Anime Film Festival: Fruits Basket (2001) October 14, 2005

The Carleton College Cinema and Media Studies program and local Northfield organization ArtOrg announce a four-week Japanese animation festival, titled ?Anime Genres: Aspects of a Global Cultural Consciousness.? Film showings will be held every Friday in October (7, 14, 21, and 28) at 7 p.m. at Carleton in Boliou Hall, Room 104. Frenchy Lunning, professor of liberal arts at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design (MCAD), will present lectures before some of the showings. The festival events are free and open to the public.

The festival is a collaborative effort between a Carleton department, a campus student organization and a local arts organization. The partnership came about as Lunning and the ArtOrg Executive Director David Machacek met to work on a grant proposal for the festival. As they were planning, John Schott, the James Woodward Strong Professor of the Liberal Arts and director of cinema and media studies, stepped forward to offer the facilities. ?We are excited about this kind of collaboration with local arts organizations,? said Schott. Machacek also expressed enthusiasm about the partnership, ?ArtOrg is grateful for Carleton?s support, which give these films a terrific venue for our audience.?

Lunning will present lectures at the first and last showings of the series. Lunning?s lifelong interest in American comic books and films led her to a discovery of anime and manga in the 1990s and changed the focus of her studies. She received her doctorate from the University of Minnesota in Design Communications and Cultural Studies and her doctoral dissertation addressed comic book superheroes and male identity, and she has continued to write about comics, anime and manga with regard to gender and identity issues.

She is a co-founder of ?Schoolgirls and Mobilesuits: Culture and Creation in Manga and Anime? a large animation festival held annually at MCAD, where she has been on the faculty for more than 20 years. At MCAD, she teaches courses in comic book history, graphic novels and cyborgs among others. She is currently working on Mechadamia, an academic journal for anime, manga and the fan arts.

?The global interest in these Japanese art forms imply a larger cultural connection to these narratives, that contemporary western audiences find intriguing and perhaps even illuminating,? Lunning said. ?It is that fascination and its connection to culture that the short accompanying lectures will discuss. The selections will show the remarkable tendency of these works to go beyond formulaic boundaries, provoking deeper questions into the nature of our desires and fears.?

The series will examine four of the many narrative genres covered by both manga and anime. Chosen for their power and their adherence to genre, each anime is part of a longer series of episodes. Audience members will be able to sample the work and draw conclusions on the nature of the genre in culture.

Friday, Oct. 7, will explore the theme of ?Transcendence, Transformation and the Apocalyptic? in ?Akira? (1988). Directed by Katsuhiro Otomo, the film is credited with pushing the envelope of what an animated movie could become. A large color palette allowed animators to produce highly detailed backgrounds of a post-apocalyptic Neo-Tokyo and bring Otomo?s original manga characters to life. The film was a technological achievement in the days before computer-assisted animation was available. Using elements of Mary Shelley?s ?Frankenstein? interwoven with a clear criticism of a militaristic approach to government jurisdiction, the story follows the path of destruction created by those foolhardy enough to again try to control an uncontrollable force.

Oct. 14 has a theme of ?The High School Melodrama: Relationships in Miniature? and the feature film is ?Fruits Basket? (2001). Directed by Akitaro Daichi, the story follows the lives of a young girl, Tohru, who has lost her entire family. She meets the Sohma family who takes her in. All is not as it seems and they learn to deal with each other and a society where none of them quite fit.

The Oct. 21 showing examines the theme of ?Cybernetic Masculinities and the Dreams of Agency? with ?Macross Plus? (1994), directed by Shoji Kawamori. Two fighter pilots are selected to test a new aircraft for Project Super Nova. Their personal grudges disrupt the tests and wreak havoc on the program. When a mutual friend from their past shows up, a strained relationship between the three men is obvious. One of them has his life threatened and the other two have to set aside their differences and overcome the events from their childhood that drove them apart and caused them to hate each other.

The theme of ?Desire, Death and Life: Adventures of the Body in Horror? is considered on Oct. 28, with the viewing of ?Hellsing? (2001). Directed by Yasunori Urata and based on the Kohta Hirano?s 1998 manga, the anime takes inspiration from late 19th century and early 20th century Western horror fiction. It includes themes from H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu works and Bram Stoker's ?Dracula,? creatively rolled together with some fast-paced action sequences. The anime is intensely stylized and characters are well-detailed with beautiful, smooth animation. The extensive soundtrack, scored by Yasushi Ishii, mixes punk rock and jazz with experimental elements.

The film festival is being co-sponsored by ArtOrg, Carleton?s cinema and media studies program and the Carleton Anime Society. For more information and disability accommodations, call Carleton?s cinema and media studies program at (507) 646-4025 or ArtOrg at (507) 645-2555.