Japanese animation, AKA anime, might be filled with large-eyed maidens, way cool robots, and large-eyed, way cool maiden/robot hybrids, but it often shows a level of daring, complexity and creativity not typically found in American mainstream animation. And the form has spawned some clear masterpieces from Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira to Mamoru Oishii’s Ghost in the Shell to pretty much everything that Hayao Miyazaki has ever done. Anime has a far longer history than you might th...ink; in fact, it was at the vanguard of Japan’s furious attempts to modernize in the early 20th century. The oldest surviving example of Japanese animation, Namakura Gatana (Blunt Sword), dates back to 1917, though much of the earliest animated movies were lost following a massive earthquake in Tokyo in 1923. As with much of Japan’s cultural output in the first decades of the 20th Century, animation from this time shows artists trying to incorporate traditional stories and motifs in a new modern form. openculture/2014/06/early-japanese-animations-the-origins-of-anime-1917-1931.html
Posted on: Wed, 04 Jun 2014 18:03:37 +0000
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