American Influence and Representation in Japanese Manga and Anime—BNHA's All Might

When talking about manga, we are typically referring to Japanese comics. The term is often mistaken and used interchangeably with the word anime, which contrarily to the written comics refers to the animated adaptations of Manga or to original animation products. Since 1970, Japanese Manga and Anime have experienced an unprecedented popularity, introducing an innovative way of telling stories and portraying reality eventually absorbed into our Western culture. This article examines the animated series adaptation of Kohei Horikoshi's Boku No Hero Akademia, paying particular attention to one of the main characters: All Might.

Ne Zha’s image transformation in Chinese animation cinema (1961–2019)

This article analyses Ne Zha’s image evolution through different animated films in the PRC from 1961 to 2019. Three key Ne Zha films are Uproar in Heaven, Ne Zha Conquers the Dragon King and Ne Zha, representing the era of ‘classical Chinese animation’, ‘modern Chinese animation’ and ‘postmodern Chinese animation’, respectively. In 2019, Ne Zha became the summer hit and the highest-grossing Chinese original animation earning ¥5.035 billion at the Chinese box office. Explorations of how classical artistic traditions and legendary stories have been transposed into these films shows that Chinese animation has retreated from the peak of national style in the 1960s and undergone change with globalization’s cultural and ideological impacts. In sum, artistic techniques associated with fine arts film, traditional narrative methods and plot stylization have gradually weakened. Contemporary elements such as Hollywood classic three-act pattern and Japanese comic character relationships and images have significantly influenced Chinese animation in the twenty-first century.

“I Can’t Be What You Expect of Me”: Power, Palatability, and Shame in Frozen: The Broadway Musical

This article combines critical, cultural, and musical analysis to situate Frozen: The Broadway Musical as a distinct work within Disney’s wider franchise. In this article, I consider the evolution of Elsa’s character on stage and the role of additional songs in the Frozen score. In so doing, I demonstrate how the stage adaptation distances itself from the feminist potential in the original animation. Using the lenses of palatability and gendered shame, I argue that Frozen: The Broadway Musical forces patriarchal modes of behaviour onto its heroines.

Shared understanding is correlated with shared neural responses in the default mode network

Humans have a striking ability to infer meaning from even the sparsest and most abstract forms of narratives. At the same time, flexibility in the form of a narrative is matched by inherent ambiguity in the interpretation of it. How does the brain represent subtle, idiosyncratic differences in the interpretation of abstract and ambiguous narratives? In this fMRI study, we scanned subjects watching a 7-min original animation that depicts a complex narrative through the movement of simple geometric shapes. We additionally scanned two separate groups listening to concrete verbal descriptions of either the social narrative or the physical properties of the movie. After scanning, all subjects freely recalled their interpretation of the stimulus. Using an intersubject representational similarity analysis, we compared the similarity of narrative interpretation across subjects, as measured using text analysis, with the similarity of neural responses, as measured using intersubject correlation (ISC). We found that the more similar two people’s interpretations of the abstract shape movie were, the more similar their neural responses were in the default mode network (DMN). Moreover, these shared responses were modality invariant: despite vast differences in stimulus properties, we found that the shapes movie and the verbal interpretation of the movie elicited shared responses in linguistic areas and a subset of the DMN when subjects shared interpretations. Together, these results suggest that the DMN is not only sensitive to subtle individual differences in narrative interpretation, but also resilient to large differences in the modality of the narrative.Significance statementThe same narrative can be both communicated in different ways and interpreted in different ways. How are subtle, idiosyncratic differences in the interpretation of complex narratives presented in different forms represented in the brain? In this fMRI study, we show that the more similarly two people interpreted an ambiguous animation composed of moving shapes, the more similar their neural responses were in the Default Mode Network. In addition, by presenting the same narrative in a different form, we found shared responses across modalities when subjects shared interpretations despite the vast differences in modality of the stimuli. Together, these results suggest that the DMN is at once sensitive to individual differences in narrative interpretation and resilient to differences narrative modality.