ment. Performance studies taught us t"acting" is not just something set apart from reality, but a model of and for the procethrough which real identities are constructed. What I suggest here is that we cbegin to think of animation as more than an entertainment medium, as a possimode of performative (real, social) world

One of the reasons that the Japanese male otaku subculture seems so extreme, thclassic example of a "pure" animation culture, has to do, I think with the relative lof integration between emotional work and programming work in Japan. These twkinds of labor are divided along gender lines almost everywhere in the poindustrial world, but in Japan, the role of facilitating communication seems toeven more disproportionately on w

Taiwanese young people, during the course of a conversation, may hold up thfingers of one hand and move their hand in a downward motion beside their facThis gesture imitates the downward lines which are drawn in manga beside a chaacter's face to indicate extreme stress or embarrassment (///), often said to be aabstracted icon of sweat running down - making the gesture an embodied remedtion of what is already a conventionalized icon of embodied affect. The convoluttravels of the pose, from theater to manga and anime, from manga and anime t434 Journal of Linguistic Anthropologyemoticons and cosplay, from emoticons and cospllong and continuous histories in which human tand animation, hav

Taiwanese cosplayers who dress as puppet characters, I found that the vast majorsaw cosplay as reanimating the characters by substituting the human body for twooden one. Their performances consisted mostly of still posing for photographand they did not try to stay in character if a camera was not present. When theperformed skits, they often maintained puppetry's striation of media, lip-synchinand posing to pre-recorded dialogue (often with all the characters voiced, as in tTaiwanese puppetry tradition, by a single p

Susan Napier's ethnography of American manga and anime cosplayers, finstance, reveals that these young people tend to see cosplay as acting out roles,times even using method acting techniques, such as writing backstories for theicharacters, to get into cha

The emoticon is an icon of generic affect, rather than individual identity, andremediates the pose. The conventionalized, held pose is a key part of the structuresuch traditional East Asian performance genres as Peking Opera and kabuki, wherit condenses the character's emotional state and often signals a narrative climConventionalized poses are also a common way that manga and anime characters ainvested with affect. The emoticon images of Wan Wan or Onion Head serve the samfunction, allowing individuals to narrate their own emotional lives through tmedium of animation.

ation of the actor. Texpression, but the cinematof constructing and presenMeadows and others, the avimagined and then construcperformer

s. Both communities, he argues, attracted huge numbers of new "immi-grants" who were trying to live out their fantasies and construct new identities forthemselves, and both were driven by work in the newest medium of mass c

The most visible areas where the social functions of performance have been remedi-ated through animation are probably online communications and the building ofvirtual communities. This includes not only the animated characters through whichpeople interact in online games, but the ubiquitous animated emoticons that createaffect in text messages sent through cellular phones and MSN ne

arate. In the contemporary cinema, forexample, live-action films are full of animated special effects; human embodiment iscritical to the process of motion capture, a key technique in digital animation; thesame stories and characters are transferred constantly between live action and ani-mated fil

- performance involves embodiment, introjection, mimesis, and self-identity; animation involves disembodiment, projection, alterity, and the objectworld, and so on. Even theoretically, these differences are tenuous; in practice, per-formance and animation are even harder to sep

characters is somore open they are to the projthey have comes fro

Character designers I have interviewed in Taiwan see this kind of incompletenessas a crucial aspect of logo characters in particular (as opposed to anime or gamecharacters) - think of the mouthless, nearly blank

something going in the spectator's imagination without finishing the process. At a certainpoint the idea is left open to be completed by the spectator . . . Take a familiar example: someof the puppets have no mouths, yet the spectator has the feeling that at certain appropriatemoments the puppet smiles or gives expression to its sentiments by facial mimic

on how the performer produces meaning - rather than on the inter-pretation of performative acts. One of the characteristics of animation, however, isthat much responsibility for communication is given to the receiver, and that anima-tors and their audiences are aware of this. For this reason, one of the key character-istics of many animated characters is incompletenes

elf. Manning, summarizingrecent work on the semiotics of branding, writes that in some contemporary branddiscourse, "the pervasive associations based on the role brands play in consumers'lives are transformed into actual anthropomorphic characteristics imputed to brandsunderstood as holistic, organic, living, growing entities with which consumers canform actual social relationships direct

Most of the research on the Japanese kawaii (terms of performance. Sharon Kinsella (1995) amance of cute identities among young Japanesedissatisfaction with the disciplinary restricti(especially the role of housewife). Looking at cuthe other hand, may lead us to see cuteness moimplicated in the tr

Otaku and yaoi fans are fetishists to the extent that we all are - in the sense that when wedesire an object, what we desire is something the object fundamentally lacks. But while therest of us are usually unaware of this lack, otaku are conscious of it to some extent. In otherwords, they realize that the object of their desire is nothing more than a fiction. [

Moe-elements are, in a sense, essential to all animation - when the human isdefined in terms of affect, it can only be projected into the material world via con-ventionalized signifiers. A characteristic of animation that comes with the striation ofmedia is the simplification of each medium's sign system in comparison with theorganically integrated sign systems of embodied performance

gital technology. Otaku subcultu"database consumption." For instance, Azuma wTINAMI, "As soon as the characters are created,categorized, and registered to a database" (2009:generate characters who are basical

eanings. Moe can be either an adjective ointense "burning" emotion felt by a fan toward afeeling i

s. The relationshipbetween fan and animated character tends to be read in terms of alterity rather thanaffinity; animated characters are not so much introjected role models as psychicallyprojected objects of desire. The idea of animation fandom as fetishism has beenarticulated most often in recent theorizing of the subculture of young, male Japanesemanga and anime fans, or ota

n. That is, the transitional space of broadcastmedia fandom has been described largely in terms of the introjection of the idealizedother into the se

with high versuthe basic insight that thestriated animation mattergraphic, rather than phanimation practices as miGershon, this volume). TBarthes' self-conscious Orabout the differences betrelate to Ja

n body. In bunraku, bycontrast, the character is composed of separated media - the puppet itself, its manipu-lation by actors visible behind and beside it, the voice of the singer who sits by theAnimation: The New Performance?stage and recites the dialoimposed on t

At the same time, contemporary manga, anime, and logo characters are oftenacknowledged as the creations of collectives, rather than auteurs. The fact that manypeople contribute to a live cinema performance (including the scriptwriter, director,cinematographer, lighting director, etc.) is certainly an aspect of cinema, but one that,under the performance paradigm, received very little attention. In anime and manga,the characters may still be seen as auteur creations (think of Disney and Miyazaki),but fans, and many scholars, often see the sense that these characters have lives oftheir own as arising from their re-creation in numerous media and styles by hun-dreds, thousands of f

ns. Of course, media fans were writing their own stories andmaking artwork based on their favorite characters back in the days of the mimeo-graph, but the Internet has increased the range of media through which fans recreatethe characters and intensified the replication of images and narratives. Animatedcharacters "belong" to fans in a different way than embodied human stars likeMarilyn Monroe or Mick Jagger. And in the age of what Henry Jenkins (2005) calls"convergence culture," even characters originally embodied by human actors arebecoming like animated characters in this sense of being collective

ce. Thinking of online role-playing as animating,rather than performing, might help us to localize these experiences in place and time.We might ask, for instance, whether young people who grew up doing much of theircommunication through MSN and cellphone texting, or who grew up in societiessuch as Indonesia where master puppeteers are powerful social and religious figures,experience having multiple online personae in the sam

On the one hand, many analyses of the experience of working on computers,especially of participating in virtual communities, note that playing multiple roles isa very common experience. In discussions of American online communities, the tropeof "multiple personalities" or "split personalities" is often used to describe the effectof working in several windows, and creating a different persona in each one, at thesame time - what Kate Bornstein and Caitlin Sullivan call "splattering" identity(Bornstein 1998:212-

ap, a noteddifference between them is the ratio of creator (s) to character(s) (Kaplin 2001). Inperformance, whether it be theatrical performance, the performance of ritual, or theperformance of self in everyday life, one body can only inhabit one role at a time.There are forms of puppetry in which one puppeteer voices and manipulates onecharacter, but these are rare. More usual are forms like wayang kulit, in which onepuppeteer moves and voices all of the characters, or bunraku, in which several peopleare responsible for creating a single char

Judith Butler posits that such reflexivity actually exposes theontological sameness of the two - that the actor's "real" social self is as much an effectof embodied, mimetic performance as is the onstage chara

nd anwith cinema and televisiontoward increasing verisimin animated cinema andimages (more detailed texprogrammers and designeEntertainment

l of these apas possible, as the projectwill, personality, and so othrough acts of creation,expression, requires a medanimation - in art, in relan

Performance (e.g., playing cops and robbers, dressing up) and animation (e.g., playwith dolls, stuffed toys, Matchbox cars, etc.) are probably both universal forms ofchildren's play. Both forms of play exist in the space where "me" and "not me" m

nts. In Butler's model, individu-als throughout their lives continually misrecognize external images as idealizedselves and embody gender and other roles through continual acts of mimesis whichbecome habitual, although, like the infant's uncoordinated movements, their perfor-mances always fail to completely reconstruct the imaginary i

Ur-cultural animation is the investment of icons, effigies, talis-mans, and natural objects with divine power, what Victoria Nelson refers to as"practices of 'en-souling' matter" (2001:30). Within anthropology, the most wellarticulated theory of animation is probably Alfred Gell's (1998) analysis of how sacredobjects are invested with their own agency - both through formal qualities thatabstractly represent cultural concepts of personhood and through human interactionwith them

stance, as well as all forms opuppetry - marionettes, glove puppets, rod puppets, shadow puppets, and so onPuppeteers and puppetry studies define animation in opposition to live theater, by thpresence of "performing objects/' including not only puppets, but masks andautomata (Proschan 1983). In sum, the arts (including media studies) definition ofanimation focuses on techne, on a range of technologies and skills that are used tocreate the "illusion of life."

Here, the history of animation is traced throughMuybridge's photography, and Alan Cholodenkoment, based on this technological history, that all cfilm itself is a technology whose primary effecthrough the rapid s

. The most common contemporary use of the termanimation (or "anime") refers to a genre of film or video, and most academic theoring of animation has taken place within film and media studies. Animation in thisense is defined in opposition to "live action" cinema or television and includes eelanimation and computer-generated animation (both 2D and 3D, both in film agames), as well as a wide variety

gy. All of these approaches retain something of thetymological sense of animation as "breathing life into" a thing, but each defines"life" in a slightly different w

In sum, the model of pertech

use Butlerhigh degree of overlap beQueer identity political mwas take

t surprisingthat these theories tended to define performance in terms of aspects of theater thatcame to the fore in discussions of its difference from television - the use of space,interactive communication, the materiality of the actor's body, the visible gapbetween actor and role, scriptedness versus improvisation, social reproduction versussocial transformation

If television's remediation of theater made drama ubiquitous, its reframing alsobrought a new reflexivity to theater itself. Television's remediation of theater in aparticular "name of the real" - its naturalization of naturalism - provoked many inthe avant-garde to relocate the real of the theater in its liveness, in precisely what waslost in the transposition to television. The

emediation" in North America and Britain. Bolter and Grusin seeremediation as "the representation of one medium in another" (1999:45), whennew technology "appropriates the techniques, forms, and social significanceother media and attempts to rival or refashion them in the name of

. I do not propose that animation should replaceperformance any more than performance replaced discipline. Rather, like disciplineand performance, performance and animation intersect and complement each oth

. I would suggest that we are already seeing the emergence of anima-tion as an alternative model of and for human action in the world, one that, likeperformance and discipline, is compelling in every sense of the wo

formedstarted doing fieldwork wseries in 2002, 1 kept runnihelp. For instance, I foundand explanations from opget into characte

nd of aperformance, in other womated characters and the pof the uncanny "illusionparticular blend of

acts of alterity." Wiconcept of performance tanimation as a k

ay, I argue that animation has thesame potential as a structuring trope in the age of digital media and the rise of thecreative industries that performance had in the age of broadcast media and the rise ofthe service indust

The proliferation of animation and animated characters is not simply an effect orsymptom of the intersection of computer technology and structural transformationsin global capitalis