On March 1st, I’ll be at MIT attending a screening of Mamoru Hosoda’s Summer Wars, followed by a Q&A with Hosoda himself!
I will be recording the Q&A and will post it up as a podcast following the event. If you have any questions you would like me to ask the director, add them to the comments below!
MIT/Harvard Cool Japan Project presents “Summer Wars”
The New England premiere of the anime feature film “Summer Wars” (2009, Director Mamoru HOSODA, Madhouse / Kadokawa). The director and producer of the film, both based in Japan, will be present at the screening and will participate in a Q/A/discussion after the film.
The film explores the drama of high school romance, hackers in virtual worlds, the complexities of extended families, and the potentials of our hyper-connected present. Suitable for all ages but aimed at teens and adults, the film is a wonderful example of recent anime virtuosity by Japan’s hottest young director. Director Hosoda’s previous film, “The Girl Who Leapt Through Time” (2006), won many prizes including the Japan Academy Award for Best Animated Film.
35mm print, Japanese voices, English subtitles. Free and open to the public.
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.
