Newtypes

This dissertation examines how the integration of digital technologies into the production, conceptualization, aesthetic forms, distribution, and reception of Japanese animation, or ‘anime,’ has greatly accelerated the medium’s transformation in ways relevant not just for studies of anime and animation, but with consequences and implications for how we theorize ‘cinema’ more broadly in the digital age. It mainly trains its focus on the 21st century, with excursions to the past to better understand the present, to ask how the ‘language’ of anime has evolved as a result of the arrival and integration of digital technology into existing formal and aesthetic systems developed over the second half of the 20th century. Where Hollywood largely abandoned traditional hand-drawn planar animation in the early 2000s, Japanese animation has never made a full-scale shift to 3D CGI, but instead employed digital technology in ways that are additive and transformative. Rather than erasing and replacing existing forms, techniques, styles, and codes, the innovations of digital technology in anime have added to, complicated, and expanded this repertoire, expanding the formal language of anime in ways that have made it increasingly unique among global visual mass media.