Tactility, or, Why We Love the Humanity of Hand-Drawn Images
Video version of my SCMS 2024 Conference Talk
I’m in Boston this week at the 2024 Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference -SCMS - which is the biggest academic gathering in my field. Yesterday morning, I chaired a panel called “Simulation and Intensity Across Media,” and gave a presentation based on a section from chapter 2 of my almost-finished Ph.D dissertation, “Newtypes: Digital Technology and the Evolution of the Language of Anime.” As I have done every year I’ve presented at SCMS, I’ve made a video version of this talk to share online, so that those interested can engage with the material regardless of geography or institutional affiliation. That video, available on Vimeo, is embedded above, and includes a few minutes of additional material beyond what could fit in the in-person talk from Thursday. Below, you’ll find a transcript of my address as spoken in the video. This is in a more academic vein of writing than what I usually post here, but I hope it is accessible nevertheless. Enjoy!
Tactility (or, Why We Love the Humanity of Hand-Drawn Images)
My bookshelves back home are filled not only with many volumes of manga, but dozens of books collecting art from various stages of manga and anime production. Collections of storyboards and key animation, art books and illustration collections, and other curios. Books like these are a huge and lucrative arm of the Japanese publishing industry and ‘Otaku media’ machine; I imported a lot of them from Japan or bought them there on a trip, but an increasing number are available localized in English in North America. These objects of fascination are not yet anime, but fragments of it, steps along the process, component parts and vital ingredients.
But something I’ve found incredibly compelling in anime of the last 10 to 20 years is how these ingredients have been elevated and emphasized as core aesthetic pieces of ‘finished’ productions, a phenomenon I’ve described as the ‘return to handcraft’ in digital-era anime. Isao Takahata’s My Neighbors the Yamadas takes pains to maintain the simple character designs and flat, minimally detailed visual grammar of the original 4-panel manga, while the director’s final feature, The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, is animated to match the sketchy, idiosyncratic qualities of storyboards, without many of the intervening steps to ‘polish’ and ‘finish’ those raw, bespoke images. The first shot after the opening credits of Hayao Miyazaki’s Ponyo is a long pan across a horizontal tableau of the port city drawn by background artist Noboru Yoshida in a soft, sketchy style with colored pencils and crayons; it looks radically different than any background art featured in Miyazaki’s earlier films, but it will feel viscerally familiar to anyone who’s ever opened a Studio Ghibli art book and perused the details of a 2-page concept art spread. And there are many notable examples of contemporary anime that have embraced a variety of techniques, both analog and digital, to make their animated more closely resemble the distinctive traits of their manga source material, with thicker and uneven line-work more reminiscent of manga pages than traditional animation.
Thus, the question: Why this magnetic pull towards such tactile, hand-crafted material? In fan spaces, in publishing, in collecting, and in the ‘finished’ art itself? From where does this impulse come, strong enough that it not only ‘survives’ the digital transformation, but plays a key role in shaping the deployment of digital tools in 21st-century anime?
The word I keep coming back to, the one that unifies and runs through all my thoughts in this area, is tactility. It is a word I have been circling for a decade in my writing on animation and identification, the notion of physical presence, of material tangibility, acting as a sort of gravitational center for how I think about manga and anime in particular. One inescapable conclusion I continually encounter, pondering anime’s ‘return to handcraft,’ is the reminder of the body – that of the artist and that of the viewer – embedded in these images, the way the body is centered in visibly hand-crafted animation and its associated materials through the tangible signs of tactility and kinesthesia with which we identify.
It is no coincidence, after all, that this ‘return’ takes place during a period of rapid advancement and proliferation of digital technologies. Başak Kaptan Şiray argues there is a direct relationship between digitality in daily life and tactility in art, one that exists on a historical spectrum with early 20th century movements like Bauhaus, Dadaism, and Surrealism, all characterized by an “inquisitive approach towards materiality” as new mass media technologies like cinema evoked “disembodied perception.” “Like the pioneer avant-garde abstract filmmakers,” she writes, “today’s artists still seek to stimulate a new perception for a possible embodiment that will activate the sense of touch in the audience.” Evoking Walter Benjamin, she reminds us that “tactile perception emerges not through attention or contemplation but through habits,” and that we return to such practices of perception at times when technology and culture begin to change and affect our behaviors and routines.
Maxine Sheets-Johnstone takes an even longer-term and wider-ranging historical and methodological view towards tactility, surveying philosophy dating back to antiquity and a range of neuroscientific studies and observations to demonstrate “that kinesthesia, tactility, and affectivity matter because they are central to animate life.” A dancer and choreographer turned philosopher, Sheets-Johnstone also sees digitality as disruptive to “the basic realities of being a body,” in a time when “texting, twittering, and facebooking have overridden the immediate tactile -kinesthetic-affective qualitative dynamics of everyday life.” She argues that motion and touch are at the center of how we experience and comprehend the world, observable in how writers from Aristotle to Leonardo da Vinci framed experience and being, seen in the formation of languages and semiotics, rooted in our origin as infants with “tactile-kinesthetic-affective bodies”, beings who speak through movement.
Germaine Dulac, in conceiving the ‘essence’ of cinema, also tied everything back to movement, the ‘true meaning’ of the cinematic essence she called cinégraphie. Her contemporary Jean Epstein made a similar argument in “The Cinema Seen from Etna,” writing that “one of the greatest powers of cinema is its animism” - a word that, not coincidentally, shares its Latin root with animation, suggesting not just an embodied motion, but a soul. “On screen, nature is never inanimate,” he writes. “Objects take on airs. Trees gesticulate … A hand is separated from a man, lives on its own, suffers and rejoices alone ...” And if a hand can have a life of its own on screen through the cinema’s transformative apparatus, so too can the results of the hand – the lines and colors drawn by the hand in animation.
Perhaps this is true even in manga, and storyboards, and the other ‘still’ images collected in those entrancing books on my shelf. Frederik L. Schodt, in the first major English-language study of manga, presented its distinct appeal to the new Western audience for which he wrote through a lens of speed and kinesthetic engagement. He recalls a manga editor telling him that the average reader could finish one of their 320-page magazines in twenty minutes, spending just under 4 seconds on each page. A hallmark of manga, Schodt argues, is “speed reading,” a variety of techniques ushering the reader along at a commanding gait. In contrast to the stricter page limits and more traditionally ‘compressed’ style of American comics, manga page counts, printed in black-and-white on cheap, recycled paper, are generally higher, and artists, having more pages to work with, tend to embrace a more ‘decompressed’ style where visual storytelling is key and there is widespread, creative experimentation with page layout. The influence of cinematic techniques are essential to understanding manga, Schodt argues, with tools like the “fade-out, fade-in, montage, and even superimposition” key to manga’s ‘decompressed’ style, and artists like Osamu Tezuka taking explicit inspiration from the dynamism of cinema. The sum total of these techniques and influences is a form of comics that generally uses more pages and frames than its American counterparts, but is read much faster.
In this same vein, I have always been fascinated by the similarity between manga and storyboards. Both tell stories through hand-drawn still images, and both use those tactile qualities to suggest a great deal of motion. While many manga do eventually lead to animation, the explicit purpose of storyboards, of cou rse, is to be animated. Storyboards have a different kind of rhythm and rigidity, generally using a repetitive layout of five frames per page, with the standardized panel size mirroring the frame of a film. But a good storyboard, like a good manga, grabs you. It pulls you along, and does so at a rapid clip. The best ones are those you start reading and quickly forget that what you are looking at is, technically, a planning document, a reference for the large staff of artists and technicians who will create the ‘finished’ images. You get swept up in the sense of ‘motion,’ even though these images are still.
The relationship between stillness and motion is the subject of Tom Gunning’s essay “Animating the Instant,” where he argues the wonderment of animation arises from its tangible origin in still images. Animation, he says, “does not exist simply in the appearance of motion; animation is in the transformation of stillness into motion. It is this potential that one senses within the tense stasis of the instantaneous image.” ‘Tense stasis’ is also, I think, a good description of the energy that animates manga and storyboards and those other ‘still image’ collections on my shelves. “Rather than simply conceived of as reproductions of motion,” Gunning writes, “both instantaneous still photography and motion picture cinematography play with our perception of motion in order to produce the instant as a wonder.”
That word – ‘wonder’ – is one I have often evoked too. In my Master’s thesis, I wrote about the mysterious sway the tactile presence of storyboards hold over me, how perusing them leaves me in wonder – “the kind of wonder [philosopher R.W. Hepburn] would describe as astonishing at ‘the achievement of what … is of high aesthetic value, perhaps at the complex formal integration of a symphonic movement, or at its vivifying initially unpromising materials.’” And that wonder is rooted in tactility: Picking up a storyboard book to peruse, say, Miyazaki’s original drawings for My Neighbor Totoro can be a sort of ‘escape valve’ action from the digitality of my w orkspace, via a physical connection with artwork that is intensely tactile. It is part of my process, while writing about and studying these films, to sometimes flip through this material, if for no other reason than to give myself a break from the digital interface of the computer via a small physical connection with the material history of my sources.
The word ‘aura’ here seems inescapably applicable, though there is a unique operation at play in animation in where and how that aura is felt. Seeing a real-world location in a film and being inspired to seek it out in reality would, for Walter Benjamin, amount to searching for the ‘aura.’ But there is no ‘location’ one may visit from an animated film in the same way there is with live-action photography. The underlying ‘reality’ of an image in an animated film is not real-world inspirations or referents, but the drawing itself – the traces from the artist’s hand. Flipping through art books and storyboard collections, examining volumes of key animation, collecting original cels and drawings – those are encounters with the ‘original’, underlying materiality of the film, a tangible and tactile reminder of the reality of the work, the place in the chain of creation one can trace back to and find the ‘aura.’ For Benjamin, this would be an imperfect analogy, as the original paper the artist’s hands physically touched would have the ‘aura,’ not the mass reproductions. But the appeal – the sense of ‘getting closer’ to the ‘source’ of the art – is, I think, clearly quite real, and here I find myself returning to Andre Bazin’s description of the faith we place in photographic reproductions, of the ontological transubstantiation that occurs in the passage from an object to its mechanical recreation.
Part of what is passed through that transubstantiation in these works are traces of physicality, of tactility, that in and of themselves provide a unique form of identification. Here I am indebted to Laura Marks’ essay “Loving a Disappearing Image,” a work that radically retools some of the basic tenants of identification in film theory. While she wrote about experimental film and video, her insight provides a compelling foundation on which to build our understanding of the appeal of tactility in hand-drawn animation. Her project, as she explains it, is to “reconfigure identification so that it is not with a coherent subject but with nonhuman or inanimate objects, and with the body of the image itself.” Retooling Christian Metz’ primary/secondary identification framework, she suggests “that secondary identification may be with an inanimate thing or things; and that primary identification itself may be an identification with dispersion, with loss of unified selfhood.”
If ‘loving a disappearing image’ requires that we “trust that the image is real in the first place,” as Marks writes – the photograph serving as a “umbilical cord between the thing photographed then and our gaze now” – then the animated form is also a material basis applicable to these ideas. The drawings exist. They are tactile, physical objects. Impressions of their physicality are often present in the final image – as brushstrokes in the backgrounds, in the texture of a pencil line, as shadows between cel layers – and those various ‘pre-production’ materials that get collected into so many books are even less mediated, their ‘incompleteness’ attesting to the humanity of their creation.
Marks writes that “Loving a disappearing image means finding a way to allow the figure to pass while embracing the tracks of its presence, in the physical fragility of the medium.” Like our own transient bodies, she argues, we are drawn to impermanence, to signs of imperfection, to decay, to palpable materiality. There is a connection between these images and our own ‘tactile-kinesthetic-affective bodies,’ that fundamental part of our presence in the world that Sheets-Johnstone argues roots us to our surroundings and mediates our experience. Within those anime materials I take off the shelf and peruse, the things that strike me, that pierce me, frequently aren’t the totality of the image or completely articulated shapes within, but smaller and more abstract pieces, like the thick but porous texture of the yellow-brown pencils Miyazaki uses for shading, drawn roughly atop his characters in patterns that don’t necessarily conform to any spatial boundaries.
We engage in a ‘haptic look’ with these materials, and those anime films and TV shows that participate in the ‘return to handcraft’ encourage the same from their viewers. My Neighbors the Yamadas does not just engage in a unique aesthetic, but encourages a particular way of seeing; it uses its partial backgrounds filled by off-white textured paper, wide-tipped pencil lines, and slightly uncontrolled splashes of watercolor to encourage the viewer to attend not only to the image’s artificiality, but its tactility and humanity. In hand-drawn animation, tactility encourages a ‘haptic look’ through which we identify with lines, with textures, with colors, with the imperfect shadows left by one cel layer upon another – with the animation process itself.
Marks invokes Roland Barthes in her essay, which recalls how essentially tactile his theories of photographic identification are. Take the ‘studium/punctum’ dichotomy of Camera Lucida: The studium, the intentional, socially and culturally understood meaning, is punctuated, is broken, by the punctum, an “element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me.” It is a “wound,” a “mark made by a pointed instrument,” the “accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me).” It is an idea Barthes shares with us entirely through tactile metaphor, emphasizing the physical response of connecting with a piece of an image that resides beyond the borders of verbal articulation, and thus arrives to us as feeling, as sensation, as a connection less with our mind than with, as Sheets-Johnstone might say, our ‘tactile-kinesthetic-affective bodies.’
It is those signs of the human hand in animation that so often act as a punctum for me. A visibly uneven line on a character, the texture of a brushstroke in the background, a color that extends beyond the boundaries of a line, the porous smear of graphite from a pencil: these are not part of the narrative, and in fact sometimes act as a break in the flow of total diegetic illusion, but they are things that come out and grab me, or perhaps that I grab onto. They burst through the confines of the film’s surface and break the exterior of my own selfhood in turn; they ‘prick’ me, but in so doing, let me know that it, the image, and me, the viewer, are both alive, because both of us have bodies that can break, and splinter, and bruise, and otherwise affect upon each other.
This is an idea at the heart of Hannah Frank’s extraordinary book Frame by Frame. Her project is to explore classic cel animation through the physical traces left behind in the photographic process; in the drawings themselves, but also shadows, hairs, fingerprints, sweat droplets, and other testaments to the physical reality of those who labored on the pictures. What she finds in the individual pictures that ‘pierce’ her do so because they exist beyond, and break the unity of, the narrative and diegetic intentionality of the piece, and attest to something else, something affective and melancholic. The notion of labor is crucial to her work, both because animation is a laborious process, and because many of the laborers who left these traces in the ‘finishing’ stages of tracing, compositing, and photographing went uncredited, their names unknown to history but their presence attested to by these traces. Frank’s method is fundamentally empathetic, seeking out signals of humanity in these images and letting them ‘prick’ her, disrupting her own ‘unified selfhood’ to put herself in the shoes of an unknown person who labored to create the image before her.
As academic texts go, Frame by Frame is one I find unusually emotional to read. There is some inevitability to this, because Frank tragically passed away only a year after defending the text, written as her Ph.D. dissertation; the entire work, published posthumously, is thus infused with a sense of transience and melancholy that automatically makes the reader more attuned to the relationship between the physicality she writes about and the fundamental impermanence we all share.
Yet even in the far happier world where Frank were still with us, I think this book would still move me immensely, because what she is studying in such fluid, attentive fashion – those material traces left by human hands and human bodies – are inherently emotional aspects of the images, as Barthes would describe them. This kind of tactility is difficult if not impossible to process on a purely intellectual level; it activates our own awareness of our body, of our tactility, and makes us active and affective. When I reach for a storyboard book after hours spent working on the computer, perhaps it is more than just admiring the artwork or giving myself a break from digitality. Perhaps, in the tactile traces reproduced in those pages, is some fundamental reminder that I am alive, because I am here to touch and look at and invest myself in those images, and because those images themselves attest to the vitality of another person’s existence, allowing us through those marks on paper to enter into some small communion across the distances of time and space.
Although Barthes does not speak about animated films in Camera Lucida, there is one moment of linguistic coincidence that, while unintentional, neatly summarizes this intersection of animation, viewers, and tactility. Musing about how photography is, to him, an adventure, a critical relationship between the image and its beholder, he writes:
In this glum desert, suddenly a specific photograph reaches me: it animates me, and I animate it. So that is how I must name the attraction which makes it exist: an animation. The photograph itself is in no way animated…but it animates me: this is what creates every adventure.
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