Imagining Transcultural Fandom: Animation and Global Media Communities
Authors
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Sandra Annett
Wilfrid Laurier University
Assistant Professor
This paper addresses the ways in which animation has become a medium for the formation of transcultural fan communities. It focuses in particular on the trend for anime, which has generated asymmetrical, tension-filled and yet productive interactions among fans in East Asia and the West. Drawing on the ideas of “recentered” media industries, imagination, and collaboration formulated by Koichi Iwabuchi, Arjun Appadurai, and Anna Tsing, it provides a comparative analysis of three animated texts from three different eras and countries: the 1935 Betty Boop cartoon “A Language All My Own,” the 1998 Japanese television series Cowboy Bebop, and the 2003-08 Korean web-cartoon “There she is!!“ These texts and the fan communities that have formed around them illustrate the shifting flows and frictions of the global media environment, from its historical context in the early film era to its digital manifestations in the twenty-first century.
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Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).
