Doing things with anime materials: Approaching Japanese animation away from the screen

Japanese Anime - 'away from the screen'

Anime – or the lineage of cel-animation that emerged in post-war Japan along with the medium of television – is today one of the most successful Japanese cultural exports and a rare example of non-Western media with a truly global audience. As anime acquires new followers worldwide and its production artefacts become objects of collection by fans, museums and cultural institutions, the question of archiving, preserving and exhibiting such materials has emerged as a new matter of concern in Japan and beyond.

Celebrating the small collection of anime materials held at the Durham University Oriental Museum, this event will bring together researchers, practitioners, curators, artists and fans to interrogate the shifting meaning of such collections and what different methods and approaches to production materials can bring to the study of animation ‘away from the screen’.

• What does it mean to collect and exhibit anime materials that, for their disposable and unattributable nature, were never intended to be collected and exhibited?
• What do anime artefacts tell us about the professional labour that was collectively employed to create them?
• What role do animation archives play in our understanding of anime’s past at a time in which many animation artefacts and tools have been subsumed by digital practices?

Workshop panel

• Dario Lolli (Assistant professor, Durham University)
• KIM, Joon-Yang (Professor, Archive Centre for Anime Studies, Niigata University)
• Gillian Ramsay (Curator, Durham University Oriental Museum)
• Helen Armstrong (Collections Manager, Oriental Museum)
• Jaqueline Berndt (Professor, Japanese graphic art, Stockholm University)
• Hugo Glover (Assistant professor and animator, Northumbria University)
• Zoltán Kacsuk (Project member, Japanese Visual Media Graph, Stuttgart Media University)