Week 4 – Anime

Is anime a high or low cultural medium, according to Susan Napier (2005) and what are some of its subgenres?

Napier considers if anime can be taken seriously as an art alongside traditional Japanese artefacts, or if it should exist and function exclusively as a sociological phenomenon (2005). The issue, however, with categorizing the value of any product is the “perennial problem of value” (ibid., 2005).

Anime in the west is considered a sub-culture, and in Japan is regarded as mass or pop culture, with growing perception as an intellectually challenging art due to the increase in scholarly writing on the phenomenon (Napier, 2005). Its existence is a juxtaposition of being rooted in high cultural traditional Japanese forms, such as Kabuki and woodblock printing, while utilizing artistic traditions of cinema and photography from around the world. As a hybrid of styles, Anime has the ability to work through contemporary issues in ways that older art forms might not be able to, while simultaneously reaching audiences and being highly accessible. For these reasons Napier believes that anime is worthy of being taken seriously, both sociologically and aesthetically (ibid., 2005).

Like films, novels and music, anime too, has several subgenres. Cyberpunk focuses on dystopian futures, with an emphasis on the human struggle of navigating a highly technological world. A crucial theme in cyberpunk anime is the amorphous difference between human and machine (Napier, 2005). Mecha anime enlists a Japanese pop culture favourite – the robot. Napier notes that classic mecha such as Astroboy paint the robot in a lighter way in contrast to more recent mecha that favour an ominous depiction. Shōjo is another popular subgenre, literally translating to ‘young woman’ and is targeted at young girls. Shōjo anime is typically characterised its focus on love and romance.

With a wide variety of subgenres that have accumulated over time, we can understand that attempting to make sense of Anime’s unstable, sporadic and evolving form and subject matter presents challenges (Denison, 2017; Condry, 2013). Due to the constant change in what value means especially in regards to the thresholds of high culture, Anime in its nature evokes a deflection around boundaries of cultures high, low and in-between, and instead exist, like other pop culture phenomenons, to create dialogue amongst each other.

References

Condry, I. (2013). The Soul of Anime: Collaborative Creativity and Japans media success story. Duke University Press.

Denison, R. (2017). Anime: A critical introduction. London: New York.

Napier, S. (2005). Why anime? In Anime: from Akira to Howl’s Moving Castle. Hampshire: Palgrave/Macmillan.