開 催 の 趣 旨   　<< 日本語はここをクリック
 

	Co-Director Dr. Minori ISHIDA Professor Programme of Interdisciplinary Japanese Studies Faculty of Economic Sciences
	Co-Director Dr. Joon Yang KIM Associate Professor Programme of Interdisciplinary Japanese Studies Faculty of Economic Sciences

 

What We Aim　　　　　　　　　　　　   　    　

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In the digital environment of animating and filmmaking, the materiality of animation appears to become more and more peripheral and invisible, without a tangible trace. The production of cel-based hand-drawn animation, which was dominant over the twentieth century, entailed a tremendous number of materials, including design sheets, storyboards, cel drawings, or background paintings.

Circulated between production crewmembers, between studios and between countries, these delicate and “fleeting” materials constituted the profilmic reality of animation. In a concrete yet disruptive way, they connected creative agency and spectatorship to a world that they were to construct on screen. Spectators could not see key drawings and inbetweenings in motion on screen, which were so rendered with characters on paper as to be copied onto cel. The outlines of characters were copied on cel, while backgrounds were painted on separate sheets of paper. All of these were stacked in order and then photographed frame by frame on an animation stand, for spectators finally to see something moving, a world in motion, on screen.

Since the launch of the Archive Center for Anime Studies, Niigata University (ACASiN) in 2016, we have archived and researched such materials, which were created and used for different anime productions between the 1960s and the1990s. Termed by us/ACASiN as “intermediate,” those archived materials should be revisited as invaluable resources for creativity, as well as research, in that they embody the multiple processes and aesthetic dynamics of anime and animation production. Reconsidered and reemployed from a media-ecological perspective, anime’s intermediate materials (AIMs) will bring to light how animators and artists in different sites of production worked as hidden “manual” agents between succeeding sheets of paper, between layers, between seconds, communicating and interacting with viewers at a variety of levels, visual, kinesthetic, diegetic, and discursive.

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Yet, these AIMs are in crisis of falling into ruin—laid off, lost, made redundant, or destroyed as industrial wastes. Without their preservation and archiving, we will be no longer able to see how these intermediate materials physically and tangibly formed aesthetic genealogies still lingering in contemporary animation studios.

This artistic-academic event is intended to develop, share, and expand understandings and knowledge of how to give a new life to archived materials, or how to “re-animate” them. Instead of seeking to elevate sketches and drawings up to the status of “high art”, reducing them to auteur-centered discourses, our intention is to emphatically and critically demonstrate how meaningful those materials themselves are both in terms of creativity—artistic engagement and embodiment—and scholarship. 
 

• What role did each of AIMs play in the process of animation production?
• What can be read from and between AIMs in terms of what they are as well as what they deliver?
• How were human agents engaged in AIMs at different stages of production?
• What did AIMs make it possible or impossible for human agents to do?
• In what ways did AIMs serve to form the aesthetics of contemporary anime?
• How can AIMs inspire today’s animators and artists who are concerned with viewing experience?