My girlfriend Ashley and I are hosting a dinner on Thursday evening before Anime Expo proper at an izakaya in Little Tokyo.
All the info you need and the RSVP form can be found here.
We really want to meet people local to LA, but we’d love to meet new people going to the con anyway, so we have some friends to hang out with. Check out the meetup page!
Friday July 1
Uncool Japan: The Trials & Tribulations of Japanese Pop Culture
6:30 pm in LP4
While fans in America consider Japan a pop culture mecca, otaku remain undesirable in Japan. This panel looks at the history and current developments around otaku and the “Japan Cool”-ification of Japanese media abroad. We’ll look at the history of the fandom and today’s anime consumer culture of Comiket, moé girls, and Akihabara; the Japanese government’s attempts to regulate otaku culture at home while promoting it internationally; and the struggles of anime trying to survive abroad. The panel also uses anime and manga about otaku as a lens for understanding these cultural issues.
New:
Anime Genesis Live: Benu’s Violent Torpedo of Moé
9:00pm in LP3
I’ll be making a guest appearance on Benu’s live podcast. Come say Hi!
Saturday July 2
Anime Intro & Ending Themes
10:30am in LP5
When we watch anime, our minds glaze over the animation that begins and ends our favorite series. But anime intros and outros are more important than you think! These small clips help sell series, promote bands, summarize plots, and emphasize important details. We’ll show many of the best and worst anime intro and ending themes on the market, the trends that flow through these promotional songs, and their importance in the context of anime’s history and popularity.
Sunday July 3
Anime Tune-Up
9:00am in LP5
Animation in anime comes in many styles, and a good lens to look at them is in anime about music. This panel takes a look at the whole gamut of musical anime — Beck, Nodame Cantibile, NANA, To-Y, Gravitation, and many more — to see what musical anime reveals about animation, the importance of precise animation (and how animators tend to ignore it), the creation of “fake” bands and songs, and how music works in the adaptation of manga to anime.
“Open-Source Culture” and the Cult of Hatsune Miku
AX Anime & Manga Studies Symposium Open Session 4
10:30am in LP5 (LACC 408B)
An academic analysis of Vocaloid as a case study of peer production in the creative industries.
AX 2011 Anime and Manga Studies Symposium
(Los Angeles, California, July 1 – July 4, 2011)
Friday, July 1
2:30 p.m. – 3:30 p.m.
Keynote Address: Prof. Ian Condry (Comparative Media Studies, MIT)
3:30 p.m. – 4:30 p.m.
Roundtable Discussion 1
Theoretical perspectives on Japanese visual culture
* Samantha Close (University of California, Irvine)
* Amanda Landa (University of Texas at Austin)
* Gino Zarrinfar (University of Hawaii Manoa)
8:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.
Open Session 1
Andrea Gilroy (University of Oregon)
* This place is a nightmare: Globalization as horror in Katsuhiro Otomo’s Domu
Casey Brienza (University of Cambridge)
* Manga Revolution or logical evolution? Field theory on the rise and
demise of Tokyopop’s U.S. publishing programme
Saturday, July 2
12:00 – 1:30 p.m.
Open Session 2
Sandra Aragona (Claremont Graduate University)
Sherrie Bakelar (University of Nevada, Las Vegas)
* Between Yasashii and Bushido: The balancing power of warrior mothers in anime
Annie Manion (University of Southern California)
* Modernity and pre-war Japanese animation
* Deborah Scally (Southern Methodist University)
Cogito, ergo anime: Some thoughts on using anime and manga in the classroom
3:30 p.m. – 5:00 p.m.
Open Session 3
Paul Cheng (University of California, Riverside)
* History, memory and aesthetics in animation: Isao Takahata’s Grave
of the Fireflies
Kukhee Choo (Tulane University)
* “Cool Japan”: Soft power in the 21st century
Gino Zarrinfar (University of Hawaii Manoa)
* The Guyver and societies of control
Sunday, July 3
10:30 a.m. – 12 p.m.
Open Session 4
Samantha Close (University of California, Irvine)
* Real ninjas make AMV’s! Anime through the eyes of vidders
Northrop Davis (University of South Carolina)
* Title to be confirmed
Forrest Greenwood (University of Southern California)
* “Past fungibility”: Examining the speculative value of history in the doujin works of Takeshi Nogami
Alex Leavitt (University of Southern California)
* “Open-source culture”" and the cult of Hatsune Miku [this one is mine!]
3:30pm -4:30pm
Roundtable Discussion 2
Teaching, writing and thinking about anime/manga: New directions, new
opportunities
* Northrop Davis (University of South Carolina)
* Druann Pagliassotti (California Lutheran University)
* Kim Rudolph (University of Oklahoma)
* Deborah Scally (Southern Methodist University)
4:30pm – 5:00pm
Closing Remarks
Writing about otaku: Lessons from fandom, academia, and beyond
Lawrence Eng (Anime and Manga Research Circle)