Proto Anime Cut

Proto Anime Cut is the first exhibition and the first publication outside Japan that presents these works as what they are: testimonies to a kind of individual and highly inspirational artistic practice on the border of film, visual art and pop culture.

In deed, it is a whole new sensation to have the sketches of Ghost in the Shell and Rebuild of Evangelion right there, in front of my nose. It gives me that profound, inside vision I've been craving for so long ago. It even gives me a bit of the sensation Walter Benjamin called aura, the mere mystification of metonymy.

As for publications, I must point out that I am only the most humble and unnoticed of many western academics that have been writing seriously about the matters for a couple of years now (Vanina Papalini, Thomas Lamarre). As for exhibitions, it is also notorious how this brings anime once more closer to people who in other contexts would discard it as just weird cartoons. The group that went round with the guide was amazingly diverse, I might have been the geekiest, another coupled seemed to also know about the matter, but there were parents with children, intellectual snobs, random curious girls and old people as well, considering the whole matter very seriously.

The axis of the exposition actually seems to be Takashi Watabe, a conceptual designer who developed the cyborgs for the original Ghost in the Shell movie and all of its sequels, and also the man behind the more complex angels and superstructures in Rebuild of Evangelion and the movie version of Tezuka's Metropolis. Designs part organic and cybernetic, part geometric but never stable, always part of a sequence, a process of transformation with the pointless logic that it is to be playful. Another work of him, director Mamoru Oshii and more of the staff of GitS is actually the old Patlabor movie, which this far had not caught my attention for its simple plot concept, but with these references may be worth rewatching.

Another surprising personality in the exhibition is Haruhiko Higami. Not an animator, in fact a man who doesn't draw, but takes pictures. As a photographer, Haruhiko does location hunting, explores real spaces that, of course, won't appear as such in the anime, but are an important basis for the final result. Hideaki Anno and Hiromasa Ogura also take lots of pictures, and part of their archive was also in the exhibition. Part of Anno's was even in the original Evangelion. I missed it in the Rebuild.

Hiromasa Ogura, by the way, is a background artist for Ghost in the Shell. I could sense the texture of the various layers used in the main scenes of the movie. The director, Oshii, precisely sets strong emphasis on background as a key element in anime movies. It is what makes out a situation, an atmosphere, a world.

The weirdest thing, however, was to see a figure of Rei Ayanami in a glass cabinet. No particular figure of Rei, just a mass production PVC figure as I see hundreds of them at each anime convention. The fact that Rei is a gorgeous work of art is out of the question, but displaying a figure in that way can't but feel weird when anyone can buy one exactly like it on e-bay (if I had the money, I would). Museums tend to put things out of context, and maybe that's what this whole situation is about. Does it lose meaning by losing contact with the otaku? Does it gain any sensible meaning by being there? Does it become anymore art by being behind a glass? It's been a couple of decades since artists have been putting art on the street and literal crap into the museum, in an attempt to destroy an institution which only becomes more absurd over time, but does not lose any authority. And still I feel I have been blessed to be able to see this exhibition. All I'm doing now is opening questions, I hope diverse answers form an interesting discussion.

Wenn jemand Lust hat, es selber zu erleben, die Ausstellung steht im Dortmunder U bis zum 9.10. Eintritt ist 5€ Erwachsene und 3€ Studenten (dann bin ich also nicht erwachsen).