To interested parties outside the department: please register with Jaqueline Berndt (jberndt@su.se) to allow access to the venue.

“Again and Again: Contextualizing and exploring the potentials of bank footage as an anime convention”

Reused footage, commonly denoted as bank, is a characteristic trait of television anime as it has developed since the 1960s. Originally popularized as part of the pivot towards limited animation and adapted to the demands of television schedules and budgets, it has over time become a convention of television anime ripe for parody and subversion. Bank refers not only to the types of stock footage common across film and television, but also to more particular types of conspicuously recurring scenes common in episodic serialized anime. These scenes may be cuts from previous episodes repurposed within the same serialized narrative (Kirkegaard, 2021), or they may be sequences storyboarded and animated specifically to be used as bank footage, particularly within certain anime genres.

Ikuhara Kunihiko (born 1964) is one of the most notable celebrity directors in the contemporary television anime sphere, straddling the line between auteur and commercial production. His major television works are Shôjo Kakumei Utena (1997), Mawaru Penguindrum (2011), Yurikuma Arashi (2016) and Sarazanmai (2019), as well as cinematic adaptations of Utena (1999) and Penguindrum (2022). Ikuhara’s brand as director is an idiosyncratic visual style that leans on theatricality, symbolism and repetition, most notoriously embodied in his use of bank footage. Each of his original works include multiple forms of bank usage spanning from incidental repetition for comedic effect to elaborately choreographed climactic sequences that mimic the rhythm and feel of conventional episodic children’s anime.

While bank footage is commonly accepted as a trait of television anime, it has not previously been studied academically, and so part of this research involves positioning itself among the multiple strains of preexisting anime research. Likewise, although Ikuhara Kunihiko’s work is well-studied in an academic context, this research has been focused on its narrative content, particularly from a queer studies perspective (see, for example, Perper and Cornog, 2006). One notable exception is Rose Bridges’ musicological approach, which applies Amy Herzog’s concept of the “musical moment” as refrain to Ikuhara’s work, overlapping but not identical with his use of bank footage (Bridges, 2021).

This seminar will provide an overview of the current state of my thesis research, present examples of the material in question, and attempt to clarify my project’s theoretical position relative to the broader field of anime research.

Works cited:
Bridges, Rose. “The Sound That Races Through the End of the World: Musical Moments as Refrain and Revolution in the Anime of Ikuhara Kunihiko.” Mechademia 13, no. 2 (2021): 9–25.
Kirkegaard, Ida. “Play it Again, Hideaki: Using the Cel Bank in Neon Genesis Evangelion.” In Anime Studies, edited by José Andrés Santiago Iglesias and Ana Soler Baena, Stockholm: Stockholm University Press, 2021. https://doi.org/10.16993/bbp.c
Perper, Timothy, and Martha Cornog. “In the Sound of the Bells: Freedom and Revolution in Revolutionary Girl Utena.” Mechademia 1, no. 1 (2006): 183–86. https://doi.org/10.1353/mec.0.0098.