Samurai from Outer Space

Samurai from Outer Space PDF Author: Antonia Levi
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
Why are Westerners of all ages now so fascinated by Japanese animated films, movies made purely by Japanese animators for Japanese audiences? The U.S. audience for Japanese animation ranges from millions who don't even know that what they're watching is Japanese, to the growing anime cult, with anime fan clubs on almost every college campus, as well as anime fan magazines and social anime sections in video stores. In Samurai from Outer Space, Antonia Levi uncovers the hidden meaning of Japanese animation: the symbols and stories drawn from Shinto, Buddhism, and Japanese art - the things that Western viewers will overlook unless they are pointed out. With 20 color illustrations, Samurai from Outer Space is both an introduction for beginners and a goldmine of information for the already addicted.

Samurai from Outer Space

Samurai from Outer Space PDF Author: Antonia Levi
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 208

Get Book

Book Description
Why are Westerners of all ages now so fascinated by Japanese animated films, movies made purely by Japanese animators for Japanese audiences? The U.S. audience for Japanese animation ranges from millions who don't even know that what they're watching is Japanese, to the growing anime cult, with anime fan clubs on almost every college campus, as well as anime fan magazines and social anime sections in video stores. In Samurai from Outer Space, Antonia Levi uncovers the hidden meaning of Japanese animation: the symbols and stories drawn from Shinto, Buddhism, and Japanese art - the things that Western viewers will overlook unless they are pointed out. With 20 color illustrations, Samurai from Outer Space is both an introduction for beginners and a goldmine of information for the already addicted.

Japanese Visual Culture

Japanese Visual Culture PDF Author: Mark W. MacWilliams
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317467000
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 365

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Book Description
Born of Japan's cultural encounter with Western entertainment media, manga (comic books or graphic novels) and anime (animated films) are two of the most universally recognized forms of contemporary mass culture. Because they tell stories through visual imagery, they vault over language barriers. Well suited to electronic transmission and distributed by Japan's globalized culture industry, they have become a powerful force in both the mediascape and the marketplace.This volume brings together an international group of scholars from many specialties to probe the richness and subtleties of these deceptively simple cultural forms. The contributors explore the historical, cultural, sociological, and religious dimensions of manga and anime, and examine specific sub-genres, artists, and stylistics. The book also addresses such topics as spirituality, the use of visual culture by Japanese new religious movements, Japanese Goth, nostalgia and Japanese pop, "cute" (kawali) subculture and comics for girls, and more. With illustrations throughout, it is a rich source for all scholars and fans of manga and anime as well as students of contemporary mass culture or Japanese culture and civilization.

Traditional Monster Imagery in Manga, Anime and Japanese Cinema

Traditional Monster Imagery in Manga, Anime and Japanese Cinema PDF Author: Zília Papp
Publisher: Global Oriental
ISBN: 9004212604
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Traditional Monster Imagery in Manga, Anime and Japanese Cinema builds on the earlier volume Anime and its Roots in Early Japanese Monster Art, that aimed to position contemporary Japanese animation within a wider art historical context by tracing the development of monster representations in Edo- and Meiji-period art works and post-war visual media. While the previous volume concentrated on modern media representations, this work focuses on how Western art historical concepts and methodology might be adapted when considering non-Western works, introducing traditional monster art in more detail, while also maintaining its links to post-war animation, sequential art and Japanese cinema. The book aims at a general readership interested in Japanese art and media as well as graduate students who might be searching for a research model within the fields of Animation Studies, Media Studies or Visual Communication Design.

Blade of the Samurai

Blade of the Samurai PDF Author: Susan Spann
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 1250027055
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Learning that the shogun's cousin has been murdered within palace walls, master ninja Hiro Hattori and Father Mateo learn of an assassination plot by a usurping clan and begin to doubt a friend's innocence. By the author of Claws of the Cat. 20,000 first printing.

Japanese Cinema in the Digital Age

Japanese Cinema in the Digital Age PDF Author: Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 082486588X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
Digital technology has transformed cinema’s production, distribution, and consumption patterns and pushed contemporary cinema toward increasingly global markets. In the case of Japanese cinema, a once moribund industry has been revitalized as regional genres such as anime and Japanese horror now challenge Hollywood’s preeminence in global cinema. In her rigorous investigations of J-horror, personal documentary, anime, and ethnic cinema, Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano deliberates on the role of the transnational in bringing to the mainstream what were formerly marginal B-movie genres. She argues persuasively that convergence culture, which these films represent, constitutes Japan’s response to the variegated flows of global economics and culture. With its timely analysis of new modes of production emerging from the struggles of Japanese filmmakers and animators to finance and market their work in a post-studio era, this book holds critical implications for the future of other national cinemas fighting to remain viable in a global marketplace. As academics in film and media studies prepare a wholesale shift toward a transnational perspective of film, Wada-Marciano cautions against jettisoning the entire national cinema paradigm. Discussing the technological advances and the new cinematic flows of consumption, she demonstrates that while contemporary Japanese film, on the one hand, expresses the transnational as an object of desire (i.e., a form of total cosmopolitanism), on the other hand, that desire is indeed inseparable from Japan’s national identity. Drawing on a substantial number of interviews with auteur directors such as Kore’eda Hirokazu, Kurosawa Kiyoshi, and Kawase Naomi, and incisive analysis of select film texts, this compelling, original work challenges the presumption that Hollywood is the only authentically “global” cinema.

Control and Freedom

Control and Freedom PDF Author: Wendy Hui Kyong Chun
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262533065
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 365

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Book Description
A work that bridges media archaeology and visual culture studies argues that the Internet has emerged as a mass medium by linking control with freedom and democracy. How has the Internet, a medium that thrives on control, been accepted as a medium of freedom? Why is freedom increasingly indistinguishable from paranoid control? In Control and Freedom, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun explores the current political and technological coupling of freedom with control by tracing the emergence of the Internet as a mass medium. The parallel (and paranoid) myths of the Internet as total freedom/total control, she says, stem from our reduction of political problems into technological ones. Drawing on the theories of Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault and analyzing such phenomena as Webcams and face-recognition technology, Chun argues that the relationship between control and freedom in networked contact is experienced and negotiated through sexuality and race. She traces the desire for cyberspace to cyberpunk fiction and maps the transformation of public/private into open/closed. Analyzing "pornocracy," she contends that it was through cyberporn and the government's attempts to regulate it that the Internet became a marketplace of ideas and commodities. Chun describes the way Internet promoters conflated technological empowerment with racial empowerment and, through close examinations of William Gibson's Neuromancer and Mamoru Oshii's Ghost in the Shell, she analyzes the management of interactivity in narratives of cyberspace. The Internet's potential for democracy stems not from illusory promises of individual empowerment, Chun argues, but rather from the ways in which it exposes us to others (and to other machines) in ways we cannot control. Using fiber optic networks—light coursing through glass tubes—as metaphor and reality, Control and Freedom engages the rich philosophical tradition of light as a figure for knowledge, clarification, surveillance, and discipline, in order to argue that fiber-optic networks physically instantiate, and thus shatter, enlightenment.

Anime, Philosophy and Religion

Anime, Philosophy and Religion PDF Author: Kaz Hayashi
Publisher: Vernon Press
ISBN: 1648898009
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
Anime is exploding on the worldwide stage! Anime has been a staple in Japan for decades, strongly connected to manga. So why has anime become a worldwide sensation? A cursory explanation is the explosion of online streaming services specializing in anime, like Funimation and Crunchyroll. Even more general streaming services like Netflix and Amazon have gotten in on the game. Anime is exotic to Western eyes and culture. That is one of the reasons anime has gained worldwide popularity. This strange aesthetic draws the audience in only to find it is deeper and more sophisticated than its surface appearance. Japan is an honor and shame culture. Anime provides a platform to discuss “universal” problems facing human beings. It does so in an amazing variety of ways and subgenres, and often with a sense of humor. The themes, characters, stories, plotlines, and development are often complex. This makes anime a deep well of philosophical, metaphysical, and religious ideas for analysis. International scholars are represented in this book. There is a diversity of perspectives on a diversity of anime, themes, content, and analysis. It hopes to delve deeper into the complex world of anime and demonstrate why it deserves the respect of scholars and the public alike.

Anime and Its Roots in Early Japanese Monster Art

Anime and Its Roots in Early Japanese Monster Art PDF Author: Zília Papp
Publisher: Global Oriental
ISBN: 9004202870
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
Japanese anime plays a major role in modern popular visual culture and aesthetics, yet this is the first study which sets out to put today’s anime in historical context by tracking the visual links between Edo- and Meiji- period painters and the post-war period animation and manga series ‘Gegegeno Kitaro’ by Mizuki Shigeru.

Japanese Culture

Japanese Culture PDF Author: Paul Varley
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824863089
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
For nearly three decades Japanese Culture has garnered high praise as an accurate and well-written introduction to Japanese history and culture. This widely used undergraduate text is now available in a new edition. Thoroughly updated, the fourth edition includes expanded sections on numerous topics, among which are samurai values, Zen Buddhism, the tea ceremony, Confucianism in the Tokugawa period, the story of the forty-seven ronin, Mito scholarship in the early nineteenth century, and mass culture and comics in contemporary times.

The Encyclopedia of Contemporary Japanese Culture

The Encyclopedia of Contemporary Japanese Culture PDF Author: Sandra Buckley
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 041548152X
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 665

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Book Description
This encyclopedia covers culture from the end of the Imperialist period in 1945 right up to date to reflect the vibrant nature of contemporary Japanese society and culture.