Dr. Stevie Swan (30:35)
Okay, thank you for that question. Let me kind of look at give a broader overview on this. And it might come across first as me going on a bit of a tangent, but I promise you I'll come back to all these questions. So first, I think that it's important to recognize the different forms of transnationality that are at play here. And so I'll start with the first one, which is I would call local global tensions. And these are, or some of them I described just before in terms of, for instance, the shift in the naming con conventions or the way that the kind of promotion of different localized places are spurred on by the increased global presence of, of of anime. But I think the it might not be initially apparent as to why there's this type of local global tension, because I think outside of Japan, but maybe even in Japan as well, they're going to look at anime and be like, oh, there's no tension Here, anime is Japanese. This is Japanese culture. But I think actually that's precisely the moment where the tension maybe is revealed, isn't the right word, but perhaps is actually tapered over or maybe even hidden might be a better way to say the opposite. In that anime is so globally known that people can recognize it and then not just recognize it, presume to know its origin. So in that moment, we see this tension of anime as, oh, it's Japanese, but I'm looking at it in Hawaii or Spain or Sri Lanka or wherever you want to talk about. You know, it's got this global presence, but we presume that it's still Japanese. And even if this consumption and in some cases production has gone on for decades, it's still Japanese. And that's the tension there that I think is perhaps the most accepted way of thinking about anime's globality, that it's somehow both local, but really actually it's just Japanese. And this is, I think, one way to conceptualize anime's globalization. But I wanted to think of, well, are there other ways to think about it? So that brings me to the second way. And this would be what I'm calling a centralized transnationality, or centralized transnational network, I think would be more accurate. And here, in the case of anime's production, I think this type of transnationality comes to the foreground most clearly. So here, Tokyo takes on a very privileged position. The vast majority of anime studios are in Tokyo. And usually the way the production works is there's a central studio and they are kind of tasked with creating this anime. And because anime is a very difficult business and it costs a lot to make and the margins are razor thin and people are overworked and underpaid, they outsource a lot of the work. And there's a ton of animators. Significant portion of the industry a few years ago was something like 80% of the industry, which are freelancers. And then there's also other studios, some of them larger, some of them smaller, that will take the extra work or other parts of the work in at different times. Now, some of these studios are in Japan, but there's also a massive number of them that are outside of Japan and largely in Asia, in places like Seoul, Shanghai, Manila, Ho Chi Minh City. There are a lot of these particular studios which are. Are. Are contributing to anime's production. So historically, anime grew out of what's called celluloid animation, where you have these. In these. These thin, clear layers of celluloid that different pieces are painted in different areas and they're composited into a single image and manipulated and then composite into a different image. And that's how we get the different frames of anime. And so layering is very important for anime. And even in the digital era where people aren't using celluloid anymore, there's. The layers are kind of baked into this production process. This also makes outsourcing pretty easy because a different person can work on a different layer in a different place and that's totally acceptable. So this is how it works within Japan, but also outside of Japan. Different parts of the production process are done in different place. But that also means that each anime and each episode could have a different configuration of locations, and those aren't always inside Japan. So for instance, in the book I talk about one particular episode which had parts of it done in Japan, parts done in the Philippines, Vietnam and China. So you have in one episode five different places making the different frames that we see or parts of the different frames that we see in the anime. So when I say anime has this a type of multi layered transnationality in some cases, I mean it quite literally that there's multiple layers of transnationality in anime. And this has been going on since the 1960s. And I think a lot of the time the discussions are that the people who are making these, these works outside of Japan are kind of quote unquote, simply following Japanese orders. But this I think is a. Is not quite accurate to the actual production processes. It's not just directors that have the entire agency about what to do for everything in the anime production. But, you know, animators have leeway to interpret the storyboards that they're given, which, you know, they can make certain changes to the image. Of course, the image is like really, really small and they have to make it quite big anyway. So they're always a process of interpretation. And what I wanted to bring to the foreground is returning the agency to these really overworked and underpaid animators both inside and outside of Japan, and show their participation in this transnational performance. So these are very skilled laborers. And in fact some of the studios that are anime is outsourced to, they work exclusively on anime, despite the fact that places like Seoul is a major hub for outsourced animation from, you know, studios that are located in the US and Europe as well. These studios there, they, they really focus on, on anime. And the other important part for me is that, you know, the, the very images that you're seeing on the screen are those are the things made by these, these animators. So you know, they're, they're actively participating in this anime production process. So just to kind of bring this back to the notion of transnationality, this is a very specific form of transnationality where there's a centralized network with a very powerful center. And in this case it's Tokyo. And that all the other nodes that the work is sent out to, they're also sending work back that we see in the final images. Now in order for any of this to work, you have to engage with what I was saying is the anime ask. These are skilled laborers. They have to know and be able to perform form the repetitions, the citations of what we expect of anime, the anime ask, this very particular style of producing anime. So because the anime ask is always a, you know, copying of other anime, to put it very kind of crudely, it's always has to do this because it has to make itself recognizable as this particular category of media. So, so here this is a really, this is a kind of not, not really like a direct copy of another work, but a kind of broad repetition or referencing of other examples, like I said before, things like character designs or facial expressions, styles of animation, things like that. A certain reperformance of these patterns. And as I was saying before, the anime s depends on these repetitions. And each repetition then is always referencing previous ones. Meaning that there's a kind of network here of references, but it's not centralized in one particular place like Tokyo is. It's. It's decentralized. And all these iterations, all these repetitions of references are linking to each of those other references. And since the collab anime production is generally collaborative and multi layered and has been happening for decades, then what the general references are are always already these kind of mixed things in the first place. So each iteration, each performance of this anime esque thing connects to this huge vast network of connections and prior iterations that occur across borders. And this is much harder to locate or pin down into one locale, like kind of inside or outside of Japan. And this is the third type of transnationality, this decentralized network which is in many ways open to traveling, but very rigid in the fact that you have to stay within the confines of what is already recognizable as an anime esque pattern. So in some ways the proof of the effectiveness of these animators to participate in anime's production is that the animators outside of Japan who've been producing anime for decades, they're clearly able to to create the anime esque because there nobody's ever commented on this, they just presume that this is is Japanese. So in a weird way, this anime esque performance both enables but also hides the transnationality of anime's production. Because the anime esque is so associated with Japan that if it's a very well done performance that is something that shouldn't be commented on, then it, it technically passes as Japanese even though it's been produced transnationally. So all three of these forms of transnationality are operating together with anime at once. So you have the decentralized transnationality of these anime esque conventions which enables the transnational labor. And all this is centralized within Tokyo as the privileged center and a standard production process. And because Tokyo is located within Japan, it allows an easier sense of associating anime with Japan as this product from Japan which is exported and gone globalized. So that's then where this local global dynamic pops in as well. So I'm sorry, this is again quite a bit of a long explanation, but I promise I'll come back to the, to the point the question here. So for me, if you know anime is this decentralized, the anime ask is this decentralized thing. People who live outside of Japan and have been watching anime for decades and sometimes even making anime for decades, it makes perfect sense that they're going to start making their own works much more or centralized much more locally. So a lot of these anime that are increasing in number, that are made largely outside of Japan, they're also transnational. But their, their kind of central node isn't Tokyo. It would be for instance, someplace like Shanghai, for instance. So this then connects to the local global dynamic because there's this notion of anime and the anime ask as this Japanese thing. And so for it to be seen as authentic, it tends to have to have some association with Japan. So for instance, if a work is centrally produced in Shanghai, it may get a Japanese language dub to then get an association with Japan in kind of some way. But from a formal perspective, they're doing the same things that so called anime proper or anime that people think of as coming from Japan do. You know, they're just repeating the anime esque patterns. So what happens is because of this emphasis on the local global, this kind of local global or like authentication of anime in relationship to Japan, these works that are made outside of Japan have this real difficult bind. Any work that is perceived as being quote unquote Japanese, they can do whatever they want to the anime esque form. And everyone's like oh, that's anime just by its by definition of being related to Japan. But these works that are open about their transnationality, they get overly scrutinized. So they're either, okay, well there, let's say they want to innovate on the anime esque or get or kind of deviate from those patterns. Then people are gonna say, oh, it's not anime enough. It's, it's, it's, it's clearly not doing what, you know, the standard anime esque is. But if they adhere to it and do it really well, then people are gonna say oh no, they're just simply copying Japanese culture. So they're in this real bind here. Despite the fact that most anime that people think are Japanese are themselves transnationally produced and themselves also again, quote unquote, copying the anime esque. So how this all gets negotiated in the future, you know, I can't, I can't predict that. But my, I guess, my, my, my guess is that the heavy association with Japan isn't going to go away for a while. Even if the anime ask tends, you know, changes, which is inevitable, the centralization of Tokyo will definitely continue. And this doesn't mean that it's going to. This is again one of the reasons the centralization is an important point, because it doesn't mean that this is exclusively quote, unquote, ethnically Japanese and that there's a lot of people who are not ethnically Japanese who move to Tokyo, sometimes even founding studios here and participate in the industry at multiple levels, you know, sometimes very high levels in the industry. So this is, I think, going to continue for some time. But there may be other centers that pop up. I think Shanghai is probably the best guess for that moving forward as another kind of center. And that might also be connected to a broader shift in a type of regional understanding of what anime could be thinking about how the various laborers contribute and participate in this and are linked with one another through these decentralized iterations of the anime esque. And I also want to want to point out here that this type of regionalization is not the standard regionalization that we might think of where it's internally homogeneous. I wouldn't go that far. I focused mainly on Asian labor in, in my research. But this shouldn't be considered a type of evenly dispersed network. So most of these animators are operating in major cities. And so you have connections between, let's say like Seoul and Shanghai and Manila. But there are places, you know, outside of those areas that aren't necessarily involved in these production networks or places in, in Asia like Sri Lanka for instance, that have no animators or involved or not involved in production, even though there are fans there. And increasingly there are animators from Europe and the US which are participating in anime production. So all of these are going largely unnoticed. And so I think it, you know, speaks to the fact that the performers in these different locales have the capacity to successfully enact the anime esque and they've been doing so for decades.
