The media as resources in the
identity quest?
• Sexuality, Body Image, Consumerism
• Power, Technology and Aggression
• Nationality, Ethnicity, and Class
Globalization, Immigration, and
Social Diversity
• The national cultural curriculum: cultural
knowledge as the glue of society = the
cannon and the melting pot/ mosaic/
salad bowl
• The Canadian Broadcast System
Mandate: reflecting our lives, informing
our citizens, consolidating our values and
telling our stories to each other
Disneyfication: Colonization of the
Imagination or Market Liberation?
• Mouse ears vs coon-skin caps? A universal child
articulated around traditional children’s culture
values (folklore, wholesome play, music) or a
national mythology based on American values?
• Barbie and Americanization: The erosion of
cultural boundaries by mass media and
commercialization (the triumph of american
programming genres)
• G.I. Joe and action toys: resisting militarized
masculinity
•
McDonaldization and Cultural
Convergence :
Market Power: hamburgers
Ritzer, G.and
rationalization of the global mass
production and distribution system
• 30,000 outlets in 121 of 193 countries
• 43% of the global fast food market
• $ 41 billion annually spent at McDonalds
Resisting Cultural Colonization
•
•
•
•
Can con: the music industry
The book Industry
Subsidized national production
NFB The Sweater:
– Hybridity and multiculturalism
– Play culture and the bond within diversity
– But the fate of hockey? Product on the ice!
Sesame-ization (Hendershot)
• Glo-local culture: 50% own production
• Cinar scams
• Canadian Ambivalence: Joe’s rant and
Molson Canadian (we are what you aren’t)
• Are Carebears Canadian?
Canada as the globalization
laboratory?
• Toy industry: name a canadian toy or game?
– Reclaiming community: Parade of the Lost Souls
• Two questions about globalization of children’s
marketing
– Homogenization vs. mobility:
• Lemish study
– Hybridity vs. multiculturalism
• Mulan and Bollytoons
Gendered Fantasy: Lemish
2002
Globalized Children’s Culture:
implications of anime
confronting the West & Asia
Kaori Yoshida
at Simon Fraser University, March 31, 2005
Spirited Away (2001)
Animation:
fantasy & a site for global politics
• Association with “innocence” of childhood &
neutrality (“odorless” product)
• A site where political battles take place
• Fantasy world: experience differences &
“otherness” during establishing sense of “self” or
“subjectivity”
Aspects of the study
• How the imaginary of animation contributes
to or undermines the formation of national
identity, through recognition of “self” in
relation to the “other”
• The manner in which transnationally
traveling anime paradoxically operates with
national culture to challenge the Western
aesthetics
Background of anime as
globalized culture
(1) Disney discourse: Wonderful world of Disney
 Suppression of “others”
 Solidify the self-other binary opposition
- The Three Caballeros, Aladdin, Pocahontas
 Limitation of Disney power
- Failure & Criticism
Interaction of anime with “others”
What are signifiers and signified…?
Interaction of anime with “others”
• Anime as a hybrid text:
– Bhabha’s “hybridity”
• “the third space”
• Reinforcement of colonizer’s power vs “threat”
– Anime’s hybridity as “the third space”:
• celebration of the previously marginalized
• destabilization of power hierarchy
(1) Interaction with the US hegemony
“If you are the parent of an American child,
then you may well have noticed how Japanese
our kid culture has become. No set of image
has dominated childish desires quite so
handily over the last five years or so as the
amalgams of cuteness and power in the
Japanese-made cartoons…” (New York Times,
December 15, 2002)
“…. It’s (anime) outside the
mainstream….exotic, deferent, not
American…. [Compared to Disney,] it’s a
highly developed art form and we need to
get away from our candy coated Disney
films…. Anime can be watched at any age.
Most anime have plots and try to be
different.” (Napier 2000: 249)
De-Japanizing of characters
“Japanese animators look on the other side of
mirror, America” (Oshii 1996: 78)
“Before the Japanese came into contact with
Westerners, they depicted themselves with Asian
features and often smaller than life eyes. After the
war however, standards of beauty that many
Japanese aspired to has been those of the West.
Girl comics of the post-war began to depict
characters with the round eyes, long leggy look of
fashion models of Paris and New York.”
(Lu 1999 “Anime vs cartoons- A look at cultural identity”)
“The general consensus also among fans an
animators alike also is that if all Japanese
characters are drawn looking Asian, the
show becomes very boring visually.”
(Lu 1999 “Anime vs cartoons”)
“I also know that it is the expressed desire of
the non-blonde Other for those
characteristics that are seen as the
quintessential markers of racial aesthetic
superiority that perpetuate and uphold
white supremacy.”
(bell hooks 1995: 29)
(2) Interaction with “other” Asia: implication of
representation of “similar other”
– Geographical proximity, cultural affinity?
– Historical conflicts within Asia
– “Asianism”: strategic auto-Orientalism?
• Experience of shared “Asian modernity”
• Leo Ching’s study of Asian pop culture
(Oshin, Doraemon)
• Lag between Japan and the “other” Asia
Doraemon
Miyazaki’s anime:
hybridity & Japaneseness
(1) Hybridized characters
& “Japanese-ness”
– Nausicaä of the Valley of
the Wind (1984)
– Kiki’s Delivery Service
(1989)
Celebration of “others”
(Spirited Away 2001)
(2) Re-discovery of Japanese-ness or
self-alienation?
– Re-introducing Japanese
tradition (Japanese-ness)
– De-familiarlization of
“Japanese Thing”
•
Princess Mononoke (1997)
– Setting: 13-14C Japan
– Characters: Samurai Warriors
Japanese-looking protagonists
– Traditional houses, scenery
Spirited Away
Spirited Away
(3) “Other” Asia in Miyazaki’s hybridized anime:
representation of Japanese superiority?
– Importance of the “past” & Japan’s association
with Asia
– Visual: absence of Western-ness; “other” Asia in
Japan’s “past”
Vivid color plates, screens: Are these Japanese or “other” Asian?
Dragon in Spirited Away
Conclusion
(1) The phenomena of anime: the
empowerment of local cultures which leads
to resist the global (or the West, the US)
(2) Intensification of cultural hybridity in anime
text
(3) Miyazaki’s anime:
– problematizes the notion of Western
aesthetic homogenization
– exposes (implicit) power relations between
Japan and “other” Asia