ABSTRACT
This chapter offers an examination after Jean Baudrillard of postwar Japanese animation in terms of the nature, history, and destiny of animation, film, war, and nation. In this speculation on “apocalyptic anime”—that is, anime in the wake of the atomic bomb, and on the animatic thinking of Baudrillard—Akira (Ōtomo Katsuhiro, dir.,1988) is treated as exemplary, not only in its narrative but as its narrative. It not only becomes exemplary of a major genre of anime, it performs that genre of apocalypse, of explosion and implosion, a form of animation film and film animation as warrior in a war between not only anime and American animation but Japan and America, even as film animation and nation animation are inextricably commingled, making it impossible to distinguish one from the other. In other words, extending von Clausewitz’s “war is merely the continuation of policy [politics] by other means,” this chapter argues that film animation is a form of war. Akira puts at stake the possibility of Japan winning this war with the United States by seducing it and its globalizing ambitions through hypersimulation, returning/maintaining Japan’s singularity, its radical foreignness, “Radical Exoticism,” as Baudrillard conceptualizes such exoticism after Victor Segalen.
