KRAZY! Times At The Vancouver Art Gallery
Time and again here I mention how wonderful of a city Vancouver, BC is for otaku. Anime and speciality shops operate all over the place, high quality (and low-cost) Japanese food is everywhere, and several large video game developers do their work here.
At present, the Vancouver Art Gallery is also home to “Krazy! The Delirious World Of Anime + Comics + Video Games + Art”, a neat little exhibit showcasing the history of these relatively new additions to modern culture.
Krazy! The Delirious World Of Anime + Comics + Video Games + Art is the first exhibition of its kind, a groundbreaking project that offers unique and dynamic insight into the world of comics, animated cartoons, anime, manga, graphic novels, computer/video games and visual art. Spanning a century of artmaking, the works in this exhibition reveal an extraordinary history of production, one that is poised to redefine the scope of visual culture in the 21st century.
(Taken from the Vancouver Art Gallery website)
So last Tuesday on the 3rd of June, Adam and I got a chance to check this exhibit out.
The Exhibition
The first section one generally enters first is dedicated to early western comic strips, especially the kinds you would have seen in Newspapers. I was, of course, unfamiliar with the majority of these works on display behind glass bubbles embedded in the walls (an unfamiliarity that would follow me throughout much of the exhibition). The pieces in the initial comics section were very simple, sketchy, and without colour; it seemed as fitting of a start as any.
The next section was dedicated to cartoons and animation. Along with animation cells and clay character maquettes with written descriptions along the walls, the section also had video monitors playing short clips from movies like Dumbo (specifically, the “Pink Elephants on Parade” sequence that weirded the heck out of me as a kid) or Over the Hedge (to represent 3D animation). Again, you had a strong sense that for the most part that a lot of the displayed pieces were of far earlier animation than not, and again I found myself very unfamiliar with many works – though really, getting new exposure to these things isn’t such a bad thing.
The exhibit after that was for graphic novels. There were two main rooms here: the first was a long room that ran from the entrance to the section to the end with a long set of shelves down the middle sporting different graphic novels; the second was a different room with displays for various graphic novels including MAUS and the Canadian-made Louis Riel graphic novel (a book I felt I needed to explain to Adam specifically).
Manga came next, and Adam and I were getting excited. Once again, we found ourselves in complete unfamiliarity. Of the several small rooms, the first two were completely dedicated to Stop!! Hibari-kun from the early ‘80s. Other sections included older Japanese artwork (the kind of stuff I want to call “proto-manga”) and even a full section dedicated to Afro Samurai fitted with manga pages and character maquettes as well as a video monitor playing a sequence from the OVA anime starring Samuel L. Jackson – if anyone’s wondering, the anime version of Afro Samurai has a very different look from the original manga version created by Takashi Okazaki. While fully appreciating a great looking Afro Samurai exhibit, you definitely find it hard to wonder exactly how the Vancouver Art Gallery chose the works that they did. But more on that in a moment… the final section on the first floor had what I believe was the true meat of the exhibit: anime.
The anime section introduction started off by summarizing the works and artists we could expect to see once inside; a projector played a clip from Macross on the wall next to the introduction. To accommodate the many larger projection displays on the walls, the anime section was lit darker than the rest of the exhibit. Once inside this section of the, though, you finally had an understanding of where the curators wanted to go with their exhibition…
It started off with Macross; to a room to the left there was Akira; a further annex had a monitor showing Paprika. This anime section was designed around – and I say this with all the respect in the world – “artsy” anime. A lot of it also had a feeling like these were the works that originally came to North America as those word-of-mouth VHS fansubs. True, there was an offshoot area dedicated to Yoko Kanno, but throughout the rest of the section I did not see as much of a Dragon Ball character, a Gundam mecha, or even an Astro Boy! Whether you consider them good or bad, it really is hard to ignore the cultural significance these sorts of works have had on the anime and manga scene. So at least at this point, the intention of the exhibition seemed to be one to show off works that were less mainstream.
Which is, of course, why when we headed upstairs into the video game section we saw three television monitors playing game demos from the various Grand Theft Auto games. Cultural significance? Definitely, but still, it just felt like overdoing a point (especially when considering that these particular monitors did not have a whole lot of written description plaques next to them). On the other side of the monitors were some other games – worth mentioning were the two TVs actually hooked up to actual games so people could play either Super Mario World or The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. A different monitor demoed the first of Sid Meier’s Civilization games; another showed the upcoming Spore – an addition that made sense considering that Will Wright, designer of Spore (and the “Sim” series) was currently in Vancouver. The far wall was covered in about thirty monitors playing demos of the first Quake game, which added to the atmosphere well enough. Finally, they also happened to have a sit-down Pac-Man arcade set up that may or may not have actually played had we put money into it.
Along the other wall of the video game section was mounted examples of game boxes, game systems (I was amused in particular by a Super Nintendo and a Super Famicon side by side), and appropriate write-ups next to all of them… well, mostly appropriate, but I’ll get to that later.
Beyond the video games was a massive section for a project known as No Ghost, Just a Shell. The project is built around a character, AnnLee, a character originally created by a Japanese figurine company (or something like that) whose copyright was purchased by two French artists. These two, Philippe Parreno and Pierre Huyghe, then commissioned other artists to create animated works featuring AnnLee; they eventually transferred the copyright to the AnnLee Association, basically making the fictional AnnLee owner of her own copyright… or something. To be completely frank, I am currently still figuring out how this entire thing works in my head… but I will say that it is a very interesting international project. The complete AnnLee project is now housed in The Netherlands).
Past the many, many AnnLee rooms, we then came to a neat Chinese short film from 2004 called Cosplayers, made by Cao Fei in Guangzhou, China. An eight-minute film with no speech, it would show a still scene from somewhere in Guangzhou that also just happened to include a cosplayer standing in frame as well. As the film went on, they would slowly begin to move around, fight each other, and near the end even terrorize the “local normals” in the film; by the end, all the cosplayers were back home eating dinner, making their next outfits, or just napping. The entire film just felt so surreal as these Chinese cosplayers laid dead in long grass, fought across steps leading into a river, and even rappelled down the dome of a building!
Finally, the exhibit ended with a few other large (but straight-forward) displays including what I can only describe as an “animated graphic worm” with five widescreen monitors side-by-side playing a video and sound animation that ran interconnected across them. Across from that was a giant anime girl’s head (exactly what it sounds like); the back of the head also had an opening where you could look in and “see what was inside such a girl’s head”. Designed like a small bedroom, the inside of the giant head was filled with figurines and the colour pink.
Coming back out we went past the gift shops selling assorted ultra-expensive things that we chose not to buy.
Final Thoughts
Advertised as “the first exhibition of its kind,” KRAZY! was a decent attempt at making such an all-encompassing thing. As I had already mentioned, there was a definite feel that they were leaning towards more obscure, more “artsy” works rather than the straight-up popular ones. While I can understand why they would aim for that sort of goal, the fact that their anime and manga sections left out names like Hideaki Anno, Akira Toriyama, and even Hayao Miyazaki just felt wrong. The same feeling occurred in the video game section with the absence of anything related to Final Fantasy; again, like them or not, it is hard to ignore their contribution to the world of video gaming.
Even the western comics felt greatly lacking in terms of content. Whether it was a means to just show less well-known works or one to simply stick their noses up at “popular comics”, it feels practically unbelievable that a comic exhibit could not have a single image of Superman anywhere – one would think at least the Fleischer Studios Superman shorts could have been included in the animation section, but no.
Oftentimes while wondering about particular choices for the exhibition, I also wondered about the people doing the written descriptions of the various works. One that really stuck in my head was the write-up for Paprika that mentioned all the different cultural references in the film including the Chinese Monkey King, Sun Wukong; I had grown up with this story to a degree, and it felt strange to see this write-up describe him as “a monkey from a Chinese Ghost Story” – Journey to the West may be mystical, but it’s far from being a “ghost story”!
Another example was their featuring of The Wind Waker to represent both the Zelda series and cell-shading. Perhaps it was just another means to kill two birds with one stone, but one would imagine that something like Ocarina of Time would perhaps be a better example of the Zelda franchise… but alas.
As a compromise for the gallery’s inability to showcase everything in the world of anime, manga, video games and animation, the Gallery had an iMac and a series of binders for their “Fan Base” feedback system. Basically, people could fill out the sheets in the binders and describe a work they felt should have been included in the exhibition; works reviewed and deemed worthy would then be given a short looping animation example in the iMac. Reading through the binders, you could tell there were a lot of fans sad about their missing works. I doubted the effectiveness of such a system, especially considering the hit-and-miss nature of viewer intelligence in the written suggestions (“Death Note is about a notebook of death…”). But, it was there for anyone who needed to vent, so hey.
For what it was, it was alright. There were certainly many ways it could have been improved with a little more variety in what they showed, but given that this is indeed the first art gallery exhibition of its kind (and considering this was a non-profit art gallery we were in), I suppose it did try to do what it could. For what it was, I found it to be interesting enough. If nothing else, it serves as a public acceptance that these art mediums of anime, manga and video games are indeed in the public eye and definitely culturally significant in this present day and age.
Links:
Vancouver Art Gallery Exhibition Page
No Ghost, Just A Shell
Cao Fei's Cosplayers (2004)
KRAZY! The Delirious World of Anime + Comics + Video Games + Art has been running since May 17th and will continue to run until September 7th of this year.
