Over at Riuva there has been some commotion about a recent Aya fiasco concerning the “creative” use of the bikini, the original source being located here.
Just add water
↩[LWC 61]
Given the state of anime fandom in Japan, it’s interesting to consider the “idol status” imbued upon the voice actors of our favorite animated characters. There’s a distinct difference between, say, celebrities in America (even the word difference) that are featured in the flesh. There’s the disparity in entertainment technology and medium choice there – live action versus animation; one needs real actors, the other, only their voices. But that’s the striking thing – how the entire person comes to fame from what is originally only the employment of their voice. How does someone like Hirano, whose anime “discography” heavily outweighs television appearances, come to such heightened levels of fame? Despite the fact that she’s a 21 year old model – dare we say “super model”? – compare it to American voice actors (or relative lack thereof): a middle aged Dan Castellaneta would not receive the same hypted-treatment as Hirano (would you want to see him in a bikini?) but he does not reach similar pinnacles of David Carradine-esque popularlity.
Inversely, there may be a retrograde effect when – insofar as only anime is viewed in an premature cross-section – American actors play voice roles, like Cameron Diaz in Shrek. One has to wonder if, due to the epitome of unmerited faggotry that is social networking in the USA, Shrek got Diaz because it’s Shrek, or if Diaz got Shrek because she’s Diaz (wiki’s 11th reference lightly speaks for the latter).
There’s also the difference in intertextuality – or we can call it blatant commercializing – apparent in anime that isn’t so visible in the same way as more generalized American animation (all South Park aside) is. ‘Casual’ fans of anime speak of Kyoani, Key, Sunrise, Taniguchi, etc.; ‘casual’ fans of American animation speak perhaps more directly of characters, Peter, Homer, Cartman, Bender, etc. There isn’t as much of a directive continuum behind the “fanthropology” of American animation. Fans of anime direct attention just as much to archetypal characters in typical, rearticulated anime (Key works et. al) as they do to the creative forces that invent these cultural artifacts. Thus it’s more intriguing to take note of the Kyon Continuum which features a similar signifier (nearly identical, coming from an artless person) that fights for a slightly less similar signified, hence the lesser-Kyon. In anime it may be more of a semiotic warfare that contests for one character design to appropriate the breadth of the archetype.
The Hare Hare Yukai is more or less fascinating in itself, but there’s some special allure to seeing people actually dance it. What was primarily invented within the animated medium finds its way into reality and as such is concretized from the utopian imaginary community. There’s several things at work here:
(1) the effect of viewing depends on the audience – a Western (non-Japanese) will find this different (how so would be impossible to determine) than a native;
(2) the seiyuu themselves performing this cultural ritual brings the essence of the fictive anime closer to the audience as non-fiction, adhering us tightly into the social and cultural web of anime (and fandom thereof) as an increasingly global, and, as the internet may subtly suggest, a transnational phenomenon;
(3) real actors may talk of “becoming the character”, though here it is reversed as the anime character becomes the seiyuu. With non-adaptive film (as in the movie isn’t a reworking of an animation) the channeling of persona and identity flows into the product and is altered by the setting because the actors as “blank” signifiers must take on the nature of the character. With this reversal of live-action – the physical appearance of the voice only – comes all the connotation of the animation from which the seiyuu has performed. A special case is Hirano, Konata and Haruhi as Lucky Star could be viewed entirely within a lens of very critical Haruhism. To that extent Haruhi and subsequent Haruhism establish a Haruhi-bias similar to a Kyon-bias when viewing Kanon 2006 after no Yuutsu.
With connotative seiyuu continuums abound in anime we’re helpless to stop making unwarranted connections. There are those spiritual predecessors and harbingers that elicit classic responses (i.e. “I’ve seen this before”), but, nevertheless, the cultural actors and artifacts present in each work are autonomous though kinetic, traveling through a very turbulent ether of fan-based perception, attitude and reception that is subject to give one work a cold-shoulder and a welcoming hug only months apart from one another…depending on whether or not Lawson blogs it.
By pleasant coincidence, I’m listening to ‘Video Killed the Radio Star’ as I type this.
Really the idol thing is just (yet) another element which nonplusses me, having grown up without a television and seeing very few films; having anything more than words with which to construct a character confuses me, let alone having to choose between a disembodied voice distributed across unrelated stories and set of discrete individual entities. (I wonder if there’s room to mention that kind of movie actor who is always really playing him or herself.)
God, it’s so hard to track you …
It’s a good post. I myself don’t know why this phenomenon occurs in Japan and not in other places: although I’m sure it has a lot to do with their culture, I also don’t know why these voice actors successfully cross the continuum from merely voices to an idol construct. Your observations are salient, as usual, but I couldn’t really add anything more.
I thought I was immune to the whole idol fandom thing until Nonaka Ai and Kugimiya Rie came along. But now I’m smitten, and it’s precisely along the lines of what you’re talking about here. I’m not smitten with the seiyuu themselves; I’m smitten with Nonaka’s innocence continuum (Fuuko, Kafuka, Mikan) and Kugimiya’s tsundere continuum (Shana, Louise, et al.). Perhaps saying that these seiyuu and others like them are typecast is doing them a disservice, insofar as they’re “spiritual harbingers,” practically cultural artifacts in themselves, setting up these semiotic continua and making anime fandom and its art more cohesive with their kinetic nature.
As to the question of why these things happen in Japan, I’d be interested to see how Japanese religion ties in, though I don’t know nearly enough about it myself to throw out any ideas right now. Maybe I’m reaching for a religious connection simply because of the implications of “idol” in English.
IK: ‘Video Killed the Radio Star’ is a much more incisive title than this mammoth of masturbatory pretentiousness. As for your last sentence, I wonder how one could analyze Shiraishi’s presence in Lucky Star? – his presence as himself during the ED’s?
Mike: Just subscribe to THAT, Superfani, Yukan and CI and you’ll eventually come across all the posts I write unless exceptions come across (Minimum Tempo that one time).
It was very interesting – I had received my copy of Mechademia I and II earlier this week and one quote by Harumi Befu struck me. It went along the lines of “anime fandom in America isn’t obsessed with Japan…this [xenophilia?] is not structural.” And then I was like “wtf”. I don’t know…Mechademia’s 5th volume or so is about “fanthropology” and maybe I plan to write something about “the case of the weeaboo” from the position of a fan and not a scholar. Though in that sense I am sort of critical (it is an unmerited criticalness perhaps) of Mechademia being written at “us” rather than “within” us – it is not organic literature, though one article by Susan Napier indicated she was lurking a Miyazaki mailing list forum thing for quite some thing, however, the key word is “lurking”. The “identity” or lurker, though, does not alter the position she researched in which was within academia. So in this sense, as people have identified throughout the previous months, I can never really speak for Japan. I don’t know what “idol” really entails in Japan, in Japanese. I can only attempt to assume what it is by what it isn’t via semiotic comparison to other cultures (perhaps a mistake in itself), though that’s probably borderline sophistry and wouldn’t make for a compelling polemic.
Pontifus: Oh I am definitely subject to the [seiyuu] continuum. Inoue Marina? I’m watching it. Aya Hirano? I’ll give it a shot… (20 faces you failed me…) I must say though, after watching Kanon 2006, I have perhaps been hypnotized to the majestic swooning that is Horie Yui. Hirohashi Ryou is another one that begs for indiscriminate following.
You bring up an interesting point with the tsundere continuum, or any other archetypal continuum, that is it the sonority of the seiyuu’s voice or the characters? Similar to that scene vs. sound problem, does the voice hold a continuous connotation that makes it perfectly suitable for the role, or is it the role that suits the voice? Which one inserts meaning into the other? I don’t know, though I’m leaning towards the seiyuu’s more popular representation/reputation than anything else (i.e. social networking, though it may differ in Japan).
Religion, eh? I don’t have any clue on that. After I read Shusaku’s “Silence” I plan (sorta kinda maybe not really perhaps) on doing some investigation into religion in anime since he was a Catholic in Japan (French literature scholar at that) and a lot of his works focus on clashing if not syncretic aspects of socio-theological positioning.
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