Japanese Anime

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Japanese Anime

• Week 4
• World Media

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Main Topics

• Historical influences toward Japanese art
• Contemporary Japan popular culture
• Japanese cinema
• Origins of anime
• Aesthetic characteristics of anime
• Re-ocurring themes of anime
• Anime global identity

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Japanese Historical Cultural Context

• Genroku period (Mid 17th to early 18th Century)
• Kasei period (Late 18th to early 19th Century)
• ? Meiji period (1868 1912)
• Taisho period (1912 1926)
• ? Showa period (1926-1989)

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Predominant Forms of Popular Culture Literature
Manga - emerging from a synthesis between post
WWII Western influences and traditional Japanese
aesthetics. Film T.V Japanese
HollywoodShochiku Studios Yakuza
movies Tora-san
series. Kurosawa
Akira Kitano Takeshi
Avant Garde Music
J-Pop Enka Karaoke Art Manga
Anime - Ghibli Studios,
Gainax Avant Garde
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• Historical Development of Japanese Cinema
• Considered to be a new means of expression,
  but what it expressed was old.
• Heavily influenced by the traditional
  pictorial and narrative arts.
• Strong tradition of storytelling and
  performance.

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• Influence of the Theatre
• Cinema was regarded as an extension of
• the stage, a new kind of drama.
• The early cinema performances, displayed a
  disregard for any claims of realism, which in the
  west was considered to be essential both in
  photographic and moving images.

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• Narrative Structure in Japanese Cinema
• Aesthetic elements communicate much more than
• the narrative.
• an aesthetically patterned narrative is
  sometimes
• preferred to one that is more logical.
• Not constrained by Western insistence for
  narrative
• progression based on cause and effect
  resolution.

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Anime animation Otaku obsessive anime
fan
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Origins of anime

• e-makimono (picture-scroll narratives)
• Kabuki theatre
• The Noh tradition (theatrical masks)
• Bunraku (puppet theatre)
• Ukiyo Zoshi (the novel)
• Manga (graphic novel)

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Other Influences

• German expressionism
• Early French animation (Emile Cohl)
• Russian animation (Yuri Norstein)
• American comics
• Disney animation
• Cinema genres
• - film-noir, the gangster, the western
• Contemporary social cultural issues

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Manga

• flowing pictures
• frivolous pictures
• comics
• graphic novels.

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Frame Syntax

• Meaning emerging from the syntactical arrangement
  of the frame
• The composition of visual elements within the
  frame
• The relation of one frame to another across a
  sequence of frames

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• Aesthetic Characteristics of Anime
• composition of the image.
• The relation between background and foreground
• Formalist aesthetic dominates, but there is
• sometimes a sophisticated aesthetic interplay
  
• between realism and formalism.
• Eg Texhnolyze, Tetsuo

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• Space
• space is not used for illusionistic effect, nor
  is
• any effort made to achieve depth.
• While Western film directors view the screen as
  a
• window into a 3 dimensional space, many
  Japanese
• directors treat this screen as a flat 2
  dimensional
• surface, much like a picture or painting.

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• Character Aesthetics
• Round faces and simplicity of features
• Stylistic features developed by manga artist
• Osamu Tezuka
• The origins of these features can also be
• found in the Noh (mask) tradition of
• Kabuki theatre.

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Metamorphosis
Metamorphosis (in animation) legitimizes the
process of connecting apparently unrelated
images, forging original relationships between
lines, objects etc, and disrupting established
notions of classical storytelling (by
collapsing) the illusion of physical space,
metamorphosis destabilizes the image, conflating
horror and humor, dream and reality, certainty
and speculation (Napier, 2001)
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Apocalypse

• The vision of worldwide destruction, expressed
  as material, spiritual or pathological
  catastrophe.
• Eg Akira

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Spirited Away

• Director
• Hayao Miyazaki (2002)
• a phantasmagoric fairy-tale

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Anime, Global Identity and Hybridity
Unlike the inherently more representational
space of conventional live-action film animated
space has the potential to be context free,
drawn wholly out of the animators or artists
mind. It is therefore a particularly apt medium
for participation in a transnational, stateless
culture (Napier, 2001).
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Anime may function as a site of subversion or
resistance to the authority of the state. Here,
Anime can be seen as opening up a new cultural
space, one in which identity is not defined or
constrained by an authentic Japaneseness, or a
Western notion of identity.