In “anime”, there is often the morphology of movement or the movement of morphology presented with which characters and backgrounds seem to merge on screen, as seen in Akira and My Neighbor Totoro. In order to make clear the dynamics in which such images could be engendered and materialized, it is necessary to take into account the way in which modern Western optical technologies such as photography were received in Japanese visual culture. In the late Edo era, there was a transmedial environment where kabuki’s body performance, ukiyoe’s image of the body, nozoki-karakuri, gesaku, and photographic apparatus were in a close interaction and engagement, thereby bringing to life performing and viewing, and reading and speaking, further triggering affects and emotions, with language and image intersecting each other. This is a kind of the animating performance of image. Among the bases of anime is a genealogy of the animating image, as vital to the examination of animation, and moving image in general.

Cab Calloway, one of the most famous jazz performers of the day, is featured in some of the Fleischer Brothers’ short animation Betty Boop series. Interestingly, Calloway himself never appearson the screen: what we see on screen is an animated character which has no resemblance of the singer. However, the audience could easily recognize the musician behind the fictional character because of therealistic reproduction of Calloway’s characteristic body movements and voice.

This essay examines the unusual representation of Calloway in the films by paying attention to the Rotoscoping process which generates such an impression. Given that the uncanny nature of his movement has often been associated with the movement reproduced by Rotoscoping, my investigation is twofold. It first attempts to locate where this uncanniness comes from. Then, I ask why the Fleischer Brothers featured Calloway in the films. Drawing on Freud’s concept of the uncanny, this essay examines the underlying structure of repressionand the subsequent appropriation of Calloway’s black body generated through the Rotoscoping process.

The Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation by Thomas Lamarre was published in 2009. This article reconsiders the character-body theory proposed in his book. Most discussions in the book are based on otaku theories. In particular, the discussions strongly concentrate on theories of body which consist of a number of other interesting issues.In this sense, I suggest that it has a capability to advance beyond the analysis of otaku-oriented anime. To make this clear, I focus on the concept of “time-image” (from Gilles Deleuze’s Cinema), which Lamarre connects with body by using otaku theories in the second part of The Anime Machine.In its third part, Lamarre’s discussion proceeds on the basisof otaku theories. Taking the concept of time-image as influential in his book, this article reinterprets character-body considered in Lamarre’s discussion.Through this reconsideration, I attempt to demonstrate how theories of character- body corresponding with time-image can be discerned from otaku theories and how such a body theory can be utilized in discussions of non-otaku-oriented anime.

The use of postscoring in the sound recording has been considered as a characteristic of Japanese animation. For the reason, various discussions have developed about postscoring.The following was mainly assumed as three premises. (1) The opposite of postscoring is prescoring, (2) postscoring is commonly used in Japanese animation, and (3) postscoring refers only to the recording of speech, while the recording of music and sound effect is not included.These premises are, however, only historically constructed and hence, do not work in general. In this essay, I investigate this issue by referring to the relevant discourses of the movie magazines of the 1930s when sound was used for animation. The term, postscoring, was born in the live-action film industry, originally as opposite to synchronous recording (1). Also, as postscoring was likely to be critically discussed in the discourse of animators such as Yasuji Murata, Takao Nakano, KenzoMasaoka, it was not used in general (2). Finally, sound recording including postscoring at that time was made mainly for music, subsequently with dialog and sound effect added. In this sense, postscoring did not necessarily refer to the recording of speech (3).

Known as “The Father of Japanese Puppet Animations”, Tadahito Mochinaga sought to explore ways of incorporating physical expressions like song, dance and musical into his work after WWII. Further, Mochinaga was involved in the production of works for Videocraft International (Rankin/Bass Productions), and in my view, he was the first Japanese animator who experienced the making of a US-style musical animation. Attempting to evaluate his artistic achievement in this essay, I analyze how Mochinaga employed physical expressions in each ofhis works of puppet animation.