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Ethnography and Fieldwork in Anime Studios

This document discusses the collaborative and structured nature of anime production. It notes that creating animation requires specialized and repetitive work where animators precisely mimic the drawings of others over and over. The document also discusses how examining specific case studies like anime in detail can provide unique insights into questions of creativity and control in media today by showing how things change across platforms and national boundaries. It introduces the topic of ethnographic fieldwork conducted by the author in several Tokyo anime studios between 2004 and 2010, where they observed various production processes and interviewed creators.

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26 views

Ethnography and Fieldwork in Anime Studios

This document discusses the collaborative and structured nature of anime production. It notes that creating animation requires specialized and repetitive work where animators precisely mimic the drawings of others over and over. The document also discusses how examining specific case studies like anime in detail can provide unique insights into questions of creativity and control in media today by showing how things change across platforms and national boundaries. It introduces the topic of ethnographic fieldwork conducted by the author in several Tokyo anime studios between 2004 and 2010, where they observed various production processes and interviewed creators.

Uploaded by

fromagebus
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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participation, which implies less hierarchy, collaboration carries hints of disciplined

structure. This is appropriate because creating animation usually requires a specialized, often
workmanlike repetitiveness in which mimicking the drawings of others with great precision, over
and over, is a basic principle of production. In some ways analogous to the contrast between
working together and submission to the enemy, the study of popular culture more generally
can lead to optimistic readings of collective projects that tackle complex problems through
innovation and shared commitments, or pessimistic readings that emphasize the dreary,
constricting forces that reproduce hegemonic structures of inequality. This binary between
oppression and liberation is difficult to escape, especially in our current era when even promises
of freedom often seem to impose the constrictions of free market capitalism, or neoliberalism,
in the name of consumer choice. That is why looking at a specific case study like anime in detail
can offer unique insights into the workings of media today by giving us a chance to track what
happens when something moves across platforms and across national boundaries. In this respect,
the lessons of anime with regard to questions of creativity and control echo against a backdrop of
broader social and economic change globally.

Ethnography and Fieldwork in Anime Studios


As a cultural anthropologist, I approach these issues by attending to some of the nuances of
social life, and then working from those details to develop larger theories about the workings of
media and culture more generally. Anime is intriguing among media forms in that it generally
requires massive amounts of labor to produce, and hence depends on wide networks of creators,
fans and businesses, and also on connections across media forms, notably comics and toys, to
become successful. In this respect, anime provides a distinctive look at some of the precursors to
todays participatory cultures and social media by drawing attention to the dynamics of
collaborative creativity. My research centers around ethnographic fieldwork, primarily in several
Tokyo anime studios, between 2004 and 2010. I spent three-and-a-half months in the summer of
2006, attending script meetings, voice recordings, editing sessions, and I conducted interviews
with diverse dozens of creators. In the years before and after, I made one or two

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