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  Conventions versus Clichés

  Anime is supposed to make the audience feel something. This chapter looks at why fans feel what they feel: visual, auditory, and social conventions from Japanese daily life embedded in anime.

  Every once in a while anime discussion groups on the Web get choked with rundowns of the “clichés” of anime. It may not be the most overworked word in discussions of the topic, but it is certainly the most misunderstood. Before we proceed any further, we need to understand why.

  Art does not exist in a vacuum; its time and place determine the aesthetics the work can get away with. And for art to be considered acceptable by its audience (and this is true whether talking high or pop art), it has to be recognizable as art. How? By embodying the rules pertaining to that work in that time and place.

  Let’s not kid ourselves: art is defined by its rules. Only in recent decades, with the likes of seemingly random artists like Jackson Pollock, has art without rules even been a concept, much less a possibility. Pop culture, to be popular, avoids the avant garde, which by definition sets out to break the rules, to lead rather than follow, and to upset the bourgeoisie at every turn. Changes in culture are usually incremental rather than wholesale; rules are amended rather than abandoned.

  We tend to forget this, since history changes our perspective. Beethoven was an innovator, writing Romantic music while the Classical school was still in vogue. However, he developed Romanticism by modifying Classicism, not by throwing it out altogether. Only a few avant-gardistes have gone for the sweeping change, and their names are seldom remembered. Few remember Harry Partch, the composer who decided that the “well-tempered” scale of the Western musical tradition was no longer interesting—he redivided the octave and, because most musical instruments couldn’t adjust, invented his own.

  Similarly, abstract animator Norman McLaren abandoned representational drawing altogether; his techniques involved scratching images onto film emulsion with a pin or stripping the emulsion off altogether and painting directly onto the clear surface. The results were chaotic, confusing and hardly ever used again—although McLaren’s techniques were revived in 1995 for some of the more hallucinatory sequences of Evangelion.

  The point of this digression is to recognize that the word “convention” has positive connotations and the word “cliché” has negative connotations, but not everyone who uses the words understands why. A gesture, a plot-point, a speech, or a bit of business—these are not necessarily clichés simply because they are used a lot. In some circumstances, these often-used devices still have the power to thrill and amuse and move an audience.

  Attending the Conventions

  Take one of the most popular ballads of nineteenth-century America: “Home Sweet Home.” In and of itself, the song is, to a modern audience, corny and saccharine, and playing it while looking at a character’s home could be considered trite and unimaginative. Yet that same song, in a scratchy turn-of-the-century gramophone recording, is played near the end of Hotaru no Haka (Grave of the Fireflies) as the camera surveys for the last time the swampy home of the two dead children. The moment is definitely not a cliché, crowded as it is with so many messages to the audience, not the least of which is: They would never have been driven to this place were it not for American bombing and adult indifference.

  Therefore, and let’s keep the distinction clear:

  A convention is an acceptable device that is intrinsically part of the narrative or character design, and which, although old, can still be used in fresh ways.

  A cliché takes the place of creativity. Clichés are used by lazy and untalented artists to finish off a work, rather than finding fresh uses for the conventions that inform the work at its best.

  An example: in any given swordfight, from Rurouni Kenshin and Utena all the way back through live-action samurai epics to Dr. Tezuka’s gender-bender swashbuckler Princess Knight, there is a standardized bit of choreography. The opponents start separated by some distance. They run full-tilt at each other, pass by each other in such a way that you can’t tell if anyone was even hit, and then stand dead still in a dramatic pause. It takes another second or two to reveal the damage.

  When used creatively, or sincerely (meaning with a complete reliance on the validity of this device as a part of telling the story, without tongue in cheek, and without looking for a quick expedient to meet a deadline), this does not become a cliché. Look at the first duel in the first episode of Utena (1997). Saionji tries to slice a flower from Utena’s coat with a mystical saber. Utena showed up for the duel armed only with a bamboo practice sword. In spite of the mismatch, you know who will win. However, the action is nonetheless exciting. Another example: this choreography is also used in the 1988 film Akira, except that motorcycles replace the swords in a high-speed game of chicken. The convention only becomes a cliché through overuse or when used by the numbers.

  At the end of Rumiko Takahashi’s Maison Ikkoku (1988), Yusaku Godai finally marries his beautiful widowed landlady, Kyoko Otonashi. If that were the sum total of the story, it would be a cliché: a predictable ending that was just sitting in the wings, waiting for its cue to come onstage. However, in the manga form of the story, Takahashi stretched the courtship over seven years, and the reader (and viewer of the anime series) saw it end in an amazing inversion of stereotyped gender roles: Kyoko continues to be the building manager, while her husband works in the otherwise completely feminine world of day-care.

  The Sound of Anime

  Maison Ikkoku is one of the more interesting anime series in its use of conventional symbols and cues; the shorthand, as it were, of Japanese cartoons. These things communicate to an audience in the know, and baffle those who don’t know. For example, an exterior shot of the boarding house often has a weird horn sounding in the background. A Japanese audience recognizes not only what it is (the horn traditionally blown by a tofu-maker at close of business) but when it is (late afternoon) and where it is (the Nakano neighborhood of Tokyo, where Takahashi lived as a college student and the location of the building that inspired the series).1But the viewer never sees the tofu-maker; we just hear the horn. Through sheer repetition, a Western viewer may only pick up the fact that the scene with a horn takes place in the afternoon.

  Another example of the creative use of a sonic convention is in the entire Evangelion series, begun in 1995. Many of the outdoor scenes, including establishing shots of Misato’s apartment building, take place with the droning of insects in the background. In fact, it is the sound of cicadas, noisy little insects that assert themselves in Japan every summer. However, they are exclusively summer insects. Evangelion features their buzzing week after week, month after month. To someone who was only used to hearing them for a short time each year, this is profoundly discomforting. In the plot, this reflects the changed climate of Japan after the Second Impact, when the Earth shifted on its axis and Japan’s climate became permanently tropical. The constant hum of cicadas is a reminder to the viewer (at least, the viewer who knows cicadas) that this is a world in which something has gone horribly wrong.

  Listing all the elements of anime shorthand and their meanings would take a separate volume, but there are a few broad conventions that absolutely must be understood at the beginning. Many of these conventions began in manga and carry over to anime.

  Inside the Lines

  Perhaps the most distinctive convention is the tendency, in moments of action or high emotion, for the background to vanish entirely. Instead, we see broad sweeping lines suggesting speed or power. This device focuses our attention on the character, but also cues us that the character is engaged in a major struggle or effort. Examples abound; it is a rare anime that does not have such a scene.

  This character focus is linked in part to a storytelling element of both anime and manga: the preference for long story-arcs. This kind of story-telling not only allows for elaborate plot development, but for character development as well. In anime, the latter is usually the more impor
tant. People who watch anime expect to see characters grow and change and react to stress. The reactions can be subtle or raving, but in any event the focus is on the character. When the background vanishes, that focus becomes literal.

  Loose Lips

  The second example of an anime convention is the apparent lack of naturalness in the movement of a speaking character’s mouth. For those who were raised solely on Disney theatrical animation (as opposed to their recent made-for-television animated series), the staccato up-and-down mouth movements of anime characters is fake-looking. You are left feeling even more uneasy when, watching a subtitled anime and hearing the original Japanese dialogue, you realize that the mouth movements still don’t precisely match the spoken words. What kind of shoddy workmanship is this?

  It’s not shoddiness. It’s not even universal, since some studios are more conscientious than others about matching lip movements to spoken words. There are, in any case, several reasons why this might be so.

  It’s just different over there. Hiroki Hayashi has directed one of the most popular of all anime, Tenchi Muyo, as well as Bubblegum Crisis Tokyo 2040.2 He also worked as an artist on the American series Thundercats. As he pointed out:

  In an American series the dialogue is written and then recorded first and the pictures are done to go along with it. This is different in Japanese [sic], where pictures are done first and then the voices are recorded afterwards. . . . Generally we only use three pictures [of mouth movements] for when the character is talking, as opposed to in the American series, in which we had to do eight.3

  Earlier media. Before television and mass distribution of magazines, one classic type of Japanese storyteller was the kami-shibai man. He would set up an easel with a series of drawings that he used as illustrations for his stories, supplying the various voices and sound effects himself.4 In that case, in the unmoving mouths of Bunraku puppets, and in Noh theater, in which the protagonists usually wear masks, Japan has a history of giving the audience mouths that move without speaking or speech from a mouth that doesn’t move.

  Western examples. Most Western television animation actually has the same problem. Yogi Bear’s mouth movements are not much more precise than Speed Racer’s. Indicting the entire medium because of this convention is petty at best.

  Eastern preference. Here again, we find a priority on the emotional life of the character, with less concern as to whether the cartoon is technically perfect. Anime voice actress and pop singer Megumi Hayashibara tells in her autobiography (published in manga format) of classes she took to prepare for voice work. “The most important thing for a voice actor is not to try and match the voice [to the mouth movements], but to get as close as possible to the way the character feels.”5 In any event, the erratic lip-synching is fairly easy to get used to, and does not take away from the enjoyment of watching anime.

  Do Blondes Have More Fun?

  Another convention to note traces back to the early twentieth century. During the Meiji period (1868–1912), Japan ended two centuries of isolation from the rest of the world by discarding many of its traditional ways. Anything modern was automatically “in,” and anything Western was by definition modern. So newspaper comic strips began in Japan by copying Western characters, and animation followed suit decades later. The result was a string of characters that looked “white” or had “blonde” hair, even if they were ethnically Japanese. It has literally taken decades before the recent crop of manga artists, born after World War II, began to draw Asians that look Asian. In the meantime, a character like Sailor Moon can be understood by Japanese viewers to be Japanese, her blonde hair notwithstanding.

  Get Real

  A fourth convention is connected to the third, and goes back to the 1960s, when artistic styles in manga began expanding beyond the cartoony look of the postwar years. Manga fans who grew up to be the next generation of artists began to choose either to keep to the older style in emulation of Dr. Tezuka, Reiji Matsumoto, Shotaro Ishinomori, Ryoko Ikeda and other major names, or to surpass them and work in a more realistic style. This “realistic” style actually ranged from caricature to hyperrealism and everything in between. The new style even rated its own name—gekiga (drama pictures)—to distinguish it from manga. The bottom line is that anime shows the same range, from the highly detailed to the blatantly cartoony. In recent years, a trend has arisen to take realistic, even serious, characters, and submit them to caricature as “little kid” versions of themselves. These are sometimes called SD (for “super-deformed”) or CB (which means either “child body” or chibi—“shorty,” “runt”). These letters in a title usually mean comedy ahead.

  Super-Deformity

  Parody drawings have been around as long as drawing itself. There are examples from ancient Greece as well as ancient Japan: people drawn with distorted features, or drawn to look like animals, or animals drawn to look like people. And anime, which evolved out of both manga and Western cartoons, has long made use of rubbery faces and limbs.

  But one particular anime convention can be accurately dated. The spring of 1988 saw two production houses working on “super-deformed” (SD) comedy projects. Sunrise, creators of the Gundam series, were working on the movie Char’s Counterattack when they came up with SD Gundam, a series of short episodic OAVs by Gundam director and designer Gen Sato.

  Both the people and the mecha have huge heads, short bodies, childlike appearances, and anarchistic attitudes. The purpose is humor and the humor is blunt—Gundams launch for an attack, for example, only to get tangled in a fishing net.

  Meanwhile, over at Artmic Studios, the creators of the all-woman Gall Force crew were working up their own SD project. Ten Little Gall Force brings us child-body versions of the crew, not to patrol the universe but to make a music video.

  From then on, everything was open for super-deformity. SD versions of the all-girl baseball team appear as commercial “bumpers” in Princess Nine. The television series version of Record of Lodoss War ends each episode with “Welcome to Lodoss Island,” an omake (bonus) in which even the dragons are super deformed. The third Sailor Moon movie briefly gives us SD versions of the Sailors, tricked into believing they’re children eating a gingerbread house. And Go Nagai has come up with SD versions of his own characters, including the bloodthirsty Devilman.

  Body Talk

  Other manga/anime conventions are more culturally specific to Japan. These include:

  Scratching the back of the head when embarrassed

  The appearance of a giant drop of sweat (not to be mistaken for a teardrop) or the apparent outline of a large X on a character’s temple in times of stress

  Blood gushing from the nose when sexually aroused

  A large bubble of phlegm coming from a character’s nose denoting that the character is asleep.

  Extending a fist with the pinky finger stretched straight out is a gesture (usually by a male) to indicate that the speaker or the subject of the sentence “got lucky.”6

  If a character (usually female) smiles and sticks out her tongue, often with eyes closed, it sends a specific message to the viewer: “Aren’t I silly?” There are many examples of this one: The opening of the fifth season of Sailor Moon shows Ami, the bookworm among the Sailor Senshi, with her nose buried in yet another book. This time, though, she drops the book to reveal a double-dip ice cream cone.

  One episode of Cutey Honey has the android pose as a reporter trying to find the link between a female rock star and invading monsters. When the rocker catches Cutey Honey in the dressing room, she throws herself at the singer declaring her love. The singer throws Cutey Honey out of the dressing room, although afterward the android says to herself, “I kind of liked it.” Cue the smile and the tongue, a signal to the audience that her “kind of liking” girl-on-girl love shouldn’t be taken seriously.

  Satoshi Kon’s Millennium Actress is, among other things, about an attempt to document the life and work of Chiyoko Fujiwara, a celebrated Japanese movie star. She got her
start in 1937, at age fourteen, when a studio head “discovered” her and decided to cast her in a part-romance, part-nationalistic piece to be filmed in occupied Manchuria. Chiyoko tells a documentarian, years after the fact, that she simply wanted to get passage to Manchuria to look for a radical student on whom she’d developed a deep crush. She agreed even though she cared nothing about politics or movies. She punctuates the story with her tongue. This was actually herway of saying that life was being silly as well as she, since the girl who didn’t really care about acting would spend the next few decades as a major film star.

  All of these conventional gestures cue the audience not only as to what is happening (or about to happen), but also how to feel about it, by invoking similar situations in previous anime. Far from being “spoilers” about the plot, they are in their own way reassuring.

  There is a still shot during the opening credits of Princess Nine, a 1999 series about a girls baseball team challenging their male counterparts, that demonstrates this quite nicely. The series is built around Ryo Kawasaki, a fifteen-year-old pitching phenomenon who apparently inherited her fiery left-handed style from her father, who was also a professional-class pitcher (and who was killed in a traffic accident when Ryo was five). The scene shows Ryo’s face, caked with dirt and streaked with tears, under the stadium lights—but they are tears of joy, as she looks toward Heaven. Anyone who’s seen any sports manga or anime at all knows what’s happening: the battle is over, the hard-fought victory is won, and she is communing with her father in Heaven.