This chapter focuses on how the multiplane camera was used in Japan and what it signified to Japanese animators. Some creators attempted to bypass its aesthetics by interrelating mimetic and allusive representation, or motion and emotion, in their storytelling through a synthesis of cinematic techniques derived from live-action film and drawing conventions derived from comics. Anime movement shares some principles with character animation, but it prioritizes the assemblage of different visual properties. It engages viewers through emotional movements, where it draws upon elements other than the visible and mimetically represented physical motion. Emotion-eliciting movements often rely on abstract, exaggerated, and stylized forms, in which the manner of representation itself becomes the center of attention. Using Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba as an example, this chapter demonstrates how the series’ visuality shifts on a spectrum, responding to existing anime norms, film forms, technologies, platforms, funding patterns, and the cross-pollination of practices among creators and audiences that do not necessarily demand the simulation of photorealism.

Since the middle of the 20th century, manga and TV anime have developed in parallel, borrowing from one another on practically every level from narrative content to expressive devices. Their productive exchange on the level of style has been facilitated by their shared material basis, the line drawing. This material homology could even blur the boundary between the static and the animated image, with anime borrowing and reproducing the dynamism of manga drawings. At the same time, movement inherent in the drawing and movement of the drawing are both intrinsically bound to the graphic style. This chapter addresses the relation between the movement of the anime and manga image and certain stylistic parameters (such as iconic abstraction, visual density, and quality of the line), providing a new vantage point on aesthetic and material connections between the two media forms, as well as on the ongoing evolution of TV anime.

This chapter takes a studio-centered approach to examining the relationship between the genre of science fiction (sci-fi) and anime production, using the animation studio Gainax as a case study. While Gainax became internationally celebrated in the mid 1990s through the creation of the smash hit Neon Genesis Evangelion (Shinseiki Evangelion, 1995–96), the studio’s growth during the “first anime boom” of the 1980s was much more precarious. Before its foundation, Gainax relied on the collective activities of sci-fi institutions for promotional marketing and professional labor. The studio’s pre-history and survival is an inflection point between the institutions of broad sci-fi fans and creators in the 1970s, and anime and manga otaku, or superfans, in the 1980s. Considering the historical precarity of Gainax, this chapter is framed around the frenzied organizations that comprised Gainax before it was established as GAINAX: the licensing store General Products and the production company Daicon Film. By analyzing Gainax’s business origins before it became incorporated as a studio, some of the ways in which the anime industry integrated sci-fi institutions become visible.