Anime as Craft

Anime provokes a number of fundamental questions with regard to technique. The overwhelming majority of Japanese-based productions maintain an attachment to 2D or hand-drawn character design within a backdrop and texturing that is aided by 3D design and digital imaging. This is a markedly distinct trajectory from North American production houses such as Pixar which have opted for an entirely immersive adoption of 3D design (Elsaesser and Hagener, 2010: 180–181). Clearly, animation in general is becoming more deeply integrated with what we might describe as the “cinematic vision”, but the question that arises here is whether these present two distinct instances of digital design in cinema or two instances of practice on a continuum of interface between cinematic imaging and animation as a separate art. Collingwood’s characterization of “art proper” suggests that art always transcends technique and can be embedded in a highly fluid inter-relation amongst potentially several disparate media simultaneously. The answer that seems unavoidable, then, is that the aforementioned seemingly divergent approaches to the moving image are indeed part of a continuum of practice.