Abstract
Serialised filmmaking methods have been generally determined to fall in two types of narratology: those that promote narrative development between instalments ('sequel') and those that resist development ('series'). However, contemporary Japanese franchises have frequently unfolded across film and television, demonstrating alternative forms of storytelling that make semantic definition more problematic. This article investigates the serial practices in Umizaru -a popular Japanese action series adapted from a manga by the Fuji Television Network that unfolded across four films and a televised drama. Analysis reveals how this 'medium-jumping' transmedia journey enables a fluctuating interplay between two narrative scenarios or 'tracks' that opposingly promote and constrain serialised development across the films, effectively shifting them between 'sequel' and 'series' formats. Elaborating on Jenkins' definition of 'transmedia storytelling' and Cattrysse's interpretation of 'cultural proximity', ultimately, this article argues that the serial processes in Fuji's Umizaru cycle are best understood according to a range of generic, discursive and intertextual associations tied to the mediums hosting the series at a given time, and the 'proximity' between transmedia movements. In recent years, serial franchise filmmaking has been at the forefront of Japanese film production. The most dominant films at the domestic box-office tend to be part of larger transmedia franchises generated by tightly connected media conglomerates (Joo, Denison, and Furukawa 2013) . Therefore, many films are not original properties but rather extensions of narratives begun elsewhere on a multitude of media platforms varying from manga to video games. Since 2006, with the help of successful cross-platform franchising, Japanese films have regularly comprised more than half of the domestic box-office year after year; reclaiming this crown after more than twenty years of Hollywood dominance. 1 One of the more significant franchises during this time was Umizaru (lit. 'Sea Monkeys'), a highly successful film series about rescue divers for the Japanese Coast Guard adapted from a manga by Sat o Sh uh o (1998) (1999) (2000) (2001) . 2 Umizaru emerged after the Fuji Television Network -a leading broadcaster in Japan -sought to expand their growing cinematic presence at the start of the twenty-first century (Kawamoto 2004 ). The initial film Umizaru (T oh o) was released in 2004 and followed by sequels Rimitto obu rabu umizaru (Limit of Love: Umizaru, T oh o 2006), Za rasuto mess eji: umizaru (The Last Message: Umizaru, T oh o 2010) and Brave Hearts: Umizaru (T oh o 2012), all directed by Hasumi Eiichir o. However, the series' real success was generated by the single-season television series Umizaru Evolution (2005) broadcast on the Fuji TV channel between the first and second films, again directed by Hasumi and featuring the same actors and narrative timeline. This brief migration onto television influenced an enormous leap in box-office revenue: 1.74 billion yen ($13.3 million) for the first film and 7.10 billion ($60.1 million) for Limit of Love. Later films in the series equalled or surpassed the revenue of the second film, with Brave Hearts topping the list of Japan's highest grossing films in 2012. As a popular 'medium-jumping' TV and cinema franchise, Umizaru is a key example of the power that television networks such as Fuji display in their dominance of contemporary Japanese cinema (Davis and Yeh 2008) . Darrell William Davis and Emilie Yeuh-yu Yeh have proclaimed television as 'the major engine and stockholder ' (2008, 66) and 'key definition to success' in Japanese cinema (2008, 70) . Film adaptations of popular TV series have the potential to generate huge returns with some, such as police comedy Odoru dais osasen (Bayside Shakedown, Motohiro Katsuyuki, T oh o) in 1998 and medical drama K odo bur u (Code Blue, Nishiura Masaki, T oh o) in 2018 (both also produced by Fuji), becoming the most successful domestic films of the year. Furthermore, the influence of serialised television drama on their cinematic adaptations has produced notable effects on narrative, with the later Umizaru films textually composed of a range of televisual and cinematic conventions. The effects of this relationship can be traced through the series' leaps between cinema and television and how residual influences from television determine the narrative trajectory of the films. However, as later films in the series exploit the cinematic potential of their increased production budgets, this occurs alongside a steady diminishing of the serialising influences from the TV series. This article focuses on the narrative effects of medium-jumping between television and cinema on Fuji's Umizaru adaptation. Through the interchangeable emphasis on serialisation and spectacle, the series reveals how it was adjusted by producers to meet the expectations of the specific medium hosting a given instalment. Moreover, closer analysis reveals a serial 'overlap' between the televisual and film formats of the series, raising questions about how chronological narrative is affected by the close interactions between media as franchises shift. By focusing specifically on the chronological narrative timeline in the Umizaru franchise, this article explores the strategies of serialisation as they occurred throughout Fuji's medium-jumping transmedia venture. Similar processes have been differentially referred to as 'transmedia storytelling' -denoting a single narrative dispersed over separate media texts (Jenkins 2006 ) -or 'cultural transduction' as reworked by Patrick Cattrysse (2017) to account for the dynamic processes of film adaptation. Cultural transduction encapsulates theories of adaptation and localisation, broadly concerning the 'ways in which certain cultural products … [have] been modified or altered to become available, appealing or relevant in other cultural contexts' (Uribe-Jongbloed and Espinosa-Medina 2017, 616). Though originally employed in relation to the migration of cultural texts across national borders, Cattrysse considers temporal and generic forms of cultural localisation as texts are adapted. Film adaptations, like other adaptations, are often produced to attract the widest possible audience, which incurs certain adjustments of the prior text: Cattrysse uses the term 'cultural proximity' to describe how adaptations are modified to appeal to the expectations of film audiences. Therefore, 'cultural' in this regard refers to cultural forms or products and how adaptations are 'proximised' to fit within the structural, generic or intertextual parameters of the media formats to which they are adapted (2017). This article develops this logic to account for transmedia forms of cultural proximity as texts move across (or between) media formats, thus helping to explain the more dynamic nature of narrative in transmedia Japanese franchises. Using Fuji's Umizaru saga as a case study allows us to understand how chronological narratives serialised across multiple media are affected by the 'jumps' between different mediums. Ultimately, I argue the serialisation processes of Umizaru are strongly contingent on the TV and film formats utilised during its transmedia journey and the temporal proximity between transmedia movements.
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