Week 5 Sara

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

The author of 'Anime: from Akira to Howl's Moving Castle' writes quite early in their chapter on why they choose to write about anime, about the concept of high and low art forms. Napier writes to convince us that anime is a significant high art form, worthy of study, and intellectual debate. Many scholarly articles have been written by Japanese scholars about the topic, which Napier (2005) considers to go further than their American contempories writing about American animation, simply because there is more depth to Japanese animation. Napier states that anime "clearly builds on previous high cultural traditions", and tackles contemporary issues in a way that traditional Hollywood fare does not; and it is this that attracts a increasing audience in the west. Napier calls anime "uncompromising" in its form, which shows in its dealing with the common subgenres of apocalyptic, the festival, and elgiac in anime.

Apocalyptic themes turn up frequently in anime; some of the most popular anime is apocalyptic fantasy. The most famous example of this is the movie Akira, which is the highest-grossing film in Japan. Another popular subgenre of anime is 'the festival', a literal translation of the japanese word "matsuri", although the word 'carnival' has also been applied. This refers to what Bakhtin (as cited in Napier, 2005) says is "the pathos of shifts and changes, of death and renewal", which is a particularly Japanese theme. Another anime subgenre, identified by Napier (2005), is the elegiac genre of anime, which deals with loss, grief and absence, often a mourning of a past time.

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