Contents

Half-breed Dog, Half-breed Film: Balto as Animelodrama
by Amy Ratelle

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The Newly Developed Form of Ganime and its Relation to Selective Animation for Adults in Japan
by Sheuo Hui Gan

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“Steadier, happier, and quicker at the work”? Women in Canadian Animation
by Lynne Perras

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TV 2.0: Animation Readership/Authorship on the Internet
by Birgitta Hosea

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Complete Volume

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Linda Willams (1998) defines melodrama as “a peculiarly democratic and American form that seeks dramatic revelation of moral and emotional truths through a dialectic of pathos and action” (p. 42). This emphasis on moral and emotional truth, as opposed to cinematic realism or adherence to historical fact positions the figure of the “suffering innocent” (p. 43) as a dividing line between the oppositions of (cinematic) “good” and “evil.” Balto (1995) takes several liberties with history. The nature of these liberties is of great interest, especially as the film is promoted as a “true” story (on its movie poster), and more particularly if we are to understand the film is operating specifically as melodrama. This paper examines Balto in terms of its melodramatic structure, and how the liberties taken with actual history serve to enhance the visceral impact of the film.

Melodrama is most often (pejoratively) deemed a genre of excess. Nearly all the writings on melodrama focus on its excessive qualities as properties of the “woman’s film” (Williams, 1998; Gledhill 2000), and are framed in terms of issues of violations of good taste, in that they are overly, often uncomfortably, sentimental. Children’s cinema is also often framed in terms of violations of good taste – too loud, too bright, too nonsensical. The similarity in negative views of these “marginalized” genres has yet to be noted in writings on melodrama or children’s cinema. It seems only logical, then, to examine Balto in terms of its excessive pathos, sentimentality and action-packed third act, especially in that the film undermines historical fact in order to drive home a larger point on suffering and the rewards of virtue, and because it implicitly maintains a tie to history, inherent in the live-action opening and closing “brackets”. Though most, if not all, children’s animation is melodramatic, Balto in particular is deserving of special attention by virtue of the tensions of pathos/action in the animated narrative, and the implicit “real-life” history in the live-action, which requires an anchor to an actual lived experience, as provided by the live-action bookends. While other animated films may have this explicit division between live-action and animation, in the case of Balto, the shift in medium is more than simply indicative of a flashback. As the human grandmother is revealed as Rosie, the little girl in the animated “core text,” this lends greater historical credence to the emotional journey of Balto in the animated portion of the film.

This troubled relationship to history is heightened by the division of the film into two parts – a brief live-action opening sequence, the animated “core text,” and a return to the live-action space at the end. Christine Gledhill (2000) further observes that “melodrama’s heightened contrasts and polar oppositions aim to make the world morally legible” (2000, p. 234) – pure/impure, rural/urban, wild/domestic, and nostalgia/history. The division of the narrative into two separate parts highlights the grey areas between historical fact and emotional truth. The interdependence of these two modes of representation as separate, yet inseparable parts of the same narrative is crucial to understanding the film as melodrama.

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Ganime is a new corporate project to develop the features of selective animation to provide a more flexible category of anime. Ganime was created jointly by Toei Animation and the publisher Gentosha. The overall project is to promote auteurism in animation by encouraging creators to have the freedom to exercise their imagination instead of conforming to the predetermined norms of the anime industry. The Ganime project also intends to liberate the artists’ creativity through collaboration among painters, novelists, musicians and film directors.

“Ga” is written with a character meaning “painting,” in their usage it is not restricted to any particular method but could be oil painting, ink painting, wood block printing, photography or even clay models; “nime” is written with katakana as a shortened form of “anime.” As the project name indicates, Ganime stresses the value of the drawing by the artists, treating them as establishing the core to which words and music are integrated to create a new form of expression.

At time of writing, fourteen Ganime titles have been released since the project was launched at the end of May 2006. Each work exhibits a different drawing technique, visual style and represents various genres. The Ganime Project also aims to incorporate works that employ different materials besides drawn animation. Most works have adapted noted examples of classic and contemporary literature and music to enrich the narrative element.² Ganime tends to be character-based, slower in pace and rendered with less motion than usually found in anime. Ganime has been introduced to the public as “the art of slow animation.”³ The works are being released directly on DVDs without prior showing on television or in theatres. Ganime works vary in length; the shortest being seventeen minutes, and the longest forty minutes, while most are between twenty to thirty minutes.

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In the film industry, historically it seems to be a truism that women have not occupied major positions. Although they have participated in the profession, there has been a relatively small number of female producers, directors, and head writers for many years. A similarly small number of women have held positions of influence in the animation industry.

A variety of reasons might be suggested for the scarcity of women animators: these might include systemic discrimination, institutional bias, and the fact that traditional animation and its focus on violence and physicality appealed to very few women. The relative dearth of females in the industry notwithstanding, the status of women in animation in Canada is anything but discouraging. From a cultural and historic perspective, this discussion will focus upon Canadian female animators and their experiences and suggest that at least some of the pessimism regarding women’s contributions to animation may have been overstated. Through examination of the challenges faced by female animators as well as strategies discovered that sustain their work, it becomes apparent that there is clearly a reason to celebrate the efforts and progress of women in Canadian animation, past and present.

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Animation Readership/Authorship on the Internet

Introduction

Traditional platforms for animation, such as broadcast television or cinema, are rapidly becoming obsolete as a new type of spectator demands more choice, the ability to interact with animated content and access to global distribution for their own user-generated work. Audiences are no longer satisfied with receiving a top down distribution of content from traditional cinema or broadcasters. Internet technologies are emerging to address this demand for active spectatorship and enable communities of interest to evolve their own alternative distribution methods.

Viewing animation online has become increasingly accessible with the mass adoption of broadband and the emergence of new file formats. TV 2.0 is an amalgamation of Internet technologies that combine video on demand with the social networking capabilities of Web 2.0. In the age of TV 2.0, the role of the viewer has increased in complexity with new possibilities for active interaction and intervention with the content displayed. This new audience seeks a form of spectatorship that can extend beyond the passive recipience of programming distributed by elite broadcasters. TV 2.0 on the Internet has changed both methods of distribution and traditional patterns for the viewing of animation. However, any potential for democratic participation in the visual culture of moving images that this could entail may be a brief historic moment before the assimilation and control of active readership by mainstream corporate culture.

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