The “Obake,” for “ghost” in English, is roughly defined as the meaningless shapes that excite apparent motions or illusions of motions when artists create animations. But this definition supposed to be validated on the theories of ecological psychology, physics, and mathematics. In this article, the definition of “Obake” is analyzed and revised as follows. They are not the unmeaning tools for making illusions or apparent motions, but “perceptual information that identifies movement” itself that has sufficient meanings and properties.

Creating motions in animations is the work of converting the information that identifies the motion, that is, the information obtained as a result of differentiating the invariant term of the motion by the time term, into some frames of moving images and rearranging it according to the arrow of time. There is no room for an illusion, perhaps. Even if you can’t perceive what is drawn at first glance, it is information that necessary for composing the movement found by the creators. It may not be creating “The Illusion of Life.”

This research began with Mr. Hideo Watanabe entrusting to the authors’ university his huge collection of “intermediate” materials which he obtained between the 1970s and the 1990 while working as director, key animator, and many other roles in the anime industry. Focusing on the animation cels, in the archived Watanabe collection, which are under the critical situation of being seriously damaged, we undertook a cross-disciplinary research. Respectively specializing in materials chemistry and animation studies, both of us conducted chemical analysis of two animation cels selected from the collection, while considering the meaning of conserving and managing animation cels, the history of the development of plastics, and the introduction of the chemical materials often called celluloid to animation. This essay is intended to report the achievements of our research, and further to address and discuss this question: how human vision has been formed/transformed through the animation industrialized on the basis of cel medium. Still in its early stage, this research aims at theorizing how the cel functioned as an agent in relation to the medium’s material reality, as well as providing the anime industry and other sectors with knowledges of conserving and managing animation cels possibly considered as cultural resources.

In this study, as a foundational research on animation therapy, we structured the psychological experiences of watching a work of animation and the impacts for the purpose of empirically analyzing and organizing the psychological experiences that the viewers had by watching animated works. As a result, the psychological experience of the animation consisted of [the enhancement of feelings], [distraction], [sympathetic reaction], [returning to/relating to reality], and [attraction felt towards constituent elements of the work]. The influences consisted of [self-transformation into positive feelings], [searching for and changing one’s own state of being], and [involvement in the works and activities beyond the works]. This study revealed that the psychological experience of animated works consisted of various positive experiences. In addition, suggestions were obtained about the experience process from the psychological experience of animation to its impacts.

Why do Canadian students want to study Japanese manga and anime? What are the challenges for the instructor when an anime film uses Japanese words for which there are no equivalents in English, or includes cultural references for concepts that do not exist in North American culture? This essay draws on the author’s fifteen years of experience teaching Japanese popular culture at a Canadian University to explore one of the most challenging areas of cross-cultural (mis) communication: vocabulary, concepts, and discourses around LGBTQ characters in manga and anime. It argues that the mismatch between Japanese concepts of gender, sex, and sexuality and those of Canada provides an opportunity to analyze unspoken assumptions of both cultures.