Napier's "Akira and Ranma 1/2: The Monstrous Adolescent" discusses the two anime works and states examples of the "liminal" or in-between-states of both. Some of these examples include
From these examples she decodes that the anime films "unhappy antiheroism" is inspiring to many. Napier said it further represents a "form of all-out adolescent resistance to an increasingly meaningless world in which oppressive authority figures administer the rules simply to continue in power." Wow. I don't mean to sound ignorant at all but I would have never thought an anime film could convey such strong themes. I knew nothing about anime films previous to reading this essay so I had no idea that it also had such dark subject matter. The decoding of the metamorphosis in Akira was decoded by Napier to have two major themes of an alienated youth's search for identity and a "cyberpunk meditation on apocolypse."
Like Akira, Ranma 1/2 has themes of identity and traditional situations in society during adolescence. I'm confused as of the opening episode's plot with a panda, and two naked gender-confused Chinese boys? girls? confronting each other in the nude...but I understand how it somehow has similar themes as Akira. Gender identities and sexism are definetly relevant in the beginning scenes, and as the little girl says to her father that she should be able to choose her fiancee, strong feminist themes are shown. Further themes of homosexuality and androgyny are expressed in Ranma and
According to Napier, the works say different things about perceptions of and preoccupations with gender roles and relations, inter-generational relations, tradition, history and the future in Japan. Japan's many lonesome people could relate to the lonely characters in the animes and feelings associated with changes in their lives that take place over adolescence. The motorcycle scene that represents the "phallic symbol of power and authority" (according to film scholar Jon Lewis) seems reasonable but at first to me seems kind of rediculously over analyzed and I don't know how non-adults who watched the anime film watched that scene and saw underlying themes such as those. The motorcycle scene could represent many things and I'm sure the movie was very emotionally mature and moving in a sense, but I am still having trouble understanding how one can watch a cartoon and instantly grasp all of the underlying themes and representation of different themes...
Anime productions such as these so popular in America, according to Napier, because of their elements of relatable adult themes such as dystopia and apocolypse.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
"I am still having trouble understanding how one can watch a cartoon and instantly grasp all of the underlying themes and representation of different themes.."
Well like with anything it depends on what you watch. Akira is NOT child friendly, non-adults probably should not be watching Akira. There is infact a rape scene, or maybe it was molestation, and there's a lot of death in it as well. It's not a movie thats made for children. It is actually a movie made to be watched over and over again and to be analysed.
Perhaps the analysation of the motorcycle being a phallic symbol is a bit of a stretch, but the thing with something like anime, it's the same thing with anything artistically created. People put things in for a reason, its not natural everything is done by way of choice. A director can choose to shoot a film from a certain angle, an artist can choose which color to use, just as an artist can choose what symbol to use to represent things.
They aren't "cartoons" I mean yeah in their purest nature they are, but they are still stories which use encoding and decoding.
There's a film Grave of the Fireflies, also an anime based off of a popular novel in Japan about the American firebombs on Japan, I haven't talked to one person who left that movie with a dry eye.
It's quite simple to see how one can grasp the underlying themes. They lay it out plain and clear, instead of a physical body doing it though, its art.
-James Dier
Cubbiestar
Post a Comment