Source：[EN] Mask, Mirror, Floor: The Metastability of Individuation in Ave Mujica
Anime Feminist 投稿用 Materials
Contents
- Submission Letter
- Compressed Essay: “Thirteen Voices, One Body”
1. Submission Letter
Subject: Pitch — Thirteen voices, one body: How Ave Mujica stages the performing body
Dear Anime Feminist editorial team,
I’m Yamazaki Ryo, an independent critic based in Japan writing on contemporary anime through the lens of cultural and critical theory at yamaryoweb.site. I’d like to pitch an analytical essay on Ave Mujica (2025), titled “Thirteen Voices, One Body: How Ave Mujica Stages the Performing Body.”
The essay (~1,500 words, draft attached below) approaches Ave Mujica through the material details of its image and sound—how the mouth moves, how the voice resonates—rather than through plot or character psychology. It argues that the work stages the performing body in ways that resist resolution into stable identity. Two observational layers anchor the piece: the bipolarity of Mutsumi’s mouth (suppressed in interpersonal scenes, voluble in the inner world; suppressed in the present, voluble in the past) and the voice actor Watase Yuzuki’s performance of thirteen distinct voices from a single body, with no acoustic processing—a configuration I read as a cinematic implementation of Julia Kristeva’s le sémiotique.
This piece is drawn from a longer essay I’ve completed in Japanese and translated into English, “Mask, Mirror, Floor: The Metastability of Individuation in Ave Mujica” (~5,500 words). The full piece extends the analysis across the continuity of the floor between reality and the inner world, the editorial paradox of dissolve and cut, and the differential use of 2D and 3DCG, ultimately reading these layers through Gilbert Simondon’s métastabilité of individuation. The version I’m submitting here stands on its own and serves as a focused entry into the larger argument; I would also be glad to discuss the longer piece if that’s of interest.
Anime Feminist’s recent essay on the doll in Asian feminism, treating MyGO!!!!! and Ave Mujica together, was a touchstone for me as I worked. Where that essay opens the question of identity and embodiment through thematic and affective registers, mine moves at a different layer—the formal-material grammar of how the image and sound stage individuation as a process that never resolves. I hope the two pieces can sit beside each other as complementary entries into the same constellation.
For context on my prior work, my Japanese-language essay on BanG Dream! It’s MyGO!!!!! (“MyGO!!!!! No.2,” published June 2025: https://yamaryoweb.site/2025/06/07/bangdream！ its mygo-no-2/) develops a reading of the band Crychic’s collapse and Tomori’s “ethics of being lost” through Kristeva’s le sémiotique and a notion of poetic language as the sharing of pre-linguistic affect. The Ave Mujica essay is a critical sequel to that piece. Other essays at yamaryoweb.site work in adjacent territory across recent anime, music, and film.
I’m open to revising framing, length, and register to fit your editorial direction, and to discussion of how the piece might best sit alongside your existing coverage of the BanG Dream! / MyGO!!!!! / Ave Mujica constellation.
Thank you for your time, and for the work you do.
Best regards,
Yamazaki Ryo
2. Compressed Essay
Thirteen Voices, One Body: How Ave Mujica Stages the Performing Body
In Ave Mujica (2025), the girls wear masks from the start, and by the end of the first episode—too early in the narrative—the masks come off. And on the faces beneath, something remains. Or rather: something has not been lost. It is as if some veil still hangs over their bodies. Then, in the third episode, in Mutsumi’s inner world, another device—distinct from the mask—appears: Mortis, a puppet, or a humanoid persona, an alter, whose mouth moves excessively.
The mask, and the puppet. A “veiled body” that lingers once the mask comes off, and a “voluble puppet” that surfaces in the inner world. Devices for what?
One could begin at the level of plot or character psychology. This essay begins elsewhere—with the material details of image and sound. How the mouth moves. How the voice resonates. The work, I want to suggest, stages the performing body in ways that resist resolution into stable identity. What follows is one entry into a longer argument; here, I focus on the mouth as object of vision and the voice as material emission from the body.
The Bipolarity of the Mouth
The first episode opens abruptly with a live performance. All members conceal their faces behind masks, yet each mask differs in design. Sakiko, the leader and narrator-figure of the band; Nyamu, with her strong self-assertion; Uika, vocalist and guitarist—all wear masks that leave the mouth uncovered. Kasumi, on bass, wears a mask through which the mouth is just barely visible. By contrast, Mutsumi’s mask conceals almost the entire face. Through the performance and the interview that follows, Mutsumi’s mouth appears not to move at all.
The major turning point is Nyamu’s mask-stripping at the close of episode one. Stripped of her mask, Mutsumi suffers a psychic shock and covers her mouth with both hands. From this moment on, movements of her mouth occur in proximity to her mother, Mori Minami, or are drawn toward her mother’s appearances. Almost without exception, the mouth twitches and parts faintly. The mother’s relentless intrusion into Mutsumi’s private space, and the moments when topics relating to the mother surface in interviews, become the triggers of catastrophe. When Mutsumi opens her mouth, the psychic equilibrium between herself and her surroundings breaks down.
This reaches its peak just before the live scene of episode two. Her quasi-retirement remark; the hyperventilation and pareidolia brought on by the recriminations around her; the swarm of mute Mutsumis encircling her—and at last, on stage, she gives way. Once she has given way, her mouth seems perpetually slack. The slackness of the mouth, which for an ordinary person is the medium of dialogue with others, has in Mutsumi become a boundary line marking departure from the ordinary.
There is a major reversal here. In the real world, Mutsumi keeps her mouth shut, yet in certain scenes the mouth is staged with abundance. After the performance is cut short, after the heated argument backstage, Mutsumi sits at home with her guitar and her remorse. At that moment, Mortis—Mutsumi’s humanoid puppet persona—appears before her. In this inner world, Mutsumi has regressed to the form of a small child, holding out the guitar toward Mortis. Rain falling, ground patterned as a grid. Mortis in adult form; Mutsumi regressed to childhood. Mutsumi moves her mouth in something close to a moan. In this inner world, the Mortis Theater, the child-regressed Mutsumi expresses mouth and emotion as a unity, with striking naturalness.
The depiction accelerates as Mortis acquires Mutsumi-like features. Mortis moves mouth and expression volubly; Mutsumi groans. Whether or not they wear masks—indeed, precisely because they wear none—they oscillate between suppression and release under the strong gravity of the inner world.
Even without a mask, Mutsumi’s mouth is suppressed in interpersonal scenes; yet in depictions of her past, the mouth moves volubly. This contrast shows that suppression and release are inverted along the temporal axis as well. Present = suppression; past = release. The mouth is at once an object that is seen and an organ that produces voice. Having described the mouth as object of vision, we turn to the mouth as the organ of voice—where another bipolarity awaits.
Thirteen Voices from One Body
In Ave Mujica, Mutsumi and the Mortis who appears in her inner world are voiced by the same actor: Watase Yuzuki. The two voices sound distinctly different. Mutsumi’s voice is low, restrained, and prone to breaking off. The voice of the humanoid Mortis is unnaturally bright, buoyant. The line of puppets does not stop there. The inner world is inhabited by a chicken puppet, a bear puppet, a cat puppet, a penguin puppet, a hill myna, a firefly, a jellyfish, a hedgehog, a puppet of Mutsumi’s mother, a father puppet, a guitar puppet, and a narrator—a population of puppets, each with its own grotesque vocal coloring. All of them are performed, alone, by Watase Yuzuki. And here, there is no technical processing. No EQ to manipulate frequency bands, no pitch shifting, no reverberation to stage acoustic space. Through changes of vocal coloring alone, thirteen distinct voices are produced.
If acoustic processing were used to alter a voice, the altered voice could be treated as something separate from the original. A voice transformed by a voice changer circulates as an acoustic entity distinct from the voice before transformation. In Ave Mujica, no processing is applied. From the same vocal cords, the same breath, the same actor, thirteen different voices emerge. The differences among them are not differences of audio equipment but differences in the mobilization of bodily organs.
Here a paradox emerges. The act of “performing Mutsumi and the various Mortises distinctly” is plainly conscious. Watase Yuzuki chooses which voice to produce. This is performance—a symbolic act. At the same time, what implements the differences between voices is the tension of the vocal cords, the depth of breath, the manner in which the oral and nasal cavities are made to resonate—the material mobilization of bodily organs. A conscious choice is realized only through the material movement of those organs. The symbolic act of performance and the material mobilization of the body occur simultaneously.
Within a symbolic act, the body sustains that act. Julia Kristeva named such a state le sémiotique.[1] A state in which, within the symbolic order, yet on a layer distinct from it, the rhythms and pulsations of the body are at work. Kristeva described this layer as the operation of pre-significative resonance in poetry and music. The handling of voice in Ave Mujica can be read as one cinematic implementation of le sémiotique. What produces the differences between voices is the symbolic difference of roles (Mutsumi, Mortis, the chicken, the mother, the father, the narrator…all distinct figures), but what materially sustains those differences is one and the same set of bodily organs.
There is corroboration for this reading on the side of the viewer. When the ED credits of episode three reveal that all thirteen roles are performed by Watase Yuzuki alone, most viewers are astonished. I was astonished. Through the body of the episode, each voice had been received as the voice of a separate being. Yet the ED reveals their identity at a single source. This astonishment means that the differences between voices had been received at the symbolic level, as “voices of separate beings,” and that, retroactively, the material level—”voices issuing from a single body”—is brought to the foreground. The symbolic difference and the bodily identity coexist, layered, within the viewer’s experience. The structure that partitions thirteen voices is rightly inscribed in the viewer as something approaching madness.
From episode four onward, an important change occurs. After the humanoid Mortis takes over Mutsumi, that vocal coloring grows ever more unnaturally bright. The puppet’s fictionality is foregrounded with greater force. This is not a movement in which the puppet acquires human corporeality. Rather, the reverse. A human body comes to emit the voice of a puppet’s fiction. The body remains the same—the vocal cords of Watase Yuzuki—yet the voice issuing from that body departs from the human voice. The relation between body and symbol is implemented not merely as “body sustaining symbol,” but as a process in which the body itself is transfigured into symbolic fiction.
What the Performing Body Records
By way of the voice actor’s body, Ave Mujica destabilizes the contour of the individual. Within the symbolic order, the body is at work; voices received as differences of role resound, at the same time, as emanations from a single body. And that body itself transfigures into the voice of fiction.
The mouth and the voice are only two of the layers through which the work performs this destabilization. In the longer argument from which this essay is drawn, I trace the same destabilization across the continuity of the floor between reality and the inner world, the editorial paradox of dissolve and cut, and the differential use of 2D hand-drawn animation and 3DCG. Across these layers, Ave Mujica, I argue, implements what Gilbert Simondon called the métastabilité of individuation: a phase that is neither stable nor unstable, but that oscillates and continues to oscillate. The work does not depict the formation of stable individuals. It records the very oscillation of individuation itself.
For now, I want to leave the mouth and the voice as they stand: an object that is seen and the body that produces it, partitioned into thirteen voices and held together by the material identity of one performer’s vocal cords. To watch Ave Mujica is to be inscribed by that partition.
[1]: Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984); originally published as La Révolution du langage poétique (Paris: Seuil, 1974).
Yamazaki Ryo is an independent critic based in Japan, writing on contemporary anime through the lens of cultural and critical theory at yamaryoweb.site. This essay is drawn from a longer piece, “Mask, Mirror, Floor: The Metastability of Individuation in Ave Mujica,” completed in April 2026.
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