Chapter 1

1. The Frame of Reference 17
thus evoke the impression of exaggerated perspectives, and “zoom” lenses
enabling the passage from wide-angle shots to “telephoto” shots in which the
lens works like a telescope. “Depth-of-field” effects are especially useful in
communicating an overall sense of displacement by capitalizing on shifts of
focus between the foreground and background and thus highlighting the features
of contrasting portions of a scene. Finally, feelings of uncertainty, fear,
anxiety or grief can be effectively conveyed with the assistance of “freezeframe”
shots, where a single frame is reiterated several times on the film strip
to give the illusion of motionlessness), while confusion is effectively generated
through “jump cuts,” brusque transitions from one shot to another.
Viewed as an ensemble, all of the anime adaptations here explored as
case studies highlight, with varying degrees of emphasis and intensity, two
complementary propositions. On the one hand, they advocate the desirability
of a survivalist ethos grounded on the premise that there comes a point when
certain forms reach an extreme of their life cycle and, in order to escape total
extinction, have no choice but to mutate into other forms, the shapes they
may thus assume eluding even the most refined faculties of anticipation or
prediction. On the other hand, they convey a message of organic adaptability
or adjustment predicated on the idea that no matter what stage in their evolution
certain forms have—or have not—reached, they are always in the
process of mutating for the simple reason that they can never presume to be
univocally and undilutedly themselves as sealed self-identical entities uncontaminated
by external agencies. This is because any text (verbal, visual, multimedia)
implicitly depends for its existence on other—real or virtual—texts.
As Geraghty puts it, adaptation is essentially a “layering process” entailing
“an accretion of deposits over time, a recognition of ghostly presences, and a
shadowing or doubling of what is on the surface by what is glimpsed behind”
(Geraghty, p. 195). Gérard Genette communicates an analogous message in
emphasizing that the realm of literature is fundamentally “palimpsestuous”
since “Any text is a hypertext, grafting itself onto a hypotext, an earlier text
that it imitates or transforms” (Genette, p. ix). Therefore, a text ultimately is
by virtue of what it is not—in virtue of all the hypothetical texts it could have
been instead.
The anime under scrutiny thus remind us that any text we might experience
as realized is simply a snapshot of a limitless textual web of crisscrossing
images and yarns—a semiotic fragment capturing no more than an ephemeral
impression of an otherwise unseizable flow of signs. In alluding to the sheer
contingency and transience of all textual formations that have more or less
haphazardly been extracted from that unquantifiable universe, the anime suggest
that strictly speaking no one text needs to be what it is. The art of adaptation
corroborates this idea, not only by underscoring a text’s ability to