Digital Realms

By Kambole Campbell.

In the eyes of contemporary viewers, anime as an industry and as a medium has had an increasingly intertwined relationship with the online space. While there’s no taking away the after-school broadcast slots and treasured home releases that defined my own interactions with anime throughout my childhood, many people today see anime primarily through streaming, with sites like Crunchyroll, HiDive, Netflix and Prime Video moving into an increasingly crowded market, starting with simulcasts before moving into their own productions. Meanwhile, fansubbing has come a long way from bootleg and snail mail. But it’s also a two-way street: as the Internet has enabled an exponential proliferation of anime, our interactions with this virtual community have been reflected by the medium itself.

This was the reasoning behind my choices as the first guest curator for Scotland Loves Anime: to see how the internet and anime have been reflected in each other, how those perspectives have changed in the time that I’ve been here. Some are famous, some are very new, all of them are incredibly cool, and representations of how the medium can be manipulated in a way that no other can, reflecting our own encounters with a definitive element of modern life.

PERFECT BLUE

One of the most well-known examples, and one of my favourite films of all time: Satoshi Kon’s Perfect Blue. The film is famous for its still shockingly prescient engagement with fan entitlement at the turn of the information age, of how terrifying the Internet can be with its combined opposites of both intimacy and anonymity. Kon achieves this through his manipulation of subjective perspective as the main character, an idol turned actress named Mima, begins to question everything she sees after finding an online fan site depicting her daily habits with eerie accuracy… Then, people around her start dying.

There’s a striking synchronicity in the way that neither Mima nor the audience can trust what our eyes are seeing. The Internet itself is, in a sense, an illusion – one that creates false proximity with strangers. The very real harm we’ve seen caused to Mima makes the actress’s words ring hollow. The idea of the Internet as a dream space is something that Kon would carry on exploring throughout the rest of his career.

SERIAL EXPERIMENTS LAIN

If Perfect Blue acted as a warning about the dangers of how the internet can bring strangers dangerously close to our own lives, Serial Experiments Lain weighs up the perils of forging one’s identity online, and the compulsions that emerge with that existence. Directed by Ryutaro Nakamura, the series is well known for its somewhat prophetic virtual realm “The Wired”, a virtual realm encompassing a number of different communications technologies. It could be taken as

pseudo-social media – unwittingly exploring the pathologies that would become commonplace more than 20 years later. Most of all this includes the identity that its main character Rein Iwakura creates for herself, with an increasing dissociation between her real and digital selves as she searches for Chisa, a dead student who has potentially transcended physical form within this space. As in Perfect Blue, the line between what’s real and what’s not becomes increasingly blurry, both complimentary testaments to how people reforge themselves online – perhaps even casting themselves as would-be saviours – and the disillusionment that comes with it.

PATLABOR: THE MOVIE

Mamoru Oshii’s feature film expansion on his Patlabor video/TV series isn’t necessarily about the internet itself, at least not in any potentially direct manner as in the interconnectivity of his later film Ghost in the Shell. But there is something in its portrayal of computers as Oshii visualises them through CGI renderings aiming for a realistic portrayal of digital interfaces – there’s also a sense of

uncanny alienation that arises from them, as they act beyond human control. It’s perhaps less personal and more decompressed about how it approaches this topic – but at the same time, it’s also simply noteworthy for the astonishing detail of its animation, full of considered, nuanced acting and movement, right down to the realistic drawings of shadows. Created by the collective Headgear – director Mamoru Oshii, manga artist Masami Yuki, mecha designer Yutaka Izubuchi, character designer Akemi Takada, screenwriter Kazunori Ito – the series became known for its use of mecha as tools of labour (the robots are called labors, in case that isn’t clear) and now criminals have begun to use them, too. The Mobile Police get specialised labors of their own, used to combat these criminals. But the series and the films were more keen on slow detective work and the workings of civic infrastructure than they were robot versus robot spectacle… though there is some of that too. In the movie, the suicide of an engineer on the massive Babylon Project construction site sets off a cascade of events that may signal the destruction of Tokyo, and computers are at the heart of it. Mixing philosophy, religious awe and existentialism with the encroaching march of technological progress, in Patlabor: The Movie, computers and digital information are treated like fire from the gods on which humanity has burned its hand, not necessarily paranoid about the dawn of the digital age but incredibly wary of it.

SUMMER WARS

Mamoru Hosoda takes a more optimistic perspective on the online space. His latest feature, Belle, sits on a continuum with his earlier works such as Digimon Adventure and its short film sequel Digimon: Our War Game!, as well as that franchise’s spiritual successor, Summer Wars. In an interview I conducted with him for the magazine Little White Lies, the director noted it was a conscious choice, saying: “When I made Digimon Adventure and Summer Wars, I wanted to show the Internet as a positive place for young people.” The result is in direct contrast to the wariness of Perfect Blue, though still aware of the unique dangers that digital lives can bring. Hosoda attributes such issues to organisations rather than individuals. In Belle, for example, it’s an oppressive police force. But in Hosoda’s eyes these are things that can be overcome by community, whether that’s the Digi-destined or Natsuki Shinohara’s eclectic family. All of his films home in on that aforementioned closeness that the Internet creates, and imagines it used for the better, that help and community is just a keystroke away.

The Digital Realms presentations are screening at this year’s Scotland Loves Anime.