Quick qestion for fans of anime and manga:

Is there any particular cultural or historical reason why the anime and manga all seem to have an epic nonsensical climax followed by a grossly sentimental denouement?  Hayao Miyazaki directed both Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind and Princess Mononoke, so I thought it might simply be a personal tic—epic nonsensical disaster followed by a natural renewal—but it even extends to works merely influenced by anime and manga. 

For example, I just finished watching the series Avatar: The Last Airbender (because Scott McCloud told me to) and there it is again: an epic nonsensical climax followed by a grossly sentimental denouement—this time the resolution of the love stories and a natural renewal—which leads me to believe that what I took to be tics are actually a rhetorically relevant structural element of these works.  

My working thesis is that it has something to do with the scouring of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—which were epic and nonsensical events followed by personal, natural and societal renewals—but before I head down the rabbit hole of secondary literature, it would be keen to know whether there isn't some more straightforward cultural or historical explanation.

Comments

[Rich Puchalsky]

"I'm not sure whether that's a feature or a bug, though, as the book's aimed at an undergraduate audience who won't always, as is the case at UCI, more familiar with anime/manga than I am."

Ah, OK. Well, I think it's perfectly fine to note that you're talking about anime/manga in America and then generalize about that if you want to, while mentioning that it might be very different in Japan, with a wider range of genres within the medium to draw on and a higher ratio of ordinary to extraordinary works.

[SEK]

JPool:

I wonder if "epic nonsensical climax" is quite the thing. I mean, yes they often feel that way, but I don't think "nonsensical" is what the films I've seen are actually going for...they're all at least trying for the impression of coherence.

But, as you note, it's a transcendent coherence, but what constitutes "transcendence" is almost always loosely defined. Or, if not loosely, in the same "the human mind can't fully comprehend this new natural/technological/evolutionary/alien development," which is, often as not, actually descends into a more lofty form of pot-logic. ("Lofty" from its creators' perspective; not so much, from ours.)

Chris S.:

Unlike the tight control over form and structure the coherent novel affords, serialized works tend to be more relaxed structurally. Or perhaps it would be better to say their structural focus is on the individual chapter; each serialized unit must intrigue the reader and advance the plot, so perhaps a lengthy denouement after the plot climax, where the loose ends are tied up after readers are already invested in the story, makes sense in that context.

This squares neatly with what Dresner said above about the encroachment of Victorian literature into Japan, because this is exactly what happened with, say, the first half of Charles Dickens' career: in The Old Curiosity Shop, Little Nelly must be threatened in each chapter, hounded until her inevitable end. What I wonder, then, is whether we may be discussing the equivalent of late Dickens, something like Little Dorrit, which is a dark, complex, and deeply unsentimental novel---in his diaries, Kafka numbers the sequence in the Circumlocution Office among those that most influend him---and which Dickens only had the freedom to write because, at that stage of his career, people would buy anything he wrote. More on this front later, as you've really got me thinking ...

Martin:

you're treating anime and manga as genres, not media.

I don't think I am, as I mentioned above the adaptation of manga into anime, and do know the difference. What gave you the impression otherwise? That is, did I say something so profoundly odd that it made me look like I didn't know the difference?

Sean:

The counterexample immediately coming to mind is Azumanga Daioh, which doesn't have a climax of any sort. Having followed our characters for three years, in the last episode (which isn't, as far as I remember, built up to or hinted at) they graduate from high school and go their separate ways.

Another one for the reading list. I actually prefer these sorts of narratives, as you'd expect from someone who loves Ulysses which---SPOILER ALERT---ends with Bloom going to bed.

Jonathan:

First of all, Avatar ended the way it did because Nickelodeon didn't want to pick it up for another season. Avatar was originally supposed to run four seasons (Water, Earth, Fire, and Air).

I was curious about that, and am now even more so given the commercial success of the film: $58 million in its first week. Funny how the animated critical darling gets canceled, but the critically panned live-action version gets the green light to complete the truncated original series.

The end result is that most series or Anime will be finished and released before the Manga reaches it's conclusion. This requires an ending to be written for the Anime. This ending is ususally written by someone other than the original author.

This explains a lot. That whole paragraph, actually, not just the bit I quoted. This is why having a blog is an academic boon.

Rich:

Here's a question: does The Lord of the Rings have an "epic nonsensical climax followed by a grossly sentimental denouement?" It has an epic climax, yes, but is it nonsensical, given that the whole work has been pitched towards making you believe that it's what needs to be done? (Despite the inherent nonsensicality of "world conflict resolves when hobbit pitches ring into volcano".) Is the denouement grossly sentimental, with the Scouring of the Shire and all that?

I think that'd be a "No" on both counts, because once you accept the premise---destroy the ring of power---the conclusion adheres to an internal logic. But in something like Avatar, not only does the final battle not make much sense within the logic of the series---where did Aang get the power to strip other people of their bending ability? we've heard of no such ability before---it willfully violates it when Aang takes on avatar form, because he still hadn't cleared that seventh shakra by giving up his worldly connection to Katara. (Talk about sentences I never thought I'd write.)

Put differently: it seems, in a lot of what I've read and watched, that there's a protagonist-centered deus ex machina that arrives in the third act to set everyone and everything straight. As with the sudden interventions of the gods, the audience has not been prepared for the arrival; and even if they are, on account of having the expectation of a deus ex machina, it's still a structural and rhetorical element of the text of the sort I'm interested in.

[Jonathan Dresner]

a protagonist-centered deus ex machina that arrives in the third act to set everyone and everything straight.

Now, that reminds me of Stephen Donaldson's original trilogy (which I once described to a friend as "a thousand pages of despair capped by fifteen pages of happy ending"), and Terry Brooks' Shannarah series (Elfstones, in particular), which leads me to wonder if it's an F/SF trope issue rather than a visual media issue.

[Rich Puchalsky]

OK, I sort of disagree with your interpretation of Avatar: TLA, then. It's hinted at numerous times in the series that Aang isn't going to just wade in and kill the firelord. He's a nonwarlike sort of monk, a vegetarian, a kid, a trickster-archetypal person, and a martial artist whose specialty is defense. And it's constantly being said (by Katara most notably that he's going to heal the world).

Did they get the exact mechanics right? Well, he was supposed to have been taught the "strip people of their bending" ability by the lion-turtle that is also an island, right near the end. He's able to go into the Avatar State because he gets thrown into a jagged piece of rock during the fight with the firelord that hits him in the exact same place as the lightning did. It's still a deus ex machina, of course, but it's not quite as unexplained as all that.

Why bring in the deus ex machina at the end? Well, in part because of the issues, already written about by others, of serialization and uncertainty about how long the series would last. I'd guess that the writers intended to signal how Aang was going to do it more thoroughly in the vanished 4th season, but they had to compress matters. They may not have even known, before the end, just how it was going to happen. But thematically it had to happen rather like that.

That's part of what I mean by "naive pacifism", by the way. Aang doesn't start to seriously think about what he's going to do about the firelord until the episode before, and then he's saved by deus ex machina ability. There's no planning in it.

[tomemos]

"It's a wonder you were able to finish your dissertation if you didn't allow yourself to generalize from examples."

Haven't finished it yet, but it goes without saying that I believe you can generalize from examples, provided that you have enough of them in mind. This post jumps right from "personal tic" to "even Avatar," which left me unclear if that was the whole sample. But maybe no one else read it that way, in which case, sorry for the slur.

[Martin Wisse]

I don't think I am, as I mentioned above the adaptation of manga into anime, and do know the difference. What gave you the impression otherwise? That is, did I say something so profoundly odd that it made me look like I didn't know the difference?

Well, you did generalised from three examples, one of which is more an "inspired by" than a "real" anime series, while the other two are treatments of the same theme by the same director, decades apart. That's like judging all comics on Frank Miller's Dark Knight Returns and All Star Batman and Robin.

There are of course some generalisations you can make about any medium, e.g. the point made about the influence of Disney on the development of manga and the stylistic tricks that are the result of it, but I don't think story structures/themes are one of them.

[SeanH]

Another one for the reading list.

To be clear, I was talking about the anime; it and the manga on which it is based are both comprised of very short episodes, the former in five-minute segments (to be broadcast on weekdays, with a 25-minute omnibus on the weekend), the latter in four-panel strips. I haven't read much of the manga, but I really love the anime.

[Endy]

You're overthinking this, attempting to attach genre significance to artifacts of differences in production. What you're describing, what you're asking to have identified is simply what's known as an ending.
American and many European works don't get endings, either because an ending would preclude further exploitation of the characters or because the series/run is canceled abruptly with no warning or recourse. The only American shows that get clear endings are shows whose creators specifically negotiate the right to have an ending and the timing thereof into their contracts--Lost, BSG, Buffy(by negotiating with a new network entirely).
In Japan series typically are contracted from the beginning for a specific length; sometimes a popular show will be extended mid-run (Utena) but shows start production knowing when they're supposed to finish. In addition, the directors and production houses are typically granted more esteem, or at least clout, so executives historically try to give a lot of warning when a show is canceled. When the original proved to be a horrible flop it was only cut from 52 episodes to 39, with plenty of time to rewrite the conclusion and compress the story to fit, and then they were still able to negotiate an extra four episodes just to better conclude a property that was losing money and not really impressing anybody (of course, after it was dead it became popular, what can you do?).

[Dave D]

Scott,

Trigun is a personal favorite of mine, and I have recently finished reading the manga series half in translation and half in the original Japanese.

I'm skipping through the comments to post this, because I'm very excited about the prospect of you reading one of my favorite manga; and I want to point out that the manga very much follows your pattern.

At the end, there is a series of cataclysmic events, followed by an "epic duel" after which, there is a sudden, immediate, and even a little jarring melodramatic denouement.

Problem: Japanese is hard to translate; one reason is that, when translated directly into English, it comes off as blunt, simplistic and childish. The Japanese often state the obvious in an extremely blunt manner, and this makes it extremely hard to translate accurately; the Dark Horse translations of Trigun fall victim to this, and a lot of it comes off as melodramatic tripe (incidentally, the anime IS melodramatic tripe).

Sorry if I'm repeating what's already been said; like I said, I'm skipping through the comments and jumping directly to recommending this manga because I am easily excitable.

[Dave D]

P.S. "anything involving a sometimes hyper-mystical, sometimes hyper-technological armageddon-type clash between outrageously powerful forces"

Trigun. Right there.