Tag: Toshiyuki Inoue

A sociology of the webgen

~ matteowatz ~ 4 Comments

Retracing the social, artistic and intellectual evolution of web-generation animation, this article first introduces the web-gen in more detail and examines its social dynamics, focusing on the networks that made it possible. Then, it moves to the web-gen’s relationship to technology, retracing the emergence of digital animation in anime and its role in a socio-aesthetic shift. This shift is afterward investigated in its critical formulation through close reading of some of the web-gen’s key texts. Finally, I interrogate the web-gen’s legacy, illustrating how its practices spread throughout the Japanese animation industry.

Ghibli outside Ghibli, 1986-1991

~ matteowatz ~ 1 Comment

While the idea of a unified “Ghibli aesthetic” or “style” is debatable at best, it makes no doubt that all the animators mentioned here brought something different to their work outside the studio. The first element was quality, a result both of their talent and of the formation they had received before or after they started collaborating with Ghibli. The second element is more difficult to grasp, and is closer to what one may refer to as a “style”: something in common to almost all of their approaches to animation. The goal of this article is not only to point out its characteristics and evolution, but also to situate it within a wider context: indeed, the period between 1986 and 1991 is a key one in anime history, as it saw the emergence of a new school of thought and style: realism. Although quantitatively minor, the work of those 6 Ghibli-related animators in fact played a central role in the spread of the realist aesthetic.

The rise of realism

~ matteowatz ~ 3 Comments

However dominant it became in the 80s, the Kanada style was never the only aesthetic of anime. Besides the heavily stylized motion of the Kanada school and the round, cute characters that characterized the lolicon boom at the start of the decade, another very different kind of animation was starting to find its footing: realism.