Channels, Fall 2016

Channels • 2016 • Volume 1 • Number 1 Page 151 Nevertheless, Ishii does not allow his artists the comfort of belonging in the world of popular ideology and fandom. Artists in the film tend instead to have an uneasy or non- traditional relationship to the mainstream culture around them. At the beginning of the film, Yoshiko holds an unusual in-between position in contemporary society. With both her children in school, she hopes to regain her job and her independence as an animator, but she has not yet made the transition to full-time employment. She apparently neglects both the role of a professional artist and the role of a mother as she spends the majority of the film drawing in her kitchen. This position lacks the legitimacy of either a paid occupation of drawing and of the typical tasks of a stay-at-home mother, but it is a necessary area of tension in Yoshiko’s life, and she copes with it as a necessary step toward her artistic goals. Even after she has achieved her goal, her statement to the director who hires her, “With the help of my Master/Grandfather…I was able to get my skills back…I think I can be a mom and an animator” implies both that the period of practice was essential to the achievement of her goals and that the position she has reached, that of a mother and a professional artist, requires an unusual degree of confidence and commitment. Akkira’s lifestyle generates different problems, but he also spends the film coping with tension between his vision of the world and the expectations of contemporary culture. His vision of the beautiful and his sense of the grotesque or absurd seem to impact every aspect of his life. The juxtaposition of his appreciation for the people and objects that surround him against the social expectations implied by his surroundings create the sense of his good-natured eccentricity. He finds enough inspiration in an ordinary bath to compose an ode to hot water and sing it loudly while the rest of the family is at supper. When no one else can be persuaded to help Ikki record his Birthday Song, Akira finds himself practicing a poorly composed choreography routine on a commuter train while the music plays through his headphones. When confronted with questions or crises, he often responds by sounding a tuning fork and holding it to his head, as though trying to tune his mind to the truth with the same tool a musician would use to tune an instrument. Perhaps his penchant for tuning his perception is the clearest metaphor for his life spent in pursuit of a different vision. His eccentricity is an indication that his life contains the same unease and in his case, often ludicrous tension between his own perception of the world and the expectations of his contemporary society. Sometimes the artist’s deviance from socially expected norms can itself be a factor in the creation of the monstrous fantastic within the film. The brief glimpses Ishii offers of Ikki’s studio indicate that his life, more than either of the others’, closely conforms to the stereotype of the anime artist and the otaku . His studio in Tokyo is apparently situated several floors up a modern, high-rise office complex and contains a selection of colorful, modern plastic furniture separated by opulent distances that emphasize the size of the room. He wears an impractical white suit and pastel shirt, along with startlingly large, round plastic eyeglass frames. His unusually smooth, geometric haircut reinforces the idea that Ikki’s concern is less about good taste than about trendiness, and the collection of his own drawings hung on the wall and his tendency to hum his own birthday song hint at his irrepressible narcissism. To complete the picture of fashionable artificiality, a life-sized stuffed dog sits on the sofa. The young assistant’s real dog, by contrast, is not permitted in