Manga and Anime Studies

Just as Neon Genesis Evangelion remains a cultural touchstone that signalled the end of Japan’s unfounded optimism of the bubble economy era, Attack on Titan is the revenant marking the post-2008 cultural shift from the free movement of globalised neoliberalism to the rising populism of the far-right and the normalisation of conspiracy theories. Game of Thrones, in the end, succumbed to the temptation of uncomplicated crowd-pleasers, which is why it has no re-watch value for me under lockdown. AoT and Eva, on the other hand, tackle what Mark Fisher termed the sense of a cancelled future under capitalist realism.

El presente artículo analizará la película "Liz and the Blue Bird" (2018), la cual presenta la tensión en la relación de Nozomi y Mizore, mejores amigas que deberán practicar una pieza musical que tocarán en conjunto para el concurso escolar de bandas, a la vez que deberán elegir el camino que tomarán terminado el colegio. Para ello se abordará la obra a partir de la perspectiva del shojo bunka, el continuum lésbico y la esperanza utópica.

Fecha de publicación: 26/04/2020
Link web: https://www.sugoi.com.pe/camino-a-la-adultez-shojo-bunka-esperanza-utopica-liz-and-the-blue-bird/

The World War II has divided Japanese history between what came before and what came behind. After been defeated in 1945, a new narrative of postwar Japan, separated for the militarized past one was constructed.
Manga, or Japanese comics, have traditionally been a significant part of Japanese popular culture. As a popular medium of social expression, manga added a visual form that helped disseminate the new narratives and perspectives to a mass audience. However, manga works are closely connected to Japanese history and culture. Then they reflect not only the reality of Japanese society but also their myths, beliefs and fantasies they have about themselves. The representation of the war in manga shows in a certain way how Japanese postwar society attempted to deal with the war and how Japan came to be what it is today.
My goal is to study how World War II was remembered and depicted in Japanese comic art during the postwar and to understand which narratives were accepted and which were rejected by the society in order to configure the idea of Japanese Nation; which narratives differs from the official discourse of the role of Japan in the War, and which ones
strengthens it.
The fixation of certain war representations and the expressions used to describe them implies that certain dominant interpretative codes were strengthened and privileged above others. The configuration of one hegemonic memory was necessary for the construction of a social imaginary as the notion of nation, but it led Japanese to think Japan within a victimhood paradigm for a long time.

Shounen manga is a type of narrative via images that accurately follows the canonical narrative schema. Shounen is an adventure tale in which the protagonist must face a sequence of antagonists, often more powerful as the story carries on, in order to reach a purpose that intersects with his personal development and doesn't concern only plot-related objectives.
Every single author ends up arranging and managing differently the four moments of a story modal structure: manipulation, competence, performance and sanction can be put in different orders to recreate different plots. This thesis intends to comparate three sucessful shounen manga, One Piece, Naruto and Bleach, to show the results these different  methods can lead to.

In this article we use the challenge of working with a set of one million manga pages to motivate the need for a computational approach for the exploration of collections of such size, and to explain our particular method that combines digital image analysis and a novel visualization technique. Any reflection on culture begins with an informal comparison between multiple objects in order to understand their similarities and differences. For instance, if we want our analysis to properly reflect the range of graphical techniques used today by manga artists across thousands of manga books, millions of pages in these books, and tens of millions of individual panels, we need to be able to examine details of individual images and to find patterns of difference and similarity across large numbers of images. To do this, we need a mechanism that would allow us to precisely compare sets of images of any size – from a few dozens to millions. We discuss how our method, which combines automatic ...

MARTIN, Fran. “Japanese homoerotic manga in Taiwan: Same-sex love and utopian imagination,” in Women’s Manga in Asia and Beyond: Uniting Different Cultures and Identities, edited by Fusami Ogi, Rebecca Suter, Kazumi Nagaike and John A. Lent. Palgrave MacMillan, Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels series (2019): 5-23.

Resumo: O presente artigo tem como objetivo tratar da produção de mangá no Brasil enquan-to uma mídia voltada para um público jovem e culturalmente híbrida entre a lin-guagem oriental e a linguagem ocidental. Para tanto, observamos algumas das ca-racterísticas mais marcantes da arte sequencial japonesa e tomamos como corpus de análise as histórias em quadrinhos da Turma da Mônica Jovem. Observamos que apesar de manter algumas características da linguagem do mangá japonês, há uma reconfiguração e apropriação de conteúdos e mesmo de estereótipos e temas relacio-nadas ao contexto brasileiro, dotando a revista de um "estilo mangá" próprio, mas que não mantém as convenções do gênero oriental como um todo. Palavras-chave: mangá; hibridismo cultural; Turma da Mônica Jovem. Abstract: This present paper aims to analyze the production of manga (japanese comics) in Brazil as a kind of media focused on young audiences and cultural hybrid between eastern and western language. We discus...

Na segunda parte deste post dedicado a Yurikuma Arashi, a mais recente série de animação do criador japonês Kunihiko Ikuhara, veremos como Yurikuma reflecte dois temas que são transversais e centrais na obra de Ikuhara: a natureza das figuras de autoridade  e, claro, o amor.

We find in the imaginary of contemporary science fiction anime some clear examples of a non-classical reinterpretation of the relationship between humans and technology. Both Gilbert Simondon’s general philosophy of individuation, with its radical critique of individualism and substantialism, and his philosophy of technology, focused in denouncing the cultural oblivion of the human aspects of technicity, offer some key elements to explore this imaginary. By applying some of the concepts developed by Simondon in his analyses of the mode of existence of technical objects to animes such as Akira, Evangelion, Ghost in the Shell and Serial Experiments Lain, I show that they share a coherent and innovative vision of the relationship between human and technical, coincident in many respects with the criticisms and proposals put forward by Simondon himself. The most important of these issues have to do with the idea of a technological extension of humanity and with the existing degree of integration or separation between the domain of technicity and that of spirituality and religion.

In ninth art, hikikomori and NEET turned into a storytelling inspiration for many works: manga such as Welcome to the NHK, Mēteru no kimochi and Asano Inio’s works; in the Italian production, some examples are Zerocalcare’s works or Habitat by Raffaele Sorrentino. In this paper, we analyse these social phenomena and how the private space is represented in comics, reflecting changes in social context. (Text in Italian) https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/between/article/view/3254/3038

Mazinga, Goldrake, Jeeg… sono questi i robot più noti al pubblico italiano che ha iniziato a scoprire i protagonisti di queste serie animate a partire dalla fine degli anni Settanta. Ma chi c’era in precedenza? Quali personaggi sono stati partoriti dalla fervida fantasia dei giapponesi prima di quel periodo? Qual’è l’origine di questa passione tutta nipponica? Quali sono gli antenati di questi eroi che hanno saputo conquistare intere generazioni? Il libro fornisce una risposta a tutte queste domande ricostruendo un pezzo di storia della cultura pop giapponese troppo spesso dimenticato e erroneamente poco considerato.

Japan has increasingly become a source of inspiration in many creative fields: from manga illustrations, street fashion, and contemporary art; to storytelling devices such as the 'Rashomon effect' in Hollywood movies, decluttering lifestyle techniques inspired by Japanese minimalist aesthetics, and even food such as kyaraben. According to Dolores Martinez, " underlying various processes of adaptation and transformation lies a common desire to somehow make art one's one, sparked by an engagement with the ideas contained in the Japanese source products. " Japanese aesthetics, such as kawaii, is shaping the worlds' influencers in art, design, fashion, gaming, and movies. Contemporary artmaking has progressed through many forms, and the current fascination of many young artists is a hybrid combination of the globalizing influences of East and West, technology, and collective and personal memories. This symposium aims to consider the growing influence of Japanese popular culture on contemporary visual arts, trace the process of how it has crossed cultural boundaries, and provide an insight into the dynamics of how culture, memory, and technology can affect the way we view and construct things in the present and future. The School of Cultural and Creative Studies at Aoyama Gakuin University in collaboration with Mutual Images Association invites individual and group submissions of abstracts that engages in substantial scholarly examinations of the visual arts that have been influenced by Japanese popular culture including, but not limited to comic books, manga,

Ro: A analiza popular culture din Japonia, dar și popular culture în general, devine un demers local și global în același timp, tocmai pentru că mediul digital și fluxurile inegale de distribuție, adesea oficiale, cât și generate de fani, sunt tot mai vizibile, prin rețelele de socializare virtuale și modul în care produsele sunt hibridate, ștergând granițe reale sau imaginare.

În cele din urmă, a înțelege popular culture ca forță generatoare de heterotopii per se, dar și de heterotopii de ordin afectiv, deschide noi piste de cercetare, făcând productivă analiza fandom-ului cumulativ în această lumină.

En: Following extensive research on anime fan identity and the Romanian community, the book poses the question of understanding popular culture as a driving force for new forms of heterotopia — the affective heterotopia driven by cumulative fandom practices and behaviours.

At the intersection of the local and the global, analysing Japanese popular culture through this lens sheds light on hybrid fan products and practices, while blurring the lines between the real and the imaginary.

Anime and its aficionadi have a terrible reputation. For some reason, they're stereotyped by non-anime practitioners as being foolish.


But the truth is that Anime can be a serious business. If you ever find yourself being harassed for watching "kid's shows," here are some points you can use to set the naysayers straight.

We also have to talk about animes merchandise; this business is in constant growth. Anime fans are acquiring tons of merchandise related to their favorite shows, especially for the most watched saga Like Dragon Ball Z.
We can see every day's new themed merchandise released, which could be clothing, accessories, figures, etc.

"Animes" are not written merely for kids
In Japan, the term "anime" is a truncated form of "animeshon" (animation), which embraces all types of hand-drawn or computer animation. Nevertheless, worldwide, "anime" is used to describe a stylized form of animation popularised from Japan - typically with colorful graphics, vibrant characters, and fantastic themes.


Anime can be sorted into several categories. The most popular animes aren't written for kids in mind. "Seinen" animes, for instance, are targeted at males aged 18-40, while the "Josei" types are written for females of that same age.

If you want Anime specifically for young children, you may consider the "Komodo" genre, which is aimed at all young children. "Shonen" (typically action-packed or comedic) on the other hand are aimed at young/teen boys around the ages of 10-18, while "Shoujo" are Anime for teenage girls.

Imagine a post-apocalyptic world where humanity must cower behind a series of three massive walls to protect themselves from monsters that have eaten the majority of the world's population.

That's the tale of "Attack on Titan," or "Shingeki No Kyojin." When one of the walls is breached, everything goes to complete hell.  It doesn't sound very much like a kid's show.

Many of the more popular anime deal with adult themes and social issues. "Attack on Titan" for instance also touches on topics such as class separation, whereby the rich tend to be more protected than the less well-off.

Some series such as "Psycho-Pass" also bear strong semblance to Hollywood movies. "Psycho-Pass" is set in the near future, where authorities use a computer algorithm to measure a person's propensity to commit a crime - similar to the Tom Cruise movie Minority Report.

It is no wonder that many Anime (20th Century Boy, Death Note, Edge of Tomorrow) have been turned into live-action movies by both Japanese producers and Hollywood.

Anime is a legitimate art-form

Japanese Anime has been around since 1917. Today, some of the most exalted anime writers have won global acclaim not just for their storytelling, but for their art.

In the beautiful art world, Anime is also making waves. They have been displayed in museums and art exhibitions around the world.

The anime industry is so thriving internationally that the market was worth approximately $3.7 billion in the U.S. alone in 2015

References: (Wikis/Merchandise Industry)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anime
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manga
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Animator_Expo
https://SuperSaiyan-Shop.com
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_Ball_Z
https://dragonball.fandom.com/

The purpose of this talk is to explore, through several concepts extracted from the philosophies of Henri Bergson, Gilbert Simondon and Gilles Deleuze, the relationships between narrative and extra-narrative elements in Revolutionary Girl Utena, Serial Experiments Lain and Puella Magi Madoka Magica. I will analyze how we are presented with not only complex narratives, but also elements that seem to exceed those narratives, defying their logic and standing in contrast with them. These anime cannot be properly understood by focusing exclusively on the way the events presented in the story unfold. In order to grasp the meaning of these works, both the constantly “floating” extra-­narrative aspects and the presence of specific points of rupture in the narrative have to be duly accounted for. I will first set up an analogy between the structure of the narrative parts of the selected anime and the structure of the “usual” form of temporality (‘product time’). I will then relate the role of extra-narrative elements to a different kind of temporality, closer to Bergson’s duree (‘process ­time’). Here, I will draw on the difference between the individual / environment pair, which constitutes the ending point of simondonian ontogenesis, and that which actually exceeds individuation: “apeiron”, the undetermined understood as a place of potentiality. Finally, I will show how these anime break with the “typical” temporality of the narrative and function as what I call “thinking devices”.

The Paralympic Games are founded on ideals of inclusivity and diversity for people with a disability. Consequently, there is an emphasis on athlete empowerment within the Paralympic Movement. One consistent criticism of the idea of athlete empowerment is that it relies on the concept of the ‘supercrip’, narratives of overcoming the tragedy of one’s disability through superhero-like qualities. The role of society is largely left out. This article shows that such narratives are prevalent in discourses surrounding the upcoming Tokyo 2020 Games, specifically in popular culture products designed to promote the Paralympic Games. This is problematic because such narratives individualize disability, rather than address larger social issues that people with a disability face in Japan.

O presente artigo busca sintetizar, de forma sucinta, como se dava a mistura entre a arte e a cultura na indústria fonográfica de modo geral na Ásia Oriental antes do boom do K-pop, levando em consideração que o estilo musical se torna por volta de 2010 o Soft-Power não apenas da Coréia do Sul, mas também de toda a Ásia Oriental pela associação do continente com o gênero musical, da mesma forma que a cultura japonesa anteriormente.

This article explores the interrelated questions of form and identity in the Japanese anime feature Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade. The film is a reworking of the fairy tale, Little Red Riding Hood, set in an alternate Japan which was conquered by Nazi Germany at the end of World War II. The main character of the film is a young recruit to a special police unit named Kazuki Fuse. His inability to kill a young girl carrying a bomb leads to disciplinary action from his superiors, but also draws the attention of the rival division in the police force, which is looking for a way to abolish the special unit. The narrative explores whether or not the traumatized young officer will be capable of using violence to defend himself and his unit. The question of whether Fuse is a rapacious wolf, capable of remorseless violence, or a sensitive victim of trauma converges with the question of the status of the film in relation to its medium. For Jin-Roh is a political thriller that, with the exception of one scene, might as well have been shot as a live action feature. Engaging the work of animation scholar Thomas Lamarre on the distinctions between the animetic image and the cinematic image, the article seeks to demonstrate that the question of the film's film can only be addressed by reference to how the narrative resolves the question of the protagonist's interiority. It is the one scene that resists being translated into a live action sequence that holds the key to the enigmatic behavior of the protagonist. Fuse proves fully capable of defending himself against armed men and defeating the conspiracy to destroy the special unit, while remaining a traumatized individual who becomes complicit in worsening his own state of psychic anguish. The most subtle of our acts is to feign blindness for the traps that we know are set for us. (La Rochefoucauld) What distinguishes an animated film from a work of live action? What is the animated image able to achieve that the cinematic image cannot? When is a man not a man, but in fact a rapacious, predatory beast in the shape of a man? These questions – the first pair dealing with the specificity

Introducción El pasado mes de marzo la Asociación de Productoras de Animación Japonesas presentó el informe anual sobre el estado de la industria. De acuerdo a los datos revelados en dicho documento, en el año 2012 se exhibieron en las pantallas de televisión 222 programas de anime. Sin embargo, como sólo es posible exhibir en televisión aquellos contenidos de los que se haya adquirido licencia, solo un puñado de ellos llegan a emitirse alguna vez en Argentina. A modo de ejemplo, si analizamos la grilla de programación de los canales de la tv abierta, surge el dato de que la oferta se limita a 1 hora semanal de Doraemon i y las series de animación que se emiten al interior del programa ZTV en Telefé ii. Frente a esta limitación de acceso, los fans se han organizado para tornar accesibles todos estos contenidos que de otro modo se perderían. El presente trabajo se plantea analizar la práctica de la

Anime fandom has been a fairly constant subject in fan scholarship, although only recently have conversations about fan subbing begun to circulate. As useful as those conversations are, none have directly dealt either with the mechanisms of fan subbing, particularly the use of linear notes, as a practice or with how these subs intersect with the flows of subcultural capital. Fan subbing, both as a productive and a consumptive practice, plays a small but influential part in subcultural capital. Engagement with media is a compositional element of such capital in this community.

NOTE:  Videos can be viewed through the original publication on TWC

The amount of new semantic content circulated in a society is limited by implicit norms and explicit rules. Belonging to a community means knowing, mastering, and even interiorizing such restrictions. Some of them are imposed by economy, as in the case of copyright, some by moral, as with pornography, and some for political reasons. In times of international tension such restrictions are tightened, giving rise to state ideologies and rhetorics of taciturnity. The essay explores those that came about in Italy, German, and Japan during World War II but also those that were circulated in their democratic opposers, USA and UK. The study seeks to show the relevance of a semiotic analysis of this corpus of propaganda materials not only for the sake of historical knowledge but also so as to cast new light on urgent present-day issues concerning both private and public conversation.

This paper surveys some of the myriad ways manga and related media in postwar and contemporary Japan have opened up space for gender expression and identification that transcend the heteronormative gender binary. For decades, manga artists and fans in Japan have been toying with gender conventions via crossdressing, homosexual, and transgender characters that variously disrupt the expected life course. The earliest such works include Tezuka Osamu’s 1950s series about the crossdressing “Princess Knight,” Sapphire, based on the male-role players in the all-female Takarazuka Revue. Androgynous beautiful male characters in the homoerotic “boys love” (BL) manga created by and for women and girls since the 1970s have also effectively unsettled gender dualism. Female homoerotic “yuri” narratives targeting female and male readers have further expanded this transgressive potential. Although many of these narratives ultimately reinforce male–female dualism, fans’ reading practices, including cross-gender identification, suggest the liberatory promise of a third gender, neither female or male, beginning in the liminal space of readers’ imaginations. Among female fans of BL, both objectifying and identifying with male characters allows these readers to vicariously experiment and play with sexuality and gender, including their own gender identities. For male readers, identification with female characters in yuri manga or male characters in BL manga can function as an escape valve for the pressure to perform conventional masculinity, even as the works simultaneously drive sexual fantasies. Whether narratively or interpretatively queer, then, the diverse gendered possibilities inherent in these manga can have tangible effects on their readers’ lives.

The popular culture of Japan draws and consolidates fans from various geographical domains and multiple backgrounds. Its engagingly rich heredity and culture is much diverse and proliferates around comics (manga), games, animation (anime) and music. These various sub genres of Japan’s popular culture and the various terminologies associated with them and their audiences frame Western fandom. Cosplay (“costume play”) is a fan culture that has an active camaraderie where fans create their costumes which are inspired by fictional characters from comics, games, animation and music. Cosplay is a fine blend of both its origin terms: “costume” and “play” since a cosplayer portrays characteristics of both these words – dressing up as a fictional character and also enact the character’s life and situations with full realization that they are trying to capture the life of someone, temporarily, who does not exist in reality. In this process happens a blurring of reality, entry into the world of fiction, a creation of new identity through this narrative resulting in the birth of an entirely new persona which is supreme in itself. (Dorfman, 2007) According to Judith Butler, the practice of enacting various identities, genders and switching between them and trying new ones or performing multiple identities, like in Cosplay, allows individuals to redefine, discover, stretch and enhenhance their own sense of identity. Thus cosplayers slip in and out of identities by switching between costumes and perform their persona by enacting the “play”. Thus the concept of identity is in a constant influx where public and private realms merge creating a sense of fragmentation and decentered self giving rise to multiple conflicting identities.
This is a postmodern concept in all senses by creating a hyper-reality where there is a disruption of the dominance of high culture by popular culture formulating a hybrid culture. This signifies that we are living in the postmodern space of virtuality which defines hobbies and connections and we ourselves are unsure of our own structured identity defined by societal norms. In this technology driven age cosplay also allows a certain form of escapism and interaction with the physical world through conversion of hobbies from a screen-centric medium to a concrete physical world.

Four Immigrants Manga traces the adventures and misadventures of this foursome of friends from their landing at Angel Island forward. They encounter a range of racism, from the casual patronizations to legislative racism, which framed the lives of Asian immigrants to California.