Content area
Full Text
The past decade has witnessed an explosion of popularity of Japanese animation (henceforth, anime) in the United States. Starting from series such as Sailor Moon (1992) and Pokemon (1997) during the mid-1990s to Yu-Gi-Oh! (1998), Dragon Ball (1986), Full Metal Alchemist (2003) and Naruto (2002) throughout the 2000s, anime has become a part of mainstream media in the US. Scholars in media studies, cultural studies, sociology and anthropology have also recently picked up on the phenomenon, bolstering anime studies in the West. Eri Izawa's study on the fantastic elements in anime and video games, Sharalyn Orbaugh's research on the visual hybridity of the female and male bodies in anime and girls' comic books (shojo manga), and Scott McCloud's in-depth visual comparison of western comic books and Japanese manga structures are good examples of scholarship on manga and anime's visual characteristics. Additionally, Susan Napier's analysis on Hayao Miyazaki's films in relation to Japanese culture and Brian Ruh's examination of Mamoru Oshii as an auteur filmmaker provide insightful literary film analyses. Furthermore, Anne Allison and Sharon Kinsella both investigate the shifting organizational aspects of manga as a subculture and mainstream industry as well as how manga and anime texts are produced and consumed as a global product from an anthropological and sociological perspective.
Although some scholars have pointed out the links between the Wachowski brothers' The Matrix (1999) and Mamoru Oshii's anime, Ghost in the Shell (1995) (Seay & Garrett 22) and American cartoons such as Power Puff Girls (1998) and 'large-eyed' anime (Mirzoeff 11), there is yet to be any substantial comparative research of anime's influence on US media in terms of the increased transnational appropriation of visuality and sensibility. Such a study is not about how much The Matrix "looks like" Ghost in the Shell, but rather, what it "means" for the former to look like the latter. In an era where information technology constantly spawns new forms of media at an exponential rate, it becomes more and more difficult to keep up with the acceleration of intertextuality created among contents such as manga, anime, video games and live-action films. Furthermore, the recent Japanese governmental promotion of their Content Industry, which heavily focuses on the symbiotic "package" nature of anime, video games and manga...