On Thu, 1 Feb 2001 02:54:36 -0500 Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu>
writes:
>
>
>
>
> to be about $500,000....Anime cartoons are so much cheaper because
> they are more simply animated than their American cousins -- their
> halting style requires fewer actual drawings per episode. Further,
> most anime programs have already been produced for Japanese
> television, which takes the burden of the initial production costs
> off of the domestic network that buys it. The low cost and high
> ratings of 'Pokemon,' especially among boys, were exactly what the
> WB, Fox and Cartoon Network were looking for. The anime shows fit
> not only their ratings needs but also those of increasingly
> niche-oriented advertisers hoping to sell boys on action figures --
> many based on the anime programs themselves -- cereals and snack
> foods" (Jim Rutenberg, "Violence Finds a Niche in Children's
> Cartoons," _New York Times_ 28 January 2001: Sec. 1, Pg. 1).
>
> With the exception of the recent surge in popularity of cheap
> Japanese Anime & HK movies (+ longer-standing audiences for Brit Pop
>
> & so-called "world music"), the American cultural markets are as
> resistant to imports as ever.
A good question is why they were a bit less resistant to European films back in the '60s and "70s. After all back then directors like Bergman, Godard, Truffaut, Fellini, and Pasolini were all able to enjoy relatively healthy boxoffice in the US. Outside of the HK cinema there doesn't seem to be anybody who can penetrate the US market now a days.
>
> A couple of years ago, I showed Fassbinder's _The Marriage of Maria
> Braun_ to my students in one of my courses. One of the students
> complained to me that the characters mainly spoke German & the film
> had subtitles....
That is the kind of thing that makes me glad that I earn my living doing software engineering rather than university teaching! -:)
>
> Will the "modernist canon," be it literary or cinematic, survive in
> America? It won't, left simply to the market & "education" reduced
> to the status of a consumer product. With regard to Jazz, Justin
> wrote a while ago: "I promote it because I hope to get other people
> as excited about this wonderful stuff as I am, and to help keep it
> around in a living form." I feel the same way about cinema &
> literature. It's a tremendous loss to today's college students that
>
> most of them will float through higher education without being
> exposed to the best of the modernists on the Left (or the Right for
> that matter), as well as other canonical works of cinema,
> literature,
> philosophy, etc.
Yes, one might thing that this is what a university education is supposed to do for students but universities have become so market driven that they rarely make the attempt now a days. Allen Bloom was a reactionary pig but he did have a point concerning what has happened to US higher education.
>In contrast, even without Dennis Robert Redmond
> promoting Japanese Anime & video games, many of them have already
> been immersed in them. Why champion _what the market has already
> given them in quantities_, when there are works & traditions that
> _might die or become at best museum pieces_ without passionate
> advocacy on the part of everyone who has learned something from
> them?
>
> The ruling class & governing elite want you to watch TV, analyze
> cheap Japanese Anime, & do "cultural studies." The ruling class &
> governing elite want to keep the best of the humanities to their
> children alone (upon whom good & expensive education is generally
> wasted),
That of course has long been their attitude towards higher education. That seemed to have a changed a bit following WW II when the GI Bill helped to make possible mass higher education. After WW II, the ruling class became convinced that an expansion of access to higher education was necessary to help produce masses of managers and professional workers for the postwar econpmic boom. The rise of the student movement with all of its associated turmoil back in the '60s seems to have gone a long way to convincing the ruling class that they had to be a bit more careful about the type of education that was to be offered to working class students. Hence, the increasing emphasis placed upon vocational training from the 1970s on. Now the ruling class had become convinced that mass higher education ought to be specifically geared to training students in specific job skills rather than providing them with a broad liberal education. That was thought to have made students too uppity for our rulers' tastes.
> consigning working-class children to vocational training
> (even at four-year colleges & universities) plus a little bit of
> "media literacy" which helps them develop a properly ironic attitude
>
> to _all_ forms of authority, legitimate or illegitimate, & hence
> become disinclined to stir themselves in the hope of making a
> political difference.
>
> Yoshie
>
> P.S. As for moralism, there is nothing more moralistic than Anime
> made for children (& bad old Westerns perhaps).
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