Collaborative creativity

Condry begins with an account of the production of director Hosoda Mamoru’s 2009 anime feature film, Summer Wars. He observes that rather than being focused on the actions of a single hero, this film is structured around the collective efforts of its various characters toward a common goal. The film’s wealth of idiosyncratic characters furnishes a diverse range of viewers with multiple potential points of entry into the story: an effect only heightened by the director’s decision to make the characters’ design simple, thereby affording viewers the opportunity to contribute something of their own. Paralleling the inter-character cooperation depicted on screen is thus a process by which the viewers of the film are induced to participate actively as well: developing forms of connection with the work that ultimately produce a sense of “joint ownership”. Moreover, Condry identifies further forms of such creative collaboration taking place on the production side as well: in the discussions among directors, designers, and animators, as well as in the creative staff’s engagement with its source materials. Turning to Hosoda’s earlier film, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (2006), for example, he notes how Hosoda introduced changes to the 1967 work of fiction by Tsutsui Yasutaka on which the film is based, making it more open-ended. 

Condry’s behind-the-scenes attention to the negotiations occurring among those involved in creating a work of anime continues in his second chapter, which focuses on the production of several animated TV series. Whereas the intricacy of anime narratives is often adduced as the major reason for their popularity, Condry’s real-time observation of the deliberations taking place at these shows’ regular planning sessions leads him to conclude that elaborately-conceived narrative lines may be less important in guiding a work through the development process than other factors – chiefly the creators’ basic conceptions of the work’s characters and their interconnections. It is not surprising that distinctive characters, rather than narrative arcs, would be the principal factor in some of the very short animated shows Condry considers, but he also offers examples of longer-format series in which a work’s complete narrative has yet to be determined (or even glimpsed), and yet the work begins to take shape around its distinctive characters, premises, and worlds. An argument that Condry introduces and continues to develop over the remaining chapters of the book is that the anime character can fruitfully be considered a generative platform itself, conducive to migration across diverse media.

While much of Condry’s analysis focuses on the production and consumption of anime in the early twenty-first century, he also endeavors to place contemporary Japan’s anime industry in both historical and comparative contexts. In the third chapter, for example, he discusses the postwar development of Japanese anime, focusing especially on the work of Tezuka Osamu. Rejecting accounts of modern Japanese anime that would describe it mainly as an autonomous outgrowth of earlier domestic visual traditions, he identifies various ways in which Japanese animators saw American animated films as both sources of inspiration and targets of rivalry: the Tōei studio, for example, explicitly aspired to become the “Disney of the East”. Attending to the embeddedness of the Japanese anime industry in this larger context, Condry also notes variant features of the production process that distinguish American and Japanese animated films. In the fourth chapter as well, Condry adopts a longer chronological view in recounting how Bandai was able to obtain the rights to producing Gundam plastic models in the 1970s and to unexpectedly transform a toy that had prematurely been judged a failure into one of its most popular products. Condry emphasizes the role that small networks of fans and the media that connected them played in achieving this remarkable success.

One of Condry’s most interesting chapters concerns the practice of fansubbing: overseas fans’ cooperative production of subtitled versions of anime works. While such activity is unmistakably prohibited by copyright law, Condry vividly demonstrates how many producers of fansubs understand themselves to be acting in the service of anime rather than counter to the interests of anime producers. He describes these fansubbers’ meticulousness and attention to detail, showing how they add value, for example, through annotation of supplementary historical or cultural information. Observing that some remove their fansubs from circulation once subtitled commercial versions are available, he argues that a set of ethical principles underlies their efforts.

Throughout The Soul of Anime, Condry shows how the anime production process often opens up various kinds of “empty spaces” that facilitate idiosyncratic forms of creative engagement and consumption. With its equal attentiveness to the industry and to its fans, Condry’s book is a timely addition that helps elucidate how the “collaborative creativity” that characterizes producers and consumers alike lies behind anime’s success. 

Matthew Fraleigh, Associate Professor of East Asian Literature and Culture, Brandeis University (fraleigh@brandeis.edu)