Japanese animation and you (or rather, me).

Sometimes it helps to think of our influences. It's always struck me that I, but even moreso my classmates, are quick to pass judgement on a piece of work based on what we're used to, rather than its objective merits. That's natural, certainly, but it's untrained thinking. The best solution is to expose yourself to as much of everything as you can.

But that sort of cosmopolitan naivete gets us about as far as deliberate ignorance. An artist can be as worldly or restricted as he chooses, and it won't necessarily bear significantly upon his output. More than anything, understanding one's influences works best when you're trying to communicate.

This goes back to a "qualia" line of reasoning, but only if we're considering qualia in a holistic sense, with the full specific context applied to the experience. I imagine the only reason we don't often default to "everything about a mentality is informed by the entire length and breadth of the experience(s) that shapes that mentality" reasoning is that it's so broad it becomes a cop-out; it's like saying "you had to be there", except it goes even farther and purports that even being there wouldn't be enough-- you'd have to be the person and everything they were up to that point, to experience just what they had in that moment.

So I suppose after a while the human collective can generate universal qualia like "redness" or "black pepper", but for as comprehensively cerebral as a film experience can be, there will always be 99% disconnect. Because realistically, no two people are ever bringing the exact same background to a piece of art, so no two can walk away with the same experience. Thus, even in an environment such as a film school, where participants are hand-picked for a sort of prevailing mentality, the devil remains in the details.

Personally, I haven't grown up on a lot of either high art or mainstream cinema. Even as a teenager, fast approaching the notion that I wanted to study film someday (although that idea wouldn't really be articulated until about three months before I applied), I took far less interest in "the canon" and preferred littler-known, sometimes downright bad movies and series. This wasn't for the purpose of being oppositional or avant-garde or the quintessential teenage rebel: I had gotten into anime from the age of 10 or so and had just developed different tastes as a result.

I can't say what anime did to me was emblematic of that generation of fandom or how it differed from what came before or after. I don't consider myself an anime fan per se because even then I was terribly selective in what I chose to watch. What it did, more than anything, was programme a set of expectations into me that I feel are, at least, far more common in Asian and especially Japanese narrative and far less common in American ones.

It's because of anime's frequently slow, meditative pace that Lawrence of Arabia was my biggest thing when I was 17. I even subjected my film class to it, and was universally reviled as a result. (Take the term "film class" with a grain of salt; in high school, it was just a place for students who were too lazy to take regular literature classes. Plus, we lived in a suburban community Joan Didion might once have written about, one of those places where it's "easy to dial-a-devotion but hard to buy a book"... suffice to say.) And I might suggest that it's because of Japanese formalism that I approached Goethe's Faust and Sherlock Holmes with such ease. Yes, the aesthetic became a way to read oppositionally after a while, but initially it was just the spoonful of sugar that helped that which my peers struggled with go down.

We're reaching a point where the boundaries of national style are quickly blurring. France's cinema du look may be pointed to as one example; Nimrod Antal, an American, making Hungarian's most internationally successful film in decades (Kontroll) is another. Lars van Trier can make films set in America from Denmark just as unselfconsciously as Hollywood has staged the exotic in its backlots for nearly a century. As much as American chic is becoming a sort of aesthetic neutral on the global stage, we're also getting a subtle form of feedback. Anime, for all its pop culture dreck, its utter ignorance of the word "cliche", and of course its unrepentant Anglophilia, is also feeding its new Western-world audience the aesthetic of Kurosawa, Mizoguchi, and Ozu. It's teaching a unique art theory: disparity versus the West's emphasis on balance; negative space as part of the image versus the West's aversion to "emptiness".

Above all, I feel I appreciate anime for teaching me different conventions for romance. Although it's not across the board, often, Asian romances are subdued, restrained, and reminiscent of nothing so much as medieval courtly love. Again, this is nothing to adopt wholecloth (I'm at odds with all standards of romance, particularly in their heteronormativity), but it counterpoints other systems-- and the significant thing about any counterpoint is how it encourages reflection for all sides.

Even if today's "youth" directors --Tarantino and Rodriguez, chiefly, and maybe a little Edgar Wright-- mostly seem to be adopting anime chic in its most superficial forms, change is coming. Yes, and I don't mean something so disingenuous as Afro Samurai-- that shit should burn. I mean change like Avatar. I mean the day when the Academy will cease to overlook the efforts of Satoshi Kon-- it's coming, maybe not as soon as it should, but it's on the horizon.

~

OFFICIAL DISCLAIMER: anime is not a ticket to enlightened filmmaking, nor are anime fans a cut above the rest. Most of them suck, just as most "cinephiles" suck. I should make the point that most anime has little to no redemptive value, but the ratio is about on par with any sort of domestic output. Here are some of the cream of the crop:

the works of Satoshi Kon:
-Memories segment: "Magnetic Rose" (wrote)
-World Apartment Horror (live action; wrote)
-Perfect Blue
-Millennium Actress
-Tokyo Godfathers
-Paprika
-"Paranoia Agent" (TV series)

the works of Katsuhiro Otomo:
-Memories segments: "Stink Bomb" (wrote) and "Cannon Fodder" (wrote and directed)
-Roujin Z
-Akira

the works of Mamoru Oshii:
-Ghost in the Shell
-Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence
-Avalon (live action)

other:
-Angel's Egg
-The Animatrix segments: "Beyond" and "Detective Story"
-".hack//SIGN" (TV series, written by Kazunori Ito, who also wrote the first Ghost in the Shell and Avalon)
-"Vision of Escaflowne" (TV series)
-"Cowboy Bebop" (TV series)
-Interstella 5555 (feature-length music video animation set to Daft Punk's album, Discovery)

Most of this will be screened during my "Introduction to Japanese Animated Cinema" course this winter at UCLA. If you're interested in attending, please stay tuned for more information.