Hayley Schaeffer (Seminar in Manga and Anime Blog)

Reading I Saw It , by Keiji Nakazawa was an incredibly flooring and informative experience- it is manga like this that really proves comic/sequential art's societal and historical importance. I had heard of this manga in the past- from watching a documentary about the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in my U.S. History class back in high school. Interestingly, I felt that the manga made the event feel drastically more real and horrifying than the live-action documentary (not to say the documentary was bad- there is just such a stark difference between being fed facts about an event, and seeing the event through the eyes of an actual witness). On that note, I find it very frustrating and saddening that so many people, especially Americans, are unaware of the scope and disastorous toll that this event had on Japan all these years later. I hope that Keiji's experience finds its way to more people in the future- because we as a society need to face this, and remember what happe...

For my presentation, I would like to discuss the some of the works and stylistic approaches of director Satoshi Kon . I specifically want to talk about 2 of his films (each with very different tones, but both equally as great!) Perfect Blue , and Tokyo Godfathers .

Ayako is a Seinen manga created by the prolific Osamu Tezuka in the early 1970s. It is the story of one incredibly dysfunctional family's downward spiral into suffering due to greed, rampant misogyny, and dark secrets. The story is quick to flush out any glimmers of hope or relate-ability in its cast and situations, and focuses on morbid themes of rape and murder alongside the gritty politics of the time. While the story is meant to be an overarching metaphor for the state of Japan during reconstruction after WWII, it is still astonishing how little some of these characters act like realistic human beings (and that's not really a criticism! It's just an observation that put me off at first). Even Ayako, the Tenge family's sole 'innocent' survivor, felt the most inhuman by the end of the story- she became a product of all the family's vices mixed together into one woman. I read the majority of Ayako alone on my couch, but for the later half my roommates w...