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More Anime College and University Courses Being Offered
Ninja Master Gara writes "Anime News Network reports New York University is offering a new courses on the anime industry and culture. Anime is slowly expanding from University Clubs into mainstream college courses, many of which begin at the 'What is anime?' level. Several Universities and Community Colleges already offer similar courses, or incorporate anime into existing studies." If any school decides to offer a course on the Gundam series, I'd be happy to teach a class.
This reminds me of the Star Trek courses that several colleges have had over the years. What a laugh riot. One syllabus I saw was basically watching 3 select star trek episodes a week, discussing them in class, and writing 5 papers analyzing them over the course of the semester. But still, that would be a great way to fulfill a GenEd humanities requirement or whatnot.
Repeal the DMCA!
I go to Western Washington University in Washington state and the Art History 270 course (India, Japan, China) taught by Momi Naughton takes an entire lecture period to talk about anime with a self-professed anime maniac, whose name I forget. He goes way back to influences such as Hokusai and brings basically the entire span of what we learned in the class and how if affected the development of anime. Quite interesting...
sig.
At the University of Texas at *Austin* last fall was a full course focusing on just anime taught by Dr. Susan Napier of the Asian Studies Center there. (Dr. Napier did a guest lecture at Dr. Gossin's course last spring when we taught "Nausicaa" for the second time.) Dr. Napier has been invited as a guest lecturer at Harvard this spring and will be reteaching the anime course there. Yes, they're actually officially studying anime at *Harvard*! (Prepare for hell to free over after classes start there in a few weeks..... )
As for the complaint about the lack of college level books about anime (in English, that is) that's true. But Dr. Napier has completed her book "Anime from 'Akira' to 'Princess Mononoke'" and it will be out sometime this spring or summer. This will be the first college level analysis/literary criticism of anime available in English.
Anyway, it would be a fun paper to write. Although, if I were teaching the course, I would open it up to a transformation sequence from any magical girl anime (Hime-chan's Ribbon, Card Captor Sakura, Saint Tail, Devil Hunter Yohko, etc). It might also be interesting to speculate about why animators decide to use the transformations with such repetition. Is it simply to reduce the amount of new animation per episode or do they think it provides continuity between episodes?
When I was in college (www.vt.edu) a few years back, I attended some of the local anime clubs from time to time.
I say some because there were three total university recgonized, bona-fide, clubs at that school. They each had separate meetings, which mostly comprised of 6-hour long screenings of non-stop anime. That's 18-hours a week, of nothing but the best in Japanese sci-fi, drama, comedy, fantasy and the occasional kids show.
Now was was really interesting about all this interest in Anime, was not the shows themselves, but rather the interest in Japanese culture they fostered. The clubs featured regular weekend clinics for language and culture courses and interest groups. A few club members even took trips to Japan regularily.
The fact that universities are starting to recognize this kind of love for culture (not just entertainment) seems like a perfect way to diversify the curriculum. It's about time!
Come on...this series needs a course devoted to it. I mean mechs, spirituality, politics, culture? I'm sure everyone else here will probably either say Lain or Neon Genisis Evangelion.
of course...the anime art form is something that should be studied. for one, it offers some great content and social/political messages that wouldn't be accepted in "mainstream" media. second, artwork and story telling go hand in hand. after all, isn't that what artwork (of any form) is supposed to do, to speak to the viewer and convey some message/story?
anyone who flames me saying that hollywierd puts out decent artwork hasn't been to the theaters lately. most of it is tripe. it's entertaining yes, but it's still tripe in an artistic sense. of course there is the rare gem out there, but it's not often that people can (or care to) recognize the difference. for this reason film classes in general (including anime classes) are a way to help people gain some perspective and recognize art for art, and not just art for the sake of entertainment.
after my first film class i couldn't watch any movie in "pan and scan" anymore. it helped me understand composition, writing, story telling, and substance...something which is lacking in most of the "modern" world.
-frozen
I'm not always the brightest pixel in the stream