Chapter 1

1. The Frame of Reference 15
aesthetic autonomy from its source. Even when bizarrely elaborate parallel
universes display outlandish menageries of creatures, the anime will succeed
in accomplishing that task as long as it is capable of intimating that its characters
inhabit a fundamentally universal human drama.
In an anime’s translation of its source’s settings into a distinctive world
of its own, backgrounds are of cardinal significance. In virtually all animation,
and indeed cinema generally, backgrounds contribute crucially to establishing
and maintaining a particular ambience and a palpable genius loci. In anime,
however, they rise to the ranks of vibrantly animate actors in their own right
in the representation of both the natural habitat and architecture. Typically,
anime’s backgrounds are intricately detailed and most liberal in the adoption
of artistic—especially painterly—effects such as watercolor-style washes,
crayon-like marks, pigment swathes and gradients. At the same time, they do
not merely augment the lifelikeness of the drama’s characters by enfolding
their personalities and actions in distinctive atmospheres but also draw vigor
from them, acquiring novel connotations and traits at every turn in consonance
with the actors’ shifting emotions. A meticulous approach to product design
ensures that settings are consistently populated by correspondingly convincing
props and accessories. At the adaptational level, an original’s transposition to
the anime screen is often individualized precisely by the depiction of objects
intended to allude metonymically to entire cultures and lifestyles. Lighting
and coloration play a key part in enhancing a background’s richness, combin -
ing particular orchestrations of the play of light and shadow with appropriate
chromatic palettes, modulations and gradations intended to convey distinctive
moods and levels of pathos.
One of the most interesting challenges posed by the anime here examined
has to do with the responses they elicit from viewers who, if they are familiar
with the sources, will have already visualized certain characters and settings
through imaginative picturing—a process that is always, inexorably, partial,
subjective and influenced by specific cultural, historical and discursive circumstances.
In seeing new versions of people we have previously visualized
inside our heads leaping, trundling and dancing across a screen in the basic
shapes of highly stylized figures set against gorgeously rendered scenery paintings
may be experienced by some not merely as an amusing surprise but as a
shock. In any case, notwithstanding the variable severity of individual reactions
to the anime adaptation at hand, it is undeniable that with each alternative
visualization reaching the screen, our pictorial memory will be
challenged, jogged or stretched in innumerable and unexpected ways.
In the specifically cinematographical arena, it is from the repeated
employment of a range of classic camera operations that anime derives much
of its distinctiveness and its adaptations of disparate sources, relatedly, come