Renewal and Religion in anime

“For at least some of the Superflat people [...] there is a kind of traumatic solipsism, even an apocalyptic one, that underlies the contemporary art world as they see it.” Thomas Looser, 2006

“Perhaps one of the most striking features of anime is its fascination with the theme of apocalypse.” Susan Napier, 2005

“For Murakami, images of nuclear destruction that abound in anime (or in a lineage of anime), together with the monsters born of atomic radiation (Godzilla), express the experience of a generation of Japanese men of being little boys in relation to American power.” Thomas Lamarre, 2006

As anime scholar Susan Napier and critics Looser and Lamarre suggest, apocalypse is a major thematic predisposition of this genre, both as a mode of national cinema and as contemporary art practice. Many commentators (e.g. Helen McCarthy, Antonia Levi) on anime have foregrounded the ‘apocalyptic’ nature of Japanese animation, often uncritically, deploying the term to connote annihilation, chaos and mass destruction, or a nihilistic aesthetic expression. But which apocalypse is being invoked here? The linear, monotheistic apocalypse of Islam, Judaism, Zoroastra or Christianity (with it’s premillennial and postmillennial schools)? Do they encompass the cyclical eschatologies of Buddhism or Shinto or Confucianism? Or are they cultural hybrids combining multiple narratives of finitude?

To date, Susan Napier’s work (2005, 2007) is the most sophisticated examination of the trans-cultural manifestation of the Judeo-Christian theological and narrative tradition in anime, yet even her framing remains limited by discounting a number of trajectories apocalypse dictates.¹ However, there are other possibilities. Jerome Shapiro (2004), for one, argues convincingly that the millennial imagination, as a subset of apocalyptic thought, is closer to the Japanese spiritual understanding of heroic mythology. Elsewhere Thomas Looser (2007) reflects upon 1990s Japanese media and art and interprets the obsession with apocalyptic images from the Superflat school and Gainax anime as a preoccupation with the postmodern crises of capital and its limits.

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