As some of you know, I'll be speaking this weekend at an academic conference called School Girls and Mobile Suits, which is largely about anime. I'm going to speak about steampunk, specifically as it relates to anime.
Considering that I haven't spoken about that specific subset of steampunk yet, I think it would benefit me to gather my thoughts in the form of this LJ post, and have people see if what I'm saying makes sense before I spew it out to a bunch of academics who'll tear me to shreds.
So, if you're interested in the intersection of steampunk and anime, read on!
What I did, in preparing for this task, was to go through the Wikipedia page for 'steampunk works' and find which animes fell under the category of 'steampunk' according to the public at large. According to them, I assembled this list:
Nausicaa
Castle in the Sky
Metropolis
Howl’s Moving Castle
Steamboy
Future Boy Conan
Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water
Last Exile
D. Gray Man
Now, I've watched all of those animes except for Future Boy Conan (which I read the Wikipedia page on, to give myself a general idea of what it's about) and I've drawn the following conclusion: The Japanese, at large, have no real emotional connection to steampunk as a genre. To go even further, their use of steampunk fills an almost occidentalist role, rather than the genuine interest that you see in Western medias. I find this rather ironic, considering how rife Orientalism was during the era of steam.
Steamboy, I would say, is the one real exception. That movie provided a real, solid steampunk base and did an excellent job... Unfortunately, it's the exception to the rule.
However, let's look at Howl's Moving Castle as an example. Howl's castle was very steampunk in its design, but unfortunately, that was it. The steampunk was a shallow veneer that was simply a facade designed to cover the real workings of the house, namely magic. Let's look at Metropolis. There were some interesting anachronistic designs, but it was the wrong era to be steampunk. It was based around 1930's-ish designs, which is distinctly after the time from which the aesthetic sense that powers the Western steampunk movement was derived. Castle in the Sky? Also missed the distinctly 'steampunk' boat. Nadia, I felt, was a pretty close miss because first of all, it took place after the steam period and secondly, it was a bit too Japanese. However, it dealt with the technology and such in a fairly responsible, logical manner. I'm going to contrast this with the next, and perhaps most important, of the steampunk animes.
I'm referring to Last Exile, which is an anime that was pretty specifically billed as a steampunk anime. This is an excellent example of my thesis, which is that the Japanese have no real connection to steampunk. First, and most importantly, the majority of the designs from the show were based off of the German interwar period styles which, as you may know, covers a span from about 1918 to 1939 which, again, is well after the end of the normally accepted steampunk period. Second, the entire story takes place in an alternate world which supposedly has nothing to do with Earth (except that it might or might not be in the future of Earth?), but it incorporates elements from multiple cultures and eras throughout Earth's history. Normally I would say that there is no problem with that, but in this case, their inclusion is haphazard and non-sensical. For example, the 'vanships' in the anime are designed after a cross between 1930's-style fighter planes (even going so far as to call aerial maneuvers after real WW1 fighter pilots) and mid-century modern cars. But unfortunately, their technology doesn't mesh with their design. For example, in Western media generally the way that one creates a steampunk world is by saying, "Okay, let's say that in 1862 the British suddenly discovered a limitless power source. What would that world look like, twenty years later?" or, of course, they solve that problem by having the world be normal and having simply one inventory who creates, say, a giant steampunk spider and then asking how that would interact with the world at the time. But in Last Exile, it's all wrong. The people have a form of magnetic propulsion and levitation that operates on entirely different principles than Earth airplanes, so why would their designs mimic ours? Planes and cars were designed the way they were largely because of their methods of propulsion. But in Last Exile, this was seemingly ignored. Airships are designed to mimic seagoing ships, but no reason for that is given. In Western steampunk, airships are more often meant to resemble zeppelins, or if they are made to resemble ships, it's because ships are still the preferred form of transportation and airships have yet to come up with their own designs because they're so new. But in Last Exile, flying is nothing new and has been around for an indeterminate amount of time. So why do the airships still resemble seaships? Unfortunately, the simple answer is that it looks cool.
I apologize for being long-winded, but what I'm getting at is that for the Japanese, steampunk isn't an intellectual exercise, and it isn't something to emotionally connect to. It is purely an aesthetic, and one that they treat the same way that they treat everything else foreign: namely, they change it into something different and make it their own.
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