Thomas Lamarre, The Anime Ecology: A Genealogy Of Television, Animation

New Voices
in Japanese Studies
Volume 12
© The Japan Foundation, Sydney, 2020

Anime studies has been a site of growing scholarly attention since the tardily 20th century, when Japanese animation became widely relished across the earth. In Japan, scholars such as Eiji Ōtsuka and Tamaki Saitō have looked at how anime reflects or reshapes contemporary social and cultural landscapes. In anglophone scholarship, anime studies was a subfield in Japanese studies or media studies until recent decades, when scholars such every bit Thomas Lamarre, Susan J. Napier and Marc Steinberg began making inspiring contributions to establish it equally a challenging and stimulating new bookish field.

The Anime Ecology: A Genealogy of Tv set, Animation, and Game Media (2018) is Thomas Lamarre's 2nd book on anime studies. Information technology examines how anime intersects and interacts with television and game media in the context of Japan. Seeking to understand the massive and complex transformations in television over contempo decades, Lamarre proposes using animation as a starting betoken to map out a rigorous and complex history of boob tube, the notion of which spans "platforms, content, infrastructures, as well as modes of reception, transmission, production, and serialization" (3). Lamarre eschews the mail-tv perspective adopted by some scholars from N America and Europe who emphasise the decline or discontinuity of boob tube as a media platform. Drawing on Raymond Williams' television studies too as philosophers such every bit Deleuze and Guattari, Lamarre offers a theoretical approach to addressing the productive aspects of tv's distribution within the framework of a media ecology. His analysis reveals possibilities for television set, animation and game media to interconnect synergistically with diverse cultures and disciplines, uniting cultural studies and science and challenging them to delineate a more nuanced pic of the transformations and furnishings of the media mix.

A major business organization of this book is how television "works through and acts with blitheness" (9), or more than specifically, Japanese animation, which is "ordinarily particularized and grouped under the loose heading 'anime'" (Lamarre 2009, ix). The book is divided into three parts. In Part 1, Lamarre uses the Pokémon incident equally a springboard to interrogate the furnishings of tv and animation on viewers. The Pokémon incident was an event that took place on December sixteen, 1997, when approximately 700 children across Japan experienced epileptiform seizures later watching an episode of the blithe series Pokémon. Neurologists traced the cause of this incident to a 12-hertz scarlet-blue flicker displayed during the programme. However, Lamarre cautions that it might be premature to explain the incident based on neuroscientific findings solitary, or to describe the determination that television set and screen media alone cause encephalon damage or trigger habit. He argues that neurological studies which attempt to reveal how the man brain is afflicted by television and other screen-based media fail to address the circuitous outcome of how homo activities or cultures alter and are modified past the media mix. Over the class of Function 1, Lamarre illustrates this by articulating that television, animation and game media do not but belong to the realm of technology; they are "technosocial assembling" (7), where social and cultural values mingle and cooperate with technology. As Due north. Katherine Hayles reminds united states of america, humans and technologies are "undergoing coordinated transformations" (Hayles 2012, 81); this has seen a blurring and merging of their corresponding boundaries, the implications of which are still coming to light and are still to be fully understood. In line with this, Lamarre suggests that the Pokémon incident may be symptomatic of more complex interactions than whatever single field of study can explain.

Lamarre furthers the discussion of the "transmedial dimensions" (116) of television in Part two, turning his gaze over again to Japan. Recalling how the imperial wedding between then Crown Prince Akihito and Michiko Shōda in 1959 boosted sales of television sets, Lamarre reminds his readers how television sets and broadcasting were used as a manner of unifying Nippon and rebuilding its image domestically after its defeat in World War II. He argues that the intensive edifice of television infrastructure after the 1950s produced "Japaneseness" by "bringing people throughout Japan into the same homogeneous temporality" (127). A "1-to-many" (35) distributive mode was thus established in Nihon with the centralisation and nationalisation of goggle box broadcasting. Notwithstanding, Lamarre seeks to disrupt the common conception of the "i to many" mode as monolithic. He gives the example of how television programs target different audiences in dissimilar time slots, showing that tv broadcasting also manifests the 'bespeak-to-signal' tendency which is considered a distinct feature of new media past scholars who fence that boob tube has been subsumed by new media. Lamarre further shows that plug-in devices such every bit VCRs, DVDs and home video game consoles, along with animated contents and characters, have transformed goggle box into a more segmented, individualised and privatised media platform. Television, he argues, is non being replaced past new media but is instead becoming a powerful part of new media.

In the 3rd and final function of the book, Lamarre scrutinises the psychological relationship that viewers and players take with television receiver equally a platform in their encounters with animation and video games. The interrelation between anime and television contributes to a phenomenon of what Lamarre calls "platformativity." Co-ordinate to his definition, platformativity describes the state where anime characters and tv media interact with viewers, users and players. Lamarre demonstrates this miracle by examining four household television media systems, or 'media ecologies': 'The Family unit Broadcast Complex', 'The Home Theatre Complex', 'The Game Play Complex' and 'The Portable Interface Complex'. Through these example studies, he shows that telly blitheness'south "production of distribution" (211) has been creating an immersive individualised space where viewers and players are absorbed and transformed into characters. This increasing immersivity, he argues, has fuelled the growing phenomenon of media addiction. Lamarre insists that we should contemplate the profound effects that idiot box blitheness and game media might be having on users as they increasingly "bear on behave in existent world" (343) due to mass production resulting from capitalistic drive. He calls for a rethink of media addiction every bit something more complex than an private neurophysiological response to stimulus. He urges for more interdisciplinary assay of how and why television blitheness and game media have been produced in lodge to permit consumers immerse—or fifty-fifty lose— themselves in this environs, with the ultimate aim of meliorate understanding the implications for users.

Lamarre brings a tight focus to a wide range of related perspectives, from the neurological and biological sciences to the humanities and social sciences. This volume's rigorous engagement with Japanese boob tube and animation makes information technology a footing-breaking contribution to Japanese studies. Scholars and students who are interested in manga, animation and other aspects of Japanese popular culture will notice The Anime Ecology more than satisfactory. It will also be of smashing benefit to audiences in the fields of television and movie house studies, new media studies, culture studies and social studies.

REFERENCES

Hayles, Northward. K. 2012. How We Remember: Digital Media and Gimmicky Technogenesis. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226321370.001.0001.

Lamarre, Thomas. 2009. The Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Printing.

Jindan Ni

RMIT University

Jindan Ni is a Chinese lecturer in Global and Language Studies at RMIT University, and has worked in the areas of Japanese classical literature, comparative literature and Chinese literature. She received a PhD in Comparative Literature from La Trobe University in 2017 and has published academic papers in Translation Studies, Japanese Literature and Comparative Literature. Her forthcoming monographThe Tale of Genji and its Chinese Precursors: Beyond the Boundaries of Nation, Course and Gender studies transnational literary practices in the premodern Sinographic sphere. She is also an active translator who has translated books from Japanese and English to Chinese.

(August 2020)