Anime as Representation

As we have attempted to demonstrate in the previous chapter, the avenue by which we understand anime as art is, perhaps somewhat counter-intuitively, not through craft, or even technique. Naturally, there has been no attempt to deny that technical, or technological, elements in the creative process will have some capacity to constrain or shape artistic expression. But so far as “art proper” itself is concerned, the focus of our consideration should be the imaginative dimension of both the creative process and the viewers’ engagement, and it is by keeping the focus on this that we avoid mistaking the essence of the art in the externalities of the process, rather than where it properly resides. As Collingwood himself acknowledges at the end of the chapter on art and craft, it is the desire to ground aesthetics with the “real” or the “tangible” that drives the attention to these quantifiable and identifiable elements in creative practice, but we would do well to avoid reifying this dimension (Collingwood, 1938: 40–41).