Japanese Visual Culture: Introduction to Anime

4 credits · Undergraduate

This course is an introduction to Japanese animation, or anime, from its earliest forms (in relationship to manga) to recent digital culture, art, and games. We will analyze and study mainly animated feature films and read the critical work they inspired. We will address such issues as cultural memory and apocalyptic imagination, robots and the post-human, cities, nature, and the transnational; gender, shojo, and the aesthetics of "cute," as well as consider specific issues in the theoretical understanding of anime within technology and media theory.