Fantasies of Asians in Animation
Fig. 1 - Willie Ito accepting his Winsor McCay Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2021 Annie Awards (screenshot published on the Nichi Bei website)
What a delight to participate in the Society of Animation Studies annual conference: “Animate Energies,” hosted this past June out of the University of Tulane by Eric Herhuth. It was sad to not see my SAS friends in person, but on the other hand its remote (and free!) nature likely facilitated participation by those unable to afford the expense or time to travel to an international event. The event moreover seemed to indicate the increasing diversity within the field of animation studies, and as the curator of this month’s “Fantasies of Asians in Animation”, I was especially happy to see numerous Asian faces and names. Despite there being so much more to be addressed, the roundtable on decolonizing animation research and pedagogy also provided a helpful introduction to the value of incorporating Anti-Racism in our work—a practice that Fantasy/Animation continues to promote through postings like the ones offered this month. Yet before introducing its next three contributions, I will interweave a review of the “Animate Energies” keynote by the legendary Japanese American animator Willie Ito (Fig. 1) with some lowlights (anti-Asian animations and wartime internments) and highlights (Asian Canadian animators) from Asian North American animation history.
Bringing BIPOC, queer, and disabled animators (and of course women) into a broader consciousness helps audiences and would-be creators look past tired tropes and can fuel imagination, ambition, and awareness. Being unaware of either Ito or his mentor Iwao Takamoto, it therefore thrilled me to learn of two AAPI filmmakers with long and successful careers that date from the Golden Age of Hollywood animation. As one “Animate Energies” attendee noted, Ito and Takamoto entered an industry that only years before produced animated Chinese minstrel shows such as Laundry Blues (John Foster and Mannie Davis, 1930) and propaganda like Japoteurs (Seymour Kneitel, 1942) that helped justify of the wartime arrests and imprisonments of Japanese Americans (including Ito and Takamoto). According to Ito, working among those who likely helped make such fare seems to have had little negative impact on his animation career. While talent, effort, and mentorship seem key to his success, working for larger studios on commercial animation feature films and television series would have limited his and Takamoto’s ability to tell more personal stories. [1]
Fig. 2 - A still from Minoru: Memory of Exile (Michael Fukushima, 1992).
On the other hand, some of my fellow Asian Canadians use short film formats and fantasy animation to communicate very real experiences and emotions. Examples they share include the break-up of a Canadian Asian couple in Requiem for Romance (Jonathan Ng, 2012), a Chinese mother in Toronto struggling to accept her son’s independence in Bao (Domee Shi, 2018) and the conflicted feelings of a child towards her working class Japanese immigrant father In the Shadow of the Pines (Anne Koizumi, 2020). Although the last, most recent film is classified as a documentary, its director Koizumi animates dreamlike elements to express shame and subsequent regret. In terms of subject matter it bears a kind of inverse relation to earlier documentary Minoru: Memory of Exile (Michael Fukushima, 1992), which employed animation to imagine the childhood experience of postwar repatriation to Japan of the director’s father (Fig. 2).
Although deeply personal, the specificities of the narratives in such films help make their subject matter accessible no matter the backgrounds of their audiences. By humanizing their subjects and exploring lesser-known histories, they moreover challenge the model minority stereotypes of easy success and near-Whiteness supposedly enjoyed by Canadians of East Asian descent. That said, it is still worth noting that Minoru’s director Michael Fukushima, now recently retired from the National Film Board of Canada, has acted as a driving force in Canadian animation for decades – not only as an acclaimed filmmaker and sometime instructor, but also as a producer and executive producer who has mentored and advocated for countless animators (including yours truly).
Continuing the Canadian connection and bringing this editorial full circle, Willie Ito is working with director Tony Tarantini and Sheridan College to produce an animation based on Hello Maggie. Written by Shigeru Yabu and illustrated by Ito, the 2007 book recounts the history of Japanese Americans during World War II, and so will make an interesting counterpart to Fukushima’s film. Arrested and detained after a sweeping identification as “enemy aliens” that followed the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor but which was grounded in pre-existing anti-Asian sentiments, most Japanese Americans and Japanese Canadians refer to their histories as being interned in World War II internment camps. Yet Ito eschews what he calls “soft sell” terminology and instead describes his early childhood as being “incarcerated” in “concentration camps“– driving his point home by recounting that some of his fellow prisoners feared eventual execution. Japanese Canadians were forcibly moved to remote ghost towns and labour camps following weeks or months of detention in the horse stables of Hastings Park in Vancouver, instead of being surrounded by armed guards or barbed wire like their American counterparts. Moreover, postwar repatriation and forced relocation imperilled community life and accelerated assimilation in ways akin to cultural genocide.[2] These government-sanctioned acts of racism led to intergenerational trauma for many North Americans of Japanese descent, but also to histories of allyship. Former internees such as Yuri Kochiyama became important Civil Rights activists, and the formation of the Canadian Race Relations Foundation was a direct result of the 1980s Japanese Canadian Redress movement and the reparations it effected.
As his keynote was titled “Animation is Colorful and Colorblind,” Ito nevertheless surprised me in being so forthright in discussing anti-Asian racism. Alongside recounting his wartime experience, he condemned the recent series of assaults on AAPI seniors and the racist coronavirus rhetoric by what he referred to as the “so-called president 45”—occurrences that, alongside the Atlanta spa shootings this past March, helped inspire this month’s CFP. Racial colourblindness or colourblind racism is broadly considered counterproductive to addressing systemic racism because it places racism in the past and ignores ongoing effects and persistent practices (Wingfield). While Ito may mean to celebrate the diversity and privileging of talent and work within animation as a kind of antidote or alternative, I wonder if given what we now know about histories of minstrelsy and brown voice in animation, the referring to the field as colourblind should also be construed as a critique or as a fantasy? There is little doubt that animation and its study offers plenty of space for diverse voices and ideas, and its opening is evidenced by numerous contributions to Fantasy/Animation and to our field in general. I am grateful to Prakash Krishnan, Patricia Petit Liang, YuJin Wang and Grace Han for answering this month’s call for submissions. How wonderful that these scholars take vastly different approaches and how lovely that concepts of collaboration can be detected throughout their weekly offerings.
**Article published: August 6, 2021**
Notes
[1] Takamoto and Ito were among the forces behind the Hanna-Barbera television series Hong Kong Phooey (1974-1976), which has ironically been criticized for racism (Complex.com). However with the title character being voiced by Black actor Scatman Crothers, a more nuanced critique could read the cartoon dog as a celebration or a parody of the 1970s enthusiasm for Asian martial arts by Black Americans, with the starring turn of NBA superstar Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in Bruce Lee’s Enter the Dragon (Robert Crouse, 1973) being just one example.
[2] My grandmother and mother were sent to Bay Farm in the interior of British Columbia and for a time were separated from my grandfather who was sent to a lumber camp. Their business and downtown Vancouver property was sold by the Canadian government to pay for their detainment and relocation to rural Ontario where they were placed into domestic service. More information about the history of the Japanese Canadians and Redress can be found on the NAJC website. CBC’s Secret Life of Canada podcast discusses the conditions at the Hastings Park detention centre, which surprised my own family because my grandmother would never talk about the troubling details of that period.
References
Complex.com. 2013. “The most racist television shows of all time.” Available at https://www.complex.com/pop-culture/2013/06/most-racist-tv-shows/hong-kong-phooey.
Ito, Willie. 2021. “Animation is Colorful and Colorblind”, Society of Animation Studies Animate Energies conference, Tulane University, June 16, 2021.
National Association of Japanese Canadians. Website available at http://najc.ca/.
The Secret Life of Cana CBC podcast. 2020. “Why aren’t there more Japantowns in Canada?” June 13, 2020, available at https://www.cbc.ca/radio/secretlifeofcanada/why-aren-t-there-more-japantowns-in-canada-1.5567426.
Wingfield, Adia Harvey. 2015. “Color Blindness Is Counterproductive,” The Atlantic, September 13, 2015, available at https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/09/color-blindness-is-counterproductive/405037/.
Biography
Dr. Alison Reiko Loader teaches at Concordia University and Dawson College in Montreal. Her research and teaching specialties include critical visuality, animation history, and early optical media. However, given the relative success of her first film Showa Shinzan (2002) and her first conference paper “We’re Asian, More Expected of Us!” initially published in 2011 by the Animation Studies Online Journal, she wonders if she should be doing more Asian-themed research and a little less puttering about.