Before Ghibli was Ghibli:Analysing the historical discourses surrounding Hayao Miyazaki’s Castle in the Sky (1986)

While Studio Ghibli may have become Japan’s most important and successful animation studio, its early significance is far more debatable in relation to the success of its films. Normally viewed from the present moment, Studio Ghibli’s brand significance is unmistakable, having become a producer of world renowned animation, and a distribution label for its own animated hit films and other high-profile animation in Japan. To challenge this perception of Ghibli’s brand significance, this article revisits the early history of Studio Ghibli in order to examine the discourses around the formation of the studio. Using Studio Ghibli’s first official film release, Tenkū no shiro Lapyuta (Castle in the Sky) (Miyazaki, 1986) as a case study, this article argues for a corrective analysis of the importance of Studio Ghibli to animator Hayao Miyazaki’s first ‘Ghibli’ film. The article demonstrates that throughout this release, there was a tension between art and industry that would become the hallmark of Ghibli’s style, but that the company itself may have had little to do with that brand’s early conception

Controllers and the Magic Kingdom: Corporate Partnership, Synergy and the Limits of Cross-Promotion in Disney and Square Enix’s Kingdom Hearts III (2019)

Who controls the Kingdom Hearts franchise? This article examines this question using a mixed industrial and promotional approach to seek moments of revelation about the creation and status of the Kingdom Hearts franchise for both of its conglomerate co-creators, Disney and Square Enix. Disney’s conglomerated industrial practice has long been assessed for adherence to the concept of synergy. By examining where and how synergy was adopted as an industrial logic within the creation of the Kingdom Hearts franchise, and Kingdom Hearts III in particular, I argue that it is in moments of tension, that we can find the most instructive evidence for who controls the games we play. Following work by Janet Wasko (2001) and Barbara Klinger (1999) in particular, I first look across the shared discursive history of the franchise and then at the promotion of Kingdom Hearts III for instances where synergy breaks down or becomes contested. These, I contend, demonstrate the limits of the logical of synergy in cross-cultural, transindustrial production cultures

Franchising and Film in Japan:Transmedia Production and the Changing Roles of Film in Contemporary Japanese Media Culture

Newly emerging film franchising practices in Japan are collapsing the boundaries between media productions, as Japan’s media industries work in collaboration to create large transmedia intertexts. This article examines the promotional discourses circulating around Japanese franchise film releases in order to understand how these new franchising practices are affecting the roles and status of popular cinema within contemporary Japanese culture

Anime and Nationalism:The Politics of Representing Japan in Summer Wars (Hosoda Mamoru, 2009)

Anime has a long and varied history of engagement with the national. This article investigates how different forms of nationalism inflected Hosoda Mamoru’s Summer Wars (2009). Rather than focusing on extreme representations of nationalism such as propaganda, this article demonstrates how everyday or banal forms of nationalism also work to construct the nation. The release of Summer Wars coincided with a notable moment of turmoil within Japan’s political firmament, and so the film’s engagement with nation-alism is examined in order to understand how Japanese media negotiate such political upheavals, and the role that nationalism plays in such negotiations. The article considers a range of representations, from the films uses of Japanese history through to its discourse on online technologies in order to better understand how anime contains and refracts nationalism

Redistributing Japanese Television Dorama:The Shadow Economies and Communities around Online Fan Distribution of Japanese Media

Fans’ online activities are often traced through the most active participatory members of fan communities. By contrast, this article examines online fan distribution from the outside in as a way of reconsidering how the peripheries of a fandom shape the communities at the heart of a fan culture. Taking Japanese dorama (television drama series) as my case study, I examine how dorama fans redistribute texts and how they communicate with one another while doing so. I argue that these practices reveal an emerging shadow economy that tantalizing challenges some entrenched ideas about online fan communities and their creative work

Disaster and relief:The 3.11 Tohoku and Fukushima disasters and Japan’s media industries

The earthquake and tsunami which occurred in the Tohoku region of Japan (northern Japan) on 11 March 2011 have taken the lives of more than 15,000 people. The disaster and the accident in the nuclear reactors in Fukushima have left about 330,000 people homeless. The catastrophe has affected not only Japanese politics, economics, society and people’s mentalities, but also its cultural industries. This article attempts to investigate two contemporary issues tracing the effects of the Great East Japan Earthquake (the Tohoku Disaster) on Japan’s media landscape: its impact on Japanese media production and distribution, particularly of its most transnationally famous forms, manga and anime; and how perceptions of ‘soft power’ have fluctuated in this difficult media moment. The research uses a cultural and industrial studies approach based on discourse analysis, focusing on the period immediately following the Tohoku Disaster in order to map significant shifts and unexpected results and responses from within Japan’s cultural industries to the earthquake, tsunami and Fukushima power plant disasters

1001 Nights and anime: The adaptation of transnational folklore in Tezuka Osamu’s Senya ichiya monogatari / A Thousand and One Nights (1969)

Stefanie Van de Peer - ORCID: 0000-0003-3152-2912 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3152-2912AM replaced with VoR 2021-06-03.Anthologising folktales from across the Middle East to North Africa, the inherently transnational 1001 Nights has become one of the most adapted works in the history of folklore (Zipes et al 2015). The tales have been adapted globally into works ranging from literature to theatre, from radio to film and animation. Historically, the 1001 Nights have served as inspiration for some of the very first animated experiments, from Lotte Reiniger’s The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926) to the Fleischer Studios’ 1936 Popeye the Saylor meets Sinbad the Sailor. One of the influences of the 1001 Nights can be found in Japanese culture (Nishio and Yamanaka, 2006). First translated into Japanese in 1875, the 1001 Nights quickly went on to take a hold of Japanese literature, and more recently it has become the basis for numerous manga and anime adaptations. This article investigates how one Japanese adaptation, Osamu Tezuka’s Senya Ichiya Monogatari (dir. Eiichi Yamamoto, 1969), expands the transnational potential of the original. In exploring how the 1001 Nights have become and remain integral to a transnational repertoire of animated storytelling, we highlight the elasticity and transnationality of 1001 Nights and the impact of its cultural localisation. We argue that the original’s structural and thematic emphasis on journeys, quests and flows provides the Japanese filmmakers with content that allows them to reach out to international distributors, making this early ‘anime’ film transnational in its own right. Through such means, the reciprocal flows of transnationalism within the 1001 Nights and its adaptations offer a mechanism for rethinking the relationship among Middle Eastern, North African and Japanese storytelling as a sometimes shared folklore.http://doi.org/10.16995/os.41pubpu