Anime and Drone Warfare

Operational Images, Dissimulation, and Hypercinematism in A Farewell to Weapons

Abstract

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.