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access to Mechademia: Second Arc
Lucid Dream
False Awakeni
Figures of the
in Kon Satosh
"Rear Window, Strangers on a Train, Psycho - they're all wonderful films, sir, but
when in the world are you going to get serious and do something animated?"
Entertaining as the reply surely would have been, it is hard to imagine
an interviewer posing that question to Hitchcock. More's the pity: a director
with a reputation for storyboarding and controlling his films down to the last
detail might have found a natural home in what Howard Beckerman charac-
terizes as "the least spontaneous of the arts."1 What we are far more likely
to see is the opposite question, one frequently put to anime director Kon Sa-
toshi, here paraphrased: You are a critical and commercial hit in Japan and
abroad, you have world-class production capabilities and resources at hand
with Madhouse studio, and you do things with animation that challenge long-
held assumptions about the uses to which animation can and should be put.
So you're going to start putting real people in front of the camera soon, right?"
As much as this attitude raises hackles among animation fans, it is under-
standable given lingering prejudices against animation as a serious art form,
especially in the West. There is also the unavoidable fact that most of Kon's
QBE?
sally negative. Among the cast of the TV series Paranoia Agent (2004, Moso
dairinin ), for instance, is the stereotypically overweight, bespectacled otaku
Kamei Masashi, whose apartment is as crammed full of bishojo figures as his
front porch is littered with trash bags.8 Kameis t-shirt pegs him as a fan of the
heavily merchandised mascot character Maromi, an analogue to Tarepanda -
in other words, another droopy little creature.9 Viewers familiar with main-
stream anime of the last decade will find direct references to Love Hina (2000),
To Heart (1999), Battle Athletes (1997-1998, Battle asuriitesu daiunddkai ),
Gate Keepers (2000), and Hand Maid May (2000) among his figure collec-
tion, while nearly every poster seen depicts the Di Gi Charat (1998-present,
De Ji Kyaratto) characters created by Koge-Donbo, adopted as the heavily
merchandised mascots for the Gamers chain of anime and manga stores.
If the references in Paprika were love letters, the references in Paranoia
Agent are letter bombs, any thrill of recognition quickly short-circuited
by Kamei s disturbing behavior. In one of his first appearances, the otaku
ignores the prostitute in his bed postorgasm to congratulate his figure col-
lection on helping him get off. Late in the series, he appears so absorbed in
making a new model that he fails to notice he has a visitor, while his suddenly
animate figures complain that Kamei is "just a doll" who can do nothing un-
less they are watching him. Further, while aware of an approaching catastro-
phe, these PVC princesses are powerless to intervene because "look who we
have for a master." In a testimony to Kameis narcissism, the last figure he
finishes before being swept up in the series' apocalyptic finale is of himself.
Taken together, it is among the most damning and direct criticism Kon and
screenwriter Minakami Seishi level in the series, only slightly removed from
Dr. Chiba Atsukos angry denunciation of a similarly obsessive colleague in
Paprika , delivered almost straight into the camera:
You get preoccupied with what you want to do, and ignore what you have
to do. Don't you understand that your irresponsibility cost lives? Of course
not. Nothing can get through all that fat. ... If you want to be the king of
geeks ( otaku no osama ) with your bloated ego, then just keep up all this and
indulge in your freakish masturbation!
Animation production does not come off any better. To be sure, episode
10 of Paranoia Agent depicts the staff working on the diegetic Mellow Maromi
RESISTANCE IS FUTILE:
WE ALL DREAM IN PANFOCUS
or public reception.18
Millennium Actress leaves ambiguous how much of what we see is Chi-
yoko's metaphorized personal history and how much the plots of her films.
By contrast, the very iconicity of the "clips" in Konakawas dream makes it
figure 2. The creation process, part one: Sagi s original sketch of her assailant.
From Poranoio Agent.
figure 3. The creation process, part two: the public embellishes/appropriates Shonen Bat From
Paranoia Agent.
figure 4. Four faces of Maniwa: detective, otaku, Radar Man, and the new "Ancient Master."
From Paranoia Agent.
The tendency of K
edge only otaku could
, r u j.j . j . .» U1 j moperation" eomve
therefore , r u be understood j.j as indicating . j . .» these U1 blind j
If there is a more pathetic sight than the underlying reality of Radar Man, it
is the helplessness of the ordinary Tokyoites swallowed up by the Shonen Bat
monster - that is, by their own creation. Repeating Paranoia Agent's open-
ing scene at the end of the series underscores whos really responsible for
bringing the apocalypse down on everyone's heads . . . and their continued
obliviousness to it. Kon shows the world post-Shonen Bat to be virtually un-
changed: people still run from responsibility, find ways to isolate themselves
even in overcrowded railcars, and distract themselves with the Maromi-like
Konya the cat. As an assessment of society as a whole, it is bleak, but for that
very reason animation fans may find something to grin about as a girl taps
out a text message reading "What? Thats an animation, right? Can't we see
something more like a normal movie?" It is a rare vindication of the medium
from Kon, a small encouragement for otaku, and perhaps a sign that those
who take their entertainment more seriously than most have a leg up.
1. Howard Beckerman, Animation: The Whole Story, 2nd ed. (New York: Allworth,
2003), 152.
2. Perfect Blue, dir. Kon Satoshi (1998); subtitled DVD (Manga Entertainment, 2000).
3. Sennenjoyu, dir. Kon Satoshi (2001); translated as Millennium Actress, subtitled
DVD (DreamWorks Video, 2003).
4. Tokyo Godfathers, dir. Kon Satoshi (2003); subtitled DVD (Sony Pictures, 2004).
5. Paprika, dir. Kon Satoshi (2006); subtitled DVD (Sony Pictures, 2007).
6. Kon Satoshi, "Comments from Interview with DreamWorks DVD Producer,"
Millennium Actress (official Web site), http://www.millenniumactress-themovie.com
(accessed April 18, 2005). The site is no longer available, but this and other press kit
materials are widely available online. See http://www.dvdvisionjapan.com/actress2.html
(accessed 5 January 2009).
7. Kon Satoshi, "Interview with Kon Satoshi, Director of Perfect Blue," Perfect Blue
(official Web site), http://www.perfectblue.com/interview.html, September 4, 1998
(accessed April 18, 2005).
8. Moso dairinin, dir. Kon Satoshi (2004); translated as Paranoia Agent, four subtitled
DVDs (Geneon Entertainment [USA], 2004-2005).
9. Tarepanda is a character created by Suemasa Hikaru and licensed by San-X. As the
name implies, Tarepanda is "lazy," "droopy," or "slouched" in appearance. The characters
incredible popularity on its introduction in 1995 has been linked to anxieties over the
Asian financial crisis of 1997. In the words of Sone Kenji of San-X, "Many office workers
felt exhausted thinking about the dark cloud hanging over the economy, which had grown
unhindered until that time. I guess they saw a little bit of themselves in the worn-out
panda character, so they were sympathetic toward it." See Hamashima Takuya, "Stressed
out? You Need 'Virtual Healing'!" Yomiuri Shimbun, November 27, 1999, 7.
10. For a sense of the actual working conditions on Paranoia Agent, see the "Paranoia
Radio" roundtable discussion between Kon, Minakami, and Toyoda Satoki on Paranoia
Agent DVD, volume 4.
11. A group of schoolboys in Paranoia Agent, for instance, seem perceptive enough
to grasp that the hand-wringing over violent video games is overblown and mock anyone
who can't distinguish between games and reality as a "loser." Within the same episode,
however, the trio eagerly trade the latest rumors about Shonen Bat, helping to spread the
phenomenon.
12. Susan Napier, "'Excuse Me, Who Are You?' Performance, the Gaze, and the Female
in the Works of Kon Satoshi," in Cinema Anime, ed. Steven T. Brown (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2006), 32.
13. Kon Satoshi, "Conversation with Satoshi Kon" (discussion with Q&A, Film Society
of Lincoln Center, New York, June 27, 2008). From notes taken by author (no transcript
available).
14. In his profile for the Japan Media Arts Plaza, Kon mentions a particular fondness
at the time for manga by Katsuhiro Otomo, the "comic new wave" and girls' ( shojo ) manga.
He claims to have been reading the latter "all the time," adding, "I devoured everything
20. Perhaps not coincidentally, the first suggestion that the old woman may be a
valuable witness comes from Kamei.
25. And Kon is aware of his audiences expectations: "I think blurring the lines of
reality and fantasy is an interesting technique. Since using it in my debut piece Perfect
Blue, many fans seem to enjoy it, so now I deliberately choose to use it." "Interview with
Satoshi Kon," Gamestar.
26. Diane Stevenson, "Family Romance, Family Violence, and the Fantastic in Twin
Peaks," in Full of Secrets: Critical Approaches to Twin Peaks, ed. David Lavery (Detroit, Mich.:
Wayne State University Press, 1995), 70.
27. One final key direct address worth noting: every episode of Paranoia Agent ends
with the image of an enormous Maromi staring straight at the viewer. The spot where
Maromi sits is exactly where Shonen Bat stands in the opening; the droopy dog is ringed
by the bodies of the main cast, arranged in a question mark, with Maniwa as its tail and
dot - and pointed straight at the viewer.
28. Zizek, Looking Awry, 18-19. Zizek often cites the figure of "the Jew" in pre-World
War II Germany, or radical Islam in the United States post-9/11. In anime, there may be no
more clear-cut example than Revolutionary Girl Utena's (1997, Shojo kakumei Utena) Hime-
miya Anthy: as the Rose Bride/Witch, she obscures the contradictions and traps inherent
in the figure of "the Prince" and bears all the anger and abuse that results from desires
frustrated by traditional models of opposite-sex romance. (Meanwhile, Utena and Anthy 's
road race to freedom in the film version [Shojo kakumei Utena: Addresensu mokushiroku ,
1999, Revolutionary Girl Utena: Adolescence Apocalypse] is as on-point an illustration of the
Lacanian "act" as you're likely to find in animation.)
29. Azuma, "The Animalizaton of Otaku Culture," 184.