Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image

Anime and Drone Warfare

Betty Stojnic — 2024-12-30

This article explores the philosophical and aesthetic implications of drone warfare through an analysis of A Farewell to Weapons (dir. Katoki Hajime, 2013), a short anime film in which a platoon of soldiers uses unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to fend off a hostile robot tank (the “GONK”). Defining “drones” as any unmanned vehicle that is either remotely controlled or fully autonomous, I discuss the film’s portrayal of the visual feed from both the soldiers’ UAVs and the GONK’s camera in relation to Harun Farocki’s concept of “operational images.” Operational images are not produced out of artistic intent, but rather as parts of operations that involve visual data processing, such as drone strikes or automatic navigation. A Farewell to Weapons is replete with operational images that demonstrate, to use Matthew King’s phrasing, the “dissimulation” (concealment) of human agency in the vast technological networks that mediate modern combat. Referring to Thomas Lamarre’s concept of “hypercinematism,” I argue that A Farewell to Weapons uses the hypercinematic movement of its virtual 3DCG camera to accentuate the dissimulated, nonhuman points of view of operational images. By embedding drone vision into its own visual logic, the film becomes a testament to the propagation of drone aesthetics in popular media, as well as a direct confrontation with the weaponisation, and eventual automation, of what we consider human vision.

Escape Vectors, Gravitational Pulls, and Machine Ontology

Eamon Reid — 2024-12-30

Japanese popular culture can be comprehended as an ideological battleground where political notions are postulated and speculated on, including popular mecha anime. This paper focuses on the mecha science fiction of Takahashi Ryōsuke to think the relation between anime media and sense-making. I critically analyse Takahashi’s FLAG. In the series, the photojournalist Saeko Shirasu is assigned to a special forces’ unit, SDC (or “seedac”) that is tasked by the United Nations Forces to reclaim a UN flag. This flag attained symbolic value following its being photographed by Shirasu, which depicts civilians raising the flag in the war-torn Uddiyana, plunged into civil war following the explosion of sectarian religious differences among Buddhists and a native belief system. The flag became a symbol for peace but was stolen by the extremist “Gelut Sect” to disrupt peace accords. I take sense-making to be connected to the democratic political problem of orientation as critically disucssed by Hannah Richter. This paper both attempts to grasp how Takahashi uses anime to think the relation between media and sense-making and uses Takahashi’s anime to conceptualize the relation between politics, media, and sense-making. I read FLAG from the perspective of MOO, arguing that various media machines–from cameras to informational fragments–have the capacity to interrupt sense. In this way, what I call the “journalist-assemblage” constitutes what Bryant terms a “rogue object”. Rogue objects constitute escape vectors that can be followed to depart from oppressive gravities. This is a political matter of orientation. I use Bryant’s typology of gravities to make this textual point in Takahashi explicit, but also to make the meta-textual argument that anime can be utilized to disrupt given sense-making practices. Adjacent to this, I make an argument contra Grant Hamilton for the relevance of the critical and philosophical interpretation of texts.

VTubers as Animated Performances

Wei-chih Wang — 2024-12-30

This paper examines VTubers as a novel form of animated performance merging human and virtual elements, rooted in anime and digital media aesthetics. Focusing on Hololive Production, it explores how VTubers diverge from traditional anime’s pre-scripted narratives by facilitating dynamic, interactive performances shaped by real-time fan engagement. It draws on Azuma Hiroki’s “database consumption” concept to argue that VTubers extend otaku culture by enabling fans to interact with modular character traits, allowing VTubers’ identities to evolve through improvisation and collaboration. Henry Jenkins’s “transmedia storytelling” and “convergence culture” theories are employed to analyze VTubers’ cross-platform expansion and global cultural influence. Furthermore, this paper addresses the emotional labor involved in VTuber performances, using Donna Haraway’s “companion species” theory to explore how VTubers foster reciprocal, emotionally rich relationships with their audiences. By positioning VTubers as a hybrid phenomenon in which anime aesthetics, digital companionship, and technological performances intersect, this paper offers a new perspective on virtual embodiment, digital kinship, and identity formation in contemporary media. It argues that VTubers represent a significant shift in how audiences engage with digital media, transcending traditional boundaries between fiction and reality, while raising ethical concerns about the sustainability of this emotional labor.

From Drawing to Movement

Gustavo França — 2024-12-31

The aim of this essay is to develop a reflection on how the person responsible for creating the character design of an animated work uses pictorial strategies in its configuration in order to solve possible impositions, challenges and limitations present in the production of animation, especially with regard to the configuration of movement. In this way, we used a combination of concepts such as style and paradigm within David Bordwell's problem/solution, the notions of burden and guideline developed by Michael Baxandall, and concepts elaborated by Pierre Bourdieu such as position-taking, and workspace, among others, to help us understand why certain stylistic choices were chosen over others in the visual creation of the characters Atsuko Kagari and Diana Cavendish from the Japanese animation Little Witch Academia (2013), created by Yoshinari Yoh at the Trigger studio.

The Joy of Devouring

Marketa Jakesova — 2024-12-30

This article performs a phenomenological analysis of Satoshi Kon’s anime film Paprika (2006) focusing on dreaming, devouring, bodily permeability, and transformation of subjectivity. While dining has long been a significant motif in Japanese cinema, eating and the metabolic body have seldom been considered serious topics in philosophy. When mentioned, they are usually seen as mere conditions for thinking or, in phenomenology, for moving around. Although Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s later work on dreams and intersubjectivity moves beyond the bounded subject, it remains primarily concerned with perception and relationality rather than material exchanges. Annemarie Mol’s critique of impermeable embodiment highlights this limitation, arguing that not only movement but also metabolism should be the focus of phenomenology. An exception in Western philosophy is Emmanuel Levinas whose philosophy of hunger challenges the idea that consumption is a purely biological function, instead reframing it as a type of existential desire. Through these interventions, Paprika emerges as a model of metabolic subjectivity, where eating, dreaming, and transformation are not separate processes but interwoven modes of becoming. The film visually enacts this by collapsing the boundaries between dream and reality, self and environment, culminating in a climax where bodily devouring is both an act of love and metamorphosis. By reinterpreting Merleau-Ponty through Mol’s metabolic perspective and Levinas’s hunger, this article argues that Paprika presents a vision of subjectivity that is radically open, absorptive, and continually reshaped by what it takes in. In doing so, Paprika not only challenges phenomenology’s emphasis on perception but also enacts a flattening of distinctions between body and mind, material and virtual, fundamentally redefining what it means to exist in an immanent world.

Anime as Social Imagination

Brett Hack — 2024-12-30

Anime has been recognized as a distinct mode of image-thinking that can inform philosophical inquiry. In particular, anime has provided philosophies of media with new insights on how to reconceptualize subjectivity and collectivity within our contemporary media-worlds. This essay aims to contribute to this project by examining how anime’s media-form interacts with the shared cognitive processes of human imagination that are actualized within anime’s fictions. Analysis will describe anime’s image-creation processes as techniques of imagination, that is, as material and cognitive “strategies and devices” that make complex, non-present objects “perceivable and experienceable,” and so enable collective practices of speculation (Heise, 2008, p. 67). The essay elaborates these techniques as an “enactive” mode of social imagination, a collaborative process of sense-making through which creators and viewers feel through the contours of contemporary social imaginaries and explore conditions of possibility for changing them (Gallagher, 2017). The theoretical and political implications of this view will be examined through a comparative analysis of two original series from the high period of neoliberal hegemony in Japan: Code Geass: Lelouch of the Rebellion (Taniguchi, 2006-2008) and Penguindrum (Ikuhara, 2011). These very different series similarly use anime techniques of imagination to experientially navigate what Thomas Lamarre (2018, p. 29) calls the media “infrastructure complex” of early 21^st-century Japan. The two series’ fantasies of changing the world within this context become perceivable through anime’s multivalent processes of social imagination, which move from the fictional enactments themselves and out into broader projects of re-imagining real-world social relations. The essay will ultimately argue that anime’s social imagination offers a way to philosophically and critically mobilize the enduring role of fictional experience and its forms of agency as tools for negotiating between different layers and conceptualizations of media-experience and their political enunciation.

The World Awakens and Changes With Your Love

Ana Matilde Sousa — 2024-12-30

This paper analyzes Kunihiko Ikuhara’s 12-episode Japanese anime series Yurikuma Arashi (2015) through the lens of French philosopher Alain Badiou’s concept of the Scene of Two. Ikuhara, renowned for his direction in shows like Revolutionary Girl Utena, constructs a visually lush and symbolically layered narrative that draws from the yuri— a genre of manga and anime focused on romantic relationships between women, with a history of unusually fluid demographics within the Japanese mediascape—alongside elements of horror cinema, including Dario Argento’s classic giallo Suspiria.

Interview with Thomas Lamarre

Lucas Ferraço Nassif — 2024-12-30

On March 8, 2024, Thomas Lamarre, from the University of Chicago, met with Lucas Ferraço Nassif and Susana Viegas at Colégio Almada Negreiros (FCSH-UNL) for an interview held on the eve of his seminar as part of the FILM AND DEATH activities. During their conversation, they addressed some of the themes and ideas that would later shape Thomas Lamarre’s talk, offering an early glimpse into the discussions to come.

Youth and Suicide in American Cinema: Context, Causes, and Consequences

Paolo Stellino — 2024-12-30

Le cinéma de Jean-Luc Godard et la philosophie

Kamil Lipiński — 2024-12-30

Cinema of/for the Anthropocene: Affect, Ecology, and More-Than-Human Kinship

Maria Irene Aparício — 2024-12-30

Anime’s Thinking Images

Patrícia Castello Branco — 2024-12-30