Chapter 1

More documents

Recommendations

Info

<strong>Chapter</strong> 1 The Frame of Reference No story comes from nowhere; new stories are born of old.—Salman Rushdie Stories, great flapping ribbons of shaped space-time, have been blowing and uncoiling around the universe since the beginning of time. And they have evolved. The weakest have died and the strongest have survived and they have grown fat on the retelling.—Terry Pratchett Adaptations are ubiquitous in the history of anime and have accrued novel connotations over time. Despite context-bound factors affecting the nature of adaptations in different periods, one constant appears to have underpinned anime’s appropriation and manipulation of sources: a tendency to underscore the status of adaptation not as a sealed product but as a process. The argument pursued in this study is fueled by the conviction that it is actually far more exciting and thought-provoking for anime viewers to reflect on the process through which an existing text has become what they see on the screen—how, in other words, it has progressively come to be translated into a work in its own right—than simply to consume the resulting show as a sealed artifact. Anime makers are well aware that adaptations have been persistently pigeonholed as coterminous with pejorative concepts such as infi - delity, mindless mimicry or even downright blasphemy. In the face of this bleak legacy, they have sought to counter its negative stance by eloquently demonstrating that an adaptation does not consist of a simple binary exchange between two discrete media based on a clear subordination of the borrower to the lender but rather of a playfully promiscuous process involving forms as diverse as novels of disparate genres and formats, stage plays and puppet shows, folk and fairy tales, comics and videogames, as well as non-fiction texts drawn from the fields of history, politics, sociology and anthropology—which, cumulatively, straddle no less than a millennium. Concurrently, the anime under scrutiny never attempt to ignore or efface 5
6 Anime and the Art of Adaptation the existence of the works they draw upon as entities endowed with independent reality and intrinsic weight. What they are eager to explore, in fact, is the extent to which that reality and that weight might be transposable to the domain of the animated image—either by reconfiguring them in accordance with certain technical criteria indigenous to animation itself or by externalizing visually their unique essence without interfering with their primarily verbal identity. Although the contingent outcomes of this exploration vary from anime to anime, the overall message conveyed by anime adaptations such as the ones here addressed is that no text can be transposed to a different form without altering substantially, acquiring fresh meanings and inaugurating novel perspectives. This is because the divergence of the expressive vehicle used by the adaptation from that used by its source is inevitably conducive to some difference in content and mood. That is to say, by encoding its source in a different form, the adaptation comes to constitute not merely an alternate way of saying the same thing but rather a different text—a radically separate way of conveying messages other the ones inherent in the source by virtue of its own formal distinctiveness. This does not automatically imply that the adaptations studied in this context always depart drastically from their sources. In fact, some of the anime echo the originals quite closely at the levels of both content and mood. Rather, it is a matter of recognizing that the “pleasure” yielded by an adaptation at its best, to cite Linda Hutcheon, entails “repetition” with “variation” (Hutcheon, p. 4). The status of adaptations as repetitions with a variation, Hutcheon proposes, underscores their independent identity as “deliberate, announced, and extended revisitations of prior works” (p. xiv) that ought not to be regarded, therefore, as mere imitations or replications. Julie Sanders enthusiastically cor roborates this proposition: “Adaptation and appropriation,” she states, “are, endlessly and wonderfully, about seeing things come back to us in as many forms as possible” (Sanders, p. 160). Adaptation, according to Sanders, should frequently be thought of as “appropriation” insofar as this term more aptly describes a “decisive journey away from the informing source into a wholly new cultural product and domain” (p. 26). A cognate position is advocated by Linda Costanzo Cahir when she contends that there are significant instances in which the term “translation” would be more fruitfully applicable than “adaptation” since translation does not simply alter a form structurally to enable it to operate in an alternative context but actually engenders “a fully new text—a materially different entity”—through “a process of language” (Costanzo Cahir, p. 14). While assessing the nature of the adaptation as an autonomous text, it is also important to appreciate that the collusion of different genres and formats poses some tantalizing questions not only about the adaptation but also
Page 2 and 3: Anime and the Art of Adaptation
Page 4 and 5: Anime and the Art of Adaptation Eig
Page 6 and 7: To Paddy, with love and gratitude .
Page 8 and 9: Contents Preface . . . . . . . . .
Page 10 and 11: Preface Keep on the lookout for nov
Page 12 and 13: Preface 3 medium (and hence a diffe
Page 16 and 17: 1. The Frame of Reference 7 about t
Page 18 and 19: 1. The Frame of Reference 9 fidelit
Page 20 and 21: 1. The Frame of Reference 11 not re
Page 22 and 23: 1. The Frame of Reference 13 to pon
Page 24 and 25: 1. The Frame of Reference 15 aesthe
Page 26 and 27: 1. The Frame of Reference 17 thus e
Page 28: Chapter 2 The Nightmare of History
Page 31 and 32: 22 Anime and the Art of Adaptation
Page 36 and 37: 2. The Nightmare of History 27 Comp
Page 38 and 39: 2. The Nightmare of History 29 Seit
Page 47 and 48: Chapter 3 Epic Adventure with a Sci
Page 65 and 66:
56 Anime and the Art of Adaptation
Page 67 and 68:
Page 69 and 70:
Page 71 and 72:
Page 73 and 74:
Chapter 4 The Fairy Tale Reimagined
Page 75 and 76:
Page 77 and 78:
Page 79 and 80:
Page 81 and 82:
Page 83 and 84:
Page 85 and 86:
Page 87 and 88:
Page 89 and 90:
Page 91 and 92:
Page 93 and 94:
Page 95 and 96:
Page 97 and 98:
Page 99 and 100:
Page 101 and 102:
Page 103 and 104:
Page 105 and 106:
Page 107 and 108:
Page 109 and 110:
Page 111 and 112:
Page 113 and 114:
Page 115 and 116:
Page 117 and 118:
Page 119 and 120:
Page 121 and 122:
Page 123 and 124:
Page 125 and 126:
Page 127 and 128:
Page 129 and 130:
Page 131 and 132:
Page 133 and 134:
Page 135 and 136:
Page 137 and 138:
Chapter 6 A Magical Murder Enigma U
Page 139 and 140:
Page 141 and 142:
Page 143 and 144:
Page 145 and 146:
Page 147 and 148:
Page 149 and 150:
Page 151 and 152:
Page 153 and 154:
Page 155 and 156:
Chapter 7 A Tapestry of Courtly Lif
Page 157 and 158:
Page 159 and 160:
Page 161 and 162:
Page 163 and 164:
Page 165 and 166:
Page 167 and 168:
Page 169 and 170:
Page 171 and 172:
Page 173 and 174:
Page 175 and 176:
Page 177 and 178:
Page 179 and 180:
Page 181 and 182:
Page 183 and 184:
Page 185 and 186:
Page 187 and 188:
Page 189 and 190:
Page 191 and 192:
Page 193 and 194:
Page 195 and 196:
Page 197 and 198:
Page 199 and 200:
Page 201 and 202:
Page 203 and 204:
Page 205 and 206:
Page 207 and 208:
198 Filmography Hisayuki Toriyumi.
Page 209 and 210:
200 Filmography The Count of Monte
Page 211 and 212:
202 Bibliography Bloom, H. 2004.
Page 213 and 214:
204 Bibliography “Kimono History:
Page 215 and 216:
206 Bibliography Wullschlager, J. 2
Page 217 and 218:
208 Index Chesterton, G.K. 128 Chir
Page 219 and 220:
210 Index Martini, S. 94 Marvel Com
Page 221:
212 Index Tarot 20 Tateishi, K. 146
show all

Chapter 1

You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles

Delete template?

Save as template?