week5&6

Is it a high or low cultural genre, according to Napier (2005)? What are some of its subgenres?

Japanese refer to animation as anime but this is not a terminology which passes just within Japan. This is in common use all over the world.

 Anime is a high culture genre. Napier mentioned that anime is a popular cultural form that clearly builds on previous high cultural traditions. (P, 4) Anime is influenced by the woodblock print, cinema, and Kabuki which is a classical Japanese dance-drama. So anime can be considered to have relation to high culture. Napier also states that many of the issues which explores in anime are familiar to high culture literature.  For example, Princess Mononoke from Miyazaki is a work which break the stereotype that anime is just children’s cartoon. It means that anime often portraying important social and cultural themes which can appeal even to young people or adult.  

 

 Anime has many subgenres. Some of genres include children’s cartoon like Pokémon and Hello Kitty, science fiction like Astro Boy, sex and crime like lchi the killer. According to Napier (2005), to define anime simply as Japanese cartoons gives no sense of the depth and variety that make up the medium. Essentially, anime works include everything that Western audiences are accustomed to seeing in live-action films-romance, comedy, tragedy, adventure, and even psychological probing of a kind seldom attempted in recent mess-culture Western film or television (p, 6)

 

 

 

Refereces

Napier, S. (2005). Why anime? In anime: From Akira to Howl's Moving Castle (pp. 3-14). Hampshire: Palgrave/Macmillan.