Animation & Cartoons

An animated cartoon is a short, hand-drawn (or made with computers to look similar to something hand-drawn) moving picture for the cinema, TV or computer screen, featuring some kind of story or plot. Animation is the optical illusion of motion created by the consecutive display of images of static elements. In film and video production, this refers to techniques by which each frame of a film or movie is produced individually. Computer animation is the art of creating moving images via the use of computers. It is a subfield of computer graphics and animation. Anime is a medium of animation originating in Japan, with distinctive character and background aesthetics that visually set it apart from other forms of animation. An animated cartoon is a short, hand-drawn (or made with computers to look similar to something hand-drawn) moving picture for the cinema, TV or computer screen, featuring some kind of story or plot (even if it is a very short one). Manga is the Japanese word for comics and print cartoons. Outside of Japan, it usually refers specifically to Japanese comics. Special effects (abbreviated SPFX or SFX) are used in the film, television, and entertainment industry to visualize scenes that cannot be achieved by normal means, such as space travel. Stop motion is a generic gereral term for an animation technique which makes static objects appear to move

Soulful bodies and superflat temporalities: a nomadology of the otaku database of world history at the ends of history

This thesis is a philosophical engagement with the popular, low, and vernacular theories of History performed and expressed within contemporary Japanese manga (‘comics’) and anime (‘limited animation’), and most importantly, in the global production and consumption of otaku (‘manga and anime fan’) cultural and media ecologies. My project is rooted in a reading of the post-structural theoretical inquiries of Gilles Deleuze in parallel with what media theorist McKenzie Wark calls ‘otaku philosophy’ to examine how both high and low theories articulate anxieties and fascinations with the global theoretical discourses on ‘the ends of History’ and the imminent demise of industrial modernity. The first portion of the thesis is dedicated to a reading of the Japanese counter-cultural manga movement called gekiga (‘dramatic pictures’). In traversing gekiga’s post-war lineages to its revival in the medievalism of otaku artists Miura Kentarō and Yukimura Makoto, the first part postulates on what an anti-modern, anti-historical approach – or what Deleuze and Guattari call a nomadology – might look and feel like as it is mediated in the manga form. The second portion of the thesis examines the way in which Japanese anime mobilises the philosophies of nomadology in its filmic form and transmedial properties. In a critical assessment of the anime works of the otaku-founded media corporation Type-Moon, this section explores the Fate series alongside Deleuzian film and media philosophies to explore the infinite potentialities and recursive limitations of otaku nomadologies as they materialise beyond the screen. By reassessing the rise of otaku culture as a vernacular, global, and cosmopolitan rise in the critique of modernity and History, this thesis hopes to explore how transcultural and transmedial fan philosophies of historicity, memory, and temporality can be recontextualised within current academic debates about the efficacy of post-national historiographic pedagogies explored in the fields of postcolonial studies, comparative studies, global studies, and media studies

The Art of Movies

Movie is considered to be an important art form; films entertain, educate, enlighten and inspire audiences. Film is a term that encompasses motion pictures as individual projects, as well as — in metonymy — the field in general. The origin of the name comes from the fact that photographic film (also called filmstock) has historically been the primary medium for recording and displaying motion pictures. Many other terms exist — motion pictures (or just pictures or “picture”), the silver screen, photoplays, the cinema, picture shows, flicks — and commonly movies

The historical reception of Japanese cinema at Cahiers du cinéma: 1951-1961

This dissertation documents and analyzes the reception of Japanese films in the French film journals of the 1950s, when postwar Paris was awash with cinephilia. The foremost of those journals, Cahiers du cinéma, began publication in 1951, the same year as Japanese cinema’s breakthrough into international film culture with the surprise victory of Akira Kurosawa’s Rashõmon at the Venice Film Festival. Previous scholarship has amply credited the critics at Cahiers with reinventing the tenets of film criticism and launching the French New Wave, but without focused attention on the Japanese case. Meanwhile, reception studies of Japanese cinema in the postwar West have tended to concentrate on the United States’ hegemonic position vis-à-vis the Japanese film industry. Entwining those two strands, I investigate how Cahiers’ sustained but selective engagement with Japanese cinema fueled intergenerational conflicts within the journal and debates with rival journal Positif, helped crystallize the key tenets of auteur theory and mise-en-scène, and navigated between orientalist notions of authentic national cinema and the vexed ideal of cinema as a universal language. In addition to mining the film journals, I draw on the rich archive of the Cinémathèque Française for unpublished quantitative data and correspondence related to screenings of Japanese films and Japan’s entries in the European film festival circuit, especially Cannes. This factual record underscores my argument that the French critics used Japanese cinema subjectively as a malleable canvas for limning their own partisan aesthetics and passionate advocacy for cinema as the seventh art. After setting the scene of 1950s cinephilia, I trace Cahiers’ encounter with the unknown of Japanese cinema which resulted in reactions from stunned amazement, through enthusiastic viewership and awareness of Japan’s already thriving film industry, to reaction against the exotic seductions of Japanese films suspected of having been made solely for export to the West. In particular, I show how Cahiers’ championing of the “incomparable” Kenji Mizoguchi as the first non-Western director admitted to their pantheon of world-class auteurs emerged from a decade of polarizing head-to-head comparisons with Mizoguchi’s increasingly disparaged countryman Kurosawa. My transregional approach thus taps and commends a fertile vein in historicocritical film studies

The blur of modernity: essentialism, affect and everyday life in Tokyo

This thesis explores the constitutive role that cultural essentialism plays in the everyday life of Japanese urban modernity. Starting from the ethnographic observation that essentialised ideas of “Japan” and “the Japanese” are not only fruit of an orientalising anthropological gaze but also a prime indigenous concern, I aim to place my analysis as a “third way” between those ethnographies that employ essentialism as method and those who handle it as an object of critique. The experiment is to re-frame essentialism as the ethnographic object under scrutiny - as a living and breathing presence in the lives of people in Tokyo The main argument guiding the thesis is that looking at essentialised social categories one does find its essentialised version – e.g. family structure understood as timeless and constitutively Japanese – but also, together with it, what is understood as its negative – e.g. a fluid changing family structure moving with history, migration to the urban centres, Westernisation and the life of the city. One does find strong binaries – e.g. old and new, Japanese and foreign, traditional and modern – and yet it is not through one of its extremes that essentialised social forms are lived and understood, but in between them. While this may appear paradoxical, in the thesis I show that it is through a dynamic of “blurring” of the terms of the opposition - in the ephemeral moments (sometimes transfixed in stone) when the two terms overlap and become undistinguishable - that the engagement with these forms is most strongly felt. This blurring carries a strong affective and aesthetic charge and can thus be in turn essentialised as something constitutively “Japanese”. Based on two years of fieldwork in eastern Tokyo the thesis aims to understand this indigenous logic in its own right, seeking to find it in different fragments of metropolitan life

Dharma noise: parergonality in Zen Buddhism and non-idiomatic improvisation

The objective of this dissertation is to explore philosophical and practical approaches to the study of improvisation in relation to Japanese Zen Buddhist doctrine and aesthetics. It specifically asks whether free form (non-idiomatic) improvisation can be practiced, and Zen Buddhism's efficacy in establishing a structured regimen for technical study on a musical instrument. In order to complete this research objective, the historical development of Zen Buddhist doctrine and aesthetics is investigated and shown to be a non-unified rubric. Using the concept of the parergon, it is then demonstrated that practicing is an appropriate activity for improvisation when supplemented by the kata forms of Zen-influenced Japanese arts. The result of such supplementation in .this case takes the form of a series of original chromatic exercises developed as a paradigm that itself acts as a supplement to improvisation. The establishment of such a regimen also suggests further research into the topic of pedagogy and Shintoism as an aesthetic or theological supplement, as well as gender issues in creative performance

Dharma noise: parergonality in Zen Buddhism and non-idiomatic improvisation

The objective of this dissertation is to explore philosophical and practical approaches to the study of improvisation in relation to Japanese Zen Buddhist doctrine and aesthetics. It specifically asks whether free form (non-idiomatic) improvisation can be practiced, and Zen Buddhism's efficacy in establishing a structured regimen for technical study on a musical instrument. In order to complete this research objective, the historical development of Zen Buddhist doctrine and aesthetics is investigated and shown to be a non-unified rubric. Using the concept of the parergon, it is then demonstrated that practicing is an appropriate activity for improvisation when supplemented by the kata forms of Zen-influenced Japanese arts. The result of such supplementation in .this case takes the form of a series of original chromatic exercises developed as a paradigm that itself acts as a supplement to improvisation. The establishment of such a regimen also suggests further research into the topic of pedagogy and Shintoism as an aesthetic or theological supplement, as well as gender issues in creative performance

‘The Wandering Adolescent of Contemporary Japanese Anime and Videogames’

PhDThis thesis examines the figure of the wandering adolescent, prominently visible in Japanese television anime and videogames produced from 1995 to the present. Japan in the 1990s and at the millennium experienced intense economic and social change, as the collapse of the 'bubble' economy of the 1980s resulted in a financial recession from which the country has yet to recover. At the close of the decade, the national experience was characterised in media descriptions of malaise and disenfranchisement, and the loss of perceived core traditional cultural values. Arguably in this period the figure of the adolescent changed qualitatively in Japanese culture, rising to prominence within youth panic discourses circulated by the Japanese news media. These concerned the perceived rise in antisocial and problematic teenage behaviour, including the otaku, the hikikomori shut-in, classroom disobedience, bullying, and prostitution, while multiple cases of brutal murder perpetrated by teenagers became the focus of extensive media coverage. Public discourse expressed alarm at the perceived breakdown of the traditional family and the growing commodification of childhood in Japanese culture. This thesis develops understanding of the shifting attitude in Japan towards adolescence within the context of these cultural anxieties, and through the analysis of anime and videogames suggests strategies that are at work within popular cultural texts that are the product of, contribute to and reorient debates about the position of the suddenly and inescapably visible teenager in Japanese society. Through analysis of discourses relating to the shifting representation of the wandering adolescent as it moves across cultural texts and media forms, the thesis forms an original contribution to knowledge and understanding of Japanese anime and videogames through illumination of a prominent motif that to date remains unexamined