 2019 - 2020 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| 0687-2464-01 | Local and Global Elements in Japanese Comics and Animation | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| FACULTY OF HUMANITIES | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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University credit hours: 2.0
Course description
One of the most incredible trends in the world of cultural exports of the late 20th and early 21st century is Japan's success in finding global readership and audience for the products of its manga (comics) and anime (animation) industries. Although other examples for the export of popular culture products exist, the magnitude in which Japan succeeded in exporting its popular culture is extraordinary, and brings up the question of what, exactly, is the secret of Japanese comics and animation that leads to the global success of both.
The class offers possible answers to this question and argues that the main reason behind the global success of manga and anime is the ability of both industries to bring together local and global elements; the ability of the artists in both industries to look both inside their own culture and outside, to the global culture and draw inspiration from both sources. This kind of cultural mix is not unusual in Japan, a country which, since the dawn of its history, has adopted elements from other culture and mixed them with elements from its own culture.
The class examines a wide variety of such inter-cultural encounters, showing how they are expressed in anime and manga productions: the history of both fields, and link between traditional Japanese art and modern cartooning, the WWII propaganda productions that were inspired by American animation, the roots of popular motifs in manga and anime as science fiction stories and "magical girls" characters in Japanese tradition and western culture, and the influence that the manga and anime productions had on the western comics and animation.