The Animation of Nature and the Nature of Animation—The Life of Made Objects from the “Record of Tool Specters” to the “Night Parade of Hundred Demons”

This article argues that animism in the Japanese context is more fruitfully understood as animation, a technique that imbues man-made things with life. Two forms of animation are at work in so-called animist beliefs: one is the docile animation of instruments when skillfully used by humans, in which case the instrument becomes part of the human body; the other is the sense of aliveness that one experiences when an object resists human use and intention. This latter sense is crucial for the narrative of the 14th century illustrated scroll “The Record of Tool Specters” and the painted genre of “Night Parade of Hundred Demons”, in which everyday objects, vessels and instruments appear as demons and threaten human life. These images show how the instruments come alive through animation strategies intrinsic to the illustrated scroll as a medium, activated by the performances of professional storytellers and shaped by the artists’ anthropomorphizing imagination. The tool specters, on the cusp of breaking free from human bondage, are recaptured in a different network of meaning, allusion and fecund cultural production. What animates the inanimate objects is a media infrastructure, a network of media platforms that stretches back in time and that allows these apparitions to be conjured in different forms and contexts.