This chapter focuses on how the multiplane camera was used in Japan and what it signified to Japanese animators. Some creators attempted to bypass its aesthetics by interrelating mimetic and allusive representation, or motion and emotion, in their storytelling through a synthesis of cinematic techniques derived from live-action film and drawing conventions derived from comics. Anime movement shares some principles with character animation, but it prioritizes the assemblage of different visual properties. It engages viewers through emotional movements, where it draws upon elements other than the visible and mimetically represented physical motion. Emotion-eliciting movements often rely on abstract, exaggerated, and stylized forms, in which the manner of representation itself becomes the center of attention. Using Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba as an example, this chapter demonstrates how the series’ visuality shifts on a spectrum, responding to existing anime norms, film forms, technologies, platforms, funding patterns, and the cross-pollination of practices among creators and audiences that do not necessarily demand the simulation of photorealism.

The character Astro Boy, which was called “child of science” in the 1963 anime series, is related here to Imperial Japan’s wartime policy of science. The term “child of science” was also applied to other characters at the time of the Asia-Pacific War, and intriguingly, the use of it covered not only mechanical but also human children. Seeking to find answers to the question of how such different things could be subsumed under the same term, the focus is on the empire’s policies and discourses of scientific warfare, and how they transformed children’s media of entertainment and education – manga, magazines, toys, and music – and even children’s bodies into weaponry at perceptual and physical levels. The issue of the “weaponization” of human bodies helps to reconsider the military traits and the subhuman qualities of Astro Boy. Extending this to Imperial Japan’s history of child soldiers, and conducting both intratextual and transtextual research of related anime and manga by Osamu Tezuka, this study brings to light the unnarrated life of Tobio, the human original of Astro Boy, as well as the implication of his premature death.