Got wind of this seminar, organized by the Creative Industries Observatory, via Anime Infatuation, and popped by Strand Poly yesterday. A quick rundown of my main takeaways and reflections on the presentations.
Extract from Andrew Osmond’s abstract: ‘In American and Britain, Japanese animation has often been presented as something completely different from “cartoons”; darker, more adult and transgressive… [but] anime and Western cartoons have always inspired and mirrored each other.’ He showed several clips from older anime - you knew that they were really old because they were on VHS tapes - that showed how some anime had influenced even Disney as well as significant American and French influences in the apprenticeship works of Hayao Miyazaki and Satoshi Kon. My favourite was the Anne of Green Gables OP clip which Osmond said was more popular, in Japan, than Ghost in the Shell or Akira.
Dr Rayna Denison was having a field day filling a huge gap in the academic literature on anime in English (e.g. by Susan Napier, Steven Brown (?), Antonia Levi, Sharon Kinsella etc.) which she claimed was largely concentrated on texts (the anime itself), consumption and fandom but almost nothing has been written about production, the studios and the industry in Japan. A great reminder that anime isn’t just a medium, style or genre but also an economic and industrial activity that needs to make a profit in order to survive. Point that aroused the most interest from the audience was how amateur cosplay was banned at TAIF and all cosplayers were professionals hired by the studios, an interesting dynamic of how industrial players have been able to tap into fan activity and transform it into professional activity.
Dr Yoko Ono’s paper made pretty big claims about how the popularity of disaster, catastrophic and apocalyptic anime reflected the alienation of Japanese youth from adults and extended it by claiming that its popularity outside Japan reflected resonance of other countries’ youth with distrust of adults who are no longer seen as mentors or models, who are no longer willing/able to care for nor guide the youth. I haven’t read the paper itself but it might suffer from problems of causal inference e.g. how do you prove that popularity of dystopian anime is caused by ideological/cultural identification rather than, say, marketing? Also, there’s a problem of selecting on the dependent variable; the prophecies of Nostradamus, which she cited a lot as an influence in anime and popular culture, was thoroughly parodied in the popular Keroro Gunso which is hardly a dystopian anime/manga. Dr Ono is obviously an Evangelion fan and drew the majority of her references from the TV series; I was also itching to ask her about her views on Rebuild but there wasn’t much time for Q&A in her slot.
Emma Hayley of SelfMadeHero talked about how she had worked with UK-based Japanese and non-Japanese artists to produce manga Shakespeare that was well received by teachers of English literature, particularly those working with young children, as well as British government agencies like the DTI and the British Council as well as winning recognition from the Japanese MFA whose otaku minister Taro Aso had created a prize for international manga. However a British employee with the Japanese Embassy gave a more cynical take on the warm bureaucratic/political reception was because the Brits were happy to be associated with something cool and fashionable and the Japanese were pleased at the seeming success of their cultural imperialism. LOL There was a Shakespeare purist in the audience who regarded this as sacrilege; Hayley’s comeback was (1) Shakespeare wrote his plays to be performed and watched, not to be studied in the classroom; (2) the manga could serve as an entry point for children to get into the full text. Someone should have asked the old fuddyduddy to watch GONZO’s R&J (see jpmeyer’s take) - bet he’ll be well and truly frothing at the mouth. LOL A pointed question from a member of the audience was: ‘What are you doing to do when you run out of Shakespeare plays? There’s not that many popular ones.’ Thankfully, there are lots of other classics of English literature to adapt. And, if I might add, whose copyright has expired.
Which leads nicely on to Dr Hye-Kyung Lee’s paper on scanlation which went into a lot of ethical debates related to fansubs that anime bloggers will be familiar with. This was backed up by impressive interview work with scanlation group founders and leaders as well as those working in the manga publishing industry. Clear difference between music filesharers (an ethic of resistance and industry hostility) and scanlators (an ethic of ‘love of manga’ and ‘gentleman’s agreement’ with industry that saw it as a means of promotion, marketing). Points from the audience included points about copyright law (not a clear case of infringement because of (non)licensing in jurisdictions where the scanlation takes place as well as fair use provisions), the influence of Japanese otaku culture (to buy lots of stuff is a way to show love) and scanlation being one case within a wider phenomenon of ‘user-led innovation’ (cf. Eric von Hippel) that has been observed in fan communities of kite flyers, surf boarders, inline skaters etc who innovate to fulfill desires that commercial entities are unable to address well and/or speedily enough as well as the validation of Bourdieu’s concept of ‘the economic world reversed’ (see the 1983 Poetics article or the first chapter of The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, 1993). ‘Everyone OTL’ moment when someone quipped: ‘So the French are right after all.’ orz
Overall, from my academic POV, IMHO Dr Denison’s paper was strongest in terms of locating it within a theoretical literature, Dr Ono’s made the strongest claims about the applicability of her analysis to wider socio-political phenomenoa, Dr Lee’s was the strongest methodologically.
On the one hand, DEKKAI JEALOUSY that all of them really seem to enjoy doing research into this area (3 out of 5 having jobs that is mainly about studying, writing, teaching about anime in a university FTW); on the other hand, I’m not sure that I could do this kind of research because it’s like making a hobby into work. A really fun and interesting and (one of those rare and magnificient creatures) truly multidisciplinary seminar.
YES. There needs to be sooooooooooooo much more research like Denilson’s! That’s such a massive hole in the English-language scholarship.
What really needs to be done is to translate the Japanese papers.
If you realise most of the anime/Jap culture papers in English comes from the same old people. Then there are those crappy uni Jap departments who serve up useless and terribly written papers (see the Cosplay one by Thang Leng Leng fromNUS).
jpmeyer, be sure to let us know when you attack that massive hole too!
tj_han, absolutely - getting together the best translated articles in an edited book or journal special issue would be a boon to the research in English. Strange that it hasn’t happened already (?) or more often because so many of the English-lang researchers like the panellists at this seminar and jpmeyer are effectively bilingual.
Though crappy papers aren’t the monopoly of anime studies and some of the worst books (e.g. Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations) can still be hugely influential and on a lot of hapless students’ reading lists in other fields/disciplines.
So do us a favour! Spread the word! Or else we be stuck with our wikipedia.