you really think so?
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.
Continue reading ‘CIO-KCL research seminar on Japan’s manga and anime industries’
Cory of Renegade Anime Blog poses the interesting question of whether anime blog aggregators operating on ‘closed garden’ (blogsuki) versus ‘open acceptance’ (animenano) principles result in less episode summary/reviews and more editorial posts being showcased. Based on the data presented, the answer is somewhat inconclusive. He renews his call for less episode summaries/reviews and more editorials as well as more commenting and trackbacks. Meanwhile Michael of anime|otaku proposes economic and psychological reasons for the continued dominance of the episode summary/review style of anime blogging.
This post examines some research design issues related to Cory’s initial line of enquiry before considering the normative assumptions and prescription that underlies the study. It goes on to suggest an additional reason for the popularity of the episode summary/review style.
Sharon Kinsella, currently Visiting Professor at MIT’s Dept of Foreign Languages and Literature, delivered the 4th Chino Kaori lecture on the above-mentioned title at my alma mater, SOAS, on 2006-10-20. Among Kinsella’s published work, her most famous to date is Adult Manga: Culture and Power in Contemporary Japanese Society (1999). The lecture will be published by the Sainsbury Institute at a later date and draws on material from her forthcoming book, Girls and Male Imagination: Fantasies of rejuvenation in contemporary Japan.
Kinsella traces images of female revolt, manifested through acts of violence and sexual liberation, in various media - films, novels, manga and anime and the accompanying dicussion among journalistic and intellectual circles. She points out the irony that this cultural material and the academic discourse is produced almost exclusively by older men. While many of these left-leaning intellectuals claim to be giving a sympathetic voice to the theme of feminist liberation, Kinsella questions if their subjectivity can be truly representative and that their efforts may, perversely, result in another male appropriation of the female voice for its own purposes.
Continue reading ‘Female revolt in male cultural imagination in contemporary Japan’
In Anime Podcast #10, JP Meyer gave a pithy response, along the lines of "not really", to a comment and question by Thor about whether increased anti-US sentiment in anime will affect anime sales in the US. I shared Thor’s impression that in blood+ and Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex 2nd Gig, the US has not been portrayed favourably. In addition to these two Production IG series, we’ve also seen SUNRISE draw a parallel between the US and the Blue Cosmos/Logos controlled Atlantic Federation with its capital in Washington D.C. and its puppet president Copeland in Gundam SEED Destiny.
This post attempts to look at the definitional problems that reflect the often confused and contradictory character of anti-Americanism and disentangle how separate levels of analysis are often conflated. Furthermore, this post argues that many of these ideas and themes regarded as “anti-American” are echoed in or even influenced by US political science, literary, cinematic and popular culture sources.
From time to time, anime bloggers have halted their quests for anime instrumentality - common reasons include "No time!", "Hobby has become like work!", "Nothing worth to blog about…", "Does anyone even read what I write?", "I’ve been arrested by the RCMP" and so on… Out there in the vastness of the internet, one spies the traces of abandoned, derelict anime blogs. A blog is very personal thing and each blogger has the right to do whatever he or she pleases with it. However there are a few things I consider to be ideal, in my own personal view, for an anime blogger to do when hanging up the ole keyboard. Continue reading ‘The End of Animeblogelion’
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