been out of sheer necessity. Japanese animation production companies that used to be able to cover the majority of the costs of produc- ing an animated television series through fees from broadcasters now gener- ally recoup less than half of their costs in this way; companies generally rely on selling branded merchandise and overseas sales to compensate for this. Toei Animation president Tsutomu Tomari has said that his company, which is Japan’s largest animation producer, ‘gets almost 40% of its revenues from abroad, and the percentage is growing every year’. Japanese television programmes are increasingly being seen on television systems around the globe and such prod- ucts are increasingly available for download on the internet as well. In particular, Japanese television is very popular throughout much of East and Southeast Asia.
The tension between the ‘Japanese’ and ‘global’ elements of anime have been with the form since its inception in the early part of the twentieth cen- tury. Daisuke Miyao’s 2002 Japan Forum article, ‘Before Anime: Animation and the Pure Film Movement in Pre-war Japan’, gives a brief account of the early antecedents of anime, which are located in the Pure Film Movement: a trend in Japan in the 1910s that tried to establish film as its own medium, as distinct from live theatrical drama. This move was a rejection of previous methods of Japanese cinematic communication in favour of American and European techniques. Imported animation was first shown in Japan in 1909, much of which was from France and served as models for subsequent Japanese experi- ments. Since efforts in animation were inherently non-theatrical, Miyao suggests that the early Japanese animators may have fulfilled the goals of the Pure Film Movement better than many of the live-action film-makers. However, there were debates over form and content of animation among some in the Movement due to the fact that one of its intended results was to bring Japanese film into line with other, global cinema. Miyao writes that, although some in the Movement ‘insisted on the necessity of Japanese stories and landscapes in order to dif- ferentiate the Japanese product for the foreign market, many opted nonetheless for subjects and stories that would be comprehensible to audiences accustomed to Western films.’ One can see in Japan, even at this early stage of animation, the tension between making a recognizably Japanese product and an easily- exportable global one.
Since that time, anime has gone back and forth between being made solely for a domestic audience and being made with international export in mind. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Japanese anime films like Saiyuki (1960, released in English as Alakazam the Great a year later) made their way outside of the country with animation studio Toei Douga’s goal of becoming ‘the Disney of the East’, and television anime like Astro Boy only cemented this trend. However, the late sixties and seventies saw less anime being exported until the 1980s, when Japanese studios began creating more work-for-hire shows for overseas products like Care Bears and Spider Man as well as having their original works exported with shows like Voltron (1985) and Robotech (1985).
Even so, there were still segments of the Japanese anime industry that did not realize that there was a market for Japanese animation outside of Japan until the 1990s or 2000s. One possible reason for this (or perhaps an outgrowth of
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it) is the common misperception that exists to this day that anime is either light fare for little kids or contains ultraviolence and sadistic sex. Both types of anime certainly do exist, although the innocuous shows and films for children greatly outnumber the sex-and-violence ones. The fact that both types of anime exist is a testament to the breadth that anime encompasses and anime has a wide demographic of viewers and fans. There exists sports anime, cooking anime, mahjong anime, domestic romance anime, and all styles in between (although some genres of anime shows and films tend to be exported more readily than others.)
Anime is also a remarkable medium in which a director can develop his style (there are still, unfortunately, few female anime directors). One of the benefits of working in animation is that the form provides one with a kind of control that is unprecedented in live-action film-making. Since whole worlds are created from scratch in anime, even the smallest included detail must be intentional to a greater or lesser degree. This provides the opportunity for auteur anime directors like Hayao Miyazaki, Mamoru Oshii, and Satoshi Kon to create unified bodies of work.
Of these directors, Miyazaki and his Studio Ghibli are certainly the most renowned of the bunch. Perhaps due to the fact that ‘anime’ has become an international buzzword for a style of animated cinema and has even been actively promoted by the Japanese government, Miyazaki tends to shy away from the ‘anime’ label in Japan. He has famously called his work ‘manga eiga’, (‘comics films’) a term that places his films in the continuity of the earlier ani- mated films that were around before the term anime became the term of choice. Miyazaki’s approach to film-making is very much grounded in the artistry of ani- mation, which makes sense given Miyazaki’s background as an animator who has worked his way up through the ranks. A film-maker like Oshii, on the other hand, is much more of a traditional director in that he himself is not an animator. Such approaches to their respective oeuvres could explain why Miyazaki has produced mostly animated films and some manga, while Oshii’s body of work contains both animated and live-action films, documentaries, novels, manga (which he has written but not drawn), and a stage play. With advances in technology, the anime film is becoming a more auteur-oriented art form since more work can be done by fewer people. One particular case in point is a director like Makoto Shinkai, whose films like Voices of a Distant Star (2002), The Place Promised in
Our Early Days (2004), and 5 Centimeters per Second (2007) were acts of indi-
vidual creative expression as Shinkai performed much of the direction, writing, editing and animation by himself.
Animation has been a part of the Japanese cinema for nearly one hundred years, and will probably become a greater part of the global cultural landscape. At this writing, anime has hit something of a peak and is starting to show a decreased presence on television and on store shelves. However, this seems more like a market correction than an abandonment of the animated form. Increasingly, mainstream Hollywood films have found anime to be a rich source of themes and visual cues for their own films. Many Hollywood remakes of anime films are currently planned or are in production, for better or for worse. Regard- less of the quality of these films, how they perform at the box office, or if they are even produced, anime (and animation in general) will always be a part of the global conversation about cinema.