Manga! Anime! Matrix!

Manga! Anime! Matrix! is a critical analysis on the influence of the Eastern tradition of storytelling using images on the Western tradition of the written word. The intersection between the two and the idea of simultaneity which we find in modern film today is the crux of this essay. This essay was written in 2014 and served as my major work for my Higher School Certificate in Australia.

Abstract

The focus of this paper is on Japanese Manga as narrative expression and on the ways the West was influenced by post-war developments in Manga and Anime, leading to simultaneity of imaginative participation, sensual experience and intellectual understanding. As this topic is very broad, it also requires a broad canvas and in attempting to do it justice without a confusion of ideas and texts, this paper will consider a number of texts rather than attempt deep analysis of one or two texts, but it will confine that selection to the dystopian genre.

The Good Stuff!

This paper is not about semantics or poetics nor does it attempt a postmodernist approach to its subject. The simple contention of my investigation is that narratives seek imaginative engagement with their audience with the ultimate — and probable impossible — goal of creating simultaneity — simultaneity of imaginative participation, sensual experience and intellectual understanding. In doing so, Western literature has developed a plethora of literacy conventions that not only capture something of the emotional potential of oral storytelling but, in the written form, can raise the simple narrative to an art form capable of reaching beyond the text itself to provoke, to make biting social comment or to explore depths of philosophical musings. Gulliver’s Travels, Animal Farm or Brave New World come to mind in this context. But, looked at a cultural product, Western literature is not the only way towards the goal of imaginative immersion and simultaneity. Japanese Manga, and later Anime, can likewise make claim to the status of an art form that parallels, albeit differently, the drive of Western literature towards simultaneity of ideas and experience.

The focus of this paper is on Japanese Manga as narrative expression and on the ways the West was influenced by post-war developments in Manga and Anime. This is a broad topic that necessarily requires a broad canvas. However, in attempting to do it justice, this paper will consider a number of texts rather than attempt deep analysis of one or two texts, but it will confine that selection to the dystopian genre.

Outside of Japan, particularly in the Western world, the word “Manga” has developed two different meanings. One characterises “Manga” and the industry surrounding it as Japanese “comics”, socio-cultural objects, and the other, assigning it a literary context. Understood in this way, “Manga” is a visual language with a distinctive visual vocabulary and visual narrative conventions. Since the conflation of these two meanings can be confusing and inappropriate, in this paper the term Manga will be used to designate a socio-cultural object, while the system of graphic expression and cinematic techniques in Manga will be referred to as ‘Japanese Visual Language”[i] (JVL).

Arguably, it was the Hiroshima experience, translated into various dystopian narratives in Japanese Manga of the post WWII period that formed the significant link between East and West. Hollywood has embraced the potential for simultaneity offered by Manga and Anime in its mass release products, particularly in animated features. Although the drivers may have been globalization and the spread of youth culture, in many ways this is a natural transition. The symbolism encoded into line, combined with the panel-to-panel narrative transitions of Manga blend easily into techniques of mis-en-scene and editing in Western film. In these genres, there is a natural fit between the expressive visual codes of Japanese Manga and the visual codes of Hollywood narrative, particularly in the sci-fi and fantasy genres. Moreover, what Manga offered Hollywood was not only exotica but also a way of exploiting the potential of visual language in animation. Of course not all films or all Manga narratives succeed in the achieving that elusive Nirvana — creating simultaneously provocation, immersion and emotional engagement. But there are moments in the best, which do achieve the simultaneous fusion of ways of seeing, ways of experiencing, ways of feeling and ways of knowing.

Whether in the Western or Japanese modes, dystopian literature is a potent vehicle for criticising existing social conditions and political systems. While imagined utopias have always been the subject of our fantasies and of the simplest of oral tales, it is the appeal of the narrative that carries the philosophy rather than the opposite. It is a moot point whether Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) for example, is to be read as a wishful Utopian vision or a disguised critique of his own society. Regardless of purpose, More takes a huge step away from the abstractions of philosophy towards simultaneous immersion and intellectual provocation through narrative detail. By the time we get to Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), the surface tale of narrator who has visited new and amazing worlds only thinly overs a political and philosophical satire. Superficially an adventure tale, Gulliver’s first person narration and point of view act as a filter for subversive parody. Virtually every character is a symbol for a person or idea but grounded and made real through very detailed description of customs. And it is this — the emotional pull of an adventure tale and Swift’s vivid description of society and government in these imagined places — that has intrigued audiences over the long-term.

Jump forward to 1932, to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and this is still the case. Even though there is an element of parody in Huxley’s use of multiple literary modes ranging from lecture at the beginning of the novel to the central debate between the World Controller and John Savage, it is still the chilling detail of the hatcheries and Pavlovian conditioning in the nurseries that unleashes the dystopian discourse.

The written word can do amazing things. It can probe the psychological. It can communicate through metaphor, symbolism and precise detail. It can lull and prod, explore and propose. It allows access to thoughts and motivations. But until abstractions become grounded in detail, there is only so much of the word we can take.

*****

The primacy given to the written word is typically a Western cultural tradition rather than a universal approach to communication. In the east, in China, India and Japan there is a long history of shared literature and cross-fertilization in multiple genres. In Japan, particularly in the Edo period, genres including horror, crime stories, morality stories, comedy, and pornography all flourished — often accompanied by colourful woodcut prints. However, developing from 13th century illustrated scrolls through to 19th century woodcuts, the visual had an equally significant place in Japanese literary production. Just as Western literature developed different literary conventions in response to different historical contexts, so too did Japanese literature. But where Japanese and Western diverged was in the fact that the Japanese form of the narrative relied on visual rather than syntactic sequence. Certainly there are limitations to this way of storytelling just as there were inherent limitations to Western literature’s ability to create multilayered insolvent, but the Japanese form had the advantage of simultaneity showing as well as telling.

However, a key question for the West revolves around whether Manga should be understood as Art or Literature — whether the development of Manga is a Japanese version of a search for simultaneity that parallels development to that of Western literature.

The answers to those questions depend on how Manga is understood and whether or not one considers visual language and the literature it creates as ‘language’ and ‘literature’. For comic theorist Neil Cohn there can be no doubt that the system of graphic expression and cinematic techniques that defines Manga is in fact “Japanese Visual Language” or “JVL” a term he uses (and which this paper follows) to distinguish between Manga as a cultural product and Manga as a living language with the subtleties that the West ascribes only to the written form. A considerable body of scholarly opinion in both Japan and the West is inclined to answer ‘yes’ to these questions. Many scholars interpret Manga as a medium as a very specific visual language read in much the same way words are read in the West. One of the first Americans scholars to write about Manga, Frederik Schodt, observed it’s unique style and determined that:[ii]

“Manga are merely another ‘language,’ and the panels and pages are but another type of ‘words’ adhering to a unique grammar” (Schodt 1996)

Roy Fox in Images in Language, Media, and Mind further notes that:

“Language and images are inextricably linked — in how we generate them, how we make meaning from them, how we use them, and how we remember them” (Fox 1994)

Moreover, the celebrated and acknowledged “Father of Manga” Osamu Tezuka commented on this process by stating,

“I don’t consider them pictures… in reality I’m not drawing, I’m writing a story with a unique type of symbol” (Schodt 1983).

Despite its long cultural pedigree in Japan and even despite its obvious ability to show and tell simultaneously, Western discourse has for many years regarded Manga as little more than an exotic annex to Western comics where written narrative was often the key to understanding the visual. By contrast, the Japanese public and Manga artists often describe Western comics as too ‘wordy’ or ‘literary’, a form in which the image illustrates rather than communicates in its own right with its own lexical and grammatical rules. To ‘read’ Manga is to read the images.

In fact, reading Manga is made possible through the elimination of textual information combined with a rhythm determined by the panel-to-panel sequence of images, a situation that parallels the shots in a cinematic sequence.

According to the seminal work of comic theorist Scott McCloud, this means that the image is not read in isolation but in conjunction with others as part the flow of narrative information. Scott McCloud was first to analyse visual structures in Manga and hypothesise that sequential meaning could be derived from the linear relationship between panels and in doing so, the differences in relationships between panels was grouped into panel-to-panel categories that comprise the grammar of JVL. The types of panel-to-panel transitions included (McCloud 1993):

1. Moment-to-moment — show a short amount of time passing
2. Action-to-action — show a whole action occurring
3. Subject-to-subject — show a shift from character to character
4. Scene-to-scene — shift between two different environments
5. Aspect-to-aspect — step outside of time to show aspects of the environment
6. Non-sequitur — have no logical relationship between panels

When McCloud established these different categories, he analysed a variety of works (Manga and Western Comics) to determine what types of transitions were used. McCloud suggested that the most abundant categories that influence and differentiate Manga from Western comics are moment-to-moment and aspect-to-aspect scenes. These two aspects appear absent in the majority of Western work and according to McCloud seem to be what sets Manga apart (See figures 2&3 in Appendix). Thus McCloud maintains that, although individual images can convey a great deal of information, as a passage in a novel can, the real power of words and images alike comes from its sequence, its narrative — combing multiple images to create a cohesive meaning greater than the isolated images alone.[iii] As in written literature, the system that accomplishes this is the grammar of language. Just as we use literary techniques to create meaning beyond the single word or phrase, JVL draws on its sequence as much as verbal and written ones do.

In arriving at his conclusions about how visual language works in Manga, McCloud concluded that even though Manga is read from right-to-left, the opposite of Western comics and literature, this aspect of sequence is negligible in the creation of meaning. McCloud suggested that the most abundant categories that influence and differentiate Manga from Western comics are moment-to-moment and aspect-to-aspect scenes and as previously stated appear absent in the majority of Western work. However, perhaps his most profound insight — and the one most influential for ongoing work — was that understanding visual grammar is grounded in understanding how content is transmitted to readers and that it is through the sequence of images, not the image itself nor whether the sequences are organised from right-to-left or vice versa.

That is not to say that the line content of the image in unimportant — just that it has a different functions. The narrative and drawing style examines the psychology of characters through moment-to-moment and aspect-to-aspect scenes. Japanese Manga very early on explored and endorsed using human characters, and over time character’s psychology became a major component of narrative structure and development. While American comic books still consistently used a high degree of action-to-action, subject-to-subject, and scene-to-scene transitions, it was the moment-moment and high number of aspect-to-aspect transitions that were absent in American comics and that limited American comics’ ability to highlight the psychological aspects in narrative.

There is a strong case to be made for the benefits derived from the simultaneity of comprehension and visual processing in reading Manga. Studies[iv] have shown reading Manga also seems to have a positive effect on education as well. Amongst Japanese students proficiency in Manga comprehension has a positive correlation in language arts as well as a heightened interest in language arts and social studies. However, this is to be expected when Manga, the socio-cultural object is being written in a visual language, JVL. In essence, it shows that “Japanese Visual Language” is actually a form of ‘writing’, just as Western literature is, the difference being that Manga is presented in a culturally determined graphic form.

Ultimately however, both the written word and (similarly) images have limitations — just as in Western literature we have to understand how to see the discourse in novels through traditional literary conventions, we have to understand the various meanings encoded in the image in Manga. Like in the Western literature, where present anxieties were projected into a future society, Japan responds very strongly to the lingering psychological trauma of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It wasn’t until after World War II that the string of events that altered history forever really began to influence culture and the context of dystopian writing and imagery, and audiences sought simultaneity. Simultaneity between the word and the image, where audiences could finally see and imaginatively experience rather than understand and conceptually experience. This is the limitation both the word and the image have, but the intersection between the two is a step towards this simultaneity we seek as an audience.

This new communicative form demands the word with the image, and we see the flow of the image-based culture into the West with Astro Boy. As already noted, the flow of the image to the West is not just because of globalisation and youth culture, but Japanese Manga/Anime has provided the so-far elusive link between discourse in the written word and the simultaneity of image and discourse. Then the development of dystopia in Manga and the complimentary trend — dystopia sees a transpacific economic and cultural transnationalism that created a postmodern and shared international youth culture of cartooning, film, television, music, and related popular arts, which was, for Atsumi the crucible in which modern Manga have developed (Takayami Atsumi).

Dystopia in the image parallels the influence of the context of Post World War II Japan, specifically in Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira (1998) and Osamu Tezuka’s Testsuwan Atom (Astro Boy) (1963). Japanese imagery as a medium reflected the products of human engineering and innovation that has created a sense of uneasiness and anxiety amongst the people it affects. This anxiety was present in several Manga works and became the foundation for the rise of dystopian Anime.

Manga was a Japanese artform that existed since the 19th century, comprised of “random or whimsical pictures” developed from woodblock printed books and was very important in Japanese militarism in the 1930’s. It wasn’t until Post WWII that the Manga industry saw a rise in popularity with Osamu Tezuka’s work and then again Manga in the 1960’s and 1970’s took a step towards realism allowing Manga to steadily become a major part of the Japanese publishing industry. Manga became largely popular and characterised by Osamu Tezuka’s depiction of big eyes, small mouth and a schema that has been recognised as a “standard” dialect, to examining the graphic emblems that form Manga’s conventional visual vocabulary or narrative.

It wasn’t until the 1950’s and onwards that Japan’s anxieties began to overshadow artistic creation due to the devastation of their homeland, and so Japanese authors and directors turned Manga into a new artform, a visual medium that picked up on the major dystopian elements that existed in early Manga and predominantly Western novels. Reading dystopian novels is uneasy and threatening, however, Japan saw a way to emphasise this further through the visual cortex; what people see really sticks with them, and so, to show the world of the horror they experienced, in the 1970’s came the birth of dystopian Anime.

The similarities and intersection between Western narrative and “Japanese Visual Language” paved the way for ground breaking Anime works. Japanese dystopian cyberpunk Anime Blame! (1998) created by the Tsutomu Nihei, 20th Century Boys (1999) by Naoki Urasawa and finally Appleseed (1985) by Masamune Shirow are all prolific in creating simultaneity between narrative structure in Western literature and visual structures in Manga into Anime. However there are two key texts pertaining to this topic that have superimposed on the visual codes of Hollywood dystopian, sci-fi and fantasy film through visual characteristics and expressive visual codes in Anime — Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost In The Shell (1995) and Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira (1988).

Following the bombing in Japan during World War II, the rise of dystopian elements in Anime was prolific, and so many critics regard Akira as a landmark Anime film, one that influenced much of the art in the Anime world that followed its release with many illustrators in the Manga industry citing the film as an important influence. The film led the way for the growth of popularity of Anime outside of Japan. Akira is considered a forerunner of the second wave of Anime fandom that began in the early 1990s and has gained a massive cult following since then. Akira has also been cited as a major influence on live-action films ranging from The Matrix to Chronicle.

The adaptation of Akira from the Manga into the Anime is regarded by Otomo as truly delivering what he believes to be the most poignant themes of his original work, translating the image and narrative structure in panel transitioning in Manga into the intersection with visual and audio conventions. The intersection between image, visual and audio conventions in Akira was the first step to achieving this simultaneity we as an audience desire and find entrancing. Susan Napier argues that because Akira deals with an apocalyptic setting, as does Neon Genesis Evangelion, it is in a good position to critique and explore problems of contemporary society (Napier 2001).[v] Napier identifies a number of themes within Akira that discuss the problems associated with contemporary society. The apocalyptic mode explicitly criticises the portrayed society and warns about future directions of contemporary development. She further shows that the reasons for the depicted future society that Otomo has created are related to human transgression, the misuse of technology, caused by the abrogation of traditional and conventional social values.

When examining and analysing Akira it is important to bear these themes in mind because the Anime uses its mode to convey message and content through the simultaneity of images, visual and audio conventions, characters and its inherent critique on contemporary Japanese development.

The Japanese Hiroshima experience, translated into the various Anime narratives, and the post WWII period formed significant links between East and West in terms of coming to a crossover of different communicative forms and taking another step closer to achieving simultaneity.

In an era where information, technology and CGI spawns new forms of media at an exponential rate, it becomes increasingly difficult to keep up with the development of intertextuality among Anime and Western movies, but scholars have managed to point out the aesthetic and visual links between Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost In The Shell (1995) and the Wachowski brothers’ The Matrix (1999). Executive producer Joel Silver further made a comment on The Wachowski brothers’ inspiration from Japanese Anime commenting:

“The Wachowski brother’s opened my eyes to it, they showed me Ghost In The Shell and they showed me what they wanted to do with that type of action and photography and try to make it with real people, with real actors and create a hybrid” (Joel Silver)

As paralleled in Ghost In The Shell the mise-en-scene of The Matrix displays a strong sense of metaphor throughout the film; many effective elements of mise-en-scene are illustrated in the “white room” scene in The Matrix, in which only minimal setting, costume, and staging are used in a very effective way. The bleak white background, anachronistic setting accompanied by the famous green and black costumes reinforce the empty and artificial world of the matrix. Its deliberate mix of surreal setting, artificiality and familiarity effectively underlines Morpheus’s explanation of the fake nature of “reality” that Neo had previously known and lived in. To continue this metaphor of a surreal and artificial lifestyle inside of the matrix throughout the film, whenever the characters are inside the matrix, the characteristic green and black clothing and dark glasses all imbue the scene with a sense of unreality and surrealism. This questioning of reality is a pervasive theme throughout contemporary Japanese Anime, suggesting it had a strong influence on the Wachowski brothers.

Furthermore, the visual style of The Matrix draws on Japanese Anime’s traditions, specifically Ghost In The Shell. These stylistic elements take from the mise-en-scene of Anime, including framing, lighting and with an emphasis on violence. The bulk of the film involved a very specific Anime trope of a savouring anticipation before violence erupts. Carlo McCormick[vi], art critic and pop culture historian says that:

“One of the delicious tropes of Anime, which I think is a direct influence on the matrix, is this savouring anticipation before the violence erupts. You get this kind of freeze frame and actionless pause right before there’s often extreme violence or a moment of great action.” (McCormick)

These fight sequences memorably take place in different settings including subway stations, in grand halls, in empty warehouses and so on. Although The Matrix incorporates a majority of scenes fuelled by extreme violence similar to Japanese Anime. The variety of philosophical and religious undertones, the genre conventions of science fiction, action and fantasy films along with influence of Japanese Manga and Anime transitions and tropes have allowed modern Western film to achieve simultaneity we as an audience seek like never before. McCormick goes one to state that:

“Slowing up of time or of this incredible pan or camera moving through space, so not only are you stopping before it happens and looking at it but you’re going to walk around it and see it from a million different points of view” (McCormick)

This simultaneity can also be seen through the “bullet time” effect, for which The Matrix is notably famous. It is heavily used in Neo’s confrontations with the agents, and when fighting it is used to showcase his superhuman powers within the matrix. The bullet time effect gives the audience the imaginative experience we seek of vicarious visual thrill of omniscience, being able to essentially stop time in the film and see an event from several points of view at once. This is what we seek in film, the ability to have a feeling of power over the temporal world of the film.

Finally, The Matrix is appealing and creating new boundaries for simultaneity and viewer participation through lightning quick scene changes, camera’s swooping in from every direction, cutting from the ground up to the sky and piercing through walls and sheets of glass.

Action packed scenes fuelled by violence, thousands of guns appear and shoot in an instant, created by a simple computer keystroke. Amazing and previously impossible skills are downloaded instantly, instead of learned through a long and tedious process over a lifetime, and a multiplicity of philosophical ideas are suggested and referenced but not completely developed throughout the film. Manga and Anime tend to develop multiple plotlines that gain depth over the course of the story — it is the combination of these multilayered in-depth plotlines of Anime and the linear narrative of Western literature that allows The Matrix to recreate the quick and bite-sized nature of the panels and moment-to-moment, aspect-to-aspect transitioning seen in Manga working simultaneously with Western narrative, that matches the philosophy that underlies The Matrix creating an immersive and imaginative experience that makes the audience feel as though they are part of the film, not just watching it.

A considerable number of modern dystopian science-fiction/fantasy films are now using visual narrative structures from Japan that allow for interactive, immersive and imaginative experience with audiences. This trend as outlined above is seen specifically in The Matrix, which uses the idea of visual narrative structure from Akira and Ghost In The Shell to seek imaginative engagement with audience and finally achieve simultaneity. To change how accessible cinematographic experience is to audiences and to be able to constantly re-evaluate the way in which the narrative structures are used is now considered the interactive potential of the modern film narrative. In essence, this is the simultaneity audiences have sought.

Allowing the viewer to be directly involved and in tune with the fiction of film, decider on the cuts such as ‘choose your own adventure’ novels, or the viewing order of the film narrative is what the future of cinema could look like. The narrative models invented by the Hollywood film adapted from the literature models of the 19th Century and Japanese Anime give audiences one of the most important roles: cracking the code of the diegetic content. Audiences have to decipher pathways of the narrative, make the links between scenes and dialogue, recognise characters and associate ideas etc… in order to synchronise with the film narrative that is presented to them, without having to actively act on the diegesis.

Although we haven’t reached simultaneity in terms of being able to choose how a film pans out, there are films such as The Matrix that are distinguishable by narrative structure and which allow viewer participation to a certain extent, by a diegetic layout which is entwined with philosophical undertones and Japanese visual structures that are reversed, or uncoordinated with the narrative. It is this step towards imaginative engagement and immersion that audiences want to feel when viewing that is setting the bar for what simultaneity attempts to achieve.

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