Mechademia 1

Author: Frenchy Lunning
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452942641
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 214

Book Description
After decades in which American popular culture dominated global media and markets, Japanese popular culture—primarily manga and anime, but also toys, card and video games, and fashion—has exploded into a worldwide phenomenon. From Pokémon and the Power Rangers to Paranoia Agent and Princess Mononoke, Japanese popular culture is consumed by an eager and exponentially increasing audience of youths, teenagers, and adults. Mechademia, a new annual edited by Frenchy Lunning, begins an innovative and fresh conversation among scholars, critics, and fans about the complexity of art forms like Superflat, manga, and anime. The inaugural volume, Mechademia 1 engages the rise of Japanese popular culture through game design, fashion, graphic design, commercial packaging, character creation, and fan culture. Promoting dynamic ways of thinking, along with state-of-the-art graphic design and a wealth of images, this cutting-edge work opens new doors between academia and fandom.The premiere issue features the interactive worlds that anime and manga have created, including the origins of cosplay (the manga and anime costume subculture), Superflat, forgotten images from a founding manga artist, video game interactivity, the nature of anime fandom in America, and the globalization of manga. Contributors: Anne Allison, Duke U; William L. Benzon; Christopher Bolton, Williams College; Vern L. Bullough, California State U, Northridge; Martha Cornog; Patrick Drazen; Marc Hairston; Mari Kotani; Thomas LaMarre; Antonia Levi, Portland State U; Thomas Looser, NYU; Susan Napier, U of Texas, Austin; Michelle Ollie; Timothy Perper; Sara Pocock; Brian Ruh; Takayuki Tatsumi, Keio U, Tokyo; Toshiya Ueno, Wako U, Tokyo; Theresa Winge, U of Northern Iowa; Mark J. P. Wolf, Concordia U; Wendy Siuyi Wong, York U.Frenchy Lunning is professor of liberal arts at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.

Emerging Worlds of Anime and Manga

Author: Frenchy Lunning
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 9780816649457
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 214

Book Description
This inaugural volume on anime and manga engages the rise of Japanese popular culture through game design, fashion, graphic design, commercial packaging, character creation, and fan culture. Promoting dynamic ways of thinking, along with a wealth of images, this cutting-edge work opens new doors between academia and fandom.

Mechademia 8

Author: Frenchy Lunning
Publisher: Mechademia
ISBN: 9780816689552
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Contributors to volume eight of Mechademia analyze Tezuka Osamu and his complicated approaches toward life and nonlife, as well as his effect on other manga artists. Using essays and reprints of Japanese manga on Tezuka, this volume questions his influence and attitudes toward the nonhuman, the sexual politics of manga bodies, and the origins of the moe culture, among others.

Otaku and the Struggle for Imagination in Japan

Author: Patrick W. Galbraith
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 147800701X
Category : Comics & Graphic Novels
Languages : en
Pages : 249

Book Description
From computer games to figurines and maid cafes, men called “otaku” develop intense fan relationships with “cute girl” characters from manga, anime, and related media and material in contemporary Japan. While much of the Japanese public considers the forms of character love associated with “otaku” to be weird and perverse, the Japanese government has endeavored to incorporate “otaku” culture into its branding of “Cool Japan.” In Otaku and the Struggle for Imagination in Japan, Patrick W. Galbraith explores the conflicting meanings of “otaku” culture and its significance to Japanese popular culture, masculinity, and the nation. Tracing the history of “otaku” and “cute girl” characters from their origins in the 1970s to his recent fieldwork in Akihabara, Tokyo (“the Holy Land of Otaku”), Galbraith contends that the discourse surrounding “otaku” reveals tensions around contested notions of gender, sexuality, and ways of imagining the nation that extend far beyond Japan. At the same time, in their relationships with characters and one another, “otaku” are imagining and creating alternative social worlds.

The Anime Machine

Author: Thomas Lamarre
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 145291477X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 684

Book Description
Despite the longevity of animation and its significance within the history of cinema, film theorists have focused on live-action motion pictures and largely ignored hand-drawn and computer-generated movies. Thomas Lamarre contends that the history, techniques, and complex visual language of animation, particularly Japanese animation, demands serious and sustained engagement, and in The Anime Machine he lays the foundation for a new critical theory for reading Japanese animation, showing how anime fundamentally differs from other visual media. The Anime Machine defines the visual characteristics of anime and the meanings generated by those specifically “animetic” effects—the multiplanar image, the distributive field of vision, exploded projection, modulation, and other techniques of character animation—through close analysis of major films and television series, studios, animators, and directors, as well as Japanese theories of animation. Lamarre first addresses the technology of anime: the cells on which the images are drawn, the animation stand at which the animator works, the layers of drawings in a frame, the techniques of drawing and blurring lines, how characters are made to move. He then examines foundational works of anime, including the films and television series of Miyazaki Hayao and Anno Hideaki, the multimedia art of Murakami Takashi, and CLAMP’s manga and anime adaptations, to illuminate the profound connections between animators, characters, spectators, and technology. Working at the intersection of the philosophy of technology and the history of thought, Lamarre explores how anime and its related media entail material orientations and demonstrates concretely how the “animetic machine” encourages a specific approach to thinking about technology and opens new ways for understanding our place in the technologized world around us.

Fanthropologies

Author: Frenchy Lunning
Publisher: Mechademia
ISBN: 9780816673872
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 379

Book Description
From fan-subs to cosplay, exploring the fan cultures inspired by anime and manga.

Interpreting Anime

Author: Christopher Bolton
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452956847
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 339

Book Description
For students, fans, and scholars alike, this wide-ranging primer on anime employs a panoply of critical approaches Well-known through hit movies like Spirited Away, Akira, and Ghost in the Shell, anime has a long history spanning a wide range of directors, genres, and styles. Christopher Bolton’s Interpreting Anime is a thoughtful, carefully organized introduction to Japanese animation for anyone eager to see why this genre has remained a vital, adaptable art form for decades. Interpreting Anime is easily accessible and structured around individual films and a broad array of critical approaches. Each chapter centers on a different feature-length anime film, juxtaposing it with a particular medium—like literary fiction, classical Japanese theater, and contemporary stage drama—to reveal what is unique about anime’s way of representing the world. This analysis is abetted by a suite of questions provoked by each film, along with Bolton’s incisive responses. Throughout, Interpreting Anime applies multiple frames, such as queer theory, psychoanalysis, and theories of postmodernism, giving readers a thorough understanding of both the cultural underpinnings and critical significance of each film. What emerges from the sweep of Interpreting Anime is Bolton’s original, articulate case for what makes anime unique as a medium: how it at once engages profound social and political realities while also drawing attention to the very challenges of representing reality in animation’s imaginative and compelling visual forms.

Electrified Voices

Author: Kerim Yasar
Publisher: Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University
ISBN: 9780231187121
Category : Communication
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Book Description
Kerim Yasar traces the origins of the modern soundscape, showing how the revolutionary nature of sound technology and the rise of a new auditory culture played an essential role in the formation of Japanese modernity. Electrified Voices is a far-reaching cultural history of the telegraph, telephone, phonograph, radio, and early sound film in Japan.

Pink Globalization

Author: Christine R. Yano
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822353636
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 337

Book Description
In Pink Globalization, Christine R. Yano examines the creation and rise of Hello Kitty as a part of Japanese Cute-Cool culture. Yano argues that the international popularity of Hello Kitty is one aspect of what she calls pink globalization—the spread of goods and images labeled cute (kawaii) from Japan to other parts of the industrial world. The concept of pink globalization connects the expansion of Japanese companies to overseas markets, the enhanced distribution of Japanese products, and the rise of Japan's national cool as suggested by the spread of manga and anime. Yano analyzes the changing complex of relations and identities surrounding the global reach of Hello Kitty's cute culture, discussing the responses of both ardent fans and virulent detractors. Through interviews, Yano shows how consumers use this iconic cat to negotiate gender, nostalgia, and national identity. She demonstrates that pink globalization allows the foreign to become familiar as it brings together the intimacy of cute and the distance of cool. Hello Kitty and her entourage of marketers and consumers wink, giddily suggesting innocence, sexuality, irony, sophistication, and even sheer happiness. Yano reveals the edgy power in this wink and the ways it can overturn, or at least challenge, power structures.

Anime's Media Mix

Author: Marc Steinberg
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 081667549X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 337

Book Description
Untangles the web of commodity, capitalism, and art that is anime