This document provides an overview of Japanese anime, including its historical and cultural influences, predominant forms, and recurring themes. It discusses how anime was influenced by traditional Japanese art forms like ukiyo-e prints, kabuki theatre, bunraku puppetry, and manga. Common themes in anime include dystopian futures, cyborgs, the relationship between humans and technology, and apocalyptic visions. Key directors and films are mentioned, such as Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away and Akira by Katsuhiro Otomo. The document also explores how anime's aesthetic style and use of space differs from Western film and how it can represent a global, stateless culture.

1. Japanese
Anime

2. Main Topics
• Historical influences toward
Japanese art
• Contemporary Japan & popular
culture
• Japanese cinema
• Origins of anime
• Aesthetic characteristics of anime
• Re-ocurring themes of anime
• Anime & global identity

3. Japanese Historical & Cultural
Context
• Genroku period (Mid 17th
to early 18th
Century)
• Kasei period (Late 18th
to early 19th
Century)
• Meiji period (1868 – 1912)
• Taisho period (1912 – 1926)
• Showa period (1926-1989)

4. IKI IN UKIYO-E PRINTS
Eishi
Geisha at the
Matsumoto Teahouse
Ôban, c. early 1790s
Eizan
Hanging Picture
in Horinouchi.
Ôban, 1807

8. Kabuki Theatre
Kabuki Theater Creator Name:Torii Kiyotada

9. Bunraku Theater
A round bunraku (puppet) theater, in Sewa village, Kumamoto Prefecture, Kyushu, Japan. Photographer: Michael S.Yamashita
Date: April, 1993

10. Bunraku Puppet Theatre
Japanese Bunraku Puppet Theater Several puppeteers manipulate Bunraku a traditional form of puppetry in
Japan. Photographer: Jack Fields 1981

11. Kibyoshi
Author unknown
Love, the Pavilion of Water
Chrysanthemums /Enshoku Suikotei/
c.1840-1850
a book, nishikie, 123x155mm
Nishikawa Sukenobu
The Heart of the Pond /Ehon ike no kokoro/
1739
a book, sumizurie, an illustration

12. Ukiyoe - Woodblock Prints
Author YOSHIDA, Hiroshi(1876-1950) Title "Glittering Sea” ("Hikaru Umi")
Date 1926

13. Predominant Forms of Popular
Culture
Literature
Manga - emerging from a synthesis between post WWII Western
influences and traditional Japanese aesthetics.
Film & T.V; Japanese Hollywood=Shochiku Studios;
Yakuza movies
Tora-san series.
Kurosawa Akira
Kitano Takeshi
Avant Garde
Music; J-Pop
Enka
Karaoke
Art; Manga
Anime - Ghibli Studios, Gainax
Avant Garde

14. Historical Development of
Japanese Cinema
• Considered to be “a new means of
expression, but what it expressed was old”.
• Heavily influenced by the traditional
pictorial and narrative arts.
• Strong tradition of storytelling and
performance.

15. Influence of the
Theatre
• Cinema was regarded as an
extension of
the stage, a new kind of drama.
• The early ‘cinema performances’,
displayed a disregard for any claims of
realism, which in the west was
considered to be essential both in
photographic and moving images.

16. Narrative Structure in Japanese Cin
thetic elements communicate much more than
rrative.
esthetically patterned narrative is sometimes
erred to one that is more logical”.
onstrained by Western insistence for narrative
ssion based on cause and effect & resolut

17. nim
e
= anim
ation
Otaku
= obsessive
anim
e
fan

18. Origins of anime
• e-makimono (picture-scroll
narratives)
• Kabuki theatre
• The ‘Noh’ tradition (theatrical
masks)
• Bunraku (puppet theatre)
• Ukiyo Zoshi (the novel)
• Manga (graphic novel)

19. Other Influences
• German expressionism
• Early French animation (Emile Cohl)
• Russian animation (Yuri Norstein)
• American comics
• Disney animation
• Cinema genres
- ‘film-noir’, ‘the gangster’, ‘the western’
• Contemporary social & cultural issues

20. Manga
• “flowing pictures”
• “frivolous pictures”
• “comics”
• “graphic novels”.

21. Manga

22. Manga Genres
• Sport
• Gangster
• Romance
• Gourmet
• Historical
• Erotic
• Satirical
•
Cyberpunk
• Mecha

23. Frame Syntax
• Meaning emerging from the
syntactical arrangement of the
frame
• The composition of visual elements
within the frame
• The relation of one frame to another
across a sequence of
frames

26. Live Action Manga
Tetsuo: The Ironman, (1989, Dir. Shinya Tsukamoto

27. sthetic Characteristics of Ani
mposition of the image.
elation between background and foregrou
alist aesthetic dominates, but there is
etimes a sophisticated aesthetic interplay
een realism and formalism.
exhnolyze’, ‘Tetsuo’

28. Texhnolyze (2004, Dir. Yoshitoshi Abe

29. http://www.cjas.org/~leng/texhnolyze.htm

32. Space
space is not used for illusionistic effect, nor is
any effort made to achieve depth.
While Western film directors view the screen as a
window into a 3 dimensional space, many Japanese
directors treat this screen as a flat 2 dimension
surface, much like a picture or painting.

33. Character Aesthetics
ound faces and simplicity of features
ylistic features developed by manga artist
amu Tezuka
e origins of these features can also be
und in the Noh (mask) tradition of
abuki theatre.

34. “Mask and Persona”
The construct of the “mask” is one of the
most profoundly developed aspects of the
traditional performing arts in Japan with
Noh theatre providing the most obvious
example.

37. The motif of the mask can be
discussed on several levels.
The first is the use of masks (or
masking) in the literal form as is
illustrated in a pronounced
fashion in several Miyazaki
productions.

39. Re-occuring Themes of Anime
Dystopian futures
yborgs
he relation between humans and technology
he animated body
e body takes on animal attributes; it merges with
nt life and melds with metal. The body is asexual
homosexual, heterosexual and hermaphrodite”
: Tetsuo, Texhnolyze, Ghost in the Shell

40. Ghost in the Shell (1995, Dir. Mamoru Oshii)

44. “Metamorphosis (in animation) legitimizes the
process
of connecting apparently unrelated images,
forging
original relationships between lines, objects etc,
and
disrupting established notions of classical
storytelling
…(by collapsing) the illusion of physical space,
metamorphosis destabilizes the image,
conflating
Metamorphos
is

45. Apocalypse
The vision of worldwide
destruction, expressed as
material, spiritual or
pathological catastrophe.
Eg: Akira

46. Akira (1988, Dir. Katsuhiro Otomo)

49. Spirited Away
Director
Hayao Miyazaki (2002)
“a phantasmagoric fairy-tale”

50. Princess Mononoke (1997, Dir. Hayao Miyazaki)

53. Spirited Away (2001, Dir. Hayao Miyazaki)

58. “Unlike the inherently more
representational space of
conventional live-action film…
animated space has the
potential to be context free, drawn
wholly out of the animator’s or
artist’s mind. It is therefore a
particularly
apt medium for participation in a
transnational, stateless
culture”
nime, Global Identity and Hybridit

59. Anime may function as
a site of subversion or
resistance to
the authority of the state. Here,
Anime
can be seen as opening up a new
cultural space, one in which
identity
is not defined or constrained by an
authentic ‘Japaneseness’, or a