Say if one were to incorporate anime, visually or stylistically, into a traditional printmaking image, e.g. in an etching or lithograph.
Immediately the conceptual critique starts with pointing out juxtapositions and the sort: digital-based image on physical medium, unserious image in a serious medium, etc.
I am more curious as to what actually occurs in presenting this hypothetical print.
example: presenting the printed image (the edition) in a grid layout.
There is then a similarity, rather than a difference, that occurs: a resemblance between the internet's format for displaying images, particularly when it comes to anime, e.g. google images, image-gallery websites like Pinterest, web or application windows, etc.
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| Yandex image search |
sidenote: "image-gallery"
Contrast: if the same presentation were to be done with a famous fine-art painting.
The resemblance here sources more from a difference: we think about reproducing art as consumable products, of the gift shop in a museum, etc., things that are generally deemed "bad" or unlike the "proper" purpose of art.
The difference happens because an individualistic image is reproduced and displayed with its copies.
Each print or image is now a "fake" because "there shouldn't be" multiple of them.
Another option: if the same presentation were to be done with an original drawing, a typical printmaking image.
This just appears as a print qua multiples. When we see a print, we know there are (or there "should be") multiples. If we saw the entire edition laid out, this just reaffirms the same fact.
A source of tension here, in a manner like the reproduced painting example, would have to stem from thinking an image shouldn't exist as a multiple at all, e.g. someone who thinks lowly of printmaking.
I am not really interested in this pathway of accepted or not-accepted art mediums, but it does exist.
Also, more things happen in these acts, obviously. I am just sticking to what I find to be either the main one, or the most initial (perhaps simplest?) one.
No difference occurs in the first example; surface-level, it is because anime images "should" be displayed like that, or we expect them to be. The reason for this, which would be a truer reason for the lack of difference, is because of the anime style. It's not individualistic, it's a style, meant to be reused and reproduced as if a formula. The anime face has a structure so solid and self-referential, it operates like a rule we don't realize as one (I emphasize "like" because I do not want to say that it is a literal rule, or even a delusional convention). It's as if there are "anime physics", a fully functional world of its own; compare to the treatment of the internet as opposing real-life, in the terms online vs. "irl".
...and so on.
In a simple way, it is because anime is not individualistic.
Perhaps this is what people focus on when they have an aversion to anime in art, usually presenting as a worry that a style traps everything into a mass-producing formula. While the lack of individualism is true, it doesn't really occur as a negative when engaging in anime-things. For instance, on the flip side, this style produces individual characters, and I do not mean literal characters in media. I am talking about using the internet as a child circa 2010's, I am talking about "otaku culture" spaces (which is actually a really good example for abstract anime).
I am talking about indie music ("doujin music") that isn't anime music, i.e. not an anime opening or theme song, but always has something to do with anime in a more general way: the usage of anime drawings for its visuals, sometimes singers present as an anime character instead of showing their face, etc.
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| Taishi - The Personalizer |
What I mean to say is that within anime, within the rules of the anime, some sort of visual-based individualism is created (bad phrasing, I do not know what to call it). In fact, such personality and character is created by these very tropes/rules: to those who understand, we know what sharp, upturned eyes mean as opposed to round, droopy ones.
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| Fujibayashi twins (Clannad) + Kagami twins (Lucky Star) |
What of this combination of individualism and sameness? How does this differ than, say, placing a judgement/assumption on someone in real life based on their appearance (and being correct)? Perhaps in that the latter isn't expected to be true. By this I mean, it isn't as if in anime a character is guaranteed to follow a trope, same way no one in real life is guaranteed to follow their respective stereotype. But in anime, in its fiction, are there implications for following/breaking a trope? Is there a realness beneath the trope-surface? Is the care in our act of judging or realizing one's character placed elsewhere?
On the example of using the internet as a child, of typing in 'cool anime girl' into google images: a care is placed on the visual aesthetic, a product of understood trope and "rules", a product that is real/true within the context of fiction.
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| 'cool anime girl' google images w/ date filter |
Compare to being enthralled by the coolness of a real person, of someone in a similarly unreachable role, for instance, like a celebrity (idol). There is an urge to say "but there's a real person there, there's more to them than that!" based on the truth of the personal, based on an understanding of the delusion of all conventions and rules needed to elevate them so such a status of 'celebrity.'
A fictional character's unreachable status is the truth; so is it that such an indulgent care and focus on aesthetic-based characteristics is okay, as it aligns with what is true (aligns with the operation of anime)?
I find a strangeness located in the fact that such a deeply felt understanding of 'character' or 'personality' is realized from a character's aesthetic tropes (as tropes/stereotypes are surface-level), e.g. the deeply personal commitment and love idol-game players have towards their favorite characters (there is no derogatory tone here, I mean the same love a normal, "normie", person holds for their favorite character of The Office). Is this act inherently aware of its own operation, i.e. the necessity of the personal/subjective in connecting with fiction, in reading "truths" in fiction, etc.?
Compare "knowing" a person with knowing a fictional character. The urge: 'can we truly know a person?' and etc. Can we truly know a character? Perhaps not as a created artform of its author, but as a character? Yes. There is nothing real beneath our forever surface-level understanding and judgement.
Perhaps we are solely dealing with the surface, with the fantasy of fiction, and therefore such equally surface-level actions (judgement, assumption, idolizing) become true or work.
In other words: The subjective surface is what there is, we reach the surface subjectively, we know it.
This is part of why the concern of an anime style in art is misplaced (I am not saying the sense of the opinion cannot be had, but that the critique looks at the wrong area). Anime in this view is viewed as a style, as its surface rules and tropes themselves, minus any meaning or implication or any connection: big eyes, sharp chin, girly face—End the sentence! End the thought! It's getting angry at the very physics of something and nothing else.
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So back to the original premise (as this has gone wildly off-track): to repeat the anime image does not threaten it, because we understand its own repetitive, fake physics. At the same time, the implications of what goes on in this image (the same area our assumptions of personality play in) is not lost either. Besides losing the allure that comes with singular images, it's quite indestructible.
Compare to the example of reproducing a fine-art image, or to repeat an image of a real(istic) person. Their individuality (the implications of the image, the personality understanding) is killed off. Its own physics and validity of existence are cut through: you are not supposed to exist as a copy, you are now fake, fake is not real.
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As always, I have no idea what any of this writing implies or leads towards.
I have left out analysis of printmaking as an art medium, because this turned into a different topic.
