Is it a high or low cultural genre, according to Napier (2005)? What are some of its subgenres?
Popular genres’ is a film genre that is mainstream within society,
although the author of the piece could not be a mainstream author. Popular
genres are normally divided into two different cultures, high and low. High
culture consists of wealth and mainstream literature (accepted by society) and
low culture is the lower wealth, a new canon and most likely the popular genre.
Princess Mononoke (1997), written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki, is
a Japanese anime film. It is based Ashitaka’s journey to find a cure for the
Tatarigami’s curse, a curse that he obtained with after saving the city from an
infected wild boar. On this journey Ashitaka finds himself in the middle of a
war between the forest gods and Tatara, an iron/mining village. During this
quest Ashitaka meets San, the princess of the Mononoke’s.
Napier states in her book Anime:
from Akira to Howl’s Moving Castle that “Japanese animation, or ‘anime’, as
it is now usually referred to in both Japanese and the West, is a phenomenon of
popular culture. This means that much (some would agree most) of its products
are short-lived, rising and falling due to popular taste and the demands of the
hungry market place”. Napier saying this means that Princess Mononoke is a
popular genre film and high cultured. Princess Mononoke is a high culture film
because it relates to high cultural traditions and also includes an amount of
academic allusions to current societal issues. In Princess Mononoke the main
plot is about a girl who lives in the forest with the wolves, also known as the
Mononoke’s, who is helped by a prince to stop the ironers/miners from
destroying the forest. The ideas between the plot are similar to real life
problems within society and the environment. I think that the relation to the
mining and wanting to get rid of the ‘night walker’ in Princess Mononoke and
the effects of mining in New Zealand are harmful to the environment, as well as
people being greedy and wanting more. In Princess Mononoke the villagers of the
mining colony get greedy about killing the night walker/forest spirit.
Napier continues to say how the culture which anime belongs to at
present is a “popular” or “mass” culture in Japan, and in America it exists as
a “sub” culture. A subgenre is a subdivision of a genre of literature. High
culture has the subgenres to “affect a wider variety of audience in more ways
than some less accessible types of high cultural exchange. In other words,
anime clearly appears to be a cultural phenomenon worthy of being taken
seriously, both sociologically and aesthetically”. Subgenres are an aspect of
the high/low culture to in order to relate to the audience.
Napier, S. J. (2005). Why Anime?, Anime and Local/Global Identity. In Anime from Akira to Howl's moving castle: Experiencing contemporary Japanese animation. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Ok Sophie. This does not read as clearly as your last post. However, you make some good points. Be careful to make clear what is your opinion and what is from the secondary readings. You clearly understand what a sub-genre is - it would have been nice if you had listed a few of the sub-genres of Anime.
ReplyDelete