Convergence, or “media mix” as it is called in Japan, is rapidly changing the modes of production and consumption in our current transnational, transmedia cultural arena. Marc Steinberg's timely work, Anime's Media Mix, contributes to our understanding of media convergence not simply by recontextualizing the phenomenon from the West to Japan, but by taking a nuanced look at convergence as a new cultural logic of consumer capitalism in this postmodern, post-Fordist age. Historically sound and theoretically engaging, Steinberg's book provides a critical genealogy of media mix in the context of the profound social, cultural, and economic transformations that occurred both in Japan and globally. For Steinberg, the so-called media mix—“the cross-media serialization and circulation of entertainment franchise” (p. viii)—is neither a technological condition marked by the proliferating digital platforms nor the result of an increasing level of user participation in the new media environment. But instead, the media mix should be understood as the cultural and economic ramification of the changing relations and interactions between labor and consumer, commodification and communication, as well as between consumable objects and consuming subjects in the transforming mechanism of capitalism. And Japanese TV animation, or anime, which emerged in postwar Japan as a cross-media network of commodity forms, is right at the center of these transformations. Therefore, to understand the anime system of media mix is to understand the changing mode of operation in both Japan's transnational media sphere and global capitalism.
The book develops in two parts. Part 1 traces the emergence of media mix in Japan to the beginning of anime with the TV debut of Tetsuwan Atomu (Astro Boy) in 1963 and its successful character merchandising, which, according to Steinberg, is “a tipping point in the development of transmedia relations in postwar Japanese visual culture” (p. ix). The commodification of Atomu into stickers and toys diffuses the character image ubiquitously across multiple platforms and establishes the interconnectivity among different media and objects, fostering a new form of commodity that Steinberg calls media-commodities. It is such intermedia connections and communications organized around the character image that mobilized the process of media mix.
Part 2 of the book further details the subsequent expansion and transformation of the media mix system with the innovative strategies by Kadokawa Books since the 1970s, and situates such changing media ecology under the historical shift from Fordist to post-Fordist capitalism. Kadokawa's synergetic model not only expanded the anime media mix to a broader film- and novel-based practice, but also introduced a new mode of multimedia consumption that highlights the relationship between character and narrative world. The character-world relation, in which the character functions as a point of entry into a particular world view, has become a central principle in both the anime media mix and post-Fordist media capitalism.
The stories of media convergence have been told many times. But the genealogy of Japan's media mix that Steinberg describes here is rather a different one. Convergence, as it appears in various contexts, has often been discussed as a result of technological advancement in the digital age. Steinberg's book, however, suggests that the media mix did not begin with the invention of new technologies or platforms, but with a somewhat “low-tech” or “traditional” aesthetic in anime—the stillness of image that Steinberg calls dynamic immobility. The stillness of the character image, which stems from kamishibai and manga, provides consistency and linkage between anime and other media and commodities. It is such consistency, according to Steinberg, that anchors the multimedia franchise of anime characters. By emphasizing the aesthetic consistency as “one of the defining features of the media mix” (p. 201), Steinberg switches the focus from new media technologies to long-existing cultural forms, and deliberately avoids the discourse of technological determinism that has often been associated with media convergence.
Furthermore, Steinberg's study in media mix is centered less on consumers than on media systems. Henry Jenkins once famously argued that convergence “occurs within the brains of individual consumers and through their social interactions with others.”Footnote 20 Steinberg, however, argues that “media connectivity or convergence does not always depend first and foremost on users” (p. xv). The commercial maneuvers by media industries, from the character merchandising of Atomu to the multimedia strategy by Kadokawa Books, often played a more essential role than fans’ imagination in building cross-media connections. By emphasizing the operations in media systems rather than the somewhat utopian notion of participatory culture, Steinberg is able to explore the materiality of media as commodities and its social and economic ramifications. Thus, Steinberg's approach to the media mix, which was informed by such theorists as Lazzarato, Deleuze, and Guattari, sheds new light on our understanding of the transformation of consumer capitalism in its post-Fordist manifestation.
Neither media mix nor post-Fordism is unique to Japan. Though Steinberg's book has clearly avoided “Japan-centrism,” its historical examination of media mix rarely goes beyond Japan's national border. A thorough survey of media convergence in a global range is surely outside the scope (and is not the main point) of this book, but some level of comparative study in this transitional arena would still be appreciated. Besides Walt Disney as a precursor of character merchandising that had noticeably influenced the commodification of Atomu in Japan, the innovative cross-media strategies operated by Kadokawa Books also have their American counterparts in Marvel and DC Comics. As the logic of convergence continues its global spread, a transnational approach to media mix will become more and more important—and fascinating—for media and cultural studies. Steinberg's book, though having not taken that direction, is certainly a pioneer work for future inquiries into the cultural and economic role of transnational media ecology in the changing mode of global capitalism.
