hazel and xoe present this month’s Anime Spotlight:
The Heisei Malaise
What do the Y2K scare, death cults, NEETs, and Nostradamus have in common? 90's/00's anime of course!
As Japan’s 1980s bubble economy burst, the tumultuous first decade of the Heisei era (1989~2018) triggered a series of paradigm shifts within subcultural pockets of the anime industry, paving the way for many of the period's postmodern masterpieces. Here you’ll find a selection of titles with overlapping thematic and formal elements that create a rich document of time, place, and aesthetics that The Internet writ large is still obsessed with today.
Time Loops and Vicious Cycles
Circular narratives are found in many of these titles, evoking the awful futility of feeling trapped in a vicious cycle, most famously explored in Neon Genesis Evangelion (1997)'s successively numbered cataclysms and Higurashi's predeterministic time loops. The circular narrative is taken to its most literal and avant garde in The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya (2006)’s Endless Eight arc, in which eight nearly-identical episodes aired one after the other to shock and outrage from audiences, mirroring the Groundhog Day Summer vacation the characters are endlessly reliving.
1999: Apocalypse, Prophecy, and Cults
Though doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo's impact on Evangelion's production is often overstated, they eerily share a common ancestor: apocalyptic fiction of the 1970s, a decade of similar economic uncertainty and political unrest. Author Ben Goto's Prophecies of Nostradamus (1973) became an unexpected best-seller, hooking Japan's young adults with its examinations of the astrologer's predictions for the future, even serving as the basis for a Toho film of the same name, known in American markets as Last Days of Planet Earth (1974). The year 1999 held great significance to Nostradamus (as did many years), which caused a resurgence in interest in Goto's writings through the 90s, reaching a fever pitch as anxiety surrounding the "millennium bug" gave way to full blown panic. The world continued to turn as calendars rolled over, but the scare was a sobering reminder of just how tech-reliant society had become in a few decades' time. 20th Century Boys (2008) adapted from the 1999 manga explores an alternate history future where Nostradamus's prophecies are made real by a group reminiscent of Aum Shinrikyo, who perpetrated the 1999 subway gas attacks.
60s and 70s New Wave Formal Influence
In the 1960s and 70s, New Wave filmmakers from every country were making politicized, experimental films with tiny budgets. As disillusionment in the two modern pillars of society, the State and Capital, grew due to market crashes, neoliberal economic policies stripping away social safety nets, and mass acts of violence, the writers and directors coming up during the 90s and 00s turned to their politically left predecessors. New Wave films utilized techniques like long still-frame montage with voiceover, multimedia, mixing color and black and white shots, and abstract visuals, along with a dose of absurdism. Perfect techniques for animation studios on shoestring budgets looking to create something highly stylized, even abrasive. Evangelion, FLCL (2000), and Excel Saga (1999) all exemplify this influence.
Not in Education, Employment or Training
The effects that technological dependency has on a person's sense of self emerged as a recurrent theme even before the Y2K bug came to prominence. Works like Welcome to the N.H.K. (2006), Chaos;Head, (2008) & Eden of the East (2009) explore the growing psychological phenomenon of young adults retracting from society, dubbed "hikikomori" in 1998 by psychologist Tamaki Saito, often honing in on hikikomori's uniquely distorted and agoraphobic relationships to the internet.
Denpa, Radio Waves, and Conspiracy
Elsewhere, the already densely metatextual musings of writers like Mamoru Oshii (Ghost in the Shell (1995)) and Satoshi Kon (Perfect Blue (1997), Paranoia Agent (2004)) were provided yet another vector through which to explore their--often female--characters' fractured psyches: The second self reflected in a computer monitor, idiomatically wielded by Serial Experiments Lain (1998), produced by Triangle Staff whose notorious prolific Chiaki J. Konaka contributed a plethora of other icy, conspiratorial scripts to anime (Malice@Doll (2001), Shadow Star (2003)). Around this time the Boogiepop (2000) light novel series exploded in popularity, defined the modern light novel, and helped codify Denpa, an entirely-too-complex-to-dissect-here literary movement largely characterized by an opaque, dissociative atmosphere and a paranoid skepticism toward computers.
Terrorism and Militarized States
Concerns with the fate of the masses both at the hands of the state and violent radicals again peaked in this period--the events of 9/11 and US military actions in the Middle East were of concern to the whole world. Security was a changing landscape in a both newly-borderless and hyper-national global arena. The state’s technopoly on violence juxtaposed with the individual, the rebel, and the radical are the subject of seminal works like Patlabor (1989), Ghost in the Shell, and Evangelion, as well as confrontationally countercultural independent films such as Peep "TV" Show (2003). Yutaka Tsuchiya's film, shot entirely guerilla with a digital camera that cost less than $4000, captures the breakdown of Tokyo's subcultures along the contours of the global reaction to the September 11th attacks and Japan's Middle East policies.
Digital Animation
As the 1990s changed hands with the 2000s, so too did traditional cel animation change hands with digital, which necessitated a set of stylistic growing pains that coalesced into a distinctive desaturated aesthetic. Though some productions fared better than others in this respect, the familiar tactility of hand-drawn and painted cels are nowhere to be found in titles like .Hack//SIGN (2002) or Gunslinger Girl (2003), whose alienated melancholy clicks right into place with the cold, mechanical feel of their visuals, deliberately or otherwise.
This spotlight highlights a pervasive trend in Japanese media from the period, but such a simplified summary inescapably comes with a degree of confirmation bias; these shifts in tone, theme, and style were far from ubiquitous, and plenty of other titles serve as strong counterpoints. All the same, they resonate timelessly as we live through culturally significant moment after culturally significant moment in a hopelessly interconnected, fractured world.
Anime:
Boogiepop Phantom (2000)
Chaos;head (2008)
.Hack//Sign (2002)
Eden of the East (2009)
Excel Saga (1999)
FLCL (2000)
Ghost in the Shell (1995)
Gunslinger Girl (2003)
Malice@doll (2001)
The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya (2006)
Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995)
Neon Genesis Evangelion: End of Evangelion (1997)
Niea Under 7 (2000)
Paranoia Agent (2004)
Patlabor 1+2 (1989, 1993)
Perfect Blue (1997)
Le Portrait de Petit Cossette (2004)
Serial Experiments Lain (1998)
Shadow Star Narutaru (2003)
Steins;Gate (2011)
Welcome to the NHK (2006)
When they Cry (2006)
Live Action:
Boogiepop and Others (2000)
Last Days of Planet Earth/Prophecies of Nostradamus (1974)
Peep "TV" Show (2003)
Pulse (2001)
Shrill Cries of Summer (aka Higurashi) (2008)
Suicide Club (2001)
20th Century Boys 1+2+3 (2008, 2009, 2009)
