Alan Saunders: Hello, and welcome to The Philosopher's Zone. I'm Alan Saunders.

Kimba - theme

Alan Saunders: The opening theme song from Kimba the White Lion, an anime made in the 1960s by Osamu Tezuka, commonly thought of as the basis for Walt Disney's The Lion King, the story follows Kimba in his quest to create a safe haven for all the animals of the jungle.

Kimba - dialogue

Alan Saunders: Today we're continuing our series on Japan and looking at whether there is philosophy in anime.

ANIME MONTAGE

Alan Saunders: Now in Japan, anime refers to any form of animation, but for Western audiences, it means animation in a distinctly Japanese style. Anime pushes the boundaries of what is acceptable, because it can. It's totally created and controlled in the mind of the animator. As our guest today will testify, it does not belong solely in the realm of children; it can be dark, incredibly violent, and very sexually explicit.

But does it represent a distinctly Japanese world view? Does the treatment of the body, the melding of the ancient, the magical and the high-tech constitute a philosophy? Or is it just harmless entertainment?

To find out more, we're joined by Jane Goodall, Adjunct Professor in the Writing and Research program at the University of Western Sydney. Jane, welcome back to the show.

Jane Goodall: Hi.

Alan Saunders: Let's start with whether you agree that there's a philosophy of anime, or whether you think it's more that there are philosophical themes in anime and philosophical readings of anime.

Jane Goodall: I'd probably have to respond by saying there are many different ways of doing philosophy. And perhaps in university philosophy programs we get used to thinking it starts with a photocopy of some pages with fairly dense argument by a well-known European name, or someone from the Classics. But philosophy can be a kind of free ranging speculation and there can be popular cultures in philosophy as well. And perhaps in Japan there's a little bit more of a seamless blend of more rigorous, institutionalised thinking about the meaning of the world and the structure of the cosmos. And popular speculation.

But perhaps to kick off on this, it interests me that the word 'anime' and the Western word, 'animation', share the same root as the word 'animism', the universe invested with spirit and a kind of numinist power in natural forms and substances. Now that's something Western scientists now really don't want a bar of; it belong in the Renaissance alchemical view of the world. But it's a fascinating thing to just allow people to freely imagine about - so trees could talk and stones can deliberately trip you up.

Alan Saunders: And does an interest in animism; does that reflect a background in what I suppose is the national religion in Japan, Shinto?

Jane Goodall: I'm no specialist in Shinto, but there is certainly a tradition in Japan of organising concepts of the world around the elements. We have Earth, Air, Fire, Water, the Japanese tend to add another one, which roughly translates as Void, or Emptiness. That is supposed to be the highest, because it involves a certain spiritual discipline to get there. But the most potent is Fire, so there's this hierarchy of powers in the elements. And that does relate to animism, because it's the elements that are the forces of the world in any form, any combination of these forces.

Alan Saunders: And it's a completely uninhibited exploration of where the imagination can take a creator, isn't it?

Jane Goodall: Well it can be. And obviously if you're going to be completely uninhibited with the human imagination, you're going to go places senses don't like you to go to. And one of the most sensitive areas is when you get innocence in what I call the experience end of the spectrum, the more decadent kind of knowing end, they to come together. So innocent, cute characters attract predators, and when that becomes sexual, you know, a cute innocent schoolgirl and somebody looking through the keyhole into the girls' changing room, who's got all sorts of wicked designs and is clearly some very powerful, more senior body, that's a very troubling idea. But it needs very few resources to realise it in animation. There's nobody to stop you, you're just drawing on a page and moving it.

Alan Saunders: We've already mentioned Shinto and you've also talked about the disciplines necessary in order to attain the void, which sounds quite a Buddhist idea. Can we see this as a blend of these ancient philosophies in modern life? You know, classical Shinto and Buddhist themes blended with the high tech?

Jane Goodall: Yes it interests me that you get this very strong cultural criticism of animistic thinking and our chemical ideas in let's loosely call it Western culture, you know, European and American scientists don't like this kind of thinking. They think it's ignorant and superstitious. Whereas in Japan, the anime tradition has allowed it to be completely continuous, and to explore the kinds of sophistication you can give to an animistic view of the world in an electronic culture.

Alan Saunders: Undoubtedly the most famous anime outside Japan are made by Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli. Films such as Spirited Away and My Neighbour Totoro. Drawing on this animistic view of the world, Miyazaki's films deal with themes of tradition, the environment, feminism and passivism. Often it is the human characters who are the cause of both destruction and redemption. This movie, Nausicaaa of the Valley of the Wind is one of their earlier works dealing with these themes.

FILM EXCERPT

Jane Goodall: You get this vision of a divided world, and Nausicaa belongs to a kingdom of the winds in the valley of the winds, so her elemental principle is the wind. She's an air spirit, kind of modern Arial, and she's a young girl probably just pubescent, which is a nice kind of innocence growing out of it - image. And she's got her own form of technology. She rides this kind of light plane really, that doesn't even have an engine, and she's a whisperer, but she whispers monsters, she calms these kind of mega-trilobites that get into armies and cause a lot of trouble in her world. But the real trouble comes from the invasion of a high tech culture that wants to take over the place and use its resources, and make speeches to the people after killing their king, about how they belong to the past and they're going to have to change and move into a new era.

Alan Saunders: The treatment of the body and of experiences in anime is also interesting, and often very extreme, and in fact you draw links, don't you, to William Blake's ideas on metamorphosis and becoming. Can you tell us about this?

Jane Goodall: Yes. I mean this is really hopping what we might think of an East West boundary. But Japanese philosophy is actually very eclectic and Blake is very eclectic. And when you get people investigating mythology and cosmology, you get a lot of crossing between traditions. That's my sort of permission to speech for talking about Blake in this context. But it did fascinate me that the way in which Blake characterises this dualism, innocence and experience, absolutely fits the anime tradition. Because to be innocent is to be very good, you know, it's to be wide-eyed and cute, to do no-one any harm, to be appealing and loving.

But even the Japanese Kawai (cute) tradition has been criticised as a mentality that breeds non-assertion. That's what one Japanese feminist calls it. And that's actually how Blake sees it. He has innocence symbolised as little lambs, weeping children, lost boys, chimney-sweeps, these figures of pathos. And perhaps they are good, they certainly don't do any harm in the world, but they attract predators, they have no power, they can't change anything. So as a principle, innocence makes goodness a very weak principle. But experience which does all the forbidden things, it becomes very sexual, very violent, it plays with all the stronger energies of life, that's what changes the world. So Blake wants to kind of validate experience and energy, energy is the only life and is from the body, he says. So it's a very physical view of an energised universe that he's interested in.

Alan Saunders: And it's interesting, since you've talked about the way in which modern science will have nothing to do with animism, it's interesting that Blake will have nothing to do with the science of his day. He was a very strong critic of Newtonian science.

Jane Goodall: Well he's down on reason. He thinks reason draws boundaries around the way the mind works. He has this sort of force formed dualism. Reason is about form, and he's more interested in force which changes forms, and that is certainly an interest of pre-scientific revolution thinking, alchemy was interested in the changing of forms through playing with forces - elemental forces. And that's absolutely the way animation works. If you look at some of the more sophisticated end of animation, like the Japanese series, Urotsukidoji. That plays with the elements and is all about shape-shifting and the alteration of forms and values.

Alan Saunders: You had a reading from Blake, didn't you, which might be relevant here.

Jane Goodall: This is from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. One of his principles also is that you can understand the world in terms of dualities, but if you stick with the dualities, you get an artificial stasis. And things only really happen in this world in an interesting way when you allow the dualities to get together and intermingle and cause a lot of trouble with each other. So he says,

Without contraries is no progression. Attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate, are necessary to human existence.

You could take that as a motto for that Japanese series, Urotsukidoji.

FILM EXCERPT

Alan Saunders: This is The Philosopher's Zone on Radio National, and that was the opening of Urotsukidoji, Legend of the Overfiend, which is a series that you've written about, Jane Goodall, and it's part of a particularly violent genre of anime. Can you tell us a little about the series and what you see playing out in this kind of anime?

Jane Goodall: It's a massive story. I mean, I'm fascinated by just the craziness of the project. It's a cosmological drama about an avatar creature. Avatars are always in the mythological anime, there's always a character who's an avatar, going between worlds. And this kind of beast man is sent from one of the supernatural worlds. It's too complicated to tell you exactly which, there are many of them. And he's come to the created world of Earth and to seek out this hidden, mystical being called The Shojin who gets born every era to change the world, but is born in human shape, or in the shape of one of the creative beings, and has to be found. Meanwhile there are other creatures with evil designs also in search of the Shojin.

So that's the basic storyline and there's this proliferation of different orders of being. Beast creatures, semi-supernatural creatures, fully supernatural creatures, but what energises the whole story is that you don't know if this regime is good or evil or an equal parts mix .

Alan Saunders: And the film that we're talking about now, Urotsukidoji, it begins, doesn't it, the very adult tradition of anime, and there's a sense of pushing boundaries here, of what is acceptable and of evoking what we fear most, isn't it.

Jane Goodall: It is quite extreme. I mean I was genuinely shocked when I watched some of it, you know, it's pretty hard to watch kind of tentacle rape scenes. It's famous for the first tentacle rape scene, and these kind of close-ups of all sorts of erotic, violent, goings on. But I think it's a genuine experiment. Again if I can put in another Blake statement:

The road of excess leads to the Palace of Wisdom.

And apparently the original creator of the Urotsukidoji, manga, which is the print version, a guy called Toshio Maeda, was shocked himself at the animated version, and couldn't quite take it, but accepted that it was also doing something very interesting.

Alan Saunders: A lot of anime deals with similar themes of dystopia, apocalypse and destruction of the world. And obviously these are also themes that can be explored extensively in the philosophy, aren't they?

Jane Goodall: Yes. I think what's more oriental about anime is that it deals in the idea of reincarnation, including the world itself as needing to undergo reincarnations. So an era is born and dies. And the avatar figure in anime is instrumental in enabling the rebirth of the era, but before it can be reborn it has to die and the dying is this amazing sensational explosion of violence and destruction. And because you need so few resources for animation, you don't have to build sets, it's a real test of what the human imagination can come up with in the way of cinography. They're wonderful cinematographers, Japanese animators, absolutely wonderful.

Alan Saunders: Japan itself of course, almost died. It was heavily bombed in World War II and of course we had the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, though the conventional bombing of Tokyo was in terms of the number of lives lost, was as bad. Now it's often said that perhaps the most famous Japanese monster, Gojira, or Godzilla as we call him, is a reflection on the destruction of World War II. Do you think that this experience still plays into anime?

Jane Goodall: I'm sure it does. One of the things you get in Urotsukidoji, is this image of a mega city that just melts. And that is a vision I think that belongs to Hiroshima, the dropping of the atom bomb on a city where, I mean again it's I suppose the fire principle, everything burns but at such a high temperature that every known substance just melts.

Alan Saunders: Well talking about crossover, you can find the typical dualisms of instructional tales like myths and folklore, Good and Evil, and invoking Blake here, Innocence and Experience. You can find that in anime, but you would argue, wouldn't you, that the Japanese oppose these kind of dualisms and that anime often blurs or complicates them?

Jane Goodall: Yes, and I think that's because if you're creating something with - because it's now done on screen, but if you think of somebody working with a pen and paper, you can turn a rabbit into a duck with a stroke of a pen. So you multiply the sophistication of that, and you have somebody drawing on screen and they decide they want to turn a small, cute rabbit into this really powerful, muscled-up dangerous sexualised monster, they can do that in a few frames. So it's that freedom of the mind to shift something into something else. The role of the shape-shifter, the theme of the shape-shifter, we do it in dreams.

Alan Saunders: Glad you mentioned the duck and the rabbit because that's probably the most famous illustration in the history of philosophy, because Wittgenstein uses it in the philosophical investigations, an illustration that if you look at it one way, it looks like a duck, and if you look at it another way it looks like a rabbit.

Jane Goodall: I guess that's relevant, because you can say we get in the habit of setting the mind for one kind of perception, and then when we shift it to another one, we can't inhabit both at the same time. And animation doesn't necessarily ask you to stay with the ambiguity, but it says OK, let's make a real hybrid out of this and see what the hybrid does.

Alan Saunders: Finally, I just want to look at the differences between Japanese and Western animation, and the experience / innocence dualism is interesting. Now you've written that we're in an area of anxious over-experience, and this is explored very differently by Japanese and American animators. Can you tell us about this?

Jane Goodall: Yes, again I think in Japan, there's this freedom to fuse and hybridise and metamorphose, that lends itself to experiments with the dissolution of dualism. So you understand the world in terms of opposites, because it helps to organise the way you see things. But then you allow those opposites to fuse and transform. In America, I think perhaps it is to do with the influence of rationalist science, there's a need to hold to taxonomies, and people get very upset if they can't tell the duck from the rabbit, you know, you're interested in evolution, this really matters.

And there's a moral tradition that gets very upset if you can't tell the good from the evil. But that holds things back in terms of the imagination. Cameron's Avatar though is a very interesting recognition of that, and the degree to which it keeps the two worlds separate is actually the way the film works, that's its dynamic. So you can't even go from the world of military industrial technology to the world of the ecological forest beings, without changing dimensions. You have to have a complete body and mind change in order to make the transition. You literally become a different person. And eventually the avatars sent from the military industrial world to the innocent world, decide they like the innocent world better. So their minds can't hold in the form that they began in.

FILM EXCERPT

Alan Saunders: Jane Goodall is Adjunct Professor with the Writing and Research Program at the University of Western Sydney.

The Philosopher's Zone this week was produced by Jeanavieve McGregor. The Sound Engineer is Charlie McCune. I'm Alan Saunders and I'll be