Procrastination

As you may have noticed, the whole blog thing is not going as well as I had initially hoped. I have been having trouble staying focused, and it got me thinking that maybe there is something to this little tidbit of news:

The Interweb is making us stupid!

After not too much introspection, I find that my attention span does indeed seem a bit diminished compared to what it once was. It takes me much longer at 40 to read a book for example than it took me as a 16 year old, when I would devour 500 pages in a couple of days. Now I am doing well if I finish a book in under a month.

Anyhow, this doesn't have much to do with Japanese fantasy... or does it? Well, it actually turns out that my first exposure to the medium of anime, which contains plenty of fantasy, was the 1977 film by Rankin Bass based on what remains one of my all-time favorite books: The Hobbit. 

An Unexpected Party

While technically not an "anime" per se, the entire animation staff for this feature was Japanese. A quick glance at the above picture shows many of the tell-tale signs of Japanese animation (large eyes being the most obvious). The setting of course is undeniably Western fantasy based however.

Although derided by many as deviating too far from the source material and leaving out important scenes, the animated version of The Hobbit remains a favorite from my childhood. A few short years later, Japanese animators were involved in the film adaptation of Peter S. Beagle's The Last Unicorn. Again, the artwork is very much anime.

My next exposure to Japanese fantasy via animation, and probably the first time I was aware that said animation was called "anime", would have been sometime in the early 80's. I'll take a look at some of these classics in my next update. 

Japanese fantasy?

So the program I am currently taking at Evergreen State is primarily involved in an exploration of Japanese fantasy and the grotesque throughout the history of the country. Although it is a broad subject, I did have certain expectations going in. I thought the focus of the course would concern folklore, mythology and fantastic tales of samurai (which I wrongly equated with the romanticized European knight) facing otherworldly foes.

In actuality, the program focuses more on what is commonly referred to as magical realism, which is sometimes considered a sub-genre of fantasy. Many of the assigned readings have had a touch of the surreal or muted elements of the fantastic, but these are not necessarily what I myself consider true fantasy.

On a whim, I decided to do a Google search using the term "Japanese Fantasy" and see what the consensus on the subject is amongst the multitudes on the internet. To my surprise, there does not actually seem to be a consensus of any sort. The top 25 search results yielded everything from a list of Japanese fantasy authors, manga, a Japanese fantasy baseball team (of all things) and pornography. An image search on Google using the same search criteria brings up a large number of pictures which are either outright erotica or bordering on such.

I then refined my search, adding the word "literature". Surprisingly, the very program I am taking at Evergreen came up in the top 10 search results. I have come to the conclusion that the fantasy genre as it exists in America and other western countries is almost absent in Japan outside of manga, anime and video games. Based on this conclusion (which may be erroneous), I will begin exploring some of the themes and elements I associated with Japanese fantasy prior to taking this class in an attempt to connect them with my new understanding (or lack thereof) of the subject.

Finally, I have to apologize for the dry nature of this post, and I promise to try and make future postings more entertaining and frequent!

It begins...

I actually joined Blogger a few years back to follow the ramblings of several other individuals. I never intended to start my own blog, as I have always felt it is somewhat pretentious. Who, other than a few immediate friends and family (and this itself is questionable) could possibly be interested in what I have to say?

The answer to that question is probably "no one". You are most likely asking yourself at this point why I am blogging then. The plain and simple answer is that I am doing it for a class project. We are required to come up with an artistic presentation of some sort for this project, and I long ago came to the realization that I am:

1. Not a very good artist despite my best efforts
2. Have no other artistic talents to speak of other than the ability to play the clarinet, which I haven't done in many years. No one wants to hear that shit anyway!

Future posts will concern Japanese fantasy, as that is what my class is ostensibly about. Finally, I have to credit another student with giving me the idea for this project (nope... wasn't even my idea). So thank you!