SAN FRANCISCO -- She has wide buglike eyes, a small mouth and virtually no psychological background, personal history, defining characteristics, attitudes or abilities.
As a generic Japanese manga character, Annlee was crafted as an anonymous figure that could be adapted to any storyline but had no chance of surviving beyond a couple of frames.
So when a pair of French artists acquired the digital files and copyright for Annlee three years ago, they removed her from the commercial cycle, freeing her from an industry that would have eventually condemned her to obscurity.
"By buying the rights to the character, they severed her from a life of a second-rate character," said the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's media arts curator Benjamin Weil.
A new exhibit at SFMOMA intends to bring Annlee to life by inviting artists to appropriate her character and fill her empty "shell" with ideas manifested as animations, paintings, posters, books, neon works and sculptures.
The exhibit, No Ghost Just a Shell, which runs Saturday through March 16, presents 12 works associated with the project from various contemporary artists. The title is derived from the classic manga film Ghost in the Shell.
Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno bought Annlee from Kworks, a Japanese company that develops animated stock characters for cartoons, comic strips, advertisements and video games for the booming manga industry.
A manga figure's price relates to the character's complexity and ability to adapt to a storyline and last for several episodes. Annlee came relatively cheap: The Frenchmen bought her for just 46,000 yen (about $400).
"The idea was to free a character that doesn't have any chance to produce a storyline," Parreno said. "The expensive ones have everything and they don't need us (to be freed)."
After extensive retouching and 3-D development, Huyghe and Parreno produced several short animations in which Annlee dons a number of personas. Then they invited other artists to create a short digital animation to bring the character to life, and integrated all of the films under the title No Ghost Just a Shell.
The first installment is Parreno's animation, Anywhere Out of the World, in which Annlee ponders her existence as an anonymous commercial product.
In another segment, Annlee appears as a clone talking to herself in both Japanese and English. In Huyghe's One Million Kingdoms, Annlee walks on a lunar landscape while audio from the original soundtrack of Neil Armstrong's voyage to the moon plays in the background.
The exhibit is more than just a bunch of animation on display. The presentation allows viewers to reflect on complex issues such as creative freedom and intellectual property rights.
"It's about how you create this thread of storytelling that in the end is a fiction itself," Weil said. "It's very much spirited by the notion of who owns what."
The exhibit first appeared at Kunsthalle Zürich and is winding up in San Francisco. SFMOMA's exhibit space is being specially adapted to effect a funereal air. The gallery is cold and sparse, allowing viewers to reflect upon Annlee's transformation on film.
After the exhibition, Annlee will be "terminated" and "buried" in a special coffin in the SFMOMA galleries. The artists have agreed to transfer Annlee's copyright to the Annlee Association, a legal entity that belongs solely to the character. A contract stipulates that artists will no longer be able to create works with Annlee as a digital model.
This contract liberates Annlee from circulation and from economic and artistic exploitation, according to the curator and the artists.
"It's a legal way to give back the rights to the character," Weil said.
"If you give (the character) to a lot of people, she belongs to everyone," Parreno said. "We wanted also for the copyright to belong to her. In a way the character is complete now. It's enough to create an identity."
