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Paper short abstract

This paper analyzes the Trace Machine technology that reshaped Japanese animation production between the 1960s to the ‘90s. By effecting workflows, labour hierarchies, and drawing practices, this invention contributed to the establishment of stylistic conventions and production culture within anime.

Paper long abstract

The invention and widespread adoption of the Trace Machine in Japan fundamentally transformed both the stylistic and production cultures of Japanese animation from the early 1960s through the 1990s. Comparable to the introduction of Xerox-based copying processes in the United States, the Trace Machine constituted a significant technological shift that reconfigured animation workflows, labour organization, and visual style within the Japanese animation industry. Analyzing this earlier period of technological change offers a historically grounded perspective on how Japanese animation studios negotiated copying technologies and integrated them into production workflows.

Drawing on Renato Barilli’s theory of Technomorphism, which posits that artistic style materializes the logic of contemporary technologies (2012: 20), this study demonstrates how the material constraints and affordances of the Trace Machine became embedded in anime style and studio practices. As a Japanese counterpart to American Xerox-based animation copying technologies, the Trace Machine significantly altered the process of transferring drawings onto cels, increasing production speed, reducing costs, and reshaping animation style. For instance, during the production of Star of the Giants (1968), animators created darker, more consistent lines to ensure reliable cel transfer. This technical application contributed to the normalization of black linework, a visual feature now recognized in anime.

The adoption of the Trace Machine coincided with broader changes in studio organization and labour structures. Production workflows developed in the 1960s reinforced hierarchical divisions within studios, particularly in departments such as shiage, responsible for finishing. These tasks were increasingly outsourced to overseas contractors and assigned to part-time workers, illustrating how copying technology facilitated both industrial expansion and labour stratification (Lewis, 2018).

Drawing on archival research and qualitative interviews with industry practitioners and researchers, this paper reconstructs the role of the Trace Machine as a technology that reshaped production timelines, labour relations, and the stylization of anime. By foregrounding copying technology as a historical insight, the study demonstrates how technological change is contested, adapted, and ultimately aestheticized within Japanese creative industries. This historical perspective remains relevant to contemporary discussions of technological disruption, including debates concerning artificial intelligence in the anime industry.

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This paper examines the videotape segments in Yui Kiyohara’s Remembering Every Night (2022) in relation to a global trend of videonostalgia and the film’s theme of memory, emphasising the role played by home video in the depiction of personal history within 21st century Japanese narrative cinema

Paper long abstract

Much like how vinyl records have come back into fashion, many filmmakers (see Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun) have been returning to the medium of video, often using it to talk about themes of memory and identity. In line with this nostalgic reappraisal of obsolete media, one scene in Yui Kiyohara’s Remembering Every Night (2022) features two characters watching a series of 90s home videos, as they are being converted from their original analogue tapes. Replicating a home movie gaze, these could-be family archives depict childhood birthdays, walks in the park, and other universal life experiences. Rather than subscribing to a popular, found footage tradition that uses video as mere documentary matter, Kiyohara weaves these tapes into a fiction narrative focusing on traces and the tension between “History” and “small histories”.

Drawing on Ina Blom’s definition of video as a “memory technology” (Blom, 2016) and Catherine Russell’s emphasis on the relationship between analogue video and autoethnography (Russell, 1999), this paper looks at the intrinsic relationship between memory, personal history and the physical medium of the video cassette as is speculated by Remembering Every Night. Linking the film’s interest in archaeology and historical artefacts to Laura U. Marks’ framework of “haptic visuality” (Marks, 1999) and Russell’s concept of “archiveology” (Russell, 2018), I look at how Kiyohara treats these tapes as physical artefacts capable of recording traces and goes beyond an "archival effect".

By examining the content of these tapes and their textual likeness to amateur media and using Shunji Iwai’s All About Lily Chou-Chou (2001) as a point of reference, I aim to situate Kiyohara’s film within a tradition of 21st Century Japanese cinema that relies on home video as a generational marker and a mediator of direct and personal experience. Given the centrality of films like Ringu (1998) within the discourse on videotape and Japanese cinema, this paper also aims to shift that focus from a territory of genre filmmaking and technological anxiety to one of intimacy, domesticity and contemporary identity.

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Paper short abstract

This paper uses media archaeology to reconstruct a fragmentary history of 'New Philippines News,' a Japanese newsreel series in wartime Philippines (1943–1945). Drawing on surviving reels and paratexts, it examines the series as imperial propaganda with subtle anti-Japanese narratives.

Paper long abstract

During the Japanese occupation of the Philippines (1942–1945), newsreels or news films (nyūsu eiga / ニュース映画) were principal forms of film propaganda. Designed not only to provide war updates but also to influence occupied populations, these films promoted images of Japanese life, military power, and imperial ideology. Newsreel series such as ‘Daitoa News’ and ‘Nippon News’ were strategically circulated in the Philippines, projecting narratives of anti-American sentiment, Japanese culture and military campaigns, and Filipino–Japanese collaboration. One year into the occupation, a local newsreel series titled ‘New Philippines News’ was produced, reportedly made from a Filipino point of view with Filipinos involved in the production. Screened until 1945, the series reported news in English for Filipino audiences, covering developments in Japan and other occupied territories while emphasizing everyday wartime normalcy and collaboration under Japanese rule. Many copies of ‘New Philippines News’ were destroyed during the Japanese retreat in 1945, rendering the series fragmentary and difficult to study. In addition, Japanese wartime newsreels, particularly those produced and circulated in Southeast Asia, remain understudied, further compounded by issues of media obsolescence and archival loss. Addressing this gap, the current study constructs a fragmentary film history of ‘New Philippines News’ through a media archaeological approach, or the study of historical media through surviving fragments, material remains, and paratextual traces. Drawing on ‘New Philippines News’ remnants, including extant digitized reels, an American-seized and reedited version, and paratextual materials such as advertisements and posters, the study examines how the newsreel series functioned during the Japanese occupation of the Philippines and highlights its promiscuity, revealing how it operated as Japanese propaganda while simultaneously carrying subtle anti-Japanese narratives. In doing so, the study foregrounds the use of newsreels in studying Japanese history in wartime Philippines through media archaeology, contributing to the wider scholarship on Japan’s historical wartime presence in Southeast Asia.