Daijoubu

I noticed that the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston will be showing the movie Grave of the Fireflies on February 11 with a panel discussion with three “experts in anime.” The panelists are John W. Dower, Roland Kelts and Susan J. Napier.

Dower is a professor who has written about wartime Japan and the aftermath of the Second World War. According to the MIT website, he “has broken new ground through his scholarly use of visual materials and other expressions of popular culture in reexamining Japanese and US-Asian history.” While I might not think of him as an expert in contemporary animation, he certainly knows the wartime context for this particular film and the use of popular culture sources for investigating historical events. As for anime in general, I think many fans are aware of Napier’s place as an academic specializing in anime. She’s looked into anime itself and also its fandom in the US. Kelts’ book, Japanamerica, is the work of a reporter, rather than an academic, so he will perhaps provide a slightly different viewpoint for this panel. I’ve only skimmed his book, but he looks at the impact of anime on America, including both the fan and corporate aspects. (Interestingly, there was an earlier showing at the Freer Gallery in Washington D.C. in December with the same panelists except for manga expert Frederik L. Schodt in place of Kelts).

This has got me thinking about panels. Last year I was on a panel about anime blogging. I recall that jpmeyer was very talkative on it (LOOOL–I still wish I had said more, but a lot of what I might have said was already being said already). Anyway, if you have three people who have similar things to say, you might get less out of it than if you have people from totally different backgrounds. I wonder what an ideal panel of “experts” might look like. For anime blogging, I’d like to see a straight episode summary blogger, a more editorializing blogger and maybe some other kind of blogger–maybe a troll, hehe. If the panel was on the otaku cultural world in general, you could have an anime “expert,” a manga “expert” and maybe a fan “expert.” I think an interesting panel might include representatives of anime fandom from different parts of the world, say the US, Singapore and Japan itself. Then you could get a good idea of how fans’ perceptions of anime differ in different parts of the world and how approaches to things like cosplay and fanart contrast.

In the case of Grave of the Fireflies, you have a specific movie to focus on. Obviously it’s good to have panelists who are experts in the history of the period depicted in the film, the history of anime and its role in Japanese society as a storytelling method, and the context of anime’s reception in America. A film critic (Roger Ebert has praised the movie) might be a good addition to such a panel as well, because Hotaru no Haka is a bit of a special case: it is not much like the majority of anime, more like a very serious film that happens to be animated. It seems like less of a film to put into any kind of “otaku” context and more one to compare to other world cinema. I think a good question for the panel might relate to the impact the film has as an animated feature vs if it were a live action one.