Andrea J. Horbinski (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ahorbinski) wrote2014-02-03 09:21 pm
ahorbinski) wrote2014-02-03 09:21 pm
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Book review: Anime's Media Mix
Bibliographic Data: Steinberg, Marc. Anime's Media Mix: Franchising Toys and Characters in Japan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012.
Main Argument: "The emergence of Japanese television animation, or anime, in the 1960s as a system of interconnected media and commodity forms was, I will argue, a major turning point and inspiration for the development of what would later be called the media mix" (i.e. what Henry Jenkins calls "convergence") (viii).
Historiographical Engagement: Steinberg is mostly drawing on Japanese scholars of various stripes here; big names are Ôtsuka Eiji, Azuma Hiroki, and Itô Gô, while Tom Lamarre gets the biggest nod on the English-language side. Also, standing up for critical theory, Brian Massumi and Maurizio Lazzarato.
Introduction: Argument, Sources, Examples Steinberg argues that
Chapter 1: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at the invention of anime by the animators of Mushi Productions in 1963. Steinberg argues that anime constitutes its own style of animation due to several formal innovations (constraints), and parts ways with Tom Lamarre on where the force of anime lies--while Lamarre claims it is in the "animetic interval," Steinberg sees it in what he calls "the dynamic immobility of the image," arguing that this "is to a great degree responsible for the connections across media forms and the dynamism of anime's media networks to which Lamarre rightly points. Stilling the movement of animation allows the anime image to connect with other media forms, expanding in the 1960s toward the Japanese media mix" (6). The "dynamically immobile character image" is the "locus for the potential movement across media forms" (6). This invention was not entirely sui generis; Tezuka's influences included his stint at Toei, the UPA cartoons of the 50s (such as The Jetsons [barf]), and Japanese television commercials of the same decade. Those at the time saw anime as two separate but complementary things: electric kamishibai and as manga in motion. The "electric kamishibai" came from the dynamically still images of the street theater, as well as the segmentation and display of still images (leading to a sense of the play of planes). The "manga in motion" feeling came from borrowing manga's focus on inter-frame relations (and the concurrent ability to collapse or telescope time) and the concomitant expansion of the interval between images. Anime's great innovation, in sum, lay in limiting movement rather than attempting realism a la Disney, allowing it to break out of the stagnation of full animation.
Chapter 2: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at the Meij-Atomu marketing campaign in which Atomu was used to sell Meiji's Marble Chocolates, although by the end even the Meiji marketers recognized that they were merely along for the Atomu ride. That 1960-65 is known as "the golden age of chocolate" in Japanese candy circles is in no small part due to Atomu and his ability to sell chocolates--necessary because of "Tezuka's curse," in which he undersold episodes of the anime to the TV station by more than 50% (the most common estimate is that he charged ¥550K for an episode that cost around ¥2.5 million) and so had to recoup costs from advertising and sponsorship. Steinberg argues that "the proliferation of the character image outside the television screen and its material ubiquity in lived space are what made both anime and character merchandising the phenomena they are today" (42). The character functions as a "nodal point" or "media attractor," and furthermore, it diffuses through the social and media environment, potentially endlessly. In that respect, it was not just the Meiji marble chocolates, but also the Atomu stickers that came with them, that were key, because with them essentially everything in a child-consumer's environment could be Atomized--which marked a fundamental shift in capitalism itself, to the post-Fordist mode in which the production and consumption of media-objects and their worlds of consumption became paramount (and indeed, in which consumption becomes a kind of labor). Thus, the character is "a device that simultaneously allows audiovisual media and objects to connect and forces their proliferation" (83). The character's mobility (what Itô Gô calls autonomy) and its communicative aspect give rise to its synergy, in which each specific incarnation of the character reinforces and augments all the others.
Chapter 3: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at the development of Atomu merchandise and in particular the transformations that Atomu wrote on "large-type" (buriki) toys, which formerly had been intended solely for export and in the 1960s were only just coming within the reach of most Japanese children-consumers. In this process, a mutual transformation occurred such that the outcome is, according to Steinberg, "media-commodities" (89). While earlier character merchandising had been tangentially related, or had focused on allowing children to be the character, the "third era" placed children at something of a remove from the world of the story; they had to access it through the character toys, at the same time as more media began to affect children's culture and the quality of visual representation of characters became much better (i.e. consistent). These new Atomu character-toys had several advantages, however: they offered physical solid and presence, were open to new narratives, and were also capable of movement. Steinberg concludes from this that the proper model of communication in this context is one of a network or series of relations, one that is not only immaterial but also immaterial, and thus that "the communication between media-commodities constitutes the surface on which the communication between consumers is inscribed. … Things communicating give rise to human communication, and it is the coordination of these two levels of communication that informs the very particular 'mediation of things and the thingification of media' that characterize the media mix" (132).
Chapter 4: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at the two strategies of media mix pursued by Kadokawa Books. Beginning in the 1970s, Kadokawa pursued a "marketing media mix," essentially a form of vertical integration in which an in-house movie studio produced films from books to which Kadokawa had the rights and an in-house music studio released the soundtrack to the same, while the publishing arm released the book with a tie-in cover, thus growing the profit of all three branches. This had several important implications: "the first is the increasingly nonlocalizable of the 'original'," while "the second seismic shift in this process of fragmentation is the rise of the textual logic of segmentation and flow" (160-61). However, "the particular form of transmedia communication that emphasized segmentation and flow becomes key to television and other media forms only within a specific (if emergent) capitalist regime: post-Fordism" (164). Furthermore, these involved the "real subsumption" of the consumer's environment--what Atomu had done for children, Kadokawa did for adults, with the result that "the presence of the consumer/commodity axis of the capitalist relation" is "in every point of social space-time," the process of "endocolonization" accomplished (167).
Chapter 5: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at the rise of the consumption of worlds, drawing on the writings of Ôtsuka Eiji, who was an employee of the Kadokawa unit that pioneered the introduction of the anime media mix at the company in the 1980s, becoming the entire company's strategy after the former head of that unit (the second Kadokawa brother) took over the company from the first after the latter was indicted for heroin smuggling. Drawing on Deleuze by way of Lazzarato, and also Leibniz, Steinberg argues that the shift from Fordism to post-Fordism has given rise to a situation in which individual companies--or more specifically individual brands--act as the Gods of Leibniz's system of monads, keeping individual worlds coherent. But (remembering the proliferation of alternate universes in fan works) the plurality of worlds in the contemporary media mixes that are self-contradictory shows that the character is in fact the regulatory mechanism that keeps all these worlds coherent, which is why it is also no surprise when looking at legal discourse shows that "the character is a material-immaterial composite that slips through legal and conceptual cracks" (194). Moreover, "the character allows for the communication of media, object, and consumer series" (ibid), and also "a technology that regulates the rhythms of consumption and production, ensuring the continued accumulation of capital" (196) in the post-Fordist world, which "does not just entail a replacement of one ideal commodity with another; it features the rise of relationality as the principle of all commodities" (198). In a brief conclusion, Steinberg argues that postwar Japanese history is unthinkable without an understanding of the anime media mix, which
Critical assessment: This is an excellent, zippy book which, I think, is fundamentally correct on almost all of its points. Steinberg explicates how the anime media mix does what it does from its historical roots, in the process making some very important points on multiple levels.
Further reading: Anne Allison, Millennial Monsters; Itô Gô, Tezuka Is Dead; Azuma Hiroki, Otaku: Japan's Database Animals
Meta notes: IS2G, this whole axiomatic designation of fan works as "parodic and exaggerated" needs explosion. I'm putting it on my to-do list. Also, the Fordist/post-Fordist disjuncture and the crises of capitalism--1929, 1973, 2008--may possibly be keys to the postwar period.
Main Argument: "The emergence of Japanese television animation, or anime, in the 1960s as a system of interconnected media and commodity forms was, I will argue, a major turning point and inspiration for the development of what would later be called the media mix" (i.e. what Henry Jenkins calls "convergence") (viii).
Historiographical Engagement: Steinberg is mostly drawing on Japanese scholars of various stripes here; big names are Ôtsuka Eiji, Azuma Hiroki, and Itô Gô, while Tom Lamarre gets the biggest nod on the English-language side. Also, standing up for critical theory, Brian Massumi and Maurizio Lazzarato.
Introduction: Argument, Sources, Examples Steinberg argues that
Ultimately, we must understand the media mix to be part of a wider shift in media consumption patterns that saw increased emphasis on the consumption of images, media texts, and their associated things and an increased speed and penetration of the consumption processes. The rise of the media mix is thus intimately bound up with social, economic, and cultural transformations that many writers have associated with the term postmodernism or post-Fordism" (xi). Moreover, understanding the mechanisms of the anime mix show that Jenkins' understanding of convergence "fails to capture the essential role played by technologies of 'thing communication' (mono komi) that are not merely hardware nor merely the products of users' creative imaginations: the media connectivity proper to the character and the materiality of media-commodities that support this connectivity. (xv)
Chapter 1: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at the invention of anime by the animators of Mushi Productions in 1963. Steinberg argues that anime constitutes its own style of animation due to several formal innovations (constraints), and parts ways with Tom Lamarre on where the force of anime lies--while Lamarre claims it is in the "animetic interval," Steinberg sees it in what he calls "the dynamic immobility of the image," arguing that this "is to a great degree responsible for the connections across media forms and the dynamism of anime's media networks to which Lamarre rightly points. Stilling the movement of animation allows the anime image to connect with other media forms, expanding in the 1960s toward the Japanese media mix" (6). The "dynamically immobile character image" is the "locus for the potential movement across media forms" (6). This invention was not entirely sui generis; Tezuka's influences included his stint at Toei, the UPA cartoons of the 50s (such as The Jetsons [barf]), and Japanese television commercials of the same decade. Those at the time saw anime as two separate but complementary things: electric kamishibai and as manga in motion. The "electric kamishibai" came from the dynamically still images of the street theater, as well as the segmentation and display of still images (leading to a sense of the play of planes). The "manga in motion" feeling came from borrowing manga's focus on inter-frame relations (and the concurrent ability to collapse or telescope time) and the concomitant expansion of the interval between images. Anime's great innovation, in sum, lay in limiting movement rather than attempting realism a la Disney, allowing it to break out of the stagnation of full animation.
Chapter 2: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at the Meij-Atomu marketing campaign in which Atomu was used to sell Meiji's Marble Chocolates, although by the end even the Meiji marketers recognized that they were merely along for the Atomu ride. That 1960-65 is known as "the golden age of chocolate" in Japanese candy circles is in no small part due to Atomu and his ability to sell chocolates--necessary because of "Tezuka's curse," in which he undersold episodes of the anime to the TV station by more than 50% (the most common estimate is that he charged ¥550K for an episode that cost around ¥2.5 million) and so had to recoup costs from advertising and sponsorship. Steinberg argues that "the proliferation of the character image outside the television screen and its material ubiquity in lived space are what made both anime and character merchandising the phenomena they are today" (42). The character functions as a "nodal point" or "media attractor," and furthermore, it diffuses through the social and media environment, potentially endlessly. In that respect, it was not just the Meiji marble chocolates, but also the Atomu stickers that came with them, that were key, because with them essentially everything in a child-consumer's environment could be Atomized--which marked a fundamental shift in capitalism itself, to the post-Fordist mode in which the production and consumption of media-objects and their worlds of consumption became paramount (and indeed, in which consumption becomes a kind of labor). Thus, the character is "a device that simultaneously allows audiovisual media and objects to connect and forces their proliferation" (83). The character's mobility (what Itô Gô calls autonomy) and its communicative aspect give rise to its synergy, in which each specific incarnation of the character reinforces and augments all the others.
Chapter 3: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at the development of Atomu merchandise and in particular the transformations that Atomu wrote on "large-type" (buriki) toys, which formerly had been intended solely for export and in the 1960s were only just coming within the reach of most Japanese children-consumers. In this process, a mutual transformation occurred such that the outcome is, according to Steinberg, "media-commodities" (89). While earlier character merchandising had been tangentially related, or had focused on allowing children to be the character, the "third era" placed children at something of a remove from the world of the story; they had to access it through the character toys, at the same time as more media began to affect children's culture and the quality of visual representation of characters became much better (i.e. consistent). These new Atomu character-toys had several advantages, however: they offered physical solid and presence, were open to new narratives, and were also capable of movement. Steinberg concludes from this that the proper model of communication in this context is one of a network or series of relations, one that is not only immaterial but also immaterial, and thus that "the communication between media-commodities constitutes the surface on which the communication between consumers is inscribed. … Things communicating give rise to human communication, and it is the coordination of these two levels of communication that informs the very particular 'mediation of things and the thingification of media' that characterize the media mix" (132).
Chapter 4: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at the two strategies of media mix pursued by Kadokawa Books. Beginning in the 1970s, Kadokawa pursued a "marketing media mix," essentially a form of vertical integration in which an in-house movie studio produced films from books to which Kadokawa had the rights and an in-house music studio released the soundtrack to the same, while the publishing arm released the book with a tie-in cover, thus growing the profit of all three branches. This had several important implications: "the first is the increasingly nonlocalizable of the 'original'," while "the second seismic shift in this process of fragmentation is the rise of the textual logic of segmentation and flow" (160-61). However, "the particular form of transmedia communication that emphasized segmentation and flow becomes key to television and other media forms only within a specific (if emergent) capitalist regime: post-Fordism" (164). Furthermore, these involved the "real subsumption" of the consumer's environment--what Atomu had done for children, Kadokawa did for adults, with the result that "the presence of the consumer/commodity axis of the capitalist relation" is "in every point of social space-time," the process of "endocolonization" accomplished (167).
Chapter 5: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at the rise of the consumption of worlds, drawing on the writings of Ôtsuka Eiji, who was an employee of the Kadokawa unit that pioneered the introduction of the anime media mix at the company in the 1980s, becoming the entire company's strategy after the former head of that unit (the second Kadokawa brother) took over the company from the first after the latter was indicted for heroin smuggling. Drawing on Deleuze by way of Lazzarato, and also Leibniz, Steinberg argues that the shift from Fordism to post-Fordism has given rise to a situation in which individual companies--or more specifically individual brands--act as the Gods of Leibniz's system of monads, keeping individual worlds coherent. But (remembering the proliferation of alternate universes in fan works) the plurality of worlds in the contemporary media mixes that are self-contradictory shows that the character is in fact the regulatory mechanism that keeps all these worlds coherent, which is why it is also no surprise when looking at legal discourse shows that "the character is a material-immaterial composite that slips through legal and conceptual cracks" (194). Moreover, "the character allows for the communication of media, object, and consumer series" (ibid), and also "a technology that regulates the rhythms of consumption and production, ensuring the continued accumulation of capital" (196) in the post-Fordist world, which "does not just entail a replacement of one ideal commodity with another; it features the rise of relationality as the principle of all commodities" (198). In a brief conclusion, Steinberg argues that postwar Japanese history is unthinkable without an understanding of the anime media mix, which
creates (1) the character merchandise as material object, (2) the world to which the character merchandise belongs, and (3) the character as immaterial connective agent guaranteeing the consistency of this ever-expanding world. Insofar as the narrative or product series continues, this world can never be apprehended in toto but only approached through the continuous, participatory consumption of the character and its world. (200)
Critical assessment: This is an excellent, zippy book which, I think, is fundamentally correct on almost all of its points. Steinberg explicates how the anime media mix does what it does from its historical roots, in the process making some very important points on multiple levels.
Further reading: Anne Allison, Millennial Monsters; Itô Gô, Tezuka Is Dead; Azuma Hiroki, Otaku: Japan's Database Animals
Meta notes: IS2G, this whole axiomatic designation of fan works as "parodic and exaggerated" needs explosion. I'm putting it on my to-do list. Also, the Fordist/post-Fordist disjuncture and the crises of capitalism--1929, 1973, 2008--may possibly be keys to the postwar period.