Anime Analysis Essay

The effects of making Anime ‘odorless’ and devoid of culture has the opposite effect of what people in Japan wanted. Many scholars from Japan had hoped Anime would be a gateway to getting foreign interested in Japanese culture. Antonia Levi studied how over the years, how many North Americans have no interested in Japan and its culture even though most Animes have many references to Japanese customs and history. Levi researched different Animes in both the Japanese and American version to see how ‘odorless’ it was and the differences between both versions. Also, she examined fans reactions to learning at the Anime is based on Japanese culture. And in the absence of culture, western traditions began to integrated itself into Anime, making it

Fennel et al. believed that Anime can contain heavy cultural/racial influences depending on the content shown. This study was created to evaluate how fans understood the racial and gender meaning within the two different Animes. The two Animes that were used are Bleach, a very well-known male-oriented fantasy anime and The Wallflower, a more female-oriented romantic comedy Anime. Both Animes were examined by the researchers for the race, status, and gender of characters, stereotypes, and the effect of race and gender towards the plot (Fennell, Liberato, Hayden, Fujino, 2012). Next, Fennel et al researched different threads on two online forums to gain insight on if fans related the Anime characters to any racial/ethnic groups, if fans saw characters portraying certain gender roles common to people in or outside Japan and if fans saw them as fictional or not. Their results found Bleach to be more ethnically diverse than The Wallflower, as The Wallflower characters were mostly white with only two darker-skinned characters who behaved in stereotypical ways. Bleach however, contain a variety of hair colors, eye colors, skin colors, body types, etc. amongst its characters. On the forum discussion

A large part of it is due to the fact that most of Japan is homogenous. Unlike other first-world countries, Japan is 98.5% Japanese, with most minorities being Korean or Chinese. Not only are their minority populations small, it’s mainly people from other Asian nations and this is transmitted into Anime. When foreigners appear in anime usually as side characters, it’s typical someone from the United States or Europe, and the typical blond-haired, blue-eyed person because that is usually the nationalities of foreigners in Japan who are not Asian. It’s rare to see other races aside from white in anime, and occasionally tan. Plus, they are typical appear and expressed in stereotypical images. For instance, Hetalia, one of Japan’s most diverse anime, portrays different ethnicities of different countries. It originally started out as a web comic but later developed into a short film anime. One of the cons of this Anime though, one criticism of this is that Hetalia is purposely stereotypical. So the countries are appearances, attitudes and actions are based on stereotypical perspectives. For example, United States or America is a tall, white blond-haired blue eyed young man chugging McDonald hamburgers and proclaiming how he’s ‘The Hero!’. Quite interesting considering most white Americans have brown hair and equally probable to have brown eyes (Malloy, 2008) and hates McDonalds. Also, in the