![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
Anime-style films have been produced within East Asia for many years by relying on a cross-border production network dominated by studios in Japan. In this production model, Japanese studios provide source material and creative development, while manual work is outsourced to animators in neighbouring countries. With China’s growing influence within the region’s creative economy, however, more transnationally co-produced animations are based on Chinese source material, offering a promise of enhanced cultural exchange while challenging received frameworks of knowledge and production in the region’s animation industry. This article examines how Japanese animation studios construct China as a nostalgic place by analyzing the use of nostalgia-driven narrative conventions in Flavours of Youth, a 2018 Sino-Japanese co-produced animation. The screen imaginaries yielded by such co-operative productions are contained within a familiar convention couched in an artistic language influenced by Japan’s centrality in the anime production network. This results in a visual rhetoric that transforms the uneven landscape of China’s transitions into a homogenous animation product.
By outlining the theoretical terms of nostalgic representation expressed as sentiment: nostalgia as mood, and style: nostalgia as mode, we examine the way Flavours of Youth frames the interplay of the two nostalgic methods as a metacommentary on China’s modernization process vis-à-vis Japan. The creative process involved in reconfiguring China’s developmental transitions through anime conventions of ‘nostalgia machines’ creates a friction between the parasitic nostalgic form and the cultural host it attaches itself to, collapsing the film’s potential for reflection on the contemporary realities of a shared Asian experience. We argue that the transnationally constructed, disembedded – and therefore artificial – nostalgia found in the film is a symptom of Japan’s continuing ambivalence towards China manifested in the anime industry’s overreliance on codified styles over shared engagement with the alternative cultural contexts of its Asian neighbours.
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank the editors and anonymous reviewers for their generous feedback on earlier iterations of this paper. We would also like to thank Leo Pang for his valuable input that helped shape our writing, as well as Daisy Bisenieks, Pan Lu, Hiroshi Murai, Lee Lok Hin and Lian Qinyi for sharing their insights with us during the course of this research.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Funding details
This work was supported by the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Grant Number P0009591.
Notes
1 Examples of the iyashikei genre anime include Mushishi (2005), Natsume’s Book of Friends (2008) and Barakamon (2014).
2 See for example, Laputa: Castle in the Sky (1986) and Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989).
3 The scarcity of resources available to the Japanese animation industry in the post-war period led to the prevalence of ‘limited animation’ and contributed to the rise of a Japanese animation aesthetic which was minimalist when compared to the full animation technique developed by Walt Disney, Warner Brothers and Hanna-Barbera studios in the US (Power Citation2009, p. 132-133).
4 Wakon-yosai was itself a revision of the Heian era formulation wakon-kansai, or ‘Japanese spirit/Chinese technique’. The ethos was again recycled in the Showa era economic boom of post-war Japan.
5 The Chinese government has tapped into this bottom-up groundswell of nostalgic sentiment to drive Xi Jinping’s 2014 ‘New Type’ Urbanization Plan (NUP 2014-2020). For the rhetoric and implementation of ‘rural community building’ policies in 2010s China, see for example, Meyer-Clement (Citation2020).
6 For work tracing the lineage of mutual influence between China, Japan and the West in the early decades of Asian animation see Daisy Du’s Animated Encounters: Transnational Movements of Chinese Animation (Citation2019).
7 Enka is a genre of sentimental popular music in Japan characterized by nostalgic lyrics and ballad-style arrangements.
8 The sekaikei style of anime is exemplified by narratives that involve characters absorbed in introspective melodramas and romances, whose emotions are mirrored in the outside world through apocalyptic cataclysms.
9 Shikumen is the name for a style of architecture unique to Shanghai that was popular from the late 19th to early 20th century. It was influenced by the city’s position as a foreign treaty port and represented an adaptation of traditional Chinese and European architectural styles. The majority of Shanghai’s shikumen survived into the 1990s, but many have since been demolished to make way for urban redevelopment.
10 See for example, ‘Shanghai zonghuo bi qian an heimu kaifashang wei mouli shaosi liang laoren’ [Developer burned two elderly people for profit in Shanghai], 22 September 2005, http://finance.sina.com.cn/g/20050920/16151984193.shtml.
11 Yokai in Japanese folklore refers to supernatural entities and spirits, often with animal features.
12 Ibid, para. 16.
13 The signing of the 1978 Sino-Japanese Peace and Friendship Treaty and the resulting intensification of cultural exchange between the two countries introduced China to Japanese animation series including Astro Boy (1963), the first Japanese program to be broadcast on Chinese TV in 1979, and feature films including Sandakan No. 8 (1974) screened during a Japanese film week held in Beijing in 1978 (Clark Citation1984). It also prepared the ground for several film and television co-productions between China’s CCTV and Japan’s NHK including the landmark documentary series The Silk Road (1980).
14 Prior to that the most widely seen form of animation in China were domestic meishu films (Wu Citation2009).
15 Japanese anime studios began outsourcing parts of their production overseas in the 1960s, mainly to South Korea (Mori Citation2011). With Korean labour costs growing, production shifted to China in the 1980s, even though the Chinese studios went largely uncredited on the finished products (Endo Citation2008).
16 These manga adaptations became a prominent genre known as xinmanhua or ‘new manga’ in Chinese.
17 See Greer Citation2019.
18 The perception of Chinese animation has begun to change in the recent years, with more and more films enjoying commercial and/or critical success including Nezha (2019), The Monkey King: Hero Is Back (2015) and Have a Nice Day (2017), a critically acclaimed independent feature which was a target of political censorship by the Chinese government.
19 For example, an official from The Association of Japanese Animations expressed that Chinese animation did not pose much threat to the Japanese industry because of creative limitations imposed on the Chinese industry by the country’s political system and the fact that many Chinese productions were copies of Japanese works (Yamada, Citation2013, p. 11).
20 See for example, Hitori no Shita: The Outcast (2016) and Robomasters: The Animated Series (2017).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Reijiro Aoyama
Reijiro Aoyama is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Japanese Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He has recently published Brush Conversation in the Sinographic Cosmopolis: Interactional Cross-border Communication Using Literary Sinitic in Early Modern East Asia (Routledge, 2022).
Royce Ng
Royce Ng is a PhD candidate in the School of Creative Media at the City University of Hong Kong, whose most recent publication is ‘From Ethnographic to Virtual World Making' in Trading Zones: Working with the Camera in Art and Ethnography (Archive Berlin, 2021).