Jonathan Clements' articles on Archiving Movements

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Prog-Knife
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Joined: Fri Jul 10, 2020 7:37 pm
Anime Fan Since: 1995

Jonathan Clements' articles on Archiving Movements

Post by Prog-Knife »

About 19 days ago volume 2 of the Archiving Movements essay collections got published. I noticed Jonathan Clements covered them, though I also remember vol. 1 made the rounds on retro anime twitter at one point. Didn't see anyone post them here so I'll post 'em. There's not a lot of academic stuff on anime. There is a bit like Mechademia, Jonathan Clements' work, Matt Alt's work, etc. but yeah . . . Each article has a download link at the bottom. Also not sure if this is the right section, hey seem to mostly focus on anime but as one of the articles say they're open to and cover all visual media.
Archiving Movements: Short Essays on Materials of Anime and Visual Media, edited by Minori Ishida and Kim Joon Yang, is related to a patchwork of international initiatives – an anime archiving project at Niigata University, an exhibition in Singapore, and a brief mini-conference in Stockholm. It seems to have been produced as an argument towards how Niigata should proceed with its research, starting with what materials should be preserved, and how they could be studied.

For the sake of argument, the materials presented in the exhibition, and discussed in the conference, were from the Gainax classic Wings of Honneamise (a.k.a. Royal Space Force), made at the tail end of the cel-and-pencil days, but also with the last great gasp of Bubble-era boondoggle money. As chronicled elsewhere, not the least in the memoirs of Toshio Okada, Wings of Honneamise had a gloriously busy, high-quality production history, fought over by its passionate creators, its grim money-man, and distributors and exhibitors determined to turn it into something that it wasn’t. Even the alternate names denote the behind-the-scenes battle over whether interfering producers, determined to call it “The Something of Something”, would get their way, along with an airline sponsor adamant that “Wings” should be in the title.
https://blog.alltheanime.com/books-archiving-anime/
Now available as a free PDF from the University of Niigata, the second volume of Minori Ishida and Kim Joon Yang’s Archiving Movements continues to assemble interesting articles about the world of Japanese animation – the editors are keen to stress that their journal is open to discussions of many forms of visual media, but are plainly enjoying the opportunity to dedicate much of their page-space, again, to anime, for as long as they can get away with it.

This issue features a long piece by journeyman TV director Hideo Watanabe, veteran of Fist of the North Star (pictured) and Voltron, about the centrality of storyboarding to animation. He interviews Wolf Boy Ken director Tomoharu Katsumata, who at first appears to contradict him, telling him that there is “no difference” between an animation director and a live-action director. One soon gets the sense that the two directors are talking at cross-purposes, partly because they have slightly different ideas about the point they are trying to make – Katsumata, perhaps punching up in a decades-old conflict with snooty detractors, is keen to stress that anime is just as valid as live-action film; Watanabe wants to assign it a special and unique status.
https://blog.alltheanime.com/books-archiving-anime-2/
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