Motion in Spatial Frames: Exploring the Elements of Animation Action

The distinctive style with which Japanese animation is rendered is what its audience have come to expect of anime, in terms of look, quality and content. Even when production began incorporating digital methods, anime made with 3D tools are invariably processed to look two-dimensional, and retained their unmistakably flat aesthetics. Being fundamentally technique-driven rather than technology-driven, locomotion and scalar relationships between elements in a moving image sequence are manipulated through compositing rather than composition. A micro-aesthetic analysis on highly dynamic action scenes from contemporaneous supernatural anime series manga adaptations, such as Dandadan and Jujutsu Kaisen, reveal the visual storytelling possibilities afforded by open compositing and limited animation in limited space. Ultimately, the portrayal of space is inextricably bound by the medium’s animetic capacity to induce viewers to haptically experience the effects of motion and movement in the multiplanar image. Finally, the paper reflects how such spatial framings and development of animation techne might enrich interdisciplinary discourse and creative practice.