I didn’t blog at all in July: a failure on my part. However, I’m looking to change that. Hopefully I’ll get a few articles up during the month of August.
But in the meantime, here’s an update of projects I’ve been working on:
- Recently attended Otakon in Baltimore, MD. I gave two talks — What’s the Point of Anime Opening & Ending Themes? and Experiments in the Anime Industry: noitaminA — and moderated another Anime in Academia panel. All three went amazingly well and they were well-received. You can even check out a write-up of my noitaminA panel over at Anime News Network (here).
- I wrote an article for the second issue of the Animerca fanzine! My essay focuses on how Toonami was influential in shaping a very new and different generation of anime fans within the United States. You can read more about the magazine here. And double bonus: it will be sold at Summer Comiket 78!
- This is unofficial, but will be announced soon: I’m working on an English translation and international distribution of the Animerca fanzine! More details to come soon.
- And I haven’t put any work into mediaflo.ws, but I am hoping to begin work on that in September or October.
So, that’s about it. I’m really looking forward to New York Anime Festival in October! And in the meantime, please be on the lookout for some more analytical articles in addition to actual anime reviews and some audio podcasts as well!
This article is an attempt to organize thoughts around Otakon 2008′s epic opening animation as well as the recent Global Shinkai Day over at Crunchyroll.
Brief History of Fan Animation
Ever since I first started talking about anime on panels at conventions (or just telling people about it in academia), I’ve always shown the famous Gainax productions, Daicon III and Daicon IV. These short animated works were exhibited at the annual Japanese Science Fiction Convention in 1981 and 1983, respectively.
Daicon III, 1981
Daicon IV, 1983
Each video was drawn by hand by a group of friends that would later form the animation studio, Gainax. In other words, real production studios did not produce the shorts, but fans of anime who took their creative capacity to a new level. Not only did these fans produce an entirely novel creation, but they pulled from popular interests of the fandom (the fandom at that time centered in global [and highly American] science fiction and Japanese animation) and created homages in celebration of the medium (a good example for American fans is the reference to Star Wars, which is evident in Darth Vader’s appearance in Daicon IV).
Eventually the Daicon animations influenced fans on such a global scale that this genre of “opening animation” spread to American conventions. In 1992, at Anime Expo in California (one of the earliest occurrences, though of course not the first, of anime conventions in the United States), a few fans at Running Ink Animation Productions produced the fifteen-minute Bayscape 2042.
At Anime Expo 1993, the same fans exhibited another hand-drawn, cel-to-film, short animation called Conscience.
Conscience begins with an artistic tip-of-the-hat to the entire history of space-based mecha series, with a scan of space debris followed by distant explosions and a parade of originally-designed fighter ships. The story progresses to a narrative following a young woman on the surface of a planet and her discovery of a princely man and her own fighter pilot, with which she joins the war in the sky above. Like the Daicon series, Conscience pays homage to a American history of fan interest in Japanese animation. For instance, although a bit feeble, the artists attempt an quick imitation of the classic Itano Circus about halfway through the short.
YouTube currently hosts a few other fan-created opening animations, such as that of AmeCon 2007, which was a digital production by Hel & Scott of the Makenai Team.
In contrast to the previously-mentioned shorts, the AmeCon opening animation follows the form of an anime episode, rather than adhering to what appears to be a trend of Anime Music Video-styled animations. An apparent reason might be that the video, exhibited in 2007, reflects the influences of a generation of fans immersed in a completely different fan culture: one generally removed from science fiction and the quest to obtain any importations of anime from Japan, and one now steeped in a viewership familiar with anime usually broadcast on television and conventions as a common phenomenon across the nation.
