It Is A Mystery…

SUNY Albany has a course entitled “Introduction to Anime”:

This course is an introduction to some of the major genres of Japanese animation: sci-fi/cyberpunk/mecha, apocalypse, gothic/noir, romantic comedy, and epic. We will discuss anime’s distinctive paradigms and its narrative and visual styles with attention to anime’s development and circulation in postwar Japanese culture and to its contemporary commercial and cultural globalization. Students will be required to view all the films before we discuss them in class (generally a 2-hour feature a week) and to watch one entire TV series on their own over the course of the semester. The reading load for this class is heavy and some of the readings are difficult. If you are not interested in film theory, you will not like this class. Because anime is a new field of film studies, relatively speaking, some readings are in early film theory, from a time when critics and theorists were trying to articulate what was significant about film as a new medium for art and experience. Though we are not seeing photographs animated for the first time, the advent of anime is something like a new medium and a new aesthetic. Other readings are critical analyses of particular works. We read these both for the writer’s particular insights into the film and for ideas about what it might be important to notice about anime in general or specific genres of anime or about animation. We may also read about the history of producing animation in general to help us understand the production of anime in particular. There are short writing assignments about the films during the semester and a final exam that covers the films and the readings.

Tags: Anime, course, film theory, university

This entry was posted on Monday, October 29th, 2007 at 12:02 am and is filed under Anime, Real Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.