From Wooden Cyborgs to Celluloid Souls: Mechanical Bodies in Anime and Japanese Puppet Theater

Animation: The New Performance?

“…Ward Keeler's (1987) classic ethnography of wayang kulit explores the role of the master puppeteer, both in Javanese social life and as a symbol. Bolton (2002), Brown (2008), and Orbaugh (2008) have analyzed how Oshii Mamoru uses images of both Japanese and European puppets and dolls to explore the question of what defines the boundary between human and nonhuman.…”

“…Oshii's oevre (especially the Ghost in the Shell series) explores the nature of the human and the nonhuman through dense narratives about a future world in which human souls are “hacked” into a wide range of media/objects—mechanical bodies, prostheses, puppets, cyberspace itself. Oshii cites a wide range of academic theory in his art (one of his characters is named after Donna Haraway, for example), and some of the most interesting academic cultural contextualizations and elaborations of the animation trope come out of critical studies of Oshii's work (e.g., Bolton 2002; Brown 2008; Orbaugh 2008).…”

“…10 10 Christopher Bolton (2002) does something very like this in his article on Oshii's remediation of bunraku in Ghost in the Shell . …”

Peek-a-boo, I See You: Watching Japanese Hard-core Animation

“…Even if the animated body cannot imply embodied actuality, many of us tend to experience it as concurrently more and less immediate than a live one. As in the case of puppets or automata, it stands at an ambivalent juncture between representation and embodiment (Bolton 2002(Bolton , 2005, constantly reminding us of how far or close it comes to depicting fleshed alterity as we humans experience it. Hentai, then, is problematically voyeuristic.…”

REMEDIATION AND LOCAL GLOBALIZATIONS: How Taiwan's ?Digital Video Knights-Errant Puppetry? Writes the History of the New Media in Chinese

“…They have discovered prototypes of such new forms as the music video, on-line roleplaying games (RPGs), and computer-generated special effects such as morphing in older forms of entertainment such as the magic show, the panorama, the "cinema of attractions," and the Homeric epic (e.g., Darley 2000;Elsaesser 1998;Hansen 1994;Manovich 2001;Murray 1997;Sobchak 2000). Scholars have likewise found traces of traditional genres in Japanese manga, anime, and video games (Allison 2006;Bolton 2002). Uses of the "new media" have thus forced scholars to reevaluate the narrative of progress associated with Modernism, as the "postmodern" turns out so often to be remediating aesthetics long marginalized as "premodern" or "folkloric."…”