Director Yuasa Masaaki

1
Director Yuasa Masaaki
by
Nicholas Buccheri
995689
to
The School of Culture and Communication
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
Bachelor of Arts (Honours)
in the field of
Screen and Cultural Studies SCRN40018
in the
School of Culture and Communication
The University of Melbourne
Supervisor: Sean Cubitt
October 2022
2
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Abstract
This thesis critiques Yuasa Masaaki’s anime, aiming to develop an understanding of how
they operate on their own and jointly through shared visual details and actions. To do so,
this thesis takes Hasumi Shigehiko’s criticism of Ozu Yasujirō as a model, particularly his
concepts of ‘theme’ and ‘thematic system’ which serve as a structural principle within
Yuasa’s work and, by extension, this work. This thesis also explores anime in terms of its
more foundational formal structure, following Thomas Lamarre in exploring how
compositing and character animation, and the relation between them, in Yuasa’s anime
articulates characters’ relations with each other and their world. Together with the thematic
system, this aims at providing a concrete basis within the image for the ideas presented in
Yuasa’s work.
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Contents
Introduction 5
1. Watching 7
2. Transforming 23
3. Fucking 46
4. Eating and Drinking 57
5. Play: Ping Pong the Animation 72
Bibliography 89
List of Illustrations 92
5
Introduction
While hitherto there has been little writing on Yuasa, scholarly or otherwise1, by plugging
away with a rare consistency over the last decade the strength of his work has inspired
increasing popularity and a soaring critical standing2. This is coeval with his founding of
Science Saru with current president Choi Eun-young in 2013, where the work has been quite
radical yet still tame when compared to his wildly experimental earlier anime. For the sake
of focus, the anime I analyse are only feature films and standard-length series with Yuasa as
the sole series director.
Hasumi’s3 odd concepts of ‘theme’ and ‘thematic system’ refer, to oversimplify, to
an action or event constituting a single scene, which proves to be ubiquitous across a body
of work and so assumes similar or different functions through repetitions and variations.
The (non-exhaustive) themes I locate within Yuasa’s work are watching, transforming,
fucking, and eating and drinking. The axis, around which this network of elements is
organised, is the thematic system.
To support this critical account of Yuasa’s thematic system, I rely on and, when the
work demands it, go beyond Lamarre’s theorisation of anime, following him in examining an
animetic manner of thinking. The animetic refers here to movement’s description across
and laterally, on and between layers of the image, distinct from cinematism’s penetration
into 3-dimensional space4. To explore an animetic manner of thinking is to explore how the
force of the moving image is harnessed apropos its potential animetic tendencies, primarily
1
The rare academic article is Steinberg’s piece on The Tatami Galaxy (2010), discussed below. Marc Steinberg,
“Condensing the Media Mix: Multiple Possible Worlds in The Tatami Galaxy,” Canadian Journal of Film Studies
21, no. 2 (2012). In the world of criticism, there are standard film reviews, but there has been no in-depth
critical study of Yuasa’s anime in either area. However, Barker has recently written a solid cursory introduction
to Yuasa for MUBI. Jennifer Lynde Barker, “Are You Ready to Rock?!: The Transformative Animation of Masaaki
Yuasa,” MUBI, August 11, 2022, https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/are-you-ready-to-rock-the-transformative-
animation-of-masaaki-yuasa.
2
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masaaki_Yuasa.
3
Hasumi Shigehiko, Kantoku Ozu Yasujirō (Tokyo: Chikuma Chobō, 1992).
4
Thomas Lamarre, The Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2009), 6.
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through compositing and character animation. Yuasa, after all, is an anime director. If he is
good enough at his job to warrant this critique, this requires an understanding of the
material being directed. How Yuasa organises this material and harnesses its possibilities is
thus central to the elaboration of his thematic system, and to how certain philosophical
ideas and themes—such as the engagement with individuality/inter-
personality/communality which forms a secondary structure of the following—are actively
thought through the image.
The thesis, then, is simple: an investigation into the richness of Yuasa’s work,
particularly as an evolving environment of shifting relations via thematic connections. The
concluding chapter on Ping Pong the Animation (2014)—made after Science Saru’s founding
but produced instead by Tatsunoko Productions—will demonstrate how these connections
enrich each movie or show within its own individual context.
7
1. Watching
There is something strange about Yuasa’s anime. Something unnatural, to the point of being
provocative. What is provocative is that this unnaturalness is the unnaturalness of anime
itself. For instance, scenes are frequently shot perpendicular to the action, making character
movement completely lateral. While this is standard practice, what draws the eye is the
world’s unreality. Perhaps due to different styles or degrees of detail between
characters/backgrounds/objects (Figure 1.1-1.3), or the use of different mediums such as
animation and photography (Figure 1.4), or even by architectural or geographical design
(Figure 1.5). The particular effect differs according to the image’s particular arrangement
and context within the movie/show at large, but there are two general tendencies. Take
Figure 1.5 from episode 9 of Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! (2020). Like the centremost
character Mizusaki, seeing some of fictional Shibahama’s nonsensical wonders for the first
time draws the eye into the background. Rather than just a row of buildings, there is
liveliness and energy as workers pour soil into a river. This river, however, flows out of no
water source but from houses, houses clumped together around the monorail’s support
structures, whose front doors open onto the muddy riverbank where dump trucks pour dirt
and whose back doors open onto the mountain range. An initial sense of linear perspective
is prematurely cut off before ever reaching a vanishing point. Indeed, Shibahama is the most
lived in and energetic place in Yuasa’s anime, but it is also hardly a place at all. It is rather
this abstract world of source-less rivers, entry-less parks with swings on a cliff’s edge,
flooded roads that lead back to themselves, invisible clock towers surrounded by other
buildings. Like vision in this scene, it is a cut off world—one can wander around in it but
without ever getting anywhere. Then take this scene from Kemonozume’s (2006) 6th episode
in Figure 1.2. Here, four elements, clearly distinct in their outlines, textures, and shading,
move over each other. Three non-character layers slide at different speeds, giving the
impression of depth and that Toshihiko is stalking rightward by induced movement. This,
firstly, is clearly not the penetrable, volumetric environment Lamarre identifies with closed
compositing. Yet this sense of movement also does something different to what Lamarre
describes with open and flat compositing. While sliding planes are characteristic of open
compositing, there is no openness to this world—it is an eminently flat image. But it is a
peculiar kind of flatness. The flatness of this and the other three stills below does not tend
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towards the uniplanarity or superplanarity of flat compositing, where the interval between
layers is squashed as elements leap between planes, thus bringing depth to the surface5.
While the movement of layers implies depth, the artistic dissonance between layers empties
that implication of content. These distinct differences in animation expressly reveal that
there is no necessary connection between parts of the world, drawn as they are on distinct
layers. Backgrounds, therefore, appear as what they are, so we look at the background as
background. Our relationship to the image as a representation of space leading down and
down to a vanishing point is broken. Rather than the possibility for movement into depth—
by the characters, camera, or our look—we bump up against a wall. What we see is
multiplanarity itself. The separation of the image into clearly demarcated layers. We come
up against the limit of anime6.
Figure 1.1 – Mind Game
5
Lamarre, The Anime Machine, 32, 38-39, 126-130.
6
Hasumi makes similar arguments in his chapter on watching regarding Ozu’s unnaturalness and his explicit
engagement with the limits of cinema. Hasumi, Kantoku Ozu Yasujirō, 97-128, especially 103-110.
9
Figure 1.2 – Kemonozume, episode 6
Figure 1.3 – Devilman, episode 2

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Figure 1.4 – Tatami, episode 6
Figure 1.5 – Eizouken, episode 9
The basis of Yuasa’s abstract and unnatural spaces lies here, in exposing anime’s
utter impotence in creating depth. These spaces, cut off and unfinished, appear as a
segmented multiplanar space tending to block vision from extending into depth, thus going
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against animation’s purported naturalism—the appearance of nature as “true to life” 7—

which Riffel locates in the coupling of spatial realism via landscape backgrounds and
Cartesian perspective. This unfinishedness is often produced by art design. Even the
decidedly less radical Science Saru-produced work lacks the cleanness typical of commercial
anime, marked by rough and incomplete colour shading, frequently discordant between
characters and objects/backgrounds (Figure 1.6), and ragged or wobbly lines, often
protruding beyond the expected outline of whatever they represent. The impression is that
everything is still being drawn.
Figure 1.6 – Lu Over the Wall
This exaggeration, of anime’s drawn character and its multiplanar spatial

construction, has the effect of dereifying and demythologising nature. Nature, like all other
represented content of the image, appears as what it is: something drawn, something
photographed, something cut out of paper, something made8. If a certain separateness
7
Casey Riffel, “Dissecting Bambi: Multiplanar Photography, the Cel Technique, and the Flowering of Full
Animation,” The Velvet Light Trap 69 (2012): 13.
8
For want of space, I cannot explore this further, but Suan asserts that compositing, by tending to hide gaps to
create a seamless image, also tends to hide the labour (and I would add the materials) that goes into its
production. Stevie Suan, Anime’s Identity: Performativity and Form beyond Japan (Minneapolis: University of
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between people and nature is maintained here in the character/background relation, this is
because this separateness is inherent in the animetic image insofar as it is multiplanar.
Yuasa’s anime only makes explicit what is implicit in anime itself. By revealing gaps as gaps
and layers as layers and drawings as drawings, the elements of the image tend to be put on
equal footing. The exaggeration of the drawn, constructed quality of the image emphasises
that nothing here is pre-given—not nature for human mastery, or anything of the sort.
Backgrounds are not there with the pre-defined purpose of framing character action. There
is no relation between elements outside of the act of relating. The necessary dynamism in
this relation magnifies Lamarre’s9 claim that the extension of layers, hence movement,
beyond the frame produces a ‘movementful’ natural world10. While this is most clear under
the transforming theme, there is also electrifying spontaneity in the play of movement and
cut off vision. Early in Lu Over the Wall (2017)11, for instance, the lethargic schoolboy
Ashimoto walks rightward almost motionlessly in front of residential buildings—the simple,
repetitive movement of his arm and head never shift him from his position in the frame. A
hint of the sea lies behind one garage, before the image opens up onto said sea and his
energetic friend rushes in from the side. Her comment that he has no energy emphasises
the vibrancy that was hiding outside his (and our) vision, emphasised further by a cut to
what was offscreen in the foreground—another friend leaping over a railing to join them
(Figure 1.7). This latter image, furthermore, lacks psychological motivation, bearing no
origin in a character’s look.
Minnesota Press, 2021), 135. The awareness Yuasa’s images instil of their multiplanarity and constructedness
thus calls attention to their contained labour and materials, allowing a keen observer to ascertain somewhat
what parts of the image were made by whom, how, etc.
9
Thomas Lamarre, “Coming to Life: Cartoon Animals and Natural Philosophy,” in Pervasive Animation, ed.
Suzanne Buchan (New York: Routledge, 2013), 121.
10
Contrastingly, the static photographic backgrounds often used in Tatami tend to magnify the inertia and
isolation of the protagonist, meandering around parallel worlds and repeated timelines in which he has no real
connection.
11
From Lu (created substantially with Flash animation) onward, Yuasa sets out a fascinating back-and-forth
between animetism and cinematism as digital makes movement into depth more accessible.
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Figure 1.7 – Lu
In the beginning of that Eizouken sequence above, the 3 protagonists move laterally
over a river-less bridge. Yet, as they exit the field of vision, the image holds for a beat too
long. It produces an unsettling sensation, that what is presented is not mere information
but the look of the world. Such images extend over Yuasa’s career and are particularly
prevalent throughout Eizouken, with characters imaged from strangely high/low angles,
from within nooks and alleyways, from distractingly long/close positions, dwarfing them
compared to their surroundings (Figure 1.8). Unlike, say, Lang’s penchant for disturbing
high-angle shots, which exaggerate the game piece-like fatalism of characters by evoking
the city’s observation of them, these shots have no concrete relation to narrative or
characterisation. This strangeness, however, is more prominent indoors than outdoors,
where characters are framed from disorientingly low and canted angles (Figure 1.9-1.11)12.
It is more the look of objects than of the world. Both of these shot varieties undermine the
viewing experience. They tend to disrupt the fixity of perspective in what a character is
seeing or capable of seeing, and expose the peculiar artificiality of what is being watched. If
12
These framings find their analogue in the following chapter. Note, in anticipation, the uncanny posture of
the grandpa in Figure 1.11, leaning back-left while reaching forward-right—his hand, chopsticks, the clam, and
the bowl then dominate the image, rather than his face or torso.
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the compositing discussed above foregrounds the image’s drawn and layered character, the
composition here foregrounds the presence of the ‘camera’. This then reveals details that
otherwise might never have been seen—a sleeping cat’s backside (Figure 1.8) or the
underside of a steering wheel (Figure 1.10). These narratively excessive visual details
therefore link Yuasa’s worlds by their excessiveness beyond characters’ vision, unmooring
perception from individual characters, locating it at times in the world and its objects. Since
the movementful world extends beyond the frame in all directions, it can present characters
and objects from all manner of strange angles and distances.
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Figure 1.9 – Kaiba, episode 8

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Figure 1.11 – Lu
In the case of Tatami’s 2nd episode, the world’s extension beyond the frame
becomes its duplication within the frame. The nameless protagonist (credited as Watashi)
watches a film he made featuring himself and another character, Ozu. A cut takes us into
the movie world which is then intruded upon by an image of Watashi watching. The film
characters look at the invading image which then morphs into a film strip that promptly
disappears, leading into the episode’s time reversal (Figure 1.12). This displacement of the
look onto its object is already anticipated by the discordant aesthetics, whereby Watashi’s
anime-ic look is made filmic (presented with scratches and blemishes resembling a film
print) while the filmic object is made anime-ic (presented in the show’s typical animation
style). This strikingly visualises the show’s structural conceit, where each episode is located
in one of many parallel worlds based on whatever university circle Watashi joins (here, the
film circle), abruptly switching to another with a time-loop at each episode’s end13. The shift
13
Whether Tatami is a parallel worlds or time-loop story is contentious. Steinberg, however, argues that these
two ideas should be treated as totally distinct, and to do so subsumes the narrative to Leibniz’s multiple
worlds theory to support his parallel worlds interpretation. Although there is much evidence supporting this
Leibnizian reading of an endless series of multiple possible worlds, to make it Steinberg is forced to ignore a
crucial moment in the finale. Watashi—now in a liminal time/space outside of the loop/parallel worlds—
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between watchers follows the shift between worlds. The displacement of the look therefore
works on a second, grander level: from one world to another.
While this impact of the world on vision and its object is unique, four scenes
instantiate a more basic but also more vivid description of the physicality of human
perception. First, and most simply, in Mind Game (2004): the camera tracks down from the
upper level of a wooden structure while hot water is poured into a bath, holds on a wide
shot of Myon and her sister Yan bathing, then pans 180° and pushes up to Nishi watching
them from upside down. In Ping Pong’s 1st episode, Smile and Peco have a friendly game
while waiting for a rival school’s transfer student, Kong, to show up so they can gauge his
talents. The camera rises out of the gym and into the sky, moving restlessly in the wind for
15 seconds. The sound of the game and the wind remain audible. The wind then carries the
match noise down to Kong and his coach, providing two important pieces of
returns to the first room in the ostensibly infinite sequence of tatami rooms and wonders if he has actually
been travelling through a small loop rather than an endless series. Steinberg slips himself into a hermeneutical
straitjacket by assuming a unity in the show’s philosophical groundwork that is absent. Indeed, he restricts
both his critical appreciation of the work and the work itself, taking away its freedom—as a TV show and not a
philosophical treatise—to be inconsistent. Steinberg, “Condensing the Media Mix,” 83, 71.
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characterisation: Kong is good enough to discern their playstyles just by listening, and to
realise Smile is losing on purpose14. The Night Is Short, Walk on Girl (2017) features an early
party scene where the camera simply pulls back from the seated nameless protagonist, The
Girl with Black Hair, to another table to frame the nameless Senpai. However, while the
prior two sequences maintained a coherent physical 3-dimensional space, this scene bears
no spatial coherence whatever. The surrounding tables move around more or less
independently if not completely freely, sliding outwards and inwards, disrupting any sense
of realistic space by being out of sync with each other and the camera’s movement. This
marks the play alluded to above, the penetration of the camera and the look into space
meets sliding layers, creating an illogical and irreal, but supple and vibrant image which
denies perceptual realism15. This same back-and-forth exists in a café sequence in Ride Your
Wave, a listening variation like Ping Pong. The camera’s rightwards creep gives the
impression that this conversation between friends about setting off fireworks is not
something we are meant to be seeing or hearing. The camera then tracks forward, and,
though not quite to the extent of Night Is Short, the two tables on either side of the frame
detach themselves from the image, kindly sliding out of the way as the camera goes down a
dumbwaiter. A dissolve transitions to the waitress Youko with her head in the shaft
eavesdropping. While the latter two scenes disrupt spatial coherence to differing degrees,
they all maintain spatial continuity by mapping out the in/coherent environment in which
14
The manga presents this simply by transitioning from Peco and Smile playing to a panel of Kong with his
hand to his ear. Matsumoto Taiyou, Ping Pong, Volume 1 (Tokyo: Shogakukan, 1996), 62-63. That this
adaptation decision speaks to affordances of the moving image distinct from comics goes without my saying it.
But it also foregrounds the thematic system as where the creator is most able to set free their imagination,
and foregrounds its unifying function. A cut identical to the manga would adequately convey the scene’s
narrative information (more adequately, even, with the luxury of sound), but this would restrict the scene
from producing the particular non-narrative effect (see below) Yuasa seems to aim for. And through this
change, corresponding with analogous moments in other work, Ping Pong the Animation, and Kong in
particular, are unified with said work and the characters within them at the same time as they are with Ping
Pong the manga. See: Hasumi, Kantoku Ozu Yasujirō, 101-102; and Shigehiko Hasumi, “John Ford, or The
Eloquence of Gesture,” Rouge 7 (2005), http://www.rouge.com.au/7/ford.html.
15
Steinberg makes a similar point on digital’s potential to imbue greater irrealism than realism into the image.
Marc Steinberg, “Inventing Intervals: The Digital Image in Metropolis and Gankutsuō,” Mechademia 7 (2012):
18.
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characters perceive their object. Additionally, though they each have variations there is a
definite pattern.
An image of an object—namely, some characters acting in some way—and a
continuous camera movement establish a watcher or listener. The dissolve in Ride Your
Wave’s case functions as a practical means for maintaining the sensuous connection
between the conversing characters and Youko, superimposing her face over the metal shaft
as the sound reaches her. There is thus a reversal of order by which an object is presented
first before the character perceiving it; a number of characters (the object) unaware they
are being watched/listened to; and a single act of sensuous perception sustained over a
continuous shot (plus dissolve in Ride Your Wave). If these scenes were presented
typically—perceiver given from the start, then object given for them—the latter’s
appearance would be pre-determined as the object of someone’s perceptual experience. In
this character-motivated class of shots, however, the motivation by a character is not
immediately clear. They seem, initially, to be merely functional presentations of
information, of the doings and spatial arrangement of the image’s subject. The camera
movement then does not create a new situation, as a cut might, but recontextualises the
current situation by transitioning from one subject to another. The post festum
establishment of a character watching/listening is actively achieved through space and time
as a sustained act of sensuous perception by means of a sustained camera movement. This
relation of perceptual experience, between the character watching/listening and the object
of their act, is, to borrow from Kant16, apperceptive, involving a relation to the I (the
perceiving character) which unites representations of objects in their self-consciousness. It
is a relation between an object and a conscious observer taking it to be in some way.
These scenes illustrate the individualised aspect of conscious observing, but also the
potential for connecting with another. Perving, overhearing, staring from across a room,
eavesdropping—all these involve the unawareness of the characters being acted upon; yet,
at the same time, there is a relation between people, even if only one party is conscious of
16
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), §16, especially
B134. One could also draw on Sellars by thinking of perception not as descriptive but as a propositional,
assertoric “seeing that something is the case”. Wilfrid Sellars, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), §16.
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it. They are thus separate, but they have the capacity to actively relate as individuals—not
unlike the relation between separate elements of the image. Through technical means of
compositing and formal strategies such as these four observing scenes, the world and
objects within it are not inert, passive givens for just as inert and passive a fixed perspective.
Rather, they—the world, objects, characters, perception—must all be made, or better, are
being made. Even the very act of drawing and shading and outlining and colouring is rough,
unfinished, still being worked on. The image’s organisation is persistently disrupted, denying
a sense of fixity or unity to space—hence also the perception of it—and exaggerating the
unnaturalness and artifice of anime. Rather than fixity, Yuasa’s anime emphasises the sense
of a movementful world within and beyond the image. Activity and dynamism, movement
and change, are thus both inherent in that world and the characters inhabiting it, and a
necessity of their interaction with each other. As the thematic system of watching can
elucidate the potential and necessity of this dynamism, transforming can help demonstrate
that dynamism itself.
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2. Transforming
While the world transforms in various respects along with or in response to characters,
Tatami and Eizouken more than others present a world so thoroughly dynamic that it often
alters itself. In Tatami, the typical incomplete, half-drawn aesthetic embodies the capacity
to become something different, realised as space comes apart—or back together— at the
seams (Figure 2.1-2.3). This activity is not limited to plays with geometry. Words burst onto
the scene from out of nowhere (Figure 2.4), or shoot out of characters’ mouths into
another’s head (Figure 2.5), transforming the environment through contact and the
presence of new objects. Indeed, these words transform the world of this English language
episode just like the film world in the film episode. While this coexists with character
transforming (see below), Eizouken is something of a Rosetta stone for the transforming
theme, perhaps paradoxically, by taking anime’s metamorphic potential out of the body and
concentrating it in the world. Anime creators Asakusa (director/writer/background
art/concepts), Mizusaki (character animation), or less commonly Kanamori (producer) or
Doumeki (sound design) imagine or remember something, and the image changes to a
different style more reminiscent of earlier Yuasa. Colouring is brightly faded and
incomplete—non-existent in the background—tending to go beyond the roughly sketched
lines. The crude animated/imagined space or object brought into the real world (Figure 2.6-
2.7) is imbued with dynamism by the fact that it is in the process of being
imagined/animated by the anime-creating protagonists. The animated space transforms, or
the animated object transforms the real world through its incursion into it, as the characters
use their imagination to conceive solutions for their anime-production problems. For
example, episode 10. Asakusa hears long-forgotten bells chiming without reason over the
water, giving her an idea for the final anime. She constructs a little mill out of sticks, then
imagines a bigger one of unknown purpose. The purpose becomes clear as she watches the
imagined mill’s operation. With each cut, the mill gets bigger, changes location, and is
attributed with new features as the idea develops. The transformation of the mill and
environment is the transformation of the idea, becoming more concrete and uniting with
other ideas into a coherent narrative world. Here, and across all his work, Yuasa invokes the
transforming theme at the most pivotal junctures.
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25

26

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Eizouken’s real world is much cleaner than these imagined/animated scenes. There
is, as elaborated on below, greater stability in figures which reduces their transformative
potential. The real world of Eizouken thus foregrounds, rather than this potential, the force
and violence of transforming itself. The climate and geography of their first anime intrudes
28
into the real world upon its screening, as does a smoking tank shell. The vertically organised
neighbourhood blocks of their final anime burst out of the ground amidst Shibahama’s
densely packed buildings. The zoom-out which ends the series then shows the mech, UFOs,
and other inventions of their anime flying over Earth. As elements from their shorts burst
onto the scene, so too does eizouken itself, as a new team creating fresh, lively animation.
Still here, transforming accompanies the most decisive points in the group’s development.
That character transformation is not prominent does not preclude Eizouken from
playing with the strange, impossible movements animation allows. And character design
anticipates this strangeness. The little gremlin Asakusa and gangly Kanamori, with her big
teeth and always open mouth, are assuredly eccentric designs. Even the model Mizusaki has
oddly bushy, angled eyebrows and similarly pointed eyelashes. This exaggerated weirdness
in character design is quite typical of Yuasa, as is the exaggeration—coexisting with
remarkably fluid motion—of the janky and unnatural movements such design encourages17.
Kanamori in particular lurches and teeters from point A to B. Kicking down a door ends with
her bringing her leg and arm down, leaning a little to the side, then straightening up—
broken down into 3 distinct movements, themselves broken down into further micro-
movements. Of course, this rigidity is not limited to Kanamori18, but the gawky inelegance of
her lanky design makes such segmented motion more natural and pronounced for her. Her
poses assume this same awkward stiffness, mechanically tilting her head excessively
up/down, for instance, or keeping her hands flat by her side like a mannequin. These
postures distinguish Kanamori from Asakusa, marked by her various funny faces, and
Mizusaki by her very particular gestures and fidgeting. On the other hand, they connect her
with Sakaki, the student council secretary. The two are cut from the same cloth. What
indicates this most clearly is not their shared cleverness, their private back-and-forth within
the eizouken/student council conflict, their bizarrely similar voice and cadence, or their
clear understanding of each other’s arguments, but that they move and pose in the same
17
The herky jerky movement of limited animation is a well-documented feature of anime. See: Lamarre, The
Anime Machine, 196; Marc Steinberg, Anime’s Media Mix: Franchising Toys and Characters in Japan
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 5; Suan, Anime’s Identity, 5.
18
Mizusaki ironically goes on about wanting to make full animation while she acts with big, emphatic gestures
and expressions which, of course, are spasmodic limited animation.
29
way (Figure 2.8). The description of Kanamori’s movement and postures applies equally to
Sakaki (with the caveat that her screen time limits the variety). During the meeting in the
stills below, they are also the only characters to sit ankle-on-knee, and both right-on-left. I
will return to these two at the end of the 4th chapter, but they pose in solidarity with a host
of Yuasa characters. As alluded to earlier, people often assume unnatural, physically difficult
if not impossible postures and positions without any motivation (Figure 2.9-11, and 1.11).
These pointless and uncomfortable leanings, head tilts and movements, analogously with
those strange compositions above, disrupt the fixity of the body and draw attention to the
drawnness of figures. These characters are not restricted by pesky things like bones and
flesh. They are drawn, so can be un-drawn, or re-drawn, or drawn differently. They are
transformative.

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31
Figure 2.11 – Night Is Short
This potential depends to an extent on character animation. Kaiba’s (2008) character

designs are clean, round, rather cartoon-like with big eyes and cute distinguishing features
like a thick lock of hair jutting upwards (Figure 2.12). The thick hair and jumpsuit-like
clothing reduces (without eliminating) volume that arises when hair or clothes billow in the
wind. This imparts a particular rounded flatness to characters, curving in two dimensions
but lacking in depth. It is thus the odd one out in Yuasa’s work, for there is a consistent
aesthetic and a clear superplanar flatness as the animetic interval is brought to the surface
of the image, aided all the more by the fairly indiscernible abstract and expressionistic
architecture and settings. Indeed, characters and environments have the same aesthetic
features and degree of detail. Colouring in particular is equally vibrant across the image,
without much tone or gradation signalling depth. Bold, solid colours then fill figures
composed of solid, round outlines which lack internal lines. The emphasis on colour and de-
emphasis on the line makes outlines tougher to read as lines, thus increasing the stability of
figures. However, as I point to further below, this does not exclude the transforming theme
but tends to redirect it out of the single body.
32
Contrastingly, and while the particular characters design naturally differs according
to the particular anime, characters in other early work and Night Is Short (sharing a
narrative universe and aesthetic with Tatami) are somewhat amorphous. Where a few solid
outlines consistently contain Kaiba’s characters, these are instead composed of more
(quantitatively and qualitatively) ragged and janky partial lines, with outlines and internal
lines which frequently vibrate. Such lines destabilise the image because they destabilise the
body. Frank19 notes that when contours are made less visible, as in Kaiba, the outline
becomes a non-deformable constraining force. The reverse is also true: making contours
more pronounced amplifies the plasmatic, deformable potential of the animated body.
Indeed, we can sense the hands of the artists as line work or colouring, for instance,
undergo subtle, momentary changes across a series or movie, magnifying the
transformative quality inherent in characters by their being drawn. These anime thus
abound in expressive transformations, permeating across bodies as a potential held in
19
Hannah Frank, Frame by Frame: A Materialist Aesthetics of Animated Cartoons (Oakland: University of
California Press, 2019), 116.
33
common20: flattening into geometric shapes (Figure 2.13); the reddening of complexion
when drinking (indicating who can handle their liquor) (Figure 2.14); the growing/shrinking
and reshaping of the body or its parts (Figure 2.15); becoming another kind of being in part
or entirely to exaggerate some character trait(s) (Figure 2.16). This potential, however, and
thus these transformations, are less common in Science Saru work. The overall style of
character design is generally the same, only played straighter, less weird, more normal.
(Hence Kaiba’s singularity: it is different in kind not degree.) Lines are still pointed and
ragged, but fewer, more stable and consistent. As odd as characters might look, this greater
consistency quelches somewhat (though not entirely) the metamorphic potential of the
body in general, and physical transformations such as those expressive ones tend to be
curtailed. However, individualised, character-driven acts of transformation persist all the
same, and persist in their physicality by Yuasa concentrating the animated figure’s
transformative potential into particular characters.
20
Fittingly, however, Mind Game’s God is the only one whose state of being is constant metamorphosis into
any shape whatever, from standard animated figures to photographed fish.
34

35
To start, physical transformations need not be exclusive to animation’s specific

affordances. Yan cutting her hair and going to change clothes in Mind Game is a superficial
transformation articulating her determination at that moment to enjoy her time in the
whale’s stomach. In Night Is Short, the titular Girl spends the third act helping everyone she
met over the titular night deal with the cold they caught. Her last visit is to her senpai, with
whom she shares a mutual attraction. When he invites her to a used bookstore, she accepts
and suddenly reddens. Initially seeming as immune to the rhinovirus as she is to alcohol, she
finally catches the cold. This change in state marks an end and a beginning. It concludes the
narrative and her efforts as the only healthy person able to help the community deal with
their illness. And though she was apart throughout the movie from her future boyfriend,
their relationship is kicked off by her sharing his cold. Ride Your Wave’s coming-of-age tale
takes the opposite route. Where The Girl goes through communal relationships and friends
to make an inter-personal connection, Hinako goes through communal relationships and
friends to recover her individuality. Separated prematurely at the first act’s close from her
boyfriend, firefighter Minato, she must go on learning how to be romantically alone again
with the support of her friends and associates. And, in fact, Minato in a second life, seen
within water by Hinako. The movie’s anime-ic physical transformations arise as the image of
36
his body is refracted in water—squashing, fragmenting, and wobbling with liquid fluidity
(Figure 2.17)—and as he manipulates water to continue firefighting from the grave (read:
water bottle/toilet/river/etc.). In keeping with these water-based anime-ic transformations,
Hinako transforms her form of activity by transitioning into lifesaving which manifests her
commitment to rekindle her independence and ride her own wave, calling forth the final
act.
37
38
Figure 2.17 – Ride Your Wave
In Tatami, Watashi’s more anime-ic metamorphoses are limited to expressive

transformations. The absence of any internally directed physical transformation (anime-ic or
otherwise) expresses his lack of psychological or emotional change throughout the series—
however superficially different his chosen circle makes his life in each episode, it is
39
substantially identical with all other versions because he is substantially identical with all
other Watashis21. Indeed, the rare exception, bulking up in episode 3, also demonstrates
this lack: he did it for others, but as always, he never considered their desire for him to stay
exactly as he was. Physical growth translates his emotional stuntedness. In the finale,
therefore, the shedding of his beard and clothes as he runs to save Ozu has the function of
announcing a new kind of self-confidence. No longer the panicking, timid narcissist, he is
now comfortable enough in himself and what others think of him to be completely nude in
public (ignore the legality). This is also reflected in mannerism changes, appearing relaxed
with his hands comfortably in his pockets or arms crossed (Figure 2.18), compared to his
earlier tenseness (Figure 2.19, also 2.13). Physical change now manifests the first real
change in his character.
21
Napier rightly highlights that the rigorous episodic structure of TV comedy, which makes up a considerable
portion of anime, de-emphasises character development and the larger narrative. Susan Napier, Anime from
Akira to Howl’s Moving Castle: Experiencing Contemporary Japanese Animation (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2005), 49. Tatami emphasises as strongly as possible Watashi’s complete lack of character
development. Each episode-concluding time reversal, at which point he is more or less the exact same person
as he was at the start (2 years earlier), demonstrates the absolute futility of expecting a substantially different
life for yourself by superficially changing your situation.
40
Kaiba tends to take transforming out of the single body, because, narratively, the
body and memories (are they the soul or spirit? the narrator asks before episodes) are
separable. To transform is usually to switch bodies. The distinctions between bodies that
41
are elided by their plasmatic reduction is compensated by the distinctions between every
body. In the final episode, Kichi swaps into a fully weaponised robot form, using every
missile launcher and lethal body part to fight off the security robots of Warp’s palace.
Transforming is decisive narratively. But for this body swap, Neiro would not have been able
to reach Kaiba/Warp physically and emotionally, and the world would be lost.
But Kaiba does occasionally feature more plastic metamorphoses. Hyohyo, a little
creature that turns her antennae into propellors, contains Neiro’s old memories from when
she and Kaiba were in love. In episode 9, as Neiro—with altered memories tricking her into
thinking Kaiba is her enemy—attacks Kaiba, Hyohyo flies down to catch him, desperately
trying to pull him to safety. Kaiba’s weight and the force of gravity pull Hyohyo one way,
while she pulls herself the other by force of will and love. Stretching translates Hyohyo’s
desperation and feelings into a palpable image, embodying immense emotional weight as
the only character capable of manipulating her figure and shape to such extents for a loved
one22. But there is also a peculiar sense of motion in the scene. Hyohyo and Kaiba are in the
foreground, while the simplified background is a brown wall with holes. Upwards
directionality is given by Hyohyo angling herself to the top right of the frame, parallel to the
holes moving towards the bottom left. But the speed of the holes’ downwards movement
implies Hyohyo herself is successfully and rapidly flying upwards. Yet, the stretchiness
implies a struggle simply to not be dragged down. There is thus a play between weighted
movement, adding to the sense of struggle and effort in the physicality of motion, and the
fluid weightlessness of animation. Indeed, at one point she drops towards the bottom left of
the frame, stretching and fighting to fly back upwards. But the speed of the background
remains constant. Is she being dragged down to the point of falling, or just decelerating? We
cannot really tell, and the independence between background and foreground layers
becomes apparent. The background helps provide a sense of direction, other than that,
Hyohyo is completely unmoored. This combination intensifies the play between weight and
weightlessness, whereas Lamarre points out that the sense of being unmoored without
22
In the following chapter I will discuss another rare example from Kaiba of bodily extension. In that case,
however, it is not consciously directed stretching but distension which merely happens.
42
directionality simply magnifies the latter23. This creates a peculiar freedom of movement, as
Hyohyo is weighted down thus unable to move any which way, but is also unrestricted by
any realistic physical laws. The whale escape sequence from Mind Game produces a similar
situation. All four characters stretch and manipulate their bodies, growing out the tiny hair
follicles on their feet to create friction in order to run up flying bits of trash, water, and
eventually air molecules. There is again this weighted weightlessness as they struggle and
grapple to drive themselves upwards through physical contact with the environment, but
with all the buoyancy implied by the non-natural forces permeating elastic figures.
Stretching’s freedom of movement becomes the decisive factor in their achievement of
freedom from the whale’s stomach.
As above-mentioned, physical transformations in more recent work are downplayed
in general but channelled into particular figures: Ride Your Wave/Minato in water; Devilman
Crybaby (2018)/demons and devilmen; Eizouken/the world. In Lu, merfolk, and primarily the
titular Lu. This fell creature, who slithers out of the sea as if out of hell, should petrify
anyone unfortunate enough to cross her path. Her very figure is disturbingly unstable—fish
swim in her water hair (what sorcery traps them there? do they eat?) and her drool is not
saliva but a blob of white dripping out of her teeth (Figure 2.20). She is in fact completely
deformable: as sunlight, merfolk’s weakness, blasts her at the end of the movie, the abstract
animation fragments her body into discrete blobs as she disappears into water (Figure 2.21).
But it is this malleability which also makes her adorable. This small, weird, jelly-like thing in
constant watery-fluid motion, whose big, black, shark-like eyes glimmer prettily—like the
eyes of cute anime girls and unlike those of every other Yuasa character—can twist and
transform like the creepiest contortionist and the cutest cartoon figure. Her cuteness is
infectious, inciting the townsfolk to spontaneously dance in rubber hose animation.
Transforming therefore abounds in Lu. It opens up unique solutions to narrative problems
during the climax. It articulates a character’s passions and feelings (Lu’s love of music as her
tail fin morphs into legs; her father’s rage and desperation as he saves her). And distracts us
from narrative logic, providing images which relish in the simple fact of animation.
23
Thomas Lamarre, “From Animation to Anime: Drawing Movements and Moving Drawings,” Japan Forum 14,
no. 2 (2002): 344-345.
43
Figure 2.20 – Lu
Figure 2.21 – Lu
Transforming is not always a solitary gesture. Kemonozume takes its title from the
kemonozume ritual—replace human arms with a flesh eater’s and absorb the flesh eater’s
life force. In the last episode, Yuka, flesh eater and co-protagonist with her boyfriend, flesh
44
eater hunter Toshihiko, wants to be of use to him in his battle and offers her arms up. He
refuses. This point will be clarified in the following chapter, but were Toshihiko to perform
the ritual, their commitment to sharing their own individual problems would be subsumed
by physically merging together (in part if not totally). Moreover, history suggests Yuka will
die and Toshiko will be consumed by the claws and turn into a monster. Not-transforming
therefore maintains their love for, and life with, each other, and also maintains Toshihiko as
his own master, winning the fight as a martial artist with his own physical and mental
talents. Kemonozume is the rare Yuasa where transforming takes the form of something
outright bad and destructive, distinguishing it from his other work to the same extent as it
connects it with anime broadly 24.
In contrast, Devilman, Kemonozume’s successor of sorts, takes physical merging as a
means of (as it happens, unsuccessfully) achieving the shared will and goals of a friendship
or team. We will see the inter-personal side of this in Fucking. But in episode 10, devilmen
merge with protagonist Akira’s body during their sky battle with his best friend, Ryo/Satan.
As they sacrifice themselves to let Akira use them to save humanity, filling in for his
decapitated limbs, the violent fusion is accompanied by flashes of lightning. The
metamorphosis of one worm-like devilman into his fresh arm creates a new spatial relation
in the image, pushing Akira into the background and erecting a new foreground by
stretching outwards from his body. The worm-like arm writhes around as Akira tries
controlling it, upon which he leaps forward into the midground with lightning flashing
behind him, and the new arm becomes his own just like the old. Like the transforming
mecha Lamarre25 discusses, Akira embodies the multiplanar image in his devilman form—
distinct elements merge together like layers of the image26. While character design
embodies multiplanarity thus, the interaction of different figures with each other and space
is permeated to the core by movement and change. What makes this scene particularly
24
Napier’s older diagnosis that, particularly in horror and anime’s ‘apocalyptic mode’, transforming commonly
alienates and devastates characters, is still broadly accurate. Napier, Anime from Akira to Howl’s Moving
Castle, 47-48. For more recent famous examples, see: Hunter x Hunter episode 131 (2014); Mob Psycho 100
(2016, 2019).
25
Lamarre, The Anime Machine, 129-130.
26
Indeed, the devilman conceptually is an inter-personal being: the unity of the human heart with a demon
body, neither human nor demon but their joint work creating the devilman.
45
dynamic therefore are the dynamics of compositing, the transformation of space as new
relations are generated when new elements are introduced into or taken out of the image,
and movement becomes distributed across and between shifting planes. Transforming here
expresses this essential technical problematic of compositing and character animation,
connecting and combining distinct things into a shared construct. To that extent, it
expresses the very same as the coming together of distinct individuals. This interest in inter-
personal and communal relations concretises under the fucking and eating and drinking
themes.
46
3. Fucking
The smuggler Parm towers over the boyish Kaiba, surrounded by squeezing floating hands.
His cheeky grin quickly disarms the scene’s threatening air. Having copied her memories,
that is, spirit or soul, into Kaiba’s body (and having already transferred his into another,
hippopotamus-like body), Parm fucks herself over the course of the 2nd episode. The sexual
activity is first revealed when hippo Kaiba and Hyohyo stumble onto the scene and watch
from outside. Given what they and we see is spatially and bodily indiscernible, the scene is
totally unerotic. Excepting the aural clarity of Parm’s insatiable moaning, panting, and dirty
talk, there is little conveying sex. Visually, panels à la a stained-glass window at first present
parts of Parm’s or Kaiba’s body (not engaged sexually), and subsequently the scene takes
place in some kind of pulsating blob, out of which emerges her head and massively
distended breasts and stomach (Figure 3.1). There is a play then between the aural and
visual image, where one sounds mind-blowingly pleasurable while the other looks terrifically
painful. Indeed, the hornier she becomes, the more she expands, and vice versa.
47
The fucking problem here is the sex-masturbation unity, where double the life =
double the pleasure, but also double the pain, double everything—concentrated in a single
individual. Additionally, Kaiba, save as an isolated fragment in some earlier panels, is neither
heard nor seen during the sequence until Parm’s death. Parm’s physical isolation within the
image gains a more solid foundation in the stability of Kaiba’s bodies. The simple, bold
48
outlines seal Parm off within a non-deformable and so impermeable border. One strong
enough to stretch out her leotard to where it is little more than thread. This makes for the
radical solipsistic withdrawal of the purportedly shared experience into the individual. With
no one to share this joy and suffering with27, they become isolated in her original body. Her
body swells and swells until we hear, rather than see, the money shot28: the blob explodes,
and we find her dead in a puddle of green fluids, returned to normal size and without any
external injuries—the boundary held up. Her individual body may be able to contain her
own growth, but not so much her horniness, passion, pain, ecstasy, to the point where her
internal organs simply cease functioning. This scene thus sets up the peculiar magnetism of
the thematic system of fucking, its reconciliation in a single act of two apparently opposed
elements: the individual and the inter-personal.
Devilman, particularly its first half, presents a non-stop barrage of sex. Orgies,
straight sex, queer sex, porn, child porn, masturbation, wet dreams, sexual assault,
necrophilia—to name a handful of scenarios. What tends to tie this vast profusion of erotic
images together (and unlike Kaiba they are both erotic and pornographic) is their sheer
physicality and the manner of presentation, primarily in exhibition for other characters
through POVs. Diverse examples include Ryo recording the opening episode’s goofy sexual
transformations (Figure 3.2), Akira using x-ray vision to peep through his friend/adoptive
sister Miki’s clothes, and Kouda railing his boyfriend/hook-up doggy-style in visceral POV.
Connecting fucking so deeply with watching visually expresses the one-sidedness of the
27
Aristotle emphasises the sharing of action and of pleasure and pain in his account of friendship. Aristotle,
Nicomachean Ethics (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2014), Book IX, especially 1166a and 1172a. While there
are of course differences between philia-based friendships and those grounded in eros, this sense of sharing is
essential in both, as also in Yuasa’s work.
28
Linda Williams notes that early stag porn tended to emphasise the ‘meat shot’, focusing on the genitals and
penetration as the climax of its generic form, while the ‘money shot’ or cum shot was becoming the dominant
climax (narratively and physically) in porn during the 70s. Linda Williams, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the
“Frenzy of the Visible” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 93-94. While containing some features
of cartoon/animated porn (namely, the extreme swelling of belly and bosom), the absence of either of these
essential shots generates a sequence that is not only unerotic but unpornographic. It becomes an aural
exhibition of pleasure but without the visual representation of the pleasurable object. See also: Rebecca
Saunders, “Here Be Monsters: Monster Porn and the Crisis of Masculinity,” Feminist Media Studies (March
2022): 4, doi: 10.1080/14680777.2022.2041253.
49
sexual relation, positing a relation between watcher and watched, a conscious observer and
its object taking it to be in some way, as I wrote earlier. As the watcher acts on what they
watch, on their object, there is a self-relation, thus more precisely the positing of a self-
consciousness, which as Hegel puts it “is desire” 29. The orectic, desire-based intentionality
by which I take something to be this for me requires this self-relation. Insofar as external
objects are, as Pippin writes, “considered as objects for the living subject, as threats to,
means to, or indifferent to such life-sustaining”30, the self gives itself its own life as referent.
One then becomes subject to, rather than subject of, their desires as a merely living being,
acting according to the basest desires and demands of their species’ life.
Like the new demons’ unrestrained fulfillment of their violent and sexual impulses,
Akira finds himself subject to his basest desires, particularly in episode 5. In a horny stupor,
drooling with spaced-out eyes and hunched over shoulders, he meets and fucks the ancient
demon Silene in her human form. Beginning from his POV taking her as his desired object
and the action as his desire’s satisfaction, the scene then shifts to her POV before
29
Georg W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), ¶167.
30
Robert Pippin, Hegel on Self-Consciousness: Desire and Death in the Phenomenology of Spirit (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2011), 30.
50
abandoning this perspectival back-and-forth for a more functional description. Silene

thrusts him in with her feet before they turn to talons and wings emerge, wrapping his head
up in her limbs to keep him wrapped up in her vagina and breasts. Reframing to present
Silene’s assertion of control recontextualises the act according to her motivation, namely, to
draw out her former lover Amon, the demon inside Akira. She punctures and squeezes his
frail body with her talons while the increasing amount of short, irregular, strained internal
lines evoke Akira’s bodily stress (Figure 3.3). The conflicting desires motivating this escapade
put them in opposition. For Akira, it is what is it. But while Silene may want Amon to make
love to her, she does not want to fuck the boy. Since the commitment to act in a certain way
for a certain end is also the commitment to keep acting thus according to appropriate future
contexts31, when they stop fucking, Silene continues trying to rouse Amon out of Akira,
whereas his action and motivating desire change entirely as the context changes for him. A
battle ensues.
31
On this point see: Pippin, Hegel on Self-Consciousness, 65-66; Terry Pinkard, Hegel’s Phenomenology: The
Sociality of Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 49.
51
During a lull in the fighting Silene demands Amon roughly “make love” to her—“抱
け” [dake], meaning make love euphemistically but primarily embrace/hug. Thereupon
Akira remembers his demon-killed parents making the same demand (in the latter
meaning). This remembering grounds his consequent desire, to commit the worst kind of
vengeance-fuelled violence, in his human heart rather than demon instincts. He then
mutilates and presumably32 rapes Silene. The vilest moment in the show is both shocking
yet not, given its intent focus on humanity’s limitless capacity for malice—a capacity just as
inherent to the sympathetic cry-baby Akira as the capacity for human connection and
sympathy. But this is followed by the show’s most singularly moving moment. Silene’s
subordinate Kaim, who loves her but whose sexual advances had earlier been jilted, offers
up his own body and life to merge with Silene, now broken and partially torn apart. While
only one has erotic feelings for the other, it is clear from her tears and the emotion in her
voice that they have love for each other and a mutual desire—to kill Devilman. The fusion of
Silene’s mangled body with Kaim’s decapitated one into another, centaur-like form, makes
up for their respective physical deficiencies in a body with the strength to match their
shared will and carry out their violent designs. Kaim’s, then, is a sacrifice not for another,
but for another and oneself: it is for the inter-personal rather than just the personal, his
desire or hers. It is thus not fucking, but not-fucking, transforming, and fighting together
which articulate their particular love; through the bodily sharing, however fleetingly, of the
pride and passion, pleasure and pain of doing something for each other. Without being able
to finish Akira off, they die standing as Silene is assured of their victory. Statuesquely smiling
in the sunrise, their activity and love is immortalised (Figure 3.4). Almost dead himself,
demons, Akira learns too late, can love too.
32
Lighting and composition, and the particularly unique context of a demon battle, make events fairly
indiscernible. It is, however, quite strongly implied.
52
Where Devilman presents its bodily union through character design, Mind Game
does so through a change in animation style. Nishi and Myon’s sex scene, represented
through cutaways (with the typical mix of hand-drawn animation, paper cut-outs, heavily
processed live-action, and stop-motion), is directly presented through oil painting. Purple,
53
pink, teal, and various other paints initially exceed their bodies, where outlines remain
reasonably solid and the two of them distinct. As they fuck, outlines begin making no
distinction between the two, instead merely assisting the different colours in offsetting
Nishi and Myon from the backgrounds (Figure 3.5). The plasmatic potential of the body is
given a particular actuality in this explosion of boundless colour, where brush strokes and
penile strokes take the same form and leave a tactile imprint in the image. Narratively, until
his early death Nishi’s extreme attraction (read: perverted obsession) for Myon had been
mostly one-sided, ogling her and putting her body on a pedestal without much if any regard
for her as a person. Since this is a key component of his alienation and isolation from the
world and others, his increasing maturity and attention to Myon’s character rather than tits
post-rebirth is central to overcoming said alienation. As Nishi’s and Myon’s feelings for each
other become mutual, fucking expresses the genuine attainment of a particular kind of
romantic love, proceeding from an immature individuality in the protagonist to a more
mature unity or inter-personal connection. This love can perhaps best be described by
appropriating Hegel: “Love neither restricts nor is restricted; it is not finite at all. It is a
feeling, yet not a single feeling […] in love, life is present as a duplicate of itself and as a
single and unified self”33. The animation visualises this precisely. While Kaiba’s thick outlines
contain Parm within herself, these pulsating, unrestricted oil colours exceed Nishi and
Myon’s individual outlines and naturally end up melding together, duplicating the self and
creating a single self, a vibrating unity. While fucking they are no longer separate selves with
isolated feelings, but a truly unified self in which any distinction between lovers evanesces,
out of sight and out of mind.
33
Georg W.F. Hegel, “Love,” in Early Theological Writings, trans. T.M. Knox (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1971), 304-305.

54
Kemonozume’s Yuka, as with all flesh eaters and Devilman’s demons, struggles to
contain her desires and violent, flesh-eating impulses. Yet, she and Toshihiko are committed
to trying to have sex without the former killing the latter. The fucking problem is that Yuka’s
arousal results in her flesh eater transformation, thus putting Toshihiko at the mercy of her
claws or teeth. Therefore, unlike Mind Game’s unity, there is a clear separation between
two: two individuals from opposing sides in an ages-long conflict—a human and a human
who transforms into a human-eating monster. There is less a Hegelian idea of love than a
Badiouian one. Their construction of love requires a dangerous wager34 and the tenacity to
keep undertaking that risk to make a life “no longer from the perspective of One but from
the perspective of Two” 35, based on the separation and difference between them. It
requires a joint effort to manage the shared desire between their individually frail bodies.
On Yuka’s part, an internal struggle, shaking violently or seeing her hands turn to claws and
forcing them back to hands, fighting herself to keep from fighting Toshihiko. On Toshihiko’s
part, a more external effort such as handcuffing Yuka in their attempt at bondage, so that
34
Note further: the final scene of the show is Toshihiko leaping from a plane after Yuka—her with, him
without, a parachute. A leap of faith. She will catch him.
35
Alain Badiou, In Praise of Love (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2012), 29.
55
he merely falls asleep with gashes on his back in place of dying (Figure 3.6). It is this sharing
of difference, together with the sharing of pleasure and pain, which distinguishes Toshihiko
and Yuka’s love. Indeed, the show makes two comparisons to other relationships:
human/flesh eater where the former’s feelings are unrequited—the latter decapitates him;
elderly husband and wife, deeply in love, are artificially transformed into flesh eaters—they
fight each other and die. Both Mind Game and Kemonozume, though taking different tacks,
use fucking to express the attainment of an inter-personal connection. There are other ways
this connection can be made, but fucking provides a clear expression of the inter-personal,
for it coexists with the expression of the individual. Even not-fucking in certain contexts
constitutes this play between individuality and inter-personality, as above in Devilman, as
well as in Watashi’s solipsistic refusal of Hanuki’s sexual advances in Tatami’s 6th episode:
not out of ethics and the refusal to take advantage drunk Hanuki, but in order to protect his
own chastity. The fucking theme articulates a high point of isolation and radical self-
centredness, on one pole, and on the other genuine love. But this romantic love, as with
friendship, familial bonds, any kind of bond, takes root outside the bedroom. Most
commonly these bonds form in the dining room.
56

57
4. Eating and Drinking
Early in Mind Game, Myon invites Nishi to Yan’s restaurant for beer and yakitori after having
informed him she is marrying a successful man with a stable job (i.e., Nishi’s opposite).
Quite obnoxiously, he takes out his frustrations on the girls’ father for his drunken
reminiscences on his days of cheating on their mother. Nishi’s control over his self-centred
emotions (his anger is not out of sympathy but because “I love the women of the Uchida
family”) is as non-existent as over his flailing body. His head grows and stretches out in
disproportion to his torso, shaking with the tautness of a rope being stretched to its limit
(Figure 2.15 above). This bodily manifestation of Nishi’s uncontrollable narcissism and
emotional distance from Myon is then externalised when her fiancé joins them. Thinking he
has no shot with girls if they prefer the fiancé’s type, Nishi motionlessly slides down to the
end of the counter (Figure 4.1). With Nishi stationary in the frame, the world transforms
itself by opening up an increasingly insurmountable gap between Nishi and Myon,
manipulating depth to graphically illustrate his sense of their growing emotional distance.
The setting of a counter rather than a more intimate, communal setting of a table or booth
further isolates Nishi and expands that gap. While transforming in this early scene has the
function of translating emotions into bodily movement and physical distance between
characters, it is crucial that after Nishi, Myon, and Yan are swallowed up by the whale and
meet the old pervert who has been living in its stomach for 3 decades, they have an
intimate, candle-lit dinner around a square-shaped table. With Nishi having come back to
life as more considerate and less self-centred, the theme of eating and drinking is what kicks
off the shift from the personal to the communal as these four try to make some kind of
temporary life for themselves inside the whale.
58
The dining table in Yuasa’s anime is indeed not a setting for eating or drinking, but
rather a site for the formation, development, articulation, and recollection of relationships.
This can be quite simple as in Ride Your Wave. Hinako begins the movie having just moved
out of home into her own apartment. She (not quite successfully) makes omurice for herself
59
when her mother phones: she has just made the same for Hinako’s brother. Omurice seems
a household favourite. Hinako is eating to remind herself of home. Or in Lu. In the second
scene, teenage Ashimoto is harangued at breakfast by his father and grandfather, so leaves
without eating anything. At dinner in a later scene, the same occurs only he takes food from
the fridge to eat alone in his room. But in the second last scene, after his grandfather’s
death, and after his father has opened up to him and the two have reconnected, they eat
breakfast together.
Lu’s linking of the thematic system and narrative structure is developed more
elaborately in Tatami, introducing change into the story’s progression through their play.
Each episode follows an identical pattern: Watashi joins a circle; he meets Ozu, a seemingly
omniscient, pointy-eared, fanged, devilish troublemaker with whom Watashi gets into
antics36; he fantasises about meeting a ‘raven-haired maiden’, usually his junior Akashi; a
fortune teller tells him to seize the opportunity dangling in front of him; and time rewinds.
In six out of the first nine episodes (before the structural narrative shift in the final two),
Watashi sits in his room towards the end eating a castella, preparing to eat a castella, or
boiling water (presumably to cook or drink with). He then notices dangling in front of him a
white mochiguman: Akashi’s stuffed toy37. Upon noticing it, he has a flashback to their first
meeting and early moments in their relationship.
What is curious about these flashbacks is that their psychological necessity is hardly
if at all established within each episode. Watashi is not obsessed with Akashi but with what
she represents: the image of the raven-haired maiden. In some episodes she barely even
appears, yet still he is drawn to remember her alone in his room. The key is in episodes 6
and 7, where he pursues two different women and gives no thought to Akashi. There is no
moment of recollection since he makes no attempt at eating or drinking and does not notice
the mochiguman. Every flashback to Akashi then is instituted not just by noticing the toy,
but also by actively eating/drinking or preparing to eat/drink, and by doing so alone. In
episode 9, he eats out with Ozu who brings the toy with him, at which point Watashi
36
Ozu’s voice actor Yoshino Hiroyuki does as good a job as I have heard at expressing the essence of a
character through dialogue, sounding exactly how one expects the sick little freak Ozu would sound.
37
Episode 8 reverses the order. He runs into Akashi at the episode’s end which triggers his memory first, and
then he goes home, sees the toy, and eats a castella, sinking into solitude.
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remembers finding the toy but not Akashi. There is no need to remember another
relationship when living such a relationship out. The necessity of these flashbacks is given
therefore by the linking of the thematic system and narrative structure. Eating and drinking
function as a narrative ritual through which, as a ceremonial communal or inter-personal
act, relationships are built up. But when that social ritual becomes a solitary act, only the
memory of another can be evoked. Watashi is only ever really able to look back at his
relationship with Akashi. He almost always dines alone38. In the final episode, seeing the
opportunity literally dangling in front of him fills him with determination to change himself
and try to create something new. Crucially, he remembers Akashi upon seeing the dangling
toy but without eating or drinking anything. Thus, while transforming articulates the
individualised change in Watashi’s character (timid to confident, tense to relaxed), it is not-
eating or -drinking which introduces this particular character development and shift in the
narrative structure: Watashi’s willingness to connect with Akashi the person instead of
fantasising about the raven-haired maiden. Then, having escaped from the series/loop of
tatami rooms and given Akashi her lost toy, it is his invitation to get ramen together which
expresses the actual beginning of their romantic relationship.
Eating and drinking as a communal ritual is presented in Tatami’s successor, Night Is
Short, particularly through boozing. The protagonist drinks absurd amounts of liquor
without getting drunk, attracting more and more people to her posse as she goes pub
crawling and wedding crashing until it seems all of Kyoto has come to drink with her. The joy
and perverse pleasure she takes in the act of drinking infects everyone else as much as it
infects the image39. She breathes life into dead parties, repairs broken relationships, and
puts colour back into the world. Her drinking contest with Rihaku, an old, depressed drunk,
emphasises the possibility for human connection through friendly competition40, a
possibility underscored by the image’s structure (Figure 4.2). They share a space, evidenced
firstly by the set-up of the scene and by the identical wall pattern in the background. But
38
There are a couple scenes over the first few episodes in which they eat or drink together and she has a
larger role. After the 4th episode, however, she disappears from the episode-to-episode plot almost entirely.
39
Boozing quite basically gives free rein to Yuasa and the animators’ gonzo expressionism, with the abstract
drunken party in Mind Game as the first example.
40
Naturally, Ping Pong does this most distinctively.
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that space is broken up externally through singles, separating them into two frames with
strikingly different aesthetic features. However, the successive images of them facing off,
doing the same thing, suggests a possibility for a relationship beyond the contest,
conditioned through the spatial/temporal connection made through editing. The final shot
of the contest itself41 is a two-shot, facing off on opposite ends of the table. The binary
narrative context is still highlighted through the colour-binary of their backgrounds (and the
fantastic flowers embellishing the Girl’s foreground), but the backgrounds are abstracted in
such a way that the spatial context of the scene (narratively speaking) simply becomes the
table and their positions opposite each other. The more internal connection made between
the two sides of this binary, as they inhabit this space simultaneously, illustrates a fresh
development in the possibility of a relationship outside the contest context. The condition
for their connection is the alcohol standing literally as the medium between them. It is the
mutual, simultaneous act of drinking which makes this relationship possible. And at the end
of the movie when she visits him sick in bed, his invitation to drink some more together
gives it shape.
41
Note their complexions: she won.
62
A drinking contest also appears in episode 6 of Tatami: Watashi vs the lonely pervert
Jougasaki. The latter pours the first drink in a typically extravagant, affected manner—
holding the bottle up high and letting wine fall into the glass—establishing his affected and
phony character. Egging them on, Hanuki pours the rest by placing the bottle slightly above
the glass, pouring quick and easy, then tilting it back up (Figure 4.3). The simplicity of this
gesture constitutes the simplicity of her character: straight to the point and frank,
uninterested in pretensions; and a real drinker—unlike these two—who simply wants to
revel in drinking. Like Night Is Short’s protagonist, whom she befriends in that movie,
drinking is a way for her to connect with others. Pouring has a similarly subtle yet more
prominent role in Kaiba. In episode 6, Neiro—having taken on a man’s body—is reminded of
Kaiba—having taken on a girl’s body—by how he pours a drink at dinner (Figure 4.4).
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Somewhat similar to Jougasaki, he raises the flask up high but in a smooth arc, a habit
episode 10’s flashbacks reveal he picked up from watching Neiro. She picked it up from her
mother. With altered memories, she does not remember Kaiba specifically only that he was
someone she once loved. A whole life can be recalled, even if only subconsciously, through
the intimacy of gesture. In Eizouken, the disposing of tea bears a similar intimacy. The
origins of Mizusaki’s obsession with movement is revealed in a flashback in episode 7 while
she animates a scene. She watched her grandmother raise her teacup, swirl the remnants
around and in one motion launch them out on the lawn. Young Mizusaki tries repeatedly
but never makes the distance—she in fact fails to do the movement properly, stopping short
before each hurl. She then begins studying how people move through drawing. By sketching
her grandmother’s movement, she eventually figures out how to launch the tea out. Picking
up this gesture expresses the intimacy of their relationship, implying the significant time and
attention required to effectively mimic her grandmother. Then, by drawing this strange,
narratively superfluous movement into one of their shorts, Mizusaki is also able to connect
with her audience, people like herself who can appreciate every individual movement as
something intended by an artist. Through eating and drinking, therefore, relationships are
inscribed in gesture.
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65
Gesture can be considered here in Crafton’s terms of embodied and figurative

performance. The former is the practice of expressing character through individual motion,
while the latter expresses character through codified and repeated expressions and
66
movements42. Suan, adopting Crafton’s distinction in his study of anime, describes

embodied acting succinctly as that through which “personality is expressed in the
character’s movement”43. The different pouring motions of Jougasaki and Hanuki exemplify
this precisely. However, Suan suggests that the “limit of embodied acting is the body itself”,
since such performances are “localized and specific to the body, particular to that individual
body”44. The imitation of gesture by Kaiba/Neiro/her mother and Mizusaki/her
grandmother undermines this proposition. These imitations are indeed embodied
performances since they emerge out of the individual character’s body, but without
representing the individual personality of the characters. Rather, they express the intimacy
of the relationship. The passing down of a gesture from mother to daughter to lover, and
grandmother to granddaughter, removes any supposed limit of such performances to that
individual body45. They are shared not impersonally through codified repetitions à la
figurative acting, but through the relationships between individuals, intimate characters
who come to share each other’s tics, habits, personalities.
Of course, Yuasa also employs figurative acting where repeated performances are
citational codes: in individual work (e.g., the particular running motion of devilmen upon
transforming [see Figure 1.3 above]); or across the whole corpus (the expressive
transformations). Among the latter also is the bulging, particularly of the throat, when a
character consumes food or drink (Figure 4.5-4.8). Most notably in Devilman’s 3rd episode.
Eating and drinking in Devilman suffers an inversion whereby it is not convivial but for
sustenance. They function as mere life-sustaining activities as Akira stuffs his face to fill his
new caloric requirements. He frequently eats around Ryo, who wants to fuel Akira’s demon
body for his own apocalyptic interests, but who himself never eats. When Akira force-feeds
42
Donald Crafton, Shadow of a Mouse: Performance, Belief and World-Making in Animation (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2013), 26, 37-41.
43
Stevie Suan, “Anime no ‘kōisha’: animēshon ni okeru taigenteki/shūjiteki pafōmansu ni yoru ‘jiko’,”
Animēshon kenkyū 19, no. 1 (2017): 5. Quotes are from Suan’s own unpublished translation,
https://steviesuan.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/Animes_Actors_Constituting_Self-hood_thr.pdf.
44
Suan, “Anime no ‘kōisha’”, 6.
45
An example from cinema is John Wayne paying homage to Harry Carey—from whom he learnt by watching
his performances and picking up his habits—with Carey’s signature arm grab at the end of The Searchers
(1956). Tag Gallagher, John Ford: The Man and his Films (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 22-23.
67
him a burger we understand why: the exaggerated bulge in his throat. As a bearer of this
physiological trait, common to Yuasa characters, he is in community with them. This is
exactly what he works to avoid. Denying this union with others, however, is futile46 and can
only result in his own devastation, as he learns regretfully with Akira, the only one he ever
cared for, dead by his own hand.
46
As Night Is Short’s protagonist claims, self-isolation can never sufficiently remove our connection to others.
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69
But this intertextual resonance is also another function of embodied performance.

Yuka in Kemonozume (Figure 4.9) and Mizusaki in Eizouken share the same atypical way of
holding chopsticks (Figure 4.10). In the former, this is taken by other characters as
embodying Yuka’s otherness, her lack of contact with human society. In the latter, more
simply Mizusaki’s quirkiness and peculiar movement. This separates them from other
characters in their respective shows, just as it unites them with each other. While figurative
performance connects characters impersonally, or physiologically for instance in the bulge
and other expressive metamorphoses, embodied acting connects them on a more intimate
level of consciously directed action. Recall, then, Kanamori and Sakaki. I will not say the
strongest, but the most direct moments of mutual understanding and sympathy in Yuasa’s
anime arise when sharing an activity, and in particular sharing a movement. One does not
need further information to know Kanamori and Sakaki are of a kind. The evidence is on the
screen, in their movement and postures. This creates a vivid fecundity in concert with those
moments when the same mutual understanding and sympathy is expressed through an
emotional register supported over time. For instance, in Eizouken’s 1st episode between
Kanamori and Asakusa. Dialogue and their hanging out together have already demonstrated
their friendship. But the intuitive understanding they share is palpably illustrated when,
70
without any planning or discussion, they both simultaneously move to carry Mizusaki off—
sharing different responsibilities as Asakusa puts Mizusaki on her back while Kanamori picks
up her legs. But the visual directness of sharing, not just an activity, but a movement, of
unity and identity within that activity rather than distinction, works so well for characters
like Sakaki who lack screen time, and thus the time needed to generate lived in emotional
connections with others. Competent filmmakers can articulate a friendship and/or the
intimate relation between central characters over the course of a movie or series narrative.
Great ones like Hawks do the same with the smallest of gestures or actions, with characters
appearing in every scene or just one. Yuasa falls in the latter camp. This superfluity beyond
the basic mechanics of plot is the point. What I have been tracing throughout this thesis is
the play of exaggeration and excess of individual characters and individual anime, which
makes connections with characters and situations within and beyond the individual work.
This is what underlies the thematic system. Eating and drinking accomplishes this more
prominently on the narrative level, but this excessiveness marks the themes of watching,
transforming, and fucking just as much. The individual movie or show ceases being just that.
Each work resonates with every other through the sharing of these visual details, these
concrete images and actions, creating a rich, dynamic network, and at the same time
enriching each individual movie or show. Enter Ping Pong.

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5. Play: Ping Pong the Animation
Peco plays for the love of the game. While, in the show’s first arc, this love does not
translate into effort, it does translate into style. Peco is an aggressive, flee-flowing, fast-
paced hitter. His eclectic play lacks control, thanks partly to his savant ability to absorb
various techniques and his uncontainable love for the sport. Ping pong, indeed, is a site of
individuation; all characters express and embody their personalities and feelings through
their play and performance, and particularly Smile. Although Peco taught him how to play,
he has a vastly different style. He is a slower, more controlled chopper. There is no passion
or eclecticism to his game. For him, it is all about precision. Smile’s play is as robotic as his
personality.
Expressive transformations à la Tatami (Figure 2.16) exaggerate Smile’s robotic traits
and abilities—including mechanical whirring in the soundtrack, glowing eyes, and precise
bullseye vision. However, the first instance of this expresses not a trait but a change.
Koizumi, the coach at Smile and Peco’s school, recognises Smile’s ability, and, more
importantly, that he hides it by going easy on opponents, namely, Peco. He challenges him,
and by pushing all of Smile’s buttons (i.e., taunting and displaying emotion) succeeds in
bringing him out of his shell—or better, locker. One of the series’ many central flashbacks,
which grounds this particular scene, is to Smile stuffed in a locker. In his memory, someone
is coming to save him. The Hero who will come whenever Smile’s in a pinch, if he chants the
words “The Hero appears” 3 times. He does; but the Hero never shows. Only the titular
monster robot from Smile’s video game. “Your body is made of iron”. Smile must unleash
his own power. “You’re a machine”. His blue eye whirs, his robot arm is linked with joints
and wiring. Smile becomes the robot (Figure 5.1).
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Figure 5.1 – Ping Pong, episode 2
Like the listening scene discussed earlier, this robotic transformation is not in the
manga. Here, however, by expressing this moment in terms of the thematic system, Yuasa
imbues it with additional emotional weight: disappointment in Smile’s acceptance that no
one is coming for him; apprehension that he must become something he cannot stand
(hyper-competitive, ruthless winning machine). Like, e.g., Watashi and Nishi, he shares a
certain level of withdrawal—socially and into his own fantasies and memories. But unlike
Watashi’s persistent refusal to change, transforming into the robot palpably manifests his
reluctant determination to become independent, to, unlike Nishi—who waits until death to
change himself—no longer wait for and rely on the Hero to save him. Indeed, Ride Your
Wave’s Hinako also echoes this transition strongly, but as an endpoint rather than
beginning. So he is not so alone as he thinks. Expressing Smile’s loneliness via this solitary
act enmeshes him in a network of relations with other Yuasa characters. This support at the
same time evidences the moment’s decisiveness, marking it as the first real stage in Smile’s
character arc. He must save himself, and indeed the Hero too. He must save Peco.
It is difficult to make sense of Peco and Smile’s relationship intellectually, for they
hardly ever speak. Even those staggeringly limited, brief, elliptical instances of dialogue,
such as Smile (who knows just how to push Peco) telling him he should quit after his loss to
74
Kong if he no longer likes the sport (he of course still does, so should not), tend instead to
support the images which describe their relationship emotionally. We feel, rather than
understand, genuine compassion and care when Peco protects Smile from bullies and
teaches him ping pong—hence his deification by Smile. Similarly, the most normally humane
we see robotic, near emotionless Smile is when he picks up and holds Peco, crying after that
humiliation to Kong, and patiently waits for him outside the school (Figure 5.2). His
compassion is, contrary to what others think, far too extreme. His softness and his own
disinterest in ping pong compels him to lose on purpose—to Peco, of course, whose laziness
has allowed Smile to surpass his ability, but also to Kong.
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Against Kong in the first tournament, Smile calmly loses the first game—all while
humming the strange Hero tune he once made in Peco’s honour—and Kong’s play now
becomes sloppy, communicating his arrogance and dismissal of lesser players. Meanwhile,
finally deciding to compete, Smile has been inputting Kong’s data, uncovering his patterns
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and weaknesses (Figure 5.3). His subsequent control over the match matches his bodily
control: he never sweats, makes no sound indicating extraneous effort, never seems to
struggle at all. But when Kong’s coach yells at his player, Smile decides to throw the match.
His superiority is recognised by Kong himself and anyone with talent to see. For Peco,
recognition of Smile’s supremacy over the player who crushed him, together with his own
tournament loss to the talentless former teammate of his and Smile’s, Sakuma, leads him to
quit the sport.
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The second arc—preparing for next year’s tournament—begins with Peco retired
and Smile having unexplainedly become, frankly, a dickhead. The actions of the five main
players in these few episodes, outside of their training, centre around their relationships to
their given ping pong-related community. Smile disrupts his team as Koizumi makes practice
entirely about him, dragging the other students along for the ride. Kazama—at this point
the best of the five (and perhaps of the world: he just won at the Youth Olympics)—disrupts
his squad by publicly announcing his disappointment in their performance while
simultaneously trying to recruit Smile to his school, Kaio. This leads Sakuma, Kaio team
member, to break his community’s rules and challenge Smile, who ruthlessly demonstrates
Sakuma’s lack of talent. Kicked off the team, he, unlike Peco, permanently quits. Kong,
surprisingly, is the only one who engages in team building. Humbled by the first
tournament, he decides to actually do what he was brought to Japan to do—improve his
new school’s team and teach his players how to fly47.
The show’s literal midpoint (the middle of the middle episode) is a lovely scene
(notably, absent in the manga) where Kong and his visiting mother make wontons together.
47
For want of space I have not discussed this, but the dream of flight, as well as the hero motif, are quite
prominent themes (in the standard sense) in Yuasa’s work.
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This same hobby constitutes Kong’s fondest memories with his mother, away from whom
he has lived much of his life since joining their province’s team as a boy. Gradually more and
more teammates flock into the kitchen to join them—much like the growing numbers of the
Night Is Short posse. The entirety of the eating and drinking theme is concentrated in this
sequence: the private memories of an intimate mother-child bond developed through
cooking; rekindling that bond through the same activity; and Yuasa’s most sustained
treatment of community building as the team comes together to cook and eat. This
confluence of relationships fills the scene with emotion, so powerful as to almost negate the
narrative: we become sucked into the maelstrom of thematic play of Yuasa’s work, a living
and evolving world which blooms from this scene in all its rich fertility. But at the same time,
the scene articulates Kong’s tremendous growth of character: once wanting nothing to do
with his teammates, he now welcomes them (if still somewhat reluctantly) to join him and
his mother in the cooking. This then leads into their shared Christmas eve dinner, which also
features, together with Smile’s humming, the first instance of Yuasa’s singing theme48. The
team performs karaoke, a song about being alone on Christmas eve, while a montage of the
show’s other characters plays; every one of them is alone.
This 6th episode ends with Sakuma and Peco together on a bridge, and Sakuma
loudly opening up about how he used to idolise Peco as he encourages him to keep playing
ping pong. As he shouts his very personal feelings, in public, the camera pans rightward
onto 3 youngish men joking about the purity of youth. There is always vibrancy, aliveness
within Yuasa’s worlds ready to enter the frame at any moment. This offsets Peco’s
lifelessness: not just the abandonment of his life’s purpose, but his near-death as he almost
drowns after cowardly leaping off the bridge. Sakuma saves him, and Peco heads back to
Tamura’s dojo where he sees a photo and is taken over by a newfound resolve. He asks
coach Tamura to teach him the sport again from scratch while the Hero Theme plays for the
first time49. He’s back.
48
Every subsequent anime features singing in some capacity as personal expression—and I would stretch to
include Eizouken, too. While lacking singing, Doumeki’s relationship to sound design has the same function and
can be taken as a variation on the theme.
49
Ushio Kensuke, who did the music for this and Devilman, has no small part to play in either show’s quality.
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Unlike the manga, Peco’s determination is expressed as a sudden change inspired by

the photo which, unlike the manga50, is obscure to us (Figure 5.4). While it evidently
features Tamura, Peco, Sakuma, and Smile after a childhood tournament, vision is cut off
firstly by a reflection of light over Smile’s face, and then through the panelling of the image.
Almost every frame of the show is chopped up into panels, often taken straight from the
manga. Like the images of multiplanarity discussed earlier, one cannot look at a screen split
up into 3, 5, 8 different images and see a representation of space. But the effect is more
abstract. This image is typical (Figure 5.5). Smile inspecting the ball exists side-by-side with a
close-up of the ball, Smile in profile, and Ota looking straight ahead. Dialogue and a prior
wide shot indicate that Ota is talking from behind Smile. Indeed, there is no one directly in
front or to the side of Smile, and the only thing in front of Ota at that angle is the ping pong
table. The fixity of perspective in characters’ vision is not so much disrupted, as seen in
other anime, but abandoned all together.
50
Matsumoto Taiyou, Ping Pong, Volume 3 (Tokyo: Shogakukan, 1997), 92.
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81
Panelling also distributes the act of looking across the image. Yuasa ratchets up this
technique during matches, offsetting the show’s quieter, more personalised second arc with
the excitement and vibrancy of the competition. One becomes aware of the vitality of this
community, of ping pong’s importance in so many lives, as the buzz and at times
disappointment surrounding the tournament explodes across the screen. This is particularly
true in Peco and Kazama’s match in episode 10—Choi’s last work as episode director on a
Yuasa show before taking on producer roles. The dizzying speed with which Choi and Yuasa
move between all the different gazes on the match with the match itself, blows up the
world into a host of distinct images and spaces, distinct ways of looking. But they are
brought into solidarity via a shared object. Watching takes on a communal function as ping
pong becomes the site of convergence for a profusion of looks; all eyes are on the game.
The persistent return to the wide image of the table, Peco, and Kazama centres them, not
just spatially within the crowd, but temporally. It provides a lull amidst frenetic action which
offers no time to think and intellectually react. Indeed, neither player has weaknesses in
their game for the other to tactically exploit. Theirs is a contest not of wits but reaction
speeds; who has the better instincts? Mixing static panels with frenzied speed through
editing and sound design (the constant sound of squeaking shoes, of the net and ball being
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hit, of players grunting) manifests Kazama’s perspective of his physical performance: his
incredible speed borders on motionlessness, just like the dynamism of these often still
images.
To return to the photo, withholding the basis of Peco’s sudden determination
produces two protagonists with obscure motives. Smile’s sudden change in character takes
several episodes to become slightly less vague, whereas Peco’s inspiration is not shown until
episode 9. What struck him in the photo was Smile smiling—something he always did when
they played together but had stopped ever since Peco’s play became lame.
Smile and Peco’s friendship has a Hawksian51 basis in mutual respect and
independence. Smile’s behaviour arises out of this. His unshakeable faith in Peco drives him
to make an incredible wager: Smile will assume the role of villain so as to let the Hero fly his
highest. Formerly lacking competitiveness, now he works tirelessly with Koizumi to perfect
his game, rolling over everyone in his path just to get the best out of Peco. From Smile’s
perspective, however, this is not quite a wager—there is neither risk nor doubt that Peco
will remember his love of the game and start taking the sport seriously. The Hero will
appear, it’s only a matter of time. If Peco is worthy of Smile’s respect—which is never
questioned—Smile must step back and let Peco prove it through his own self-will and self-
respect. Their independence is in fact quite extreme; they exchange no dialogue after
episode 5 until the finale. Only Smile interacts with Peco before that, watching over him at a
distance: running past Peco, passed out in front of the training centre, he hums the Hero
tune for the first time since the early episodes; and pausing to watch Peco play Kong at the
tournament, he declares the Hero’s return.
Here is the positivity of friendship in producing individuality, catalysing Peco’s
salvation by bringing him back to what he loves. In the final tournament, Peco’s love of the
game bursts outwards—he flies through the air making returns, plays behind-the-back
shots, uses a gimmicky racket to twiddle (a toy, Kazama accuses: correct, and Peco beats
him with it anyway). Stars and light flash around him as his passion and joy infect the image
as much as they infect everyone else. And in this respect, at least, Ping Pong is in closer
conversation with Night Is Short than the latter is with Tatami, despite being its follow-up.
Peco’s uncontainable love for the game, which radiates outwards through his style,
51
Robin Wood, Howard Hawks (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2006), 44.
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transforms Kong and Kazama, reminding them of their own passion for ping pong. Kazama’s
flashbacks to his grandfather describing the pain and anguish of ping pong excellence give
way to flashbacks of playing with his father, asking if Kazama is having fun. Like Smile from
his locker, Peco gets Kazama out of his toilet stall—not by pulling him, but by allowing
Kazama to grow his own wings and fly (Figure 5.6). No longer alone, someone has come to
join Kazama on the summit. The suffering of victory passes over into the joy of play.
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85
The turning point in the Peco/Kazama match is when Peco imagines a conversation
with Smile: “Your knee will be fine. It’s like you always said—the strongest players let you fly
the highest. Can you fly?”. If he were concerned about his future career, Peco’s busted knee
would have led him to withdraw before facing Kazama, having already qualified for
nationals. But, without the two ever speaking, he instinctively understands that Smile is
waiting for him in the final. Hopped up on painkillers, Peco jeopardises his future to fly with
Smile; and the latter knows it. Anyone unfamiliar with their relationship would be appalled
to hear Smile robotically declare his plan to attack Peco’s knee. But Smile trusts him to deal
with it. Peco, the Hero, has no weaknesses. Similarly, Peco dispels his initial concern when
Smile tumbles over into the boundary by smashing his mate’s desperate return while he lies
on the floor. Peco trusts Smile to recover and return the shot. This is neither appalling nor
unsportsmanlike. It is a pure expression of the complete and utter respect and admiration
they have for each other. They are here to go all out, as Smile does by leaping into the
boundary. His character arc completes full circle in an inversion of episode 2’s transforming
scene. Peco does come to save him from his locker. “Blood tastes like iron”. Peco teaches
him ping pong and implores him to behave with emotion, to play with grit. “There’s blood
flowing in you, too”. He roars with his own voice, sheds off his iron casing to reveal the red
86
veins beneath. The robot becomes Smile (Figure 5.7). In the ensuing rally, too, his robotic
control over his body vanishes. Sweating profusely, with blood oozing from his knee, he
stumbles around desperately trying to return a superior player’s shots, grunting and
panting, letting out all kinds of effortful noises. After losing the point, he smiles. The Hero
has returned. So Smile has returned.
Everything in this rally scene, in its abstracted white void—Peco, Smile, the table, the
grey boundary—constantly shifts around. While Peco and Smile move nonsensically—
forwards/backwards, side-to-side, up/down, around and around, growing and shrinking—
the table rotates and tilts, flattens and curves. There is no fixity whatever to this image: the
entire frame in fact tilts and rotates. Through compositing and character animation, Yuasa
brings us to anime’s limit from a hitherto unapproached angle. While compositing, generally
speaking, is meant to make movement coherent, even when incoherent I can refer to layers
sliding outwards and inwards in the early Night Is Short scene. But here, movement is not
(or not only) lateral, or diagonal, or forwards and backwards across and between flat layers
of the image. Things move any which way without such planar restrictions. But there is no
volume here; neither camera nor characters penetrate this impenetrable non-space. The
87
scene can thus be rationalised neither cinematically nor animetically. In this moment, there
is a sense in which Yuasa’s work almost ceases to be anime.
Absent depth and any sense of space, absent any animetic tendency of movement
and so any affinity with anime beyond the simple conditions of movement, the mechanical
succession of moving images, and the intervals that arise when such movement encounters
layers of drawings52, these conditions are made clear as day. Compositing and character
animation function simply as means of relating drawn elements across intervals and means
of drawing the movement of those elements. Movement, indeed, becomes movement plain
and simple. Thus, by taking dynamism to such extremes, we become keenly aware of its
possible negation. Our look, furthermore, whose object is motion itself, enters into a
strange rhythm with that arrhythmic movement. The duration of this single image, in a
show characterised by hectic cutting between and within images, draws intense awareness
to the flow of time as the temporal progression of the anime becomes the temporal
progression of the game53. This inexorable flow, this ceaseless movement, produces a cruel
tension: in order to continue being anime such pure movement must stop54, but stopping is
the very last thing Peco or Smile can do—to stop is to lose the point. The sudden relief
comes not through compositing or character animation, but with a cut, through montage:
cinema is the hero that saves anime from itself. With this scene over, we realise that the
climax of the anime is the climax of anime. Years of friendship, immense talent and effort
came together to threaten to negate our viewing experience of the anime and anime itself.
By its singularity, the image loses support as Peco and Smile are isolated not just from every
spectator in the stadium, but from every Yuasa character and situation, and anime broadly.
Ping Pong is thus enriched through the severance of connections, for this makes Peco and
Smile’s connection all the more intimate. What separates Peco and Smile from all else
brings them closer together; they alone have the privilege of sharing this situation. Indeed,
the heightened temporal linkage between them translates not only their skill and focus but
52
Lamarre, The Anime Machine, xviii, 303.
53
Hasumi makes similar arguments concerning emotion in Ozu and cinema’s possible negation—e.g., in There
Was a Father (1942). Hasumi, Kantoku Ozu Yasujirō, 139-140. See also: Chris Fujiwara, “The Critical Event of
Director Ozu Yasujiro”, Lola Journal 7 (2016), http://www.lolajournal.com/7/hasumi_fujiwara.html.
54
This is a technical problem, too: such movementful animation is presumably very difficult and cannot
feasibly be perpetuated. Not to mention it would get boring pretty quickly.
88
their emotional bond into a palpable image; their peculiar emotional connection connects
them peculiarly in this image. And it is this which set them off independently on all their
training, all their waiting, to take all those risks and go through all that emotional and
physical pain—all for the love of a friend.
89
Bibliography:
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Badiou, Alain. In Praise of Love. London: Serpent’s Tail, 2012.
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to-rock-the-transformative-animation-of-masaaki-yuasa.
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Animation, edited by Suzanne Buchan, 117-142. New York: Routledge, 2013.
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Lamarre, Thomas. “From Animation to Anime: Drawing Movements and Moving Drawings.”
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Yuasa Masaaki, dir. Devilman Crybaby. Science Saru, 2018.

Yuasa Masaaki, dir. Kaiba. Madhouse, 2008.
Yuasa Masaaki, dir. Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken!. Science Saru, 2020.
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92
List of Illustrations
1.1. Mind Game (2004) 8

1.2. Kemonozume, episode 6 (2006) 9
1.3. Devilman Crybaby, episode 2 (2018) 9
1.4. The Tatami Galaxy, episode 6 (2010) 10
1.5. Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken!, episode 9 (2010) 10
1.6. Lu Over the Wall (2017) 11
1.8. Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken!, episode 1 (2010) 15-16
1.9. Kaiba, episode 8 (2008) 16
2.9. Kaiba, episode 8 (2008) 30
2.11. The Night Is Short, Walk on Girl (2017) 31
2.12. Kaiba, episode 9 (2008) 32
2.15. Mind Game (2004) 34
2.17. Ride Your Wave (2019) 37-38
93

3.1. Kaiba, episode 2 (2008) 47
3.5. Mind Game (2004) 54
4.1. Mind Game (2004) 58
4.4. Kaiba, episode 6 (2008) 65
4.5. Mind Game (2004) 67
4.6. Kaiba, episode 10 (2008) 68
5.1. Ping Pong the Animation, episode 2 (2014) 73
5.3. Ping Pong the Animation, episode 3 (2014) 76-77
5.6. Ping Pong the Animation, episode 10 (2014) 84-85

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1

The School of Culture and Communication

in partial fulfillment of the requirements

for the degree of

Bachelor of Arts (Honours)

Screen and Cultural Studies SCRN40018

School of Culture and Communication

The University of Melbourne

Supervisor: Sean Cubitt

Figure 1.1 – Mind Game

Figure 1.2 – Kemonozume, episode 6

Figure 1.3 – Devilman, episode 2

Figure 1.4 – Tatami, episode 6

Figure 1.5 – Eizouken, episode 9

against animation’s purported naturalism—the appearance of nature as “true to life” 7—

Figure 1.6 – Lu Over the Wall

This exaggeration, of anime’s drawn character and its multiplanar spatial

Figure 1.8 – Eizouken, episode 1

Figure 1.9 – Kaiba, episode 8

Figure 1.10 – Devilman, episode 1

Figure 1.12 – Tatami, episode 2

Figure 2.1 – Tatami, episode 6

Figure 2.2 – Tatami, episode 9

Figure 2.3 – Tatami, episode 10

Figure 2.4 – Tatami, episode 6

Figure 2.5 – Tatami, episode 6

Figure 2.6 – Eizouken, episode 3

Figure 2.7 – Eizouken, episode 2

Figure 2.8 – Eizouken, episode 10

Figure 2.9 – Kaiba, episode 8

Figure 2.10 – Kemonozume, episode 1

Figure 2.11 – Night Is Short

This potential depends to an extent on character animation. Kaiba’s (2008) character

Figure 2.12 – Kaiba, episode 9

Figure 2.13 – Tatami, episode 1

Figure 2.14 – Night Is Short

Figure 2.15 – Mind Game

Figure 2.16 – Tatami, episode 3

To start, physical transformations need not be exclusive to animation’s specific

Figure 2.17 – Ride Your Wave

In Tatami, Watashi’s more anime-ic metamorphoses are limited to expressive

Figure 2.18 – Tatami, episode 11

Figure 2.19 – Tatami, episode 8

Figure 3.1 – Kaiba, episode 2

Figure 3.2 – Devilman, episode 1

abandoning this perspectival back-and-forth for a more functional description. Silene

Figure 3.3 – Devilman, episode 5

け” [dake], meaning make love euphemistically but primarily embrace/hug. Thereupon

Figure 3.4 – Devilman, episode 5

Pennsylvania Press, 1971), 304-305.

Figure 3.5 – Mind Game

Figure 3.6 – Kemonozume, episode 5

4. Eating and Drinking

Figure 4.1 – Mind Game

Figure 4.2 – Night Is Short

Figure 4.3 – Tatami, episode 6

Figure 4.4 – Kaiba, episode 6

Gesture can be considered here in Crafton’s terms of embodied and figurative

movements42. Suan, adopting Crafton’s distinction in his study of anime, describes

Figure 4.5 – Mind Game

Figure 4.6 – Kaiba, episode 10

Figure 4.7 – Tatami, episode 1

Figure 4.8 – Devilman, episode 3