Caietele Echinox, vol. 29, 2015: Utopia, Dystopia, Film 156 Luiza-Maria Filimon “Beware the Cosmic String, My Son”: Highjacked Realities and Accidental Utopias in Shinichiro Watanabe’s Space Dandy ABSTRACT Hey, Everett,1 Anime series in the dystopia sci-fi subgenre What am I like in your world? are essentially what Miller Jr. describes as Let me take a peek. “investigations into the nature of human identity and its relation to sociocultural Hey, Everett, forces and structures.” The rarer utopian According to you, there are lots of counterparts tend to fall under Louis Marin’s different worlds suggested interpretation according to which I’m not sure I understand “Utopia, in its ever-changing state, is the symbolic destination of all travel nar- Oh, the dream of a never-ending dream ratives.” One of Watanabe’s recent ani- mated series, Space Dandy is at its core a From X Jigen e Youkoso space odyssey through the multiverse where (“Welcome to the Xth Dimension”) “normal” is the exception. The study ana- performed by Etsuko Yakushimaru lyzes five episodes set in utopian-like places and deconstructs world-building mechanisms, features and functions, while also recon- Introduction sidering the nature and conditions needed for utopias to function as organic but un- Prior to Space Dandy (2014), Shini- hinged realities in a subversion of the chirō Watanabe’s critically acclaimed anime dystopian tropes. series, Cowboy Bebop (1998-1999), was KEYWORDS conceived “not just [as] a space adventure Utopia; Anime; Space Opera; Science- series for adolescent boys but [as] a pro- 2 Fiction; Parallel Universes; Shinichirō gram that would appeal to adults.” Set in Watanabe. the year 2071, on the spaceship Bebop, it “follows the adventures of a group of LUIZA-MARIA FILIMON bounty hunters (two males and two fe- National School of Political Science and males): ex-triad member Spike Spiegel, ex- Public Administration, Bucharest, Romania cop Jet Black, con-artist Faye Valentine, [email protected] and child computer hacker Radical Ed- ward.”3 The “Bebop” in the title, is a Highjacked Realities and Accidental Utopias in Shinichirō Watanabe’s Space Dandy reference to “a modern movement in jazz Its slapstick humor and oc- 157 that started at Minton’s Playhouse in Har- casional raunchiness is lem in 1941. The artists there began a crea- marked by an irreverent self- tive competition in an attempt to play jazz awareness. An A.V. Club review sum- ‘freely’, and this competition resulted in the marizes Space Dandy as follows: development of bebop.”4 With the series’ “creator-of-record [being] ‘Hajime Yatate’ The series premiere of Space Dandy – Sunrise Studio’s well-known house pseu- goes out of it way to announce the donym for a team effort”5 – we can presume show’s anarchic, irreverent tone. The that the series creators were “playing “free- show’s titular, pompadour-sporting hero ly” or experimenting without ‘fear of risky is a freelance hunter for exotic, unreg- things’ in the hope of creating a ‘new istered aliens in some far-flung future; genre’.”6 he travels the galaxy in his broken- The main character of Cowboy Bebop, down starship, the Aloha Oe, with only Spike Spiegel, is in Susan Napier’s view, a similarly broken-down robot and a “literally and symbolically adrift in a useless, feline alien for company. A universe that sustains him physically but pre-credits introduction helpfully ex- offers him no emotional or spiritual nourish- plains that these are the adventures of ment.”7 He is part of a reflexive commen- “Space Dandy and his brave space tary between what Annett regards as “the crew… in space.” The show’s belief affects of cool, detached irony and a poig- that the word “space” is enough to nant longing for connection”8 in a world make anything awesome teeters be- inhabited by a sense of dispossession and tween earnest and ironic, as the over- spiritual homelessness. Foreshadowing a the-top vocal performances and char- new trend in the anime medium during the acter animation are juxtaposed with late 1990s and onwards, Cowboy Bebop was eye-popping cosmic panoramas.11 an exponent of a phenomenon described by Napier as affected by “an increasing disillu- This study examines the theme of uto- sionment with the promise of technology.”9 pia in what can be considered a postmodern This was identified in the “rough, retro look pastiche series, comprised of mash-ups and to [...] technology [featured in the series drawing influence from Western sci-fi which] rather than emphasizing amazing movies like Forbidden Planet (1950) or inventions, concentrates on the anguished Tron (1982)12 and Japanese animation clas- psyches of its vulnerable and memorable sics alike. In order to more aptly contextu- characters.”10 alize the place of Space Dandy in the On the other hand, Space Dandy is at Japanese animated sci-fi genre, the paper first sight, the complete opposite of its pre- first offers an overview of how dystopias decessor. It has shed the grievous, brooding and utopias function in anime, of what they layers and quasi-dropped the postmodern / represent for the East Asian culture while, at millenarian / technology-induced angst. In- same time, running a parallel thread to stead and in spite of its shortcomings, Space Western movies and symbols. One particu- Dandy is a series that embraces the crisis, lar aspect we explore deals with the causes ridicules it and in doing so, opens the door that enabled the emergence of Space to new original creations in a financially- Dandy’s utopian communities / places and pressed industry, catering, like other of its how in spite of the trope subversion at the kindred, to the lowest common denominator. centre of the series, they remain bound to a Luiza-Maria Filimon 158 sum of externalities. Because Nineteen Eighty-Four (as is the case with of their inherent accidental ichi-kyu-hachi-yon / 1Q84) .15 origins, these alien utopias The 1988 animated epic, Akira, di- do not succumb to the classical entrapping rected by Katsuhiro Otomo, explored such of the dystopian hubris as a plot device. themes as “the relationships between hu- Even when in some of these instances, the mans and machines and ultimately depict[ed] conjuncture that allowed them to exist, the potential for human development and disappears – as is the case with the end of evolution when confined by an oppressive sentience in one instance, we find in the police state.”16 Originally a seinen manga,17 sage words of a character that “this is not an developed by Masamune Shirow,18 Ghost in ending, but a new beginning.”13 the Shell achieved international mainstream success when it was made into an anime by Mamoru Oshii.19 A stated source of inspira- Observations on Dystopias and Japanese tion for The Matrix,20 Ghost in the Shell Animations: from the Bomb to the attracted parallels to Donna Haraway’s Automaton theories on the “Cyborg Manifesto”21: “we are all now cyborgs, we need to know how We have been subordinate to our the computer sees, to learn to recognize its limitations until now. The time has gaze and then to imitate it.”22 come to cast aside these bonds and to Haraway’s identified dualisms can be elevate our consciousness to a higher recognized in part or in their entirety in the plane. It is time to become a part of all dystopian anime subgenre: “representation / things. simulation; organic / biotic component; re- Puppet Master, Ghost in the Shell production / replication; scientific manage- (1995) ment in home or factory / global factory (electronic cottage); labor / robotics; public Mainstream movies like The Matrix or private / cyborg citizenship; sex / genetic (1999), The Hunger Games (2012) or In- engineering; mind / artificial intelligence.”23 ception (2010) were inspired by or were The dystopian Akira is according to a similar to Japanese cult films such as Akira commentator cited by William M. Tsutsui, (1988), Ghost in the Shell (1995), Battle an exercise in “post nuclear sublime,” rid- Royale (2000) or Paprika (2006). Earlier, dled with the traditional motifs of urban during the postwar period, Japanese sci-fi nihilism where the cinematic cityscape un- authors from Kōbō Abe, Shinichi Hoshi, ravels into “riots in the streets, a venal Sakyo Komatsu to Kenzaborō Ōe and authoritarian state, millenarian cults, terro- Haruki Murakami, were themselves in- rist movements, biker gangs, and a peculiar fluenced and hence embodied the literary government program for developing psychic “structural compromise” of writing in a mutants.”24 A memento of the present, Akira genre that imported “[c]ontemporary Amer- in Pellitteri’s view: ican SF [...] in part as a result of the Ameri- can military occupation.”14 Murakami’s [...] introduces a narrative dystopia that works, for example, echo to varied degrees goes allegorically over the main phases those of William Gibson’s Johnny Mnemo- of contemporary Japanese history, trans- nic (see Sekai noowari to hādo-boirudo figuring the visual spectacularity into a wandārando / Hard-Boiled Wonderland and metaphor for the implosion / explosion the End of the World) or George Orwell’s of Japanese society, beginning from the Highjacked Realities and Accidental Utopias in Shinichirō Watanabe’s Space Dandy trauma of the bombs up to the current Of familiar entropic re- 159 hyper-industrialization and social decay.25 sults we are reminded of in Fritz Lang’s 1927 epic, Me- Shapiro, on the other hand, while still tropolis, where the robotic mechanical man keeping in line with the “present as origin,” is the logical expression for