Mutual Images Journal

Editorial – Continuing research in a time full of sound and fury

2024-03-17T18:57:50+00:00

Dear readers, students, fellow scholars,
welcome to this eleventh instalment of Mutual Images Journal, titled “On
politics of visual media” after the main section of this present piece.

If only we had known [...]

Composer Kajiura Yuki and neo-medieval anime soundtracks

2024-03-17T19:02:17+00:00

This study semiotically interrogates the historical imaginary evinced in the neo-medievalist musical topoi found in Kajiura Yuki’s distinctive music for anime, which is easily recognised by its eclectic mix of sounds and styles gathered from across the globe. Her early scores employed a compositional method practised in Japanese popular music since the 1990s, which treated the creative act as a process of musical curation. This technique is evident in Kajiura’s handling of medieval Gregorian chant, which - as she has explained in interviews - she did not learn from studies in music history but rather from the German band Enigma and their hit album MCMXC a.D. from 1990, where samples of chant were mixed with Euro dance pop and French rap. The anime Noir from 2001 contains an excellent example of her approach, combining chant-based vocal tracks with energetic dance rhythms. Enigma used chant to call on modern neo-medieval tropes that highlight the pleasures of mysticism, religious devotion, and sexuality freed from morality, and Kajiura has replicated this imagery in Noir, making chant the symbol of an ancient criminal order that both worships and overtly sexualises femininity as embodied by the main female characters. Kajiura’s later style expands the technique of the Gregorian chant-influenced sound she developed in her earlier works: shifting away from Latin lyrics to her invented nonsense language of “Kajiurago” (literally “the language of Kajiura” in Japanese), with her ethereal chant delivered primarily by female voices. This shift is partially due to her collaboration with FictionJunction and Kalafina and is also a reflection of the strong female anime protagonists. Her signature sound enlivens the soundscapes of both Fate/Zero (2011) and the blockbuster anime, Demon Slayer (2019). The track “Brace up and run!” opens each episode of the latter, highlighting female voices chanting Kajiurago as a musically haunting reminder of the otherness of the past.

From Dungeons & Dragons to Dragon Quest: Cultural dialogue and material shifts

2024-03-17T19:05:35+00:00

Arguably one of the most popular genres in today’s video game market is the Japanese role-playing game (JRPG). The distinguishing traits of the genre are often a matter of debate. The final decision on whether something is a JRPG usually relies more on general feelings than on rigid criteria (Mallindine 2016). However, one shared trait among the exponents of the genre is that they find its roots in Western tabletop role-playing games, such as Dungeons&Dragons (1974). As a matter of fact, Dungeons&Dragons served as an inspiration for many other role-playing games (RPGs). One such example is Wizardry (1981), which, together with Ultima (1981), was among the most successful computer role-playing games of its time (Barton & Stacks 2008). The two games served as the beginning for long-spanning series, which enjoyed wide success in Japan (Adams 1985), where the RPG genre as a whole was soon integrated, through various platforms, into the local media ecology (Steinberg 2015). Wizardry in particular was also among the games which influenced Horii Yūji (Horii 2018a. 2018b) to create Dragon Quest (1986), one of the earliest examples of JRPG. This article seeks to draw a connection between Dungeons&Dragons and the early JRPGs. First, I compare Dungeons&Dragons, a tabletop RPG, to its most well-known digital counterparts of the time, Wizardry and Ultima. By doing this, I expose the differences between ‘pen and paper’ and ‘screen and software.’ Then, I observe the differences between Wizardry, Ultima, and Dragon Quest in terms of both aesthetics and gameplay, in order to understand how Japanese developers and distributors negotiated the concept of RPG for the Japanese market. In both comparisons I consider how characters, avatar, gameplay, and narrative are mediated by the platform and the cultural milieu hosting them.

Introduction – On politics of visual media

2024-03-17T19:14:41+00:00

"The visual" is the dominant social mode of modern media in what some have come to call the “post-literate age” of international mass media distribution and cultural hegemony. Media images are suffused with culturally-inflected visual meaning at both their points of production and moments of reception. But their very ubiquity, or mere “commonality”, often results in the dismissal of their political significance. In terms of [...]

Video Gaming and Narratives of Love as a potential stance of cultural-political meaning in current societies: A study of It Takes Two, 2021

2024-03-17T21:16:42+00:00

In 2021, arriving shortly after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic and the social distancing it required, a creative co-op video game, It Takes Two, created by Swedish developer Hazelight Studios and published by American gaming giant Electronic Arts, gained huge popularity on a global scale, including unexpected success in the Chinese market. Although the game is not officially available in China, has no publishing license, and no official promotions, still half of its sales come from China. The game is based on a divorce-themed story, and by integrating cooperative gameplay mechanisms, it enables players to engage in constructing their own “narrative of love” that reflects and coincides with specific cultural indicators. Bringing the dynamics of marriage and divorce to the forefront, the game has generated enormous discussion in mainstream Chinese online platforms, and drew attention to political-cultural notions of what it means to be married and then to struggle and go through the (emotional, practical, and legal) divorce process. The aim of this article is to approach video games such as It Takes Two as a cultural form that should be understood as part of our politics as citizens and individuals in a broad sense, and as part of a wider and more complex connection we have with each other and with society (Street, 2007). Drawing on an analysis of the function of gameplay mechanics in relation to video game setting and structure, this study provides a discussion of the visual and narrative representations of an ostensibly “typical” universal love and divorce issue within the sociocultural context of a Western family, and examines how Chinese audiences make sense of such “lessons” and ideology, and how they work (or might not work) for them. It Takes Two raises awareness of and questions about how games can elicit emotional responses and deep reflection in real life for its players about the vicissitudes of marriage (and love relationships in general) and the culturally specific, at times legal, and broadly visual political implications of their successful or disastrous unfolding.

Be a part of the narrative: How audiences are introduced to the “free choice dilemma” in the interactive film Bandersnatch

2024-03-17T21:19:27+00:00

The first major interactive film on Netflix with live-action scenes was Bandersnatch, released in December 2018. Bandersnatch offers viewers a unique viewing experience distinct from traditional cinema, as it provides the viewer with multiple choices within the narrative trajectory. Digital interactive media technologies have become increasingly popular due to public demand for interactive engagement and a democratisation of text control. There is a social desire to deprive the author of total control over the story; to co-create stories using imagination while adhering to formal limitations and structures; to play with the text as an incomplete form; for the ability to rearrange the story’s order, alter its quality, and other such things. These meet the audience-creative user’s needs and satisfaction (Cover, 2004). Where personal emotions can be invested and free choice can be exercised in cyberspace, the emergence of interactivity as a kind of audience engagement is a robust culturally rooted desire. This article attempts to understand and analyse the uses and gratifications experienced by the audience during the interactive viewing process. However, digital participation proves to have limitations. Through a case study of the interactive film Bandersnatch, this paper explores how the interactivity and the features of video games can be used to give users so-called “free choice,” but that can actually be frustrating and ultimately offer only the illusion that the audience has any significant control over the story. In the end, the decisions made by the audience offer some relevant affordances to the interactive user but eventually proceed to reinforce the ideological control from the production team.

The bias on characters’ visual traits in Japanese animation and the misconceived “transnationality” of anime

2024-03-17T21:27:39+00:00

In the dynamics centred on East Asian cultural output, a special place is occupied by Japan’s production (namely, comics and animation, or manga and anime respectively) and the distribution and widespread consumption of this vast output around the world.

Despite the interpolations many anime series or films faced when exported, a specificity of the medium was/is usually recognised by foreign audiences. However, issues often unfold in the reception of anime’s visual codes, which entail problematical aspects in the grasping of the narratives and an underlying dimension of what I shall here call “graphic politics”. Today, the visual-narrative logics of anime characters’ physiognomies, and therefore, the motivations and intentions of their creators, are still largely misinterpreted based on culturally-inflected interpretations; this gives us clues on what the audiences of anime are, what they expect and draw from anime’s stories, and what this means for a global politics of anime as a medium of expression and a creative output. In this article, through the description of visual examples and established, or, at times controversial, scholarship in the field, I discuss the persistence of wide misunderstandings in the cultural politics of anime’s design and its impact on the reception of anime’s intentions globally.

Among the collateral effects of this misunderstanding, a technical and moral justification to call (or imply as) “anime” animations designed and produced outside of Japan by non-Japanese authors seems to be emerging in the global discourse, thus privileging a fabricated idea of anime as just a “form” over anime as also and mainly a Japanese cultural artefact, in a momentous process of progressive dilution of the Japan-embedded characteristics of the animations made in Japan.

Horror and the Cube Films: An unlikely medium for the negotiation of Nationalist-Cultural ideologies

2024-03-17T21:32:18+00:00

Over the past several decades, scholarship has come to recognise the unexpected significance of horror cinema ventures as both culturally and politically relevant. One of Canada’s greatest horror film successes was Vincenzo Natali’s 1997 psychological thriller Cube that metaphorically explores the suffocating nature of vocational social relations under the conditions of a patriarchal military-industrial capitalism. So innovative was its premise that US interests quickly acquired the rights to produce and distribute Cube 2: Hypercube (2002) and Cube Zero (2004), but they were just as quick to reformulate the most subversive critique of the original film. Two decades later, in 2021, Japanese producers released a remake of the original film (which was so popular there), although it also re-coded the thematic critique, just as the American sequels had done. With this group of films across three national production traditions arises an opportunity to “detect shifts in the ideological constellation”, as Slavoj Žižek has argued, by “compar[ing] consecutive remakes of the same story” (2011, p. 61). Following primarily Herbert Marcuse’s understanding of political repressive tolerance, this article demonstrates the way in which constructions of cultural identity are negotiated across national traditions in the age of globalisation. Cube and its follow-ups demonstrate the nationalist-inflected limits of critical expression in the way that each subsequent film attempts to re-focus and re-code the horrors of the narrative machine in order to assert their own nationalist sensibilities threatened by the cultural levelling effect of globalisation in an age of transnational cinema distribution.

Tobacco Packaging Design in China, Thailand, and New Zealand: A Comparative Study

2024-03-17T21:43:30+00:00

Packaging design has received much interest from the academic and industrial worlds. Numerous studies have shown that packaging significantly impacts purchase intent, product satisfaction, and repeat purchases. However, to some extent, tobacco packaging is not used to fulfil its consumer target’s demands or increase the repeat purchase rate. By contrast, it has the official duty to discourage tobacco use, as it is a highly regulated business. Nevertheless, tobacco manufacturers do their best to find the last opportunity to advertise on tobacco boxes because the packet is their final or only marketing or advertising tool in many countries. Thus, tobacco packaging design could be the most challenging advertising practice in many nations because two contradicting advertising contents (persuasion and dissuasion) emerge in one medium simultaneously. In this paper, I comparatively content-analysed 65 popular cigarette brands from China, Thailand, and New Zealand to find out how tobacco companies use cigarette packaging to communicate with their customers. The results suggested that Chinese tobacco packaging is highly market-oriented and emphasises the use of traditional Chinese cultural elements. Conversely, tobacco packaging in Thailand and New Zealand focuses on health communication. But warning labels in the two countries are platitudes. The results also indicate that although policy factors have had a positive impact on tobacco packaging in terms of its discouraging function and contributing to tobacco control over the past decades, there is a need for policies to be tailored to the socio-cultural context. Efforts should focus on improving tobacco packaging from the perspective of smokers’ psychology. This adjustment is deemed necessary due to the declining effectiveness of current tobacco packaging control policies in reducing smoking rates in recent years.

Animating the Spirited: Journeys and Transformation – Tze-yue G. HU, Masao YOKOTA & Gyongyi HORVATH (eds)

2024-03-17T21:48:34+00:00

Tze-yue G. Hu, Masao Yokota and Gyongyi Horvath edited an impressive anthology in 2020, Animating the Spirited: Journeys and Transformations, to examine the relationship between the concept of “the spirited” (or “the spiritual”) as part of our essence as humans and humanistic productions, especially all aspects of animation industries. T.-y. G. Hu is an independent educator and scholar-author based in Northern California with book publications such as Culture and Image-Building (University of Hong Kong Press, 2010). Her background in the healing arts programme provides [...]

Okada Toshiki and Japanese Theatre – Peter ECKERSALL, Barbara GEILHORN, Andreas REGELSBERGER & Cody POULTON (eds)

2024-03-17T21:51:22+00:00

Since emerging on the scene in the 1990s, influenced especially by the work of Hirata Oriza, playwright Okada Toshiki has written dozens of works, a selection of which have toured throughout the world. Okada Toshiki & Japanese Theatre tells the reader that “he is the only Japanese theatre artist of his generation to have a significant international career and his work is known widely in Europe, North America, Asia and Australia” (1). Okada’s work encompasses colloquial yet troubled language, slowed tempos coupled with abstract physical scores, rich visual and aural designs and collaborations, and close engagement with events such as the Iraq War, precarious employment, the 2011 disasters, and post-Anthropocene modes of dramatic exploration. The book [...]