Japanese Animation in a Global Era

Part of the Living Traditions Series
Live Webinar | Calculate your local time

Tuesday, January 31, 7 pm ET

In an era of ubiquitous streaming services, anime has found its way into nearly every corner of the globe. At this webinar, Mike Toole, editor at large at Anime News Network, and Thomas Lamarre, author of The Anime Ecology: A Genealogy of Television, Animation, and Game Media join us to examine this uniquely Japanese visual media. Exploring topics ranging from fan culture to marketing strategies in Japan vs. North America, our speakers will illuminate the historical framework behind the anime industry as well as its role within an increasingly complex and interconnected world. The fourth event in our multi-part Living Traditions webinar series this season.

Event Handout (PDF)

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Speakers:
Mike Toole, editor at large at Anime News Network
Thomas Lamarre, Professor, Department of Cinema and Media Studies, East Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago

Moderator:
Julia Mechler, manga creator

Agenda:
7-8 pm ET (4-5 pm PT)    Discussion and Q&A

Program Details
This is a free event, with advance registration required. The program will be live-streamed through YouTube, and registrants will receive the viewing link by email on the day before the event. Participants can submit questions through YouTube during the live stream.

About the Speakers

Mike Toole has been writing professionally about anime and manga for 25 years, for storied print publications like Sci-Fi Magazine, Otaku USA and Anime Insider. Currently, he is the editor at large at Anime News Network, the internet’s biggest English-language source for news, reviews and information about anime and manga. Toole is also an anime industry veteran, having served past clients like Geneon, Bandai Entertainment, Crunchyroll and Viz as web designer, copywriter and onscreen host. Toole is currently a producer at Discotek Media, a boutique DVD/Blu-Ray publisher based in Florida. His duties for Discotek involve curating extras for some of the company’s many new and classic releases. His most recent major Discotek project is providing a guided commentary track for the classic 1960s anime film FLYING PHANTOM SHIP.

Thomas Lamarre is a scholar of media, cinema and animation, intellectual history and material culture, with projects ranging from the communication networks of 9^th-century Japan (Uncovering Heian Japan: An Archaeology of Sensation and Inscription, 2000), to silent cinema and the global imaginary (Shadows on the Screen: Tanizaki Jun’ichirō on Cinema and Oriental Aesthetics, 2005), animation technologies (The Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation, 2009) and on television infrastructures and media ecology (The Anime Ecology: A Genealogy of Television, Animation, and Game Media, 2018). He has also edited volumes on cinema and animation, on the impact of modernity in East Asia, on pre-emptive war, and formerly, as Associate Editor of Mechademia: An Annual Forum for Anime, Manga, and the Fan Arts, a number of volumes on manga, anime and fan cultures. He is co-editor with Takayuki Tatsumi of a book series with the University of Minnesota Press entitled “Parallel Futures,” which centers on Japanese speculative fiction.

Julia Mechler is a manga artist, publishing her first comic book, Hymn of the Teada, an Okinawan-themed comic book released by Heavy Metal Magazine. She began her career as a motion graphics designer at the Los Angeles branch of a Japanese anime/gaming company. Though her career focuses on digital entertainment, she is also an expert on Okinawan traditional performing arts, producing shows in Okinawa that mesh traditional dance and digital entertainment.

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Living Traditions webinar series is co-presented with the Japan Institute of Portland Japanese Garden and supported by the Government of Japan.

Japan Society programs are made possible by leadership support from Booth Ferris Foundation and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature. Additional support for cultural programs is provided by an anonymous donor and the Sandy Heck Lecture Fund.