Andrea (Week 5)

According to Lent (2000), what place does animation occupy in Asian societies? How different is this across Asia (i.e. comparing China and Japan)?

As Napier (2005) claim “the ‘culture’ to which anime belongs is at present a ‘popular’ or ‘mass’ culture in Japan, and in America it exists as a ‘sub’ culture. (…) [but] in Japan over the last decade, anime has been increasingly seen as an intellectually challenging art form, as the number of scholarly writings on the subject attest” it seems like the situation of this “short-lived, rising and falling due to popular taste and demands of the hungry market” (Napier, 2005) products are changing very differently from the last decade till now.

Anime in Japan is truly a mainstream pop cultural phenomenon. The audience range from children, teenagers to young adults.

The animated works are major parts of the output of Japanese studios, it also occupied a large percent of Japanese output market. “Commercially, it is beginning to play a significant role in the transnational entertainment economy, not only as an important part of the Japanese export market, but also as a small but growing part of the non-Japanese enterprises that deal with anime.” (Napier, 2005)

The situation is a little bit different in china. Although the number of animation viewers is increasing so quickly in the last decade, it is still stand out of the mainstream place. For me the answers may be find in both cultural and commercial way. Commercially, on the one hand, graphic novels, or cartoons are not the main industry in china. On the other hand, Japanese animation in china is popular by lots of kids and teenagers, and some of them are addicted in it. This somehow makes those parents feel like the animation influence their kids very badly. Cultural way, the same as Japanese culture, china is even more complicated and higher cultural country with long history than Japan. This may cause the cultural conflict and crash very strong.

Is it a high or low cultural genre, according to Napier (2005)? What are some of its subgenres?

Napier (2005) describes that “For those interested in Japanese culture, it is richly fascinating contemporary Japanese art form with a distinctive narrative and visual aesthetic that both harks back to traditional Japanese culture and moves forward to the cutting edge of art and media.”

As we both know “Japan is a country that is traditionally more pictocentric than the cultures if the west”. And anime actually offers people an opportunity of understanding the basic level Japanese social context. “Anime, with its enormous breadth of subject material is also a useful mirror on contemporary Japanese society, offering an array of insight into the significant issues, dreams, and nightmares of the day” (Napier, 2005) so for me, it is definitely a high cultural genre.

Its subgenres could divide into three parts, which are the apocalyptic, the festival, and the elegiac. Personally, the subgenres of anime are also the reflections of anime being the high cultural popular culture genre.

Reference

Lent, J. A. (2000).Animation in Asia: appropriation, reinterpretation, and adoption or adaptation. Retrieved 21 June, 2006, from AnimeResearch.com

Napier, S. (2005). Why anime? In Anime: from Akira to howl’s Moving Castle (pp.3-14). Hampshire: Palgrave/ Macmillan.