The Peer-reviewed Open Access Online Journal for Animation History and Theory – ISSN 1930-1928
Introduction Born in Japan as a Game Boy game, since 1997 the Pokémon franchise has mushroomed worldwide across animated series and movies, trading cards, character toys, and videogames, including a plenitude of tie-in “media-commodities.” In the US market, where it rode an outstanding commercial wave, Pokémon became the “must-have toy” of 1999 as reviewed by […]
Children’s animation adapted from literature – including short stories, folk tales and ancient myths – showcases diverse approaches of reinventing and reimagining elements of art history within the animated works, depending on their specific cultural sources. Furthermore, this reliance upon native cultural art as source material knows no geographic bounds. As this paper will demonstrate, […]
In the wake of its military defeat in World War II, Japan experienced a period of unprecedented economic change that stretched from 1946 to 1991. This period, referred to as “the Japanese economic miracle”, saw Japan experience huge economic growth and become ‘the world’s second largest capitalist economy’.[1] The economic miracle’s causes are still debated: […]
The late twentieth century witnessed multiple reconsiderations of the reiterated filmic melodrama in cinema studies. To some, the filmic melodrama stands as a poignant example of women’s film (Williams p. 2); to others, it represents the neo-Marxist liberation of bourgeois struggle (Gledhill pp. 6-8); and still to others, it exists as a mode of expression, […]
This article explores the reception of Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch (2013) in the West, particularly in terms of the involvement of renowned Japanese animation house Studio Ghibli. I argue that Studio Ghibli acts as a significant paratextual point of reference to the game for the game’s marketers and the critical community […]
Japan has enjoyed a market for animation that extends far beyond its country’s borders since the beginnings of anime. While anime is usually produced predominantly for the country’s domestic market, international markets have developed a taste for Japanese anime over time, increasingly now in its subtitled, Japanese-language form (Pellitteri 2014; Ruh 2010; Daliot-Bul 2014). Prior […]
Originally delivered at the University of East Anglia in Norwich as the keynote paper at the symposium “Media Journeys 2018: Animation in Transnational Contexts”, 24 May 2018. From its earliest beginnings, the appreciation and study of anime – both by its local fandom and in terms of the academic response – has been profoundly and […]
Though critics and scholars continue to split hairs over which films best exemplify Japan’s “New Wave” of cinema from the late 1950s through the 1960s, the vast majority of works highlighted within such debates share one overarching commonality: they are works of live-action cinema. Situating animated media within a sea of scholarship celebrating handheld cameras, […]
The postwar emergence of manga and anime as mass media directed at children emphasized the importance of shōjo and shōnen (boys and girls) characters that encouraged its targeted audience to achieve easy identification. As teenagers gradually became the intended key audience, an increasing range of imagined lives were displayed in these visual narratives. From the […]
Outside Japan, anime is mainly used as a term referring to animation made in Japan. Inside Japan though, the word “anime,” an abbreviated pronunciation of animation in Japanese has been used widely as an abbreviation for all animation. However, despite the escalating popularity and attention in the worldwide media, the meaning and usage of the […]