Steinberg, Marc. Anime's Media Mix: Franchising Toys and Characters in Japan.

Li, Hongmei

Steinberg, Marc. Anime's Media Mix: Franchising Toys and Characters in Japan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. 314 pp. Paperback. ISBN 978-0-8166-7550-0. $25.00.

The popular Japanese term "media mix," which describes what theorists in North America call "media convergence," came into popular use in the 1980s and reached its peak in the 1990s and 2000s. The phrase refers to "the cross-media serialization and circulation of entertainment franchises" and the reproduction of content across different media forms, including (but not limited to) television, radio, book, games, and toys (viii). As with the study of media convergence in the West, theorists assume that the rise of the media mix phenomenon goes hand-in-hand with the rise of the term. Marc Steinberg's book challenges this assumption by tracing the origin of the media mix farther back, to 1963, when Japan witnessed the emergence of the anime system in postwar visual culture. "Anime" (an abbreviated Japanese pronunciation of "animation") refers specifically to Japanese hand-drawn or computer-generated animated productions, and Steinberg, focusing on both history and theory of anime, accordingly divides his book into two sections. Part I, composed of three chapters, examines the extremely popular and influential Tetsuwan Atomu television series in relation to the emergence of anime and the transmedia system. The two chapters comprising Part II examine the synergy between media commodities and the consumption of character goods by considering the important role played by Kadokawa Shoten, a Japanese publishing house that contributed greatly to the media mix.

Although animated media had existed before the 1960s, it was the production of the television series Tetsuwan Atomu (Astro Boy, 1963-1966), according to Steinberg, that marked a "tipping point" (ix) in the history of the media mix in Japan. A key feature of the television series--one that did not occur with the earlier manga, or comic-book version, of Astro Boy in the 1950s--was the built-in character merchandizing and the consequent integration of the character images into the Japanese consumers' lives. Steinberg argues that, "the emergence of anime marks ... a break of sorts with the forms of animation and media systems that came before it, and an event that made an incredible mark on the Japanese media ecology henceforth" (xiii). Steinberg stresses the discontinuity between the anime of the 1960s and the previous era. He emphasizes the crossover of different media and commodity forms and how anime has played an important role in forging the interconnectivity between media content and advertising, media characters and commodities, and production and consumption. Steinberg situates the analysis of anime in the broader economic, political, and cultural context in postwar Japan and argues that anime is emblematic of Japan's transformation into a post-Fordist economy.

Steinberg's first chapter, "Limiting Movement, Inventing Anime," discusses the technical, aesthetic, and historical reasons for the development of limited animation and "the dynamically immobile image," an essential element for the emergence of the anime system, in relation to two popular media in Japan: manga (comics) and kamishibai ("paper drama"), a form of storytelling using storyboards (20). Manga was extremely popular among children in postwar Japan, and narrative comic strips appeared in newspapers and magazines, becoming an essential part of the Japanese media culture. Kamishibai--a popular street entertainment form for children in the 1930s, which had its second and final boom in postwar Japan--prepared viewers to accept anime as a form of limited animation and helped them to understand the dynamic relationship between motion and stillness. Both media forms, Steinberg explains, prepared Japanese children in particular and consumers in general to accept "limited animation," a key feature of Japanese anime requiring fewer drawings while lengthening the on-screen duration of each drawing (5). This method was adopted largely to meet the challenges of limited staff, resources, and time; full animation, on the other hand, demands more drawings, and is thus considerably more expensive to produce. In this chapter, Steinberg explains how emotional investment can be possible in a medium that does away with the smooth, realistic movement of both cinema and full animation, and he suggests that the motion-stillness rhythm of Tetsuwan Atomu's limited animation inspired a movement of commodities.

Steinberg elaborates on this suggestion in his expansive second chapter, "Candies, Premiums, and Character Merchandising: The Meiji-Atomu Marketing Campaign," which provides a historical analysis of the ways in which media connectivity was essential for the commodification of anime by examining the practice of character merchandising in the eleventh episode of the Tetsuwan Atomu anime "The Time Machine." Character merchandizing broadly refers to "the licensing, production, marketing, and consumption of goods and media based around the image of a character" (41). Steinberg points out that the production of desire was essential for transmedia consumption and the crossover between media image and consumer products. He analyses how the marketing campaign that used stickers of Atomu and his friends as "freebie" buying incentives for the Meiji Marble Chocolates created a sticker boom in Japan, which in turn popularized Atomu in anime. Here Steinberg advances three arguments: first, the anime system and character merchandizing are inherently related in Japan; second, the media character "as a technology of attraction and diffusion" has to be understood in its material and historical context; and lastly, the theorization of "the character as a technology of connection" necessarily creates media synergy (45).

In his third chapter, "Material Communication and the Mass Media Toy," Steinberg discusses the significant relationship between material consumption and the mass media toy by examining how commercial stickers and badges comprise a new medium that has helped to create the convergence of media as objects and objects as media. Calling the outcome "media-commodities," Steinberg points out the dual process of the transformation of images and things in such a way that "both are brought into the same communication network" (89). For example, when a media character is used to promote a product, the image is materialized, which further promotes the media character, leading to the creation of the communicative ecology that consists of both the ubiquitous media image and consumer products associated with the image.

In Part II, Steinberg analyzes the historical significance of Kadokawa Shoten (Kadokawa Books), a Japanese publishing house that since the 1970s has expanded into film productions and other media businesses. He uses Kadokawa Shoten as a relatively recent example to understand some of the changes in media mix from anime-centered practices to a broader range of activities. This section also discusses this media conglomerate's association with the rise of the term "media mix." Chapter 4, "Media Mixes, Media Transformations," thus examines how Kadokawa Shoten transposed "the methods of media connectivity practiced by television anime to the realms of film and the novel" and became a key player in contemporary media mix practice (135-36). Kadokawa was even associated with the creation of the term "media mix," which was at first simply a marketing strategy that used films to promote novels, novels to promote films, and films' theme songs on radio to promote records, films, and books. Steinberg argues that such media connectivity reflects a societal transformation from standardized mass production and mass consumption--a Fordist socio-economic culture--to a society that stresses fragmentation, experience, flexibility, fluidity, portability, and heterogeneity.

In his final chapter, "Character, World, Consumption," Steinberg uses the Kadokawa Media Office, a small company within Kadokawa Books, as a starting point for understanding the emerging media mix practices, especially in terms of the fans' participatory role in creating the narrative when they consume media and products. Steinberg suggests that the new practices symbolize the general convergence of production and consumption we now witness as well as a partial return to the anime-centric media mix. Steinberg also attempts to establish a more general theory about media character in the larger context of the transformation of late capitalism. He concludes by coming full circle, stressing the importance of Tetsuwan Atomu as a key event in the establishment of the Japanese media mix.

Overall, the book presents an accessible argument about the emergence of the media convergence and how marketing and advertising played an essential role in creating the media mix in Japan. Whereas Henry Jenkins's seminal 2006 book Convergence Culture views media convergence as occurring in the minds of consumers, Marc Steinberg largely focuses on the production side even while occasionally discussing fans' participation. Scholars interested in Japanese anime, children's literature and Japanese media history will find this book a valuable addition to current scholarship on these topics.